刍议我国增值税转型

实行消费型增值税有利于加快企业发展,提升产品竞争力。目前我国已具备增值税转型条件,宜采用“一步到位”方式,但不宜提高税率。     

Likelihood-based specification analysis of continuous-time models of the short-term interest rate

An extensive collection of continuous-time models of the short-term interest rate is evaluated over data sets that have appeared previously in the literature. The analysis, which uses the simulated maximum likelihood procedure proposed by Durham and Gallant (2002), provides new insights regarding several previously unresolved questions. For single factor models, I find that the volatility, not the drift, is the critical component in model specification. Allowing for additional flexibility beyond a constant term in the drift provides negligible benefit. While constant drift would appear to imply that the short rate is nonstationary, in fact, stationarity is volatility-induced. The simple constant elasticity of volatility model fits weekly observations of the three-month Treasury bill rate remarkably well but is easily rejected when compared with more flexible volatility specifications over daily data. The methodology of Durham and Gallant can also be used to estimate stochastic volatility models. While adding the latent volatility component provides a large improvement in the likelihood for the physical process, it does little to improve bond-pricing performance.     

我国外资企业避税问题分析

外资企业进入我国,给我国的经济带来了活力,推动了我国的经济增长。但与此同时,也在我国谋取了大量税收利益。本文通过对外资企业在我国避税特点的分析,指出其进行逆向避税的不同动机,并重点分析了外资企业在税务筹划中所采取的各种避税手段,为我国反避税工作的开展提供借鉴参考。     

Do homeowners achieve more household wealth in the long run?

Despite the public’s faith in homeownership as a vehicle for wealth creation, there are surprisingly few empirical studies of the independent impact of homeownership and its duration on household wealth accumulation. This paper provides the first empirical evidence that homeownership, after controlling for other drivers of wealth accumulation, is positively and significantly associated with wealth accumulation over time. Using the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics, it examines the influence of housing tenure choices between 1989 and 2001 on household net wealth levels in 2001 after controlling for initial wealth in 1989, location, income, education, and other family and personal characteristics that might influence the rate of wealth accumulation. Importantly, the models used also control for the tendency of households to accumulate wealth between 1984 and 1989 (five years prior to the studied period). This approach is used to address the possibility that an unobserved variable—the propensity to save or accumulate wealth—may be associated with both the probability and duration of homeownership and the rate of wealth accumulation. All else equal, those who owned homes and owned for longer periods of time had significantly higher household net wealth by 2001. These results are compelling because house price appreciation over the period was near its long-run average while stock gains were above and real rent increases below their long-run averages. Hence, the findings are suggestive of a positive influence of ownership over long periods on net wealth, even during a period when alternative investments produced higher than normal returns and rents grew slowly. This is especially important because the overwhelmingly majority of households do not sell their homes shortly after buying them. In our sample, those who became owners typically owned for 7 years. Furthermore, most households that bought during a period of declining real home values in the early 1990s continued to own their homes for at least eight years and came out well ahead of those who did not own.     

库存周期计算的价值方法和实物方法研究

研究比较了库存周期计算的价值方法和实践中常常使用的实物方法,并以钢铁制造企业的钢卷产品为例加以说明。     

Forecasting economic time series using flexible versus fixed specification and linear versus nonlinear econometric models

Nine macroeconomic variables are forecast in a real-time scenario using a variety of flexible specification, fixed specification, linear, and nonlinear econometric models. All models are allowed to evolve through time, and our analysis focuses on model selection and performance. In the context of real-time forecasts, flexible specification models (including linear autoregressive models with exogenous variables and nonlinear artificial neural networks) appear to offer a useful and viable alternative to less flexible fixed specification linear models for a subset of the economic variables which we examine, particularly at forecast horizons greater than 1-step ahead. We speculate that one reason for this result is that the economy is evolving (rather slowly) over time. This feature cannot easily be captured by fixed specification linear models, however, and manifests itself in the form of evolving coefficient estimates. We also provide additional evidence supporting the claim that models which ‘win’ based on one model selection criterion (say a squared error measure) do not necessarily win when an alternative selection criterion is used (say a confusion rate measure), thus highlighting the importance of the particular cost function which is used by forecasters and ‘end-users’ to evaluate their models. A wide variety of different model selection criteria and statistical tests are used to illustrate our findings.     

关于收益法的经济价值论及其基础之研究

收益法是资产评估中最基本的一种方法,本文对资本价值理论及其价值论基础--效用论、边际效用论以及理论应 用(收益法)进行全面系统的研究。     

基于多元统计分析的封闭式基金业绩评价

本文引入在险价值(VaR)和基金折价率指标,利用因子分析和聚类分析方法对基金业绩进行综合评价。实证分析发现我国封闭式基金收益率优于市场收益率,少数几只基金业绩相对突出,实现低风险高收益的目标。但封闭式基金折价幅度较大,基金内部收益水平与外部评价状况背离,反映了市场投资者的投资非理性现象。     

Environmental standards as barriers to trade

This paper examines the case of a good, polluting in consumption, whose pollutive content is restricted by a government with strong environmental policies. When foreign producers are unable to comply with the restrictive environmental standard of such a country, to which they wish to export, they often allege that those standards constitute illegal barriers to free trade. An example of such a good is gasoline, excessively pollutive formulations of which are prohibited from importation into the United States by the 1970 Clean Air Act. Rather than banning them, such imports should be taxed, along with the domestically produced substitute good, according to their respective pollutant contents. This would foster economic efficiency and should be more acceptable to foreign producers than the outright prohibition mandated by the Clean Air Act. The results of this paper reaffirm the argument in a previous article in this journal (Socio-Economic Planning Sciences 29 (1995) 187), though the countries’ roles in the two papers are reversed, that free trade and Pigouvian environmental policies increase international welfare.