Recently, several scholars in Economics of the Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS) of the University of Macau (UM) and APAEM Asian Economics team members have published articles in leading international journals.
Associate Professor Yibai Yang, doctoral student Rongxin Xu, and Assistant Professor Zhijie Zheng from Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai published a paper entitled “Intellectual property rights, taxation, and firms’ innovation: Theory and evidence from China” in the Journal of Economics. This study develops an R&D-based growth model with corporate taxation to explore the heterogeneous effects of intellectual property rights (IPR) protection on innovation of firms with different tax rates. To account for the interactive effect between IPR and taxation, the team finds supportive evidence for the theoretical result using firm-level data in China. Moreover, their empirical analysis shows that strengthening IPR is associated with less innovation by high-tax firms and more innovation by low-tax firms.
Assistant Professor Shanglyu Deng and his team published an article entitled “Confidence Management in Contests” in the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy. The study indicated that when an incumbent employee competes against a new hire for bonuses or promotions, the incumbent’s perception of the new hire’s ability distribution is biased. This bias can result in overconfidence or underconfidence. We show that debiasing may be counterproductive in incentivizing efforts. The results of the article contribute to the extensive discussion of confidence management and organizational transparency in firms.
Moreover, Assistant Professor Fung Kwan and his research team published “Guangdong – Hong Kong – Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA): economic progress, diversification, and convergence” in the Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy. The team uses principal component analysis to create three indices that measure the economic development of eleven cities in the Guangdong – Hong Kong – Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) over 2010–2019. The indices, composed of sixteen socio-economic indicators spanning five dimensions: macro, openness, consumption, human capital, and diversification, track individual cities and the whole region’s performance. The indices show the diversified development of the GBA and the similarity of the human capital and consumption dimensions. A comparison with Yangtze River Delta and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei confirms a rapid integration in the GBA in these two dimensions and calls for more collaboration to promote trade and FDI in less developed GBA cities.
Source: Department of Economics, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Macau.