In generating fast economic growth, China is also generating growing concern about its environmental record. Using 2000-2009 data, we find that, while spending on environmental infrastructure has visible positive environmental impact, city spending is strongly tilted towards transportation...

Urban ecologists have extended the bounds of this field to incorporate both the effects of human activities on ecological processes (e.g., humans as generators of disturbances), and the ways in which the structures, functions, and processes of urban ecosystems, and human alterations to them, in...

This paper surveys recent literature examining the relationship between environmental amenities and urban growth. In this survey, we focus on the role of both exogenous attributes such as climate and coastal access as well as endogenous attributes such as local air pollution and green space. A...

China's rapid economic growth has been fueled by industrialization and urbanization. Given its export focus, this industrialization was spatially concentrated in the coastal eastern cities. Over the last decade, a spatial transformation has taken place leading to a deindustrialization of the...

Large shareholders may play an important role for firm performance and policies, but identifying this empirically presents a challenge due to the endogeneity of ownership structures. We develop and test an empirical framework which allows us to separate selection from treatment effects of large...

This paper introduces new nonparametric statistical methods to evaluate zero-cost investment strategies. We focus on directional trading strategies, risk-adjusted returns, and the investor's decisions under uncertainty as the core of our analysis. By relying on classification tools with a long...

Expansion of the use of student test score data to measure teacher performance has fueled recent policy interest in using those data to measure the effects of school administrators as well. However, little research has considered the capacity of student performance data to uncover principal...

Public and private equity waves move together. Using quarterly cash-flow data for a large sample of venture capital and buyout funds from 1984-2010, we investigate the implications of this co-cyclicality for understanding private equity cash flows and performance. In the cross-section, varying...

We combine survey and administrative data for about 13,000 New Zealand firms from 2005 to 2013 to study intangible investment and firm performance. We find that firm size and moderate competition is associated with higher intangible investment, while firm age is associated with lower intangible...

We estimate price regressions for surgical procedures used to treat colon cancer, a leading cause of cancer mortality. Using a claims database for self-insured employers, we focus on transaction prices, rather than more commonly available billing data that do not reflect actual payments made....