当前应对我国通货膨胀的思考

当前国内外环境仍然极为复杂,物价上涨比较快、通胀预期增强。造成这轮通货膨胀的主要原因,在于应对金融危机而采取强力的救市政策、流动性过剩、CPI体系、大宗商品价格等方面。抗通胀不能一味地紧缩货币,搞不好会打压经济增长,很可能出现＂通胀没有管住,经济却出现下滑＂的滞胀危险。治理当前通货膨胀的思路,应结合当前国家宏观政策,从控制信贷、人民币升值、融资、税收、改善收入分配等方面着手。     

Endogeneity and permeation in an organizational communication network

Face-to-face conversation has been shown to be influenced by features that ensure comprehensible and linear conversation (“endogeneity”), and attributes of its potential participants, such as organizational position or contextual role, that “permeate” these endogenous effects. A direct comparison of both features is rarely studied, however, due to methodological challenges it presents. In addition, conversation is increasingly taking place in new mediated forms, such as emails and social media. It remains to be seen if social dynamics observed in face-to-face conversation transfer to these new media forms. Using an email network among individuals during a military exercise, we use relational event modeling to determine whether social norms of communication dominate conversation flow in this medium and to what extent individual attributes affect the flow of messages to and from those in the organization. Though email communication does not require immediate response, we find that immediate-response turn-taking dynamics occur anyway; though emails are only visible to sender and recipient(s), we observe a “Matthew effect” in the communication sequence (i.e., those who receive many emails receive even more in the future). Finally, these dynamics are only marginally affected by measured individual attributes (e.g., military rank, situational awareness), suggesting the primacy of “endogenous” conversation dynamics in this network. We thus find that many previously-observed social dynamics in face-to-face conversation carry over to the new form, despite practical differences between the two types. This study is only one of a handful that directly compares endogeneity and permeation in a communication network.     

Household Saving in the United States: Measurement and Behavior

Official measures of U.S. personal saving incorporate conceptual errors relating to the measurement of both income and consumption. This article identifies the errors, computes an adjusted personal saving rate to correct the errors, and estimates equations explaining personal saving. The estimates support the adjustments, and the adjusted series has more pronounced movements than the official series, the movements being largely related to changes in income and wealth.     

Predictability of Interest Rates and Interest-Rate Portfolios

Due to the near unit-root behavior of interest rates, changes in individual interest-rate series are difficult to forecast. We propose an innovative way of applying dynamic term structure models to predict future changes in interest-rate portfolios. Instead of directly forecasting the movements based on the estimated factor dynamics, we use the dynamic term structure model as a decomposition tool and decompose each interest-rate series into two components: a persistent component captured by the dynamic factors, and a strongly mean-reverting component given by the pricing residuals of the model. With this decomposition, we form interest-rate portfolios that are first-order neutral to the persistent dynamic factors, but are exposed to the strongly mean-reverting residuals. We show that the predictability on the changes of these interest-rate portfolios is significant both statistically and economically. We explore the implications of the predictability in future interest-rate modeling.     

我国外汇储备对通货膨胀影响的实证分析

近来,通货膨胀趋势日显,外汇储备的大幅度增加与通货膨胀之间是否具有因果关联性成为一个值得探讨的问题。文章将二十世纪八九十年代的通货膨胀时期与此次通货膨胀时期作为两个时间段,运用格兰杰因果检验与相关分析的方法,来阐明在这两个不同时期,外汇储备与通货膨胀之间的关系,并探究其原因,给出相关的政策建议。     

Forecast Uncertainty—Ex Ante and Ex Post: U.S. Inflation and Output Growth

Survey respondents who make point predictions and histogram forecasts of macro-variables reveal both how uncertain they believe the future to be, ex ante, as well as their ex post performance. Macroeconomic forecasters tend to be overconfident at horizons of a year or more, but overestimate (i.e., are underconfident regarding) the uncertainty surrounding their predictions at short horizons. Ex ante uncertainty remains at a high level compared to the ex post measure as the forecast horizon shortens. There is little evidence of a link between individuals’ ex post forecast accuracy and their ex ante subjective assessments.     

试论汉代通货膨胀

中国古代的通货膨胀问题近年逐渐为学术界所关注，本文运用现代经济学原理，对汉代通货膨胀的成因、类型以及汉政府所采取的对策等问题进行系统探索。     

The premium of inflation-indexed life insurances for the Romanian life table

This paper deals with the pricing process of life insurances that provide an insured sum indexed annually according to the current inflation rate. In these terms we propose an appropriate formula for the discount factor. In order to describe the inflation, we consider a stochastic autoregressive model. We deduce analytical expressions for the mean value and the variance of random variable defined as the present value of 1 unit indexed annually according to the inflation rate, payable over t years, when inflation is generated by an autoregressive process of order one. At the same time, we obtain numerical results for the Romanian life table, regarding the mean and the standard deviation for the actuarial present value of a pure endowment life insurance with the sum insured indexed annually with the inflation rate.     

治理通货膨胀的综合调控分析

本文在讨论治理通货膨胀的宏观调控手段，及与其配合运用的多项政策的必要性和可能性的基础上，建立了定量分析的灵敏度和弹性的算法，解释其经济意义，并从宏观调控的角度回顾了８０年代后期对通货膨胀的治理．最后提出了对治理通货膨胀的几点看法．     

Forecasting Macroeconomic Variables Under Model Instability

We compare different approaches to accounting for parameter instability in the context of macroeconomic forecasting models that assume either small, frequent changes versus models whose parameters exhibit large, rare changes. An empirical out-of-sample forecasting exercise for U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) growth and inflation suggests that models that allow for parameter instability generate more accurate density forecasts than constant-parameter models although they fail to produce better point forecasts. Model combinations deliver similar gains in predictive performance although they fail to improve on the predictive accuracy of the single best model, which is a specification that allows for time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.