学术论文

We evaluate the impact of the African slave trade between 1400 and 1900 on modern household finance. Exploiting cross-country and cross-ethnic group differences in the intensity with which people were enslaved and exported from Africa, we find that slave exports during the 1400–1900 period are negatively associated with current measures of household (a) access to financial services, (b) access to credit, (c) use of mobile finance, and (d) trust in financial institutions, suggesting that the slave trade has had an enduring, deleterious effect on household finance.

以时间为单位量度客户的耐性并计算危机率，已成为运营管理中重要的一环。这项技术能帮助企业优化客户服务中心的运作，如人手分配及编更事宜等等。当客户申请服务时，他们的耐性将会随时间推移产生改变。现行的数据收集系统有时候无法观察到客户服务中心提供服务的确切时间，故此我们开发了一个TunT（Transform-unTransform）的估计程式，把这个复杂的难题简化为回归分析的问题。我们为客户服务中心不同的服务时间进行分类，并使用均值匹配转换，对相关的数据进行转换，从而使我们能简单地表现出异方差－变异数函数。然后我们把非参数回归分析的技术应用在转换后的数据上。最后，我们会对估计出来的回归函数进行转换，计算出原始危机率。在我们的模拟计算中，我们利用客户服务中心的数据（实验组）与医疗保险计划中的数据（控制组）进行对比。研究证明，与现行方法相比，我们的模型能得出更准确的危机估计值，帮助企业优化人手安排。

Using a comprehensive sample of credit card data from a leading Chinese bank, we show that government bureaucrats receive 16% higher credit lines than non-bureaucrats with similar income and demographics, but their accounts experience a significantly higher likelihood of delinquency and debt forgiveness. Regions associated with greater credit provision to bureaucrats open more branches and receive more deposits from the local government. After staggered corruption crackdowns of provincial-level political officials, the new credit cards originated to bureaucrats in exposed regions do not enjoy a credit line premium, and bureaucrats’ delinquency and reinstatement rates are similar to those of non-bureaucrats.

We consider a firm consisting of two divisions, one responsible for designing and manufacturing new products and the other responsible for remanufacturing operations. The firm will sell these new and remanufactured products either directly to the consumer (direct selling) or through an independent retailer (indirect selling). Our study demonstrates that a firm’s organizational structure can affect its marketing decisions. Specifically, a decentralized firm with separate manufacturing and remanufacturing divisions can benefit from indirect selling with higher firm profit, supply chain profit, and total consumer demand than direct selling. Moreover, this structure also induces a remanufacturable product design. In contrast, a centralized firm in which the manufacturing and remanufacturing divisions are consolidated is intuitively better off by choosing direct selling than indirect selling. Furthermore, we show that, surprisingly, when the focal firm sells through an independent retailer, a decentralized internal structure can result in higher supply chain profit than a centralized internal structure. We further investigate the case of dual dedicated channels and conclude that, while direct selling of remanufactured products and indirect selling of new products can better induce a remanufacturable product design and higher supply chain profit, it is not in the best interest of the firm in terms of total sales and firm profit.

We analyze optimal auction mechanisms when bidders base costly entry decisions on their valuations, and bidders pay with a fixed royalty rate plus cash. With sufficient valuation uncertainty relative to entry costs, the optimal mechanism features asymmetry so that bidders enter with strictly positive but different (ex-ante) probabilities. When bidders are ex-ante identical, higher royalty rates—which tie payments more closely to bidder valuations—increase the optimal degree of asymmetry in auction design, further raising revenues. When bidders differ ex-ante in entry costs, the seller favors the low cost entrant; whereas when bidders have different valuation distributions, the seller favors the weaker bidder if entry costs are low, but not if they are high. Higher royalty rates cause the seller to favor the weaker bidder by less, and the strong bidder by more.

Using a large panel of more than 140,000 state-owned enterprises (SOEs), this study examines SOEs’ investment behavior surrounding 82 national elections in 25 European countries between 2001 and 2015. We find that SOEs increase their corporate investment by about 29% of the sample average during national election years. This effect is more pronounced in fixed timing and closely contested elections. The effect is also stronger in countries with low institutional quality, more centralized political systems, and state-controlled banking systems. In contrast, we find the matched non-SOEs significantly decrease their corporate investment during national election years.

鉴于社会上对具有吸引力的人持正面印象，网上卖家有理由担心消费者对其个人资料相片的观感。尽管现有文献强调「美貌溢价」 和「丑陋惩罚」，但本研究分析了于各个消费者对消费者的电商平台的卖家头像，发现相貌的吸引力与产品销量之间存在 U 型关系（即美丽与丑陋的长相导致溢价，而平凡的长相则被惩罚）。通过分析两组大型数据，我们发现长相具吸引力以及不具吸引力的人，均比长相平凡的人出售更多产品。两项网上实验指出，长相具吸引力的卖家，因消费者认为其具有更高的社交能力而享有更高的可信度；而长相缺乏吸引力的卖家亦被视为较可信。虽然与外观相关产品的「美容溢价」很明显，但对于专业相关产品以及在女消费者评估男卖家的情况下，「丑陋溢价」更为明显。这些发现指出外观成为网上平台印象形成的关键工具，以及其于电子商务和营销中所带来的影响。

We propose a functional censored quantile regression model to describe the time-varying relationship between time-to-event outcomes and corresponding functional covariates. The time-varying effect is modeled as an unspecified function that is approximated via B-splines. A generalized approximate cross-validation method is developed to select the number of knots by minimizing the expected loss. We establish asymptotic properties of the method and the knot selection procedure. Furthermore, we conduct extensive simulation studies to evaluate the finite sample performance of our method. Finally, we analyze the functional relationship between ambulatory blood pressure trajectories and clinical outcome in stroke patients. The results reinforce the importance of the morning blood pressure surge phenomenon, whose effect has caught attention but remains controversial in the medical literature. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

We show that installing stronger risk management into financial institutions—a proposal widely discussed following the 2008 financial crisis—is insufficient to constrain institutions’ exposure to investment with lurking risk, such as asset-backed securities (ABS). Regulations affect the functioning of risk management: risk management constrains institutions’ exposure to risky ABS when they face mark-to-market reporting combined with capital requirements; however, this role is considerably weaker when capital requirements are combined with historical cost accounting. We find suggestive evidence that financial regulations affect risk management functions through promoting risk managers’ efforts in uncovering ABS risk and curbing executives’ incentives to take excessive risk.