Digital Commons Network^™

Weak-Form Market Efficiency And Calendar Anomalies For Eastern Europe Equity Markets, Francesco Guidi, Rakesh Gupta, Suneel Maheshwari

Suneel K. Maheshwari

No abstract provided.

Economic Freedom And Fiscal Performance: A Regression Analysis Of Indices Of Economic Freedom On Per Capita Gdp, Jason Ockey

Jason R Ockey

This paper explores whether different forms of economic freedom drive fiscal performance. We also seek to determine which specific measurements of economic freedom have the most statistically significant impacts. Though the results of our analysis show that economic freedom does impact levels of per capita GDP, the interpretation of these results is more complicated. Because some indices of economic freedom have negative effects on per capita GDP or are statistically insignificant, it is important to note that simply generally increasing a country’s overall level of economic freedom will not necessarily spur economic growth or increase fiscal performance. This paper does …

Economic Approaches To Global Regulation: Expanding The International Law And Economics Paradigm, Dan Danielsen

Dan Danielsen

The recent economic crisis has demonstrated with startling clarity the importance of developing a more robust framework for assessing the effects of national rules on global welfare. For more than fifty years, law and economics scholars have examined the effects of domestic legal rules on economic activity and general welfare in the United States. More recently, international law scholars have begun to use economic methods to analyze the international legal order. In this article I survey this evolving body of “international law and economics scholarship” with a view to articulating its principle methodological innovations as well as assessing its contributions …

Local Rules And A Global Economy: An Economic Policy Perspective, Dan Danielsen

Dan Danielsen

This article explores the growing significance and theoretical implications of ‘local rules’—such as Chinese labour standards, US financial regulation and Swiss bank secrecy rules—in the global economy. In particular, the argument developed is that Ronald Coase’s framework for analysing the effects of legal rules on economic welfare can help to reveal important weaknesses in current international legal approaches to analysing the transnational impact of local rules as well as contribute to a ‘global economic policy perspective’ better attuned to problems of power in the global regulatory order. Such a perspective will help us to see the effects of power differences …

China's Western Development Strategy: Policies, Effects And Prospects, Zheng Lu, Xiang Deng

Zheng Lu (Chinese: 路征)

China’s Western Development Strategy (WDS) has been carried out since 1999 with remarkable achievements, whereby Western China also experienced a rapid and stable development during the past decade. This paper analyzes policy actions and effects of WDS. The findings indicate that Western China’s economic development has experienced a dramatic reversion after implementation of WDS, which to a certain extent, proves that WDS has played a significant role in promoting western regions’ development. This paper also reveals some key constraints on Western China’s economic development and then offers a set of policy ideas for the next stage of Western development.

Economic Integration, Political Integration Or Both?, Daniel Brou, Michele Ruta

Daniel Brou

We study the effects of economic and political integration by presenting a model in which firms compete with each other in both an economic market—where they produce a good and compete for market share—and in a political (rent seeking) market—where they compete for transfers from the government. Growth is driven by firms’ cost-reducing innovation activity and economic and political integration affect firms’ incentive to innovate differently. In this setting, economic and political integration can be seen as complementary. Economic integration, when not accompanied by political integration, can lead to less innovation and slower growth as firms respond to increased competition …

[Review Of The Book Labor Regulation In The Global Economy], Gary Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] This is a practical and useful volume on labor standards in today’s highly globalized world. An introduction is followed by ten chapters, some of them general, talking about the ILO or the WTO, and some more specific, focusing on the United States and Europe. The general chapters cover the ILO, corporate codes of conduct, efforts to introduce labor standards into the multilateral trade regime, arguments for and against labor standards in trade, and policy implications. The specific chapters cover U.S. initiatives on child labor, labor standards in the bilateral trade agreements entered into by the United States and the …

[Review Of The Book Forecasting Retirement Needs And Retirement Wealth], Gary Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] This volume enables researchers to learn about some of the latest research findings on specific issues. It is not the place to seek an introduction to current thinking on retirement, pensions, and Social Security—the papers are too narrowly focused for that. But for current or would-he pension specialists, this volume and the larger series of which it is a part are indispensable resources.

How Does Your Kindergarten Classroom Affect Your Earnings? Evidence From Project Star, Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Nathaniel Hilger, Emmanuel Saez, Diane Schanzenbach, Danny Yagan

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

In Project STAR, 11,571 students in Tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within their schools from kindergarten to third grade. This article evaluates the long-term impacts of STAR by linking the experimental data to administrative records. We first demonstrate that kindergarten test scores are highly correlated with outcomes such as earnings at age 27, college attendance, home ownership, and retirement savings. We then document four sets of experimental impacts. First, students in small classes are significantly more likely to attend college and exhibit improvements on other outcomes. Class size does not have a significant effect on earnings …

How Well Does Bankruptcy Work When Large Financial Firms Fail? Some Lessons From Lehman Brothers, Thomas Fitzpatrick, James Thomson

James B Thomson

There is disagreement about whether large and complex financial institutions should be allowed to use U.S. bankruptcy law to reorganize when they get into financial difficulty. We look at the Lehman example for lessons about whether bankruptcy law might be a better alternative to bailouts or to resolution under the Dodd-Frank Act’s orderly liquidation authority. We find that there is no clear evidence that bankruptcy law is insufficient to handle the resolution of large complex financial firms.

Labor Standards, Economic Development, And International Trade, Gary Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] Higher real earnings at the fullest possible level of employment are the goals of those of us who work in the labor field. This paper addresses the role of labor standards in helping to achieve those goals. The United States government has two sets of interests in labor standards. The Department of Labor is supposed to "foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners of the United States, to improve their working conditions, and to advance their opportunities for profitable employment." The Agency for International Development seeks to "help the poor toward a better life" in a …

Medicare’S Bundled Payment Pilot For Acute And Postacute Care: Analysis And Recommendations On Where To Begin, Neeraj Sood, Peter Huckfeldt, Jose Escarce, David Grabowski, Joseph Newhouse

Peter J. Huckfeldt

In the National Pilot Program on Payment Bundling, a subset of Medicare providers will receive a single payment for an episode of acute care in a hospital, followed by postacute care in a skilled nursing or rehabilitation facility, the patient’s home, or other appropriate setting. This article examines the promises and pitfalls of bundled payments and addresses two important design decisions for the pilot: which conditions to include, and how long an episode should be. Our analysis of Medicare data found that hip fracture and joint replacement are good conditions to include in the pilot because they exhibit strong potential …

Can Health Insurance Reduce School Absenteeism?, Ryan Yeung

Ryan Yeung

Enacted in 1997, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) represented the largest expansion of U.S. public health care coverage since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid 32 years earlier. Although the program has recently been reauthorized, there remains a considerable lack of thorough and well-designed evaluations of the program. In this study, we use school attendance as a measure of the program’s impact. Utilizing state-level data and the use of fixed-effects regression techniques, we conclude that SCHIP has had a positive and significant effect on state average daily attendance rates, as measured by both SCHIP participation and eligibility rates. …

But That’S Not What Economic Mobility Is!, Gary Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] How many times have you attended a talk or read a paper on economic mobility and thought, “What you are talking about is not what I am interested in”? Not only do different people have different ideas about what economic mobility is, but they have different clear ideas about what economic mobility is. The purpose of this paper is to present the essential features of the different economic mobility concepts that are found in the literature.

How Do Environmental And Natural Resource Economics Texts Deal With The Simple Model Of The Intertemporal Allocation Of A Nonrenewable Resource, Robert Main

Robert S. Main

Textbooks in Environmental and Natural Resource Economics invariably deal with the problem of allocating a non-renewable resource over time. The simplest version of that problem is the case of a resource that is to be allocated over two periods. The resource has a constant Marginal Extraction Cost (MEC). Most textbooks treat this case before moving on to more complex and realistic cases. This paper suggests the results that should be emphasized and the method that should be used to arrive at those results. It also points out the possible confusions that should be avoided. Finally, it examines how several well-known …

Grossman's Missing Health Threshold, Titus Galama, Arie Kapteyn

Titus Galama

We present a generalized solution to Grossman’s model of health capital (1972), relaxing the widely used assumption that individuals can adjust their health stock instantaneously to an “optimal” level without adjustment costs. The Grossman model then predicts the existence of a health threshold above which individuals do not demand medical care. Our generalized solution addresses a significant criticism: the model’s prediction that health and medical care are positively related is consistently rejected by the data. We suggest structural- and reduced-form equations to test our generalized solution and contrast the predictions of the model with the empirical literature.

Medical Expenditure Measures In The Health And Retirement Study, Dana Goldman, Julie Zissimopoulos, Yang Lu

Yang Lu

This paper reviews out-of-pocket (OOP) medical expenditure measures collected in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Medical expenditures are an important cost of poor health. Medical expenditure measures are important for understanding retirement decisions, financial preparation for retirement, and predicting the consequences of health care reform, particularly Medicare reform. Despite the comprehensiveness of the HRS, there are always limitations to what can be learned from population interviews. To assess the quality of current HRS measures of OOP spending, we compare various measures of OOP spending across survey waves to the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) and Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey …

Who Would Be Affected By Soda Taxes?, Diane Schanzenbach, Leslie Mcgranahan

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

In 2009–10, 17 states considered expanding taxation on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) as a potential source of funds and a means to curb obesity. This article examines the various types of soda tax proposals, the underlying economic theory, and the anticipated impact of the proposed taxes on different population groups.

Economic Growth And Income Convergence In Ethiopia: A Critique, Asayehgn Desta

Asayehgn Desta

Sense Of Place: Perth Community Attitude Towards Places Of Significance On The Gnangara Groundwater System, Sorada Tapsuwan, Zoe Leviston, David Tucker

Sorada Tapsuwan

Climate change is exacerbating an ever increasing demand on Perth's traditional water sources. One of these water sources is the Gnangara Groundwater System (GGS). Land uses above the Groundwater System directly affects water infiltration and subsequent aquifer recharge and, as such, need to be carefully considered to ensure future water supply security for Perth. Community acceptance has been demonstrated to be an integral component of effective land use planning. The psychological concept of Sense of Place (incorporating the notions of identity, attachment and dependence) can be used to predict intention to accept or reject land use planning decisions. Results from …

New Models For Book Publishing, Kwanghui Lim

Kwanghui Lim

No abstract provided.

A Review Of Social And Economic Drivers Of Community Acceptance And Adoption Of Decentralised Water Systems, Aditi Mankad, Sorada Tapsuwan

Sorada Tapsuwan

The aim of this paper is to highlight key social and economic drivers crucial to understanding community acceptance and adoption of decentralised water systems. The review focused on social science literature pertaining to alternative forms of household water, with an emphasis on research examining decentralised water acceptance. Researchers consistently reported that most communities were open to alternative water sources for domestic applications; however, this was highly dependent upon the level of personal contact with the water. Acceptance and adoption of alternative water technology, such as decentralised systems, was influenced by risk perception, water culture, and threat perception. Motivational drivers were …

Using Examiner Assignment To Estimate Causal Effects Of Ssdi Receipt, Nicole Maestas, Kathleen Mullen, Alexander Strand

Nicole Maestas

We present the first estimates of the causal effect of SSDI receipt on the labor supply generalizable to the entire population of program entrants in the present day system. We take advantage of a unique workload management database to match Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) applicants to disability examiners, and use natural variation in examiners’ allowance rates to estimate the labor supply effects of SSDI. Because applicants are randomly assigned to examiners (conditional on observable characteristics), examiner-specific allowance rates can be used to instrument for the allowance decision in a labor supply equation contrasting denied vs. allowed applicants. We find …

Experimental Evidence On The Effect Of Childhood Investments On Postsecondary Attainment And Degree Completion, Susan Dynarski, Joshua Hyman, Diane Schanzenbach

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

This paper examines the effect of early childhood investments on college enrollment and degree completion. We use the random assignment in the Project STAR experiment to estimate the effect of smaller classes in primary school on college entry, college choice, and degree completion. We improve on existing work in this area with unusually detailed data on college enrollment spells and the previously unexplored outcome of college degree completion. We find that assignment to a small class increases the probability of attending college by 2.7 percentage points, with effects more than twice as large among blacks. Among those with the lowest …

Changes In Body Mass During Elementary And Middle School In A National Cohort Of Kindergarteners., Ashlesha Datar, Roland Sturm, Victoria Shier

Roland Sturm

Abstract OBJECTIVE: To analyze changes in BMI, according to gender and race/ethnicity, in a nationally representative cohort of children in the United States during their elementary and middle school years to identify critical periods of excess BMI gains. METHODS: The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class monitored a nationally representative cohort of kindergarten students over 9 years (1998-2007). Height and weight measurements were available for 4240 white, 640 black, and 1070 Hispanic children in kindergarten and 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 8th grades. In each wave, we estimated the proportions of children with BMI values in each quartile of the Centers for …

Economic Status And Coping Mechanisms Of Individuals Seeking Hiv Care In Uganda, Sebastian Linnemayr, Brooke Stearns Lawson, Peter Glick, Glenn Wagner

Sebastian Linnemayr

This study uses novel data to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the demographic and economic circumstances facing HIV-positive individuals who have just entered HIV care in Uganda. While the provision of HIV care and ART may improve physical health, to achieve the broader goal of improving the quality of life and socioeconomic viability of people living with HIV/AIDS, appropriate social and economic programs may need to complement treatment. We report results from baseline data of a longitudinal, prospective cohort study with a 12-month follow-up period in two Ugandan HIV clinics. We use t-tests to examine differences across sample subpopulations and …

Technology & Torts: A Theory Of Memory Costs, Nondurable Precautions And Interference Effects, Ben Depoorter

Ben Depoorter

This Article examines the influence of nondurable precaution technologies on the expansion of tort awards. We provide four contributions to the literature. First, we present a general, formal model on durable and non-durable precaution technology that focuses on memory costs. Second, because liability exposure creates interference, we argue that tort law perpetuates the expansion of awards. Third, because plaintiffs do not consider the social costs of interference effects, private litigation induces socially excessive suits. Fourth, while new harm-reducing technologies likely increase accident rates, such technologies also raise the ratio of trial costs to harm, leaving undetermined the overall effect of …

Sheep And Their Herders: Testing The Myth Of Rational Voters – A Latvian Case Study, Daniel Brou, Kirk Collins, Brent Mckenzie

Daniel Brou

Through the use of a simple behavioural political economy model, we cast doubt on the assumption that voters behave in predictable ways dependent on their expected support for government policies. We show that under certain conditions an unfavourable (i.e. welfare reducing) policy may result, even with well-informed, welfare maximising voters. While true that voter behaviour may align with government policies, this alignment has more to do with a perceived lack of influence, rather than policy support. The case of Latvia's accession to the European Union is used as a case study to evaluate the government's policy in terms of voting …

Lost Jobs And Health Insurance: An Analysis Of The Impact Of Employment Volatility On Firm-Provided Health Insurance Coverage, Fredrik Andersson, Iben Bolvig, Matthew Freedman, Julia Lane

Matthew Freedman

It is an established fact that there are high levels of employment volatility in the United States. Despite the importance of employer-provided benefits in the U.S. insurance system, the impact of prior job instability on one’s future ability to obtain insurance coverage is not well understood. This paper finds a negative relationship between the volatility of a worker’s employment and her likelihood of receiving firm-provided health insurance. Previous employment volatility reduces each of the four factors necessary to receive such insurance: a worker’s subsequent chances of getting a job, her chances of getting a job in a firm that offers …

Low-Income Housing Development And Crime, Matthew Freedman, Emily Owens

Matthew Freedman