Lobbying as a potent political marketing tool for firm performance: A closer look

This study endeavors to enhance political marketing literature about the impact of lobbying on firm performance. Our sample is composed of 140 U.S. firms and spans the years 2007–2014 to encompass the 2007–2009 recession and the subsequent recovery period. Our findings indicate that lobbying expenses positively contribute to firm performance. Also, government contracts in both ways, dollar amount and number of government contracts, act as mediators between lobbying expenses and firm performance. In addition, organizational slack moderates the relationship between lobbying expenses and government contracts. The managerial implications suggest that lobbying expenses can be leveraged as a potent tool for firm performance. Firms with larger lobbying efforts acquired both, higher dollar amounts and a greater number of government contracts.     

对大众文化媒体中网络汽车文化的思考

汽车文化借助互联网，产生了前所未有的影响。汽车网络媒体异军突起，成为传播汽车文化的一种全新媒体，正有力地颠覆传统媒体所主导的传统观念和道德规范。网络汽车文化属于大众文化范畴，应加以健康引导。     

Some Tests of APT Mispricing Using Mimicking Portfolios

Cross-sectional and time-series tests using mimicking portfolios are used to assess the exactness of the APT with(out) a residual market factor. The first factor seems to be sufficient to span the efficient set, whether the model is estimated using (un)conditional variance-covariance matrices that are (un)adjusted for nonsynchronous trading. Although the conditional standard deviations of the mimicking portfolios significantly explain the time-variability of security volatilities, the residuals of the mean equation still exhibit heteroskedasticity. Similar results are obtained for portfolios of CAPM-betaranked securities, and for randomly selected individual securities.     

城市低收入保障制度与反贫困的公共政策

城市低收入保障制度实施中“应保未保”的现象较为普遍，低收入保障所需资金的缺口较大，缺乏全国统一的贫困标准使得其随意性很大。解决这一社会问题必须从近期和远期两个目标入手，近期目标是尽快遏制城市贫困人口剧增的势头，防止在深化改革的过程中出现快速增长的新生贫困人口；远期目标是立足最终消除城市贫困现象。     

Concessional Amnesty and the Politics of Immigration Reforms

This paper establishes a political support model of immigration reforms. The analysis highlights the distinction between border enforcement and employer sanction measures in that the former can be more aptly characterized as an income transfer from employer to native labor interests, whereas the latter generates deadweight losses that are borne entirely by producers. We show that while amnesty may appear to run contrary to the original intent of the immigration reform, it may nevertheless facilitate rent capture by the politician by "wiping the slate clean" and reducing the deadweight loss of employer sanction measures.     

试论供应链主体的核心竞争力与领导权策略

一条标准的供应链由处于不同环节的供应商、研发商、生产商、分销商、零售商、信息服务商、物流服务商和消费八大主体构成。处于供应链不同环节的不同主体具有不同的核心竞争力。可以通过获得行业内部的竞争优势力争成为供应链成本集成的主导，在供应链多个环节增强核心竞争力，交叉进入多条供应链，以企业集群和行业协会的方式袅与供应链管理等措施，谋求对供应链的领导权和尽可能大的利益回报。     

基于Excel的库存仿真决策

电子表格Excel具有强大的计算功能，它提供了一种描述问题、建立模型、处理数据与求解的有效工具。本文通过库存问题的一个实例，说明它在计算机仿真决策中的应用。     

Economic Performance, Trade Restrictiveness, and Efficiency

The paper addresses the question of whether trade restrictiveness impacts economic performance, via a trade restrictiveness index that is decomposable into a trade distortion and a domestic distortion component. The paper builds on the Anderson and Neary price index measure of trade distortion, in evaluating trade restrictiveness via a distance function approach. This is accomplished by adding a “dual” version to their trade restrictiveness price index, based on distance functions that scale output quantities. The authors compute the trade restrictiveness quantity index (TRQI) using a parametric frontier approach to model the production side of the economy, and a panel of information on the agricultural sector of a set of European Community countries. The results suggest that the use of TRQI makes a considerable difference to interpretations of the efficiency impact of agricultural trade policies in EC countries, as compared to policy‐oriented aggregates or result‐oriented measures of trade restrictiveness.     

Do the Forward Sales of Real Estate Stabilize Spot Prices?

We examine the effect of forward sale (pre-sale) activities on the volatility of spot prices in the real estate market. The abundance of pre-sales data and major changes in regulatory control on the pre-sale market during the 90's in Hong Kong allow us to undertake empirical tests using Hong Kong's real estate data. Our results show that the volatility of spot prices increased significantly after forward sales were severely dampened by regulatory control measures introduced in 1994, but decreased again when the measures were partly relaxed in 1998. The results contribute to the long lasting debate on whether the introduction of a futures market reduces the volatility of spot prices. Previous studies were mainly conducted in markets with low transaction costs, notably financial markets. By utilizing the unique regulatory changes in the pre-sale market of Hong Kong, we are able to conduct an experiment on the conditional volatility of spot prices in a high information-cost environment, thereby shedding light on the important role of forward housing contracts in providing price expectation information for spot trading.