Rationale: Accurate estimation and prediction of health care costs play crucial roles in the decisions of health plans and other health care agencies on policies and resource allocation. A particularly problematic issue that underlies difficulties in filling that role is the impact of...

This study examined the risk connectedness and its asymmetric between oil, gold, and foreign exchange under the realized volatility, spillover index framework, and high-frequency data during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was found that: (1) At the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, the total...

Urban last-mile delivery providers are facing more and more challenges with the explosive development of e-commerce. The advancement of smart mobile and communication technology in recent years has stimulated the development of a new business model of city logistics, referred to as crowdsourced...

We identify a new phenomenon – “Plebeian bias” – in the crowdsourcing of creative designs. Stardom, an emphasis on established individuals, has long been observed in many offline contexts. Does this phenomenon carry over to online communities? We investigate a large-scale dataset...

This paper shows that politicians' pressure to climb the career ladder increases bank risk exposure in their region. Chinese local politicians are set growth targets in their region that are relative to each other. Growth is stimulated by debt-financed programs which are mainly financed via bank...