This paper is based on an ongoing joint work with David Sahn and Xiaobo Zhang.

Technology and innovation play an increasingly important role in the economic development of both developed and developing countries. We investigate how policy and market factors influence firms’ (or other potential innovators’) decisions on innovation or imitation by developing a conceptual...

This paper presents preliminary results on the possible demand for weather insurance in China. Results from 1,564 farm households from Western and Central China between October 2007 and October 2008 suggest that the greater risk for farmers is drought followed by excessive rain. Heat is less...

A regime-switching model for analysis of market integration has been developed that incorporates rate of trade information. An application of the methods to United States–China soybean trade demonstrates that the extended trade information allows better interpretation of market conditions....

We investigate the relationship between changes in socioeconomic factors and the emerging coexistence of under and overweight among adults in China during 1991-2000. Our key questions are: (1) whether any socioeconomic factor explains both increasing overweight (Body Mass Index (BMI)less than or...

Traditional economic theory posits that a well functioning capital market is a necessary condition for industrialization and economic growth. However, in reality it is observed that micro and small enterprises are ubiquitous because entrepreneurs can set up business in low-return activities with...

Rural Development

Modeling crop yield distributions has been an important topic in agricultural production and risk analysis, and nonparametric methods have gained attention for their flexibility in describing the shapes of yield density functions. In this article, we apply a nonparametric method to model joint...

Credit markets are an essential economic institution. In developing countries, particularly in countries undergoing rapid social and economic transition, it is important to identify emerging credit demandand institute credit supply in a timely manner to facilitate economic transformation. This...

We study the factors influencing the sugar imports in China. A multivariate linear regression model for quantitative analysis in established and the model is researched with multicollinearity treatment, autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity test. Research result shows that the per capita income...