Scale Effects, Technical Efficiency and Land Lease in China

Using a panel dataset from Zhejiang province in China over the period 1995-2002, we propose a two-step estimation procedure to investigate the links between land lease activity and production efficiency. We find that the output elasticity with respect to land, the scale effect and the technical efficiency are higher for farmers involved in land-lease activities. In addition, technical efficiency and land-lease activity are endogenous, and farmers with higher technical efficiency are more likely to lease more land and adopt advanced technologies to achieve higher profits, which in turn alters the technical efficiency.Land Lease, Land Use Rights, Technical Efficiency, Scale Effect, Farm Management, Land Economics/Use, Q15, P23, D50,

Rapid Isolation of Dorsal Root Ganglion Macrophages.

There are growing interests to study the molecular and cellular interactions among immune cells and sensory neurons in the dorsal root ganglia after peripheral nerve injury. Peripheral monocytic cells, including macrophages, are known to respond to a tissue injury through phagocytosis, antigen presentation, and cytokine release. Emerging evidence has implicated the contribution of dorsal root ganglia macrophages to neuropathic pain development and axonal repair in the context of nerve injury. Rapidly phenotyping (or "rapid isolation of") the response of dorsal root ganglia macrophages in the context of nerve injury is desired to identify the unknown neuroimmune factors. Here we demonstrate how our lab rapidly and effectively isolates macrophages from the dorsal root ganglia using an enzyme-free mechanical dissociation protocol. The samples are kept on ice throughout to limit cellular stress. This protocol is far less time consuming compared to the standard enzymatic protocol and has been routinely used for our Fluorescence-activated Cell Sorting analysis

Rational Expectation and Education Rewarding: The Case of Chinese Off-Farm Wage Employment

This study establishes a life-cycle model that a representative agent chooses optimal time of education to maximize his/her life earning, which implies that there may exist nonlinear relation between education and earning. Using the data of Chinese off-farm wage employment, we find that the duration of schooling years will increase by 1.7 years with 1 percent increase in rate of return to education. The empirical results also indicate that controversies about return to education might arise from model misspecification without consideration of nonlinearity and sample selection.return to schooling, life-cycle model, rational expectation, China, Labor and Human Capital, I20, J43, Q01,

An efficient approach to acoustic emission source identification based on harmonic wavelet packet and hierarchy support vector machine

A new approach for acoustic emission (AE) source type identification based on harmonic wavelet packet (HWPT) feature extraction and hierarchy support vector machine (H-SVM) classifier is proposed for solving the fatigue damage identification problem of helicopter moving component. In this approach, HWPT is employed to extract the energy feature of AE signals on different frequency bands, as well as to reduce the dimensionality of original data features. We trained the H-SVM classifier on a subset of the experimental data for known AE source type, and then tested on the remaining set of data. Also, the pressure off experiment on specimen of carbon fiber materials is investigated. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach can implement AE source type identification effectively, and achieves better performance on computational efficiency and identification accuracy than wavelet packet (WPT) feature extraction and RBF neural network classification