l outsourcing with a return policy is quite commonly adopted in the fashion supply chain. Under the return policy, the supplier as a brand owner may focus on production, and then outsource retailing to the retailer. In the meanwhile, the retailer may receive some support money from the supplier...

Inflation as measured by the personal consumption expenditures price index is near historical low levels, below the Federal Reserve’s 2% longer-run goal. Another common inflation measure, the consumer price index, is also historically low, but remains closer to 2%. The recent gap between these...

The well-known Phillips curve suggests that future inflation depends on current and past inflation and a measure of economic slack or resource utilization. Using the unemployment gap to measure slack, a simple Phillips curve currently predicts that inflation will remain quite low through 2015....

A series of essays authored by San Francisco Fed President and CEO John C. Williams, Senior Vice President and Associate Director of Research Mary C. Daly, Research Associate Yifan Cao, and Senior Economic Education Manager Jody Hoff, argue that the answer to the questions 'Does college matter?'...

We consider service competition between two platforms, who are assumed to be farsighted, i.e., they consider the chains of reactions following their initial deviation. We first investigate the one-sided competition where the supply-side capacities of two platforms are fixed and then proceed to...

This dissertation contains three essays concerning two broad areas, namely, optimal capital structure and risky assets modeling. In the first paper, we study corporate debt values, capital structure, and the term structure of interest rates in a unified framework. We employ numerical techniques...

Sustainability is significantly important for fashion business due to consumers’ increasing awareness of environment. When a fashion company aims to promote sustainability, the main linkage is to develop a sustainable supply chain. This paper contributes to current knowledge of sustainable...

Based on the approach of flow distances, the international trade flow system is studied from the perspective of multi-layer flow network. A model of multi-layer flow network is proposed for modelling and analyzing multiple types of flows in flow systems. Then, flow distances are introduced, and...

Original polypropylene (PP) foams with radially gradient porous structures and selective filtration were developed through the supercritical CO 2 assisted extrusion foaming couple with the stretching auxiliary. Firstly, the relationship among the physical characteristics, processing technology...