We establish a theoretical model to explain the relationship between the regional technical efficiencies and production location choice. A higher regional technical efficiency level attracts foreign direct investment (FDI) and offsets the adverse effects of a high wage rate and setup cost. Data...

This study investigates whether audit markets remain competitive in the wake of Arthur Andersen's demise and merger with Ernst & Young to create the Big Four. We conduct the study estimating audit fee models using Australian audit market data from both 2000 and 2003 to determine whether there is...

In this paper, we study Lp-error estimates for a scheme proposed by Zhao et al. (2006) for solving the backward stochastic differential equations . We prove that this scheme is of second-order convergence for solving for yt and of first-order convergence for solving for zt in Lp norm. And we...

Recently, various environmental problems have been generated with the rapid economic development in China. That’s because China currently over-emphasized economic development beyond environmental issues; therefore, now it is important to enforce optimal environmental policies in order to...

Increasing scarcity of freshwater resources and growing environmental awareness give rise to the use of reclaimed wastewater as an additional source of water supply. However, the amount of wastewater that can be reclaimed for reuse is subject to many factors, ranging from technical possibility...

This paper examines the impact of leadership transition on government expenditure, particularly the composition of the expenditure. Using the Chinese provincial-level data during the period 1992-2006, we find that the transition of provincial leaders seems to have no significant effect on...

This paper considers the mean variance portfolio management problem. We examine portfolios which contain both primary and derivative securities. The challenge in this context is due to portfolio's nonlinearities. The delta-gamma approximation is employed to overcome it. Thus, the optimization...

This paper discusses parametric analysis of bivariate failure time data, which often occur in medical studies among others. For this, as in the case of univariate failure time data, exponential and Weibull models are probably the most commonly used ones. However, it is surprising that there seem...

The continued trend of globalization and technology improvement like the internet and transportation have spawned an increasing number of complex service chains that span across local, regional and national boundaries. Service level agreement (SLA) plays a crucial role in gluing service chains...