The sub-Saharan Africa region recorded the fastest conversion of forest land to agriculture in the past 20 years. The region also has the widest yield gap and together with Latin America and Caribbean has the largest unused arable land. However, there are wide variations across countries and...

Since the publication of the Report of the Brundtland Commission (Our Common Future) in 1987, and the consequent Earth Summit on sustainable development, global attention on natural resource scarcity and degradation has been increasing, because of climate change and rising food and energy...

In health economic evaluation studies, to value productivity loss due to absenteeism, existing methods use wages as a proxy value for marginal productivity. This study is the first to test the equality between wage and marginal productivity losses due to absenteeism separately for team workers...

A number of studies have investigated the predictability of Chinese stock returns with economic variables. Given the newly emerged dataset from the Internet, this paper investigates whether the Baidu Index can be employed to predict Chinese stock returns. The empirical results show that 1) the...

New Zealand's unrelenting current account deficits, its trade performance and high external debt level remain central to ongoing economic policy debates. However, what has been overlooked in the discussion of New Zealand's economic relations with its trading partners is the positive contribution...

We explore individual lender behaviour on Renrendai.com, a leading Chinese peer-to-peer (P2P) crowdlending platform. Using a sample of roughly 5 million investor-loan-hour observations and applying a high-dimension fixed effect estimator, we establish evidence of herding behaviour: the investors...

The informal sector has long been viewed as a locus of the disadvantaged, unskilled, and inexperienced workers in under-developed and developing economies. Workers in the informal sector, however, can learn skills and gain experience that could help them switch to better-paying jobs in the...

This paper proposes new dynamic conditional futures hedge ratios and compares their hedging performances along with those of common benchmark hedge ratios across three broad asset classes. Three of the hedge ratios are based on the upward-biased carry cost rate hedge ratio, where each is...

This paper incorporates the Baidu Index into various heterogeneous autoregressive type time series models and shows that the Baidu Index is a superior predictor of realized volatility in the SSE 50 Index. Furthermore, the predictability of the Baidu Index is found to rise as the forecasting...

With rapid growth of natural gas consumption in China, it is in urgent need of more accurate and reliable models to make a reasonable forecast. Considering the limitations of the single model and the model uncertainty, this paper presents a combinative method to forecast natural gas consumption...