如何缩小我国个人贫富差距

我国个人收入差距不断扩大,是国民收入初次分配和再分配制度存在缺陷造成的。只有深化分配制度改革,才能从根本上扭转这一趋势,最终更好地实现社会公平。     

US inflation dynamics on long-range data

In this article, we evaluate inflation persistence in the United States using long-range monthly and annual data. The importance of inflation persistence is crucial to policy authorities and market participants, since the level of inflation persistence provides an indication on the susceptibility of the economy to exogenous shocks. Departing from classic econometric approaches found in the relevant literature, we evaluate inflation persistence through the nonparametric Hurst exponent within both a global and a rolling window framework. Moreover, we expand our analysis to detect the potential existence of chaos in the data generating process, in order to enhance the robustness of our conclusions. Overall, we find that inflation persistence is high from 1775 to 2013 for the annual data-set and from February 1876 to May 2014 in monthly frequency, respectively. Especially from the monthly data-set, the rolling window approach allows us to derive that inflation persistence has reached to historically high levels in the post–Bretton Woods period and remained there ever since.     

外汇监管套利研究：基于外汇差额缺口视角

2008年全球金融危机后,学术界一致认为监管套利是导致危机的重要原因。当前,外汇管理处于渐进性改革中,放松外汇管制和人民币国际化步伐加快,外汇监管套利迅速发展。本文以进出口、收付汇、结售汇差额缺口为度量指标,对差额缺口的构成、影响因素进行分析,对外汇监管套利行为进行研究,在此基础上得出研究结论。     

Unethical use of wildlife in tourism: what's the problem,who is responsible,and what can be done?

Wildlife tourism is a huge global market, the revenue from which can promote local livelihoods and tourist education, enact conservation, and improve animal welfare. Such benefits arise if wildlife tourist attractions (WTAs) prioritise ethical deliverables above financial profit, but recent work has shown that the majority of WTAs have substantial negative animal welfare and conservation impacts. In the absence of global regulatory authorities, tourist revenue has become the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes acceptable use of animals in WTAs. Tourists, however, are not adequate assessors of WTAs’ animal welfare and conservation impacts: they lack the specialist knowledge required and are subject to a number of psychological biases that obscure the ethical dimensions of decisions to attend particular WTAs. This inadequacy is evidenced, and compounded, by overwhelmingly positive reviews on TripAdvisor (the industry-leading review site), even for WTAs with objectively poor ethical standards. Our suggested solution is to empower tourists by presenting unequivocal assessments of WTAs' animal welfare and conservation impacts, hosted in the fora that tourists already use to make their travel decisions. We would thereby promote a subjective norm that tourists should consider and limit their individual negative impacts when choosing which WTAs to visit.     

Central Bank Independence and Sacrifice Ratios: Some Further Considerations

The existing literature reports a positive relationship between sacrifice ratios and central bank independence. This paper discusses two critical points related to the usual procedures employed by this literature. One concerns the issue of non-stationarity of the inflation rate, the other the problem of correlation between the error terms for different disinflation episodes in the same country. The way in which the sacrifice ratio-central bank independence relationship is tested is reconsidered taking into account these points. Our results shed considerable doubts on the nature and robustness of such a relationship and on the usual interpretation given to it in the literature.     

Does IMF Support Accelerate Inflation Stabilization?

This paper analyzes the effects of International Monetary Fund (IMF) arrangements on the timing of inflation stabilization programs. By providing financial support that may allow the reduction of inflation without incurring politically unacceptable economic costs, the IMF can hasten stabilization. But, since support can also reduce the costs of inflation, it may instead delay it. Empirical results obtained for 10 countries that suffered from chronic inflation fail to support the hypothesis that IMF financial assistance accelerates stabilization. Rather, they indicate that other factors have a greater impact on the timing of stabilizations: greater fragmentation of the political system delays stabilization, while a higher level of inflation hastens it. JEL Classification Numbers: E63, E31, F35     

Is the monetary policy rule responsive to exchange rate changes? The case of Indonesia,Malaysia, the Philippines,and Thailand

Extending Obstfeld and Rogoff (J Econ Perspect 9:73–96, 1995), Ball (Monetary policy rules, University of Chicago Press, pp. 127–144, 1999), Svensson (J Int Econ 50: 155–183, 2000), Taylor (Am Econ Rev 91: 263–267, 2001), Gali and Gertler (J Econ Perspect 21:25–46, 2007), and others, this paper finds that central banks in the Philippines and Thailand respond negatively to the current real exchange rate and positively to the lagged real exchange rate whereas central banks in Indonesia and Malaysia do not react to the current or lagged real exchange rate. For the Philippines and Thailand, the null hypothesis that the sum of the coefficients of the current and lagged real exchange rates is zero cannot be rejected at the 5% level. Central banks in these four countries respond positively to the inflation rate and the output gap, suggesting that the concept of a simple or an extended Taylor rule would apply to these countries. Monetary policy reaction functions for Indonesia and Thailand are steeper than those for Malaysia and the Philippines and would be more responsive to a change in the inflation rate.      

性别收入差异及性别歧视的变化

性别歧视带来的性别收入差异一直备受关注。文章基于吉林省1990-2010年间三期妇女地位的调研数据分析了吉林省的性别工资差异问题,并运用Oaxaca-Blinder对性别收入差距进行了分解。文章对20年间吉林省的性别收入差异进行了横向和纵向的分析,实证研究得到如下结论:性别分割是我国劳动力市场上一直存在的一种现象,性别收入差距总体趋势在扩大;个体特征差异能够在一定程度上解释性别收入差异,现阶段性别收入差异在很大程度上是由于劳动者本身的人力资本水平引起的,是正常合理的范围;歧视仍然是造成性别收入差距的一个原因,女性在获得教育的机会上还是比男性要低,而且女性很难进入到高收入行业和职业,使得在教育方面女性仍然处于不利地位。但是经过20年的发展,对女性的歧视逐步减弱。     

Intersectoral wage linkages: the case of Sweden

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether wage-setting in certain sectors of the Swedish economy affects wage-setting in other sectors. The theoretical background is the Scandinavian model of inflation, which states that wage-setting in the sectors exposed to international competition lead wage-setting in the sheltered sectors of the economy. The Johansen maximum likelihood cointegration approach is applied to quarterly data on Swedish sector wages for the period 1980:1–2002:2. Different vector error correction (VEC) models are created, based on assumptions as to which sectors are exposed to international competition and which are not. Granger causality tests are then carried out in the different restricted/unrestricted VEC models to test for sector wage leadership. The Granger causality tests provide strong evidence for the presence of intersectoral wage causality, but no evidence of a wage-leading role for the internationally exposed manufacturing sector.