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This paper draws on 'diaspora at home', a concept that encapsulates the unique dynamics between Hong Kong and mainland China, as an analytical tool to explore the cross-border experiences of 23 Hong Kong students at 11 universities in mainland China. It empirically ascertains how the made and imposed claims and identifications of these Hong Kong students resulted in inclusion and exclusion as their interactions with their mainland peers and institutions deepened. Specifically, it highlights how their 'diaspora at home' status offered exclusive access to privileged higher education opportunities, preferential treatments and opportunities for upward social mobility. Meanwhile, such a status also resulted in an overwhelming sense of political liability as they unwittingly became 'political tokens' and suspected political subjects amid the increasingly tense political atmosphere between mainland China and Hong Kong. This paper pinpoints the relevance of class and politics in understanding how diasporic groups engage with higher education.

This paper contributes to the understanding of how shifting time, space and subject positions can impact on the political habitus of border-crossing students. Employing in-depth interview data from a longitudinal project involving 31 mainland Chinese students whose higher education journeys converged in Hong Kong, it argues that it is often unintended outcomes such as the development of a political habitus that can have lasting effects on students' longer-term life trajectories. This paper's systematic exposition of these students' political habitus formation redresses Bourdieu's relative neglect of the shaping of the political habitus of 'non-professional' political agents, in contrast to his emphasis on that of the 'professionals', such as politicians. This paper also moves beyond existing literature's focus on social agents' experiences in static and unified political fields at specific times by foregrounding the experiences of these mainland Chinese students moving across conflictual political fields over time.

In 1988, a new year before the greatest urban mass protest in modern Chinese history, three major events took place in the cultural, ideological and theoretical realms. One was the broadcasting of the TV series River Elegy, the second was the controversy over the political theory of neo-authoritarianism, the third event was the so-called Shekou Storm (Shekou fengbo) that began in February 1988 and lasted more than eight months. After presenting a profile of the Shekou Storm, the author explores its origins and implications, especially for the values of Chinese youth. (DÜI-Sen)

This paper explores the impact of educational mobilities on the ethnic identity construction of minority students in China. Adopting 'temporality' as an analytical tool, this paper highlights the dynamic temporal multiplicity in ethnic identity construction by comparing longitudinal in-depth interviews of a Mongolian and a Tibetan student. This multiplicity of temporality is manifested in three aspects: temporality of ethnic othering, temporality of ethnic identity awakening, and temporality of 'worldly time' and 'ethnic time. The 'worldly time' and the 'ethnic time' entail distinctive understandings about these students' pace and priorities in life. Both students defer their 'permanent' ethnic identity to an imagined future. Yet, adopting the gaze of the dominant others, both students subconsciously constructed an essentialist view of their ethnic cultures as fixed and stable and those of the dominant cultures as alive and fluid. This paper enriches our understanding of the politics of subjectivation through the lens of 'temporality'.

Evidence based on firm-level data from 89 countries with updated country-level data on financial structure suggests that in low-income countries; labor growth is more rapid in countries with a higher level of private credit/GDP. This positive relationship with private credit is especially pronounced in industries that depend heavily on external finance. The results, which are robust to multiple estimation approaches, are consistent with the predictions of new structural economics. In high-income countries, labor growth rates increase with the level of stock market capitalization, consistent with predictions from new structural economics. However, the association disappears when stock market development is treated as an endogenous explanatory variable using instrumental variable regressions. There is no evidence that small-scale firms in low-income countries benefit the most from the development of the private credit market. Rather, the labor growth rates of larger firms increase to a greater extent than others with the level of private credit market development, a finding consistent with the perspective from historical political economy that banking systems in low-income countries serve the interests of the elite rather than providing broad-based access to financial services.

This paper examines cross-country evidence of how the Covid-19 pandemic spread and the mortality rates associated with preexisting vulnerabilities, the government's mobility restriction policy, institutions (democracy), and culture (individualistic culture and trust). Preexisting vulnerabilities (that is, the share of the elderly, urbanization, obesity prevalence, and air pollution) increase the spread of the pandemic and/or the mortality rate. On average, the government policy delay in mobility restriction, democracy, and culture indicators are not significantly associated with the pandemic outcomes. However, government delay in restricting mobility drastically amplifies the positive association between preexisting vulnerabilities and pandemic mortality. Individualistic culture and general trust amplify the positive links between pandemic mortality and the share of elderly people or urbanization. The analysis shows that in modeling the pandemic outcomes, it is important to consider cross-country spatial interactions.

Purpose: The role of energy or emission intensive firms face contradictory demands from advancing economic development and environmental improvement and protection and thus require appropriate policy interventions to balance the two needs. China's "Green Credit" policy that restricts loans to energy or emission intensive firms provides an example to study the impact of these kinds of policy intervention. Design/methodology/approach: Using the data of all A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges, our paper empirically analyzes the impact of the Green Credit Policy on performance of these energy or emission intensive firms. Findings: (1) Using difference-in-difference (DID) and propensity score matching (PSM)-DID method and the dynamic effect method, we found that from 2012 to 2015, the Green Credit Policy had an inhibiting effect on the performance of energy or emission intensive firms. This inhibiting effect was gradually weakened in 2016, and it turned into a positive promoting effect in 2017; (2) The performance's change of these firms around 2015 showed that Green Credit promoted the green transformation and upgrading of these firms; (3) Loans were helpful to the performance of energy or emission intensive firms to some extent, but government subsidies were not significant. Originality/value: The results suggest that the government, banks and other institutions should dynamically assess the implementation results of the Green Credit Policy on energy or emission intensive firms.

A void in the literature on the business environment is how it evolves over time. Focusing on China during its crucial two decades of transition (from the early 1990s to the early 2010s), this paper documents how the country's business environment and the characteristics of entrepreneurs evolved, along with the role played by local governments. Relying on multiple comprehensive data sets, the paper shows that many aspects of local business environments improved: infrastructure, development of the court system, and access to external finance. Meanwhile, the share of politically connected private firms remained large, and their advantage in accessing key resources increased. Under this dual-track private sector development, private firms became larger and more innovative and adopted more formal corporate governance mechanisms. Entrepreneurs became much better educated, with more diverse sectoral experience. Market competition increased over time, especially after China's World Trade Organization entry. The paper offers suggestive evidence that this dual track development had negative consequences, such as a lower tendency to innovate by politically connected firms.

The problem of assigning cell probabilities to maximize a multinomial likelihood with order restrictions on the probabilies and/or restrictions on the local odds ratios is modeled as a posynomial geometric program (GP), a class of nonlinear optimization problems with a well-developed duality theory and collection of algorithms. (Local odds ratios provide a measure of association between categorical random variables.) A constrained multinomial MLE example from the literature is solved, and the quality of the solution is compared with that obtained by the iterative method of El Barmi and Dykstra, which is based upon Fenchel duality. Exploiting the proximity of the GP model of MLE problems to linear programming (LP) problems, we also describe as an alternative, in the absence of special-purpose GP software, an easily implemented successive LP approximation method for solving this class of MLE problems using one of the readily available LP solvers.

Abstract The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a global economic recession but little is known about its impact on the informal economy including peer-to-peer rental market. Against this backdrop, this study assessed the financial loss of Airbnb listings and its hosts in Sydney from January to March 2020. Findings show that the pandemic resulted in 70% income loss for Airbnb hosts with hosts suffering eight times higher than the Airbnb platform itself. However, like other gig workers and freelancers, many Airbnb hosts are not qualified to claim the financial aids from the government in Australia. Our study shows the vulnerability of the sharing economy during a time of crisis. It contributes empirical evidence to the widening public debate on the sustainability and the sharing economy but most importantly, raises concerns over the sharing economy's contribution to a resilient society and economy.