To better understand the influence of Tamarix spp. (tamarisk shrubs) on soil fertility and salinity and the implication for saline soil management in northwestern China, several soil physical and chemical characteristics were measured beneath tamarisk canopies from the upper, middle, and lower...

Recent work on the networks has focused on the weighted hierarchical networks that are significantly different from the un-weighted hierarchical networks. In this paper we study a family of weighted hierarchical networks which are recursively defined from an initial uncompleted graph, in which...

The Las Vegas Valley metropolitan area is one of the fastest growing areas in the southwestern United States. The rapid urbanization has presented many environmental challenges. For instance, as population growth and urbanization continue, the supply of sufficient clean water will become a...

This paper investigates the degree of bank competition in the euro area, the U.S. and U.K. before and after the recent financial crisis, and revisits the issue whether the introduction of EMU and the euro have had any impact on bank competition. The results suggest that the level of bank...

This paper investigates the rapid growth of China's share in the international commodity market and the structural changes of China's commodity exports. It demonstrates a significant improvement of international competitiveness in China's manufacturing sector. The panel data analysis, based on a...

The paper reviews soybean production and its demand change in China. It proposes that the improvement in technical efficiency of soybean production is indispensable for the increase of soybean output and, in turn, to satisfy the domestic demand for soybean. The paper investigates the technical...

Demand Response (DR) is one of the typical methods for optimizing load characteristics in power systems. Utilities offer DR schemes to generate incentives toward consumers’ power consumption behavior for load optimization. In tariff planning, power consumption variation is an important issue...

The paper proposes a model to investigate the influences of agglomeration on heterogeneous firms' exporting behaviors. Competition and thus selection effect caused by agglomeration forces less productive firms to exit the market while agglomeration externalities increase firms' productivity and...