The Solow Growth Model (Solow Model, a quick primer), named after Nobel prize winner Robert Solow explains how an economy can grow relative to inputs such as capital, technology and labor. As Tianyong Zhou of the Dongbei University of Finance and Economics points out however this model does a poor job at explaining China’s past […]
Category: Sunday Papers
J.P. Morgan was asked in 1912 by a Congressional Subcommittee (the Pujo Committee) what the most important factor in determining creditworthiness was? His answer became famous: “The first thing [in credit] is character … before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it.… A man I do not trust could not get money from me […]
Kristi Govella, Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian Studies of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa takes a closer look at how rising powers (read China throughout) are dealing with ‘global commons’ issues. By looking at how rising powers have dealt with the long established and widely accepted norms in place in the centuries […]
In a Peterson Institute for International Economics Policy Brief (an accessible 11-pager) Professor Robert Z. Lawrence of Harvard University addresses the issue of the precariousness of the WTO in the light of unilateral sanctions by members against one another in recent years. That the WTO isn’t functioning properly is a problem not helped by America’s […]
There’s an established body of research on how investor contact can affect company behavior. Most work concludes the interactions are beneficial in that the process shines more light on the corporate managers and more light is better than less. The work picked over today is therefore of interest as it demonstrates how, in certain circumstances, […]
From a somewhat unexpected source comes new work on the age-old question of why the East failed to industrialize and why the Industrial Revolution was a Euro-centric affair. Rafael Torres Gaviria, from the Department of Economics at the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia believes the answer, in a nutshell, is Mongols. The mystery is more […]
To liberalize or not to liberalize, that is the question many developing markets wrestle with. If you open up your markets you could be opening up to chicanery, volatility and a noncompetitive increase in the cost of capital as a result. If you don’t, you could lose the benefits of better actors and the improved […]
Heng Wang and Ross P. Buckley of the University of New South Wales, in a paper for a forthcoming edition of the Singapore Journal of Legal Studies, bring us up to date on China’s progress with their Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) or as it’s mostly now referred to the e-CNY. If the subject is […]
Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Megan Hogan, both of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (a Washington based think tank), take a closer look at “The CHIPS and Science Act, signed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on August 9, 2022, [Which, in their words] represents the biggest US foray into industrial policy in 50 years.” […]
Unsurprisingly, for-profit providers of shared e-bike services claim they reduce carbon emissions; but is this true? Qiumeng Li (et al.) of the University of Cambridge notes in the paper highlighted today there’s (until now?) no real consensus on this among the scientific community. The problem is if they’re being used instead of a regular bike […]
Social science and economics researchers love ‘exogenous shocks’ or what the rest of us call ‘bolts from the blue’. These shocks allow them to look for patterns the slow creep of orderly progress often mask. Zhenshu Wu (et al.) from the Tilberg University of the Netherlands has used the shock of the COVID-19 stock market […]
Hanming Fang, at the University of Pennsylvania – Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (et al.), isn’t claiming the paper highlighted today is revelatory. There’s no doubt people feel better and spend more when home prices rise than when they fall. What’s new in this work however is the data being compared and, […]
Professor Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University and Yuanchen Yang of the IMF, writing in a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, MA, U.S.A.), supply a fresh and perhaps the most up to date look at China’s residential property market. The focus of the paper is not the widely reported-on Tier 1 […]
Since 2010 a widely accepted index of employee satisfaction has been available in China from CSR-analysis service provider Hexun.com. Using this information Professor Xu Xixong (et al.) from the School of Economics and Business Administration at the Chongqing University set about finding out if there was a relationship between Chinese firm stock-price crash-risk and happy […]
The attack on a gas pipeline in Europe recently reminds there are a lot of assets that run under oceans, and top of them, that are all also vulnerable. Christine A. McDaniel and Weifeng Zhong of the George Mason University – Mercatus Center, have had a closer look at Taiwan in this regard focusing on […]
Feng Wei (et al.) from the Shandong University has taken a snapshot, 2018, of the largest EV-adopting city in China, Shanghai, to try and calculate the benefits of EV introduction. The paper is filled with fascinating observation of which one is an aside noting not all EVs are equal in terms of their environmental benefit. […]
Leona Shao Zhi Li (et al.) from the University of Macau claims the work highlighted today is “..the first comprehensive study to examine the impact of [An] adverse foreign trade policy shock on innovation responses in the source country,..”. I’m sure this is correct, but it’s sad to note only recently has data on this […]
Researchers (in the West) pinned down a long time ago the business of knowing what ‘type’ you are and then inferring political (and all sorts of other, social, religious and etc.) leanings. Nearly all of that work though has been conducted in Western democracies and Xiaoxiao Shen, a doctoral student at Princeton University, wondered if […]
In a piece for the Annual Review of Economics (a publication by academics, for academics, about what other academics are up to) Zhiguo He of the Booth School of Business and NBER and Wei Wei of the Becker Friedman Institute (both Booth and Becker Friedman at the University of Chicago) review the literature on China’s […]
In an ‘Occasional Paper’ from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center Jason Jia Xi Wu (a Shenzhen native) dissects the Greater Bay Area (GBA) Initiative for what it reveals about central planning in the Xi-Era. His conclusions are not encouraging. It’s a long and dense piece but the short summary, I think, is this: Central […]