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The Zhongguancun (ZGC) Forum was successfully held from September 24 to 28 in Beijing, China. Professor Chen Lin, Associate Dean in Research and Knowledge Exchange and Chair of Finance, was invited as a keynote speaker for the parallel forum – Financial Technology Forum.

正當全國經濟實力雄厚的城市紛紛招賢納士、擴張高等院校、興辦科技園之際，筆者不禁想起自1999年起，在深圳舉辦的中國國際高新技術成果交易會，那本地、海外的科研人才蜂擁而至，濟濟一堂的盛況。深圳至今發展成首屈一指的科技大城，香港在科技產業的發展瞠乎其後。面臨新一波創新及科技熱潮，如何後來居上，甚至脫穎而出，無疑是本港未來經濟發展的一個迫切問題。

“I had once came to HKU as a visiting scholar and was impressed by the high level research , and more so by the hardworking attitude of students. I look forward to teaching soon, and engage in exciting knowledge exchange with the young generation.”

Study by Professor Roni Michaely, Professor in Finance of HKU Business School and his co-authors reveals Index Funds put less efforts in monitoring their portfolio firms, resulted in power imbalance between investors and firm managements.

An international research team led by Dr. Jayson Jia, Associate Professor of Marketing at HKU Business School, investigated how family social networks respond to the shock of a sudden natural disaster. This research has just been published in Nature Communications, a leading science journal.

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.