20世纪90年代以来中国经济的动态效率

本文借助于西方宏观经济学中的索洛经济增长模型和拉姆齐 卡斯 库普曼斯模型 ,讨论了宏观经济中最优消费和储蓄的确定机制 ,并得出判断宏观经济运行动态效率的黄金定律以及修正黄金定律标准。同时 ,借助代际交叠模型从理论上探讨了自由竞争经济出现动态无效的可能性。在此基础上 ,我们利用黄金定律规则对中国实际经济运行的动态效率进行了考察 ,认为 2 0世纪 90年代初起中国经济运行处于一种动态无效状态 ,进而我们深入分析了造成中国经济出现动态无效的原因。根据中国经济处于动态无效的事实 ,并结合原因探索 ,我们最后提出了摆脱动态无效困境的若干政策建议。     

FDI对我国中部地区技术进步影响的实证研究

梳理了中部地区吸收利用FDI的现状和特征,计算出了中部的TFP(全要素生产率),并以此作为技术进步的衡量指标,构建VAR模型对FDI和TFP的相关性进行实证分析.结果表明,短期内FDI对中部地区的技术进步有一定的促进作用,但长期来看促进作用并不十分显著.中部地区在吸收利用FDI过程中要引导技术引进,加强自主创新;创造公平环境,扶持本土企业;鼓励中外合资,强化技术合作.     

Contestability in bus markets – evidence from the British de-regulated market

Following the 1985 Transport Act in Great Britain, reforms in the provision of bus services continue across Europe and other parts of the world to this day. The British experience, however, remains a key point of study in informing these continuing developments. This article looks at the issue of contestability in bus markets, and tests for the existence of the contestable market in Britain through an examination of fare levels, profit margins and technical efficiencies in 90 identifiable bus markets. The main conclusion is that there is evidence of the contestable market in Britain, however it can hardly be described as widespread, only found to be present in 15 of the 90 markets identified in the sample. The real issue however, particularly with regard to continuing reforms elsewhere in Europe, is the ability of regulatory authorities to maintain competitive and contestable (free) markets and the research suggests that in the face of market forces this is simply not possible. The only conclusion therefore is that contestability in the free market is not sustainable, and thus can only be introduced directly through franchising.     

Do government owned banks trade market power for slack?

The ‘Quiet Life Hypothesis (QLH)’ posits that banks with market power have less incentives to maximize revenues and minimize cost. Especially government owned banks with a public mandate precluding profit maximization might succumb to a quiet life. We use a unified approach that simultaneously measures market power and efficiency to test the quiet life hypothesis of German savings banks. We find that average local market power declined between 1996 and 2006. Cost and profit efficiency remained constant. Nonparametric correlations are consistent with a quiet life regarding cost efficiency but not regarding profit efficiency. The quiet life on the cost side is negatively correlated with bank size, quality of loan portfolio and local per capita income. The last result indicates that the quiet cost life is therefore potentially due to benevolent excess consumption of local input factors by public savings banks.     

The elasticity of demand for wagering in an unregulated market

The literature estimating the take-out rate (price) elasticity of horse race wagering has consistently found values far above one. The persistence of these apparently inefficiently high prices can be attributed to institutional factors of the US market where federal taxes are imposed on the total amount wagered, and not on the bookmakers’ revenue. By investigating all horse races in New Zealand from August 1993 to April 2009, our article is the first one to consider price setting for wagering in an unregulated market where taxes for a monopolistic betting agency are based on revenues. In such a setting, one would expect elasticities close to one, but in all econometric specifications, we find values well below one. We identify two reasons why higher prices could nevertheless reduce profits: cross price elasticities are negative and, due to the specific features of parimutuel betting, international competitors may only be attracted when take-out rates are above a critical threshold.     

Efficiency of health care delivery systems: effects of health insurance coverage

Health insurance expansions may increase the demand for care-creating incentives for health systems to increase input consumption. The possibility remains that added capacity and personnel will have little effect on health outcomes, decreasing the technical efficiency of health care delivery systems. We estimate that a 1 percentage point increase in health insurance coverage decreases the technical efficiency of health care delivery by 1.3 percentage points, translating into approximately 50 billion dollars in additional health expenditures. This finding uncovers a previously unexplored consequence of changes in health insurance on the supply side of health care markets suggesting one avenue through which health care costs growth may occur.     

Stock return reversal and continuance anomaly: new evidence from Hong Kong

Using weekly data, this article conducts a comprehensive analysis and presents new empirical evidences on the short-term stock return reversal and continuance anomaly in the Hong Kong stock market. We confirm that winner stocks behave differently from loser stocks in that the return reversal phenomenon is pervasive within past winner stocks only while past loser stocks tend to show weak return continuance. The arbitrage strategy can earn significantly positive contrarian profits, especially for small firms and illiquid stocks. The anomaly varies across different industries and is also sensitive to the market movement. Despite the existence of the anomaly, our results still in general suggest that the Hong Kong stock market is weak-form efficient because arbitrage trading costs would largely overwhelm the available profits in most cases.     

Optimal monetary policy and the role of hybrid inflation-price-level targets

This study investigates the role of hybrid inflation-price-level targets as a solution to the well-known stabilization bias problem that arises under discretionary policies. The analysis shows that social welfare will be improved by employing a weighted average of inflation and price level as one of the central bank's target variables in addition to the output gap growth target. The reason is that imposing the optimal hybrid target will reduce inflation variability in a highly efficient way. In particular, the optimal hybrid regime outperforms other previously suggested regimes when the degree of inflation persistence is moderate.     

Measuring market distortion: international comparisons,policy and competitiveness

This paper develops a framework to simultaneously estimate production possibility frontiers and measure distortions in factor and product markets. The econometric results, based on a panel of 61 countries over the period 1970 through 1985, reveal very little distortion in factor markets but considerable distortion in product markets. In addition, the distortions tend to vary with the cyclical behaviour of economic activity. Further, the results suggest that in order to improve efficiency, commercial policy should aim at reducing product-market distortions rather than factor-market ones.     

On the efficiency of the negligence rule

The three versions of the negligence rule discussed in the literature differ regarding whether a negligent injurer is liable for the entire loss or only for the incremental loss; or regarding whether negligence is defined as failure to take at least due care or failure to take a cost‐justified precaution. It is shown in the paper that the incremental version with untaken precaution notion of negligence is not efficient; not even for the unilateral case. The paper also establishes, for the bilateral case, the efficiency of the incremental version with the shortfall‐from‐due‐care way of defining negligence.