We examine the impact of Confucian philosophy on external pay gaps, and find that a Confucianist atmosphere is negatively associated with firms' external pay gaps for both executives and employees. Mechanistically, the Confucian concept of "righteousness" reduces the self-interested motivation...

Exploiting the U.S.-China trade war in 2018 as an exogenous shock, we investigate how interstate frictions affect corporate research and development (R&D) investment based on the Difference-in-Differences (DID) method. We find that firms with higher exposures to the trade war significantly...

As a potential candidate in the future energy storage system, Zinc-air batteries (ZABs) are impeded by their insufficient discharge voltages and low charge-discharge efficiencies. Building the alkaline hybrid zinc batteries (AHZBs) combining ZAB and alkaline zinc/cobalt batteries (ZCB) at the...

Carbon-coated lithium ion phosphate was synthesized from a gel precursor with ferric iron and a carbon source of organic chelating agent via a sol–gel method. The dependence of the microstructure and electrochemical performance of the synthesized LiFePO4/C on the pH value of the precursor...