This paper presents the first comprehensive study on the determinants of public pension fund investment risk and reports several new important findings. Unlike private pension plans, public funds undertake more risk if they are underfunded and have lower investment returns in the previous years,...

This paper investigates the determinants of public pension plan risk-taking behavior using the percentage of total plan assets invested in the equity markets and the pension asset beta as measures of investment risk. We find that government accounting standards strongly affect public fund...

Land use/coverage change (LUCC) exerts a profound influence on global carbon emission through changing structure and functions of ecosystem. Taking Nanchang City as an example, this study determined organic carbon emission of land ecosystem by ecosystem type method. In 2005, total carbon...

This book provides an analysis of the existing economic dynamics and factors contributing to entrepreneurship in China. Featuring contributions from prominent authors such as Zoltan Acs and Jian Gao, it first poses a theoretical question of whether entrepreneurship exists in China and, if so,...

Using the split share structure reform in China as a natural experiment, we study how changes in controlling shareholder incentive affect the pay-for-performance sensitivity. The reform converts the shares owned by controlling shareholders from non-tradable to tradable shares. The removal of...

This article examines the influence of national and local forces on housing prices in 20 local US real estate markets during the recent housing price run-up and decline. We use reduced-form panel data fixed-effects models with robust SEs to determine the impact of national and local effects on...

The paper considers the block sampling method for long-range dependent processes. Our theory generalizes earlier ones by Hall, Jing and Lahiri (1998) on functionals of Gaussian processes and Nordman and Lahiri (2005) on linear processes. In particular, we allow nonlinear transforms of linear...

Groundwater is an important source of freshwater throughout the world. Due to over-exploitation of groundwater over many years, a number of potential adverse hydrogeological problems have raised. To reduce such adverse effects, it is necessary to carry out strict groundwater management in...

Credit trading, or leverage trading, which includes buying on margin and selling short, plays an important role in financial markets, where agents tend to increase their leverages for increased profits. This paper presents an agent-based asset market model to study the effect of the permissive...

This paper presents a make-or-buy (M–B) model in which a firm (say Firm 1) may produce in-house, or outsource a product to the unique vendor, the monopolist in the outsourcing market. Demand for the finished product is stochastic and price-sensitive, and Firm 1's information forecast about the...