Teacher Training and Teacher Optimism about the American Economic System

The amount and type of economic-education training teachers receive have predictable effects on the teachers' optimism about the future of the American economic system.     

Money as Social Exergy

Synopsis It has been proposed that open thermodynamic systems will act to dissipate available energy gradients by self-organizing into coherent structures that, with time, evolve and develop into nested hierarchies – panarchies – that adapt to internal and external changes according to a characteristic adaptive cycle. This paper seeks to apply these ideas in the purely societal realm by investigating the role of money in economic systems. Money represents the value embodied in goods; a value that is separate from the exact nature of those goods. We suggest that money thereby liberates the ‘free value’ of economic desire and that this free value has properties analogous to energy. The result is the self-organization of structures and systems (‘econosystems’) that dissipate this ‘free value’. Econosystems act at different scales, and nested levels of econosystems form a panarchy, having effects that can be observed. In particular, it appears that money facilitates the creation of relationships between econosystem actors, increasing the connectedness of the econosystems that envelop those actors. We have identified a phenomenon whereby freed social value (i.e. money) can aggregate, or pool, at a larger econosystem scale in structures such as banks. These pools act as gradients that actors at the neighborhood scale can exploit for self-organization in the econosystem. Thus, econosystem actors appear to be freed from thermodynamic constraints by using money as a means of self-organization. However, because of these pools of aggregated social exergy, connectedness is increased at the larger scale of the econosystem. The potential consequence of this dynamic is that money may act to push larger scale econosystems toward a state of heightened vulnerability to collapse, while freeing smaller scale actors from apparent constraints. In this way, we propose that money acts to skew information feedback loops between econosystem actors and larger scale structures such as economies and ecosystems.      

Equity market neutral hedge funds and the stock market: an application of score-driven copula models

In this article, we study the time-varying market neutrality of equity market neutral hedge funds. We use data from the Hedge Fund Research? Equity Market Neutral Index (HFRX EH), which represents the performance of a portfolio of individual equity market neutral hedge funds. For each day, we measure different levels of association of the Standard and Poor’s 500 (S&;P 500) index and the HFRX EH. We use non-linear dynamic conditional score models of location, scale and copula that, to the best of our knowledge, have not yet been applied in the body of literature on hedge funds. We study whether the neutrality of the HFRX EH that is evidenced in the body of literature for the period of April 1993–April 2003 also holds for the following decade, for the period of May 2003–December 2016. We estimate different average levels of association for the pre-, during- and post-periods of the US financial crisis of 2008. We find that the association of the S&;P 500 and the HFRX EH, on average, is significantly positive for the pre- and post-periods of the financial crisis, and it is significantly negative for the period during the financial crisis.     

最低工资、就业弹性及就业效应研究

最低工资标准的提升对于就业的效应究竟是正是负,目前理论界并没有一致的论证结果。本文首先从市场结构和企业应对措施两个角度,梳理了西方学界关于最低工资对就业影响的作用机理,然后建立一个涉及农民工、企业和政府三方的博弈模型,推导出行业就业弹性对劳动参与的关键作用,并利用全国各省市六个行业的面板数据进行了实证分析。本文的主要结论是,最低工资的实施标准按行业设置比目前按地区＂一刀切＂的模式更具科学性。     

Quasi-Experimental Evidence of Peer Effects in First-Year Economics Courses at a Chinese University

The authors of this article implement a quasi-experimental strategy to estimate peer effects in economic education by exploiting the institutional setting in a large public university in China, where roommates are randomly assigned conditional on a student's major and province of origin. They found significant impacts of peer academic quality, measured as roommates’ average scores on the national College Entrance Exam, on first-year economics students’ scores in first-year microeconomics, macroeconomics, and accounting courses. They also found nonlinearity in peer effects: Roommates’ academic ability has significant effects for academically weak students but not for academically strong students.     

Patents,R&;D and lag effects: evidence from flexible methods for count panel data on manufacturing firms

This paper investigates the relationship between patents and research and development expenditures using new longitudinal patent data at the firm level for the U.S. manufacturing sector from 1982 to 1992. The paper also develops a new class of count panel data models based on series expansion of the distribution of individual effects. Estimation results from various distributed lag and dynamic multiplicative panel count data models show that the contemporaneous relationship between patenting and R&D expenditures continues to be strong, accounting for over 60% of the total R&D elasticity. The lag effects are higher than have previously been found for the 1970s data. We would like to thank Chris Bollinger, Bronwyn Hall and Paula Stephan for useful comments on the previous version of the paper. Earlier versions were presented at the 11th International Conference on Panel Data, Texas A&M University, the Midwest Econometrics Group Meeting, and the Annual Conference of the Southern Economic Association.     

技术型企业过往绩效对团队创新行为的影响：关系冲突的中介效应

基于IMOI模型,引入具备动态特征的“过往绩效”概念,利用长三角地区101个项目导向型研发团队问卷数据,依据社会信息处理理论和归因理论探讨过往绩效对团队创新行为的影响效果与内在机制。结果发现,过往绩效与团队创新行为显著正相关,关系冲突在过往绩效影响创新行为路径中起部分中介作用,并且关系冲突的中介机制在中国“人情”文化背景下能得到更好的解释;进一步,团队内部的恶意归因倾向在这一过程中发挥着调节作用。研究结果有助于从新视角探索技术型团队创新行为诱发机制,对双创背景下技术型企业创新管理实践具有一定参考意义。     

House Prices,Wealth and Consumption: New Evidence from Australia and Canada

Over the past two decades, a number of countries have experienced appreciation in house prices at the same time that aggregate consumption has increased. This paper tests alternative hypotheses for this phenomenon by using repeated household surveys from Australia and Canada to identify the transmission mechanism that links consumption and household wealth. The empirical analysis suggests that neither a direct wealth effect nor a common causal factor likely accounts for the observed correlation between wealth and consumption in these two countries. Rather, indirect factors such as collateral effects arising from relaxation of credit constraints are a more likely explanation.     

R&D Spillovers for Public R&D Productivity

ABSTRACT

This paper empirically investigates whether the productivity of a public (government-funded) R&D project improves when the aggregate R&D investment in the same technology field increases. Based on the unique project level data that cover almost entire public R&D projects in Korea, this paper shows that aggregate investment in other public R&D projects in the same technology field increases a public R&D project’s outputs both independent of its project expenditure (additive spillover effects) and interactive with its project expenditure (multiplicative spillover effects). The spillover effects from the aggregate private R&D investment in the same technology field also exist, but to a much lesser extent.     

评析技术悲观主义与技术乐观主义

科技悲观主义和科技乐观主义从不同的关注点,为科学技术在社会中扮演的角色进行界定,或令人充满希望;或令人恐惧。两种思想都具有片面性和局限性,但对社会的发展都有重要的启示作用。我们应全面、辨证地评价技术的社会作用及其产生的社会后果。