In this study, we find that the average cash flow risk (CFR) of United States firms shows a significantly increasing trend over the past four decades or so. This does not portend well considering the significance of cash flows in maintaining a firm’s financial health and going concern status....

Growing international trade has not only positively affected the People's Republic of China's (China's) economic development, but also expanded the exportation of energy embodied in goods during their production. This energy flow out will pose risks to China's rational utilization of natural...

This paper presents a new cellular automata (CA) model which uses artificial neural networks tlsbfor both calibration and simulation. A critical issue for urban CA simulation is how to determine parameter values and define model structures. The simulation of real cities involves the use of many...

A constrained cellular automata (CA) model based on 'grey cells' for the simulation of different types of urban forms and developments is developed within a raster GIS. Remote sensing and GIS are used to supply information on environmental constraints and locations of growth centers for the...

Considerable research has been conducted on the topic of unidirectional evacuations from exits. However, few studies aim at simulating counter flow through a bottleneck with complex conflict. This paper proposes an agent-based model to investigate bidirectional flow evacuation. Pedestrian speed...

This paper examines the factors influencing the accessibility of microcredit by rural households in China. The empirical analysis utilises logistic regression, with data collected through a household survey carried out in one province in China. A total of twelve household-level factors are...

Microcredit has gained worldwide acceptance in recent years as a flexible mechanism to expand individuals' (especially the poor's) access to financial services, which is considered as an efficient way to achieve poverty reduction and other social development. A large number of empirical studies...

This study aims to evaluate the effects of elevated carbon dioxide (EC) on soybean growth in the water-deficient region of Huang-Huai-Hai Plain, China. A pot experiment involving two CO2 concentrations (ambient, 380.1±32.2μmolmol−1 and elevated, 740.6±45.4μmolmol−1) and two water levels...

In this paper, we present a meta-heuristic base on improved shuffled frog leaping algorithm (SFLA) to tackle the multi-objective problem (MOP). The SFLA is suitable to solve the single objective problem. For the multi-objective problem, one main issue is that how to evaluate the quality of two...