Using the 1997-1998 New South Wales public-hospitals comparison data, we investigate the hospital-level inefficiency by applying a stochastic-frontier multiproduct cost function. We use a flexible translog cost function to reduce the measurement errors of the outputs of the hospital. The main...

Power cable engineering is a critical method for urban power supply, and ductbank laying of cables is a way of underground cable lines. Considering the cost and construction, MPP pipes with poor heat dissipation performance are often used in ductbank. Many cables are arranged densely in the...

The study is to present an integrative model of predictors and outcome of customer satisfaction in the fast food sector of Pakistan and also examine its effects. Moreover, we also examined the contingent effect of social trust and corporate social responsibility (CSR) on the relationship between...

Background: Health care systems in many countries are characterized by limited availability of provider performance data that can be used to design and implement welfare improving reforms in the health sector. We question whether a simple mystery shopper scheme can be an effective measure to...

This paper examines the impact of product market competition and corporate governance on the cost of debt financing and the use of bond covenants. We find that more antitakeover provisions are associated with a lower cost of debt only in competitive industries. Because they are exposed to higher...

With rapid growth of natural gas consumption in China, it is in urgent need of more accurate and reliable models to make a reasonable forecast. Considering the limitations of the single model and the model uncertainty, this paper presents a combinative method to forecast natural gas consumption...

Background: Entrepreneur was the key factor of venture capital-backed star-ups, and control rights serve as an important incentive to attract entrepreneurs' human capital investment.Objective: In this article, we investigate the ways in which the specificity and exclusiveness of entrepreneurs'...

Whether the US Farm Bill 2008 has any impacts on China's agriculture, is highly related to the China's rural poverty alleviation and it deserves to be explored to see what will happen. According the existing empirical studies in the past, we expect that the US Farm Bill 2008 will exert an...

We build a dynamic capital structure model to study the link between systematic risk exposure and debt maturity, as well as their joint impact on the term structure of credit spreads. Our model allows for time variation and lumpiness in the maturity structure. Relative to short-term debt,...

The overall goal of this paper is to analyse the political economy of food price policies in China during the global food crisis. The results show that given China's unique economic and political context and the nature of its agricultural markets, the government's reaction to the crisis was...