‘Free actors’ and organizations: critical remarks about the new career literature,based on French insights

What is the reality of contemporary careers? Have individuals become masters of their professional destiny? While the ‘new career literature’ puts forward the figure of an individual free to invent his/her career (the ‘free actor model’), this article shows that the changes purported to affect careers are less radical than they seem. Despite a weakening of environments, discriminating career mechanisms are still imposed on cadres, at least in France. Because individuals do not always have the means or the will to escape those mechanisms, ‘external clues’ continue to mark careers more than the new career literature supposes. To account for the realities observed in France, this paper proposes a specific view on careers, which highlights why career rules still exist in the country.     

Design limits and dynamic policy analysis

This paper characterizes the frequency domain properties of feedback control rules in linear systems in order to better understand how different policies affect outcomes frequency by frequency. We are especially concerned in understanding how reductions of variance at some frequencies induce increases in variance at others. Tradeoffs of this type are known in the control literature as design limits. Design limits are important in understanding the full range of effects of macroeconomic stabilization policies. We extend existing results to account for discrete time bivariate systems with rational expectations. Application is made to the evaluation of monetary policy rules.     

Does personal background influence a finance minister to cook the books? An investigation of creative accounting in Swiss cantons

This article aims to identify the factors influencing the use of creative accounting in the public sector. Its distinctive feature is that it sheds light on creative accounting when used, not to hide public deficits, but to conceal surpluses. It especially explores the impact of the finance minister’s (FM)’s background on the phenomenon. We take advantage of the quasi-experimental settings of the Swiss cantons in which the financial management act sets out the possibility of implementing certain accounting gimmicks, including mainly additional ‘depreciation’ charges. These charges, which are depreciations in name only, enable the FM to artificially inflate expenses, thus increasing the deficit or reducing the surplus. Our panel data set of the 26 cantons over the period 1980–2012 includes a new data set of creative accounting and of 116 cantonal FMs. Our results indicate that the FMs cook the books irrespective of their personal or ideological background with the exception that trained economists tend to apply creative accounting more. Additionally, stringent fiscal rules urge FMs towards more surplus-hiding accounting.     

数字贸易政策国际比较、发展趋势及启示

随着信息通讯技术的发展,数字贸易作为一种新兴的国际贸易形式得以快速发展,在拓展国际贸易范围和边界的同时,也对全球贸易规则提出新的挑战。本文在分析全球数字贸易发展现状的基础上,重点梳理了美国、欧盟、日本等国家数字贸易政策发展脉络,以及数字贸易的未来发展趋势。然后,本文从中小企业的发展、平台企业的作用、数字贸易规则制定等方面提出对中国数字贸易发展的启示。本文认为,中国作为极具潜力的数字贸易大国,在数字经济发展的驱动下参与并推动建设国际数字贸易治理体系势在必行。     

PLC的编程语言与编程注意事项

本文简述了可编程控制器(PLC)的基本特点和发展情况,介绍了PLC的顺序功能图、梯形图、功能模块图、指令表和结构文本等编程语言及其功能特点,阐述了PLC在编程过程中梯形图与指令表语言编程的规则和注意事项等。熟练掌握PLC程序的编程语言、编程方法及编程注意事项,对于PLC编程的快速入门及工程应用具有十分重要的意义。     

Weighted majoritarian rules for the location of multiple public facilities

We consider collective decision problems given by a profile of single-peaked preferences defined over the real line and a set of pure public facilities to be located on the line. In this context, Bochet and Gordon (2012) provide a large class of priority rules based on efficiency, object-population monotonicity and sovereignty. Each such rule is described by a fixed priority ordering among interest groups. We show that any priority rule which treats agents symmetrically — anonymity — respects some form of coherence across collective decision problems — reinforcement — and only depends on peak information — peak-only — is a weighted majoritarian rule. Each such rule defines priorities based on the relative size of the interest groups and specific weights attached to locations. We give an explicit account of the richness of this class of rules.     

制约上市公司并购的外部因素及对策

随着我国证券市场的建立,上市公司并购出现快速发展的趋势,但同时存在着制约其发展的一些外部因素。本文建议,应建立健全相关并购法规,减少政府干预,完善证券市场机制及拓宽并购融资渠道,加强与规范中介机构在并购中所起的作用,以推动上市公司并购的健康发展。     

关于制订《经济责任审计条例》的思考

本文通过对新修订的《中华人民共和国审计法》和现有的省级《审计监督条例》中关于经济责任审计规定的比较分析,结合中国审计现实情况,提出国务院制定《经济责任审计条例》应明确的一些问题,并提出现阶段应采取的措施。     

Post-euro EU and US interest rates and foreign exchange rates: Are they in harmony or in disarray?

This paper focuses on: (1) how a select set of financial and economic factors could set the path for interest rates and foreign exchange rates, and (2) whether the resultant realized interest and exchange rates would be in harmony or in disarray. Using post-euro data for the EU and the US, an array of monetary rules is examined. In particular, the paper investigates whether the original and the extended Taylor rules provide an explanation of the dynamics of the EU monetary system since the inception of the euro. Our findings indicate that the EU and the US monetary responses are not the same and that exchange rates play a significant role.     

Revising the European Central Bank’s fiscal rules to support growth and employment

Abstract

The paper presents a reform proposal for the operations of the European Central Bank (ECB) whose purpose is to create a common set of risk-free assets for financial institutions operating in the euro area (EA), which is the necessary condition for having a single internal financial market. The proposal does not require the introduction of changes in the existing European Union treaties. The effects of this reform on the debt dynamic of EA member countries permit a revision of the existing fiscal rules. With the help of some simulations, it is shown that maintaining compliance with the European treaties, the reform of the ECB operations and revised fiscal rules would transform the current fiscal deflationary stance into a reflationary one. Some implications for aggregate demand and growth for the EA are briefly discussed.