Correcting for the endogeneity of pro-environment behavioral choices in contingent valuation

In contingent valuation studies, observed behavioral choices often enter as independent variables in the willingness to pay function. However, these variables may be endogenously determined when the error term in the behavioral model is correlated with the error term in the willingness to pay model. We investigate the effects of correcting for the endogeneity of a variable, namely membership status in environmental organizations that proxies unobservable characteristics of the respondents. Jointly modeling the membership variable and the willingness to pay response yields an estimate for the effect of the former that contradicts previous findings but is intuitive and agrees with theoretical expectations.     

你有什么不明白的?——“玩范纳贝”问答

[在查尔斯·埃什与2008/2009年de Appel策展项目成员的对话《站着,我不(Stand,I Don’t)》当中,埃什说道,如果有人说‘对不起,我不明白’,你可以问‘你有什么不明白的?’     

Constructing and Contesting a Gujarati-Hindu Ethno-religious Identity Through Development Programmes in an Indian Province

Through a case study of Hindu nationalism in India, this paper explores how development programmes serve as the site of construction of, as well as contestation over, religious identity. The participation of low-caste Dalits and tribal Adivasis in the mass violence perpetrated against Muslims in the Indian province of Gujarat in 2002 conveyed the impression that Hindu nationalists had achieved one of their key objectives of creating “Hindu unity”. Cutting across social and status divisions in the local Hindu population, the Hindu nationalist party's constituency today includes its traditional upper-caste supporters, as well as lower castes. While “the other” in the Hindu nationalist conception of community included Dalits and Adivasis as well as Muslims and Christians until the mid-1980s, the recent “Hindu unity” agenda has seen the boundaries of “the other” closing in around Muslims and Christians only. Despite these developments, this paper argues, continuing attempts at the construction of a unified ethno-religious identity are circumscribed and complicated by processes of contestation. Through village-level research, it shows how government actors are involved in simultaneous processes of construction as well as contestation over a Gujarati-Hindu identity through development programmes.     

Countercyclical Bank Capital Requirement and Optimized Monetary Policy Rules

Using BoC-GEM-Fin, a large-scale dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with real, nominal, and financial frictions featuring a banking sector, we explore the macroeconomic implications of various types of countercyclical bank capital regulations. Results suggest that countercyclical capital requirements have a significant stabilizing effect on key macroeconomic variables, but mostly after financial shocks. Moreover, the bank capital regulatory policy and monetary policy interact, and this interaction is contingent on the type of shocks that drive the economic cycle. Finally, we analyze loss functions based on macroeconomic and financial variables to arrive at an optimal countercyclical regulatory policy in a class of simple implementable Taylor-type rules. Compared to bank capital regulatory policy, monetary policy is able to stabilize the economy more efficiently after real shocks. On the other hand, financial shocks require the regulator to be more aggressive in loosening/tightening capital requirements for banks, even as monetary policy works to counter the deviations of inflation from the target.     

关于现代艺术的一段回忆:对话瓦尔特·本雅明

据悉,一间"现代美术馆"不久将在中国南部某家美术馆亮相,该馆整体重现了在现代主义历史上堪称开山之作的一次展览,其馆藏也均为当年展品的复制。对此我们均深感兴趣且拭目以待,并借此机会同瓦尔特.本雅明进行了一次访谈;当年他曾是复制艺术的主要倡导者,也是博物馆(美术馆)发展历程的见证人和观察员。     

Decomposing trust and trustworthiness

What motivates people to trust and be trustworthy? Is trust solely “calculative,” based on the expectation of trustworthiness, and trustworthiness only reciprocity? Employing a within-subject design, we run investment and dictator game experiments in Russia, South Africa and the United States. Additionally, we measured risk preferences and expectations of return. Expectations of return account for most of the variance in trust, but unconditional kindness also matters. Variance in trustworthiness is mainly accounted for by unconditional kindness, while reciprocity plays a comparatively small role. There exists some heterogeneity in motivation but people behave surprisingly similarly in the three countries studied.     

Globalisation and Obesity

The WHO has recently announced the global obesity epidemic. An economic model is developed in which globalisation factors generate health externalities and contribute to global obesity growth. The unbalanced panel data set contains the information for 79 countries over the period 1986–2008. Fixed‐effects panel data estimation and quantile regression analysis were used to analyse the data. The fixed‐effects panel model results indicate that the impact of trade openness and the globalisation social index (GSI) on global obesity rates is positive and significant, which is consistent with prior expectations, while surprisingly the foreign direct investments (FDI) has no impact on global obesity. While these results are interesting, they are hiding the effect of globalisation processes across the conditional distribution of the obesity variable. The use of quantile regression uncovered that the impact of the FDI and the GSI on low and average quantiles (low and average obesity rates in our sample) is positive and significant, while high quantiles are not affected. Since low and average quantiles (low and average obesity rates) are representative of the less‐ and medium‐developed countries, this result implies that social globalisation and FDI adversely impact obesity in less‐to‐medium developed countries. Trade openness generally has no impact on changes in obesity rates across quantiles.     

2010:自反性、世界主义作为分析单元

2010年对我来说是颇为特殊的一年,完成阿姆斯特丹deAppel艺术中心的策展课程并回国之后,我并不确定个人的这段漫长而曲折的职业合法化过程是否已经完成。我所生活和工作的珠三角地区,其当代艺术生态的发展长久以来依赖着某些英雄式个体的浪漫主义革命或自我抵抗,一     

Possibly-Final Offers

A price-setting seller faces a buyer with unknown reservation value. We show that if the buyer is sufficiently risk averse, the seller can benefit from employing a Possibly-Final Offer (PFO) strategy. In a PFO, if the buyer rejects the seller's initial offer the seller sometimes terminates the interaction. If the seller does not terminate, he follows up with a subsequent, more attractive offer. As the buyer's risk aversion increases, the seller's expected profit under the optimal PFO approaches the full-information profit. These results extend to contexts with endogenous commitment, multiple types of buyers, multidimensional objects, and nonseparable utility functions.