Catch me if I fall: Cross-national differences in willingness to take financial risks as a function of social and state ‘cushioning’

Knowledge about the existence and source of national differences in willingness to take risks plays a vital role in ensuring successful communication, collaboration, and understanding across countries, from the personal to the organizational and political/social domain. The current study investigates differences in financial risk-taking willingness between countries as a function of social and state ‘cushioning’, i.e. the extent of a person’s social support network and the state’s social-safety support network. The study compares large-scale household data and self-reports on willingness to take financial risks across three countries differing in their state support networks: Austria, Italy and the United States. Results show that personal social support network size influences risk-taking willingness (social cushioning). Furthermore, and most notably, we find evidence of an interactive relationship between social and state cushioning. High state cushioning renders the influence of social cushioning on financial risk-taking willingness less important. Contributions to management and business practice as well as theory on the influence of personal distance to financial support on risk-taking willingness are discussed.     

A Turnpike Theorem in the Closed Dynamic Leontief Model with a Singular Matrix of Capital Coefficients

The paper refers to the well-known Tsukui turnpike theorem on convergence of optimal growth trajectories in the closed dynamic Leontief model to the maximum balanced growth trajectory, called turnpike. In the original proof of this theorem, the assumption that the matrix B of capital coefficients is non-singular plays an essential role. For many reasons this assumption, very convenient for theoretical analysis, is not always satisfied in input-output systems built for empirical purposes. This paper fills the gap between theory and empirical studies, presenting a proof that convergence of optimal trajectories towards the turnpike is also a characteristic feature of the closed Leontief model in the case when matrix B is singular. The general idea of the proof is based on the approximation of a singular matrix B by an infinite sequence of non-singular matrices.     

Income Inequalities and International Trade in Goods and Services: Short- and Long-Run Evidence

In this article, we study the short- and long-run effects of trade openness in services on wage inequalities. The sample covers ten Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries from 1980 to 2005. We find a differentiated impact of trade in goods compared to trade in services: while trade in goods has a short- and a long-run impact on inequalities, trade in services has only long-run effects. Moreover, we also find that international trade in services has a stronger impact on inequalities than international trade in goods, and this effect does not concern only inequalities between top incomes and low incomes but also between top incomes and median incomes.     

Affective responses to consumer situations

The behavioural perspective model of consumer choice (bpm) proposes three structural components of consumer situations from which consumers' verbal responses to consumption environments can be predicted. These are utilitarian reinforcement, informational reinforcement and behaviour setting scope. It is argued that pleasure, arousal and dominance, presented by Mehrabian and Russell as environmentally determined affective reactions, are respectively feasible verbal responses to these structural components. Consumers (N = 561) completed Mehrabian and Russell's measures of these affective reactions and of approach-avoidance for one of four ranges of verbally expressed consumption situations derived from the model. The results indicate that, for these theoretically grounded ranges of consumer situations, approach-avoidance is satisfactorily explained by pleasure, arousal and dominance. Further, mean differences in these affective variables between situations which, the bpm argues, show distinct patterns of reinforcement and behaviour setting scope are successfully predicted.     

Investment strategies by foreign automobile firms in China: A comparative study of Volkswagen,Honda, and Hyundai

The paper uses rolling sample tests to investigate time-varying calendar effects in the Chinese stock market, based on the GARCH (1, 1)-GED model. The Friday effect existed with low volatility at the early stage, but it seems to have disappeared since 1997. The positive Tuesday effect began to appear then. There is a small-firm January effect with high volatility. The turn-of-the month effect has also disappeared in the Chinese stock market since 1997.     

Asymmetry in the jump-size distribution of the S&P 500: Evidence from equity and option markets

This paper studies alternative distributions for the size of price jumps in the S&P 500 index. We introduce a range of new jump-diffusion models and extend popular double-jump specifications that have become ubiquitous in the finance literature. The dynamic properties of these models are tested on both a long time series of S&P 500 returns and a large sample of European vanilla option prices. We discuss the in- and out-of-sample option pricing performance and provide detailed evidence of jump risk premia. Models with double-gamma jump size distributions are found to outperform benchmark models with normally distributed jump sizes.     

Calibration to American options: numerical investigation of the de-Americanization method

American options are the reference instruments for the model calibration of a large and important class of single stocks. For this task, a fast and accurate pricing algorithm is indispensable. The literature mainly discusses pricing methods for American options that are based on Monte Carlo, tree and partial differential equation methods. We present an alternative approach that has become popular under the name de-Americanization in the financial industry. The method is easy to implement and enjoys fast run-times (compared to a direct calibration to American options). Since it is based on ad hoc simplifications, however, theoretical results guaranteeing reliability are not available. To quantify the resulting methodological risk, we empirically test the performance of the de-Americanization method for calibration. We classify the scenarios in which de-Americanization performs very well. However, we also identify the cases where de-Americanization oversimplifies and can result in large errors.     

基于Krashen监察模式的公安英语口语教学改革研究

为积极响应教育部加强大学英语教学改革的号召,进一步加快公安院校行业英语口语教学的改革步伐以提升公安院校学生听说能力,以Krashen监察模式理论为研究视角深入剖析公安英语教学的现状,从教改目标、思路及实施方法三方面论述了进行公安英语口语教学改革的可行性和实效性。     

空间经济学的演化及在中国的发展

20世纪90年代以来，新经济地理学的经济学家们把空间因素纳入到主流经济学的理论体系，经过多年的演进，空间经济学的总体框架已经基本形成。国内对于空间经济学的研究尚处于起步阶段，可喜的是我们已经看到一批重要的研究成果，而且空间经济学在中国蓬勃发展的土壤日益成熟。随着经济全球化的日益展开，全球范围内的空间问题变得更加凸显，区域间的这种相互影响、相互制约的紧密联系是空前的，它从现实性上为空间经济学的发展提供极佳的素材，空间经济学必将大有作为。