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筆者三個月前在本欄撰文，倡議「化西入中」的港式教育，吸引中國內地學生來港求學，從而促進香港和內地的人才流動，助推粵港澳大灣區經濟融合。業界一些朋友看了此文，頗感興趣，致電商討。一位朋友特別前來香港大學，跟筆者探討教育和人才問題。寒暄幾句後，他便單刀直入：「你提出的觀點，無非是把香港當作內地人才加工的基地，然後走內銷的道路。這對你們搞教育的當然是一盤好生意，但對香港又有什麼『着數』呢？」此問乍聽突兀，細想卻值得思辨一番。

影響香港超過半個世紀的「積極不干預」管治理念，間接導致香港經濟產業單一，社會缺乏向上流機會，現在是時候改弦易轍，另覓有效的方法以協助創造多元化的產業及勞工職位。

New research by Professor Roni Michaely and other co-authors shows that while Socially Responsible Investment Funds are good at picking firms that adopt such behaviours, they do not inspire those firms to further improve their performance.

HKU Business School Professor James K.S. Kung has recently won the Royal Economic Society Prize for the best article published in The Economic Journal in 2020. His paper, “Long Live Keju! The Persistent Effects of China's Civil Examination System”, co-authored with Dr. Chicheng Ma and Dr. Ting Chen, examines the long-term consequences of China’s millennium-long civil examination system for human capital or educational outcomes.

最近，新疆的棉花成為國際重要議題，使平凡的棉花，再度引起關注。若論單一商品，今天的棉花，遠不若芯片、石油或黃金那麼受人重視。然而，大多數經濟體由農業邁向工業，初期都以紡織業為主，而作為農產品的棉花，是紡織業的主要原材料，也可以說是經濟發展由農業到工業的橋樑。不單如此，棉花及其有關的紡織業，數百年來均與全球政經發展緊密地交織一起。這裏就棉花對全球經濟發展作幾方面簡單的回顧。

Dr Sangwoon Park’s study takes a scientific look at what makes friendships at work tick and how these friendships affect productivity in the workplace. His findings reveal that worker productivity declines when friends socialize at work, but that, surprisingly, people are also willing to “pay” almost 5% of their wages to work near a friend – suggesting that friends who work together get more out of their jobs than just money.

We use staggered share repurchases legalization from 1985 to 2010 across the world to examine its impact on corporate behaviors. We find that share-repurchasing firms do not cut dividends as a substitution. The cash for repurchasing shares comes more from internal cash than external debt issuance, leading to reductions in capital expenditures and R&D expenses. While this strategy boosts stock prices, it results in lower long-run Tobin's Q, profitability, growth, and innovation, accompanied by lower insider ownership. Tax benefits and paying out temporary earnings are two primary reasons that firms repurchase.

拜登上台後，白宮摒除了特朗普時期誇誇其談、不幹實事的作風，各種政策重上軌道，特別是應付新冠肺炎和處理肺炎帶來的經濟後遺症，都顯得積極進取。也許由於壓制疫情和提振經濟是當務之急，其他政策都要讓路。以外交政策為例，拜登在上任約兩個星期後才在國務院作簡單的闡釋，但其中有關外貿方面着墨不多。不過，我們仍可以從拜登在競選時對有關問題的論述、和他上台後執行的政策，了解他的政府怎樣處理美國的外貿問題。

過去兩年來，香港經歷了內外環境巨變。社會運動影響下，本港經濟持續低迷，加上中美貿易談判曲折、新冠肺炎疫情衝擊 、世界經濟下行，無疑令本地困局雪上加霜。失業人數不斷攀升，青年失業率更遠高於其他年齡組別。若要走出逆境，年輕一代需要多元發展，而粵港澳大灣區建設正好為他們開闢一條發展的新跑道。

Prof. Hongbin Cai, Dean of HKU Business School was interviewed by Master Insight on how dominant of Hong Kong tertiary Institutions among the global critical situation.

Estimating the hazard function of customer patience time has become a necessary component of effective operational planning such as workforce staffing and scheduling in call centers. When customers get served, their patience times are right-censored. In addition, the exact event times in call centers are sometimes unobserved and naturally binned into time intervals, due to the design of data collection systems. We develop a TunT (Transform-unTransform) estimator that turns the difficult problem of nonparametric hazard function estimation into a regression problem on binned and right-censored data. Our approach starts with binning event times and transforming event count data with a mean-matching transformation, which enables a simpler characterization of the heteroscedastic variance function. A nonparametric regression technique is then applied to the transformed data. Finally, the estimated regression function is back-transformed to yield an estimator for the original hazard function. The proposed estimation procedure is illustrated using call center data to reveal interesting customer patience behavior, and health insurance plan trial data to compare the effect between treatment and control groups. The numerical study shows that our approach yields more accurate estimates and better staffing decisions than existing methods.

近日最矚目的國際新聞，莫過於特朗普總統頒布行政命令，限制美國國民和企業在45天後停止與TikTok和騰訊微信的交易。此前國務卿蓬佩奧已提出了對中國的「清潔網絡」行動。

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.