Property rights protection and access to bank loans

Poor protection of private property has limited the access to bank loans by private enterprises in developing and transition economies. Under those circumstances, private entrepreneurs have resorted to various ways of enhancing the de facto protection of private property. Using a dataset of 3,073 private enterprises in China, this paper empirically investigates the impact of political participation and philanthropic activities – informal substitutes for the lack of formal protection of private property – on the access to bank loans.     

Sequencing and the Adding-up Property in Contingent Valuation of Endangered Species: Are Contingent Non-Use Values Economic Values?

This paper presents tests of the theoretical validity of the contingent valuation (CV) method. The validity of CV is especially a concern when involving environmental goods with a predominant non-use value. One test of theoretical validity is the adding-up property that implies that a specific good should be equally valued irrespectively of it is being valued directly or built-up sequentially. In this CV study four independent sub-samples stated willingness to pay for the same composite good, or package, using different sequences. One sub-sample valued the composite good directly, while two sub-samples faced built-up sequences valuing first subsets of this composite good. A fourth sub-sample valued the composite good from a dividing-out approach, facing first the valuation of a larger multi-package. Theoretically expected sequencing effects were observed; the subset goods obtained higher values earlier in a sequence, and the dividing-out approach decreased the stated value for the composite good. Most importantly, these CV data did pass the tests of the adding-up property.     

On strategic complementarity conditions in Bertrand oligopoly

Summary. For Bertrand duopoly with linear costs, we establish via a single (counter-)example that: (i) A new monotone transformation of the firms' profit functions may lead to the supermodularity of transformed profits when the standard log and identity transformations both fail to do so, and (ii) Topkis's notion of critical sufficient condition for monotonicity of a Bertrand firm's best-reply correspondence cannot be extended to rely only on positive unit costs. Received: January 16, 2001; revised version: March 20, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" This work was completed while the first author was visiting the Institute for Industrial Economics at the University of Copenhagen during Spring 2000. Their financial support and stimulating research environment are gratefully acknowledged. The views expressed here are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the European Commission. Correspondence to: R. Amir     

论国际经济法的形成发展与知识产权国际保护

国际经济法是国际公法的一个重要组成部分，它经过了三个阶段的形成与发展。特别是自上世纪70年代以来，国际知识产权组织成立，国际知识产权的法律地位日益突出，知识产权的法律保护也就成为各国关注的焦点。如何推动更公平、平等的国际经济新秩序和知识产权法律的完善与发展，是值得研究的新课题。     

加强建筑企业职业健康安全管理之我见

无论从建筑企业自身,还是行业发展;无论是近期生存还是长远发展,建立有效的职业健康安全管理体系,可有效保护建筑业劳动人员的健康安全,完善中国社会主义市场经济运行机制,促进社会稳定、经济健康发展。     

Good News and Bad News: Search from Unknown Wage Offer Distributions

The largest market in national economies is the labor market. Labor market contracting is characterized by job search, often from unknown wage offer distributions. This paper reports experimental tests of finite horizon models of job search in which the wage offer distribution is unknown. Theoretically-optimal search from an unknown wage offer distribution can have the seemingly paradoxical property that some offers will be accepted that are lower than other offers that will be rejected in the same period of the search horizon. Thus the reservation wage property (or lowest acceptable wage path) may not exist. This can occur because an offer that is a priori relatively high (good news) can imply that it is highly probable that search is from a favorable distribution, and such an offer can look unattractive when it is an a posteriori relatively low offer from a favorable distribution (bad news). This paper reports results from experimental treatments for search from unknown distributions in which the reservation wage property does exist and treatments in which it does not exist. We find that the consistency of search behavior with search theory reported in earlier papers is robust to the presence or absence of the reservation wage property and to whether the draws come from known or unknown distributions.     

国有企业审计监督体系构建研究

在我国现行国有资产管理体制下,国有企业不仅要接受国有资产监管体系内部多种形式的监督,而且还要同时接受政府审计、社会审计和内部审计的监督。由于各种审计主体职责重复、各自为政,在导致审计资源严重浪费的同时,还造成许多国有企业长期缺乏有效的审计监督。本文从我国国有资产监管体系的现行架构出发,对政府审计、社会审计、内部审计及其他多种审计主体的分工与配合问题进行了研究,为国有企业建立合理有效的审计监督体系提供参考。     

太阳能光伏产业可持续发展理论研究思考

从太阳能光伏产业发展出发,结合产业组织理论与可持续发展理论,提出太阳能光伏产业可持续发展理论研究体系,包括太阳能光伏产业可持续发展的基本内涵、资源配置、理论模式、运行机制等;我国太阳能光伏产业发展的物质基础、技术基础、现状、障碍及风险预测预警机制;从核心竞争力、核心技术研发及全球化等方面实现我国太阳能光伏产业可持续发展战略路径选择。太阳能光伏产业可持续发展理论的研究,对深化再生能源健康发展、规范可再生能源市场、保障能源安全、丰富产业经济学与能源经济学具有重要的理论与实践价值。     

我国农村饮用水安全现状、问题及政府管制

农村饮用水安全是关系农村居民生活质量和生命安全的大问题。农村饮用水安全具有公共性,需要政府进行管理。我国农村饮用水安全问题主要体现在水质差、水量不足、取水不便、不能保证供给等方面。为此,需要政府投入和民间筹资多方支持,同时政府应加大宣传力度,加强农村配套设施建设,以消除农村饮用水存在的安全问题和隐患。     

Do Institutions Cause Growth?

We revisit the debate over whether political institutions cause economic growth, or whether, alternatively, growth and human capital accumulation lead to institutional improvement. We find that most indicators of institutional quality used to establish the proposition that institutions cause growth are constructed to be conceptually unsuitable for that purpose. We also find that some of the instrumental variable techniques used in the literature are flawed. Basic OLS results, as well as a variety of additional evidence, suggest that (a) human capital is a more basic source of growth than are the institutions, (b) poor countries get out of poverty through good policies, often pursued by dictators, and (c) subsequently improve their political institutions.