International cooperation and foreign investment issues are two important components of an international economy. The various aspects of research related to such international cooperation and foreign investment decisions are fraught with various complex factors. In this thesis, we consider two...

Using data from the 2009 China Health and Nutrition Survey, this study investigates China's income-health gradient by analyzing the effect of both current and long-term household income on 22 blood-based biomarkers, 4 used as individual variables and all 22 assessed as a composite. After...

We draw attention to two identification issues with previous studies that utilized tertiary education expansion to estimate the causal effect of education on fertility: (i) the mis-categorization of women past the usual college-entry age as "unexposed" to the expansion, and (ii) a possible...

In the late 1970s China launched its agricultural reforms which initiated a decade of continued economic growth and significant transformation of the Chinese society. The agricultural reforms altered the peasants' incentives, weakened community organization and lessened the central government's...

We examine the importance of the information contained in sector investment growth rates for explaining the cross section of equity returns. We propose an empirical specification that outperforms the capital asset pricing model and Cochrane's (1996) model and performs at least as well as the...

In this paper we present a simple model where asset returns are functions of multiple investment growth rates. The model is tested for its ability to price the 25 Fama-French portfolios using the Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM) methodology, as well as Fama-MacBeth cross-sectional...

This paper investigates convergence patterns among 113 market economies. Incorporating different grouping methods, both ADF (augmented Dicke-Fuller) tests and KPSS (Kwiatkowski, Phillips, Schmidt, Shin) tests are used to examine whether countries converge to the group average. The test results...