In this paper, we report a study of the reliability optimal design of multi-state weighted series-parallel systems. Such a system and its components are capable of assuming a whole range of levels of performance, varying from perfect functioning to complete failure. There is a component utility...

We examine the short-run dynamic relation between daily institutional trading and stock price volatility in a retail investor-dominated emerging market. We find a significantly negative relation between volatility and institutional net trading that is mainly due to the unexpected institutional...

An agent's productivity depends on his responsiveness to existing incentives ("drive"). Over the long term, this heterogeneity in drive may create significant incentives for the agent to work hard even with vanishingly small amount of existing incentives, explicit or implicit.

We study the daily trading volume volatility of 17,197 stocks in the U.S. stock markets during the period 1989--2008 and analyze the time return intervals $\tau$ between volume volatilities above a given threshold q. For different thresholds q, the probability density function P_q(\tau) scales...

What are the incentives faced by local officials in China? Without democratic institutions, there is no mechanism for local residents to exercise "voice". Given the hukou registration system, local residents have little opportunity to threaten "exit" if they are unhappy with local taxes and...

On the basis of the relative daily logarithmic returns of 88 different funds in the Chinese fund market (CFM) from June 2005 to October 2009, we construct the cross-correlation matrix of the CFM. It is shown that the logarithmic returns follow an exponential distribution, which is commonly...

Nowadays and in the coming years, increased attention is being given to the tidal current energy development all over the world. China is a country endowed with abundant tidal current energy resources. In this paper, the distribution of tidal current energy in China was presented. Policies and...

This paper uses a new data set of 12,000 firms in China to estimate the returns to research and development investment and its spillover effects, and investigates how the returns to research and development depend on firm incentives. For the firms in the sample, the results show that on average...

This article studies a principal-agent problem where the only commitment for the uninformed principal is to restrict the set of decisions she makes following a report by the informed agent. We show that an ex ante optimal equilibrium for the principal corresponds to a finite partition of the...