Increasing scarcity of freshwater resources and growing environmental awareness give rise to the use of reclaimed wastewater as an additional source of water supply. However, the amount of wastewater that can be reclaimed for reuse is subject to many factors, ranging from technical possibility...

This paper examines the impact of leadership transition on government expenditure, particularly the composition of the expenditure. Using the Chinese provincial-level data during the period 1992-2006, we find that the transition of provincial leaders seems to have no significant effect on...

This paper considers the mean variance portfolio management problem. We examine portfolios which contain both primary and derivative securities. The challenge in this context is due to portfolio's nonlinearities. The delta-gamma approximation is employed to overcome it. Thus, the optimization...

In this paper, we study Lp-error estimates for a scheme proposed by Zhao et al. (2006) for solving the backward stochastic differential equations . We prove that this scheme is of second-order convergence for solving for yt and of first-order convergence for solving for zt in Lp norm. And we...

While countries around the globe have increased spending on health care, economists and policy makers have raised concerns over the productivity and efficiency of health care. This article applies a stochastic frontier approach to address this issue using data from 141 countries for the period...

For strategic and competitive insights, this study measures and benchmarks the comparative operating efficiencies of insurance companies in Taiwan and mainland China. We employ the two-stage DEA with the bootstrapped truncated regression approach to examine the overall efficiency of insurance...