Rapid population growth and uneven transport infrastructure development remain pivotal challenges in many developing countries. This study examines the relationship between population characteristics and transport infrastructure. The data used in the study is the village-level data from the Socioeconomic High-resolution Rural-Urban Geographic (SHRUG), a database in India.. Transport infrastructure is measured by five indicators: paved roads, bus services, national highways, state highways, and major district roads. Population density is the main explanatory variable, while the number of households and total population are included as robustness checks. Linear Probability Models (LPM) are used for the main analysis. The results show that population density is positively associated with all five measures of transport infrastructure. Similar positive relationships are found when the number of households and total population are used as alternative population measures, supporting the robustness of the findings. These results indicate that villages with larger populations are more likely to have better transport infrastructure. This study provides empirical evidence that population characteristics are closely associated with transport infrastructure development. The findings highlight the importance of considering population distribution in infrastructure planning and may provide useful insights for transport policy and balanced regional development in developing countries.

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This paper examines the internship dilemma among Chinese college students, focusing on how internships have changed from supplementary learning experiences into informal prerequisites for graduate employment. Against the background of higher education expansion, credential inflation, and intensified competition for stable jobs, the paper asks why internship competition has become increasingly unequal and how it affects youth development and social mobility. Drawing on recent literature on graduate employability, internship inequality, and employment anxiety, the paper uses credential inflation, signaling theory, social capital, and class reproduction as its main analytical framework. It argues that internships now operate as a new screening mechanism that rewards not only individual effort and ability, but also family resources, social networks, and familiarity with professional norms. As a result, internship competition may reproduce class inequality, intensify employment anxiety, and weaken the promise of higher education as a pathway to upward mobility. The paper further suggests that universities, employers, and policymakers should expand accessible internship opportunities, regulate unpaid or exploitative internships, strengthen career support for disadvantaged students, and reduce excessive reliance on internship experience in recruitment.

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Developed-market evidence generally predicts lower acquirer returns when targets are publicly listed, because bidding competition, liquidity, and overpayment transfer more gains to target shareholders. In China, however, a listed target may bundle operating assets with a scarce financing and restructuring platform, disclosure credibility, and regulatory safety. Using China Stock Market & Accounting Research (CSMAR) M&A records and daily returns, this paper studies Chinese A-share listed acquirers. The event-level dataset contains 18,859 announcements and the clean event-study sample contains 12,596 observations. Average market-adjusted cumulative abnormal return (CAR) is 0.76% over [-3,+3] and 1.29% over [-10,+10]. Acquisitions involving listed targets are associated with significantly higher announcement returns across baseline specifications, narrower windows, and market-model returns. In the full model, the target-listed coefficient is 1.27 percentage points for CAR over [-3,+3] and 1.72 percentage points for CAR over [-10,+10]. State-owned acquirers also earn higher conditional returns after firm characteristics, transaction variables, momentum, and fixed effects are controlled for. The evidence supports a platform-acquisition interpretation in which investors price the financing, restructuring, transparency, and regulatory attributes attached to listed targets. The estimates remain conditional announcement-return evidence rather than causal evidence on long-run integration.

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This study focuses on the impact mechanism and repair path of the negative public opinion of Xiaohongshu user-generated content (UGC) on the beauty brand trust of female consumers aged 20-30 in the first and second-tier cities from 2023 to 2026. In recent years, Xiaohongshu has become the main platform for beauty consumption decisions by virtue of the decentralized UGC ecology. In the context of "acquaintance trust", its content dissemination mode is essentially different from that of traditional social platforms; consumers' trust in "real experience of similar people" is much higher than the brand's official advertisements. At the same time, the excessive commercialization of the platform has led to the proliferation of hidden advertising and doubts about the authenticity of the content. The destructive power of negative public opinions has been significantly amplified. This paper adopts the method of literature research and questionnaire survey, and a total of 287 valid questionnaires were collected and analyzed. The study found that 92.0% of respondents had been exposed to negative UGC of beauty brands, and 68.3% experienced a significant decline in trust. The content related to product safety has the strongest impact. The effectiveness of the repair strategy follows the rule that "substantive action is better than a sincere gesture or a symbolic statement", and the trust damage caused by negative public opinion is long-term and incompletely reversible. This study extends the trust anchor drift theory to the consumer empirical level, and provides reference for the trust management of beauty brands.

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