Determining the ratio of product price to the marginal cost of production, otherwise known as the markup, is a key question in economics. In terms of the overall economy, markup variation affects the dynamics of inflation, the fluctuation of output and employment over business cycles, and the transmission of macroeconomic policies. At the firm level ... 閱讀更多

Business studies that probe how one factor influences another over time are often vulnerable to a subtle kind of error. Rigorous tests are therefore needed to avoid the drawing of false conclusions, as explained in a paper by HKUST’s Jiatao Li and mainland colleagues. They show how a long-standing problem in econometrics may have compromised the results of ... 閱讀更多

In recent decades, corporate social responsibility, or CSR, has become an increasingly important aspect of firms’ operations. For companies in emerging and transitional markets, where market-based institutions are relatively weak, governments have played a key role in driving CSR. A case in point is China, where the government has pushed CSR as a way of ... 閱讀更多

In May 2016, the Chinese question-and-answer platform Zhihu launched Zhihu Live, allowing contributors to hold live talks and collect entrance fees from participants. While contributing to the knowledge available on the platform, how did this new payment-based approach affect users’ unpaid-for contributions? Using evidence generated by this “natural ... 閱讀更多