Acknowledgements I would like to thank my advisor, Paul Saylor, for his generous financial support while I have been at the University of Illinois, and for his personal guidance and friendship during the last three years. His wonderful family has also provided emotional support, cheesecake, and lodging when I needed it most. I would like to thank Steve Ashby for all the time and effort he has p...

The urban geography of thirteenthand fourteenth-century Paris suggests that propertied Parisians placed poor young men who needed help in crossing the threshold to adulthood near the top of their list of poor people who were in need of charitable assistance. Indeed, only widows and other elderly unattached women outranked such boys. By 1342 Paris had ten shelters for poor unattached women and a...

Given that the stated purpose of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is to create value for the newly merged firm, the M&A offer premium ought to be positively related to the realized benefits or realized synergies that result from combining the target and the acquirer. Not all empirical evidence supports this notion, however. Because some M&A activities have not been found to be consistently value ...

BACKGROUND Myopia has become a significant global public health concern, and is highly prevalent worldwide especially in Asian countries. It is associated with genetic factors as well as socioeconomic status; however, the underlying cause for school myopia has not been established. This study evaluates the impact of living environment on school myopia in Chinese school-aged children. METHODS ...

We analyze whether firms prefer collocating with incumbent firms when choosing among markets to enter, highlighting the role of resource-seeking as a motivation for collocation. We propose that entrants will locate near others possessing resources that can spill over, but will avoid locations where existing firms will exploit spillovers without contributing. To test these propositions, we analy...

This paper aims to understand how renters make their housing decisions in urban China, where market mechanisms are being introduced into a previously welfareoriented housing system. It is argued that while renters now enjoy more housing options, their choices are constrained not only by socio-economic factors as is the case in the West, but also by persisting socialist institutions such as the ...

In this paper, we examine the importance of year, industry, corporate-parent, and businessspecific effects on the profitability of U.S. public corporations within specific 4-digit SIC categories. Our results indicate that year, industry, corporate-parent, and business-specific effects account for 2 percent, 19 percent, 4 percent, and 32 percent, respectively, of the aggregate variance in profit...

In seeking to understand the relationship between housing and health, research attention is often focussed on separate components of people's whole housing 'bundles'. We propose in this paper that such conceptual and methodological abstraction of elements of the housing and health relationship limits our ability to understand the scale of the accumulated effect of housing on health and thereby ...

In the last three decades, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has managed to replace its welfare-based urban housing system with a market-based housing provision scheme. With such significant housing policy changes, the PRC has successfully expanded urban home ownership and impressively increased per capita housing consumption. The housing market has become one of the major pillar industries ...

In down-payment constrained housing consumption models, increases in house prices could trigger household mobility decisions in housing markets. This study empirically tests house price dynamics associated with the mobility of households in the public resale and private housing markets in Singapore. The results show that stochastic permanent breaks were found in the public housing resale prices...