Urban bias has long been China’s dominant economic policy. The persistent urban bias leads to a severe rural-urban income gap and diverts physical as well as an effect of diverting the rural resource out of agricultural sector, and thus is detrimental to agricultural growth. This paper uses China’s provincial panel data from 1978 to 2007 to investigate the diverting effects of the rural-urban i...

Using two waves of panel data from the National Survey of Midlife in the United States (MIDUS), we examine the relationship between volunteer work and three dimensions of well-being: hedonic (e.g., positive mood), eudemonic (e.g., purpose in life), and social (e.g., feeling of belonging to the community). We test for the effects of volunteering measured as a binary and a continuous variable. Re...

How do individual preferences over welfare spending respond to economic hard times? In this paper we reconcile two prominent, opposing expectations: that recessions lead to a ‘hunkering down’ such that individuals become less favorable to taxation and expenditure; and that downturns, being associated with increases in risk, should lead to increased demand for government expenditure. We present ...

Based on China’s inter-provincial panel data from 1999–2009, this paper has tested the impact and extent of marketization, government governance, and legal environment of sustainable economic development by controlling physical capital, human capital and productivity, so as to find the institutional reality for the difference in China’s economic development and another explanation for it. It tu...

What is the relationship between corporate philanthropy and corporate financial performance? Some scholars argue that corporate philanthropy facilitates stakeholder cooperation and helps secure access to critical resources controlled by those stakeholders, suggesting that corporate philanthropy should be positively associated with corporate financial performance. In contrast, other scholars tak...

The paper contributes to the measurement of poverty and vulnerability in three ways. First, we propose a new approach to split total poverty into chronic and transient components. Second, we provide corrections for the statistical biases often introduced by the use of a relatively small number of periods in the estimation of the importance of risk in accounting for total poverty. Third, we appl...

This research investigates the determinants of software piracy using panel data analysis. Our dataset contains eleven countries in the Far East during the period 1995 to 2006. Our major empirical result shows a negative relationship between software piracy and the unemployment rate, per capita GDP, and the balance of trade, but a positive relationship in population and economic freedom. These r...

We investigate whether the impact of institutions depends not just on their current state but also on how they came to be. In particular, we hypothesize that while economic freedom that emerges spontaneously may be growth promoting, economic freedom that emerges as a result of costly lobbying efforts may be less fruitful. In an extreme case, costly lobbying efforts may even negate the growth-en...