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This paper aims to examine the relationship between economic freedom and Islamic rural banks' efficiency in the case of Indonesia.

The study covers 40 Islamic rural banks in 34 Indonesian regions from 2014 to 2020. Tobit regression is utilized to expose the impact of economic freedom on the efficiency of Islamic rural banks, and nonparametric frontier data envelopment analysis is used to acquire banks' technical efficiency.

The findings reveal that overall economic freedom has a strong favorable impact on the efficiency of Islamic rural banks. The study’s breakdown components suggest that business freedom, government spending and investment freedom are favorable indicators, whereas government integrity and tax burden are negative indicators, and all indicators agree with previous studies.

This research can serve as a guideline for Islamic rural bank management in terms of maintaining financial efficiency. The government should think about the ramifications of financial sector liberalization and reforms, according to these findings. When financial intermediaries operate in a less constrained environment, they are more likely to pursue competitive practices that increase their operating rate and other efficiency metrics. Finally, academics might utilize this information to investigate the economic flexibility of Islamic rural banks.

The novelty of this study is in using data envelopment analysis and Tobit regression to identify economic freedom and Islamic rural banks' efficiency. To the best of the authors' knowledge, the study of the role of economic freedom in Islamic rural bank's efficiency is limited, particularly in the context of Indonesia.

This paper aims to study vehicle-type strategies for the manufacturer's car sharing by accounting for consumers' behavior and the subsidy.

The authors develop a game model, in which a monopoly manufacturer that can produce gasoline vehicles (GVs) or energy vehicles (EVs) not only sells vehicles in the sales market, but also rents them out in the sharing market by the self-built platform. The manufacturer strategically chooses which type of vehicles based on consumers' behavior and whether the government provides the EVs’ subsidy.

When consumers' low-carbon awareness is relatively high or the marginal cost is low, the manufacturer chooses EVs. The manufacturer chooses GVs when the low-carbon awareness and the marginal cost are low. Only when the low-carbon awareness and the subsidy are not too low, the manufacturer who originally chose GVs launches EVs. When the low-carbon awareness is high, the excessive subsidy discourages the manufacturer from entering the sharing market. If the government provides the subsidy, the manufacturer launches high-end EVs. Otherwise, the manufacturer launches low-end EVs. Moreover, the subsidy increases consumer surplus and social welfare since the high subsidy makes EVs’ sharing market demand be negative.

This study enriches the literature on vehicle-type strategies for the manufacturer's car sharing, owns a practical significance to guide the manufacturer's operation management in the car sharing market and provides advice on whether the government should provide EVs’ subsidy.

This paper aims to take a step in this direction and use the high dimensional fixed effects and quantile regression discontinuity design to test the managerial Coase theorem, which provides an institutional perspective for us to gauge the impact of private property rights on firm performance and the effect of management costs on intermediate inputs.

This study first uses high dimensional regression discontinuity designs to examine the impact of privatization on firm performance in China between 1998 and 2013.

Results indicate that privatization effects increase average outputs of the firm by around 10% given lower management costs, and management costs increase intermediate inputs by more than 50% points. Using data from annual surveys to test managerial Coase theorem, the authors show that management costs negatively affect the marginal effect of privatization on the average outputs of the firm. The positive impact on the investment in intermediate goods and services is larger in magnitude under higher management costs.

The authors develop the managerial Coase theorem. Today, given lower management costs, private property rights provide an incentive structure for a firm to maximize the value of the assets and expand the boundaries.

This chapter tests theoretically and empirically the existence of a stable relationship between energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Based on microeconomics and physics, a model has been specified and applied to annual data for twenty countries, which representing 61 percent of the world’s population in 2018, over the period 1995–2015. The data are from the International Energy Agency (2019) and econometric techniques including panel data and causality tests have been used. The results indicate that there is a causal relationship between energy consumption and CO2 emissions. In general, consumers cannot directly change emissions caused by production processes, but they can act on emissions caused by their own domestic energy consumption. Approximately three quarters of domestic energy consumption is due to heating and domestic hot water consumption. Taking into account the lower emissions and the lower economic cost of the initial investment, four potential energy systems have been selected for use in heating and domestic hot water. Their social returns have been assessed across nine of the twenty countries in the sample over a lifecycle of 25 years from 2018: France, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Iceland, Germany, United Kingdom, Morocco and the United States. Cost-benefit analysis techniques have been used for this purpose and the results indicate that the use of thermal water, where applicable, is the most socially profitable system among the proposed systems, followed by natural gas. The least socially profitable systems are those using electricity.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance of enterprise is influenced by the enterprise digital transformation. In addition, this study explains how enterprise digital transformation affects ESG performance.

The sample covers 4,646 nonfinancial companies listed on China’s A-share market from 2009 to 2021. The study adopts the fixed-effects multiple linear regression to perform the data analysis.

The study finds that enterprise digital transformation has a significant inverted U-shaped impact on ESG performance. Moderate digital transformation can improve enterprise ESG performance, whereas excessive digital transformation will bring new organizational conflicts and increase enterprise costs, which is detrimental to ESG performance. This inverted U-shaped effect is more pronounced in industrial cities, manufacturing industries and enterprises with less financing constraints and executives with financial backgrounds. Enterprise digital transformation mainly affects ESG performance by affecting the level of internal information communication and disclosure, the level of internal control and the principal-agent cost.

The government should take multiple measures to encourage enterprises to choose appropriate digital transformation based on their own production behaviors and development strategies, encourage them to innovate and upgrade their organizational management and development models in conjunction with digital transformation and guide them to use digital technology to improve ESG performance.

This study shows that irrational digital transformation cannot effectively improve the ESG performance of enterprises and promote the sustainable development of the country. Enterprises should carry out reasonable digital transformation according to their own development needs and finally improve the green and sustainable development ability of enterprises and promote the sustainable development of society.

This study examines the relationship between enterprise digital transformation and ESG performance. Different from the linear relationship between the two in previous major studies, this study proves the inverse U-shaped relationship between enterprise digital transformation and ESG performance through mathematical theoretical model derivation and empirical test. This study also explores in detail how corporate digital transformation affects ESG performance, as well as discusses heterogeneity at the city, industry and firm levels. It is proposed that enterprises should take into account their own characteristics and carry out reasonable digital transformation according to their development needs.

This research studies the influence and mechanism of rearing cost and endowment insurance on family fertility desire from the micro perspective.

Through the construction of overlapping generations (OLG) model and on the basis of this research purpose, the research hypothesis proposed by the theoretical model is tested by using the data of China household tracking survey (CFPS).

(1) Endowment insurance has an inhibitory effect on family fertility desire. The marginal effects of participating in old-age insurance on total fertility desire and boy fertility desire are – 3.2% and – 3.6% respectively. (2) The cost of rearing has a significant negative impact on family fertility desire. (3) There is regional heterogeneity in the impact of endowment insurance and rearing cost on fertility desire. (4) There is no significant difference in the impact of endowment insurance on fertility desire between urban and rural areas.

This research tries to fill the gap existing in the international literature by analyzing the micro mechanism of the influence degree of upbringing cost on fertility desire by introducing the rearing cost and fertility rate into the OLG, providing a micro basis for relevant quantitative calculation.

This research investigates how subsidy programs in Vietnam's residential electricity market affect consumers' well-being.

Two perspectives are employed: cash transfer and quantity-based subsidy. The effectiveness of cash transfer is measured in three ways: benefit incidence, beneficiary incidence and materiality. The quantity-based subsidy is established under the increasing block rate pricing, with the first two block rates being lower than the marginal cost. To improve the quantity-based subsidy, the research examines the consumer surplus under four proposals.

The results show that both types of subsidies are ineffective in supporting the poor.

In order to achieve a more equal distribution among households, the subsidy program should remove all subsidized blocks and reflect the full marginal cost. Changes should be made to the price structure regarding both marginal price and intervals.

To mitigate the impact of the quantity-based subsidy, the government should improve the cash transfer by reducing extortion and improving targeting efficiency, especially for poor households living in rented houses.

This paper is the first to discuss the welfare effect of the electricity subsidy in Vietnam. First, it comprehensively evaluates the cash transfer subsidy in Vietnam. Second, it suggests a modification in the residential electricity tariff.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

This study analyzes the impact of COVID-19 on agricultural production in South India by evaluating the influence of market channels and socioeconomic conditions on the production decisions of farmers during two key cropping seasons. We base our analysis on primary data from 200 marginal, small and medium farmers, primarily focusing on the key seasonal crops, namely paddy and black gram.

We studied the downstream supply chains of paddy and black gram crops in the district of Villupuram, situated in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Using a Bi-Probit model, we analyzed the production decisions of marginal, small and medium farmers engaged in paddy and black gram cultivation. Various factors are considered, including farmers’ socioeconomic characteristics, gender, market channels accessed and the coping strategies employed.

After the easing of lockdown measures in June 2020, our research revealed substantial disruptions in agricultural production during the critical Kharif and Rabi seasons. Most farmers refrained from returning to their fields during the Kharif season; those who did produced millet as the main crop. Factors such as choice of market channels in previous seasons, economic status, access to all-weather roads, labor availability, gender and coping strategies played an important role in the return to production in the subsequent Kharif and Rabi seasons.

Our data revealed several interesting threads related to price volatility, irrigation and access to markets and their impact on food security. The role of intermediaries and market channels in providing liquidity emerges as an important aspect of farmers' choice of markets. The pandemic impacted all these factors, but a detailed analysis was beyond the scope of this study.

We also find that resilience to economic shocks varies not only by economic status but also by gender and social groups. Farmers with female members are more likely to be resilient, and marginal and small farmers primarily belong to social groups that are economically less developed.

This study contributes to the literature on factors influencing farmer choice and decision-making and provides nuances to discussions by analyzing crop-specific supply chains, highlighting the critical role of socioeconomic factors. It also highlights the role of demographics and infrastructural factors like access to all-weather roads and access to markets that influence farmers’ production decisions.