Karst rocky desertification is one of the major ecological and environmental problems that threaten the sustainable development of southwestern China. This study focuses on a case study of the small watershed in Chenqi where karst rocky desertification is particularly severe. This paper...

Karst is widely distributed in the southwest of China, especially in Guizhou Province. The phenomenon of desertification in these areas is very serious. And soil erosion is the key link in the process of desertification. Through field monitoring, underground soil leakage is derived to the main...

In this paper, we propose a panel data semiparametric varying-coefficient model in which covariates (variables affecting the coefficients) are purely categorical. This model has two features: first, fixed effects are included to allow for correlation between individual unobserved heterogeneity...

We examine the impact of several chronic diseases on the probability of labour force participation using data from the Australian National Health Surveys. An endogenous multivariate probit model is used to account for the potential endogeneity of the incidence of chronic conditions such as...

Over the last 20 years, China's demand for and supply of livestock products has increased dramatically. Although, China's livestock production has changed, with the share of pork production declining, pork production remains the core of the country's livestock industry. China's hog industry is...

The stochastic frontier model used for continuous dependent variables is extended to accommodate output measured as a discrete ordinal outcome variable. Conditional on the inefficiency error, the assumptions of the ordered probit model are adopted for the log of output. Bayesian estimation...

The experiments of reforming the methane of coke-oven gas with steam were performed. The effects of the thermodynamic factors, such as the H2O/CH4 ratio, the conversion temperature (T) of methane and the reaction time (t), on the methane conversion rate have been investigated. The experimental...

This paper investigates the returns to scale of large banks in the US over the period 1997–2010. This investigation is performed by estimating a random coefficient stochastic distance frontier model in the spirit of Tsionas (2002) and Greene (2005, 2008). The primary advantage of this model is...

We consider Bayesian estimation of a stochastic production frontier with ordered categorical output, where the inefficiency error is assumed to follow an exponential distribution, and where output, conditional on the inefficiency error, is modelled as an ordered probit model. Gibbs sampling...