Dr Teng Ge

We provide a plausible explanation for the phenomenon of migration to big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. This process can be observed particularly among students who migrate to these cities and prefer to look for their first jobs upon completion of their studies, instead of going back to their hometowns. Despite the slightly higher wages offered in big cities, it is unclear why recently graduated students feel attracted to remain in big cities, where the living costs are much higher and the job market is more competitive compared to small cities. We develop a search and matching model in which we consider that the social connections created by the agents during their studies are used as a tool to get jobs. We solve for the optimal investment in social connections, and for the level of social capital that makes agents indifferent between migrating and staying in their current locations. We use a computational model and show that for agents with a sufficiently large social network, the value of social capital is large enough to overcome the value of going back to their hometowns, where they would face lower competition and living expenses, but they would lack the advantages that a social network represents.

In this paper, we study the asymmetric duopoly models of competing supply chains with financing uncertainty. The financing uncertainty of the green supply chain’s capacity investment could be available as complete or incomplete information to the traditional supply chain. By analyzing and comparing the optimal quantities, optimal prices, and optimal profits of both cases, we find that the financing uncertainty of capacity investment does not affect either chain’s choices of equilibrium quantities and prices in the complete information case. If this information is incomplete for the traditional supply chain, financing uncertainty plays an important role in determining optimal quantities and optimal prices, together with the lending interest rate. To encourage the use of environmentally friendly technologies, government should use per-unit subsidies if the green supply chain suffers the cost disadvantage, and should encourage financial institutions to provide preferential loans to the green supply chain that suffers manufacturing or retailing capacity restrictions.