The warming climate has rapidly altered vegetation growth in drylands, and consequently, has put great pressure on sustainable livelihoods. Various datasets have been applied from local to global scale to study vegetation dynamics and there is a lack of solid comparison among multiple datasets....

The dissolved organic matter (DOM) with high mobility and reactivity plays a crucial role in soil. In this study, the characteristics and phytotoxicity of DOM released from the hydrochars prepared from different feedstocks (cow manure, corn stalk and Myriophyllum aquaticum) under three...

The incorporation of transition metal elements is an effective route to enhance the photocatalytic properties of semiconductors. Tin oxide (SnO2) has a wide band gap of 3.6 eV, which inhibits its applications as visible-light photocatalysts. In this work, niobium-modified SnO2 quantum dots...

The decades-long history of friendly relationships in both countries bore the fruits in the form of the Pakistan–China free-trade agreement (PCFTA) in 2006. This paper aims to estimate Pakistan’s bilateral trade potential with China by employing the gravity model of trade in a panel data set...

The decades-long history of friendly relationship in both countries bore the fruits in the form of Pakistan-China free-trade agreement (PCFTA) in 2006. This paper aims to estimate Pakistan's bilateral trade potential with China by employing gravity model of trade in a panel data set covering the...

We address to what extent a central bank can de-risk its balance sheet by unconventional monetary policy operations. To that end, we propose a novel risk measurement framework to empirically study the time variation in central bank portfolio credit risks associated with such operations. The...

We propose a dynamic semi-parametric framework to study time variation in tail parameters. The framework builds on the Generalized Pareto Distribution (GPD) for modeling peaks over thresholds as in Extreme Value Theory, but casts the model in a conditional framework to allow for time-variation...

We propose an empirical framework to assess joint and conditional probabilities of credit events from CDS prices observed in the market. Our model is based on a dynamic skewed-t distribution that captures many salient features of CDS data, including skewed and heavy-tailed changes in the price...