The article addresses the potential role of geosciences in development of civilian nuclear power plants (NPPs). We firstly highlight the fact that the Fukushima accident of 2011 is different from previous major nuclear accidents at the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl in that the former was...

People who are unable to maintain the same standard of living as others around them experience a sense of relative deprivation that has been shown to reduce feelings of well-being. Relative deprivation reflects conditions of worsening relative poverty despite striking reductions in absolute...

The recent increase in Chinese house prices has led to concerns that China is vulnerable to asset price shocks. In this paper, we apply recently developed recursive unit root tests to spot the beginning and the end of potential speculative bubbles in Chinese house price cycles. Overall, we find...

To remain competitive in the present dynamic environment, ‘governance for agility’ has become a key solution. Past literature paid little attention to understanding how governance for agility, particularly in regard to the delivery of Information Technology (IT) implementation....

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system in companies can be implemented to Multi National Corporation (MNC), Larger Enterprise, and Small & Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). In China, 99% of all companies can be categorized as SMEs. With a decade of high-speed economy development after entering...

It has been widely documented that the poor spend a significant proportion of their income on gifts even at the expense of basic consumption. We test three competing explanations of this phenomenon--peer effect, status concern, and risk pooling--based on a census-type primary household survey in...

This paper accounts for China?s economic growth since 1980 in a uni-fied endogenous growth model in which a sequencing of physical capital accumula-tion, human capital ac-cumulation and innovation drives the rise in China?s aggre-gate income. The first stage is characterized by physical capital...

This paper derives the structure of a production function which is necessary and sufficient for generating a fixed cost. We extend the classical production function in order to allow each input to have a fixed and a variable part. We characterize and estimates both fixed and variable components...

In this paper, we propose a population-based optimization algorithm, Sequential Monte Carlo Simulated Annealing (SMC-SA), for continuous global optimization. SMC-SA incorporates the sequential Monte Carlo method to track the converging sequence of Boltzmann distributions in simulated annealing....

One of the pervasive issues in social and environmental research has been to improve the quality of socioeconomic data in developing countries. Because of the shortcoming of standard data sources, the present study examines luminosity (measures of nighttime lights) as a proxy for standard...