Carbon emissions trading is essential for reducing carbon emissions, and its role in regional carbon unlocking needs further clarification. This study uses the difference-in-differences (DID) model and synthetic control model (SCM) to evaluate the carbon unlocking effect of China’s six pilot carbon trading provinces. This study found that (1) carbon lock-in effects in China are mainly influenced by technology lock-in and fixed input lock-in; (2) each province’s overall carbon lock-in level presents a decreasing trend yearly, and the regional distribution presents characteristics of “low in the east and high in the west”; (3) carbon emissions trading pilot policies effectively promote the carbon unlocking effect in pilot regions overall, with Guangdong having the most significant unlocking effect. Conversely, Beijing, Hubei, Chongqing, and Shanghai also had different degrees of carbon unlocking. Finally, (4) an assessment of impact mechanisms indicates that technology and institutions have a significant mediating role in effectively promoting carbon unlocking under the carbon trading policy. Conversely, social behavior has an inverse effect, and fixed assets are not affected by the policy. This study demonstrates the carbon unlocking effect of carbon emissions trading and provides a quantitative reference for implementing carbon emissions trading policies and determining carbon unlocking paths.

Scientific and technological innovation and human capital savings are important ways to promote the high-quality development of China's economy. On this basis, using the panel data of 30 provinces in China from 2009 to 2017, this paper empathically tests the impact of university research activities on high-quality growth of China's economy, and explores the influence mechanism from two dimensions of talent cultivation and achievement transformation. Based on the spatial perspective, the regional heterogeneity of these influences is analyzed. This paper finds that: First, research and development activities in universities effectively boost the high-quality development of China's economy. Secend, the stimulating effect of university research and development on economic growth. On the one hand, through the talent training function of scientific research activities, it enriches the accumulation of human capital and drives the economic development; On the other hand, constrained by the predicament of scientific research achievement transformation, the stimulating effect of university scientific research activities on economic growth will be limited to a certain extent. Third, there are significant regional differences in the promoting effect of university research activities on high-quality economic development, and this difference may come from the spatial spillover effect of university research activities. This study has important enlightening significance to understand the relationship between university scientific research activities and high- quality economic development.

In the context of the continuous deepening reform of the foreign investment negative list system and the increasing pressure on financial risk prevention and resolution, it is of great significance to study the impact of the foreign investment negative list system on banking risks. This study is conducted on the basis of systematically sorting out the mechanism of the foreign negative list system affecting the risks of domestic banks. Based on the panel data of 27 provinces (cities, districts) in China from 2006 to 2016, and comprehensively adopting the synthetic control method, the difference-in-difference (DID) model, mediating effect model, and other methods, this article systematically examines the impact of the foreign negative list system on Shanghai banking risks. The study found that the implementation of the foreign investment negative list system has significantly reduced the credit risk of the Shanghai banking industry, and this reduction effect has gradually strengthened over time. Additionally, the implementation of the foreign investment negative list system will also significantly reduce the liquidity risk of the Shanghai banking industry; However, the effect of this positive influence is short-lived and subsequently weakens. The analysis of the mechanism of action indicates that the foreign investment negative list system primarily reduces the risk of Shanghai's banking industry by stimulating the inflow of foreign capital and reducing government intervention. However, the effect of improving the level of the rule of law to mitigate commercial bank risk is not apparent. Regarding other influencing factors, the growth of local government financial resources and the increase in new loans have significantly reduced banking risks, while the rise in residents' leverage has substantially increased the level of banking risks.

Background: Bladder cancer (BLCA), particularly invasive BLCA, has become a medical burden worldwide as it is associated with recurrence and easy metastasis. There are specific differences in the expression of various miRNAs in tumor and normal tissues. Hence, miRNAs can be used as biomarkers for tumor diagnosis and prognostic evaluation. The current study aimed to predict the downstream target genes of BLCA-related miRNAs and explore their association with immune infiltration. Method: Data on BLCA-related mRNA and miRNA expression levels were downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas. Correlation analysis and Cox regression analysis were performed to validate the miRNA risk model. The infiltration of various immune cells should be compared to determine the distinct differences between the immunological microenvironment of the two risk groups. Results: A predictive framework of BLCA was established using the expression levels of two miRNAs. Cox regression analysis showed that the low-risk group had a better prognosis. Then, the target genes of miRNA were predicted, and the target genes were analyzed using Gene Ontology and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes. Moreover, variations in immune cells and functions between the high- and low-risk groups were assessed. Conclusion: The prognostic features composed of two associated miRNAs (MIR-25, MIR-548AN) may help predict the overall survival of BLCA.

This paper deals with the gender gap in accessing and using financial services provided by mobile money and financial institutions. Using data from ECOWAS member countries, we applied the Fairlie decomposition method to estimate and decompose the gender gap. The results show that mobile money contributes to improving of the use of services compared to financial institutions. However, it also increases the gender gap in women's disadvantages in accessing and using these services. The difference in the level of education and income between males and females is the main factor explaining the gender gap.

Information leakage in the stock market has been widely proven. Information disclosure is sometimes uneven, and there is significant information asymmetry between ordinary investors and professional institutional investors. In this paper, Regression Discontinuity design (RDD) model is first employed to analyze the information leakage issues. Based on the daily closing stock prices of 15 capital service listed companies, we analyze the difference between the market reaction time and the disclosure time of two stamp tax policies. We found that the sample policies information may leaked to the market about two days earlier. This paper provides a new method analyzing information leakage.

Energy Performance Certificates are a key tool for achieving energy efficiency in the building sector. The existence of this type of legislation provides incentives for the energy renovation of buildings, increases energy-efficiency investments, and improves social welfare. At the same time, informational asymmetries are mitigated and energy consumption is reduced. However, the decarbonization of the building sector might influence regional energy poverty, especially because the rural energy poor are more vulnerable to energy price increases than their urban counterparts. Empirical research on rural-urban differences and the effects of Energy Performance Certificates is urgently needed, given the rising fuel prices and vulnerabilities of the energy market.

Carbon emissions trading is an important part of emission reduction policy tools, and manufacturing is the foundation of a strong country. This paper explores the impact of carbon emissions trading pilot on the high-quality development of manufacturing industry by using the double difference method. It is found that carbon emissions trading can significantly promote the high-quality development of manufacturing industry, in which the government's will of ecological environment governance, technological progress and industrial structure rationalization have significant intermediary effects. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the impact of carbon emissions trading on the high-quality development of the manufacturing industry is most significant in the western region. Accordingly, the study proposes suggestions on how to further improve China's carbon emissions trading market and realize the high-quality development of the manufacturing industry.

Because of the complexity of indirect financial intermediary services (FISIM) accounting, the traditional price index deflation method can no longer meet its accounting needs. The manual of price and volume measurement suggests that the stock deflation method and output index method should be used to calculate the volume of FISIM. Comparing the two accounting frameworks, it can be found that the key to the implementation of the stock deflation method is to set a scientific and reasonable deflation index from two aspects of service price and the service quantity, while the key of the output index method is the selection of the output index and the determination of weight. This paper compares the application cases of stock deflation method and output index method in practice, summarizes the similarities, differences, advantages and disadvantages of each case in index construction, index selection and weight determination, and further provides a reference for China FISIM volume accounting.

This paper uses the questionnaire data of the World Bank’s China Enterprise Survey 2012 to establish a Logit model to empirically study the relationship between knowledge sources and technological innovation in Chinese manufacturing enterprises. The results show that although internal and external knowledge has a positive effect on enterprise technological innovation in general, there are significant differences when taking the types of innovation, subject characteristic and the types of cooperation into consideration. From the current development stage of China's manufacturing enterprises, external knowledge sources, external enterprise knowledge subjects, and employee knowledge have a more positive effect on technological innovation, which also shows that the role of technical employees on technological innovation has a significant threshold effect, and only after a certain degree of accumulation can internal technical employees have a more significant positive effect on technological innovation.

College choice and choice of major are the most important decisions for future earnings. It is still unclear, however, what makes a greater difference—college or major—or whether a choice of college matters more for some majors, but not the others. Using cross-classified models and College Scorecard data, I show that a discipline is more consequential for future earnings than a college. The effect of STEM is substantial but is less pronounced at institutions with higher overall median earnings. The effect of college selectivity on earnings is more pronounced for non-STEM disciplines. Institutional characteristics—such as tuition, shares of graduates receiving different forms of financial aid, institutional size and location, and type of college—correlate with earnings of graduates. Racial and gender composition of an educational program correlate with expected earnings of its graduates even after control for other institutional and disciplinary characteristics. Models presented here provide a better understanding of the effect of college and major choices on future earnings.

Based on the income poverty level differences and multi-dimensional poverty perspective in China, this paper compares the performance of education poverty alleviation, employment poverty alleviation, and industry poverty alleviation. The hypothesis was tested by quantile regression and ordered probit model. The results show that: in the short term, the effect of poverty alleviation through education is not significant; however, the effect of poverty alleviation through employment and industry is significant, increasing the income of poor households to a certain extent. The effect of poverty alleviation through employment is high. In the long term, the effect of poverty alleviation through industry is good. For the deep poor households, the effect of poverty alleviation through employment is more significant in the short term. For the marginal poor, only industry poverty alleviation has a significant effect on poverty alleviation. Education poverty alleviation and industry poverty alleviation are conducive to improving multi-dimensional poverty. In the alleviation of multi-dimensional poverty, employment poverty alleviation and education poverty alleviation have a certain synergy.

Rental unaffordability is defined as spending more than 30% of a household’s gross income on rent. Post-pandemic inflation and interest rate increases have intensified rental unaffordability. This research examines rental affordability in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. It also explores the effect of renters’ “affordability knowledge” – defined as the expertise tenants have and use to make economical rental housing choices – on rent expenditure and affordability positioning and compares personal finances, economic perspectives, and demographics based on renters in affordable and unaffordable situations. The results show that nearly two-thirds of the renters studied are in unaffordable rental situations. Interestingly, affordability knowledge was found to reduce rent spent and increase affordability situations. Significant demographic differences were found between those in affordable and unaffordable rental situations, including rent spending, food spending, transportation spending, savings, perceived homeownership likelihood, and age. The research offers important insight into current rental affordability economics, recommendations for policymakers, and opportunities for real estate organizations.

Based on fully considering the actual differences in statistical indicators between Hong Kong, Macao, and the nine cities in the Pearl River Delta, this paper constructs a high-quality urban development evaluation system that is suitable for the actual development of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. The Entropy Weighted TOPSIS two-step method is used to process data and systematically investigate the changes in the high-quality development index of 11 cities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area from 2013 to 2020. The study found that the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area has thoroughly implemented the new development concept, and the level of high-quality development has continued to improve. The profound integration effect of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area has appeared, and it has promoted the high-quality development of the region in coordination. The construction of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area has strongly promoted the great practice of "one country, two systems" to achieve stability and prosperity.

The Hospital Price Transparency Final Rule aims at reducing the cost of healthcare in the United States by making information about the prices of medical services more readily available to market participants. The economic rationale is that higher price transparency should reduce the level and the dispersion of prices by disincentivizing hospitals from charging higher prices than possible. Using data on 3789 prices for three diagnostic imaging procedures and on the compliance with the rule for 86 acute care hospitals in the Greater Los Angeles area, we test the hypothesis that price levels and price dispersion are lower among hospitals that are more compliant. We do not reject this hypothesis, although we do not observe strictly decreasing relationships in all analyses. Prices are lower at hospitals with high or medium compliance than at hospitals with low compliance, but there is not a clear difference between hospitals with high and hospitals with medium compliance. Prices are less dispersed among hospitals with high compliance than among hospitals with low compliance, but the evidence for hospitals with medium compliance is less clear. We conclude that high compliance with the Hospital Price Transparency Final Rule implies lower prices and less price dispersion among hospitals.

Based on provincial panel data in China, this study is the first to investigate whether industry-university-research collaborative innovation (IURCI) can help to improve factor misallocation. It is found that IURCI can significantly improve capital misallocation and labor misallocation, and the effect has regional differences, which shows that the improvement effect is obvious in areas with factor under-allocation, such as the central and western regions, but not obvious in areas with factor over-allocation, which conforms to the rule of diminishing marginal returns. A regulatory effect model is built to explore the impact of regional heterogeneity, through which we find that after considering three external environmental conditions, including economic development level, academic research level, and marketization degree, the improvement effect of IURCI on factor misallocation undergoes significant changes. The research results show that to deepen the marketization reform of factor allocation, we can start with IURCI. The government should form a sustainable and normalized industry-university-research collaborative innovation ecological mode through pilot cases and adopt measures according to local conditions to ensure the efficient use and reasonable distribution of capital and human resources of enterprises, universities, and scientific research institutions.

Financial development and industrial structure optimization are two-wheeled engines for promoting high-quality development, but the causal identification of the two is still poorly understood. This paper addresses this research gap by comprehensively analyzing the relationship between them. Regional economic growth is a necessary condition for achieving high-quality development. Taking China as an example, this study empirically examines the role of financial development and industrial structure optimization in high-quality development using the entropy method, fixed effects, mediation effects and instrumental variable regression. The study results show that (i) financial development has actively promoted regional economic growth. (ii) The driving effect on the central and western regions is greater than that on the eastern region. (iii) There are differences in the mediating effect of industrial structure optimization and rationalization between different levels of financial development and economic growth. (iv) In addition, the mediating effect of industrial structure optimization is larger in the eastern region than in the central and western regions. (v) The mediating effect of industrial structure rationalization is not obvious in the eastern region, but has a masking effect in the central and western regions. Our findings provide new strategies for financial development and industrial structure optimization in developing countries.

A large body of research has been dedicated to the study of relationships between social or cultural capital and educational outcomes in Western countries. However, few studies have examined these associations in a Chinese context, and even fewer have examined the effects of both forms of capital on educational outcomes simultaneously within a familial context in China. This study offers a reformulation of the associations between family social capital and family cultural capital on the educational outcomes of adolescents in both rural and urban China. Using the structural equation modelling approach and the China Education Panel Survey, this study sheds some new insights – the presence of significant compositional differences in both family social capital and family cultural capital between rural and urban Chinese adolescents, and differential effects of both forms of capital on educational outcomes were found. Family social capital presented larger positive effects on the academic effort and educational aspiration of rural adolescents while having no positive effects in facilitating the academic achievement of both rural and urban adolescents. Meanwhile, family cultural capital presented larger positive effects for urban adolescents on all educational outcomes as compared to their rural counterparts.

Background: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) stands out as one of the most lethal cancers globally, given its complexity, recurrence following surgical resection, metastatic potential, and inherent heterogeneity. In recent years, researchers have systematically elucidated the significance of long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) in the initiation and progression of HCC. The introduction of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) databases has significantly enhanced the prognostic assessment of HCC. However, the association between HCC and cell senescence has been infrequently explored in the literature. Method: We downloaded liver hepatocellular carcinoma (LIHC)-related messenger RNA and lncRNA expression levels from TCGA. Correlation analysis, Cox regression, and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression analysis were employed to validate the lncRNA risk model associated with cellular aging. Comparing the infiltration of diverse immune cells enabled the identification of distinct differences in the immunological microenvironments of the two risk groups. Subsequently, we conducted a real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) experiment to confirm the accuracy of the selected lncRNAs. Results: A predictive framework for HCC was constructed based on the expression levels of five lncRNAs. Multivariate and univariate Cox regression analyses revealed that lncRNA signatures associated with senescence were independently correlated with an increased risk of HCC. Additionally, the nomogram also provides a more refined and sensitive model. Further investigation into the variations in immune cells and functions between the high-risk and low-risk groups was conducted. Subsequently, a qPCR experiment results revealed underexpression of AC068756.1, AC090578.1, AC145343.1, and LINC0022 in Huh7 and LM3 cells. In contrast, AP003392.4 did not exhibit a significant difference between Huh7 and control cells. Conclusion: The prognostic features and nomogram, consisting of five aging-related lncRNAs (AC068756.1, AC090578.1, AC145343.1, AP003392.4, and LINC00221), may be useful in predicting the overall survival of HCC.

The UK fully legalised open market share repurchases in 1981, and to our knowledge no study has investigated the business cycle’s influence on repurchase decision-making. We address this aspect and investigate the period 1985-2014. This is relevant as the business cycle factors impact the firm-specific variables such as cash flow, profitability, dividends and capital structure, and these factors traditionally influence repurchase decisions. This forms the paper’s theoretical intuition, and the empirical objectives test the business cycle’s influence on the decision to undertake a repurchase, and also its influence on repurchases values. The results find that the business cycle influences both the decision of undertaking repurchases and repurchases’ values, and this influence has aggregately remained positively associated with economic prosperity. Thus, the frequency of repurchase announcements by British firms is more probable during prosperous economic circumstances. The results also reveal that the repurchase-business cycle relationship witnessed a structural break in 1996:Q2, and the real difference following this break is the increase in the business cycle’s influence on the decision regarding repurchase values. The paper thus contributes to existing literature by directly testing the UK’s repurchase-business cycle relationship, and providing detailed empirical evidences that business cycle conditions strongly impact the repurchase decision-making.