垂直财政不对称与收入不平等——基于转移支付依赖的门槛效应分析

收入分配不平等是现阶段我国社会的主要矛盾之一。本文实证考察了分税制改革以来政府间纵向财政分配体制对居民收入差距的影响。结果显示,垂直财政不对称提高总体上未起到缩小居民收入分配差距的作用。转移支付依赖度较低时,垂直财政不对称提高有助于降低居民收入不平等;而转移支付依赖度超过某个阈值时,垂直财政不对称提高反而加剧居民收入分配不均衡。在一般性转移支付的门槛效应中,垂直财政不对称提高会降低收入不平等;在专项转移支付的门槛效应中,垂直财政不对称对收入不平等的影响呈现“U型”关系。这意味着政府间财政分配关系改革应合理控制转移支付规模,进一步提高一般性转移支付的比重。     

The behaviour of betting and currency markets on the night of the EU referendum

We study the behaviours of the Betfair betting market and the sterling/dollar exchange rate (futures price) during 24 June 2016, the night of the EU referendum. We investigate how the two markets responded to the announcement of the voting results by employing a Bayesian updating methodology to update prior opinion about the likelihood of the final outcome of the vote. We then relate the voting model to the real-time evolution of the market-determined prices as the results were announced. We find that, although both markets appear to be inefficient in absorbing the new information contained in the vote outcomes, the betting market seems less inefficient than the FX market. The different rates of convergence to the fundamental value between the two markets lead to highly profitable arbitrage opportunities.     

Threshold effects of terms of trade on Latin American growth

This paper investigates nonlinear relationships between terms of trade volatility (totvol) and economic growth in 14 Latin American economies from 1997 to 2014. In the 2000s, Latin American countries experienced accelerated economic growth often attributed to commodity price booms. We split the sample into two regimes based on totvol thresholds determined by bootstrap techniques. Fixed effects, instrumental variable and dynamic panel regressions address endogeneity in trade growth, subject to traditional economic channels such as domestic investment, population growth, exchange rate, government size, and institutions. We find statistically significant thresholds and stronger trade-growth links during the 2000s commodity boom and in larger economies.     

Unemployment and labour force participation in Spain

This article examines the relationship between the unemployment rate and the labour force participation rate in Spain. Cointegration analysis is performed for aggregate, male and female time-series. Results suggest that there is no a long-run relationship between the two variables for the aggregate and male cases. However, the findings support a long-run relationship between the two variables for the female time-series. Thus, the unemployment invariance hypothesis is supported in the two former cases but not in the latter.     

Do denominations of origin provide useful quality signals? The case of Bordeaux wines

This paper investigates whether the existing Denominations of Origin (DOs) provide useful quality signals for wine consumers. To test our conjecture that the large number of existing DOs is too many for the typical consumer, we investigate the patterns of co-movement among average monthly wholesale prices for red wines from the 11 main DOs in Bordeaux over 16 years, 1999–2014. Our results indicate that consumers substitute among these wines according to the similarity of semantic elements in the names of DOs on the labels, and not according to prices or terroir that could reflect intrinsic quality where the names as such cannot. This finding suggests that the current DOs are too numerous and complex to provide helpful quality signals to consumers. A substantial reduction of the number of DOs might be warranted to better address the broader informational issue in wine markets.     

中国沿海地区经济结构变动对海洋环境的影响

中国沿海经济结构的研究对海洋环境的发展意义重大,然而二者之间的定量关系及内在机理尚不完全清楚。以2007-2016年为研究时段,我国沿海11省(区、市)为研究区域,借助固定效应以及门槛模型,测度经济结构变动与海洋环境之间的关系。结果表明:①在经济结构中产业结构(-0.099)对海洋的弹性系数最大,其次是经济增速(-0.058),投资对象为正向影响,但不显著;非经济结构中,技术进步(0.052)的弹性系数最大,其中环境规制(-0.045)、人口规模(-0.045)抑制海洋环境的改善。②区域对比北部、东部海洋经济圈产业结构对海洋环境起抑制作用,另外,东部海洋经济圈环境规制、人口规模与海洋环境水平呈明显的负相关性;南部海洋经济圈相对于其他两个区域,结果不显著。③将产业结构、技术进步作为门槛变量,在各自的作用下分别存在双重门槛和单一门槛。产业结构门槛值为0.533、0.462,仅河北,福建未跨越第二门槛;科研能力门槛值为40,仅河北、福建、海南未跨过门槛值。因此,应适度调整产业结构,注重经济增长的质量,合理控制城镇人口的流动,积极鼓励科研创新,实现经济与海洋环境协调发展。     

Does global liquidity drive commodity prices?

This paper tackles the question of whether a cross-sectional perspective on monetary policy is capable of explaining movements in global commodity prices. In this vein, we contribute to the rich literature on global liquidity in two different ways: on the one hand, to achieve a global series in terms of common monetary policy shocks, we propose a distinction between common and idiosyncratic factors across economies, as proposed by Bai and Ng (2004). Our second innovation stems from the consideration of a Markov-switching vector error correction model when analyzing time-varying short-run dynamics. Having identified the long-run structure which includes a proportional relationship between commodity prices and global liquidity in the first step, our results indeed show that the impact of a global liquidity measure on different commodity prices is significant and varies over time. One regime approximately accounts for times where commodity prices significantly adjust to disequilibria, while the second regime is characterized by either a weak or no commodity price adjustment. The fact that global liquidity also reacts to disequilibria in a specific regime demonstrates the two-way causality between monetary policy and commodity prices.     

A fractional cointegration var analysis of exchange rate dynamics

In their seminal work, Baillie and Bollerslev (1994) carried out an analysis of deviations from the cointegrating relationship of seven important exchange rates. They suggested that the exchange rate series possess long memory and therefore such processes could be well described as fractionally integrated processes. Hence, the influence of shocks to the equilibrium exchange rates may only vanish at very long horizons. In this work we analyze the cointegrating structure of five exchange rates to the US dollar, namely the British pound, the Euro, the Swedish Krona, the Canadian Dollar and the Swiss Franc. The series possess long memory and we show that they can be modeled through fractional integration. In fact, standard cointegration is rejected with the more traditional Johansen CVAR methodology. By using the recently introduced Fractionally Cointegrated VAR by Johansen and Nielsen (2012) we provide a cointegrating relationship taking into account fractional integration.     

Exchange rate sensitivity of US bilateral trade flows

The traditional way of assessing the impact of currency depreciation on the trade balance has been to estimate the elasticity of trade volume to relative prices. To this end, most previous studies used aggregate trade data. To avoid aggregation biases potentially hidden in aggregate data, recent studies have relied on bilateral trade data. Since import and export price data is not available on bilateral level, this study proposes an alternative way of assessing the impact of currency depreciation on bilateral trade flows. The models are applied between the US and her 19 industrial trading partners using recent advances in time-series modeling.     

湖北物流业与经济发展的实证研究

分析湖北发展物流业对经济增长的前项效应、后向效应和旁侧效应,阐明发展物流业可以促进湖北产业结构的优化。提高湖北综合经济实力。并运用协整理论、Granger因果检验定量分析了湖北物流业与经济发展之间的关系,结论是湖北物流业与经济发展具有长期稳定的协整关系．湖北物流业是经济发展的原因。