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While budget structure discontinuity signals decisional shifts, it has not been studied in depth in China’s context. We identify and explain budget structure discontinuity in 31 Chinese provinces between 1996 and 2018. We identify that fiscal expenditure on economic development and on science, education, culture, and healthcare (SECH) are more discontinuous, while expenditure on public safety is more incremental. We find that because Chinese provincial leaders have strong incentives to outperform predecessors and leaders of other provinces for better promotional prospects and transfer payments. New chief leaders gather political authority as their tenure increases and utilize their authority to overcome institutional inertia to achieve political missions, causing budget discontinuity. We empirically verify our mechanism and find that leaders strive for the upper reaches in economic development and approach the national average in SECH. With our mechanism, we form a coherent logic chain among institutional arrangements, budget discontinuity, and fiscal performance.

COVID-19 has created long-lasting yet unprecedented challenges worldwide. In addition to scientific efforts, political efforts and public administration are also crucial to contain the disease. Therefore, understanding how multi-level governance systems respond to this public health crisis is vital to combat COVID-19. This study focuses on China and applies social network analysis to illustrate interactive governance between and within levels and functions of government, confirming and extending the existing Type I and Type II definition of multi-level governance theory. We characterize four interaction patterns—vertical, inter-functional, intra-functional, and hybrid—with the dominant pattern differing across governmental functions and evolving as the pandemic progressed. Empirical results reveal that financial departments of different levels of government interact through the vertical pattern. At the same time, intra-functional interaction also exists in provincial financial departments. The supervision departments typically adopt the inter-functional pattern at all levels. At the cross-level and cross-function aspects, the hybrid interaction pattern prevails in the medical function and plays a fair part in the security, welfare, and economic function. This study is one of the first to summarize the interaction patterns in a multi-level setting, providing practical implications for which pattern should be applied to which governmental levels/functions under what pandemic condition.

In this study, we used regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences methods to verify whether price effects exist in the China Securities Index (CSI 300). Results suggest that the stocks included in this index had an extra abnormal rate of return of approximately 15% compared with the control group. Furthermore, the excluded stocks had a negative abnormal return of approximately 10% before the exclusion announcement, which reversed after the announcement. However, the price effects of the excluded stocks were not significant. Overall, the results indicate that price effects in the CSI 300 are asymmetrical.

Previous studies have yielded contradictory findings on whether a natural disaster increases or decreases time preference and hence, respectively, lowers or raises saving. This paper delves into the psychological essence of time preference and proposes a theoretical path by which a disaster affects time preference through its impact on cognitive self-control. The theoretical framework is applied to analyzing the saving behavior of households impacted by the 2008 earthquake in Wenchuan, China. The analysis reveals that the effect on cognitive self-control, as manifested in variables calibrating attention and mood, differs according to severity of damage and level of income. Individuals in more severely affected counties and of lower income levels show diminished cognitive self-control consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder. Conversely, individuals in more moderately affected counties and of higher income levels show enhanced cognitive self-control consistent with the findings of post-traumatic growth reported in some studies. A further stage of the analysis shows cognitive self-control to be directly related to saving behavior. This implies that more severely affected and lower income households should exhibit decreases in saving, and vice versa, and this relationship is confirmed by direct estimation. Estimation of the relationships between the earthquake and both the cognitive self-control indicators and the saving rate makes use of propensity score matching and difference in difference techniques while estimation of the relationship between the cognitive self-control indicators and the saving rate makes use of generalized quantile regression. The finding of differing psychological reactions to the disaster resolves the controversy surrounding the direction of the effect of a disaster on saving behavior.

This paper presents a simple bargaining model in a contracting situation betweena risk-neutral principal and a risk-averse agent with limited liability. An increasein the agent's bargaining power has two effects. First, the negotiated contracts provide the agent a higher reward, which gives stronger incentive to exert effort. Second, the agent, whose marginal utility decreases with increasing income, exerts less effort, given the same reward, when the equilibrium income increases with the bargaining power. Therefore, we can show there is an inverted-U-shape relationship between agent's effort level and agent's bargaining power.

This article is the first to study a bargaining model in a moral hazard framework where the principal is risk neutral and the agent is risk averse. We show that the power of incentives increases with the agent’s bargaining power if the contracts induce a high effort. However, under reasonable assumptions about the agent’s utility function, the contracts induce a high effort less often as the agent’s bargaining power increases. As for the social welfare, we are surprised to find that a utilitarian, who cares about the sum of the two parties’ certainty equivalents, is worse off as the agent’s bargaining power increases. These results are in sharp contrast to the literature, which features risk-neutral agents protected by limited liability.

The properties of LaCl 3 :CeF 3 crystal are investigated and its hydroscopic nature has a much more decrease than that of LaCl 3 :CeCl 3 crystal. The scintillation properties of LaCl 3 :CeF 3 maintain as excellent as that of LaCl 3 :CeCl 3 . The LaCl 3 :CeF 3 crystal has a good optical transmittance without obvious optical absorption bands between 322 and 800 nm, and has the same absorption edge as the LaCl 3 :CeCl 3 crystal (about 315 nm). Its emission spectra, decay time and light yield are the same as the LaCl 3 :CeCl 3 .

LaCl 3 :5%Ce crystals with diameter of 25 mm were grown by modified non-vacuum Bridgman method. Their photo-luminescence at temperature from 80 to 500 K in steps of 50 K were measured by the single-photon counting method with FLS920 spectrofluorimeter. It was found that the total emission intensity above room temperature is little stronger than that below room temperature. And the decay times also show slight increase with temperature. Irradiation with γ-ray from 60 Co source will induce some optical absorption within 320–500 nm in the crystals, cause decrease of light yield and change the relative intensity ratio of the two emissions from 5d→ 2 F 5/2 and 5d→ 2 F 7/2 , but have no influence on the luminescence mechanism.

The LaCl 3 : Ce crystal is a very promising new scintillator. In this paper, the radiation damage effects of LaCl 3 : Ce crystal were investigated by the characterization of transmittance, light yield, luminescence, and decay time. It is found that the transmittance decreases with the increase of irradiation dose. The radiation doses not change the luminescence mechanism of the crystal, but slightly affects the relative intensity ratio of the two emission components of Ce 3 + ions. The decay time is kept before and after Co 60 γ -ray irradiation. In addition, the thermoluminescence (TL) and isothermal decay were also investigated. It is discovered that the TL curves should belong to the first order kinetic.

Pure Li 6 Gd(BO 3 ) 3 single crystals with maximum dimension up to 23 mm in diameter and 180 mm in length have been grown successfully for the first time by the modified Bridgman method in platinum crucibles in the air atmosphere. The phase was checked by X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) and the symmetry belongs to monoclinic system with P2 1 /c space group. The analysis of main compositions indicates a depletion of Gd and an excessiveness of Li or B in the tail of as-grown crystals ingots. It was found that the as-grown crystal has high optical transmittance within wavelength concerned. Photoluminescence (PL) and X-ray stimulated luminescence (XSL) of the as-grown LGBO crystals at room temperature were measured and discussed.