Sources of Investment Inefficiency: The Case of Fixed-Asset Investment in China

This study attempts to measure the inefficiency associated with aggregate investment in a transitional economy. The inefficiency is decomposed into allocative and production inefficiency based on standard production theory. Allocative inefficiency is measured by disequilibrium investment demand. Institutional factors are then taken into consideration as possible explanatory variables of the disequilibrium. The resulting model is applied to Chinese provincial panel data. The main findings are: Chinese investment demand is strongly receptive to expansionary fiscal policies and inter-provincial network effects; and although there are signs of increasing allocative efficiency, the tendency of over-investment remains, even with improvements in production efficiency.Over-investment, Efficiency, Disequilibrium, Soft-budget constraint

The Influence of Language Policy and Planning on Intercultural Education in China

Intercultural education, as an important aspect of English learning, is set as one of the fundamental teaching principles in Chinese schools. This paper incorporates three sociolinguistic concepts “language policy and planning”, “language ideology” and “cultural identity” into the discussion of intercultural education in China. Three practical suggestions are also proposed to facilitate intercultural education for English learners in China

A CLT for the LSS of large dimensional sample covariance matrices with diverging spikes

In this paper, we establish the central limit theorem (CLT) for linear spectral statistics (LSS) of large-dimensional sample covariance matrix when the population covariance matrices are not uniformly bounded, which is a nontrivial extension of the Bai-Silverstein theorem (BST) (2004). The latter has strongly influenced the development of high-dimensional statistics, especially in applications of random matrix theory to statistics. However, the assumption of uniform boundedness of the population covariance matrices has seriously limited the applications of the BST. The aim of this paper is to remove the barriers for the applications of the BST. The new CLT, allows spiked eigenvalues to exist, which may be bounded or tend to infinity. An important feature of our result is that the roles of either spiked eigenvalues or the bulk eigenvalues predominate in the CLT, depending on which variance is nonnegligible in the summation of the variances. The CLT for LSS is then applied to compare four linear hypothesis tests: The Wilk's likelihood ratio test, the Lawly-Hotelling trace test, the Bartlett-Nanda-Pillai trace test, and Roy's largest root test. We also derive and analyze their power function under particular alternatives.Comment: Comparing with the old manuscript, we modified the title of the paper. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2205.07280. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2205.0728

Forecasting tourism demand with an improved mixed data sampling model

Search query data reflect users’ intentions, preferences and interests. The interest in using such data to forecast tourism demand has increased in recent years. The mixed data sampling (MIDAS) method is often used in such forecasting, but is not effective when moving average (MA) dynamics are involved. To investigate the relevance of the MA components in MIDAS models to tourism demand forecasting, an improved MIDAS model that integrates MIDAS and the seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average process is proposed. Its performance is tested by forecasting monthly tourist arrivals in Hong Kong from mainland China with daily composite indices constructed from a large number of search queries using the generalised dynamic factor model. The forecasting results suggest that this new model significantly outperforms the benchmark model. In addition, comparing the forecasts and nowcasts shows that the latter generally outperform the former

The influence of customer-to-customer interactions on elderly consumers’ satisfaction and social well-being

This study highlights the valuable role the hospitality industry can play in addressing a societal problem by studying how social interactions between elderly consumers and other customers influence the satisfaction and social well-being of the former. The data were collected from 268 elderly consumers in local coffee shops in the United Kingdom using a self-administrated questionnaire. The findings reveal that elderly customers’ interactions with other customers have a direct effect both on customer satisfaction and social well-being. They also show that social interactions with other customers have both direct and indirect effects on the social well-being of elderly customers. The study provides good evidence for how commercial hospitality settings can serve as a space for social exchange that helps to alleviate social isolation