Por LINGLING WEI, de Pequim

Mais empresas privadas chinesas estão tendo acesso ao mercado nacional de títulos de dívida, que durante muito tempo foi dominado por emissores estatais, enquanto Pequim tenta aumentar a sua base financeira como parte dos esforços para se abrir gradativamente ao capital estrangeiro.

O volume de títulos emitidos por empresas não-estatais, apesar de ainda pequeno, ajuda a expandir a abrangência do mercado da dívida da China. Isso também é fundamental para a ambição de Pequim de dar ao yuan um papel mais global, o que exigiria que a China, em algum momento, amplie as formas como os investidores podem ter acesso à moeda. Atualmente, o mercado chinês de títulos de dívida está fechado para a maioria dos investidores estrangeiros.

De acordo com uma análise da ChinaScope Financial para o The Wall Street Journal, as empresas privadas venderam um total de 34,7 bilhões de yuans (cerca de US$ 5,5 bilhões) em títulos de dívida no ano passado, em comparação a 3,8 bilhões de yuans em 2010 e 2 bilhões de yuans em 2007, quando a China começou a permitir a emissão de títulos de dívida por empresas privadas. Ainda assim, isso é apenas 2,5% do total de 1,4 trilhão de yuans que a China vendeu em títulos de dívida em 2011.

Em comparação aos empréstimos bancários, que podem ser difíceis de conseguir por empresas privadas, “o mercado de dívida nos oferece financiamento estável e confiável por um longo período de tempo”, disse Xu Jun, um alto executivo da Neoglory Group, uma fabricante de ornamentos e empresa imobiliária de capital fechado da província de Zhejiang, no leste da China. Ela concluiu sua primeira emissão, totalizando 1,6 bilhões de yuans, em novembro.

O mercado chinês de títulos dívida, que totaliza mais de 20,1 trilhões de yuans (US$ 3,2 trilhões), é o segundo maior da Ásia, ficando atrás só do Japão. Ele tem servido principalmente como um veículo de financiamento para o governo central para a construção de aeroportos, rodovias e outros projetos de infraestrutura. Os bancos e as empresas estatais também respondem por uma grande parcela das emissões de títulos.

As autoridades vêm se mobilizarando para ampliar o mercado de títulos de dívida. Durante o ano passado, Pequim acelerou a aprovação da entrada de investidores estrangeiros no mercado doméstico de dívida. O governo também lançou a fase de provas de um programa para permitir que as empresas privadas invistam no mercado interno de dívida com fundos em yuan captados em Hong Kong, que se transformou em um mercado offshore para o yuan. Isso aumenta a demanda por investimentos em yuan em casa.

Autoridades do Banco Popular da China, disseram que o banco central vai incentivar empresas privadas de alguns setores-chave, especialmente empresas de pequeno e médio porte, a captar recursos através da venda de títulos de dívida.

A liberalização do mercado de capitais também poderia ajudar a China a realizar o seu objetivo de transferir seu padrão de crescimento de um modelo dependente das exportações e de investimentos para um modelo movido pelo consumo interno.

(Colaborou Wang Ming, em Xangai.)

By SUDEEP REDDY And JOE LIGHT

The job market is showing signs of life, though its slow recovery suggests unemployment will remain high for years to come.

Employers added 162,000 jobs in March, the biggest monthly gain in three years, with one-third of the growth coming from the government’s hiring of 48,000 temporary workers for the 2010 Census. Despite those gains, the jobless rate held steady at 9.7% as new workers entered the job market and people who had previously quit the labor force returned.

The average length of unemployment rose last month to the highest point since record keeping began in 1948: more than 31 weeks. The number of workers out of work for six months or more rose sharply.

The latest report, which marks the third month since November in which payrolls increased, indicates the labor market is pulling out of a deep downturn that slashed more than eight million jobs since the recession hit in late 2007.

“It confirms that the economy has turned an important corner,” says J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. chief economist Bruce Kasman. “It’s been growing for a while, but I think what we’re seeing is that this growth is now broadening out to include jobs.”

The stock market was closed Friday for a holiday, but the jobs report sent stock futures climbing during a morning session. As investors anticipate a stronger economy—and look ahead to an eventual Federal Reserve rate hike—they pushed down Treasury debt prices, sending the yield on 10-year Treasury notes, the benchmark for corporate and consumer borrowing, to 3.94%, the highest since June.

Among those who have landed jobs lately is New York Web developer Philip John Basile, although, as with many other new hires, it is a temporary six-month assignment with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. He had been searching in earnest for three months, he says. “I’m still looking for a permanent job, but this is a good middle ground,” he says.

Many employers are reluctant to hire until they see stronger evidence of an economic recovery. Private-sector payrolls increased by 123,000 in March, but much of that boost was a bounce back from employment depressed in February by snowstorms. The government said overall payrolls increased by an average of 54,000 a month over the last three months.

The economic recovery so far remains heavily reliant on government support, which is visible in the jobs numbers. Hiring for the decennial census is expected to add hundreds of thousands of temporary jobs in the coming months. Other forms of government intervention also remain crucial. The housing sector’s boost is being driven in part by tax breaks and extensive government support for the mortgage market. And last year’s $787 billion stimulus is temporarily preventing even deeper job losses in fields from construction to education.

“We don’t expect it to get worse, but we’re not seeing a rebound yet,” says Donald Stone Jr., chief executive of Dewberry & Davis, a Fairfax, Va.-based engineering firm. The closely held company is hiring 30 right now, but doesn’t expect employment to return to its peak anytime soon, Mr. Stone says. Dewberry employed 1,800 in 2009, about 10% below its prerecession high.

While stimulus projects have bolstered its business with the federal government, state and local governments still seem strapped for cash, Mr. Stone says. Dewberry’s private development work also has remained scarce. “Projects have been very sporadic and certainly not what I would call a rebound,” he says.

Catholic Health Initiatives, a nonprofit national health-care provider based in Denver, is taking a wait-and-see approach to hiring. Over the last 18 months, the company laid off about 2,000, leaving its work force at 70,000, says chief operating officer Michael Rowan. With inpatient admissions down 3.5% this year, Mr. Rowan expects staffing to grow only 1%, and that will happen through acquisitions.

Health care was one of the few sectors adding jobs during the downturn. But in March, the gains were broad-based.

The retail sector added 14,900 jobs. Temporary employment—a positive indicator for the labor market, since many employers increase temp hiring as a prelude to adding permanent jobs—increased by 40,200. Construction added jobs for the first time since mid-2007, although the gains likely were the result of a bounce back from February’s weather slowdown. Manufacturing added 17,000 jobs, the third straight month of gains.

Replacing the more than eight million jobs lost since the recession started likely will take much of the next decade. The economy needs to create at least 100,000 jobs a month just to keep the unemployment rate flat, due to population growth. Because of the downturn, millions of Americans quit searching for work or dropped out of the labor force. A broader measure of unemployment, which includes people who stopped looking for work and those settling for part-time jobs, rose to 16.9% in March.

The government’s March jobs report showed strong gains over recent months. Despite additional census jobs, the report was slightly weaker than expected, but with stock markets closed for Good Friday, the report’s full impact will be more apparent next week.

The improving economy is certain to draw more job seekers back into the market, one factor likely to keep the unemployment rate from dropping quickly. The labor force—those working or looking for work—grew by 398,000 in March, the third straight monthly increase.

Federal Reserve officials expect the jobless rate to remain above 9% through this year and above 8% throughout 2011. The large pool of available labor is likely to constrain wage growth in the coming years. The report showed that average hourly earnings declined 0.1% during the month, although the average work week and total hours worked grew. For that reason, even with the latest turn toward job growth, the Fed isn’t likely to raise interest rates until late this year at the earliest.

Write to Sudeep Reddy at sudeep.reddy@wsj.com

By MICHAELEEN DOUCLEFF

The Wall Street Journal (illustration) Associated Press (photo); Universal Music Publishing (score)

Adele slightly modulates her pitch at the end of some long notes, adding to the tension.

On Sunday night, the British singer-songwriter Adele is expected to sweep the Grammys. Three of her six nominations are for her rollicking hit “Rolling in the Deep.” But it’s her ballad “Someone Like You” that has risen to near-iconic status recently, due in large part to its uncanny power to elicit tears and chills from listeners. The song is so famously sob-inducing that “Saturday Night Live” recently ran a skit in which a group of co-workers play the tune so they can all have a good cry together.

Adele, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter performed “Someone Like You” from her latest album “21″ at WSJ Cafe

What explains the magic of Adele’s song? Though personal experience and culture play into individual reactions, researchers have found that certain features of music are consistently associated with producing strong emotions in listeners. Combined with heartfelt lyrics and a powerhouse voice, these structures can send reward signals to our brains that rival any other pleasure.

Twenty years ago, the British psychologist John Sloboda conducted a simple experiment. He asked music lovers to identify passages of songs that reliably set off a physical reaction, such as tears or goose bumps. Participants identified 20 tear-triggering passages, and when Dr. Sloboda analyzed their properties, a trend emerged: 18 contained a musical device called an “appoggiatura.”

An appoggiatura is a type of ornamental note that clashes with the melody just enough to create a dissonant sound. “This generates tension in the listener,” said Martin Guhn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia who co-wrote a 2007 study on the subject. “When the notes return to the anticipated melody, the tension resolves, and it feels good.”

Chills often descend on listeners at these moments of resolution. When several appoggiaturas occur next to each other in a melody, it generates a cycle of tension and release. This provokes an even stronger reaction, and that is when the tears start to flow.

“Someone Like You,” which Adele wrote with Dan Wilson, is sprinkled with ornamental notes similar to appoggiaturas. In addition, during the chorus, Adele slightly modulates her pitch at the end of long notes right before the accompaniment goes to a new harmony, creating mini-roller coasters of tension and resolution, said Dr. Guhn.

To learn more about the formula for a tear-jerker, a few years ago Dr. Guhn and his colleague Marcel Zentner found musical excerpts—from Mendelssohn’s “Trio for Piano” and Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” for example—that reliably produce the chills and then measured the physiological reactions (heart rate, sweating, goose bumps) of listeners.

Chill-provoking passages, they found, shared at least four features. They began softly and then suddenly became loud. They included an abrupt entrance of a new “voice,” either a new instrument or harmony. And they often involved an expansion of the frequencies played. In one passage from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 (K. 488), for instance, the violins jump up one octave to echo the melody. Finally, all the passages contained unexpected deviations in the melody or the harmony. Music is most likely to tingle the spine, in short, when it includes surprises in volume, timbre and harmonic pattern.

“Someone Like You” is a textbook example. “The song begins with a soft, repetitive pattern,” said Dr. Guhn, while Adele keeps the notes within a narrow frequency range. The lyrics are wistful but restrained: “I heard that you’re settled down, that you found a girl and you’re married now.” This all sets up a sentimental and melancholy mood.

When the chorus enters, Adele’s voice jumps up an octave, and she belts out notes with increasing volume. The harmony shifts, and the lyrics become more dramatic: “Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead.”

Adele, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter performed “Rolling In The Deep” from her latest album “21″ at WSJ Cafe

When the music suddenly breaks from its expected pattern, our sympathetic nervous system goes on high alert; our hearts race and we start to sweat. Depending on the context, we interpret this state of arousal as positive or negative, happy or sad.

If “Someone Like You” produces such intense sadness in listeners, why is it so popular? Last year, Robert Zatorre and his team of neuroscientists at McGill University reported that emotionally intense music releases dopamine in the pleasure and reward centers of the brain, similar to the effects of food, sex and drugs. This makes us feel good and motivates us to repeat the behavior.

Measuring listeners’ responses, Dr. Zatorre’s team found that the number of goose bumps observed correlated with the amount of dopamine released, even when the music was extremely sad. The results suggest that the more emotions a song provokes—whether depressing or uplifting—the more we crave the song.

With “Someone Like You,” Adele and Mr. Wilson not only crafted a perfect tear-jerker but also stumbled upon a formula for commercial success: Unleash the tears and chills with small surprises, a smoky voice and soulful lyrics, and then sit back and let the dopamine keep us coming back for more.

—Ms. Doucleff is a scientific editor at the journal Cell.

By KATY MCLAUGHLIN

Chef and restaurateur David Burke’s business sounds like a financial-crisis perfect storm. Consider:

His restaurants are mainly in hard-hit areas including Manhattan’s Upper East Side and Las Vegas. Mr. Burke has no experience owning restaurants in a down economy; he launched his empire during restaurant boom times, starting in 2003. And the $7 billion fine-dining industry will see a 12% to 15% drop in sales this year, according to Technomic, a Chicago restaurant industry consultant.

And yet…Mr. Burke reports overall growth, some of his restaurants are booked to capacity on some evenings, and restaurant-industry analysts say he is one of the few high-end players with the right idea for the times.

How could this be? Mr. Burke, it seems, has figured out a way to navigate the downturn. His strategy is to throw out the high-end-dining playbook that says discounting should be subtle. Instead, he is offering dramatic, attention-getting and significant discounts. By engineering the menu carefully and keeping labor costs in check, he is able to slash prices without losing money, he says.

His promotions have included $20.09 three-course meals with items such as oysters and lobster at many of his upscale restaurants, including two in Manhattan (where, without discounts, entrees run $29 to $44), and $5 burgers and milkshakes at his Chicago steakhouse (where a 14-ounce sirloin is $48 on the regular menu). On one menu, he crossed out prices of wine and listed new prices with the term “sale” — a rarely seen word in fancy restaurants.

TRY IT! David Burke’s promotions include a wine auction and $20.09 three-course meals

One of his most unusual promotions is the Wine Auction at the tony David Burke Townhouse in Manhattan. Diners are handed a list of high-end wines with prices ranging from $200 to $600 struck out with red ink. The sommelier approaches the table, suggests that diners make him an offer and begins a negotiation. Wine director Bruce Yung says he sells an average of five bottles a night, meeting his reserve price or better.

“It’s worth a shot,” says Mr. Burke of his unorthodox approach to selling fine wine. “I’m sitting on close to $200,000 worth of wine anyway, already paid for.”

The D Word

Discounting is a strategy high-end restaurateurs have traditionally avoided or carried out in subtle ways, out of fear of eroding the cache of their brands. But this winter and spring, an unprecedented number of fine-dining restaurants slashed their prices.

Mr. Burke tries to set his restaurants apart from other bargains being offered mainly by making his discounts as drastic, easy-to-grasp and catchy as those of one of the few restaurants doing well these days: McDonald’s.

“I have teenage kids who go to McDonald’s for a dollar meal,” Mr. Burke says. The snappy ring to that promotion inspired him to come up with a high-end equivalent. “I see that it’s working for them at a buck, so it might work for me at $20,” Mr. Burke says.

 

Wooing Diners in a Down Economy

2:07

Chef David Burke is known for his creative cuisine. Now he’s using that same creative approach to weather a downturn in dining out. He talks with WSJ’s Beckey Bright about his strategy.

Starting in January, he rolled out $20.09 meals on Sunday nights at David Burke Townhouse and Fishtail in Manhattan, and at David Burke Fromagerie in Rumson, N.J. At Primehouse, in Chicago, he offers the $20.09 deal for lunch six days a week, excluding Sunday. At David Burke at Bloomingdale’s, in Manhattan, he serves a $20.09 dinner every night of the week. For a $5 supplement, diners can have a one-pound lobster or filet mignon entrée.

Last year, DB Global, Mr. Burke’s New York-based company, had $35 million in revenue, and for this year he predicts $45 million. Like many multi-unit operators, he reports that his less-expensive restaurants are doing well this year. For instance, David Burke at Bloomingdale’s, which has both a sit-down restaurant and a Burke in the Box take-out area, is up 2% over last year. Sales at all three Burke in the Box restaurants — the others are at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, and Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut — are up from last year.

Still, even his high-end restaurants, while taking a hit, are doing better than many of their high-end competitors: Primehouse had a 2% decline in sales in the last quarter of 2008 and beginning of this year, compared with the prior year; Fromagerie is down 5%, and David Burke Townhouse in New York City saw an 8% sales drop. Across Manhattan, meanwhile, fine-dining operators are reporting sales declines of around 15%, and some celebrated restaurants, including Fiamma, a highly praised Italian eatery in the same price range as Mr. Burke’s fanciest restaurants, recently closed.

Some of the impact of Mr. Burke’s discounting is measurable: The Sunday discount dinner at Townhouse in Manhattan turned a night that typically grossed $5,250 into a $12,750 night, Mr. Burke says. There are softer benefits, too, such as increased goodwill, publicity, and customers who discover the restaurants and return on full-price nights, Mr. Burke says.

Internal Breeding

Mr. Burke is somewhat insulated from the risk of besmirching his high-end image with discounts because of his unique public persona, says Ed Levine, founder of the food blog SeriousEats.com. “David Burke is the master of the culinary grand gesture, so this is perfectly in keeping with his brand,” Mr. Levine says. Mr. Burke now has “pricing gimmicks” that link up with other gimmicks he’s used over the years, Mr. Levine says. Mr. Burke, for example, bought his own breeding bull to sire the beef cattle used at Primehouse. He also lines his beef-aging cave with Himalayan rock salt, which he sells for $29.99 for a two-pound box.

Discounting, if done too often for too long by too many players, can erode pricing power in the long term, says Dennis Lombardi, executive vice president of WD Partners, a restaurant and retail consultant in Dublin, Ohio. Citing one example, “customers have been trained to expect to buy pizza at a discount,” because of all the coupons and deals, Mr. Lombardi says.

Mr. Burke says that by limiting most of his discounts to Sunday and varying the deals, he avoids such expectations.

Less Bass

With careful planning, Mr. Burke says he is able to keep food costs on his discounted menus at about 45% of the menu price, which is higher than the traditional 35% most fine-dining restaurants aim for but still enables him to earn a profit, because people tend to order more drinks when they are paying less for food. He sprinkles in luxurious ingredients, though some, such as dry-aged beef or black bass, are served in smaller portions than on the a la carte menu. He caught a break this winter when the wholesale prices he was paying for lobster fell to about $5 a pound, from a norm of $7.50, enabling him to include on the discounted menu items such as lobster carbonara and half an “angry lobster,” a spicy signature dish.

Stephen Hanson, a New York-based restaurateur who manages operations for the Chicago hotel where Primehouse is located and who helped devise the concept for the restaurant, disagrees with the discounting approach. Mr. Hanson says he fears that the customer will think, “Were you gouging me beforehand?” But Mr. Hanson, whose company, New York-based B.R. Guest Restaurants, owns 14 other restaurants in New York and Las Vegas, says he is content to let Mr. Burke, whom he calls “a marketing genius,” decide the menu pricing.

During a weeklong promotion in October at Primehouse in which Mr. Burke sold normally $12 burgers for $5, the restaurant made money, Mr. Burke says. Serving lunch to 30 to 40 people on an ordinary day yields about $8,000 per week. During the promotion, the restaurant served 300 lunches a day, Mr. Burke says, for a weekly lunch take of $30,000. While food costs were higher, because more was served, labor costs stayed almost the same, because waiters at the restaurant make most of their wages through tips and the kitchen required only two extra line cooks, who make $15 an hour, he says.

In addition to discounting, DB Global is reducing labor costs. Every week the company analyzes how many bookings have been made at each restaurant and looks at past history to determine how busy it will be. Then it pares or increases hourly staff — about 70% of all employees — accordingly. In winter, about a dozen cooks usually return to their home countries, including Mexico, India and France, for six weeks of unpaid vacation; this year, Mr. Burke encouraged them to take two or three months off. Because his three Manhattan restaurants are in close proximity, he also moves staff from less-busy to fuller restaurants and asks them to multitask. For example, the company butcher now also makes ravioli and crab cakes.

DB Global also focuses on retaining every potential customer. On a recent Tuesday, Fishtail was too full to accommodate more patrons. Mr. Burke instructed the Fishtail hostess to send patrons to nearby David Burke Townhouse, promising a free drink would be waiting. Out of 20 potential guests, 18 took the offer, Mr. Burke says.

—Ms. McLaughlin is a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Los Angeles.

Write to Katy McLaughlin at katy.mclaughlin@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page R3

By PATRICK G. LEE

Looking to attract employers’ attention, some law schools are throwing out decades of tradition by replacing textbook courses with classes that teach more practical skills.

Indiana University Maurer School of Law started teaching project management this year and also offers a course on so-called emotional intelligence. The class has no textbook and instead uses personality assessments and peer reviews to develop students’ interpersonal skills.

New York Law School hired 15 new faculty members over the past two years, many directly from the ranks of working lawyers, to teach skills in negotiation, counseling and fact investigation. The school says it normally hires one or two new faculty a year, and usually those focused on legal research.

And Washington and Lee University School of Law completely rebuilt its third-year curriculum in 2009, swapping out lectures and Socratic-style seminars for case-based simulations run by practicing lawyers.

A few elite players also are making adjustments. Harvard Law School last year launched a problem-solving class for first-year students, and Stanford Law School is considering making a full-time clinical course—which entails several 40-hour plus weeks of actual case work—a graduation requirement.

“Law firms are saying, ‘You’re sending us people who are not in a position to do anything useful for clients.’ This is a first effort to try and fix that,” says Larry Kramer, the law dean at Stanford.

The moves come amid a prolonged downturn in the legal job market. Only about one-quarter of last year’s graduating law-school classes—down from 33% in 2009—snagged positions with big law firms, according to the National Association for Law Placement, an organization that collects employment data.

In past years, a law firm could bill clients for a new lawyer’s work, even if that time were spent getting the novice up to speed. During the recession, corporate clients started limiting the number of hours a firm could charge and made it a policy not to pay for first-year associates, explains Don Liu, general counsel for Xerox Corp.

“This is a push from clients saying, ‘Why are we going to pay this kind of money? We don’t want to train the new lawyers,’” says Jennifer Queen, head of recruiting for McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP.

There are also fewer jobs to go around at a time when lawyers are in excess. In 2010, there were more than twice as many people—about 54,000—who passed the bar exam than there were legal job openings in the U.S., according to an analysis by consultants at Economic Modeling Specialists Inc.

Most law schools’ offerings cover a wide range of topics, but clinical placements—often students’ first chance for a taste of real law work—are usually optional and far fewer in number than theory-based courses.

“Medical students learn from real doctors in a real hospital during their education. In law, we’re learning from a bunch of academics who have deliberately elected not to pursue law as a profession…there’s such a disconnect,” says BeiBei Que, a 2007 graduate of the University of Illinois College of Law. Ms. Que, who runs a boutique law firm that helps tech start-ups navigate legal issues, says she had to pick up practical skills—networking, soliciting clients, forming a business plan—on her own.

Law schools have generally lagged behind other, more real-world oriented institutions like business schools in piloting practical improvements, as law professors tend to focus on scholarly work, says Bill Henderson, a professor at Maurer. And curriculum change tends to “move like a glacier,” he adds.

But many remain skeptical that new approaches to education will have a meaningful impact on the ability of lawyers to land jobs. “It could enhance the reputation of the law school…as places that will produce new lawyers who have practical skills,” says Timothy Lloyd, a partner at Hogan Lovells and chair of its recruiting committee. “As to the particular student when I’m interviewing them? It doesn’t make much of a difference.”

Other recruiters say schools that have overhauled programs need to do a better job of promoting the changes to employers in order to see an impact. Until then, law school prestige will remain a big factor, says Bruce MacEwen, a law firm consultant and blogger who tracks the legal industry.

“Firms are very obsessed with prestige,” he says. “That’s just a fact of life.”