We develop a political economy model of trade agreements following along the line of Grossman and Helpman (1995a) yet incorporating contracting costs, uncertainty and multiple policy instruments. We show that rent-seeking efforts do not affect tariff rates as they are offset by the substitution...

Residential energy consumption (REC) is the second largest energy use category (10%) in China and urban residents account for most of the REC. Understanding the underlying drivers of variations of urban REC thus helps to identify challenges and opportunities and provide advices for future policy...

Semiconductor test scheduling problem is a variation of reentrant unrelated parallel machine problems considering multiple resource constraints, intricate {product, tester, kit, enabler assembly} eligibility constraints, sequence-dependant setup times, etc. A multi-step reinforcement learning...