The Impact of US Political Pressure on the RMB Exchange Rate

The US-China game of Renminbi (RMB)/US Dollar exchange rate has aroused increasing attention recently. From the US perspective, appreciation of RMB exchange rate could reduce the US-China trade deficit, boost the US economy and thus lower the unemployment rate (Cheng and Zhang, 2012). Therefore it is crucial for the US government to figure out whether there is an influence from US political pressure on RMB flexibility and the most effective way to accelerate the appreciation of RMB exchange rate. Aminian et al (2008) believed that US political pressure may be one of the causes for the appreciation of RMB exchange rate, while Liu and Pauwels (2012) stated that there is no significant impact from external political pressure on RMB exchange rate. Previous studies only examined the impact of one aspect of US political pressure on the RMB exchange rate. That’s why the conflict appears. This paper will fill in the gap of previous literature and resolve the conflict by investigating the impact of US political pressure from three aspects, namely, from US Congress, the US public media and from US lobbyists. This paper finds that the political pressure from Congress and the US public media alone have little impact on the RMB exchange rate in the short run, while the political pressure from US lobbyists has a positive impact on the appreciation of RMB exchange rate. By recognizing this, the US government could reinforce the lobbyist way to accelerate the appreciation of RMB exchange rate effectively

The Evolution of China's Pay Inequality from 1987 to 2012

This paper provides new estimates of the evolution of pay inequality in China, overall and also by region and sector, in the period from 1987 to 2012, using the between-group component of Theil’s T-statistic measured across regions and sectors. We find that China’s overall pay inequality started to rise rapidly in the early 1990s and that it peaked in 2008, with the between-province component peaking as early as 2002. Since 2008, overall pay inequality has decreased, with between-province and between-sector inequality both showing steady declines. We argue that China’s pay inequality during the reform period was not simply a matter of economic inequality; it was the joint product of both market and institutional forces. In this vein, we also argue that the recent decline of overall pay inequality after the 2008 global economic crisis was not a temporary phenomenon triggered by the global downturn, but a long-term outcome driven by both economic and policy factors

Deep Extreme Multi-label Learning

Extreme multi-label learning (XML) or classification has been a practical and important problem since the boom of big data. The main challenge lies in the exponential label space which involves $2^L$ possible label sets especially when the label dimension $L$ is huge, e.g., in millions for Wikipedia labels. This paper is motivated to better explore the label space by originally establishing an explicit label graph. In the meanwhile, deep learning has been widely studied and used in various classification problems including multi-label classification, however it has not been properly introduced to XML, where the label space can be as large as in millions. In this paper, we propose a practical deep embedding method for extreme multi-label classification, which harvests the ideas of non-linear embedding and graph priors-based label space modeling simultaneously. Extensive experiments on public datasets for XML show that our method performs competitive against state-of-the-art result