服务贸易壁垒的测量与建模——兼谈澳大利亚经验

一、为何担心？ 　　为什么贸易理论家和贸易政策实施者应该为服务业担心？ 　　首先,世界国民生产总值（GDP）的60%是靠服务业获取的（世界银行2001）.这并不仅仅是一个富国经济现象--世界发展报告列出的132个国家中有119个国家的服务业在GDP中所占的份额超过其工业份额,其中81个国家--从孟加拉国、博茨瓦纳到赞比亚、滓巴布韦--的服务业占它们所在国GDP的份额超过了50%.     

Natural Language in Banking

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of natural language technology in banking applications. The paper provides a brief review of natural language systems and technologies and then a summary of some of the banking systems that use natural language. The integration of natural language into broader-based bank information systems is also discussed.     

The Impact of Consumers’ Need for Uniqueness and Nationality on Generation Y's Retail Patronage Behaviors: Investigating American and Taiwanese Consumers

ABSTRACT

Generation Y (Gen Y) consumers are now one of the most influential buying segments in U.S. history. This article empirically assesses the extent to which American Gen Y consumers and same-aged Taiwanese consumers’ need for uniqueness serves as a meaningful discriminant across retail patronage behaviors for branded apparel products. Results indicate a great deal of similarity between the two cultures’ need for uniqueness. Empirical findings reveal that consumers’ need for uniqueness does influence retail patronage behaviors. The implications of the similarities and differences between American Gen Y consumers and their Taiwanese counterparts serve as potential managerial mechanisms for building and sustaining retail patronage in a globalization era.     

Using Pacioli’s pedagogy and medieval text in today’s introductory accounting course

Students today see little relevance in learning double-entry bookkeeping and find it difficult to learn how to prepare journal entries correctly. In particular, they struggle with the first stage of the double-entry process: identifying which accounts are to be debited and which are to be credited for each transaction. This paper reports on an attempt to overcome this situation by using the first printed instructional text on the subject (Pacioli, 1494) as the principal textbook on a 20-hour component of the introductory financial accounting course in an undergraduate accounting degree program. Instruction followed the pedagogy presented by Pacioli and only minimal additional costs to faculty were incurred.     

Who Loses HOPE? Attrition from Georgia's College Scholarship Program

Georgia's lottery-funded HOPE Scholarship program provides free tuition to in-state students who can maintain a B average at state universities. However, roughly half of HOPE Scholars lose their support after their freshman year. This study employs student-level administrative data to identify the observed characteristics that systematically relate to scholarship attrition. Conditional on measures of student ability, there are not statistically significant differences between white, black, and Hispanic students. However, there are dramatic differences across academic disciplines. Students majoring in science, engineering, and computing are 21 to 51 percent more likely to lose their HOPE Scholarships than students in other disciplines.     

School Kids and Oil Rigs: Two More Pieces of the Post‐Katrina Puzzle in New Orleans

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina's landfall in August 2005 and the reports of rampant looting of businesses in the city, we became curious about the extent of Katrina looting as compared to that after other major storms that hit New Orleans in 1947 and in 1965. Using burglary as a proxy variable for looting, we discovered that the burglary rates in the month before and the month after Katrina were significantly higher than those before and after the other two hurricanes. We then investigated the socioeconomic conditions in the city in an effort to explain these numbers. Population loss and high unemployment rates, coupled with a decline in high‐paying manufacturing jobs and an increase in low‐wage food and hotel service jobs generated severe economic inequality in the city that exacerbated the situation created by Katrina. Our current analysis of the impact of public school desegregation and the oil bust suggests that both events contributed to population loss and the increase in low‐wage jobs prior to the storm. We believe that this type of research can assist in the recovery of New Orleans by providing an understanding of the city's pre‐Katrina social and economic conditions and make clearer which post‐Katrina changes are desirable.     

A comprehensive project for managerial accounting

This paper presents a unique procedure which integrates many managerial accounting topics in a single project. The project requires that each student create and interrelate all necessary accounting reports of a manufacturing process for one month of operation. Specific step-by-step instructions are not provided to the students. Only a set of general assignments is given as an outline to the sequence of activities. This allows for maximum flexibility as each student creates all the components of individual projects. The finished project provides each student with an overview of what managerial accounting is all about.     

Assessing editorial preferences towards Industrial Organization articles

In light of widespread specialization of research and teaching, it seems appropriate to supplement the existing general rankings of economics journals with subdiscipline-specific rankings. That is the primary objective of this paper. The availability of subdiscipline-specific rankings also permits both (i) alternative journal ranking methods for the general discipline that account for the breadth of a journal's impact across specialized fields, and (ii) estimation of the relative weights implicitly associated with each field in traditional disciplinary journal rankings. The results are robust to the exclusion of self-citations.     

Models for data transmission delay in cable networks

Cable networks have been upgraded in recent years to support bidirectional traffic rather than just unidirectional television signals. Thus, it has become possible to use cable networks for internet browsing and telephony. In this paper, we propose delay models to determine how this bidirectional traffic is best handled and to evaluate the resulting performance of the network, notably its delay properties. It is shown that these models, variations on the repairman problem and the bulk service queue, lead to actual improvements in the data transmission schedules for cable networks. Moreover, these models can be combined in order to arrive at approximations for the average packet delay. Our theoretical calculations are backed up by simulations.