This paper studies the effect of local off-farm employment and migration on rural households’ technical efficiency of crop production using a five-year panel dataset from more than 2,000 households in five Chinese provinces. While there is not much debate about the positive contribution...

Does culture, and in particular religion, exert an independent causal effect on long-term economic growth, or do culture and religion merely reflect the latter? We explore this issue by studying the case of Protestantism in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries....

Does culture, and in particular religion, exert an independent causal effect on long-term economic growth, or do culture and religion merely reflect the latter? We explore this issue by studying the case of Protestantism in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries....

The Riegle-Neal Act in 1994 established the conditions for the removal of restrictions on interstate banking and branching in US. One of the primary motivations for enacting this act was permitting banks to diversify geographic risk. The purpose of this paper is to study the role of...

The 1994 Riegle Neal (RN) Act removed interstate banking restrictions in the US. The primary motivation was to permit geographic risk diversification (GRD). Using a factor model to measure banks' geographic risk, we show that RN expanded GRD possibilities in small states, but that few banks took...

For autoregressive moving average (ARMA) models with infinite variance innovations, quasi-likelihood-based estimators (such as Whittle estimators) suffer from complex asymptotic distributions depending on unknown tail indices. This makes statistical inference for such models difficult. In...

Predicting the wind speed at multiple time points over a time span between two and 4 h typically requires a multi-input/multi-output model. This study investigates a wind speed forecasting method based on spectral clustering (SC) and echo state networks (ESNs). A wavelet transformation was used...

Haze pollution has worsened and has received close attention by news agencies in the past two years. This type of environmental pollution might have a great effect on tourism image and the entire tourism industry of a destination. This study aimed to reveal the potential impacts of haze...