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.

Poland has experienced a very sharp rise in income and wealth inequality after the economic transition. We measure the relative persistence of income inequality and intra-generational income mobility in Poland during the period 2008-2015. Our research is based on the panel survey data, our subsample includes 501 households. To measure the persistence of income inequality we calculate Shorrocks’s R coefficient. We find that if inequality is measured by the Gini index the relative persistence of income inequality in Poland is similar to Western Europe. In the case of the Theil index and the Mean Log Deviation (MLD), the relative persistence is higher than in a majority of Western Europe countries and similar to the United Kingdom or the United States. The income distribution in Poland is rather stable. Income mobility is lowest at the bottom and at the top of the income distribution. In the middle (3rd) quintile upward mobility is higher than downward mobility. The short-term income mobility in Poland has not changed during and after the Great Financial Crisis and is still medium in comparison with the rest of Europe.

This paper uses China Household Income Project rural household survey data spanning 30 years (1988-2018) to study the impact of China’s industrialization on rural household income. In the semiparametric regression model, we use the rural households’ distance to the manufacturing hub to analyze the spillover effect of industrialization on their income and the spatial attenuation. The results show that the income gap between rural households in Guangdong and other provinces increased from 1988 to 2002, but continuously decreased from 2002 to 2018; the rural households’ distance to the Pearl River Delta or the Yangtze River Delta, the two international manufacturing hubs, has a significant impact on their income, which has been increasing from 1988 to 1995, but has been decreasing since the new century. On the contrary, the influence of the rural households’ distance to the provincial capital on their income has been increasing since the new century.

Achieving food security through improved agricultural technology is one of the greatest challenges of our time. Indeed, it is one of the elements explicitly mentioned in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). One factor that can lead to improved production and distribution systems is the availability of data of all kinds on the sector. In this paper we study what is happening in this respect in two Mediterranean olive oil producing countries, and show how available data can facilitate the coordination and communication of technical developments and improve the competitiveness of producers.

Calculating the amount of regulatory capital to cover unexpected losses due to operational events in the upcoming year has caused problems because of difficulties in fitting probability distributions to data. It is consequently difficult to judge an appropriate level of capital that reflects the risk profile of a financial institution. We provide theoretical and empirical analyses to link the calculated capital to the sum of losses using appropriate statistical approximations. We conclude that, in order to reasonably reflect the associated risk, the capital should be approximately half the sum of losses, with a wide bound for the ratio of capital to sum.

Based on China's 30 provincial panel data from 2006 to 2018, this paper uses the spatial Durbin model to empirically study the influence path and transmission mechanism of financial development on regional technological innovation, and introduce digital finance environment, marketization degree, and government environmental management as an adjustment variable to verify its regulating effect on financial development and regional technological innovation. The study found that the overall promotion of digital finance to local technological innovation is not significant. Besides, the characteristics of ownership discrimination and weak risk appetite in the bank's medium and long-term credit market have led to its failure to promote regional technological innovation. In contrast, the stock market and bond market in direct financing channels have enhanced local innovation capabilities. When the external environmental system is used as the adjustment variable, the results show that an excellent digital finance development, marketization degree, and government environmental management can effectively and positively regulate the effect of financial development and technological innovation.

With the development of information technology and its application in environmental governance, the role of the internet in improving energy efficiency and reducing energy-saving potential (ESP) has attracted more attention. In this study, the slack-based model (SBM) and the unexpected model, along with the entropy method, were applied to measure China's energy-saving potential and internet development. Further, we empirically analyzed the direct effect, mediating effect, threshold effect, and regional heterogeneity of the internet on ESP. Our conclusion shows that there is a significant spatial correlation between internet penetration and ESP. Internet penetration has become an important tool for reducing ESP, but this effect shows regional heterogeneity. Human capital accumulation, financial development, and industrial upgrading are important influencing mechanisms, but indirect effects are weaker than direct effects. The impact of internet penetration on ESP is non-linear, and for improving human capital accumulation, financial development, and industrial upgrading, the role of internet popularization in energy conservation is more obvious.

Under the background of digital economy, global tax governance has become one of the important topics in today's world development and change. In recent years, new challenges, such as tax base erosion and profit transfer, and the imbalance of cross-border tax source division, have become prominent, forcing the reform of international tax rules and the reshaping of international tax order. Based on this, the article first deeply digs into the scale and cross-border characteristics of the spatial-temporal aggregation of the digital economy, and comprehensively evaluates its impact on the global tax governance pattern. After that, the article combs out the realistic picture and challenges of the current digital tax reform from the aspects of theoretical basis, basic principles and governance mechanism. Finally, based on China's basic national conditions, the article puts forward some institutional ideas and policy suggestions, with a view to improving China's participation, voice and influence in global tax governance, and also enabling governments, enterprises and residents of various countries to enjoy the fruits of world economic development fairly and promote the construction of Community of Shared Future for Mankind.

The issue of food security has become a global challenge, and it is therefore crucial to seek measures to ensure food security. As an emerging economic model, the digital economy is regarded as the most effective tool for the modernization of agricultural development. As a large food-producing country, China faces serious problems of agricultural non-point source pollution and food loss and waste. The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of digital village construction on food security. We measure the level of digital village construction and food security by entropy method and use the spatial Durbin model to analyze them. In this paper, we found that digital village construction facilitates food security not only in the region but also in neighboring regions. In addition, we found that the promotion effect is significant in main grain producing regions, while the opposite result is found in non-main grain producing regions. We hold that the application of the digital economy in the countryside has played an obvious role in promoting food security in main grain producing provinces, and provides important experimental evidence for reference to ensure food security in the future.

Gravity Energy Storage (GES) systems are recently being considered as a viable solution for storing intermittent renewable energy power, specifically in high curtailment zones. While a few studies have analyzed the material costs of GES systems, there is a paucity of literature on analyzing the socioeconomic costs of GES systems. This study analyzes the location-dependent costs of GES plants using a multi-factor spatial parameterization model for evaluating the existence of a point of minimum cost in a suburban mountainous geography. A case study of 500x500 points in a 50x50km2 area in the suburban area of Fukuoka city in Japan is performed. It is found that the cost of material transportation and transmission is more dominant in determining the position of an optimal cost location than factors of excavation and land costs. The position of the minima is also related to the principal urban area in that the line connecting the Center Business District (CBD) and suburban flat areas (line 1) is where the potential minima lie. The intersection point of an orthogonal to the line connecting the CBD with a substation nearest to the flat area with line 1, is the potential zone of minima location. The findings of this study are critical for urban energy planners and reveals how socioeconomic cost factors can aid in geolocation a suitable GES installation site.

Economic globalization has intensified economic volatility around the world, and the importance of economic resilience has become increasingly prominent in the face of rising uncertainty due to frequent domestic and foreign shocks. Based on provincial panel data in China from 2008-2019, a comprehensive indicator system is constructed to measure regional economic resilience (RER), and the impact of financial driver (FD) on RER is explored from staged, pathway and non-linear perspectives. The main findings are as follows. (1) Both national and regional levels of FD and RER show an upward trend, and the impact of FD on RER has an “inverted-U” shape: as the capacity of FD increases, its impact on regional economic resilience shifts from promoting to inhibiting. The RER has significant spatial agglomeration characteristic. (2) Interestingly, staged analysis shows FD can significantly promote RER only when it is in the “recovery stage”. (3) The pathway analysis of its effect on regional economic resilience shows the following characteristics: financial scale > financial efficiency > financial deepening. (4) From different regions, there are significant differences in the effect of FD on the promotion of regional economic resilience: central region > western region > eastern region. Finally, the corresponding suggestions were provided.

Current societal challenges related to retirement planning, healthcare systems’ evolution and environmental changes require households to pay a closer attention to their personal finances. This in turns calls for the associated industry to transform and scale. To do so, the personal finance industry could potentially leverage artificial intelligence tools for which there has been increasing levels of chatter. However, there is, to my knowledge, little consensus on whether or not those tools are appropriate given the challenges ahead. The literature review at the heart of this article first suggests that the stream of personal finance where transformation is more than needed is the one pertaining to investments, rather than the ones associated to loans, insurances or payments. Second, the productivity levers fueling the transformation of this branch are yet more driven, as of today, by simple digitalization notions rather by the usage of A.I. instruments. Over the next couple of years, more attention should thus be paid to use/business cases associated to investment products and the digitalization of their distribution chain.

The construction and optimization of a portfolio is a complex process that has been a historically active research area in finance. For portfolios with highly correlated assets, the performance of traditional risk-based asset allocations methods such as the mean-variance (MV) model is limited when numerous assets are correlated. A novel clustering-based asset allocation method, called Hierarchical Risk Parity (HRP), provides an opportunity to mitigate these limitations in portfolio construction. HRP utilizes the hierarchical relationships between the covariance of assets in a portfolio to determine weight distributions, eliminating the need for the inversion of the covariance matrix that is required by most traditional risk-based asset allocation methods. This research examines the viability of Hierarchical Risk Parity (HRP) method in portfolio construction of a US equity portfolio and compares the performances of HRP to traditional asset allocation methods exemplified by the mean-variance (MV) method. The results of this research show that the performance of the HRP method is comparable to the performance of the MV method. Given these findings, HRP provides an advantageous approach for portfolio construction in practical scenarios where correlated assets are present in the portfolios.

The extensive, interdisciplinary nature of construction supply chains make them prone to inefficiencies at organisational interfaces. Inefficiencies are accentuated by the project-centric delivery paradigm, and complex logistics systems between multiple stakeholders. They manifest as a multitude of concurrent activities, processes, and systems both on and off-site. Transportation is the largest component of the logistics domain. Transport operations are inherently fragmented, intrinsic to every business, while vehicle ownership and deployment is typically externalised. Differentiated waste removal and materials delivery further disintegrate the already fragmented construction supply chain. Inefficiencies from the insularity of the planning process across segmental boundaries aggregate incrementally, with impacts visible at the macro level. Re-configuration of activities, resources and actors are acknowledged strategies for optimising logistics and transportation function. This paper investigates the impact of three integration strategies on a manufactured construction products supply chain efficiency. These strategies include vertical integration of distribution, integrated planning for transport operations, and integration of reverse logistics into operations. Sustainability impacts are evaluated according to domestically determined monetary parameters in order to benchmark performance at the business and national scale.

Competitive balance indicates the degree of control participating teams have over a sports competition. Supporters look for excuses to justify their team’s defeat and the triumph of their rivals. If the competition has required a preliminary qualifying group stage, they will argue that the winning team was in an "easy group" from the start, and their team was unlucky to be in a "difficult group". It is therefore of interest to determine what is an "easy group" and what is a "difficult group". This is directly related to the concept of competitive balance. We have a wide range of indices to measure competitive balance. We will use the Distance to Competitive Balance, a standardized index that complies cardinality property. The perfectly unbalanced distribution is the truncated cascade, which allows the maximum value of concentration to be obtained. We focus our attention on the UEFA Champions League, before and after competition, and we measure the competitive balance of the qualifying stage groups between the 1999/2000 and 2022/2023 seasons. The composition of the UEFA Champions League groups seems to be balanced and has no influence on which team will be the champion. A highly competitive group will be more "difficult" in terms of qualifying than a highly concentrated one. Supporters say that their team was unlucky to be in a “difficult” group, but the data does not prove them right.

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.

This paper examines impacts of China’s financial liberalization policy on income inequality, through three channels: financial scale, financial structure and financial efficiency, an empirical analysis based on panel data of 30 provinces in China from 1996 to 2013 is conducted. The results confirm the Kuznets effect between financial scale, financial structure and income inequality. As the size of the financial sector expands, the financial structure is tilted toward direct financing, and the income gap among residents will experience a "reverse U-shaped" trend that rises first and then falls. Most of China has not yet passed the turning point, and is still in the upper bound of the "inverted U-shaped" curve. Financial liberalization policies will continue to exacerbate income inequality. The impact of financial efficiency on income distribution is quite different in different regions of China. After dividing the whole China into three regions according to the degree of economic development, it is found that the financial efficiency of the eastern and western regions has a Kuznets effect on the income gap, but compared with the eastern region, more provinces and cities in the western region have entered the stage of reducing the income inequality, and the financial development has a great impact on the western region. The effects of financial development on central China are weak, and income inequality increases with financial efficiency.

Liquidity and its associated issues are one of dominant strands in the market microstructure. In this study, microblogging-based behavioral perspective on economic unrest is linked to the market liquidity. The concept of liquidity is examined in terms of price dispersion relative to the quantity traded. The analysis contains the quantification of multiple linear regression, Gaussian distribution technique, and vector error correction methodology. In the economic stability period, the investor’s mood, either in positive manner or pessimistic context, had an influential role on the price impact volume-based liquidity. Meantime, the probability was higher for occurrence of price impact volume-based liquidity in response to the sentiment indicators. In the economic unrest environments, the positive bias investor’s mood was not vigorous enough to influence the dispersion of asset’s prices and trading quantity. Most importantly, the negative bias investor’s emotion was linked to increase the dispersion of asset’s prices relative to the quantity traded. Investors with a lower amount of trading quantity had declined the liquidity in the market. Additionally, there was a higher probability for occurrence of illiquidity in the pessimistic market periods. However, changes in past sentiment series were not associated with changes in pervious liquidity series, either in short run or long run. The findings may be potentially applicable to manage the behavioral perspective of liquidity risk.

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.

The requirement of having multiple nanocarriers (NCs) and active agents for improved therapy, imaging, and controlled release of medications efficiently in one platform has made the creation of therapeutics and theragnostic nanodrug delivery systems a difficult task for present researchers. Multiple drug resistance (MDR), a high clearance rate, severe side effects, undesirable drug distribution to the specific site of liver cancer, and a low concentration of medication that reaches liver cancer cells are just a few of the drawbacks of traditional liver cancer chemotherapy. As a result, new techniques and NCs must be developed to transport the medication molecules targeted to the malignant hepatocytes in an acceptable number and duration inside the therapeutic window. Because of the great efficacy of drug loading or drug encapsulation efficiency, high cellular uptake, high drug release, and minimal adverse effects, therapeutics and theragnostic systems have benefits over conventional chemotherapy. These NCs have a high drug accumulation rate in tumours while causing minimal toxicity in healthy tissues. This study focuses on current research on NC-based therapies and theragnostic drug delivery systems, omitting nanotechnology's negative consequences in the field of drug delivery systems. Clinical advancements of theragnostic NCs for liver cancer, on the other hand, are not covered in this article. Only the most current breakthroughs in NC-based drug delivery systems for liver cancer therapy and diagnosis are discussed in this study. This review will not go over the detrimental effects of individual NCs in the medication delivery system.