第七届中国经济学年会论文专场综述：香港经济学者专场

黎志刚, 宋敏　《Economic development and air quality: some regional evidence from China》

　　The main purpose of this paper is to find a new regress method to test if the EKC theory exist in china, through traditional method and the new method which derived by author, we get different conclusions and give some explanation about it. What we want to know is the relationship between air pollution and economic development, and explore can EKC explain this relationship just it apply abroad. So called EKC theory is environmental Kuznets curve, which means economic growth brings an initial phase of deterioration followed by a subsequent phase of improvement. The turning point are around per capita income of $8000. in the before empirical testing of air pollution in china, EKC is not found. Author find that they use formal data, which cause measure problems such as endogeneous sampling and misreporting problem. So in this paper, he use data from over 700 weather stations all across china to get regress. And add population, economic growth rate, industrial share as explanatory variables and visibility as main explained variable. As a new method, he apply high frequency data to regress also, which is daily data from Monday to Sunday, the results is that the weekends weather indicator is the best among whole week. Because manufacture corporation is off-working at those days. So indirectly the air pollution level is significantly correlated to the industrial share. On holidays, the same situation occurs.  So the conclusion is that if use annual data, EKC is not founded because Chinese do not arrive the $8000 per capita income, but if we use daily data to do regress, EKC is highly significant, so economic growth significantly reduces air quality but in some areas with relatively high economic development level , the air quality raise back gradually compared to other areas.

肖耿　《Inflation, appreciation, or reform? A structural and institutional perspective on RMB and China's external balance》

　　The paper’s main purpose is to analysis the external imbalance of china, find out the reason and give some policy advice. At first, author propose that the main challenges china face are structural imbalance (surplus labor vs surplus capital ), current account surplus and rising foreign reserves and transaction barrier. In the recent decades, Chinese wage advantage and transaction barrier are all diminishing. about current account surplus problem, supply chain support the increasing export but international supply chain does not work for Chinese import. If take PPP exchange rate as a benchmark, Chinese currency is seriously under-valued, and Chinese domestic price is much lower than the one which derived by nominal exchange rate. So it is a effective way to adjust it just by revalue RMB? The answer is no. because currency appreciation will bring domestic deflation, so exporter will gain cost reduction again and there is no lasting effects on competitveness. It tells us current account imbalances has very little to do with nominal exchange rate.  Then author propose a method to speed up the growth of china’s domestic price level, that is inflation-first and appreciation-second strategy. From the Balassa-Samulson theory and empirical practice of Japan, there is a substitution between inflation and appreciation. More appreciation, fast price level raise, author propose that 4% of inflation and appreciation is the best estimator. Compared with other asian countries, china is under deflation now, so china have room to promote economic expansion by public investment, this measure is also helpful for reform the situation that surplus capital do not hire surplus labor due to poor financing, planning and regulatory systems.

李春涛, 宋敏　《Innovative Activities in Chinese manufacturing firms: The role of firm ownership and CEO》

　　The main purpose of this paper is to analysis what is the vital factors affect corporation innovation. The first part author propose a problem of Chinese economy, rapid growth of manufacturing sector due to cheap labor, high saving and investment. As we know, in the macroeconomic theory, technology development is the vital factor which drive the long-term economy growth. In practice, R&D is associated with technical process. So author use probit regression and tobit regression to formulate the relationship between corporate innovation and firm ownership, CEO incentives, CEO professional background, CEO discretional power and CEO education. Pick 1572 firms across 18 cities of china from 2000 to 2002, author conclude that compared with state-owned enterprises, private firms and foreign-owned firms are more innovative, CEOs with performance-based compensations increase the innovation of R&D, CEOs with more discretional power and professional background will improve the innovation opposed to a government official background.

王程　《Equilibrium matching and termination》

　　This paper propose a new model to explain a set of labor market observations that are difficult to explain with standard models of labor market. For jobs are dynamic contracts and job separations are terminations of optimal dynamic contracts, so terminations are an incentive device. Transitions from unemployment to jobs are a process of matching and bargaining, and bargaining are over the values of an optimal dynamic contract to each party.  The dynamic of the optimal contract then takes the firm and the worker to a state of termination. Non-employed workers, including terminated workers, make consumption and saving decisions as in a typical growth model, and choose whether or not to participate in the labor market. Firms enter freely into the market to determine the number of jobs in the economy. This paper takes a dynamic contract point of view to modeling jobs and job separations in mortensen-pissarides. Based on the assumption above, workers that produce a sequence of bad outputs become too poor to motivate, and workers who produce a sequence of good outputs become too expensive to compensate and motivate. Thus job separation is a purely endogenous process in our model, motivated by the dynamic provision of incentives and risk sharing.  Terminations occur not because the technology of the match has evolved to be sufficiently poor as in Mortensen and Pissarides, or it is found out to be sufficiently bad as in Moscarini. Terminations occur because the economic relationship that evolved endogenously around the fixed match technology has become too costly for the parties to maintain.