One way to obtain a global public good is to set up an institution to buy it, with the nations of the world contributing to the cost according to whatever sharing arrangements make political sense. An example would be the purchase of the services of national armed forces to carry out...

The failure of many paintings to sell in art auctions indicates the presence of reserve prices set by sellers. This paper examines the relationship between sale rates and price surprises over time in art auctions. Using data on contemporary and impressionist art, we show that while sale rates...

This paper provides a statistical reason and strong econometric evidence for supporting the adaptive expectations hypothesis in economics. It points out why the rational expectations hypothesis was embraced by the economics profession without sufficient evidence. Finally it will summarize the...

We investigate global factors associated with cross-border capital flows. We formulate a model of gross capital flows through the international banking system and derive a closed form solution that highlights the leverage cycle of global banks as being a prime determinant of the transmission of...

The model of Chow (1987) for inflation in China is applied to explain inflation in Taiwan. A cointegration relation linear in the log of a price index and the log of the ratio of money supply to output is estimated. Inflation is explained by the change in this log ratio, lagged inflation and the...

This paper reviews the basic laws and policies of the Chinese government on environmental problems and discusses the issues in policy implementation, the prospect of solving the environmental problems in the future and some recent successes in the development of alternative energy and in...

The most important aspect of the Chinese economy today is its rapid changes. The changes are propelled by the Chinese entrepreneurs. This essay is an attempt to understand who the entrepreneurs are, the environment in which they work, whether the dynamic changes will continue and what policies...

As the title of this essay suggests, I believe there are both positive and negative effects of inequality. On the positive side, differential rewards provide incentives for individuals to work hard, invest and innovate. On the negative side, differences in rewards that are unrelated to...

Measures of public preferences toward risk are critical to evaluations of public policies on many safety, environmental, and health issues. In this paper we provide a method for measuring the revealed preferences for safety risks from state level public choices about speed limits. The idea is to...

A long literature in empirical finance has isolated both a value and a small-capitalization effect in asset pricing. This study confirms the existence of these style effects both in new types of equity indexes and in the stocks of Chinese companies traded in international markets. We then...