PurposeThis paper seeks to use data from China between 1929 and 1933 and provides new empirical evidence to the debate over the impact of land ownership and land‐renting systems on agricultural productivity.Design/methodology/approachThe authors estimate the OLS regression to determine the relationship between land ownership (and land‐renting systems) and farmers' productivity.FindingsThe findings suggest that land ownership was not a major factor in determining farmers' productivity; instead, agricultural infrastructures and institutions had the greatest influence on agricultural productivity. Furthermore, different renting systems generated different impacts on farmers' behavior: sharecropping reduced farmers' productivity while fixed rental contracts had no significant impact on farmers' productivity.Practical implicationsThis paper has two important policy implications for developing countries. First, agricultural policy that aims to raise agricultural productivity should focus more on improving agricultural infrastructures and institutions than on blindly supporting land privatization. Second, policymakers should promote fixed rental contracts over share contracts because fixed rental contracts were shown to have a smaller adverse impact on farmers' incentives.Originality/valueThis paper uses data from China and provides new evidence on the relative importance of land ownership and agricultural infrastructures/institutions in agricultural production. China is a country with a long agricultural history and a long‐standing well‐developed tenancy system. The case of China may therefore provide answers to policymakers in other developing countries.

The rapid advance of information and communication technology (ICT) has revolutionized the dissemination of stock market information. Based on the noise trading theory, this study discusses whether the changes brought by ICT have promoted the transparency of stock market information or instead flooded the stock market with misinformation. A cross‐country panel dataset of 71 countries from 2002 to 2014 was established. The empirical methodologies include panel unit root tests, panel variance ratio tests, and panel multiple regressions. The results of panel unit root tests and panel variance ratio tests show that stock markets in countries with high ICT diffusion are efficient while stock markets in countries with low or medium ICT diffusion are not all efficient. The results of panel regressions further show that the effect of ICT diffusion in reducing market noises was more significant than its effect in magnifying the noises.

In 2022, approximately 90% of the entire population in Taiwan actively used social media. Although several studies have examined emotional changes among social media users in Taiwan, the endogeneity problem stemming from reverse causality has not been recognized and properly addressed. Therefore, this study examines the effect of social media usage on negative emotions using ‘the frequency of using mobile phones as opposed to landline phones’ and ‘the frequency of using the Internet to run errands’ as instrumental variables for social media usage. Using data collected from the 2017 ‘Taiwan Social Change Survey’, our estimation results showed that Facebook usage significantly increased the frequency with which users experienced negative emotions, including envy, feelings of inferiority, and depression. The findings suggested that the negative emotions caused by social comparison via social media likely outweighed the happiness derived from social media, resulting in Facebook users experiencing more negative emotions. One important implication of our study is that reducing social media usage can alleviate mood swings.

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