China first adopted minimum energy performance standards (MEPS) in 1989. Today, there are standards for a wide range of domestic, commercial and selected industrial equipment. In 1999, China launched a voluntary endorsement label, which has grown to cover over 40 products including water-saving...

My dissertation has three chapters in econometrics. The first chapter, coauthored with Kenneth A. Couch, contains a proof that under one testable condition a measure of economic mobility formed by the ratio of permanent to total variance employing the methods of Gottschalk and Moffitt (1994) is...

In the last five years, China's refrigerator market has grown rapidly, and now urban markets are showing signs of saturation, with ownership rates in urban households reaching 92%. Rural markets continue to grow from a much lower base. As a result of this growth, the Chinese government in 2006...

The time when energy-related carbon emissions come overwhelmingly from developed countries is coming to a close. China has already overtaken the United States as the world's leading emitter of greenhouse gas emissions. The economic growth that China has experienced is not expected to slow down...

This dissertation investigates how institutional environments and firm resources influence firm scope. Building on strategy and international business literatures, I propose that institutional environments influence firm scope through the impacts on both the development of internal resources and...

This dissertation investigates how institutional environments and firm resources influence firm scope. Building on strategy and international business literatures, I propose that institutional environments influence firm scope through the impacts on both the development of internal resources and...

Using 1987, 1996, and 2004 data, we show that the gender pay gap in the Chinese urban labor market has increased across the wage distribution, and the increase was greater at the lower quantiles. We interpret this as evidence of the “sticky floor” effect.We use the reweighting and recentered...

Using the nationwide household data, this study examines the changes in the Chinese urban income distributions from 1987 to 1996 and from 1996 to 2004, and investigates the causes of these changes. The Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method is applied to decomposing the mean earnings increases, and...

In contrast to the United States and European countries, China has witnessed a widening gender pay gap in the past two decades. Nevertheless, the size of the gender pay gap could still be underestimated as a result of not accounting for the low-wage women who have dropped out of the labor force....

The additive model overcomes the "curse of dimensionality" in general nonparametric regression problems, in the sense that it achieves the optimal rate of convergence for a one-dimensional smoother. Meanwhile, compared to the classical linear regression model, it is more flexible in defining an...