Health and political regimes: Evidence from quantile regression

This study investigates how political regimes affect health conditions such as infant and child mortality rates and life expectancy using data from 180 countries observed between 1960 and 2013. Panel quantile regression is used to examine the effects at different intervals throughout the distribution of health outcomes. The estimation results indicate that democracy has significant positive effects on health outcomes and that its impacts are greater when health outcomes are worse. These results are robust to different democracy and health indices. The effects of different types of democracies and dictatorships are also considered, that is parliamentary, mixed (semi-presidential) and presidential democracies, and civilian, military and royal dictatorships. The parliamentary form of democracy has the largest positive impact on health outcomes at the worst quantile of health outcomes, although the difference in the impacts of the three types of democracies is not necessarily large. Furthermore, all types of dictatorships have a negative impact on health outcomes, with military dictatorship having the worst outcome when health outcomes are worse. Finally, the effects of democratization on health outcomes are significantly positive when the health outcomes are worse.     

Social capital and well-being in the Italian provinces

Recent years witnessed a growing interest in the concept of well-being and quality of life, as alternative to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The determinants of well-being, especially at the regional and provincial levels, is understudied in a macro perspective, as opposed to a micro perspective (individuals, survey data) that has been the dominant approach until recently. In this paper, we estimate an empirical model for the Italian NUTS-3 provinces to evaluate the role of social capital on well-being by using aggregated (provincial) data. Our findings suggest that social capital, social security programs, income, and grant-making activities by Bank Foundations, even though not uniformly distributed across Italy, positively affect well-being, thus contributing to explain the persistent dualism that characterizes the Italian economy.     

The impact of research collaboration on academic performance: An empirical analysis for some European countries

The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of internal and external research collaborations on the scientific performance of academic institutions. The data are derived from the international SCOPUS database. We consider both quantity (the number of publications) and quality indicators (the field-weighted citation impact and the share of publications in the 10% most-cited articles) to evaluate universities' performance in some European countries (Germany, France, Italy, the UK and Russia). To this end, we develop a non-overlapping generations model to evidence the theoretical idea of research externalities between academic institutions. Moreover, we implement an empirical model to determine the extent to which the impact of internal and external collaborations on universities' performance is sensitive to the geographical dimension of the data.     

Do Air Quality Alerts Affect Household Migration?

This article examines the effect of air quality information on immigration and emigration of households in California counties by measuring the change in the number of air quality alert days. Based on panel data for 2000–2014, I find evidence suggesting that more frequent air quality alerts reduce the rate of population growth in a county by decreasing immigration of households. This is driven by “Unhealthy” air alerts, which signals weaker air quality than “Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups.” The negative impacts on immigration are larger for high household income counties and are strongest when there is a sharp increase in the number of air quality alerts.     

Board directors with foreign experience and stock price crash risk: Evidence from China

This study examines the impact of board directors with foreign experience (BDFEs) on stock price crash risk. We find that BDFEs help reduce crash risk. This association is robust to a series of robustness checks, including a firm fixed effects model, controlling for possibly omitted variables, and instrumental variable estimations. Moreover, we find that the negative association between BDFEs and crash risk is more pronounced for firms with more agency problems, weaker corporate governance, and less overall transparency. Our findings suggest that the characteristics of board directors matter in determining stock price crash risk.     

Policy induced increases in private healthcare financing provide short-term relief of total healthcare expenditure growth: Evidence from OECD countries

Healthcare reforms have long been advocated as a cure to the increasing healthcare expenditures in advanced economies. Nevertheless, it has not been established whether a market solution via private financing, rather than public financing, curb aggregate healthcare expenditures. To our knowledge, this paper is the first that quantifies the impact of reforms that significantly increases (decreases) the private (public) share of healthcare financing on total healthcare expenditures relative to income in 20 OECD countries. Our reform measure is based on structural break testing of the private share of total expenditures, and verification using evidence of policy reforms. To quantify the effect of these reforms we apply Propensity Score Matching and Inverse Probability Weighted regression analysis. Over a 5-year evaluation period the reforms lead to an accumulated cost saving 0.45 percentage points of GDP. The yearly effects of the reforms are largest in the first years in the post-reform period and decreases in size as a function of time since the reform. Our findings suggest that the investigated healthcare reforms have a relatively short-lived effect on aggregate health spending relative to GDP. The findings are robust to various sensitivity tests.     

Programme Evaluation with Unobserved Heterogeneity and Selective Implementation: The Mexican PROGRESA Impact on Child Nutrition

This paper considers the impact of Programa de Educación, Salud y Alimentación ( PROGRESA ), a large Mexican rural anti-poverty programme that had an evaluation sample in which overall treatment was randomly assigned to some communities but not others, on child nutrition. When we examine the impact of PROGRESA based on the presumption of randomized allocations, we find that PROGRESA had no or even a negative impact on child nutrition. However, not all children designated to receive nutritional supplements actually did so. Our preferred estimates – child fixed-effects estimates that control for unobserved heterogeneity that is correlated with access to the supplement – indicate a significantly positive and fairly substantial programme effect of the nutritional supplements on children 12–36 months. They imply an increase of about a sixth in mean growth per year for these children and a lower probability of stunting. Effects are somewhat larger for children from poorer communities but whose mothers are functionally literate. The long-term consequences of these improvements are non-trivial; its impact working through adult height alone could result in a 2.9% increase in lifetime earnings.     

Construct measurement in strategic management research: illusion or reality?

Strategic management research has been characterized as placing less emphasis on construct measurement than other management subfields. In this work, we document the state of the art of measurement in strategic management research, and discuss the implications for interpreting the results of research in this field. To assess the breadth of measurement issues in the discipline, we conducted a content analysis of empirical strategic management articles published in leading journals in the period of 1998–2000. We found that few studies discuss reliability and validity issues, and empirical research in the field commonly relies on single‐indicator measures. Additionally, studies rarely address the problems of attenuation due to measurement error. We close with a discussion of the implications for future research and for interpreting prior work in strategic management. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The impact of regulation on market risk

While it is crucial to understand the impact of regulatory changes on market risk, the literature does not show how risk responds to expected regulatory changes that are specifically designed to change risk. Our paper fills this gap by providing a detailed study of one such case. Using both a sample of privatized U.K. companies, and U.K. and U.S. control portfolios, between 1993 and 2000, we show (both for the single-factor market model and the three-factor Fama-French model) that the observed changes in market risk are significant and consistent with theory.     

Public and Private Education in an Integrated Europe: Studying to Migrate and Teaching to Stay?

This paper investigates public and private choices between internationally applicable and country‐specific education when graduates are mobile. Human capital depends on innate skills and study effort with either type of education. It is shown that national governments provide too few students with internationally applicable education, and too many with country‐specific education. This effect is mitigated, but not entirely eliminated, by the introduction of a graduate tax, according to which graduates are required to pay part of their taxes to the country where they received their education, regardless of residence. However, private educational choices are socially optimal with suitably differentiated tuition fees.