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The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the determinants of foreign and domestic tourist arrivals and revenue receipts from tourism using state-level panel data in 25 Indian states for the period 1995 to 2011.

The study uses IV-2SLS method to examine the determinants of foreign and domestic tourist arrivals in Indian states. Economic development (proxied by per capita income, PCI) is an endogenous variable. We have used the state-wise “liable to flood prone area” as an instrument for PCI to control for endogeneity. An inverse relationship exists between state-wise “liable to flood prone area” and real PCI, in a sense that states with greater proportion of area marked as liable to flood experience lower economic development. For robust analysis, the study has also used IV-Tobit model to examine the effects of economic development and crime on revenue receipts from tourism.

The empirical results based on IV-2SLS method suggest that, in addition to economic development, other factors such as the presence of world-class monuments, natural landscapes and cultural heritage also encourage both international and domestic visitors in Indian states. While crime activities adversely affect the inflow of foreign and domestic tourist arrivals, terror activities do not significantly impact tourist arrivals and tourism receipts. Finally, the estimates of IV-Tobit model show that economic development and government expenditure on tourism sector leads to a significant increase in tourism receipts.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study done in Indian context in which state-level panel data have been used to examine the impact of economic, social and cultural factors on tourist arrivals and revenue earnings from tourism. Hence, the present study not only contributes to existing tourism literature, but also makes an important contribution to structuring suitable tourism management policies for the Indian states.

This paper aims to examine the determinants of rural dwellers financial literacy in Ghana.

A cross-sectional primary data set was used to estimate the factors influencing rural farm households' financial literacy using the IV-Tobit model.

The findings reveal that most rural residents are financially illiterate. The econometrics model results depicted that respondents' socioeconomic and demographic characteristics such as gender, income, age and education significantly affect financial literacy. Again, respondents who are risk seekers and listen or watch education programs are more likely to be financially literate.

The paper examined the determinants of rural dwellers financial literacy in four regions in Ghana. Future research should consider all or many regions for an informed generalization of findings.

This paper provides evidence that rural dwellers are financially illiterate and it would require the policymakers or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to establish a village or community group that comprises a wide range of bankers and government officials to help rural dwellers acquire some financial skills. Also, the positive relationship between media (whether respondent watches or listens to educational programs) and financial literacy implies that policymakers should focus on improving individuals' financial knowledge through training programs and utilize the media as a channel to propagate financial education to the public.

Although previous studies have examined the determinants of financial literacy, little is known in developing countries and, in particular, rural communities. The authors fill this gap by contributing to the scanty existing literature in developing countries in several ways. First, this is the first study to examine the financial literacy level of rural dwellers in Ghana. Second, to not undermine the credibility of the estimation results, this study addresses the potential endogeneity issue, which other researchers have not adequately recognized. Finally, the study expands the scant literature on the subject and provides critical policy implications that will help policymakers formulate financial market policies that will contribute to rural dwellers financial literacy enhancement.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of savings mobilization on access to credit among smallholder farmers’ in the Birim central municipality of Ghana.

A cross-sectional primary data set was used to estimate the factors influencing smallholder farmers’ access to credit and size of loan to be borrowed using the IV-Probit and IV-Tobit model.

The results of the study revealed that savings mobilization has a positive significant impact on access to credit and the total amount of credit one can borrow as well. Other control variables such as transaction cost and farm size depicted a negative significant impact on access to credit. Land ownership, member of an association, household size, years of farming experience and education also showed a positive significant impact on access to credit.

The paper only examined the savings effect on credit accessibility among smallholder farmers in one of the municipality’s in the Eastern region of Ghana. Future research should consider all or many municipality for an informed generalization of findings.

This paper provides evidence that smallholder farmers knowledge on the financial market is poor and it would require the policymakers or NGOs to organize financial management training programs so that the farmers high ignorance of the financial market will significantly reduce.

Although existing studies have examined smallholder farmers’ access to credit, the unique contribution of this paper is the analysis of the impact of saving mobilization on credit accessibility in Ghana, a major access to credit determinant in the financial market. In addition, those researchers who factored in savings as an access to credit determinant did not also consider the casual relationship between these two variables, thus, the present of endogeneity of which this paper does.

Degradable mulch film (DMF) is a potential alternate to polyethylene (PE) mulching. In this regard, the purpose of this paper is to explore the effects and paths of natural disaster shock and risk aversion influencing farmers’ DMF adoption.

This research is conducted by collecting cross-sectional data of corn farmers in Zhangye, China. First, by using the Tobit model, the paper attempts to explore the effects of natural disaster shock and risk aversion influencing farmers’ DMF adoption. Second, IV-Tobit model is applied to deal with endogenous problems between risk aversion and DMF adoption. Additionally, the researchers used a moderating model to analyze feasible paths of natural disaster shock and risk aversion impacting farmers’ DMF adoption.

The outcomes show that natural disaster shock and risk aversion significantly and positively affect farmers’ DMF adoption. Though risk aversion plays a significant moderating effect in influencing farmers’ DMF adoption by natural disaster shock, the moderating effect has a serious disguising effect. By considering the heterogeneity of risk aversion, the paper further confirms that if the intensity of natural disaster shock is increased by one unit, the intensity of MDF adoption by farmers with high-risk aversion also tends to increase by 15.85%.

This study is the pioneer one, which is evaluating the intensity of farmers’ DMF adoption from adoption ratio, investment amount, labor input and adoption time. Additionally, the research provides important guidelines for policymakers to motivate medium and low-risk aversion farmers to adopt DMF.

This paper examines the impact and mechanism of China's digital inclusive finance on rural consumption upgrade. First, the impact of the development of digital inclusive finance on the upgrading of rural household consumption structure is to be theoretically analyzed and empirically tested. Secondly, in terms of heterogeneity analysis, it pays attention to the age heterogeneity of users that digital inclusive finance influencing rural residents' developmental consumption upgrade, which is related to the issue of intergenerational “digital gap”. Thirdly, the mechanism of digital inclusive finance in promoting rural consumption upgrade is to be investigated. Finally, how to promote the role of digital inclusive finance in upgrading the structure of rural consumption to a developmental demand level will be showed.

From the perspective of the micro-household, this study is conducted by using the instrumental variable (IV) method, with 2SLS model and IV-Tobit model, based on the matched city-level data of Digital Inclusive Financial Index (DIFI) with the Chinese Household Financial Survey (CHFS). “The relief degree of land surface” is an ideal instrumental variable of digital inclusive finance, for including regional altitude difference and terrain factors of regional area, has theoretical influence on the development of digital inclusive finance, and is not affected by other economic variables.

The conclusions show that the digital inclusive finance plays a significant role in promoting the rural households' developmental consumption, but has no significant effect on the rural households' survival-type consumption and hedonistic consumption. Furthermore, this paper examines the impact and mechanism of China's digital inclusive finance on rural consumption upgrade. First, the impact of the development of digital inclusive finance on the upgrading of rural household consumption structure is to be theoretically analyzed and empirically tested. Secondly, it is discovered that digital inclusive finance is age heterogeneous in promoting the upgrade of consumption structure of rural household, and its effect on the elderly is weaker than that on the young for the intergenerational “digital gap”. Thirdly, these conclusions reveal that the digital inclusive finance does affect the consumption of rural residents through three mechanisms: increasing income and wealth, easing liquidity constraints and facilitating payment methods. Finally, how to promote the role of digital inclusive finance in upgrading the structure of rural consumption to a developmental demand level will be showed.

The current research on the relationship between digital inclusive finance and rural consumption only stays at the level of total rural consumption and has not stressed the structural problems of rural consumption. Can digital inclusive finance promote the upgrade of rural consumption structure? To what level can digital inclusive finance promote the upgrading of rural consumption structure? Therefore, it is of great theoretical value to study the upgrading of rural consumption structure from the micro level. Can the current digital inclusive finance benefit the elderly and help break the vulnerability of the elderly to enjoy finance? In this regard, evidence of heterogeneity remains to be provided.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of off-farm labor employments on household land rental behavior in rural China.

IV-Probit and IV-Tobit model are used to identify the estimate of interest.

The results indicate that households with more members participating in either migration or local off-farm work are more/less likely to rent out/in land. Moreover, the effect of migration on household land rental behavior is much larger than the effect of local off-farm work.

These results suggest that ensuring benefits of migrants in urban cities can automatically promote household land rental behavior in rural China.

The authors provide a rigorous and careful empirical analysis on the effect of off-farm employment on household land rental behavior and pay special attention to the endogeneity issue tackled using separable instruments.

Finance is crucial to boosting agricultural development in developing countries. This paper aims to investigate the effects of rural formal and informal financial access on agricultural technical efficiency (TE) in China.

Based on the survey data of demonstrative family farms in Langxi county, Anhui province and Wuhan city, Hubei province in central China in 2017, this research assesses agricultural TE by using a three-stage DEA model. It adopts the tobit model to evaluate the effects of formal and informal financial access on TE, and to explore the heterogeneous effects by types, management states and scales. It uses the OLS regression and PSM method to check the robustness, and applies the IV-Tobit method to solve the endogeneity. The authors apply the mediation effect model to explore the channels through which financial access impacts TE.

Family farms' average TE reaches 13.9%, which shows much room for improvement under the given technical conditions and constant inputs. The research confirms the advantage of formal financial access in raising TE relative to informal financial access. The heterogeneous analysis documents more prominent effects of formal financial access on enhancing TE of aquaculture, hybrid, demonstration and large farms. The mediating effect model reveals that the enhancing TE effect of formal financial access derives from improved machinery investment and family labor division rather than land circulation.

The research clarifies finance into formal and informal finance. The results have considerable policy implications for rural financial policies in China.

What makes firms innovate their business models? Why do they engage in innovating how they create, deliver, and capture value? And how does such innovation translate into innovation performance? Despite the importance of business model innovation for achieving competitive advantage, existing evidence seems to be confined to firm-level antecedents and pays little attention to the impact of industry structure. This study investigates how different stages of an industry’s life cycle and levels of industry competition affect firms’ business model innovation, and how such innovation translates into innovation performance. Based on a cross-industry sample of 1,242 Austrian firms, we introduce a unique measure for the degree of innovation in a firm’s business model. The results indicate that the degree of business model innovation is highest toward the beginning of an industry life cycle, that is, in the emergent stage. Competitive industry pressures turn out to be negatively related to the degree of business model innovation. Moreover, we find that the degree of a firm’s business model innovation, conditional on it having introduced a new product or process recently, positively influences innovation performance. Our findings contribute to the ongoing dialog on the role of industry structure in business model innovation, and provide implications for the management of business model innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between financial literacy and entrepreneurial activities, and the moderating effects of industrial regulation in the relationship between financial literacy and entrepreneurship.

In this study, the role of financial literacy on entrepreneurial participation and performance is investigated through multi-sourced data from the Chinese Family Panel Studies with manually merged provincial and industrial data from 2014. Four hypotheses are tested based on Probit and Tobit models. Moreover, instrumental variable method and principal component analysis are applied to provide robustness checks.

The empirical results demonstrate that financial literacy has significantly positive effects on entrepreneurial participation, as well as on entrepreneurial performance. In addition, industrial regulation positively moderates the effects of financial literacy on entrepreneurial participation and performance, which indicates that financial literacy plays a more important role in promoting entrepreneurship in tightly regulated industries.

This study proposes and tests the effects of financial literacy on entrepreneurial activities, which fills an important gap in the literature. The results in this paper provide evidence that financial literacy has positive impacts in both the entry and operation stages of entrepreneurship. This evidence provides theoretical foundations for policy making in popularizing financial knowledge and supporting entrepreneurial activities. Moreover, this research further reveals the effects of industrial regulation in the context of China, suggesting that the government should be more effective in promoting administrative decentralization and reducing unnecessary interventions.

This paper investigates the relationship between market power and efficiency for Indian banks in order to test the validity of the quiet life hypothesis (QLH) during 2005–2019.

First, the bank-level DEA efficiency scores and three measures of the Lerner index: traditional, efficiency-adjusted, stochastic are estimated. Then, efficiency scores are regressed on Lerner indices plus a set of banking and economic control variables.

Robust evidence against the QLH is obtained. Moreover, the conventional Lerner index suggests that market power of Indian banks, as well as of the different bank groups, increased during the study period, due to a greater reduction in costs compared to that of the price of banking services. The efficiency scores also declined for the banking system as a whole, and for all bank groups except new private banks.

This is the first study testing the QLH for the different categories of Indian banks and also provides robust inferences by using both stochastic and non-stochastic measures of market power.