Globalization and Inequality: Evidence from Within China

In this paper, we provide a case study of the impact of globalization on income inequality using data across Chinese regions. The literature on cross-country studies has been criticized because differences in legal systems and other institutions across countries are difficult to control for, and the inequality data across countries may not be compatible. An in-depth case study of a particular country's experience can provide a useful complement to cross-country regressions. We construct a measure of urban-rural income ratio for 100 or so Chinese cities (urban areas and adjacent rural counties) over the period 1988-1993. The central finding is that cities that experience a greater degree of openness in trade also tend to demonstrate a greater decline in urban-rural income inequality. Thus, globalization has helped to reduce, rather than increase, the urban-rural income inequality. This pattern in the data suggests that inferences based solely on China's national aggregate figures (overall openness and overall inequality) can be misleading. The negative association between openness and inequality holds up when we apply a geography-based instrumental variable approach to correct for possible endogeneity of a region's trade openness.

Multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm for multi-step electric load forecasting

As energy saving becomes more and more popular, electric load forecasting has played a more and more crucial role in power management systems in the last few years. Because of the real-time characteristic of electricity and the uncertainty change of an electric load, realizing the accuracy and stability of electric load forecasting is a challenging task. Many predecessors have obtained the expected forecasting results by various methods. Considering the stability of time series prediction, a novel combined electric load forecasting, which based on extreme learning machine (ELM), recurrent neural network (RNN), and support vector machines (SVMs), was proposed. The combined model first uses three neural networks to forecast the electric load data separately considering that the single model has inevitable disadvantages, the combined model applies the multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm (MOPSO) to optimize the parameters. In order to verify the capacity of the proposed combined model, 1-step, 2-step, and 3-step are used to forecast the electric load data of three Australian states, including New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria. The experimental results intuitively indicate that for these three datasets, the combined model outperforms all three individual models used for comparison, which demonstrates its superior capability in terms of accuracy and stability

Exotic Higgs Decay h→ϕϕ→4bh\rightarrow\phi\phi\rightarrow 4b at the LHeC

We study the exotic decay of the 125 GeV Higgs boson ($h$) into a pair of light spin-0 particles ($\phi$) which subsequently decays and results in a $4b$ final state. This decay mode is well motivated in the Next to Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (NMSSM) and extended Higgs sector models. Instead of searching at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) which are beset by large Standard Model (SM) backgrounds, we investigate this decay channel at the much cleaner Large Hadron Electron Collider (LHeC). With some simple selection cuts this channel becomes nearly free of background at this $ep$ machine, in stark contrast with the situation at the (HL-)LHC. With a parton level analysis we show that for the $\phi$ mass range $[20,60]GeV$, with $100\,fb^{-1}$ luminosity the LHeC is generally capable of constraining $C_{4b}^2\equiv\kappa_{V}^2\times\text{Br}(h\rightarrow\phi\phi)\times\text{Br}^2(\phi\rightarrow b\bar{b})$ ($\kappa_{V}$ denotes the $hVV(V=W,Z)$ coupling strength relative to the SM value) to a few percent level ($95\%$ CLs). With $1\,ab^{-1}$ luminosity $C_{4b}^2$ at a few per mille level can be probed. These sensitivities are much better than the HL-LHC performance and demonstrate the important role expected to be played by the LHeC in probing exotic Higgs decay processes, in addition to the already proposed invisible Higgs decay channel.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures. Version accepted by EPJC. Tables and figures updated after correcting a mistake in signal event generation. Results essentially unchange