Liquidity Constraints and Postharvest Selling Behavior: Evidence from China's Maize Farmers

This paper addresses the impacts of liquidity constraints on household postharvest commodity selling behavior. Using data collected from China's maize farmers, we find that households with debt, in general, sell their maize much earlier than debt‐free households, thus potentially losing inter‐temporal arbitrage opportunities. Segmenting our sample into wealthy and poor households, we find that the relationship between a liquidity constraint and postharvest sales is apparent only among poor households. Using the occurrence of an illness in children or an elderly household member as an instrument for liquidity, we control for potential endogeneity associated with liquidity. We find that poor households in which there were children or elderly people with sicknesses in previous years are more likely to sell maize early than other poor households.     

Current and potential methods for measuring emotion in tourism experiences: a review

This study provides an assessment of methods used in existing tourism research to measure emotion and discusses the potential for use of psychophysiological methods such as electro-dermal analysis, facial muscle activity, heart rate response, eye-tracking system and vascular measures. Psychophysiological measurement techniques have been reported in the marketing, advertising and media literature; however, to the best knowledge of the authors, no studies are reported in the tourism literature. Instead, studies of emotion in the tourism literature invariably employ self-report questionnaire methods which capture only tourists' high-order emotions and are subject to a variety of forms of bias. Unconscious emotional responses that can provide unbiased portrayal of individuals' initial emotional reactions when exposed to a stimulus have been largely ignored. The paper concludes that studies combining both self-report and psychophysiological measures are needed and areas for future research are discussed.     

Neglected Rural Public Health Issue： The Case of Intestinal Roundworms

Despite increasing institutional and financial support, certain public health issues are still neglected by the Chinese Government. The present paper examines the soil-transmitted helminth （STH） infection and reinfection rates by conducting a survey on 1724 children in Guizhou Province, China. Our results indicate that 37.5 percent of children had been infected with one or more of the three types of tested STH. However, only 50.4 percent of children reported having taken deworming medicine during the 18-month period before the survey. Of those who reported being dewormed, 34.6 percent tested positive for STH infections. Poverty and number of siblings are significantly and positively correlated with infection and reinfection, and parental education is significantly and negatively correlated with infection and reinfection. Given the ineffectiveness of treatment in these areas to date, for anthelminthic campaigns to actually succeed, China must pay more attention to local- level incentives to improve children＇s health.     

我国农村公共品质量的影响因素分析——以道路、饮用水和灌溉项目为例

本文利用对5省101个村的三类公共投资项目的第一手调查资料,介绍了我国农村公共投资的现状,提出了两组衡量公共投资质量的指标,并在此基础上分析了影响农村公共投资质量的因素。研究结果表明,农村直接选举有助于提高农村公共投资的质量,但是村民参与对农村公共投资的质量没有显著影响。     

The Creation and Spread of Technology and Total Factor Productivity in China's Agriculture

The overall goal of this study is to create a framework for assessing the trends of China's national and international investment in agricultural research and to measure its impact on total factor productivity. The main methodological contribution is to provide more convincing measures of crop–specific technologies from China's national research program and of those imported from the international agricultural research system. Our results find that from 1980 to 1995, China's total factor productivity for rice, wheat, and maize grew rapidly and new technology accounts for most of the productivity growth.     

Marketing reforms,market development and agricultural production in China

Chinese agricultural reforms have consisted of two transitional stages; initially decollectivization in the late 1970s followed by market liberalization in the mid 1980s. While much research has been conducted on the initial stage of increasing the incentives for farmers in collective cultivation, little quantitative evidence exists on how marketing reforms and the development of rural markets has affected agricultural production decisions. Using more accurate and disaggregated measures of the reform and market development components of liberalization than previous research, this study examined the effects of these liberalization policies on the agricultural production decisions in Shaanxi province. Procurement quota levels were found to be positively associated with the area planted to grain crops. Thus, quotas represent an effective way of increasing grain production and thereby also a means of achieving food self sufficiency which remains an important policy objective for the Chinese government. The involvement of state grain stations in free market grain trade and the expansion of rural markets has increased the area planted to the two potential cash crops, soybeans and wheat, and reduced the sown area of the Subsistence crop, corn reflecting the reduced need to plant corn as a self insurance mechanism for smoothing consumption. An increase in procurement quotas increases fertilizer use on grain crops, due to the policy of linking quotas to access to below-market priced fertilizer, but decreases the use of labor, which shifts to other more profitable enterprises. Market development has increased these off-farm employment opportunities and the earnings associated with them, thereby promoting the shift of labor out of crop production and increased the use of fertilizer which has also become more available.     

Abstract, classic, and explicit turnpikes

Portfolio turnpikes state that as the investment horizon increases, optimal portfolios for generic utilities converge to those of isoelastic utilities. This paper proves three kinds of turnpikes. In a general semimartingale setting, the abstract turnpike states that optimal final payoffs and portfolios converge under their myopic probabilities. In diffusion models with several assets and a single state variable, the classic turnpike demonstrates that optimal portfolios converge under the physical probability. In the same setting, the explicit turnpike identifies the limit of finite-horizon optimal portfolios as a long-run myopic portfolio defined in terms of the solution of an ergodic HJB equation.     

Economic integration agreements and the margins of international trade

One of the main policy sources of trade–cost changes is the formation of an economic integration agreement (EIA), which potentially affects an importing country's welfare. This paper: (i) provides the first evidence using gravity equations of both intensive and extensive (goods) margins being affected by EIAs employing a panel data set with a large number of country pairs, product categories, and EIAs from 1962 to 2000; (ii) provides the first evidence of the differential (partial) effects of various “types” of EIAs on these intensive and extensive margins of trade; and (iii) finds a novel differential “timing” of the two margins' (partial) effects with intensive-margin effects occurring sooner than extensive-margin effects, consistent with recent theoretical predictions. The results are robust to correcting for potential sample-selection, firm-heterogeneity, and reverse causality biases.     

Does retailer CSR enhance behavioral loyalty? A case for benefit segmentation

We study the effects of consumer perceptions of four types of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities on their behavioral loyalty toward retailers. The four activities are environmental friendliness, community support, selling locally produced products, and treating employees fairly. Behavioral loyalty is measured by share-of-wallet (SOW). We control for other retailer attributes that drive attitudes and SOW, and examine how the market is segmented in terms of consumer response. We partition the total effect of CSR on SOW into a direct effect and an indirect effect mediated through attitude towards the store. These effects differ by CSR activity and customer segment. The effects on attitude are positive and positive attitude enhances SOW, so the indirect effects on SOW are positive. While we generally find positive total effects, the total effect of one of the CSR activities, environmental friendliness, is significantly negative for one group of consumers. The magnitude of CSR's total impact on SOW is not only statistically significant but also managerially meaningful in an industry where every share point carries a substantial dollar amount. We characterize the customer segments and conclude with implications for how best a retailer can manage its CSR initiatives.