Xiao Li

With the rise in global awareness of sustainable transition, investor groups have become continuously engaged in pressuring firms to improve their environmental performance. However, there is limited knowledge about whether firms respond to these pressures through substantive actions or symbolic gestures. Based on the ethical decision-making framework, our study examines the relationship between retail investors’ green appeals and corporate greenwashing. Our results show that retail investors’ green appeals result in significant increases in corporate greenwashing, suggesting that firms are more inclined to adopt symbolic gestures in response to these investor aspirations. Meanwhile, we find that the information asymmetry and the short-term investment horizon of retail investors are two primary reasons for firms’ adoption of greenwashing in response to retail investors’ green appeals. This positive relationship is more pronounced in firms with opportunistic executives, financial constraints, weak environmental ethics, and without political connections. The consequences of greenwashing reveal that while corporate greenwashing behavior may receive positive market reactions in the short term, in the long term, regulators will recognize this behavior resulting in penalties for the firm.

Three leather balls discovered in tombs IM157, IM209, and IM214 of the prehistoric Yanghai cemetery (42°48′N, 89°39′E) located about 43 km southeast of the modern city of Turfan, were AMS radiocarbon dated to the time interval between 1189 and 911 BCE (95% probability), and thus predate other currently known antique balls and images of ball games in Eurasia by several centuries. Our study approves the antiquity of the Yanghai balls, but the available data is not enough to answer the question how these balls were played. Although, their use in team and goal sport is likely, a suggested game similar to hockey, golf or polo cannot be confirmed, because no appropriate sticks were found in direct association with the balls. The affiliation of curved wooden sticks in Yanghai with ball games suggested earlier remains hypothetical, as all found sticks are noticeably younger in age, and other forms of use should be verified by future studies. Two of the three balls were found in the burials of the possible horse riders. Given that ball games from ancient times were considered an excellent form of physical exercise and military training, we suggest that balls (and ball games) appeared in the region at the same time as horseback riding and mounted warfare began to spread in the eastern part of Central Asia.

The economical/environmental scheduling problem of the ship integrated energy system has high computational complexity, which includes more than one optimization objective, various types of constraints, and frequently fluctuated load demand. Therefore, the intelligent scheduling strategies cannot be applied to the ship energy management system online, which has limited computing power and storage space. Aiming at realizing green computing on SEMS, in this paper a typical SIES-EESP optimization model is built, considering the form of decision vectors, the economical/environmental optimization objectives, and various types of real-world constraints of the SIES. Based on the complexity of SIES-EESPs, a two-stage offline-to-online multiobjective optimization strategy for SIES-EESP is proposed, which transfers part of the energy dispatch online computing task to the offline high-performance computer systems. The specific constraints handling methods are designed to reduce both continuous and discrete constraints violations of SIES-EESPs. Then, an establishment method of energy scheduling scheme-base is proposed. By using the big data offline, the economical/environmental scheduling solutions of a typical year can be obtained and stored with more computing resources and operation time on land. Thereafter, a short-term multiobjective offline-to-online optimization approach by SEMS is considered, with the application of multiobjective evolutionary algorithm and typical schemes corresponding to the actual SIES-EESPs. Simulation results show that the proposed strategy can obtain enough feasible Pareto solutions in a shorter time and get well-distributed Pareto sets with better convergence performance, which can well adapt to the features of real-world SIES-EESPs and save plenty of operation time and storage space for the SEMS.

We investigate the cross-correlations of return-volume relationship of the Bitcoin market. In particular, we select eight exchange rates whose trading volume accounts for more than 98% market shares to synthesize Bitcoin indexes. The empirical results based on multifractal detrended cross-correlation analysis reveal that the nonlinear dependencies and power-law cross-correlations in return-volume relationship are found; all cross-correlations are multifractal, and there are antipersistent behaviors of cross-correlation for q=2; the price of small fluctuations is more persistent than that of the volume, while the volume of larger fluctuations is more antipersistent; and the rolling window method shows that the cross-correlations of return-volume are antipersistent in the entire sample period.

A combinatorial analysis of intrinsicality takes intrinsic properties to be independent of accompaniment: a property is intrinsic only if it is possible for a lonely or an accompanied thing to have it or lack it (I). Cameron argues that the combinatorial analysis in Langton & Lewis (1998) faces an epistemic circularity, which makes (I) suspicious. In this paper, I examine two approaches to free the combinatorial analyses from the circularity and find them all fail. Then I provide an outline of an argument for (I) by appealing to the grounding analyses of intrinsicality, which shows an advantage of the grounding analyses over the combinatorial ones.

In Mandarin Chinese, gradable predicates can be classified into two types based on their morphosyntactic features: one consisting of gradable lexemes like gradable adjectives and gradable verbs, and the other consisting of verbal phrases made up of a possessive/existential morpheme, you, and a bare NP. The goal of this paper is to provide a formal account of the gradability of the “you + NP” construction. We show that the gradability of this construction is conditioned by the NP inside: when the NP inside denotes abstract substances, “you + NP” is gradable; if NPs denote non-abstract substances, “you + NP” is non-gradable.and non-abstract NPs differ in the types of measure scales they are associated with: abstract NPs are associated with a scale that lacks an absolute zero point, and non-abstract NPs are associated with a scale that contains such a point. The semantics of the existential/possessive morpheme you is sensitive to this distinction and gives rise to variation in gradability.

This article studies a type of comparative in Mandarin Chinese, which has rarely been discussed in the literature (Cheng 1966). I refer to them as Differential Verbal Comparatives (DVCs). I show that DVCs, unlike Chinese adjectival and adverbial comparatives, allow differentials that are definite DPs, for example, Jane Eyre he Pride and Prejudice ‘Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice’. Based on this fact and other empirical differences between DVCs and adjectival/adverbial comparatives in Mandarin Chinese, I motivate and develop a mapping-based semantic analysis of DVCs and argue that this analysis fares better than a degree-based analysis

In this paper, we employ Weibo Index as the proxy for investor attention and analyze the relationships between investor attention and stock market performance, i.e., trading volume, return, and volatility. The empirical results firstly show that Weibo attention is positively related to trading volume, intraday volatility, and return. Secondly, there exist bidirectional causal relationships between Weibo attention and stock market performance. Thirdly, we generally find that higher Weibo attention indicates higher correlation coefficients with the quantile regression analysis.