私募基金的管理规模与最优激励契约

私募基金是一种新兴的资产管理模式,其本质上也是一种委托代理契约。本文利用Tirole(2006)的公司融资分析框架和思想,研究了私募基金管理者与基金外部投资人的委托代理关系,求解出私募基金的最优管理规模和分成比例,并用数值计算方法对理论结果进行了讨论。理论模型和数值计算表明:私募基金的最优管理规模和分成比例是存在的;只有在某些特定的参数组合下,现实中广泛使用的"2—20"合同才具有某种合理性,且并非最优;业绩表现费有助于降低私募基金管理者的道德风险。     

政府补贴能否促进高新技术企业的自主创新？——来自中关村的证据

中国政府对高新技术企业投入了大量补贴以激励它们创新,但是对补贴效果的研究并未达成一致结论。基于中关村3万多个高新技术企业2001-2012年的观察值,本文同时采用PSM与DID法对政府补贴的效果进行了研究,结果发现:第一,整体而言,政府补贴显著提高了创新经费支出、新产品销售收入和专利申请数量;第二,进一步将创新细分为自主创新和购买引进新技术之后发现,政府补贴存在“挤出效应”:被补贴企业的自主创新明显下降,而购买引进新技术显著增加;第三,政府补贴对企业的短期创新激励有显著的促进作用,但是对长期创新激励的促进作用不显著。本文对高新技术企业的补贴效果提供了实证绩效评估,所得出的结论有助于政府优化和调整激励创新政策。     

Engaging Australian small-scale lifestyle landowners in natural resource management programmes – Perceptions,past experiences and policy implications

This study explores Australian small-scale rural lifestyle landowners’ perceptions of and experiences with natural resource management (NRM) extension and incentive programmes and discusses means to better-match such programmes to these landowners’ NRM interests, assistance needs and delivery preferences. Data was collected from seventeen in-depth qualitative case-studies of small-acreage landholders located in the Noosa hinterland in south-east Queensland. These landholders indicated a high need for expert advice, labour and other resource assistance to achieve their property management objectives. They had, however, a low-level of awareness and understanding of available programmes (particularly incentive schemes) that could provide some of their needed support. Other key barriers to the landholders’ participation in these programmes were aversions to support providers, a perceived unsuitability of properties or irrelevance of particular incentive programmes, and concerns about programme application procedures or property-rights and value-related implications of engagement. Increased NRM engagement among small-scale lifestyle landowners may be achievable through amendments to existing support programmes and better communication of these programmes. The design and delivery of appropriate measures and messages may require collaborative partnerships, with knowledgeable and influential ‘go-to’ landowners and peer-mentoring networks playing a critical role. In many cases, conservation-focused incentive programmes may need to facilitate cooperative NRM among groups of adjoining micro-scale lifestyle landowners and allow greater flexibility in the length and allowable land and forest management practices of contractual agreements. Moreover, small-scale lifestyle landowners have much interest in and need for support to integrate multi-purpose agroforestry systems with other environmental and aesthetic property management goals. Workshops, follow-up field-days on participating properties, free one-on-one on-property advice, and NRM guides that include detailed case-study accounts of landowner experiences are important means of communicating the availability, administrative requirements and benefits of support programmes to small-scale lifestyle landowners.     

Truthful germs are contagious: A local-to-global characterization of truthfulness

We study the question of which social choice functions from an abstract type space to a set of outcomes are truthful, i.e., implementable by truthful mechanisms, when utilities are quasi-linear. For convex domains, our main theorem characterizes truthful social choice functions as those satisfying two properties: local weak monotonicity and vortex-freeness. The first of these constrains the function values at any two sufficiently proximal points, while the second asserts that its line integrals around sufficiently small triangular loops must vanish.The characterization implies a local-to-global principle that allows one to deduce truthfulness of a function from its behavior on arbitrarily small neighborhoods of each point. Other consequences include a simple alternate derivation of the Saks–Yu Theorem that weak monotonicity characterizes truthfulness of functions having a convex domain and finite range, and a sufficient condition for constructing truthful functions by “stitching together” truthful subfunctions on different subsets of the domain.     

Payments for agrobiodiversity conservation services: An overview of Latin American experiences,lessons learned and upscaling challenges

Many developing countries face a major challenge today: how to safeguard the biodiversity maintained in the fields of the rural poor - which constitute a national and global public good - whilst meeting those same people's development needs and rights? A solution to this dilemma has thus been sought in adapting the design and implementation of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) concepts to the conservation of agrobiodiversity.Here we review the application of nine such Payments for Agrobiodiversity Conservation (PACS) schemes that have been applied to date in four Latin American countries over the period 2010–2018. These covered 130 threatened varieties across a number of major food crops, and involved over 100 farming communities and 1,100 farmers (45 % of which were women). Conservation service offers were received through a competitive tender mechanism. Average bid offers revealed high heterogeneity, varying between US$675/ha. to ten times as much.In relation to issues identified as key to PES, such as spatial targeting, differentiated payments and conditionality, the underlying design of the PACS schemes may be considered solid. PACS-related prioritisation processes allow for the a priori identification of sites with high ecosystem service densities and high threat levels. The use of competitive tenders permits accounting for cost heterogeneity in the provision of conservation services and for payments to be differentiated. Conditionality is strong.In terms of implementation, a “back of the envelope” calculation based on the results of the competitive tenders suggests that conservation costs are modest. For a priority conservation portfolio of 100 varieties (which may be from different crops) each with a target area of five hectares, costs would amount to just under US$860,000 over twenty years or US$70,000 p.a. at a 5 % discount rate. The small-scale and one-off nature of the interventions realised to date, along with threatened crop variety seed availability constraints, have however meant that environmental effectiveness has been incomplete in the short-term (area cultivated with specific threatened varieties increased, but still below the “not at risk” threshold). The establishment of systematic monitoring systems is required to determine longer-term impacts and inform more regular PACS interventions within a dynamically evolving systems context.     

SHIRKING,STANDARDS AND THE PROBABILITY OF DETECTION

By relaxing the common efficiency wage assumption of exogenous shirking detection probabilities, we demonstrate how standards and efficiency wages are related. In a more general setting where the probability of detection depends upon the equilibrium effort level of non‐shirkers, we show that the uniformly positive (negative) supply‐side relationship between wages (unemployment insurance) and effort is no longer guaranteed. Profit maximization on the part of the firm, however, ensures that effort will depend positively (negatively) on wages (unemployment insurance) in equilibrium.     

Decomposing growth in the gender wage gap in urban China: 1989–2011

This paper examines trends in the gender wage gap observed in urban China during the post‐reform era. Using China Health and Nutrition Survey data, changes to the gap between 1989 and 2011 are analyzed using the Wellington decomposition method. While women's gains in observed characteristics have narrowed the wage gap, they are more than offset by changes in the returns to these characteristics. Men's returns to potential labour market experience have grown particularly rapidly, relative to women's, and this represents the single largest contributing factor towards the widening of the gender wage gap. Further investigation explores gender wage patterns through the dimensions of occupation, ownership sector and birth cohort. Taken together, my results raise concerns that China's urban labour market may increasingly disincentivize women's long‐term labour force attachments.     

One size may not fit all: Welfare benefits and cost reductions with optional differentiated household electricity rates

We consider optional time-of-use (TOU) pricing for residential consumers, offered by a publicly regulated electricity supplier, as an alternative to a single TOU or flat rate structure. An equilibrium model explores and quantifies the effects of such pricing on welfare, consumption, and production costs. The supplier offers to each household a menu of possible rate structures obtained by maximizing a collective welfare function subject to three restrictions: Pareto efficiency, incentive compatibility, sufficiency of supplier revenue to cover costs. Simulations based on realistic calibration of the model demonstrate that optional pricing can increase overall consumer welfare and reduce average cost.     

Labour market adjustment to third-party competition: Evidence from Mexico

China's exports reduce wages in importing countries, but few studies have looked at competition in third-party markets. We examine labour market outcomes in Mexico's apparel and textile sectors associated with US apparel and textile imports from China. Using data on US imports in conjunction with quarterly Mexican labour force surveys, we show that US imports from China are associated with a reduction of employment in Mexico's apparel and textile sectors. These effects are the most pronounced for the least educated. Wages were not impacted on net except for possibly the poorest which would indicate stronger local labour market ties in the left tail of the wage distribution. Finally, the effects of trade-induced demand shocks dissipate after about two quarters indicating low firm-level adjustment costs.     

Individual labour income,stock prices and whom it may concern

In this paper, a panel model which describes the relationship between individual labour income and stock prices in Germany is estimated. The specification allows the individuals to cluster concerning the model parameters that describe first the individual labour income dynamics and second the relationship between the individual labour income and financial markets. Methodically, a Bayesian model-based non-Gaussian panel data approach, proposed by Juarez and Steel (2010a), is used. A group of individuals with a high cluster assignment probability is found. The characteristics of this group, whose individuals share the same autoregressive dynamics and a common, relatively high dependence on financial markets, are investigated further. It can be shown that this group has a statistically significantly different partition of the major occupational groups. This leads to implications for various branches of the literature, such as the pricing of human capital contracts, the hedging of individual income risk, portfolio optimization or asset pricing.