Climate change makes extreme droughts more frequent with heavy economic losses in China, thus this study aims to evaluate China's regional vulnerability to drought and propose proper mitigation strategies for drought-vulnerable areas. In this paper, an integrated index containing exposure,...

The article looks at the differences between “digital natives” and “digital immigrants.” Digital natives are the new generation of young people born into the digital age, while “digital immigrants” are those who learnt to use computers at some stage during their adult life. Whereas...

A novel GAHP-TSU (gravity-assisted heat-pipe thermal storage unit) is presented, in which the composite granular solid–liquid PCM (phase-change material) is piled up as the porous-medium layer. The composite PCM, which melts over a temperature range of 200–250 °C, is composed of a mixed...

In this paper, permutation flow shops with total flowtime minimization are considered. General flowtime computing (GFC) is presented to accelerate flowtime computation. A newly generated schedule is divided into an unchanged subsequence and a changed part. GFC computes total flowtime of a...

This paper aims to enhance the understanding of provincial tax performance in China, paying special attention to the recent fiscal reforms in the 1980s and in 1994. Using provincial panel data for the period 1986-2004, our analysis consists of two steps. First, a combined fixed time effects and...

China faces a water scarcity problem that is severe by international standards. Many factors, including rapid urbanization and environmental degradation etc, have been challenging the water service delivery in China. Since water scarcity and quality have impact on the poor, reforms to the water...

The emerging land-related unrest in China poses a pressing challenge on the legitimacy of the government. Through the perspective of good governance, the paper examines the role of land in government financing and its economic and political cost, as well as the erosion of government's...

Prior studies have theoretically and empirically documented that incentives to disclose information involve a trade-off between the benefits to the corporation of reducing information asymmetry and the costs of revealing proprietary information. This study investigates the interplay of managers'...

Minimax problems can be approached by reformulating them into smooth problems with constraints or by dealing with the non-smooth objective directly. We focus on verified enclosures of all globally optimal points of such problems. In smooth problems in branch and bound algorithms, interval Newton...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to empirically test information asymmetry and agency conflicts hypotheses, as to firm's choices in selling preferred stock in public and private markets. Design/methodology/approach – Using firm-level preferred stock issue data, the author uses a...