人民币汇率问题:升值及其成本—收益分析

在回顾改革开放以来人民币汇率变动的基础上,本文首先讨论了汇率升值的短期压力和长期压力,前者源自内外经济失衡和双顺差的持续,后者由于劳动生产率的提高和经济竞争力的增强,认为目前宏观经济失衡主要表现为实体经济和货币经济的两个双向循环和双向依赖;测度了中国的外商直接投资函数和进出口函数及其汇率弹性,估算了不同幅度汇率升值的成本,主要包括引进外资和出口贸易减少的数量,以及由此带来的GDP和就业人数减少的规模,发现三个季度后,升值的影响下降一半以上,七个季度以后,升值的影响近于消失。并据以对可选择的升值幅度和操作方式提出了政策建议     

Fixed costs and long-lived investments

Fixed costs models are difficult to analyze because they feature non-degenerate, time-varying distributions of capital across firms. If investments are sufficiently long-lived however then the cross-sectional distribution of capital holdings has virtually no bearing on the equilibrium and the aggregate behavior of fixed-cost models is essentially identical to neoclassical models. The findings are due to a near infinite elasticity of investment timing for long-lived investments – a feature shared by fixed-cost models and neoclassical models. “Irrelevance results” found in numerical studies of fixed-cost models are not parametric special cases but instead are fundamental properties of models with long-lived investment goods.     

国际贸易与劳动力市场:研究述评

近三十年来,国际贸易迅速发展,同时各国劳动力市场保持着一种动态变化,国际贸易对劳动力市场的影响不断加深.在这一背景下,国际经济学和劳动经济学领域的学者对国际贸易与劳动力市场的关系进行了大量的理论与经验研究,相关研究主要集中在三个方面:国际贸易对各国工资的影响、国际贸易对各国就业的效应以及国际贸易对劳动力需求弹性的影响.本文将从上述三个方面对相关研究进行回顾.     

医疗服务市场的高价格形成机制——一个基于信息扩散的解释框架

本文指出,一个自由的医疗服务市场会导致过高的价格水平,其原因在于,医疗服务的价格变化信息在患者之间扩散是一个缓慢的时间过程,致使医院的医疗服务需求对价格变化不敏感,从而降低了医疗服务市场的竞争性。本文同时指出,政府只要能够改变医疗服务价格信息的扩散机制,就能够建立一个以市场机制为基础的高效率的医疗卫生体制。     

On Indexed Bonds and Aggregate Demand Elasticity

Bonds indexed to the price level or inflation have become popular and more common in the industrialized world. This paper examines the impact of indexed bonds on the price level elasticity of aggregate demand. With a model of aggregate demand based on the standard IS-LM framework and expanded to differentiate between bonds which are indexed to the price level and bonds which are not so indexed, we find that the existence of indexed bonds decreases the elasticity of aggregate demand with respect to the general price level.

The economic sustainability of optimizing feedstock imports with environmental constraints

The energetic crisis jeopardizes the safety of nations and people in multiple ways. In addressing the problem of commodity production out of feedstock imports, an eco-environmentally rational agent aims at minimizing the cost of feedstock imports and their increasingly expensive transportation, but also the water footprint of the feedstock production process and the water scarcity in the exporting countries. This implies the need for more accurate feedstock import strategies, that account for the increased multiplicity of factors at play. This study proves the existence of solutions and quantitatively demonstrates that transportation costs and non-uniform feedstock characteristics inhibit feedstock interchangeability, by solving a novel nonlinear program that accounts for the complexity of the factors at play. Moreover, it is shown that the interplay between water footprint and water scarcity across countries can inhibit or foster feedstock interchangeability. Model validation strategies and a sensitivity analysis complete the study.     

Income and Price Elasticities of Demand in South Africa: An Application of the Linear Expenditure System

This paper investigates the expenditure patterns of South African households using detailed cross‐sectional expenditure and price data that varies across region and time. Linear expenditure system parameter estimates are used to calculate income and price elasticities for a number of product categories at different points of the income distribution. We find substantial variation in the price and income elasticities of demand for items across the income distribution, with the bottom quartile being extremely sensitive to increases in the price of food and clothing items, and the top quartile being as sensitive as households in developed countries.     

Is the cardholder an efficient alarm system to detect credit card incidents?

There is a growing tendency in credit card industry to increase the contribution of the smallest players, the cardholders, in the detection of card incidents. This article examines whether cardholders are efficient at detecting/communicating incidents of theft, loss or fraudulent use of their cards. The analysis focuses on whether they demonstrate enough speed of response to support a risk control subsystem by the issuer. The research follows a completely new approach showing how the issue can be handled by applying the concept of elasticity, a notion just recently exported from economics to the field of statistics by linking it with the reverse hazard rate. The issue is focused on the analysis of the characteristics of the elasticity function of the random variable that measures the delay of cardholders in reporting incidents. This study is illustrated with an application to a real data set of 1069 incidents.     

The productivity of agricultural credit in India

This study examines the nature of the relationship between formal agricultural credit and agricultural Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in India, specifically the role of the former in supporting agricultural growth, using state level panel data covering the period 1995–1996 to 2011–2012. The study uses a mediation analysis framework to map the pathways through which institutional credit relates to agricultural GDP relying on a control function approach to tackle the problem of endogeneity. The findings from the analysis suggest that over this period, all the inputs are highly responsive to an increase in institutional credit to agriculture. A 10% increase in credit flow in nominal terms leads to an increase by 1.7% in fertilizers (N, P, K) consumption in physical quantities, 5.1% increase in the tonnes of pesticides, 10.8% increase in tractor purchases. Overall, it seems quite clear that input use is sensitive to credit flow, whereas GDP of agriculture is not. Credit seems therefore to be an enabling input, but one whose effectiveness is undermined by low technical efficiency and productivity.