为什么国有企业越来越垄断?

近年来,我国的国有企业在产业政策的保护下表现出越来越垄断的趋势。本文运用共同代理模型解释了这种政策倾向的形成原因。代表各个产业部门的利益集团围绕政府的政策展开博弈,政策的形成是政府对各个产业利益集团进行平衡的结果。但是,政府对国有部门的重视程度超过非国有部门。随着国有企业逐渐从许多产业退出,余下的国有部门越来越缺乏其他利益集团的制约,政府因而就倾向于保护这些国有部门的垄断利益。     

共同富裕、贸易开放与中国的代际收入流动性

本文利用2002-2018年期间的中国家庭收入调查数据,系统考察了贸易开放对中国代际收入流动性的影响及其作用机制。研究结果表明:(1)从整体上来看,贸易开放显著促进了中国的代际收入流动性,经内生性处理和稳健性检验,这一结论是成立的。(2)贸易开放主要通过促进子代教育、职业向上流动显著提高代际收入流动,但通过激励企业创新、提高子代个人努力程度的两个机制作用不显著。(3)贸易开放显著提高了男性子代的代际收入流动性,对女性子代的影响不显著,与此同时,还具有明显的“弱势群体”特点,显著提高了受教育水平较低子代、低收入家庭子代的代际收入流动性,有助于这类子代跳出“代际低收入传承陷阱”。本文研究提示贸易开放提高了中国的代际收入流动性,有利于促进共同富裕。在继续提高贸易开放水平的同时,应进一步重视提高低收入家庭子代的受教育水平,关注女性子代的收入问题。     

促进共同富裕的税收制度与政策研究

实现共同富裕是社会主义的根本目标,是社会主义优越性的体现.本文首先介绍了共同富裕的内涵,共同富裕是全体人民的富裕,是兼顾公平与效率的富裕.本文进一步阐述了税收制度在促进共同富裕中发挥的积极作用,并结合具体数据进行国际比较,剖析目前我国税收制度在促进收入分配方面存在的不足.我国税收制度在缩小收入差距方面已取得阶段性成效,但仍存在直接税体系不完善、"税收洼地"引发诸多避税风险、税收征管体制面临多重挑战等方面的不足.最后,本文从持续优化税收营商环境,鼓励勤劳创新致富;健全直接税体系,提高税收调节收入再分配的作用;规范地方税收优惠,维护财政收入分配秩序;提升税收征管水平,严厉打击偷税漏税行为四个维度提出了政策建议.     

Common pool resources and contextual factors: Evolution of a fishermen's cooperative in Calcutta

The CPR school has successfully rebutted Hardin's pessimistic Tragedy of the Commons model. However, in recent years, critics have focussed on the inward orientation and lack of contextual analysis characterising the writings of the CPR school.Oakerson [A Model for the analysis of common property problems. Working Paper R86-13. Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University, 1986] and Ostrom [Governing the Commons. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990] have detailed the list of variables that have to be studied to understand the mechanics of collective action. However, these factors are internal to the community. Recent critics' point out that the actions of individual agents are also influenced by the alternatives embedded outside the system. These variables are collectively labelled contextual factors.In our paper, we have analysed the case of a fishermen's cooperative in the Calcutta Metropolitan District to show how the historic and economic context shapes targets of resource users and affects the feasibility of alternative courses to achieve the target by determining opportunity and transaction costs of actions. This indicates the importance of contextual factors in explaining the formation and evolution of the resource regime.     

Open access,common property and scarcity rent in fisheries

Open access resources are frequently not managed efficiently, resulting in falling stock levels and a declining income for fishermen. In the late 1970's, the policy response to this problem was the implementation of 200-mile fishing zones, which enabled the European Union to formulate and implement the Common Fisheries Policy, aimed at (among other things) conservation and distribution of available stocks. In Germany, this shift from an open access regime towards a common property regime had favourable outcomes. The trend of falling prices was reversed. The conclusion was that intertemporal efficiency had increased as a result of (inter)governmental policy. Apparently, a wedge was formed between price and marginal harvesting costs, implying that scarcity rent had returned as a component of prices.     

Examining the disclosures on the websites of English credit unions

This paper examines the disclosures made on English credit unions’ websites. Credit unions without a website are presumed to be small. Community credit unions with websites tend to offer basic services with a limited range of products that may appeal to poorer members of society. Occupational credit unions appear more likely to have a greater range of products.     

Using common features to understand the behavior of metal-commodity prices and forecast them at different horizons

The objective of this article is to study (understand and forecast) spot metal price levels and changes at monthly, quarterly, and annual frequencies. Data consists of metal-commodity prices at a monthly and quarterly frequencies from 1957 to 2012, extracted from the IFS, and annual data, provided from 1900 to 2010 by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). We also employ the (relatively large) list of co-variates used in Welch and Goyal (2008) and in Hong and Yogo (2009).We investigate short- and long-run comovement by applying the techniques and the tests proposed in the common-feature literature. One of the main contributions of this paper is to understand the short-run dynamics of metal prices. We show theoretically that there must be a positive correlation between metal-price variation and industrial-production variation if metal supply is held fixed in the short run when demand is optimally chosen taking into account optimal production for the industrial sector. This is simply a consequence of the derived-demand model for cost-minimizing firms. Our empirical evidence fully supports this theoretical result, with overwhelming evidence that cycles in metal prices are synchronized with those in industrial production. This evidence is stronger regarding the global economy but holds as well for the U.S. economy to a lesser degree.Regarding out-of-sample forecasts, our main contribution is to show the benefits of forecast-combination techniques, which outperform individual-model forecasts – including the random-walk model. We use a variety of models (linear and non-linear, single equation and multivariate) and a variety of co-variates and functional forms to forecast the returns and prices of metal commodities. Using a large number of models (N large) and a large number of time periods (T large), we apply the techniques put forth by the common-feature literature on forecast combinations. Empirically, we show that models incorporating (short-run) common-cycle restrictions perform better than unrestricted models, with an important role for industrial production as a predictor for metal-price variation.     

Policy coordination among the ASEAN-5: A global VAR analysis

This paper aims to analyse the feasibility of policy coordination among the ASEAN-5 economies. This is done by determining whether they experience symmetric responses to common shocks. Given that the problem of dimensionality plagues large-scale macroeconomic modelling, a Global VAR model by Pesaran, Schuermann, and Weiner (2004) and Dees, Mauro, Pesaran, and Smith (2007) is used. The results in this paper provide some weak evidence of symmetric responses to the common (global) shocks of interest: a US monetary policy shock, a US output shock, a Chinese output shock; an oil price shock. Shocks from the US produced the most symmetric responses. The lack of symmetry in some cases has implications for further policy coordination. Since migrant remittances could provide an adjustment mechanism, further labour market integration is needed as it currently lags behind trade and financial integration in the region.     

Belief consistency and trade consistency

Interpersonal consistency can be described in epistemic terms as a property of beliefs, or in economic terms as the impossibility of certain trades. The existence of a common prior from which all agentsʼ beliefs are derived is of the first kind. The non-existence of an agreeable bet, that is, a contingent zero-sum trade which is always favorable to all agents, is of the second kind. It is well established that these two notions of consistency are equivalent for finite type spaces but not for countable ones. We present three equivalences of epistemic consistency and economic consistency conditions for countable type spaces, defining in this way three levels of consistency of type spaces: weak consistency, consistency, and strong consistency. These three levels coincide in the finite case. We fully analyze the level of consistency of type spaces based on the knowledge structure of Rubinsteinʼs email game. The new notion of belief consistency introduced here helps to justify the requirement of boundedness of payoff functions in countable type spaces by showing that in a large class of spaces there exists an agreeable unbounded bet even when a common prior exists.     

道德哲学视域下的关公崇拜

在中国传统民间信仰之中,关公崇拜是俗文化兴起的产物,是社会道德情感社会潜意识孕育产生的一个道德模范,经典的三国演义为关公崇拜提供了有力的文本支撑,历代统治者的推波助澜也为这种崇拜发展起了重要作用。同时,关公崇拜背后有着深厚的道德内涵和社会价值,它所推崇的"义"是一种超越传统血亲关系的品德。这种品德即使在今天的商业社会也有着其存在发展的土壤,这也是关公崇拜得以延续至今的重要原因。