人民币汇率失衡及贸易壁垒对我国出口行业影响异质性研究

贸易摩擦、新冠疫情使我国经济贸易面临严峻挑战,人民币汇率波动及贸易壁垒将常态化地影响我国出口贸易.在加快形成以国内大循环为主体、国内国际双循环相互促进的新发展格局背景下,文章基于HS分类原则,选取WTO等机构的贸易数据,通过构建BEER模型测算了人民币汇率失衡程度;通过建立固定效应面板模型研究了人民币汇率失衡及贸易壁垒双因素对我国出口行业影响的异质性.研究表明:人民币汇率失衡对我国出口贸易整体上具有显著负向影响,非关税壁垒对我国出口贸易整体上具有显著正向影响;关税和非关税构成的贸易壁垒与人民币汇率失衡双因素对我国出口贸易具有显著抑制作用,并对不同出口行业的影响存在异质性;人民币汇率失衡与非关税壁垒双因素对大多行业均具有显著负向影响,人民币汇率失衡与关税壁垒双因素对不同行业影响的正负效应及程度大小有异质性.因此,建议通过运行逆周期因子等完善人民币汇率自我修正机制;通过引导出口企业了解使用外汇衍生品等促进外汇衍生品市场运行机制的健全;通过加强"海外仓"建设及深耕RCEP框架下的东盟十国市场等实施出口行业差异化贸易策略;通过提升自主科技创新能力等加快出口行业产业转型升级,推动双循环,实现我国出口贸易高质量发展.     

Integrating Operational and Organizational Aspects in Interdependent Infrastructure Network Recovery

Managing risk in infrastructure systems implies dealing with interdependent physical networks and their relationships with the natural and societal contexts. Computational tools are often used to support operational decisions aimed at improving resilience, whereas economics‐related tools tend to be used to address broader societal and policy issues in infrastructure management. We propose an optimization‐based framework for infrastructure resilience analysis that incorporates organizational and socioeconomic aspects into operational problems, allowing to understand relationships between decisions at the policy level (e.g., regulation) and the technical level (e.g., optimal infrastructure restoration). We focus on three issues that arise when integrating such levels. First, optimal restoration strategies driven by financial and operational factors evolve differently compared to those driven by socioeconomic and humanitarian factors. Second, regulatory aspects have a significant impact on recovery dynamics (e.g., effective recovery is most challenging in societies with weak institutions and regulation, where individual interests may compromise societal well‐being). And third, the decision space (i.e., available actions) in postdisaster phases is strongly determined by predisaster decisions (e.g., resource allocation). The proposed optimization framework addresses these issues by using: (1) parametric analyses to test the influence of operational and socioeconomic factors on optimization outcomes, (2) regulatory constraints to model and assess the cost and benefit (for a variety of actors) of enforcing specific policy‐related conditions for the recovery process, and (3) sensitivity analyses to capture the effect of predisaster decisions on recovery. We illustrate our methodology with an example regarding the recovery of interdependent water, power, and gas networks in Shelby County, TN (USA), with exposure to natural hazards.     

Cross‐Sectional Psychological and Demographic Associations of Zika Knowledge and Conspiracy Beliefs Before and After Local Zika Transmission

Perceptions of infectious diseases are important predictors of whether people engage in disease‐specific preventive behaviors. Having accurate beliefs about a given infectious disease has been found to be a necessary condition for engaging in appropriate preventive behaviors during an infectious disease outbreak, while endorsing conspiracy beliefs can inhibit preventive behaviors. Despite their seemingly opposing natures, knowledge and conspiracy beliefs may share some of the same psychological motivations, including a relationship with perceived risk and self‐efficacy (i.e., control). The 2015–2016 Zika epidemic provided an opportunity to explore this. The current research provides some exploratory tests of this topic derived from two studies with similar measures, but different primary outcomes: one study that included knowledge of Zika as a key outcome and one that included conspiracy beliefs about Zika as a key outcome. Both studies involved cross‐sectional data collections that occurred during the same two periods of the Zika outbreak: one data collection prior to the first cases of local Zika transmission in the United States (March–May 2016) and one just after the first cases of local transmission (July–August). Using ordinal logistic and linear regression analyses of data from two time points in both studies, the authors show an increase in relationship strength between greater perceived risk and self‐efficacy with both increased knowledge and increased conspiracy beliefs after local Zika transmission in the United States. Although these results highlight that similar psychological motivations may lead to Zika knowledge and conspiracy beliefs, there was a divergence in demographic association.     

Towards Uniformly Efficient Trend Estimation Under Weak/Strong Correlation and Non‐stationary Volatility

In this paper, we consider the deterministic trend model where the error process is allowed to be weakly or strongly correlated and subject to non‐stationary volatility. Extant estimators of the trend coefficient are analysed. We find that under heteroskedasticity, the Cochrane–Orcutt‐type estimator (with some initial condition) could be less efficient than Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) when the process is highly persistent, whereas it is asymptotically equivalent to OLS when the process is less persistent. An efficient non‐parametrically weighted Cochrane–Orcutt‐type estimator is then proposed. The efficiency is uniform over weak or strong serial correlation and non‐stationary volatility of unknown form. The feasible estimator relies on non‐parametric estimation of the volatility function, and the asymptotic theory is provided. We use the data‐dependent smoothing bandwidth that can automatically adjust for the strength of non‐stationarity in volatilities. The implementation does not require pretesting persistence of the process or specification of non‐stationary volatility. Finite‐sample evaluation via simulations and an empirical application demonstrates the good performance of proposed estimators.     

辩证唯物主义视野下库恩科学发展模式的评价

从辩证唯物主义的视野看,库恩创造性把“科学认识论”的范畴拓展到社会历史范畴,其科学革命的结构理论主张符合辩证唯物主义的过程论,其动态发展模式在一定程度上符合辩证唯物主义对立统一规律.但同时也存在一些消极方面的因素,如科学发展模式否定了实践对认识的决定作用、范式论中的存在唯心主义倾向,在真理问题上存在相对主义观点等.     

Feminized Forestry: The Promises and Pitfalls of Change in a Masculine Organization

The gendering of forestry as a distinctly masculine profession has led to a wide range of negative outcomes, including legal actions concerning discrimination, poor public perceptions and poor environmental records. Forestry organizations have addressed these concerns by attempting to increase the number of women in the profession. These efforts have been largely ineffective. Using the case of community‐based forestry, I argue that when we begin to consider not only women but also normatively feminine values as agents of change, our understanding of the profession of forestry may be rejuvenated.     

Inference and Decision Making for 21st-Century Drug Development and Approval

ABSTRACT

The cost and time of pharmaceutical drug development continue to grow at rates that many say are unsustainable. These trends have enormous impact on what treatments get to patients, when they get them and how they are used. The statistical framework for supporting decisions in regulated clinical development of new medicines has followed a traditional path of frequentist methodology. Trials using hypothesis tests of “no treatment effect” are done routinely, and the p-value < 0.05 is often the determinant of what constitutes a “successful” trial. Many drugs fail in clinical development, adding to the cost of new medicines, and some evidence points blame at the deficiencies of the frequentist paradigm. An unknown number effective medicines may have been abandoned because trials were declared “unsuccessful” due to a p-value exceeding 0.05. Recently, the Bayesian paradigm has shown utility in the clinical drug development process for its probability-based inference. We argue for a Bayesian approach that employs data from other trials as a “prior” for Phase 3 trials so that synthesized evidence across trials can be utilized to compute probability statements that are valuable for understanding the magnitude of treatment effect. Such a Bayesian paradigm provides a promising framework for improving statistical inference and regulatory decision making.