Diminishing Returns and the Limit of Athletic Performance

The purpose of this paper is to estimate athletic performance profiles over time, to establish that diminishing returns is a characteristic of performance functions, to measure the rate of the marginal decline, and to measure the upper (lower) bound or limit of performance. The empirical results yield estimates of the limiting value of athletic performance and the frontier maximum (minimum) record. Since lower bounds in the running events have been shown to be sensitive to choice of the nonlinear model, logistic and an exponential model for the men's running and distance events are estimated as a cross-check on my differential equation model. The issue of the gender gap (whether women will ever catch men) in athletic performance is also explored.     

How Monetary Policy can have Permanent Real Effects with Only Temporary Nominal Rigidity

A macroeconomic model is developed in which the psychological concept of loss aversion is incorporated into workers' preferences. The impact of monetary policy in the presence of loss aversion depends on the specification of the reference wage. The plausible specification that a worker's reference wage is the real wage she was paid in the previous period is considered in detail. Specifying the reference wage in this way, we show that an unanticipated change in monetary policy has a permanent, real effect when short term labour contracts are written in nominal wages.     

行走在“家”的边缘——论张爱玲作品中“家”的意识

“家”的意识始终渗透在张爱玲的作品中,既有对实体家园与心灵家园的强烈渴望,又更多地表现为行走在家的边缘的孤独与荒凉。     

基于核心竞争力的企业无形资产信息披露核心指标的构建

文章以 Hamel与Prahalad核心能力理论为基础，揭示了要素和核心竞争力的相互作用机理，厘清了无形资产构成要素与核心竞争力的关系，确认和识别了核心竞争力；测度了核心竞争力和企业无形资产的价值；最后基于核心竞争力的视角，构建了无形资产信息披露的核心指标，对企业财务报告能有效地披露无形资产信息提供了一种可行方法。     

The Growth-maximizing Tax Rate

This note is a reply to Professor Kennedy's criticism of the specification of my model on taxation and economic growth and my testing of the degree of homogeneity of the growth-generating function in an earlier paper in this journal. I find that the model relating the pattern in the growth rate to the pattern in the division of the share of output is not affected by incorporating factor inputs into the model, that the function is homogeneous of degree one, and that the growth-maximizing tax rate of about 20 percent of GDP stands, as in the original paper.