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As ESG (environmental, social, and corporate governance) is consistent with the spirit of sustainable development, it is useful to elevate ESG performance to realize the sustainable development of enterprise and society. Using the data of Chinese A-share listed firms in the period of 2011 to 2019, this paper takes the National Big Data Comprehensive Pilot Zone policy as a quasi-natural experiment and uses the difference-in-differences method to assess the effect of digital economy development on ESG performance. This paper reveals the following: (1) the digital economy can facilitate ESG performance; (2) digitalization of the economy helps enterprises to propel digital transformation, which in turn lifts ESG performance; (3) digital economy development has a deeper impact on private enterprises, especially for those in China's capital cities; and (4) digital economy development moderates the inhibiting effect of ESG performance on corporate financial constraints. The findings of this paper indicate that digitalization of the economy can help to achieve sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In sports practice, cold water baths are increasingly used by athletes and practitioners to relieve post-exercise fatigue and accelerate the recovery of physiological functions and athletic ability. Various cold bathing schemes with different water temperature and time combinations used in previous studies can all produce a certain recovery effect, but it is still difficult to determine the appropriate cold bathing scheme that is conducive to short-term recovery. Its relatively good recovery effect is sought under the condition that the time combination is controlled. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of an intervention on the recovery effect of cold water baths after resistance training. The research in this paper will use literature method, experimental method and mathematical statistics method to sort out the existing literature data, and carry out experimental research on the basis of the existing research results. Physiological function and the recovery effect of the ability to exercise again in a short period of time, explore its mechanism, and provide a reference for the practical application of cold water bathing. Experiments have shown that different cold bath programs have different intervention effects after resistance training, which can increase the recovery effect by about 10% and shorten the recovery time.

Currently, the Chinese government is considering two major strategies, namely, developing the digital economy and achieving common prosperity, to address regional development imbalances. Using panel data from 276 Chinese cities spanning from 2011 to 2019, the article first employs the entropy method to measure China's digital economy development, digital fusion application, and Internet accessibility. Subsequently, the paper evaluates the influence of the digital economy on regional development imbalances, focusing on the rural-urban income gap. The results show a significant reduction in the rural-urban income gap due to digital economy development. Notably, digital fusion applications have a greater impact on reducing the rural-urban income gap than Internet accessibility. In addition, a heterogeneity analysis reveals that the influence of the digital economy on the rural-urban income gap is only reflected in the eastern and western regions, with a more substantial effect observed in the western region. This study, to some extent, helps Chinese government officials distinguish the diverse impacts of different dimensions and regional variations in digital economies on the rural-urban income gap. Such insights can guide the government in strategically advancing digital economy development to accelerate the mitigation of regional disparities and achieve sustainable economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the Chinese Central Government has put great emphasis on the marine economy, since it has been a new driving force of the national economic development. Yet, the relationship between marine economic development and energy efficiency remains unknown. In this paper, we investigate whether marine economic development affected energy efficiency. We focused on the Zhoushan Archipelago, the first National New Area for marine economic development in China. We applied panel data approach to construct the counterfactual of Zhoushan Archipelago. We compared Zhoushan and its counterfactual, the synthetic Zhoushan, and viewed the difference between them, after the Zhoushan Archipelago New Area, as the impact of marine economic development on energy efficiency. We found that compared with its counterfactual, the real Zhoushan had a more substantial improvement in energy efficiency after the National New Area construction. We estimated that the construction of the National New Area for Marine Economy increased energy efficiency by about 10 percentage points. We also applied the bootstrapping technique to illustrate the significance of the estimated results. The results suggest that the Zhoushan Archipelago New Area construction had a statistically significant impact on energy efficiency. In addition, we conducted two tests, including leave-one-out tests and permutation tests, to check the robustness of estimated results, which also serve as an illustration of significance of the estimated results from an alternative empirical perspective. The results from these two tests are similar to each other, both indicating that the Zhoushan Archipelago New Area construction had a statistically significant positive impact on energy efficiency. Overall, our results suggest that marine economic development had a sizable improvement in energy efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The grey model, which is abbreviated as GM (1, 1), has been widely applied in the fields of decision and prediction, particularly in the prediction of time series with few observations, referred to as the poor information and small sample in the literature related to grey model. Previous studies focus on improving the accuracy of prediction but pay less attention to the robustness of the grey model to outliers, which often occur in practice due to an incorrect record by chance or an accidental failure in equipment. To fill that void, we develop a robust grey model, whose structural parameters are obtained from the least trim squares, to forecast Chinese electricity demand. Also, we use the last value in the first-order accumulative generating time series as the initial value, according to the new information priority criterion. We name the novel grey model, proposed in this paper, the novel robust grey model integrating the new information priority criterion, which could be abbreviated as NIPC-GM (1, 1). In addition, we introduce a novel approach, that is, the bootstrapping test, to investigate the robustness against outliers for the novel robust grey model and the classical grey model, respectively. Using the data on Chinese electricity demand from 2011 to 2021, we find that not only does the novel robust grey model integrating the new information priority criterion have a better robustness to outliers than the classical grey model, but it also has a higher accuracy of prediction than the classical grey model. Finally, we apply the novel robust grey model integrating the new information priority criterion to forecasting the future values in Chinese electricity demand during the period 2022 to 2025. We see that Chinese electricity demand would continue to rise in the next four years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here, we assessed the impact of low-carbon city pilot projects on carbon emissions across China through application of a series of econometric techniques to data on these three waves of low-carbon city construction. Our baseline results are obtained from a difference-in-differences estimator, comparing cities with and without introducing low-carbon city pilot projects, and show that low-carbon city pilot projects reduce carbon emissions by about 2 percentage points. We found a similar impact of low-carbon city pilot projects on carbon emissions when we controlled for the estimated propensity of a city to launch the low-carbon city pilot project based on a series of urban characteristics. We obtained comparable estimates when we instrumented whether a city would launch the low-carbon city pilot projects using regional waves of low-carbon city pilot projects. Our results also show that low-carbon city pilot projects have a larger impact on carbon emissions in northern, poorer, and less industrialized cities than those with the opposite characteristics. We found little evidence for the persistence of this impact on carbon emissions, implying that it is necessary to dynamically adjust the low-carbon city pilot projects for cities that have launched the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation, as a driving force to economic growth, has been referred to as an important development strategy by the central government of China. In order to improve the innovative capability of cities, Chinese officials started to construct innovation cities in 2008. Previous studies have investigated the ecological and economic effects of innovation city construction; however, the environmental effect of the project remains unclear. In this study, we constructed an annual panel of 285 cities in China, from 2007 to 2015, to assess the effect of innovation city construction on carbon emissions. Our baseline results are obtained from a difference-in-differences estimator, comparing cities with and without introducing innovation city construction, whose results show that innovation city construction reduces carbon emissions by about 2% on average. We found a similar effect of innovation city construction on carbon emissions when we controlled for the estimated propensity of a city to launch the innovation city construction based on a series of urban characteristics, such as gross regional product and population. We obtained comparable estimates when we used the propensity score as weights to balance urban characteristics between cities with and without launching the innovation city construction. Our results also show that innovation city construction has a larger effect on carbon emissions in western, poorer, and fewer population cities than in those with opposite characteristics. We found suggested the persistence of the effect that innovation city construction had on carbon emissions, implying that the Chinese government should encourage innovation to reduce carbon emissions. Besides, we performed a series of robustness tests, including the leave-one-city-out test, the bootstrapping test, and the permutation test, to illustrate the robustness of our results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies paid attention to improving the predicted capability of the classical grey model, but its robustness is still unclear and not explored, in particular when these exhibit outliers in the time series, which is due to measurement error, uncorrected record, and censored date. In this study, we proposed a novel robust grey model. The novel robust grey model adopts the median regression method to address these problems caused by outliers, which provides the robust parameters. The analytical expression for the time response function and the forecasting values is derived by the grey system technique and mathematical tool. With annual observational data of Chinese electricity demand, we examine the fitness capability of the novel robust grey model, by comparing it with the classical grey model. Also, we adopt the bootstrapping test to further illustrate the sensitivity for the new robust grey model when there are outliers in the time series. To our knowledge, it is the first to introduce the bootstrapping test to the literature related to the grey model and to focus on the robustness of the grey model. The computational results suggest that the new robust grey model has higher precision than the classical grey model, but it is also very robust to outliers, whose accuracy and robustness are better than the classical grey model. Finally, we apply the novel grey model to forecast the future values in Chinese electricity demand during the year 2022 to 2025. This new model proposed in this study estimates that the Chinese electricity demand would continue to increase after the year of 2022, arriving at 10.446×105 million kW·h in the year of 2025 approximately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, major cities in China have suffered from severe air pollution, which is also known as smog. Despite lay considerations that smog might pose risks for psychopathology, it remains unknown whether it is only linked to affective psychopathology or to a broader range of symptomologies. Moreover, whether individual differences in emotion regulation, a transdiagnostic risk factor for psychopathology, would influence the magnitude of pollution-induced symptoms is not well understood. Using a longitudinal design, the current study measured trait emotion regulation and psychopathological symptoms in a sample of university students at Time 1 (without smog, N = 120) and then reassessed for psychopathology at Time 2 (after acute exposure to smog for 1 week, N = 102). The results showed that participants had higher levels of positive symptom distress, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, and psychoticism at Time 2. Moreover, reappraisal is negatively associated with smog-induced elevations in psychopathological symptoms only when participants rely heavily on suppression. We discuss the implications of this investigation for both intervention efforts and future work on the contextual factors surrounding the deployment of emotion regulation strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy makers around the world are turning to smart city projects in an effort to address the challenges of population growth, energy efficiency, and environmental sustainability. Previous studies have evaluated the effect of smart city projects on air quality. However, evidence on the impact of the projects on energy efficiency remains unclear. This study gathered prefecture-level city panel data in China, and used three strategies, namely a difference-in-differences estimator, a matching difference-in-differences estimator, and a counterfactual model using a machine learning algorithm, to assess the impact of smart city projects on energy efficiency. This study reported similar results across these strategies above. That is, after the introduction of a smart city project, energy efficiency had a remarkable and sizeable increase, ranging from 4 to 7 per cent. Moreover, this study shows that the effects of smart city projects increased over time. In addition, this study found that the effects varied according to the characteristics of the cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pulmonary injury and inflammation have been detected in cases of subchronic inhalation exposure to reclaimed water, but the mechanism remains unclear. Endotoxin has been verified as the key risk factor in acute inhalation exposure through the TLR4 (Toll-like receptor 4) signalling pathway. In long-term exposure, endotoxin may also be a risk factor in reclaimed water, but the contribution of other health risk factors should not be underestimated. Wild-type C57BL/6J and TLR4-signalling-pathway-defective mice were used in this study to assess the risk of subchronic inhalation exposure to reclaimed water. Two types of reclaimed water, i.e., secondary effluent and MBR (membrane bioreactor) effluent, were found to induce pulmonary injury and inflammation in the wild-type mice and Tlr4 −/− mutants. However, when both mice were exposed to the same concentrations of pure endotoxin in reclaimed water, only the wild-type mice that were treated with high-dose endotoxin showed pulmonary injury. In summary, non-TLR4 signalling pathways are related to lung inflammation caused by long-term exposure to reclaimed water. It is highly possible that pollutants in addition to endotoxin in the reclaimed water can induce chronic inflammation in the lung. [Display omitted] • Inflammatory responses induced by reclaimed water rely on pathways more than TLR4. • 39.4 ng/kg/d of endotoxin induce pulmonary injury in wild-type but not in Tlr4 −/− mice. • 3.8 ng/kg/d of endotoxin cannot trigger pulmonary inflammation in wild-type and Tlr4 −/− mice. • Other chronic inflammation inducers besides endotoxin may exist in reclaimed water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Work context transformed. Employees increasingly interact with enterprise social media, wherein employees may feel disconnected from workplace. Drawing on social affiliation theory, we develop and examine a moderated mediation model to explore the indirect effect of enterprise social media usage on counterproductive work behavior (CWB) via workplace loneliness and the moderating role of information and communication technology hassle (ICT hassle). We test hypotheses by conducting a three-wave survey of 345 knowledge workers. Results indicate that enterprise social media usage has a positive effect on workplace loneliness, and workplace loneliness mediated the indirect effect of enterprise social media usage on CWB. The moderated mediation analysis indicated that ICT hassle positively moderates the above mediation effect. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Zhou, Cao, Goh and Kong.)