This study benchmarks green efficiency in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) in China and the San Francisco Bay Area (SFBA) in the United States to diagnose whether emerging megaregions' green gap reflects managerial inefficiency or technological backwardness. Using a Slacks-Based Measure (SBM) model with undesirable outputs within a meta-frontier framework, it decomposes Meta-Frontier Efficiency (MTE) into Group Technical Efficiency (GTE) and the Technology Gap Ratio (TGR) for 35 cities and counties over 2004 to 2023. The two agglomerations achieve nearly identical managerial efficiency, with average GTE of 0.920 and 0.914, but the SFBA's MTE of 0.920 far exceeds the YRD's 0.795. This gap stems from technology: the SFBA's TGR is 1.000, meaning its group frontier coincides with the global meta-frontier, whereas the YRD's TGR is only 0.873 and has widened over time. Spatial autocorrelation analysis reveals no significant clustering of green productivity, indicating that green technologies are highly localized and do not diffuse spontaneously across city boundaries, so that economic integration has outpaced environmental and technological integration. These findings imply that the YRD should shift its policy focus from managerial tightening toward green technology research and development, and promote policy-driven green technology transfer from leading cities to peripheral manufacturing ones.

Randomised controlled trials are often impractical for evaluating labour market support programmes, since random assignment carries high costs, long timelines and considerable implementation difficulty. How to obtain an accurate and reliable estimate of a programme's treatment effect from observational data subject to selection bias has therefore been debated in labour economics and causal inference for four decades. This study takes the National Supported Work Demonstration, a randomised experiment whose true effect is known, deletes the experimental control group, substitutes a non-experimental comparison group drawn from the Current Population Survey, and asks how close matching comes to an answer that is already established. Against an experimental benchmark of $1,794, the naive comparison returns -$8,498, with the wrong sign, regression adjustment yields $699, and propensity score matching yields $1,984, with 181 of 185 treated units on common support. The practical implication is that a matching estimate is credible only to the extent that the diagnostics printed beside it are, since balance, overlap and sensitivity to the matching rules are what an evaluator can inspect when no benchmark exists.

This paper examines the spillover effect of live performance economy on China's urban development. It draws on the theory of inter-industry connection and consumption multiplier, gathers existing literature and examples of urban culture and tourism consumption in China, and analyzes these impacts from multiple dimensions. Analysis shows that live performances stimulate urban consumption through ticketing and related expenses, support the night economy, and encourage the integration of culture and tourism. They also expanded flexible employment, attracted cultural professionals, enriched the cultural life of residents, and contributed to the cultural characteristics of the city. Therefore, the live performance economy is becoming an important means to improve the quality of urban culture and tourism development and strengthen the soft power of cities. However, the maintenance of these interests depends on the coordination between public governance, business innovation and responsible public participation. By combining the study of the impact of economy, industry, employment and social culture, this article clarifies the contribution of live performance to urban development and puts forward suggestions for improving local development strategies.

The new materials industry is a strategic pillar industry underpinning China's pursuit of technological self-reliance and self-strengthening. It plays a vital role in the development of advanced manufacturing, the achievement of the "dual carbon" goals, and the security of industrial and supply chains. The deep integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with materials Research and Development (R&D) is continuously reshaping the innovation and production models of the industry. Existing literature has extensively examined new materials technologies and AI-driven innovation, but relatively little research has systematically analyzed the competitive landscape of the industry from the perspective of industrial economics. Clarifying the characteristics of industry competition can provide practical insights for domestic industrial policymaking and overseas industrial deployment under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative. Using Porter's Five Forces model as the analytical framework, this study examines the competitive characteristics of China's new materials industry by drawing on publicly available industry reports, existing literature, and online interviews with industry practitioners, given the constraints on obtaining first-hand corporate research samples. The findings indicate that the industry as a whole has high entry barriers, while supplier bargaining power varies significantly across different segments. Buyers and substitutes exert moderate competitive pressure, and the intensity of intra-industry competition differs substantially between low-end and high-end segments. Based on these findings, corresponding industrial policy recommendations are proposed, followed by a discussion of the limitations of this study and directions for future research.

By reviewing existing relevant literature, this paper finds that prior studies have made progress in the research on game merchandise, emotional consumption mechanism and customer perception perspective, yet there remains a gap in the research on the emotional consumption mechanism of game merchandise from the customer perception perspective. Taking Genshin Impact as an example and adopting the research perspective of consumers' emotional consumption of game merchandise, this paper collects relevant public online information as well as user posts and post-purchase reviews on Xiaohongshu, Douyin and Taobao for analysis. The findings indicate that consumers' emotional consumption of merchandise products stems mainly from four dimensions: the connection between products and game characters, official or community recommendations, the intrinsic functional value of products, and basic guarantee factors such as return and exchange services. Among them, the connection between merchandise and game character-related elements serves as the primary motivation for players to make emotional purchases. This paper analyzes the drivers of players' emotional consumption, enabling game companies to better understand the elements that players truly expect from products, which is also a critical factor influencing merchandise sales. Therefore, this study provides guiding implications for game companies in developing merchandise products from the customer perception perspective.