This thesis includes four empirical studies related to foreign direct investment (FDI), governance, economic growth and the environment. We firstly investigate the existence of the so called pollution haven hypothesis (PHH) in China, i.e. the impact of regional environmental regulations (ER) on...

We document that hedge funds nurture mispricing in the Chinese financial market. We exploit the relationship between hedge fund holdings and the degree of mispricing in case that hedge fund holdings of stocks are mainly for arbitrage purpose but not for hedging, and that with and without...

Unlike the prediction of a frictionless open economy model, long-term average savings and investment rates are highly correlated across countries—a puzzle first identified by Feldstein and Horioka (1980). We quantitatively investigate the impact of two types of financial frictions on this...

This paper studies the famous Feldstein and Horioka finding, which is a high correla-tion between long period averages of savings rates and investment rates across countries. We first confirm the Feldstein-Horioka finding with a more recent data set, and then show that a calibrated complete...

Drawing on a new dataset of diversification of export products, the paper makes the first attempt in the empirical literature to test the impact of product diversification on the choice of exchange-rate regimes in a sample of 72 developing countries (1974-2010). The paper finds that...

The underlying components of protection motivation theory (PMT; Rogers 1983) areexplored through choice experiment-based analysis within a random utility framework, toaccount for some of the motivational, cognitive, and affective processes that likely affectceliacs’ propensity to use a novel...

This study proposes a multi-dimension, multi-contingent "fit" perspective for examining different practices adapted by entrepreneurial firms in acquiring human resources. We posit that while environmental constraints are important considerations for adapting recruitment practices through...

Generalized likelihood ratio statistics have been proposed in Fan, Zhang and Zhang [Ann. Statist. 29 (2001) 153-193] as a generally applicable method for testing norparametic hypotheses about nonparametric functions. The likelihood ratio statistics are constructed based on the assumption that...

Likelihood ratio theory has had tremendous success in parametric inference, due to the fundamental theory of Wilks. Yet, there is no general applicable approach for nonparametric inferences based on function estimation. Maximum likelihood ratio test statistics in general may not exist in...

The empirical likelihood cannot be used directly sometimes when an infinite dimensional parameter of interest is involved. To overcome this difficulty, the sieve empirical likelihoods are introduced in this paper. Based on the sieve empirical likelihoods, a unified procedure is developed for...