Towards expenditure rules and fiscal sanity in the euro area

The study demonstrates the key role of expenditure policies in explaining fiscal developments during EMU in the euro area, its three largest members and four “macro-imbalances” countries. It compares actual primary expenditure trends with those that would have prevailed if countries had followed neutral policies based on expenditure rules since the start of EMU. Moreover, the implications for debt trends are calculated. Results show that all sample countries except Germany applied expansionary expenditure policies already before the crisis. Consequently, expenditure and debt paths were much higher compared to a counterfactual neutral expenditure stance. Rule-based expenditure policies could have led to much safer fiscal positions much more in line with the EU's Stability and Growth Pact. An empirical analysis of the determinants of countries’ expenditure stance confirms the need for stronger fiscal rules and institutions in the euro area.     

Gender Unemployment Dynamics: Evidence from Ten Advanced Economies

The paper investigates gender unemployment dynamics in 10 advances economies applying a recent methodology on widely available Labour Force Surveys data. We calculate the job finding and separation rates for each gender and use them to construct the steady‐state unemployment gap as well as two counterfactual gender unemployment gaps: one generated by differences only in job finding rates and the other by differences only in separation rates. We find that in all countries the gender unemployment gap attributed to differences in the job finding rate is lower than the gap attributed to differences in the separation rate, suggesting that gender differences in the separation rate are the major factor behind the gender unemployment gap.     

What Survey Data Reveal about Price and Wage Rigidity in Portugal

This paper exploits the information collected from a survey conducted on a sample of Portuguese firms to study the patterns of firms’ price and wage adjustments and the extent of nominal price and wage rigidities. The evidence shows that the frequency of price changes varies substantially across sectors and depends on the intensity of competition, the share of labor costs and firms’ price reviewing behavior. The results also suggest that the constraint imposed by the presence of downward nominal wage rigidity is less important in firms where the fraction of permanent and high‐skilled workers is lower and the share of flexible pay components is higher.     

THE INEFFICIENCY OF WORKER TIME USE

Much work is carried out in short, interrupted segments. This phenomenon, which we label task juggling, has been overlooked by economists. We study the work schedules of some judges in Italy documenting that they do juggle tasks and that juggling causally lowers their productivity substantially. To measure the size of this effect, we show that although all these judges receive the same workload, those who juggle more trials at once instead of working sequentially on few of them at each unit of time, take longer to complete their portfolios of cases. Task juggling seems to have no adverse effect on the quality of the judges' decisions, as measured by the percent of decisions appealed. To identify these causal effects we estimate models with judge fixed effects and we exploit the lottery assigning cases to judges. We discuss whether task juggling can be viewed as inefficient, and provide a back‐of‐the‐envelope calculation of the social cost of longer trials due to task juggling.     

THE DEMAND FOR LIQUID ASSETS,CORPORATE SAVING,AND INTERNATIONAL CAPITAL FLOWS

The recent period of capital outflows from emerging economies has coincided with an increase in their corporate saving. In this paper, we model corporate saving as a demand for liquid assets by credit‐constrained firms in a dynamic open‐economy macroeconomic model. We find that the implications of this model are very different from standard models, because the demand for foreign bonds is a complement to domestic investment rather than a substitute. We show that this complementarity is at work when an emerging economy is on its convergence path or when it has a higher TFP growth rate. This framework is consistent with a number of stylized facts found in high‐growth, high‐investment emerging economies.     

THE FAILURE TO PREDICT THE GREAT RECESSION—A VIEW THROUGH THE ROLE OF CREDIT

Much has been written about why economists failed to predict the latest crisis. Reading the literature, it seems that this crisis was so obvious that economists must have been blind not to see it coming. We approach this failure by looking at one of the key variables in this analysis, the evolution of credit. We compare the conclusions reached in the recent literature with those that could have been drawn from an ex‐ante analysis. We show that the effect of credit on the business cycle cannot be exploited from a policymaker's point of view.     

食管癌患者健康相关生命质量研究

目的:探讨食管癌患者的健康相关生命质量现状及影响因素?方法:采用一般资料问卷?欧洲五维度健康评定量表(EQ-5D量表),对209例食管癌患者进行问卷调查,采用单因素分析和多因素分析探讨食管癌患者健康相关生命质量的影响因素? 结果:食管癌患者行动?自我照顾?日常活动?疼痛/不适?焦虑/抑郁五个维度存在问题的比例分别为18.2%?12.0%?22.0%?38.3%?25.4%;自评健康得分(VAS评分)为(75.20 ± 11.00)分;综合健康指数得分(Index得分)为(0.84 ± 0.22)分?患者的性别?家庭年收入?文化程度是VAS评分的主要影响因素;患者的年龄?治疗方式?肿瘤分期?医保类型是Index得分的主要影响因素?结论:实施心理干预?早诊早治?大病医疗保险有助于提高食管癌患者健康相关生命质量?     

生态翻译视域下隐喻翻译研究——以《围城》英译本为例

隐喻作为一个非常巧妙的语言应用现象,非常值得研究。本文拟从生态翻译学对其进行研究。生态翻译学是一个从生态学角度研究翻译活动、翻译现象和翻译理论的新的研究范式。本文着重从适应/选择,三维转换和整体/关联的角度对《围城》这一文学巨著中典型的隐喻现象的翻译进行讨论,旨在开拓隐喻研究的新视角