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This paper investigates the impact of human capital, social capital, career planning behavior, protean career orientation and core self-evaluations on students' academic and life satisfaction in China, with the mediation effect of perceived employability and moderation effect of perceived labor market conditions. Data were collected by distributing online questionnaires to 1155 students in three types of universities. All the hypothesized direct paths and the mediation effects were supported. The moderation effect was partially supported. Perceived employability contributes to positive evaluations about life and academic work, and the perception of labor market condition could be enhanced to improve students' academic evaluations.

The TFT-LCD (thin-film transistor liquid crystal display) industry in Taiwan has been developed for decades. To provide better service for customers, most Taiwan companies in the supply chain have set up their warehouse in mainland China for vendor managed inventory (VMI). However, over the last decade, owing to the industry issues of product diversity strategies and short product lifecycles, it has become difficult for suppliers to control well the stock level in VMI, especially the operation of defective product returns. In order to keep high customer satisfaction, it is considered an option by forecasting possible future defectives for preparing the returning products to satisfy customers. The non-equigap grey model (NGM) used to be applied to such short-term time series data and has shown to be an effective tool. However, NGM predictions still can be improved by making more appropriate background values by determining their parameter a values. Accordingly, this paper employs the mega-trend-diffusion (MTD) technique to estimate better a values, and the model is thus called MTD-NGM(1,1). In the experiments, two data sets taken from a supplier are examined for effectiveness validation. The experimental results indicate that MTD-NGM(1,1) can generally produce better predictions than NGM(1,1). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Objectives: Individual stressors of depressive symptoms in old age are well identified, yet little is known about the neighborhood stressors of depressive symptoms. Guided by the ecological extension of the Pearlin's Stress Process Model, this study explores the rural and urban differences in neighborhood stressors of depressive symptoms among older adults in China. Research Design and Methods: Data came from two waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, a nationally representative survey. The study included 6,548 older adults ages 60 and above in 2011, with follow-up in 2013. Predictors (individual and neighborhood characteristics) were drawn from the 2011 baseline, and outcome, depressive symptoms, was extracted from the 2013 wave. Results: Multilevel modeling results showed that after controlling for depressive symptoms at the baseline, symptoms decreased in neighborhoods where physical environment and social environment were better. Among rural respondents, neighborhood stressors stemmed mainly from the physical environment, whereas among urban residents, the stressors came from the social environment. Discussion and Implications: This study demonstrated and discussed the role that neighborhoods may play in reducing depressive symptoms in later life. Community organizers and policy makers are encouraged to ameliorate community environments to improve mental health among older adults in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine why Chinese reverse merger (RM) firms have lower financial reporting quality than U.S. IPO firms. We find that the financial reporting quality of U.S. RM firms is similar to that of matched U.S. IPO firms, but Chinese RM firms exhibit lower financial reporting quality than Chinese ADR firms. We also find that Chinese RM firms exhibit lower financial reporting quality than U.S. RM firms. These results indicate that the use of the RM process is associated with poor financial reporting quality only in firms from China, where legal enforcement and investor protection are weak. In addition, we find that compared with Chinese ADR firms, Chinese RM firms have weaker bonding incentives (as measured by CEO turnover-performance sensitivity) and poorer corporate governance. These factors, in turn, contribute to the lower financial reporting quality of Chinese RM firms. Overall, our results suggest that the less scrutinized RM process allows the Chinese firms with weak bonding incentives and poor governance to gain access to U.S. capital markets, resulting in poor financial reporting quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An eye-movement study was conducted to examine whether Chinese readers immediately activate and integrate related background information during discourse comprehension. Participants were asked to read short passages, each containing a critical word that fitted well within the local context but was inconsistent or neutral with background information from the early part of the passage. This manipulation of textual consistency produced reliable effects on both first-pass reading fixations in the target region and second-pass reading times in the pre-target and target regions. These results indicate that integration processes start very rapidly in reading text in a writing system with properties that encourage delayed processing, suggesting that immediate processing is likely a universal principle in discourse comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It was not until 1987 that the relations between Taiwan and China began to thaw, opening the door for cross-strait civilian contacts. In recent years, with China's rapid economic development, ever-increasing numbers of Taiwanese citizens have been traveling to China, in spite of the fact that official cross-strait relations remain hostile, with political and even military crises often occurring. How do such factors affect Taiwanese people's willingness to travel to China? This study is intended to discuss how significant events (such as the "Special State-to-State Relation" proposition, Taiwan's presidential elections, and the SARS outbreak) and economic factors influence Taiwan's outbound tourism to China. Quarterly data used in this study cover the 41-quarter period from 2Q 1994 to 2Q 2004. A unit root test ensures that all of the estimated variables are stationary; then, a casual model is developed to estimate how economic variables and significant events influence Taiwan's outbound travels to China. Empirical results show that significant political events do not remarkably reduce the Taiwanese people's willingness to travel to China. while the SARS outbreak had a greater impact. On the other hand, income, price, and outbound travels of the previous period are significant independent variables, while variables such as exchange rate and the prices of alternative destination tours are less significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this study is to build a model to forecast the visitor arrivals to China and to examine the impact caused by the SARS incident. Seasonal ARIMA models and seasonal dummy variables are created to build tile forecast models, and we use intervention analysis to process the outliers resulting from unexpected incidents. The results reveal that the SARS incident had a considerable impact on the international visitor arrivals to China and caused the figures to drop by at least 42%. The seasonal ARIMA models are also used to forecast the visitor arrivals to China up to the end of 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigated the concepts of intelligence of two groups of Hong Kong Chinese university students. They differed in the secondary schools from which they graduated, one followed the Chinese system and the other the English system. These two groups were otherwise similar in age, academic achievement, and racial background. Subjects were asked to rate items selected from four popular intelligence tests in terms of their relevance to measuring intelligence and perceived difficulty. The relevance ratings were taken as reflections of the group's concept of intelligence. Factor analysis revealed two major factors and several minor factors underlying the relevance ratings of the two groups. The major ones were Non-verbal and Verbal reasoning skills, and the minor ones were Social, Numerical, and Retrieval skills. The Non-verbal reasoning skill was rated equally relevant by the two groups of subjects and was considered as the most relevant skill to measuring intelligence. The Verbal reasoning and Social skills were next, followed by the Numerical skill with the Retrieval skill being the least relevant. The Chinese-school group tended to rate the Verbal reasoning skill to be less relevant than did the English-school group. These findings were attributed to the mental effort involved in solving each type of task and to the differences in school instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]