Relationship between Internet Use and Negative Affect.

While positive emotions like happiness and life satisfaction have received great attention, how to eliminate negative affect is largely neglected. This study contributes to the literature by examining the relationship between Internet use and people's negative affect. Unlike previous studies that consider only one indicator, we capture negative affect from different dimensions by considering loneliness, sadness, and life hardship. We employ an endogenous ordered probit model to address the selection bias of Internet use and analyze the 20,107 individual-level samples sourced from the 2020 China Family Panel Studies survey. The results show that Internet use significantly reduces people's loneliness, sadness, and life hardship. We also find that studying online and watching short videos would increase people's loneliness feeling and shopping online deepens people's life hardship. In contrast, using WeChat significantly reduces sadness and life hardship. Our findings confirm that guiding people to use the Internet appropriately is necessary to reduce negative affect and improve the quality of their life.

Does online food shopping boost dietary diversity? Application of an endogenous switching model with a count outcome variable.

Increasingly, rural households in developing countries are shopping for food online, and the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this trend. In parallel, dietary guidelines worldwide recommend eating a balanced and healthy diet. With this in mind, this study explores whether online food shopping boosts dietary diversity-defined as the number of distinct food groups consumed-among rural households in China. Because people choose to shop for food online, it is important to account for the self-selection bias inherent in online food shopping. Accordingly, we estimate the treatment effects of online food shopping on dietary diversity using the endogenous switching model with a count outcome variable. The results indicate that online food shopping increases dietary diversity by 7.34%. We also find that education, asset ownership, and knowing the government's dietary guidelines are the main factors driving rural households' decisions to shop for food online.

Factors affecting online shopping frequency: lessons from New Zealand.

During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, the number of people shopping online has increased worldwide, and New Zealand is no exception. To date, little is known about the online shopping behaviours of New Zealanders in a pandemic environment. This paper provides the first attempt by exploring the factors affecting online shopping frequency in New Zealand, a country widely regarded as a paragon of excellence for containing the COVID-19 pandemic. A Poisson regression model is utilized to analyze data collected through an online survey between July and November 2020. The empirical results show that people's online shopping frequency is positively affected by payment convenience, competitive pricing, living in the city, and the number of children. The perceived effectiveness of the government's action in combating COVID-19, having poor past online shopping experiences, and being married reduce online shopping frequency.

Short communication: The relationship between farm debt and dairy productivity and profitability in New Zealand.

For a variety of reasons, dairy sector indebtedness has increased in recent years. However, it is not clear whether increased debt boosts or damages the economic performance of dairy farms. This paper provides empirical evidence by exploring the effects of farm debt measured by debt-to-asset ratio on dairy productivity and profitability, using the New Zealand DairyBase data of 2,637 dairy farms for a 10-yr period 2005 to 2014. A fixed-effects panel data model is utilized for the empirical analysis. The findings show that farm debt is significantly and negatively associated with both dairy productivity and profitability. We find that dairy productivity is positively determined by production intensification, irrigation intensity, milking frequency, cattle breeds and stocking rate, whereas dairy profitability is positively affected by milk price, business type, milking frequency, and stocking rate. Further analyses reveal that the debt ratio significantly decreases both the technical efficiency of dairy farms and return on assets; a high debt ratio increased dairy productivity between 2005 and 2009, whereas it decreased dairy productivity between 2011 and 2014; the effects of the debt ratio on dairy profitability vary over time. The analysis for a 10-yr balanced panel data (250 farms) shows that debt ratio does not significantly affect both dairy productivity and profitability, which suggests that the presence of farm-specific attributes such as farm life cycle and managerial ability of dairy farmers may also affect the debt ratio and through this farm performance.

Production intensification and animal health expenditure on dairy farms in New Zealand.

Although previous studies have investigated the effects of production intensification on farm economic performance and production efficiency in the dairy sector, knowledge is currently lacking on how intensification is related to farmer activities directed toward animal health outcomes. This study addresses the gap in the literature. A fixed-effects model estimated with a panel data set from New Zealand dairy farms is used to analyze the relationship between feed use intensification and animal health expenditure, controlling for a range of confounding effects. The empirical results show that, on average, feed use intensification is associated with a statistically significant increase in health expenditure per cow, and the positive effect is due primarily to the expenditure patterns of the farmers who have adopted the most intensive farming systems. The results also indicate that profitability, as measured by cash surplus, did not appear to be significantly related to the level of animal health expenditure on New Zealand dairy farms between 2005 and 2014.