This paper attempts to compare the efficiencies of different political institutions (with or without checks and balances) in extracting external “cheap talk” information. We find that a political institution with checks and balances can extract more credible information (measured by the...

Abstract Under the support of the remote sensing and geographical information system (GIS) techniques, we acquire the land use data in 1990 and 2008 regarding 6 inhabited islands, namely Longxue Island, Hengmen Island, Weiyuan Island, Oi'ao Island, Hengqin Island and Gaolan Island in Pearl River...

Rice productivity and sustainability are continually threatened by abiotic stresses, particularly in the era of global climate change. In severe cases, 100% yield loss can be experienced due solely to abiotic stresses, such as drought. The situation may become worse due to climate change that...

This paper is concerned with decentralized tracking-type games for large population multi-agent systems with mean-field coupling. The individual dynamics are described by stochastic discrete-time auto-regressive models with exogenous inputs (ARX models), and coupled by terms of the unknown...

China reformed value-added tax (VAT) by removing investment from the tax base in northeastern provinces in 2004, which is a “natural experiment” of its tax system. Using difference-in-differences method, this paper for the first time investigates the impact of VAT reform on China firms’...

A single-level optimization model (i.e., a Route Flow Estimator (RFE)) has been proposed to estimate the historical air travel demand. However, the RFE may require a significant amount of additional data collection effort when applied to estimate travel demand in small or medium-sized networks....

Investigations of the existence of residential peer effects in higher education has shown mixed results. Using data from a Chinese college, we find no evidence of robust residential peer effects. Using the same data we find evidence that females respond to peer influences, whereas males do not,...

We develop an equilibrium model in a 2-country, 2-good, pure exchange economy in which investors with logarithmic utility functions have heterogeneous beliefs about exogenously given output or endowment processes. We obtain closed-form representations of real exchange rates and of stock prices....

The timing effects (timing without observability) identified by Weber, Camerer, and Knez (2004) in coordination game experiments are caused by their fixed-matching protocol. When we use a random-matching protocol the alleged timing effects completely vanish.