Debt monetization,inflation, and the ‘neutral’ interest rate

The main purpose of this study is to explore the potential expansionary effect stemming from the monetization of debt. We develop a simple macroeconomic model with Keynesian features and four sectors: creditor and debtor households, businesses, and the public sector. We show that such expansionary effect stems mainly from the reduction in the financial cost to servicing the public debt. The efficacy of the channel that operates allegedly through the compression of the risk/term premium on securities is found to be ambiguous. Finally, we show that countries that issue their own currency can avert getting stuck in a structural ‘liquidity trap’ provided their central banks are willing to monetize the debt created by a strong enough fiscal expansion.     

统筹城乡发展中农民权益保障问题思考——以成都改革为对象的分析

农民问题的核心是农民的权益保障问题。论文对成都统筹城乡改革中有关农民权益保障,包括经济权益、社会权益、政治权益的基本情况进行了调研分析,在经验归纳的基础上指出,在坚持中国共产党及其政府作为制度的整体设计者与公共资源的主体供给者前提下,从农民的权益诉求出发,落实并保障农民的权益。     

预测与对策:未来中国房地产价格走势分析——以成都市为例

全球金融危机对中国房地产价格影响很大,通过对一系列影响因素的分析,发现这一时期人们的心理预期是所有影响因素中最为敏感的因素,能严重影响中国房地产价格。研究表明,四川省成都市的房地产价格走势与全国房地产价格走势接近,因而能够以该城市的房地产价格作为研究样本,在各种心理预期量化的基础上,预测出未来三年中国房地产价格并提出了相应的政策建议。     

Kuhn’s Theorem for extensive form Ellsberg games

We propose the notions of mixed and behavioral Ellsberg strategies for extensive form games and prove that these strategies are outcome-equivalent if and only if mixed Ellsberg strategies satisfy a certain rectangularity condition. In addition, we show that not only the profile of Ellsberg strategies must be appropriately chosen but also the extensive form must satisfy further restrictions beyond those implied by perfect recall in order to ensure that each player will respect his ex ante strategy choice with the evolution of play.     

Raising the bar (4)

This editorial summarizes and comments on the papers published in issue 11(4) so as to raise the bar in applied spatial economic research and highlight new trends. The first paper deals with common factors and spatial dependence in the error term specification of a production function model. The second paper sets forth a New Economic Geography (NEG) model with production activities that vary in their complexity, so as to analyse the impact on specialization patterns across different regions. The third paper measures the efficiency of local public investments using a relatively unknown econometric technique in which the time span over which the variables in the regression equation are measured is increased by one time period every run. The fourth paper adopts a conditional quantile regression approach to determine the impact of people employed in informal jobs on the wage distribution in Colombia and five of its regions. Finally, the last paper proposes and tests two new Bayesian variable selection approaches for spatial econometric models.     

Gentrifier? Who,Me? Interrogating the Gentrifier in the Mirror

Schlichtman and Patch suggest that there is an elephant sitting in the academic corner: while urbanists often use ‘gentrification’ as a pejorative term in formal and informal academic conversation, many urbanists are gentrifiers themselves. Even though urbanists have this firsthand experience with the process, this familiarity makes little impact on scholarly debate. There is, Schlichtman and Patch argue, an artificial distance in accounts of gentrification because researchers have not adequately examined their own relationship to the process. Utilizing a simple diagnostic tool that includes ten common aspects of gentrification, they compose two autoethnographic memoirs to begin this dialogue.     

Neighborhood as Spatial Project: Making the Urban Order on the Downtown Brooklyn Waterfront

This article argues for a reconceptualization of one of the most basic concepts in urban studies: the neighborhood. Traditionally neighborhoods have been understood as clearly bounded, quasi‐Westphalian containers or as ‘natural areas’ of urban community. But this approach is widely acknowledged to be under‐theorized. And it fails to account for the ways in which the production of neighborhood is inherently political and often conflictual. After reviewing the ways in which neighborhood has been used in urban sociology and urban planning, this article offers a critical conception of neighborhoods as ‘spatial projects’ on the submetropolitan scale. This approach captures the ways in which neighborhoods are not abstract spaces on a city map, but the uneven, unequal products of complex, ongoing struggles between various groups and institutions. This approach is developed through an ethnographic and historical case study of neighborhood formation in one part of Brooklyn, New York. The article concludes with a discussion of how the language of spatial projects refocuses urban research on the political and economic forces that produce neighborhood in the contemporary city.     

Afriat’s theorem for indivisible goods

We identify a natural counterpart of the standard GARP for demand data in which goods are all indivisible. We show that the new axiom (DARP, for “discrete axiom of revealed preference”) is necessary and sufficient for the rationalization of the data by a well-behaved utility function. Our results complement the main finding of Polisson and Quah (2013), who rather minimally modify the original consumer problem with indivisible goods so that the standard GARP still applies.     

居民消费能力视角下的中国经常账户顺差影响因素协整分析

持续、巨额的经常账户顺差给中国带来了一系列负面影响。彻底扭转中国经常账户失衡,迫在眉睫。文章基于居民消费能力的视角,对中国经常账户问题进行了理论和实证分析。理论研究结果表明,居民消费能力是影响中国经常账户的主要因素;实证研究结果表明,中国经常账户顺差与居民消费能力、投资率、净国外资产比率和人口抚养比存在长期动态均衡关系,其中居民消费能力是影响经常账户的重要因素且与经常账户余额/GDP呈负相关关系。最后文章提出了相关的对策和建议。