The European high-speed train network: Predicted effects on accessibility patterns

The principal aim of this paper is to evaluate the impact of the future European high-speed train network on accessibility, by reducing time distance between places and modifying their relative location. We compare the current situation with that foreseen for the year 2010, according to the Outline Plan of the European High-Speed Train Network, in order to analyse which areas will most benefit from construction and improvement of the infrastructure. It is hypothesized that the high-speed train will certainly bring the peripheral regions closer to the central ones, but will also increase imbalances between the main cities and their hinterlands. A weighted average distance indicator is applied for this purpose. This measure identifies the spatial distribution of accessibility in the area of study, emphasizing the infrastructure effects, and locates accessibility changes at the European level. A Geographic Information System (GIS) has been used to carry out this study.     

Predicting the geo-temporal variations of crime and disorder

Traditional police boundaries—precincts, patrol districts, etc.—often fail to reflect the true distribution of criminal activity and thus do little to assist in the optimal allocation of police resources. This paper introduces methods for crime incident forecasting by focusing upon geographical areas of concern that transcend traditional policing boundaries. The computerised procedure utilises a geographical crime incidence-scanning algorithm to identify clusters with relatively high levels of crime (hot spots). These clusters provide sufficient data for training artificial neural networks (ANNs) capable of modelling trends within them. The approach to ANN specification and estimation is enhanced by application of a novel and noteworthy approach, the Gamma test (GT).     

不良贷款约束下的中国银行业全要素生产率增长研究

本文运用共同边界Malmquist-Luenberger生产率指数测度了2004—2009年中国27家商业银行在不良贷款约束下的全要素生产率增长及其成分,并对影响全要素生产率增长的宏观经济因素进行了实证分析。本文的主要结论有:在表示偏离共同边界的技术落差比率方面,国有商业银行呈"V"型,股份制商业银行较平稳,城市商业银行逐步上升;总体上,中国银行业的全要素生产率是进步的,纯技术进步是推动全要素生产率进步的主要动力,纯技术效率变化和规模效率变化进步都不明显,技术规模变化显示中国银行业趋向CRS边界;股份制商业银行的纯技术赶超最优,而潜在技术相对变动方面表现较弱;外资银行进入和固定资产投资增加对银行全要素生产率提高有推动作用。     

论GIS在社会经济领域中的运用

地理信息系统是一种新兴的技术工具,它不仅被应用在现代测绘、军事国防、野外数据采集等自然科学方面,而且被广泛应用在社会经济领域中,在管理和决策中具有重要的作用.随着人类获取空间数据能力的不断提高和信息技术的发展,地理信息系统的应用将提升到一个新的深度和广度,它将在国民经济信息化中发挥重要的作用.本文介绍地理信息系统的基本概念及其在经济、管理、法律等领域中的应用实例,着重强调在社会经济领域中开展地理信息系统应用研究的意义.     

The shading and distancing of commerce: When internalization is not enough

A political economy of degradation and of sustainability should account not only for the full range of production costs but the sources of those costs. It should consider how the pursuit of wealth can, deliberately or not, lead to uncounted costs and unaccountable actors. This article explores the conditions of cost generation and externalization, especially those that are largely unintended and inadvertent. It shows how the pursuit of wealth, the expansion of markets, the mobility of capital, and the entanglements of production processes can lead to the unwitting generation and displacement of costs. It analyzes competitive business strategy and patterns of production and consumption for their contribution to such costs. Business strategy and state policy tend to create a never-ending search for frontiers, however simulated and however unecological they may be. The costs generated in those frontiers are a function of shading, that is, obscuring of costs, and distancing, the separation of production and consumption decisions, both of which impede ecological and social feedback and create cognitive, institutional, and ethical lags between initial benefits and eventual full costs. As distance increases along dimensions of geography, culture, bargaining power, or agency, negative feedback loops are severed, stakeholders expand while decision making contracts, environmental problems are displaced, and shading and cost externalization increase. The likelihood of sustainable resource use increases as distance is lowered, as institutions locate decision authority in those who receive negative ecological feedback and who have the capacity and incentives to act on that feedback, and as the burden of proof for economic interventions shifts to the interveners.     

The evolution of inter-organisational social capital with foreign customers: Its direct and interactive effects on SMEs’ foreign performance

Taking a longitudinal approach, we analyze how the evolution of different dimensions of social capital between an SME (Small and Medium enterprise) and its key foreign customers directly influences the firm’s foreign performance growth. Moreover, we utilize a contingency approach by introducing two dyad-specific characteristics into the analysis: psychic and geographic interorganizational distances. Our findings contribute to the international business literature on social capital and suggest that while an investment in social capital with distant foreign customers always reinforces SMEs’ foreign performance development, relational and cognitive social capital have the same positive effects only for low levels of interorganizational psychic distance.     

National politics and bank default risk in the eurozone

We study the impact of national politics on default risk of eurozone banks as measured by the stock market-based Distance to Default. We find that national electoral cycles, the power of the government as well as the government’s party ideological alignment significantly affect the stability of banks in the eurozone member countries. Moreover, we show that the impact of national politics on bank default risk is more pronounced for large as well as weakly capitalized banks.     

The effects of activity and geographic diversification on performance: Evidence from French financial institutions

Our paper studies the impact of activity and geographic diversification on financial institution's performance. These diversification strategies are complementary in generating performance and may provide important implications. Moreover, we investigate the interaction between these two strategies. Our dataset comprises 4532 years observations over the period of 2002 to 2012 and covers 412 French financial institutions. We find a negative relationship between diversification and performance. However, this relationship is significantly positive when institutions implement a dual diversification strategy. In this paper, we propose a classification of French financial institutions. For generalists’ banks and cooperative banks, we find similar results to those of the entire sample. Furthermore, for specialized financial institutions, the relationship is positive and significant. Our findings are robust to the potential endogeneity problem and to measures of diversification and performance.     

Unbundling the differences between Psychic and Cultural Distance: An empirical examination of the existing measures

The diversity between the country-scores of Hofstede, Schwartz, GLOBE, Håkanson and Ambos and Dow and Karunaratna is the main focus of this study. To investigate the correlation between the country-scores of these CD (Cultural Distance), pPD (perceived Psychic Distance) and PDs (Psychic Distance stimuli) instruments we apply the Mantel test, a test predominantly used in anthropology and genetics, which can be particularly insightful when examining “distance” data. The matrix correlation findings provide evidence supporting the high diversity between these measures and their lack of consistent results for the same countries. Therefore, despite the similarity between the way of conceptualizing and operationalizing CD that Hofstede, Schwartz and GLOBE share, these CD measures do not report consistent findings. Consistently, the lack of correlation, between the PDs measure of Dow & Karunaratna and pPD of Håkanson & Ambos, indicates the diversity between PD stimuli measures and perceived PD measures. At the same time, while the two Psychic Distance (PD) measures indicate high correlation in some cases, overall they are highly diverse from the CD measures. We argue, therefore, that identical studies could reach significantly different conclusions by simply using different measures of CD,pPD&PDs which then denotes significant implications for the reliability of research findings. Additionally, we point out potential weaknesses of these measures when examining culturally proximate countries and multicultural nations.     

Decomposing local fiscal multipliers: Evidence from Japan

Recent studies on fiscal policy use cross-sectional data and estimate local fiscal multipliers along with spillovers. This paper estimates local fiscal multipliers with spillovers using Japanese prefectural data comparable with the national accounts. We estimate the local fiscal multiplier on output to be 1.7 at the regional level. We decompose the regional fiscal multiplier into the prefectural fiscal multiplier and the region-wide effect. Converting the latter component into the spillover, we find that the spillover is positive and small in size. We also decompose the regional fiscal multiplier on output into multipliers on the expenditure components. Our estimates suggest that there are crowding-in effects of government spending on consumption and investment. Moreover, we find that the regional fiscal multiplier on absorption exceeds 2.0 and that the spillover to absorption is considerable in contrast to the spillover to output.