The oxygen reduction reaction of the cathode in an Al-air battery plays a key role in the performance of the entire battery. Generally, Pt and its alloys are recognized as catalysts with high oxygen reduction catalytic performance, but their application is limited by the rare earth content and...

This paper utilizes a unique county-level dataset to examine technical efficiency and technology gap in China’s agriculture. We classify the counties into four regions with distinctive levels of economic development, and hence production technologies. A meta-frontier analysis is applied to the...

Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth in the mass adoption of vehicle sharing systems across the world. Among various vehicle sharing systems, electric vehicle (EV) sharing is considered as the most effective means in reducing fossil fuel consumption and alleviating urban transportation...

Empirical research on the dynamics of the US dollar price of gold has largely focused on the macroeconomic influence of developed economies and gold's role as a safe haven during times of market turmoil. However, the economies of several emerging markets now account for a substantial fraction of...

We study the dynamic relationship between movements in consumer confidence and equity prices. By conducting the level OLS tests, we have observed a strong contemporaneous relationship between consumer confidence and equity prices. A further VAR analysis justifies that one time lag S&P 500 return...

This paper analyzes the relationship between customer satisfaction and long run stock returns. An equally-weighted portfolio of 230 customer satisfaction score documented companies in American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) delivers a four factor alpha of 6.91% per year. Results are robust...

In merger and acquisition (M&A), we find strong evidence that within a 90 day window of a deal announcement date, analysts are more likely to upgrade their recommendations over the acquirer stocks in deals with cash only payment compared to deals with pure stock payment. To disentangle the means...

We consider a single-server scheduling problem given a fixed sequence of job arrivals with random no-shows and service durations. The joint probability distribution of the uncertain parameters is assumed to be ambiguous and only the support and first moments are known. We formulate a class of...

We find strong evidence that analysts tend to have downward-biased earnings estimates immediately before merger announcement dates when earning announcement date is within a 60 day window prior to merger announcement date. Compared to pure stock deals, acquirer stocks in cash-only deals tend to...