The impact of farmland property rights security on the farmland investment in rural China

This paper aims to estimate the effect of the security of farmland property rights on land-attached and long-term investment. Based on the data from a nationally representative sample with 5887 plots of 1175 households among 5 provinces in rural China, we adopt Probit, Ordinary Least Squares / Tobit, and the household fixed effect methods to yield the consistent results. The results show that the security of farmland property rights have significant and positive effects on the possibility and amount of the overall farmland investment. However, it has different effects on the different types of investments. The share of farmland retained significantly affects the investments in soil quality improvement and changing use of the plots but does not affect the investment in water conservancy facilities. The types of farmland property rights affect investments in water conservancy facilities and changing use of plots, but do not affect investment in soil quality improvement. The findings imply that the Chinese government should be the principal investor in water conservancy facilities and enlarge the operational scale of farmland by facilitating farmland transfer to increase private investment.     

Informal Property Rights as Relational and Functional: Unravelling the Relational Contract in China's Informal Housing Market

In the face of state-led land grabs, enterprising Chinese peasants have started a revolution in the ambiguous and insecure rural tenure system by developing an extralegal property system known as the small property right (SPR). Using the SPR, peasants are able to capitalize on their property through the sale of houses built on collectively owned land. Little is known, however, about the specific process behind the development of the SPR by the peasants, or how this extralegal property system functions in terms of securing the use and transfer of property without the backing of law. This article aims to clarify the situation through the lenses of the Endogenous Nature of Institutions and Relational Contract Theory, aiming to understand the socially constructed, endogenous and relational nature of the property rights that make SPR functional. Based on an ethnographic investigation of Beijing's largest SPR housing settlement, we show how enterprising peasants develop long-term relational contracts with urban households for the provision of housing services, secured on the basis of the common interests and symbiosis of the two parties and a reputation system that serves to deter defaults. The discretionary treatment of SPR housing by local states serves as a further motivation for the village and the informal homeowners to preserve a stable property arrangement, with such a specific institutional setting being an exemplar of China's pragmatic state entrepreneurialism.     

No‐arbitrage implies power‐law market impact and rough volatility

Market impact is the link between the volume of a (large) order and the price move during and after the execution of this order. We show that in a quite general framework, under no‐arbitrage assumption, the market impact function can only be of power‐law type. Furthermore, we prove this implies that the macroscopic price is diffusive with rough volatility, with a one‐to‐one correspondence between the exponent of the impact function and the Hurst parameter of the volatility. Hence, we simply explain the universal rough behavior of the volatility as a consequence of the no‐arbitrage property. From a mathematical viewpoint, our study relies, in particular, on new results about hyper‐rough stochastic Volterra equations.     

Embracing invention similarity for the measurement of vertically overlapping claims

ABSTRACT

Clear and well-defined patent rights can incentivize innovation by granting monopoly rights to the inventor for a limited period of time in exchange for public disclosure of the invention. However, with cumulative innovation, when a product draws from intellectual property held across multiple firms (including fragmented intellectual property or patent thickets), contracting failures may lead to suboptimal economic outcomes. However, an alternative theory, developed by a variety of scholars, contends that patent thickets have a more ambiguous effect. Researchers have developed several measures to gauge the extent and impact of cumulative innovation and the various channels of patent thickets. This paper contends that mis-measurement may contribute to the incoherence and overall lack of consensus within the patent thickets literature. Specifically, the literature is missing a precise measure of vertically overlapping claims. We propose a new measure of vertically overlapping claims that incorporates invention similarity to more precisely identify inventive overlap. The measure defined in this paper will enable more accurate measurement, and allow for novel economic research on cumulative innovation, fragmentation in intellectual property, and patent thickets within and across all patent jurisdictions.     

Salvador Allende's development policy: Lessons after 50 years

Last year, 2020, was the 50th anniversary of the opening of the ‘Chilean road to socialism’ by Salvador Allende. Although the Allende government is the political reference for the 'socialism of the 21st century’ in Latin America, international supporters tend to disregard the primary cause of its downfall, focusing instead on the circumstances of Allende's death. This article explains the link between the Allende government's development policies and its macroeconomic outcomes between 1970 and 1973. It finds that Chile's economic collapse had an endogenous cause related to government policies. This supports the views of Mises and Hayek on the feasibility of socialist economic policies. Policymakers and commentators should recognise essential lessons from the Chilean experience to learn from past errors and effectively promote Latin America's economic development.     

基于NETSTARS运用定床水理原理在河道疏浚中的应用

疏浚大多用于河道的过分淤积,拓宽则用于通水隘口的消除。而随着时空的演变河床疏浚与河槽拓宽的进行所需考虑的因子越来越多,故疏浚进行前应尽量考量整个河道的河性以及施工后可能引致的变动,使能维持预期的效果,并避免造成负面效应。本文主要以涧河为研究对象,利用NETSTARS拟似二维水理输砂模式,探讨河道疏浚后的水理与输砂演变趋势等相关课题。     

国企民营化与企业创新效率：促进还是抑制?

文章基于混合所有制改革的背景，从创新效率的视角考察了微观创新主体民营化前后创新行为的变化。研究发现，民营化抑制了企业的创新效率，企业的专利数量显著减少，这种影响在缺乏原国有大股东制衡、无系族的上市公司以及外部产权保护较弱的地区更加显著，而且相对于创业型企业，民营化企业的创新效率更低。进一步研究发现，民营化抑制企业创新效率的一个重要途径是关联交易显著增加、投资显著减少，民营化后非国有大股东更多地表现出掏空动机，减少了创新活动，降低了创新效率。文章的研究结论为理解民营化企业的效率提供了新视角，有助于我们正确认识和理解新兴转轨经济体的民营化行为，而且对于监管层如何推进混合所有制改革具有重要的政策启示。     

基于广义资源观的企业并购整合的价值创造

并购是重新配置资源有效机制,而并购后的整合是提高社会资源配置的有效手段。并购后整合是否能实现价值的创造是决定企业是否进行并购的重要决定因素。基于广义资源观,探讨了并购后整合的价值创造机理,认为在企业并购中资源、能力和知识的转移是可以实现的,但因要素特性不同和转移过程中遇到的影响因素不同使得其转移的过程和难度有所不同。在企业并购中,经过长期学习积累起来的、以知识为主要形态的无形资源、隐性知识和核心能力的转移难度就很大。无形资源、隐性知识和核心能力的转移难度与这些要素的特征有直接关系。     

Neo-institutionalism is not yet a scientific success: a reply to Barry Weingast

Barry Weingast agrees that the idea of liberalism was crucial for the making of the modern world, though in most of his comment he turns to his own writings making institutional change the crux. Yet institutions in Britain did not in fact change much, the changes had little economic oomph, and underlying property rights were good in numerous economies worldwide since ancient times. An ideational economic history works better: liberty caused our riches.     

A genetic algorithm based approach to transactional and QoS-aware service selection

As there are various risks of failure when Web services are deployed in unreliable environment, the execution of a composite Web service (CWS) requires the transaction mechanism to guarantee its reliable execution. However, the existing service selection approaches consider QoS and transaction separately and have not considered that transactional properties may affect the QoS such as the execution time of a CWS. This work addresses the importance of considering transactional properties and how the transactional properties affect the QoS simultaneously in the process of service selection by a QoS-aware and transactional-aware selection approach. First, a performance evaluation method is proposed to calculate the execution time of a transactional CWS. Then, a genetic algorithm based approach, which takes into account the execution time, price, transactional property and successful execution rate of CWS, is presented to achieve global optimisation service selection. Finally, experimental results show the efficiency and effectiveness of the approach.