The development of diverse forms of agricultural scale operations is widely recognized as a cornerstone of modern agricultural management. Most existing studies largely examine land-scale or service-scale operations in isolation and pay little attention to their potential synergies in achieving economies of scale. Using survey data on 1026 plots from 865 rice farmers in Jiangsu Province, China, this study employs fixed-effects regression models to investigate how land-scale and service-scale operations jointly promote scale economies through agricultural machinery utilization. The empirical results reveal three key findings: (i) both land-scale and service-scale operations significantly reduce per-mu (1 mu = 0.067 ha) machinery costs, thereby generating scale economies; (ii) their synergy further amplifies these economies, providing strong evidence of synergy rather than substitution; and (iii) village governance significantly moderates this relationship, with stronger governance reinforcing the synergistic effects between land- and service-scale operations. These findings suggest that dual agricultural scale operations are mutually reinforcing in promoting mechanization. Policy should therefore prioritize their synergistic development and recognize the coordinating role of village collectives.

Gender imbalance in marriage markets places severe pressure on bachelors. Although prior studies link skewed sex ratios to health outcomes, causal evidence

Public climate sentiment reflects societal perceptions and emotional responses to climate-related risks, yet its relationship with objective environmental outcomes remains insufficiently understood. This study aims to examine whether public climate sentiment is systematically associated with urban air quality. Using a large-scale dataset of 256,400 geo-tagged Weibo posts from 2010 to 2023, this study constructs a city-level public climate sentiment index for 287 Chinese cities through supervised text classification and machine-learning-based continuous sentiment scoring. The resulting index is integrated with city-year data on PM _2.5 concentrations and analyzed using two-way fixed-effects models, robustness checks, instrumental variable estimations, heterogeneity analyses, and channel analyses. The results show that more positive public climate sentiment is consistently associated with lower PM _2.5 concentrations. This association is more evident in non-resource-based cities, southern cities, provincial capitals, and environmental-protection priority areas. Further analyses show that public climate sentiment is systematically associated with public transport use, green patent activity, and environmental investment, suggesting that it is closely connected to broader behavioral, technological, and governmental responses. This study contributes by developing a scalable AI-enabled measure of public climate sentiment, linking digital social signals to objective city-level environmental outcomes, and demonstrating how social sensing can complement conventional environmental indicators in urban sustainability governance.

Land use transitions increasingly hinge on how governance arrangements shape resource use efficiency and knowledge diffusion in agricultural systems. Collective irrigation, as a key institutional form of water governance, has been widely promoted to improve irrigation performance, yet its potential linkages with peer effects in agricultural production remain insufficiently understood. Using plot-level panel data from Jiangsu Province, China, for 2015 and 2019, this study examines how peer effects and collective irrigation affect the technical efficiency of rice production. A time-varying stochastic frontier production function is employed to estimate technical efficiency, while a linear-in-means model is used to capture peer effects and compare their effects across different irrigation types. The results indicate that peer effects play a significant role in improving technical efficiency in rice-growing areas. These effects are more pronounced under collective irrigation arrangements. Moreover, peer effects under collective irrigation are stronger in villages without public technology extension services, among farmers with lower grain production capacity or without off-farm employment, and on smaller plots. Mechanism analysis indicates that peer effects under collective irrigation operate partly through input decisions, especially pesticide use. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of considering both peer interactions and irrigation institutions when improving agricultural production efficiency.