The Distributional Incidence of Growth: A Social Welfare Approach

This paper provides a normative framework for the assessment of the distributional incidence of growth. By removing the anonymity axiom, such framework is able to evaluate the individual income changes over time and the reshuffling of individuals along the income distribution that are determined by the pattern of income growth. We adopt a rank dependent social welfare function expressed in terms of initial rank and individual income change and we obtain partial and complete dominance conditions over different growth paths. These dominance conditions account for the different components determining the overall impact of growth, that is the size of growth and its vertical and horizontal incidence. We then provide an empirical application for Italy: this analysis shows the distributional impact of the recent economic crisis suffered by the Italian populaltion.     

Think Twice Before Going for Incentives: Social Norms and the Principal's Decision on Compensation Contracts

Principals make decisions on various issues, ranging from contract design to control system implementation. Few studies examine the principal's active role in these decisions. We experimentally investigate this role by studying how a principal's choice of an incentive contract that may discourage misrepresentation, compared to a fixed‐salary contract, affects the honesty of his or her agents’ cost reporting. Results show that, besides an incentive effect and a principal trust effect, the active choice for incentives produces a negative “information leakage” effect. When principals use incentives, their choices not only incentivize truthful reporting and signal distrust, but they also leak important information about the social norm, namely, that other agents are likely to report dishonestly. Agents conform to this social norm by misrepresenting cost information more. Our results have important practical implications. Managers must recognize that their decisions can leak information to their agents, which may produce unanticipated consequences for the social norms of the organization.     

Trust Me! I am a European Central Banker

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the European Central Bank (ECB) has experienced an unprecedented deterioration in the level of trust. This raises the question as to what factors determine trust in central banking. We use a unique cross‐country data set that includes a rich set of socioeconomic characteristics and supplement it with variables meant to reflect a country's macroeconomic condition. We find that besides individual socioeconomic characteristics, macroeconomic conditions play a crucial role in the trust‐building process. Our results suggest that agents are boundedly rational in the trust‐building process and that current ECB market operations may even be beneficial for trust in the ECB in the long run.     

职业成长对员工建言行为的影响

基于员工利益视角,整合社会交换理论与关系人口学理论,并探索性地引入员工与主管前摄性人格匹配,可深入研究职业成长对员工建言行为的作用机理。运用多元线性回归分析多个组织的335份员工-主管配对样本数据,结果表明：职业成长对员工建言行为具有正向影响,员工对组织的责任感知在职业成长与建言行为间起到中介作用,员工-主管前摄性人格匹配不仅正向调节职业成长对建言行为的作用,而且正向调节责任感知对建言行为的作用。     

人口老龄化对积极财政政策有效性的影响——兼析延迟退休的宏观经济效应

人口老龄化不但影响到宏观经济的稳定,也会对财政政策的有效性产生影响。将人口老龄化引入动态随机一般均衡模型,分析人口老龄化对4种积极财政政策工具（扩大政府支出、提高劳动所得税起征点、提高劳动所得税累进性和增加公共投资）有效性产生的影响以及延迟退休的动态宏观经济效应,结果表明：人口老龄化扩大了政府支出和政府公共投资对消费产生的挤出效应,降低了4种积极财政政策工具对产出、消费、就业的促进效应,也强化了其对通胀和工资膨胀的提升效应;延迟退休未对私人消费产生挤出效应,有利于就业、产出和消费增长,并有助于稳定通胀和工资膨胀;与财政政策工具相比延迟退休引致的整体社会福利损失较小。人口老龄化降低了积极财政政策的有效性,基于稳定宏观经济和降低社会福利损失的考虑,延迟退休是一个较优的政策选择。     

河南艾滋病村驻村调查笔记

通过对艾滋病村和受艾滋病影响群体状况的直接观察和解释,揭示艾滋病疫情对当地社会经济发展、人民生活和社会稳定所造成的负面影响。政策建议:(1)为了避免更大的灾难,政府应当把遏止艾滋病作为“科学发展观”和“人口与发展战略”的一个组成部分,以便进一步动员各方面资源参与艾滋病的防治工作。(2)国家人口和计划生育系统应当全面介入国家的艾滋病预防。     

Corporate Social Responsibility: Exploring Stakeholder Relationships and Programme Reporting across Leading FTSE Companies

Although it is now widely recognised by business leaders that their companies need to accept a broader responsibility than short-term profits, recent research suggests that as corporate social responsibility (CSR) and social reporting become more widespread, there is little empirical evidence of the range of stakeholders addressed through their CSR programmes and how such programmes are reported. Through a CSR framework which was developed in an exploratory study, we explore the nature of stakeholder relationships reported across leading FTSE companies and the importance they attach to communicating both social and business outcomes. It is evident from the hypotheses tested that the bigger FTSE companies, particularly extraction companies and telecoms, are more adept at identifying and prioritising their stakeholders, and linking CSR programmes to business and social outcomes. However, we draw the general conclusion that building stronger stakeholder relationships through CSR programmes – other than with customers – is not currently a priority for most companies. We also conclude that a limited sophistication in managing multiple stakeholders may compromise the impact of CSR upon business and social results. Finally, the managerial implications and the contribution of our study are discussed before closing with an acknowledgement of the limitations of this work and suggestions for further research.     

中国百岁老人养老问题研究

利用"中国高龄老人健康长寿"课题1998年调查数据,对中国百岁老人老有所养、病有所医、老有所乐等养老问题进行了初步分析.研究表明,中国百岁老人基本上实现了老有所养、病有所医和老有所乐,家庭在百岁老人养老中占绝对主导地位,是百岁老人经济供养、病时生活照料和精神慰藉的主要承担者,社会所起作用甚微.百岁老人的经济自立状况、医疗需求满足程度及医疗照料资源的可获性因城乡、性别及居住方式而异,并直接影响到其对生活的评价.社会和政府应更多地关注独居百岁老人及靠社会救济的百岁老人.     

Dealing With Uncertainties When Governing CSR Policies

As corporate social responsibility involves a voluntary business endeavour to address social and environmental issues beyond legal compliance, governments cannot fall back on hierarchical command-and-control policies to support it. As such, it is complementary with the increasing popularity of public policies known as New Governance policies, where the government is engaged in a horizontal inter-organizational network of societal actors and where public policy is both formed and executed by the interacting and voluntary efforts from a multitude of stakeholders. However, such policies are known to generate substantive uncertainty about the content of CSR and its related issues, strategic uncertainty regarding the behavior of the actors involved and institutional uncertainty related to the interaction process involved in the institutional change. We explore New Governance policy instruments to address these uncertainties in the context CSR and discuss the experiences with these methods in the European Union. Jan Lepoutre is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Economics at Ghent University, Belgium. In his dissertation, he focuses on the competences associated with small business social responsibility and networks as governmental means to build competences among small businesses. Nikolay A. Dentchev is an independent research fellow at Ghent University, Belgium, and a project coordinator at the corporate venturing department of Fortis Group (Fortis Venturing). He holds a Ph.D. in business economics from Ghent University. His current research is related to entrepreneurship, instrumental stakeholder theory, and management challenges of corporate social responsibility. Aimé Heene is a professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration at Ghent University, Belgium. He teaches strategic management for private and public organizations and currently focuses his research on (competencebased) management in public and social profit organizations.     

社会资本:解释经济增长的一种新思路

社会资本是指包括信任、共同的规范或习俗、组织三方面内容在内的生产性资源 ,它可以增强人与人之间的信任 ,减少机会主义行为 ,降低交易成本 ,促进经济增长。社会资本理论为解释经济增长提供了新的思路。