农村居民消费、流动性约束和消费信贷的实证研究

本文利用1978-2004年我国农村居民人均消费支出和人均可支配收入数据对农村居民消费和流动性约束之间的关系进行了实证研究。分析结果表明：我国农村居民受流动性约束的程度明显偏高；而自从我国大力发展居民个人消费信贷业以来，流动性约束水平有所下降，消费信贷的发展发挥了一定的作用。今后在我国农村地区进一步建立健全面向广大农民的消费信贷业务，对于缓解流动性约束，推动农村居民消费需求增长具有积极的意义。     

How much do online consumers really value free product returns? Evidence from eBay

Consumer return rates have been steadily rising in recent years, resulting in growing costs for retailers who must manage the returns process and the disposition of returned products. This cost pressure is driven in part by extremely generous return policies, such as giving consumers a full refund upon return. Interestingly, this common retail practice of full refunds is inconsistent with the recommendations of many analytical models of returns, which nearly always show that a partial refund is optimal. Such inconsistencies between theory and practice might arise when the decision drivers included in the analytical models do not match the decision drivers in practice. It might also be the case that retailers are overly optimistic about the value that consumers assign to a full refund, and thus assume that the value of such a policy outweighs its costs. In this paper, we use data collected from eBay, where identical products are sold with different return policies, to investigate these open questions in the literature. We analyze both the return policy drivers from the retailer's perspective and the return policy value from the consumer's perspective. Our results suggest that the value of a full refund policy to consumers may not be as large as one might expect, and it also exhibits a large heterogeneity across buyers with different levels of online purchase experience. In addition, we provide empirical evidence for what has long been suspected by online retailers – that a non-refundable forward shipping charge quickly erodes any value that consumers assign to return policies. The generality of our results is limited by the fact that eBay differs from traditional retail contexts in many respects, including the fact that eBay buyers may not be representative of the general buyer population. However, our study of how eBay consumers value free returns provides new insights into an understudied area, and it can serve as a starting point for future studies of the value of return policies in other retail contexts.     

Universal food security program and nutritional intake: Evidence from the hunger prone KBK districts in Odisha

This article provides evidence on the role of consumer food subsidies in improving nutritional intake and diet quality by evaluating the expansion of the government food assistance program coverage in the hunger prone state of Odisha in India. In 8 districts of Odisha, popularly known as the Kalahandi-Balangir-Koraput (KBK) region which is notable for extreme poverty and starvation deaths, the government did away with the targeted food assistance program in 2008 and made the scheme universal. Using a Difference-in-Difference methodology over two repeated cross sectional household surveys, this article finds that the shift from targeted to a universal food security program in the KBK region of Odisha has led to an improvement in the household nutritional intake and diet quality. Further examination suggests that proportion of households consuming below the recommended dietary allowance of calorie, fats and protein has declined significantly in this region post the intervention.     

美国金融监管改革法案解读与启示

次贷危机暴露了美国现行金融监管制度的缺陷,使美国对其监管理念和监管体系进行反思.<多德--弗兰克华尔街改革和消费者保护法案>是美国在危机后进行大规模金融监管改革的立法尝试.新设金融稳定监管委员会防范系统性风险、成立消费者金融保护局、加强金融衍生品监管、终结金融机构大而不能倒状况等立法内容折射出美国金融监管理念的革新.我国应适度借鉴美国金融监管改革立法优质内核,完善我国金融监管法律制度建设.     

消费者需求受食品质量与安全影响的讨论分析

近年来,国内经济发展迅速,人们生活水平也得到很大提升,使得人们越来越重视安全,而食品是人们生活中的基本物质保障,是人们生活的必需品,所以食品的质量与安全问题是当下最热门的话题之一.当前消费者的需求会受食品质量与安全的影响,频发的食品质量与安全问题让人们愈发重视食品质量与安全,消费者的需求渐渐发生变化.基于此,本文展开了...     

When Should “Consumers-as-Producers” Have to Comply With Consumer Protection Laws?

Since the 1960s, consumer protection law has been built on the contrast between large “producers” and small “consumers.” Today, instead, an ordinary consumer owns what can accurately be called a “personal mainframe”—a home computer whose processing power matches an IBM mainframe from about 10 Years ago. Equipped with a personal mainframe—an Information-Age factory—ordinary “consumers” at home are increasingly also becoming “producers.” As unregulated consumers become regulated producers, a major legal question is whether and when the individual should have to comply with consumer protection laws. The discussion here selects four examples of US legal rules that might apply to consumers-as-producers, with recommendations spanning the range of possibilities: (1) consumer privacy legislation: creating a threshold, with no compliance required for databases of fewer than 5,000 names, is recommended; (2) advertising substantiation: concerning the requirement that advertisers have a “reasonable basis” for their claims, applying current law to small advertisers is recommended; (3) spam: current law does not create a threshold for those who send a few commercial emails, but such a threshold is worth considering; (4) political blogging: the author agrees with the US Federal Election Commission decision to create a major exemption from campaign finance laws for online political advocacy, even for large blogs or websites. The common theme among these recommendations is to describe the sort of harm that existing law seeks to reduce. The approach here next looks at how the use of personal mainframes affects creation of those harms. Where the sorts of harm are likely to be created by consumers-as-producers, the analysis tilts towards requiring compliance. Where the sorts of harms are unlikely to be caused by consumers-as-producers, then the case for an exception is stronger.