Privatization in China's industry

This paper adopts property rights and organization theory perspectives to analyze the process of privatization of state enterprises and performance of newly created shareholding corporations in China. Relying on case study information, the paper concludes that although the shareholding corporations have contributed, to a certain extent, to better performance, their potentials have not been fully realized due to various economic environmental and ideological constraints.     

Between Collapse and Survival in North Korea: an Economic Assessment of the Dilemma

The current North Korean reform focuses on an open door policy without much import liberalization and on a partial domestic liberalization limited to the consumer sector. This can be considered a variant of the so-called East Asian growth model pursued in South Korea, Taiwan, and China. Although the basic directions of such a model are understandable, the intensity of the reform measures is not radical and strong enough, and the economy has exhausted domestic resources to rely on and is having difficulty in getting access to external resources. Collaboration from the US and South Korea is the most critical elements for the success of North Korean strategy since these will lower political uncertainty and give the regime access to international capital and markets.They may have at most two or three years to rely on and try a big push from the outside, which can hopefully give the system a new momentum for recovery. Otherwise, collapse is certain since they do not have their own ability to revitalize the economy. Success or failure of the next three-year reform will determine the future of North Korea. Failure, including the sudden stop of the reform by internal coup, could lead to collapse of the North Korean regime (hard landing), which will bring in radical reforms either by a new North Korean leadership or by a South Korean takeover. Success could lead to a widening and deepening of reforms to deal with the main body of the domestic economic system (Chinese style soft landing), or alternatively give room for stop-go style (Romania or Cuba style) muddling through.     

Global Liquidity and Commodity Prices

While monetary easing and increasing participation of financial institutions in commodity trading have enhanced the financialization of commodity markets, this paper investigates empirically whether the impact of global liquidity on commodity prices has grown since the crisis. For each commodity group, this paper uses a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model to address the short‐run relationship between global liquidity and commodity prices. The key finding is that the effect of global liquidity on commodity prices becomes more salient since the global financial crisis. This paper also suggests a price‐based liquidity indicator has a greater explanatory power for the commodity price dynamics than monetary aggregates.     

The managed heart: The structural analysis of the stressor–strain relationship and customer orientation among emotional labor workers in Korean hotels

This study examined the structural relationships among three different dimensions of workplace stressors (customer-related stressor, CRS; work environment-related stressor, WERS; job-related stressor, JRS), negative affectivity (NA), emotional exhaustion (EE), and the negative effect of that strain on customer orientation (CO) in the context of the emotional labor (EL) of frontline employees in the hotel industry. Data were collected from self-administrated questionnaires distributed among frontline employees in room and F&B divisions in Korean deluxe tourist hotels, where EL is intense. The results of the structural equation analysis indicated a positive association between all three workplace stressors and NA and between NA and EE. There was also a relationship in the opposite direction with EE and CO, as hypothesized. The moderating effect of organizational level on the workplace stressors–NA relationships was also confirmed. In addition, in an alternative model, we found that NA partially mediates the relationship between JRS and EE; whereas, NA fully mediates the relationships between CRS/WERS and EE. Practical implications are discussed in detail and limitations of the study and future research directions are also suggested.     

Subjective model selection rules versus passive model selection rules

In this paper, the choice of a particular functional form based on the objective of the author is called the subjective model selection rule and the choice of a particular functional form using pre-selected model selection criteria is called the passive model selection rule. The objective of the author is the analysis of equilibrium, an efficient input choice, the study of the returns to scale function, the estimation of the elasticity of substitution, and the evaluation of the technical progress. Depending on the chosen objectives, economic restrictions such as the homogeneity, homotheticity, and regularity condition (positivity, monotonicity, and quasiconcavity) can be imposed. Various well-known functions beginning from the Cobb–Douglas (CD) to a globally well-behaved polynomial series are listed and the performances are compared with respect to the possibility of extracting economic interpretation, usefulness for advanced studies, computational easiness, and the potentiality of extending the given function to a more complex function. The isoquants and three dimensional output surfaces are plotted for a series of production functions using the transportation data of Zellner and Revankar (1969). Barnett and Jonas (1983) imposed the sufficient conditions for quasiconcavity of production functions while Gallant and Golub (1984) imposed the necessary and sufficient conditions. The strength and weakness of the above two methods are discussed. These methods are extended for three input cases using the U.S. electric power industry data of Nerlove (1963) and Greene (2008).     

Consumption and Portfolio Selection with Labor Income: A Continuous Time Approach

This paper studies the consumption and portfolio selection problem of an agent who is liquidity constrained and has uninsurable income risk. The paper investigates how the optimal consumption and asset allocation policies deviate from the case where the financial market is perfect, i.e., the case where there are no liquidity constraints and uninsurable income risk. In particular, the paper shows that, for a given level of financial wealth and labor income, optimal consumption is smaller and the optimal level of risk taking is lower in the case where the agent is liquidity constrained and has uninsurable income risk than in the case where the financial market is perfect. The paper also discusses how the agent assesses the value of lifetime labor income and relates this evaluation to optimal consumption and asset allocation policies.     

The service sector and economic growth: some cross-section evidence

It has often been claimed that a relative expansion of the service sector has a deleterious effect on economic growth. This paper uses cross-section country-level data from three decades –1960s, 1970s and 1980s – to see whether in fact this negative relation is reflected in the data. It is found that the effect is negative or positive depending on how the role of the service sector is measured, but there is a strong case that effect is in fact usually negative.     

The lag relationship between wholesale and consumer prices: An application of the Hatanaka-Wallace procedure

This paper examines the lag distribution relating wholesale to consumer price changes. Sims' causality test indicates a one-sided lag structure. Following Hatanaka and Wallace, parameters of the lag distribution which can be estimated with relatively high precision are emphasized. Thus, our concern is with the sum of coefficients and the first four moments of the distribution. Short-run effects are estimated from lag moments using Pearson's method for equating moments. As a smoothness prior, a Beta distribution in the lag weights is suggested. Tests for bias due to missing components in the wholesale price index indicate little is lost because of misspecification.