Revisiting the relationship between suicide and unemployment: Evidence from linear and nonlinear cointegration

This study employs the linear and nonlinear ARDL cointegration methodologies to examine the potential symmetric and asymmetric responses of suicide rates to unemployment rates in the US from 1928 to 2013. Our results suggest that suicide rates are pro-cyclical with respect to the business cycle (measured by changes in the unemployment rate) after extensively controlling for divorce and fertility rates. Unemployment has symmetric long-run effects on the age-adjusted suicide rate and four age-specific (from ages 25–34 to 55–64) suicide rates, while the effect of an economic expansion on suicide rates for those aged over 45 is greater than the effect of an economic recession. These findings imply that the effect of an economic expansion on the decrease of the suicide rate is higher than the effect of an economic recession on the increase of the suicide rate for individuals aged over 45. Therefore, intervention designed to reduce suicidal behaviors should emphasize periods of economic recession more than periods of economic expansion for those of middle age and beyond.     

A Bayesian analysis of suicide data

The identification of change points in a sequence of suicide rates is one of the fundamental aspects of Durkheim’s theory. The specification of a statistical standard suitable for this purpose is the main condition for making inferences about the causes of suicide with distinctive trends of persistency and variability just as Durkheim theorized. At present, the statistical ‘strategy’ employed by the French social scientist is too ‘rudimentary’. A hundred years later, I take the opportunity to test Durkheim’s theory through modern methodological instruments, specifically the Bayesian change-point analysis. First of all, I analyzed the same suicide data which Durkheim took into consideration. Change-point analysis corroborates the Durkheimian analysis revealing the same change-points identified by the author. Secondly, I analyzed Italian suicide rates from 1864 to 2005. The change-point analysis was very useful. Durkheim’s theory ‘works’ until 1961: suicides rates increased as industrial development increased. However, after 1961 and the economic boom, they declined, and when they began increasing again, after 1984, they did not reach the same level as before. This finding obliges us to ‘adjust’ the Durkheim’s theory giving space to Halbwach’s convergence law. Therefore, as high economic and social development levels are attained, suicide rates tend to level-off: People adapt to the stress of modernization associated to low social integration levels. Although we are more ‘egoist’, individualism does not destroy identity and the sense of life as Durkheim had maintained.     

Economic Integration of Immigrants

A bstract . This empirical study of the processes by which immigrants are absorbed into the economy and society of their host country was conducted among 500 families who had arrived in Israel from 3 to 13 years earlier. The following variables were found to have a positive impact on their economic integration: white collar occupations of husband and wife, young age , small size of the family , residence in proximity to a central city in contrast to living in a development town , and greater length of their stay in the host country. Analysis showed, however, that economic integration had no significant impact on any of the other indices of absorption, including the general index of "rootedness in the country." Hence for immigrants who come to the host country and remain a significant length of time—in the case of this sample, at least three years—more resources should be allocated to their cultural and social integration and less to the economic aspects of absorption. The study showed that there is at least one salient malleable variable, town of residence ; it can be controlled because most immigrants to Israel depend on the government for housing. Further research is needed on immigrants who migrated a second time during early years in their stay; they were not included in this study. It may be that, for this latter group, economic integration is a crucial aspect of absorption.     

A compositional approach to regional socio-economic impact assessment

Economic and social impact assessments of developmental initiatives are often undertaken by independent analysts and rarely is an integral approach adopted. It is here argued that economic impact assessment can facilitate social impact assessment and simultaneously improve the accuracy of employment estimation, by distinguishing between various socio-demographic groups. In turn, the assessment of the socio-demographic composition of the local community has direct implications for the accuracy of the economic impact assessment. A methodology for a more integrated approach to economic and social impact assessment is developed herein and is empirically estimated. Compared to traditional, independent approaches, it is held that this approach yields improved estimates of changes in a community's employment and socio-demographic structure.     

Impact of the Great Recession on unemployed and NEET individuals’ labour market transitions in Ireland

The impact that the Great Recession has had on countries’ labour markets has been well documented. In Ireland, the contraction in economic activity that took place resulted in the country's overall unemployment rate increasing from 4.6% in 2006 to 15% in 2012. The country's youth unemployment rate rose from 9.9% to 33% over the same time period, while the proportion of NEETs increased from 10.1% in 2006 to 18.7% in 2012. Policymakers are aware of the unemployment rates of young and prime-aged people as well as the NEETs rate. However, little is known about these groups’ profiles, whether their profiles have changed since the recession and also their labour market transition patterns pre and post the Great Recession. Given the importance of this information in the design of effective activation measures to assist unemployed and NEET individuals, this paper examines each of these issues in turn. Overall, the study found for all three groups examined that the rate of transition to employment fell dramatically between 2006 and 2011. The analysis showed that the drop in the groups’ transition rates was not due to changes in the underlying sub-group population structures but to changes in the external environment that resulted in the impact of possessing certain characteristics changing over the recession. For example, education and nationality have become more important in finding a job in Ireland over the course of the recession, while there has been a fall in the scarring impact of unemployment durations.     

The impact of territorially concentrated FDI on local labor markets: Evidence from the Czech Republic

This paper investigates the impact of a large and territorially concentrated foreign direct investment (FDI) inflow on local labor market outcomes in the Czech Republic. A conditional difference-in-differences technique is employed for an estimation of the impact and block bootstrapping is used for computing consistent standard errors. The results indicate a positive and statistically as well as economically significant effect of a large investment project on the local unemployment outflow rate, which is driven mainly by increases in the aggregate unemployment exit hazard rates for unemployment durations smaller than nine months. Subsequent to the investment, the unemployment rate decreased by 1.7 percentage points and the employment rate increased by 3.7 percentage points in the host district. However, the impact on long-term unemployed was negligible as the exit hazard rates for durations longer than nine months remain unchanged. Moreover, a simple cost–benefit analysis suggests that investment incentives paid from a state budget would pay off only in a horizon of twelve years.     

HOW DOES FEMALE EDUCATION AFFECT FERTLITY? A STRUCTURAL MODEL FOR THE CÔTE D'IVOIRE†

This research study provides some insights into methodological issues in modeling fertility and its proximate determinants. The aim is to examine the links between female schooling and fertility in the Ivory Coast. The article first presents a brief literature review on the effect of education on fertility, describes the data and choice of econometric models, and indicates in a reduced form model the estimates of the impact of education and other socioeconomic factors on age at cohabitation and duration of breast feeding. Data are obtained from the 1986 Cote d'Ivoire Living Standards Survey among women aged 16 years or older. A probit model is used to estimate the probability of a woman having given birth at least once. The Kaplan-Meier hazard rate (Meyer's method) is used to explain women's age at cohabitation as a function of her education, personal characteristics, and local factors such as wage rates an social service infrastructure. Duration of breast feeding is explained by household characteristics as well as cohabitation explanatory variables among a subsample of women with at least one birth. Findings from the age at cohabitation models indicate that results varied with choice of the hazard models. Controls for unobserved heterogeneity were important for estimating the effects of secondary education. Econometric techniques that captured the heaping in duration of breast feeding data did not improve the fit. Both breast feeding and education were endogenous to fertility. This means that women with more children tended to marry later and breast feed longer. Findings indicate that primary schooling had a weak impact on fertility and proximate determinants. Secondary schooling had a strong impact. Women with secondary schooling cohabited 4 years later and breast fed 8 months less than non-schooled women.     

Corporate social and environmental disclosure as a sustainable development tool provided by board sub-committees: Do women directors play a relevant moderating role?

The aim of this research is to examine the impact of three audit committee characteristics on corporate social and environmental responsibility (CSR) disclosure: the existence of an audit committee, audit committee independence, and audit committee financial expertise. Moreover, this research analyzes the moderating effect of board gender diversity between these audit committees' attributes and CSR reporting. The results of analyzing 13,178 firm-year observations of non-financial companies show that the presence of an audit committee and audit committee financial expertise are positively associated with CSR disclosure. However, a higher proportion of non-executive directors in audit committees has a negative effect on the disclosure of CSR information. These findings suggest that some audit committees' features play an important role in ensuring the reporting of environmental, social, and economic information. Our evidence also indicates that the presence of female directors on boards increases the positive impact of financial expert membership of audit committees on CSR disclosure, while women directors moderate any negative effect of the percentage of independent directors on audit committees on CSR reporting by increasing the latter. In addition, female directors moderate the positive impact of the existence of an audit committee on the disclosure of CSR information by reducing the latter.     

女性思维下的生态小城镇建设思路探索——寻找沙河子镇的“小城小幸福”

沙河子镇是商洛市唯一的省级重点示范镇,该镇城镇化建设在男性思维指引下有跑偏之势,生态问题引发的一系列社会问题严重影响社会和谐。为此,笔者建议该镇在男性理性思维的基础上,激活潜在的女性感性思维,积极发挥女性思维中天然的贴近度和亲和力,凸现以人为中心的城镇生态化建设。     

Corruption, Growth, and Income Distribution: Are there Regional Differences?

This paper uses panel data from 61 countries at different stages of economic development over a 20-year period to investigate regional differences in the effect of corruption on economic growth and income distribution. Using two measures of corruption, we find that there are statistically significant regional differences in the growth and distributional impacts of corruption. The largest growth impact of corruption is found in African countries while OECD and Asian countries have the lowest growth impact. On the other hand, the largest distributional impact of corruption in found in Latin America. A 10% decrease in corruption increases the growth rate of income by about 1.7% in OECD and Asian countries, 2.6% in Latin American countries, and by 2.8% in African countries. A one standard deviation decrease in corruption decreases the gini coefficient of income distribution (0–1 scale) by 0.05 points, 0.14 points, 0.25 points, and 0.33 points in OECD, Asian, African, and Latin American countries, respectively. The results are robust to various specifications, measurement of corruption, measures of investment, as well as the conditioning variables. The results have interesting policy implications for economic growth, especially in low income countries with high rates of corruption.     

财税政策影响产业升级的理论机制分析——基于地方政府竞争视角

财税政策通过促进关键生产要素流入可促进产业升级。通过构建动态模型分析地方政府财税竞争对要素流动、社会福利及产业升级的影响。研究发现,提高生产要素的税率不仅会导致该生产要素外流,还会导致其他生产要素外流;在税率变化冲击下,要素存量调整至新的均衡状态与生产函数凹性和调整成本函数凸性有关;对发达地区落后产业实行高综合税率以及新兴产业实行低综合税率会促进地区产业升级,对落后地区实行低综合税率会促进地区经济发展和产业升级;政府的财税协调有利于地区间实现产业升级和提高社会福利水平;地区居民对企业的持股份额会影响地区福利水平。     

Board gender diversity and environmental,social, and economic value creation: Does family ownership matter?

Prior literature on firm value creation for stakeholders has oversimplified and narrowed the concept of value down to “economic returns.” Although economic returns are fundamental to a firm's core stakeholders (i.e., shareholders), other legitimate stakeholders want “value” beyond economic returns. We define stakeholder value as the financial and nonfinancial returns a firm can offer to its legitimate stakeholders, and empirically investigate whether board gender diversity (BGD) improves our multidimensional measure of value. Using Thomson Reuters' ASSET4 data for U.K.‐listed firms available from Eikon for the period 2007–2017, we report a significant positive relationship between BGD and stakeholder value creation. In particular, BGD increases social and environmental value creation in addition to economic returns. Furthermore, our results suggest that even though gender‐diverse boards are associated with stakeholder value creation in family firms, this is only conspicuous for environmental value creation. The findings suggest that although female directors cater to the interests of broader stakeholder groups, family ownership causes them to mainly focus on environmental stakeholders. The study provides important implications for regulators, stakeholders, and academic scholars.     

Nonlinear relationship between economic growth and nuances of globalisation with income stratification: Roles of financial development and governance

We study the effect of overall globalisation on economic growth in a neoclassical macroeconomic growth model. We further assess our model by considering the decomposed measures of globalisation including economic, political, and social globalisation components. To this end, we estimate panel data models by applying the cross-sectional dependency-autoregressive distributed lags (CS-ARDL) approach to a sample of 116 countries during the available period, 1980–2015. We classified our sample into upper middle-, lower middle-, and high-income groups to minimise country-specific heterogeneity. Our results affirm the presence of a quadratic (nonlinear) U-shaped relationship between the overall globalisation (including the economic, political, social components) and economic growth for the lower middle- and upper middle-income group. However, they provide evidence of a positive linear relationship between globalisation and economic growth for the high-income countries. Given the arguments that the impact of globalisation on growth is conditional on local financial development (FD) and quality of governance (QoG), we incorporate their role. We provide fresh evidence that the impacts of globalisation on economic growth are more profound in the countries with a higher QoG and a higher deepening of FD. We further check the robustness of our analysis applying the U test and dynamic generalised methods of moment approach. We also provide policy implications.     

Policies to support ethnic minority enterprise: the English experience

Using Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data for 29 countries this study investigates the (differential) impact of several factors on female and male entrepreneurship at the country level. These factors are derived from three streams of literature, including that on entrepreneurship in general, on female labour force participation and on female entrepreneurship. The paper deals with the methodological aspects of investigating (female) entrepreneurship by distinguishing between two measures of female entrepreneurship: the number of female entrepreneurs and the share of women in the total number of entrepreneurs. The first measure is used to investigate whether variables have an impact on entrepreneurship in general (influencing both the number of female and male entrepreneurs). The second measure is used to investigate whether factors have a differential relative impact on female and male entrepreneurship, i.e. whether they influence the diversity or gender composition of entrepreneurship. Findings indicate that – by and large – female and male entrepreneurial activity rates are influenced by the same factors and in the same direction. However, for some factors (e.g. unemployment, life satisfaction) we find a differential impact on female and male entrepreneurship. The present study also shows that the factors influencing the number of female entrepreneurs may be different from those influencing the share of female entrepreneurs. In this light it is important that governments are aware of what they want to accomplish (i.e. do they want to stimulate the number of female entrepreneurs or the gender composition of entrepreneurship) to be able to select appropriate policy measures.     

Effects of social and cultural processes on health1

Future advances in the planning and evaluation of health service systems are highly dependent upon the development of a methodology that permits the empirical validation of hypotheses concerning the effects of social and cultural processes on health. In this paper such a methodology has been proposed. A structural model has been developed and analyzed, using the causal modeling technique of path analysis, in which social, economic, and demographic characteristics of New Mexico counties have been related to the infant mortality rate as an index of health. Path coefficients have been estimated from census data and vital statistics. Dynamic programming has been utilized to predict the combined direct and indirect effects on the health of New Mexico's population that would result from changes in the composition of the population.Analysis of the model suggests that these structural characteristics are causally interrelated, with economic factors a major determinant of infant mortality. While urbanization and migration also significantly affect infant mortality rates, education surprisingly is not important causally when compared to other variables, nor is proportion nonwhite when other social and economic factors are taken into account. In contrast, the proportion of Spanish-Americans residing in a county has a rather unexpected effect in that infant mortality rates decline as the proportion of this ethnic group rises. This finding suggests that it is important in health planning to consider cultural factors that may be unique to particular ethnic groups.In general the model building techniques and the algorithms presented here provide a valuable means of generating and testing hypotheses regarding the effects of social and cultural processes on health.     

The Determinants and Impact of State Abortion Restrictions

This paper shows that a state's abortion policy is determined by the strength of interest advocacy groups and political forces. The greater the membership in the National Abortion Rights Action League, the percentage of female state legislators and the percentage of Democratic female legislators, the less restrictive a state's abortion policy. The greater a state's population that are Roman Catholics, the more restrictive a state's abortion policy. The paper also estimates the impact abortion restrictions have on a state's abortion rate. The empirical results show that abortion restrictions have no statistically significant impact on a state's abortion rate. A state's abortion restrictions do not significantly increase out-of-state abortions.     

外来人口社会融合与中国城市创新

构建社会融合综合指标以及经济、心理、行为、身份各个融合分指标,建立联立方程研究外来人口社会融合对城市创新的影响。结果表明：社会融合和城镇化水平的提升并没有提高城市创新能力,只有建立在社会融合基础上的城镇化才能促进城市创新水平的提升;经济融合、社会融合、文化和行为融合并没有带来城市创新能力的提升,脱离社会融合的城镇化水平对城市创新的影响为负,但城镇化和社会融合四个维度的交互项对城市创新水平的影响为正;人力资本水平和城市规模以及两个变量与社会融合的交互项都有助于提升城市创新水平,说明在相同的社会融合水平下,人力资本水平越高的群体对城市创新能力的影响越大;与中小城市相比,在特大和超大城市中社会融合水平的提升对城市创新能力的影响更大。     

NONLINEAR GROWTH EFFECTS OF TAXATION: A SEMI‐PARAMETRIC APPROACH USING AVERAGE MARGINAL TAX RATES

One of the major challenges of empirical tax research is the identification and calculation of appropriate tax data. While there is consensus that average marginal tax rates are most suitable for studying the effects of tax policy on economic growth, because of data limitations the calculation of marginal tax rates has been limited to the USA and the UK. This paper provides calculations of average marginal tax rates for the four Scandinavian countries using the methodologies of Seater (1982, 1985) and Barro and Sahasakul (1983, 1986). Then, by pooling the newly calculated tax rates for the Scandinavian countries with the data for the USA and the UK, we investigate the effects of tax policy shocks on the per capita GDP growth rate. Our results suggest that an increase in average marginal tax rates has a negative impact on economic growth. Employing additive mixed panel models with penalized splines as estimation approach, we show that changes in tax rates have nonlinear effects. Increasing average marginal tax rates turn out to be the most distorting at relatively moderate tax rates. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

In search for yield? Survey-based evidence on bank risk taking

Monetary policy can have an impact on economic and financial stability through the risk taking of banks. Falling interest rates might induce investment into risky activities. This paper provides evidence on the link between monetary policy and bank risk taking. We use a factor-augmented vector autoregressive model (FAVAR) for the US for the period 1997–2008. Besides standard macroeconomic indicators, we include factors summarizing information provided in the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Terms of Business Lending (STBL). These data provide information on banks׳ new loans as well as interest rates for different loan risk categories and different banking groups. We identify a risk-taking channel of monetary policy by distinguishing responses to monetary policy shocks across different types of banks and different loan risk categories. Following an expansionary monetary policy shock, small domestic banks increase their exposure to risk. Large domestic banks do not change their risk exposure. Foreign banks take on more risk only in the mid-2000s, when interest rates were ‘too low for too long’.