Bureaucracies in the Russian Voucher Privatization

The paper analyses the implementation of voucher privatization in Russia in the framework of incentive theory. The central government needs the support of local privatization agencies. These agencies possess private knowledge concerning: a) their personal reform attitude; b) local privatization conditions. According to the trade-off between rent extraction and efficiency, the speed of privatization (the efficiency goal) is constrained by the informational rents that the government must pay to local agents. Through voucher privatization, the government learns about local privatization conditions. Surprisingly, this additional information does not necessarily lead to more privatization. In fact, the government may even slow down reforms in order to save on bureaucrats' rents. This result of the model matches with the facts of Russian privatization in the period 1992–93.     

农业税减免、粮食直接补贴政策对我国主要农产品国际竞争力的影响

农业税减免、粮食直接补贴政策的收益,会通过土地市场的作用,转化为土地租金,成为农业生产的固定成本,对我国主要农产品国际竞争力会产生不利的影响。本文在分析上述两项补贴政策对土地租金作用的基础上,模拟测算了没有这两项政策背景下几种主要农产品的生产成本,通过与其他国家相应农产品生产成本的比较发现,上述两项政策的实施会提高主要农产品的生产成本,降低其国际竞争力。     

Pricing Upward-Only Adjusting Leases

This paper presents a stochastic pricing model of a unique, path-dependent lease instrument common in the United Kingdom and numerous commonwealth countries, the upward-only adjusting lease. In this lease, the rental rate is fixed at lease commencement but will be reset to the market rate at predetermined intervals (usually every five years) if it exceeds the contract rent. We derive a closed form expression for the market rent of a lease with upward-only adjustments. Results indicate what the initial coupon rate on a 10-year lease with one reset should be relative to that on a symmetric up-and-downward adjusting variable rate lease under various economic conditions (level of real interest rates and expected drift and volatility of the underlying rental service flow). We also consider the calculation of effective rents when free rent periods are given.     

Adaptation and Climate Change Impacts: A Structural Ricardian Analysis of Farm Types in Germany

Based on farm census data, we explore the climate‐dependent incidence of six farm types and the climate‐induced impacts on land rental prices in Germany. We apply a structural Ricardian approach by modeling the dominant farm type at 9,684 communities as depending on temperature, precipitation and other geographic variables. Rents per farm type are then modeled as depending on climate and other conditioning variables. These results allow the projection of the consequences of climate change as changes in our climate variables. Our results indicate that permanent‐crop farms are more likely to dominate in higher temperatures, whereas forage or mixed farms dominate in areas of higher precipitation levels. Land rental prices display a concave response to increases in annual precipitation, and appear to increase linearly with rising annual temperature. Moderate‐warming simulation results for future decades benefit most farm types but seem to penalise forage farms. Rental prices are projected to increase, ceteris paribus, for all farm types.     

财政赤字的排挤效应:实证分析

本文首先通过把财政收支引入居民消费函数,估计财政赤字对民间消费的影响;然后,分别从经济周期、全社会固定资产投资的资金来源以及资本收益率等角度,分析财政赤字对民间投资的影响.其结果均表明,1998年以来我国实施的积极财政政策所导致的财政赤字,并没有产生排挤效应.     

战略管理中持续经济租金产生机制探析

在战略管理领域中 ,资源选取机制与能力建造机制对于公司短期经济租金的获取作出了较为圆满的解释 ,但对于长期经济租金产生机制的阐释却存在明显不足。通过分析两种经济租金产生机制的固有缺陷 ,二者在租金持续产生过程中是互补而不是独立的关系 ,只有两种机制的有效融合才是公司获取持续经济租金的源泉 ,而核心能力为二者的融合提供了基础。     

Creating relational rents: The effect of business groups on affiliated firms’ performance in Indonesia

This research attempts to extend the discussion of business groups in emerging economies by treating business groups as a form of interorganizational network that generates relational rents among affiliated firms by creating technological and managerial capabilities. Based on the relational view, this research investigates whether value created by business groups depends upon sharing, combining, and exchanging unique and specific resources or assets among affiliated firms. Results show that technological capabilities contribute to create relational rents in terms of affiliated firms’ investment in R&D and human capital. Managerial capabilities also contributed to generating relational rents through investment in managerial knowledge acquisition for affiliated firms without R&D units and in training for affiliated firms with R&D units. However, learning by exporting and learning from imported input do not yield relational rents within business groups. Overall, these findings reveal that business groups as interorganizational networks are contingent on their internal, unique, and specific capabilities, as social capital theory argues.

Explaining the Increase in Young Adults Living with Parents

Abstract:

In recent years, a rising proportion of young adults living with their parents has garnered national attention. Even young adults between the ages of twenty-five to thirty-four have not been immune to this trend. This article explores the causes behind the rising parental co-residence over the past thirty-five years using macro data. The article shows that rents have far outstripped incomes for young adults and that increasing unaffordability of renting is a significant factor behind the rising proportion of young adults living with their parents. Although declining interest rates have mitigated rising home prices thereby increasing home affordability, they have not impacted rental affordability.     

租金博弈中的腐败与民主监督--转型期民主监督的腐败预防机制

本文针对现实生活中给予检举腐败行为以物质奖励的现象,从寻租经济学的角度,将物质奖励定义为"检举租金";从理性经济人假设入手,利用博弈模型、边际分析和实证研究等方法,分析了"检举租金"对腐败的抑制作用,在我国转型的特殊时期,"检举租"与相关政策配合,可以促使一个以民主监督为主力的腐败预防机制的形成.     

Endogenous Land use and the Ricardian Valuation of Climate Change

The Ricardian technique uses cross-sectional variation in the capitalized value of climate in land to infer the agricultural costs or benefits of dynamic climate change. While a practical approach for predicting the consequences of global warming with readily available data, it may yield biased results when land-use decisions depend on the climate attributes being valued and when land has unobserved attributes that differ with the use to which it is put. This paper illustrates the conditions under which such a bias will occur, describes an empirical model that corrects for it, and estimates that model with agricultural census data from Brazil. The approach, moreover, allows constraints on adjustment to be explicitly incorporated into the Ricardian framework, relaxing one of that technique’s most conspicuous assumptions. I would like to thank Patrick Bayer, Steven Berry, Robert Evenson, Michael Hanemann, Robert Mendelsohn, Bill Nordhaus, Kerry Smith, Karl Storchmann, two anonymous referees, and seminar participants at the University of California – Santa Barbara and the Research Triangle Institute for their useful insights and helpful comments. All remaining errors and omissions are my own. Fabiana Tito provided excellent research assistance, and Denisard Alves and Robert Evenson generously supplied the data.