Is pension insurance a barrier to entrepreneurship? New evidence from China

This article provides evidence of the impact of pension insurance on entrepreneurship. It uses recent, nationally representative sample data from the Chinese General Social Survey (2013). We use a probit regression model to investigate whether the pension insurance converge rate affects the probability of a person becoming an entrepreneur. We find that the presence of both basic pension and business pension insurance reduce individual entrepreneurial probability. We also find that the two types of pension insurance do not appear to increase entrepreneurship among any particular subgroup, based on geo graphical regions, gender, education, social connection or marital status. Moreover, we argue that the basic pension and business pension insurance actually have a negative effect on the probability of small business entrepreneurship. Even, we have found there seems to be one important exception to this general pattern. For, most importantly, basic pension and business pension insurance have a positive effect on the probability of one particular kind of entrepreneurship: Innovation-driven entrepreneurship. Exploring possible mechanisms, we find that the important transmission channels through which pension insurance affects business creation is the lack of security and total family income

Multistage stochastic programming modeling for farmland irrigation management under uncertainty

Farmland management and irrigation scheduling are vital to a productive agricultural economy. A multistage stochastic programming model is proposed to maximize farmers’ annual profit under uncertainty. The uncertainties considered include crop prices, irrigation water availability, and precipitation. During the first stage, pre-season decisions including seed type and plant density are made, while determinations of when to irrigate and how much water to be used for each irrigation are made in the later stages. The presented case study, based on a farm in Nebraska, U.S.A., showed that a 10% profit increase could be achieved by taking the corn price and irrigation water availability uncertainties into consideration using two-stage stochastic programming. An additional 13% profit increase could be achieved by taking precipitation uncertainty into consideration using multistage stochastic programming. The stochastic model outperforms the deterministic model, especially when there are limited water supplies. These results indicate that multistage stochastic programming is a promising method for farm-scale irrigation management and can increase farm profitability