In this paper, we review the research on the substitution between social security wealth and private wealth. Our review includes over 100 theoretical and empirical contributions. Nearly 70% of the literature identifies the statistically significant impact of social security wealth on different forms of private savings. A strong majority of authors, who obtain statistically significant results find the negative impact of social security on private savings. We discuss the main limitations of the literature.

Consideration of optimal commodity storage with different discount rates. Finding that, even with a lower discount rate than private storage, optimal government-financed storage may not narrow price fluctuations compared with optimal privately financed storage because a government has to choose a probability of buffer stock failure greater than zero to economize on storage costs that could conceivably become very large. There is no presumption that government financed storage would be larger, with narrower intervention bands and more stable prices, than with privately-financed storage. The welfare enhancing effect of government financed storage compared to private storage is therefore indeterminate.

This study investigates the effects of innovation reform on wealth inequality by analyzing China’s Comprehensive Innovation Reform Pilot Zones (CIRPZs). Employing a difference-in-differences methodology, we assess the impact of CIRPZs on urban wealth distribution among China’s prefecture-level cities. Our findings reveal a paradox: although CIRPZs are designed to stimulate economic growth and technological advancement, they inadvertently exacerbate wealth inequality. This outcome is confirmed through a series of rigorous robustness checks. We identify two key mechanisms driving this phenomenon: the virtual wealth effect, whereby technological progress disproportionately benefits tech-savvy individuals and firms, and wage stratification, leading to increased income disparities within innovative sectors. Additionally, we find that the impacts of CIRPZs vary across regions, with significant widening of wealth inequality observed in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, and Chengdu-Chongqing, while a moderating effect is noted in the Central Plains. These insights emphasize the nuanced effectiveness of innovation reform policies and their implications for policymakers in developing economies. We advocate for policy frameworks that balance technological advancement with equitable economic outcomes, a crucial step for fostering sustainable and inclusive development.

The long-term low level of residents' property income is not only detrimental to the wealth accumulation of farmers, but also aggravates the urban-rural income imbalance. This paper uses an empirical approach to explore the mechanism of digital literacy's impact on farm households' property income. The main findings of this paper are as follows: (1) Digital literacy and its sub-dimensions can significantly increase the level of farmers' property income, with the strongest contribution of digital information acquisition literacy. (2) Digital literacy has a greater boosting effect on the property income of farm households with low education level heads, low physical capital households, and villages with better economic development. (3) Digital literacy increases the property income of farm households mainly through expanding social capital and improving risk preferences. The innovation of this paper is to construct a digital literacy evaluation index system based on a micro perspective that fits the behavioral characteristics of farmers, and reveal the impact and mechanism of digital literacy and its sub-dimensions on farmers' property income. This study expands the theoretical research related to digital literacy and farmers' property income, and provides a scientific basis for the choice of strategies to enhance the digital literacy of the majority of farmers, which is important for promoting wealth accumulation of farmers and achieving common prosperity.

We offer an extensive analysis of the significance of information within the realm of Gaussian quadratic economies. We build upon the seminal papers of Morris and Shin (2002, 2007) and consider a signal game of incomplete information. Particularly, we question the suitability of partial transparency portrayed by fragmented information in addition to the private signal in terms of welfare effects. We can summarize our findings in two main points. First, fragmented information, in conjunction with a private signal, can reduce the reliance on public signals. Second, a conflicting effect arises between increasing full disclosure and increasing the precision of fragmented (semi-public) information when examining different complex scenarios, involving for example endogenous private information or imperfect correlated signals. For a critical threshold, an optimal communication strategy designed by fragmented information should be implemented whenever that kind of information is acquired at a high precision.

Current societal challenges related to retirement planning, healthcare systems’ evolution and environmental changes require households to pay a closer attention to their personal finances. This in turns calls for the associated industry to transform and scale. To do so, the personal finance industry could potentially leverage artificial intelligence tools for which there has been increasing levels of chatter. However, there is, to my knowledge, little consensus on whether or not those tools are appropriate given the challenges ahead. The literature review at the heart of this article first suggests that the stream of personal finance where transformation is more than needed is the one pertaining to investments, rather than the ones associated to loans, insurances or payments. Second, the productivity levers fueling the transformation of this branch are yet more driven, as of today, by simple digitalization notions rather by the usage of A.I. instruments. Over the next couple of years, more attention should thus be paid to use/business cases associated to investment products and the digitalization of their distribution chain.

There is a considerable amount of debate on the impact of capital liberalization on economic performance. Using Three-Stage Least Squares (3SLS) estimation technique introduced by Zellner and Theil (1962), we synthesize studies on the determinants of governance and capital flows. We find evidence of a revolving door relationship. Foreign aid has a negative impact on governance and, thereby reduces capital inflows since bad governance hinders capital inflows. The need to fill the gap created by private capital outflows encourages inflow of foreign aid, which in turn harms governance. Therefore, capital liberalization could grease a revolving door and undermine economic development in the aid receiving countries.

Entrepreneurs are important actors in economic activities and creators of social wealth. Excellent entrepreneurs contribute their wisdom to the accumulation of social wealth and the promotion of high-quality economic and social development. The business environment is the main manifestation of the soft power of cities and regional economic development, and a better business environment can effectively attract enterprises and promote their sustainable growth. Using data from Chinese A-share listed companies from 2009-2019 as a research sample, the following research conclusions were drawn: (1) A better business environment helps enhance entrepreneurship. (2) A better business environment promotes entrepreneurship by reducing rent-seeking expenses and corporate credit costs. (3) Compared to traditional enterprises, high-tech enterprises are better able to enjoy the benefits brought by business environment optimization and further enhance entrepreneurship. When competition is low, entrepreneurs face lower rent-seeking expenses, which is conducive to stimulating entrepreneurship. The businessenvironment can promote fairness and bring more equal financing opportunities for enterprises, which has a higher impact on entrepreneurship for the group facing higher financing constraints. This study meticulously analyzes the impact ofthebusiness environment on entrepreneurship, providing references for the next steps of optimizing the business environment and enhancing entrepreneurship.

The Paper investigates the elasticity of substitution between foreign direct investment (FDI) and private domestic investment on the external reserves of some selected 14 African countries. To achieve the objective of the best substitutability of investment suitable for Africa, using data on gross fixed capital formation as a proxy for private domestic investment, inflation, external reserves, and foreign direct investment. From the Empirical literature reviewed, studies on the substitutability of investments in external reserves in Africa have not yet been addressed. The Dynamic General Methods of Moments (DGMM) was employed for the analysis since the African countries are more than the scope of the study which ranges from 2010 to 2022. The results show that foreign direct investment is preferred to private domestic investment in Africa. Additionally, the elasticity of substitution from FDI to domestic private investment was found to be stronger and more elastic than the contrary. Therefore, the study recommends that African countries should focus on strengthening fixed assets to create more revenue from additional fixed assets which would impact more on the external reserves of Africa, by attracting foreigners.

This paper analyses a model of private value auctions with symmetric risk-neutral bidders, where bidders' private values of an indivisible good are fuzzy. The auction is studied as a game with incomplete information. Fuzzy random variables, their quantile functions, and expressions for expectations through quantile functions are used. An explicit expression for the solution is found. Also, expected bidders' payments are studied.

This paper investigates the impact of monetary policy on the performance of deposit money banks in Nigeria, using monthly data series spanning the period 2008 to 2023. Total private sector credit of deposit money banks was used to proxy the performance of deposit money banks while money supply, monetary policy rate, cash reserve ratio, and maximum interest rate were used as proxies for monetary policy. The Ex-post Facto research design was adopted in this study. Data on total private sector credit of deposit money banks, money supply, monetary policy rate, cash reserve ratio, and maximum interest rate were obtained from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Statistical bulletin. The hypotheses of this paper were tested using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag statistics. The findings disclosed that total private sector credit of deposit money banks has a significant relationship with money supply and maximum interest rate while cash reserve ratio and monetary policy rate has an insignificant relationship with total private sector credit of deposit money banks. The researchers recommended among other things that the monetary authorities should consider policies that enhance liquidity within the banking system. This can be achieved through open market operations, reducing the reserve requirements, or other mechanisms that increase the availability of funds in the economy as the money supply was found to be statistically significant. Also, it is crucial for monetary authorities to monitor and adjust the maximum interest rates to ensure they remain conducive to deposit growth. High lending rates may discourage borrowing and subsequently reduce deposits, while more favorable rates could encourage economic activity and deposit inflows.

Digitalization is nowadays one of the fastest developing processes. The adoption of digital technologies can provide innumerous opportunities for the organizations to evolve and gain competitive advantage by leveraging of technologies to respond to dynamic expectations and demands. Information about the country digitalization level is essential to decision makers in both public and private organizations. It can present insights on which areas need the most investment, and furthermore to gain feedback on the outcomes of these investments. For companies, it can create a certain predictability on which products and services will be required the most. To assess the evolution of this process in different countries, various indexes were proposed and employed by different corporations. The Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) and ICT Development Index (IDI) are used by public organizations. Digitalization Index (DiGiX) and Cisco Digital Readiness Index (CISCO) are used by private companies. Comparing two sectors highlights the most common factors of digital evaluation. Indexes are analyzed thoroughly by their structure, coverage, weights, methodology and ranking. The result of the practical work is a equivalence table which shows the percentage of their similarity. Additionally, a new digitalization index is proposed, based on the result of the previous comparison, which can be applied to analyze both public and private sector of the country’s digitalization level.

Following the seminal paper on Optimum Currency Areas (OCA) by Mundell (1961) a wealth of literature has been published on the business cycles synchronisation and its main determinants. This work provides a systematic review of this research field both at country-level synchronization and regional level. The paper aims to evaluate the contribution of the related literature’s methodologies to the measurement of the business cycle and the estimation of the level of synchronization. The discussion of the collected papers is expected to substantially assist researchers, practitioners, and policy makers keen to employ themselves in the area of business cycles synchronisation.

This study provides insight into CEO compensation dynamics in the public sector and private sector publicly listed firms in New Zealand. This research uses descriptive statistics, OLS regression, and the difference-in-difference method to analyze the compensation-performance relationship for the period 2005 to 2012. Our findings show that CEOs in the private sector publicly listed firms are receiving higher remuneration benefits. Our results suggest that firm sales and past compensation are the most important determinants of CEO cash-based as well as total compensation. Firms with a larger board size and the presence of a formal remuneration committee are likely to provide higher cash compensation than those without.

Considering that housing is the single biggest asset for most households, owning a home may create barriers to entrepreneurship for young people who generally accumulate relatively little wealth due to a short-term career and low income. Using longitudinal data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) survey, our empirical work suggests that homeowners are associated with significantly less propensity for entrepreneurial engagement and the negative homeownership effect on entrepreneurship is much larger for younger homeowners. These findings are robust to omitted variable bias, reverse causality and model misspecification. We explore the mechanism through which capital constraints related to housing purchase may more affect younger homeowners from starting entrepreneurial activities. We find strong supportive evidence for this mechanism.

The knowledge-capital model explains outward foreign direct investment (FDI) of a country from its relative abundance of its knowledge assets. Early versions of the knowledge-capital theory model these assets as if they were only the results of knowledge investments by private firms. We extend the theory by a formal model of the public-private interaction in knowledge development. This sheds light on the role of the origin country of multinationals. The paper extracts four testable predictions from the model. We use the inter-country variation in national knowledge-creation systems and FDI performance to test the model using a new dataset; it holds knowledge-creation indicators for about 200 countries over the period 2000-2020. Based on a range of non-parametric tests, we can corroborate that the basic tenet of the knowledge-capital model is correct. Moreover, the results show the important role of public knowledge production for outward FDI.

This research paper examines changes in patient care management in acute care hospitals between 2001 and 2011. During this time, there were two opposing factors at play: the competition effect of the reform and the policymaker’s decision to reduce public hospitals across France. By studying the trends, it is evident that there has been a significant overall shift in patient care management during this period. This change could be attributed to the global competition effect and the concentration of in-patients in specific public facilities. Through the difference-in-difference method, the study analyzed time variations in the intensity of local competition. It was found that local competition had a negligible impact on patient care management. Additionally, the study revealed that there was a significant positive competition effect on high-technical procedures for the private sector, which is in line with the market segment where private sector hospitals have a leadership position and the pro-competitive reform intensified this position. The study also uncovered a negative competition effect on the length of stay for public hospitals. Prior to the implementation of the DRG-based payment reform, public sector hospitals were paid a global budget. However, after the reform was implemented, they had to shorten the length of stay to increase the number of stays. For-profit hospitals have always been paid based on the number of stays. The results are robust and consistent when alternative measures of local competition are used.

The rise of privately issued digital currencies, which primarily serve as alternative investment assets poses a challenge to the traditional financial instruments traded in the financial market. This study examines the dynamic relationship between the major privately issued digital currency (Bitcoin) and two financial market securities in Nigeria. The paper employed Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model and presents three relevant findings. First, the impulse response function indicates the absence of a significant response of the Nigerian financial market to shocks emanating from the Bitcoin market, implying lower connectedness between the two markets. Secondly, the outcome of the variance decomposition reveals a lower contribution of Bitcoin to changes in stock prices and treasury bills, however, stock prices and treasury bills contributed higher impact to each other compared to the contribution of Bitcoin. Thirdly, a weak bi-directional causality between the Bitcoin and treasury bills was observed and a uni-directional causality running from treasury bills and stocks, implying the existence of portfolio rebalancing from the fixed income to the equities market. Despite the weak connection between digital currency and the financial market, the paper recommends that the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Securities and Exchange Commission should maintain monitoring the development of crypto exchanges and continue reviewing the existing policy restricting cryptocurrency transactions through banks to avoid its unsavoury effects.

Poland has experienced a very sharp rise in income and wealth inequality after the economic transition. We measure the relative persistence of income inequality and intra-generational income mobility in Poland during the period 2008-2015. Our research is based on the panel survey data, our subsample includes 501 households. To measure the persistence of income inequality we calculate Shorrocks’s R coefficient. We find that if inequality is measured by the Gini index the relative persistence of income inequality in Poland is similar to Western Europe. In the case of the Theil index and the Mean Log Deviation (MLD), the relative persistence is higher than in a majority of Western Europe countries and similar to the United Kingdom or the United States. The income distribution in Poland is rather stable. Income mobility is lowest at the bottom and at the top of the income distribution. In the middle (3rd) quintile upward mobility is higher than downward mobility. The short-term income mobility in Poland has not changed during and after the Great Financial Crisis and is still medium in comparison with the rest of Europe.

Economic growth rests on entrepreneurship and capitalism. Entrepreneurship is important because entrepreneurs work unceasingly to create, use, and disseminate new products and productive techniques to raise living standards. Capitalism is characterized by private property rights, a free market, and the pursuit of profit, which are driving forces for innovation and productivity and in turn economic growth. Using six proxies for economic growth, our results show that capitalism, measured by the Economic Freedom of the World Index, and entrepreneurship, measured by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data set, fostered economic growth in member states of the European Union between 2000 and 2021.