Bioethanol is an essential energy source and is produced from agricultural feedstocks. However, raw bioethanol contains much water and methanol, and the traditional distillation approach has hardly removed it. Adsorptive separation of ethanol from water and methanol by adsorbents is an...

This paper first identifies an interesting pattern in farm household livestock production in many developing countries: an inverted-U shape relationship between household livestock production and the levels of economic development (or farm household income). Using backyard hog production as a...

In this paper we find that real grain prices in China have displayed increased volatility in the past decade. This is true for rice, wheat, corn, and for most of provinces. Farmers in China are found to be risk averse because when they make acreage allocation decisions. Given the widespread...

To investigate the competitive dynamics of dominant-fringe firm competition, this paper considers a new analytical theory of production and competition, which incorporates the relationships amongst fixed costs, variable costs, market uncertainty and product value. In particular, we examine the...

We investigate the link between distress and idiosyncratic volatility. Specifically, we examine the twin puzzles of anomalously low returns for high idiosyncratic volatility stocks and high distress risk stocks, documented by Ang et al. (2006) and Campbell et al. (2008), respectively. We...

This paper develops and tests a model that explains entry into serial entrepreneurship and the performance of serial entrepreneurs as the result of selection on innate ability. The model supposes that agents establish businesses with imperfect information about their entrepreneurial ability and...

Recent evidence has shown that entrants into self-employment are disproportionately drawn from the tails of the earnings and ability distributions. This observation is explained by a multi-task model of occupational choice in which frictions in the labor market induces mismatches between firms...

Most existing models of employee spinoffs assume they are driven by a desire to implement new ideas. However, history is replete with examples of spinoffs that were launched to continue with old ideas that their parents were in the process of abandoning. We develop a model of technology choice...

I revisit the question of whether entrepreneurs face liquidity constraints in business formation. The principle challenge is that wealth is correlated with unobserved ability, and adequate instruments are often difficult to identify. This paper uses the son’s birth order as an instrument for...

Languages and cultures are mediums of transmitting information. Their value rests on their ability to lower variable costs in communication. Lower variable cost systems in general entail higher fixed costs. Each culture or language has evolved to adapt to the local environment. As environment...