Between 1995 and 2007, inflation-adjusted house prices more than doubled in some areas of the U.S. During this unprecedented boom, households spent more and reduced their saving rate. A key question is how much of the increased spending was related to rising house prices, as opposed to other...

Although long-term care is a substantial financial risk for retired households, only about 10 percent purchase insurance, with many of the remainder relying on Medicaid. Faced with rising Medicaid expenditures on long-term care, states have attempted to encourage the purchase of private...

As a modified building-integrated solar thermal system, building-integrated dual-function solar collector here proposed is able to provide passive space heating in cold winter, and water heating in warm seasons. In this study, evaluations were made on this modified collector system for the warm...

This paper studies the border effects and sensitivity of the economic output of manufacturing in Jiangsu, China, caused by meteorological and environmental factors. The meteorological data, environmental data and annual manufacturing data of Jiangsu from 1993 to 2011 are used as input for this...

This study analyzes the impact of team transformational leadership on team performance during the new product development (NPD) process and the mediating role of team climate. Data were collected from 184 NPD projects of Chinese high-tech firms. The results show that NPD team transformational...

Although product innovation is a key tool for firms competing in the marketplace, innovating firms often fail to obtain economic returns from their product innovations. This study examines the moderating effects of legal, marketing, and technological capabilities on the relationship between...

The line-cell conversion is established as a new production system towards converting traditional conveyor assembly line to a cell system, in which one (or multiple) worker carries out all of the operations of a job in a cell. Its performance improvement can be enhanced by reducing worker(s)...

In practical waste management systems, amounts of waste transported and treated are not always equal on a daily basis. To distinguish between these two kinds of amounts and reflect their random relationships effectively, an inexact joint-probabilistic left-hand-side chance-constrained...

Monthly forecasting of electric energy consumption is important for planning the generation and distribution of power utilities. However, the features of this time series are so complex that directly modeling is difficult. Three kinds of relatively simple series can be derived when a discrete...