Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how households’ engagement in concurrent business (CB), which is measured by the contribution of off-farm income to household income, affects the farm size–technical efficiency (TE) relationship in Northern China. Design/methodology/approach This paper applies a stochastic frontier analysis method to analyze data on 1,006 rural households collected from four major wheat-producing provinces in Northern China, adopting a translog specification for the underlying production function. Findings The analysis yields three findings. First, the farm size–TE relationship is inverted U-shaped for all CB engagement levels higher than 5 percent, and the most technically efficient farm size increases with the level of household CB engagement. Second, how TE varies with the level of CB engagement depends on farm size: an inverted-U relationship for relatively small farms (<10μ), a positive relationship for middle-size farms (10–20μ), and a negative relationship for large farms (>20μ). Finally, the overall TE score, 0.88, suggests that wheat output can be increased by 12 percent in Northern China if technical inefficiency were eliminated. Originality/value Unlike most previous studies that examine the impacts of farm size and households’ off-farm business involvement separately, this paper examines how these two factors interact with each other.

Whether the construction of China’s cross-border e-commerce (CBEC) comprehensive pilot zones can promote economic growth and social sustainable development is an important question worthy of discussion. This paper uses the difference-in-differences (DID) method to test the impact of the establishment of CBEC comprehensive pilot zones on economic growth and discusses the impact mechanism. The results are as follows. (1) The construction of CBEC comprehensive pilot zones can promote economic growth. After testing with parallel trend, placebo, and other robustness methods, the results are still valid. (2) The economic promotion effect of the construction of CBEC comprehensive pilot zones will be more evident in the coastal and eastern regions. The economic promotion effect of the first, second, and third batch of CBEC comprehensive pilot zones is clear. (3) The main ways that the construction of CBEC comprehensive pilot zones can facilitate economic growth are through urban digitalization, trade openness, and information service industry agglomeration.

We examine the impact of international students on China's total factor productivity (TFP) from 2000 to 2017 using two‐way fixed effect, IV‐2SLS, and system GMM methods. The results are as follows. (1) International students can promote the growth of China's TFP. (2) Short‐term international students play a more important role than long‐term international students. International students contributed the most to TFP growth in the eastern region, followed by the central and western regions. (3) The main ways that international students facilitate the growth of TFP are through improving technical progress and reducing education costs.

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