Peer Effects among Swimmers

We develop a novel identification strategy and examine various aspects of peer effects using swimming data. We find that the performance of adjacent competitors positively influences swimmers' performances. In particular, swimmers are influenced by slower‐lane peers, suggesting that being chased improves one's performance. We use absenteeism data to directly compare the performances of swimmers with and without peers. We have found that swimmers swim faster with peers swimming behind them than when swimming alone, but that they swim slower with peers swimming ahead. Finally, we find that observability is a key determinant of peer effects, by comparing freestyle and backstroke competitions.     

Competition Between Online and Physical Stores: The Implications of Providing Product Information by Pure‐Play E‐tailer

This paper studies the competition between a single pure‐play e‐tailer and a bricks‐and‐mortar retailer, which are originally spatially differentiated. By utilizing information and communication technology, a pure‐play e‐tailer can strategically control consumers' disutility for online purchase. However, such an action may also raise consumers' motivation to visit the physical store, which causes free‐riding by the bricks‐and‐mortar retailer. We show that in the presence of a high free‐riding effect, the e‐tailer should be willing to provide information only about ‘niche’ products, which also results in improving the welfare of all members in the market. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

中国城市及城市群技术效率差异研究

笔者通过随机前沿分析方法,测算中国不同地理范围的城市技术效率值并对其影响因素做出分析.研究发现,大规模生产资料的投入仍然是我国城市经济增长的主要决定因素；中国城市的生产效率并未出现逐年改进；东部城市群的技术效率一定程度上优于中西部,单个城市的技术效率差异更加明显,现阶段的资源型小城市技术效率优于大中型城市；外资能够与城市技术效率改进形成良性互动,国内资本则反之.     

Recent Political Change in Myanmar and Its Impact on her Economic Growth

The present study estimates the causal effect of a process of political change, namely, a recent constitutional referendum, on economic growth in Myanmar. To analyze the impact of this process, this study compares the trajectories of actual and counterfactual GDP per capita after the referendum using the synthetic control method. We calculate the counterfactual GDP per capita using country‐level panel data from 2002 to 2013, with Myanmar as the treated country and a set of developing countries in East and South Asia, the Pacific and sub‐Saharan Africa as the control group. The results of the synthetic analysis suggest that the recent process of political change in Myanmar had a positive and significant effect on GDP per capita but not on per capita foreign direct investment or trade.     

Value-at-risk in a market subject to regime switching

Many empirical researches report that value-at-risk (VaR) measures understate the actual 1% quantile, while for Inui, K., Kijima, M. and Kitano, A., VaR is subject to a significant positive bias. Stat. Probab. Lett., 2005, 72, 299–311. proved that VaR measures overstate significantly when historical simulation VaR is applied to fat-tail distributions. This paper resolves the puzzle by developing a regime switching model to estimate portfolio VaR. It is shown that our model is able to correct the underestimation problem of risk.