Coastal roads are lifelines for bringing emergency personnel and equipment into affected areas after tsunamis, thus careful thought should be given to how to make roadways safer from tsunamis. Scouring at roadways is the primary damage caused by tsunamis; however, tsunami-induced scouring and...

How the duration of housing allowance spells varies with the generosity of the housing allowance system carries important policy implications. In 1997, the Swedish housing allowance system implemented a drastic reform which substantially affected claimants who were couples with children in terms...

Jie Chen and Bruce J. Dickson draw on extensive fieldwork as they explore the extent to which China’s private sector supports democracy, surveying more than 2,000 entrepreneurs in five coastal provinces with over 70 percent of China’s private enterprises. The authors examine who the private...

We argue that financial frictions and financial shocks can be an important factor behind the slow recoveries from the three most recent recessions. To illustrate this point, we augment a simple RBC model with a collateral constraint whose tightness is randomly disturbed by a shock that...

The resolution of General Circulation Models (GCMs) is too coarse for climate change impact studies at the catchment or site-specific scales. To overcome this problem, both dynamical and statistical downscaling methods have been developed. Each downscaling method has its advantages and...

After three decades of housing reform, Chinese government embarked on a large-scale expansion of public housing provision over the last few years. This very ambitious plan of public housing construction aims at reducing the negative impacts from global economic slowdown since 2008; at the same time,...

We present an RBC model with a collateral constraint whose tightness is randomly disturbed by a financial shock and evidence that such shock has become more persistent since 1980s. We show that this can be an important contributor to the recent slow recoveries, and a key mechanism may have to do...

We argue that financial frictions and financial shocks can be an important factor behind the slow recoveries from the three most recent recessions. To illustrate this point, we augment a simple RBC model with a collateral constraint whose tightness is randomly disturbed by a shock that...

Discrete scan statistics are used for testing the null hypothesis that the observations are identically distributed against a clustering alternative that specifies an increased incidence of observations in a connected subregion of the circle. To implement the testing procedures based on the scan...

Studies of Western settings, in general, argue that social capital, defined as a set of civic norms and social networks among ordinary citizens, nurtures democratic governance at various levels. Does such a social capital exist in a transitional society such as China? If so, what kind of role...