Does the Confucius institute impact international travel to China? A panel data analysis

This article examines the impact of Confucius Institutes on inbound travel to China. We estimate a panel gravity model of inbound tourism flows to China between 2004 and 2010. We use a Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood estimator to control for heteroscedasticity endemic in gravity models (Santos Silva and Tenreyro, 2006). We find that the presence of Confucius Institute(s) in the source country increases overall tourism in general and business and worker tourists in particular.     

Does tourism cause growth asymmetrically in a panel of G-7 countries? A short note

We analyse whether tourism (measured by real tourism receipts) causes growth in an asymmetric fashion in a panel of G-7 countries over the period of 1995–2014. Our results reveal that the tourism-led growth hypothesis holds for France, Germany, and the US, with negative tourism shocks being more important for Germany, Italy, Japan, while positive shocks are more important in UK and the US. Our results imply that, policy makers in Germany, Italy and Japan should be more concerned when tourism receipts decline.     

Does college football impact the size of university applicant pools and the quality of entering students?

The role played by collegiate athletics in furthering the mission of institutions of higher education has been one of the more active research streams in the economics literature. Two areas of emphasis in this particular genre concern the relationship between athletics success and the size of a university’s applicant pool, and the relationship between athletics success and the quality of a university’s incoming class. This study extends both lines of research above by employing a unique panel data set consisting of 10 institutions that either added or eliminated college football between 1997 and 2015 in order to examine the impact of the presence of college football programme on both the size of university applicant pools and the quality of the students chosen for admission. Results from a panel data estimator presented here suggest that the size of their applicant pool shrinks the year following discontinuation of a college football programme. In the case of ACT scores, the results are similar, indicating that the ACT scores of incoming freshmen decrease after discontinuation of football.     

Does a college education cause better health and health behaviours?

In this article, we exploit the recent higher education expansion in China to apply a regression discontinuity method to identify the causal effects of higher education on health and health behaviours. We do not find causal effect of a college education on better smoking and drinking behaviours. For our selected measures of health, we do not find causal effect of a college education on better self-assessed health, less chance of having illness in the past 3 months and keeping normal body weight; however, we find that a college education could significantly reduce the probability of having hypertension.     

Does tourism influence economic growth? A dynamic panel data approach

On average, tourism-specialized countries grow more than others. This is not consistent with the core of modern economic growth theory that suggests that economic growth is linked to sectors with high-tech intensity and large scale. In this article, we use appropriate panel data methods to study the relationship between tourism and economic growth. In general, we show that tourism is a positive determinant of economic growth both in a broad sample of countries and in a sample of poor countries. However, contrary to previous contributions, tourism is not more relevant in small countries than in a general sample.     

Does financial liberalization decrease capital flight? A panel causality analysis

We employ a panel causality approach in order to examine whether financial liberalization affects the magnitude of capital flight, which measures unrecorded accumulation of foreign assets by the private sector. Our data from 21 emerging market economies for the period between 1980 and 2004 show no significant evidence of a causal relationship. Lagged values of capital flight, however, seem to increase its current level, indicating its self-reinforcing characteristic. Our results suggest that financial liberalization policies per se may not be helpful in reducing capital flight.     

Does sovereign debt weaken economic growth? A panel VAR analysis

We estimate panel vector autoregressions to analyze the highly disputed relationship between sovereign debt and economic growth. Using data on 20 developed countries, we find no evidence for a robust effect of debt on growth, even for higher levels of debt. We do find a significant negative reverse effect of growth on debt, which explains the negative correlation.     

A study on the tourism practitioners＇ perception of tourism impact： a case study of Hainan,China

This study examines the urban population of tourism practitioners perceptions of economic, environmental, and social impacts on cultural, convention, and sport tourism may have in Haikou and Sanya. Hainan, China. The study uses a modified Urban Tourism Impact （UTI） to examine economic, environmental, and social perceived impacts. Analysis of the data includes testing three models of structural relationships between tourism impacts and support for development in each of the tourism market sub-divisions through a confirmatory factor analysis. The results of this study show that the positive economic impacts consistently exert influence on predicting support for tourism development in all three models. However; the social impacts play a greater explanatory role with all three market segment, the negative environmental impacts play a role in determining support for sport tourism only. Differences have been found with those with a higher education level in predicting support for cultural tourism, but not convention or sport tourism.     

Does preschool education attendance matter? Evidence from a natural experiment in Spain

The non-compulsory and non-free of charge character of preschool education level before 3 years old in Spain raises some doubts about the exogenous nature of this variable. This article provides new evidence about the impact of preschool years on educational outcomes by exploiting a peculiar Spanish database that supplies information on two classrooms at fourth grade in primary schools where students were randomly allocated into each group. Using an identification strategy that reproduces a natural experiment, we find that belonging to the group with more average years of preschool education significantly and positively impacts on fourth-grade students’ average outcomes. Particularly, an increase of one standard deviation in the difference in years of preschool attendance results in an increase of 0.16 (0.13) standard deviations in the group achievement for mathematics (reading). In view of the importance of preschool education and considering that preschool attendance before 3 years old is related with socio-economic variables, we conclude that extending free preschool education to the 2-year-old age group in Spain should be considered especially for students in families with less favourable backgrounds.     

Does environmental quality influence health expenditures? Empirical evidence from a panel of selected OECD countries

In this paper we examine the role of environmental quality in determining per capita health expenditures. We take a panel cointegration approach in order to explore the possibility of estimating both short-run and long-run impacts of environmental quality. Our empirical analysis is based on eight OECD countries, namely Austria, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK for the period 1980-1999. We find that per capita health expenditure, per capita income, carbon monoxide emissions, sulphur oxide emissions and nitrogen oxide emissions are panel cointegrated. While short-run elasticities reveal that income and carbon monoxide emissions exert a statistically significant positive effect on health expenditures, in the long-run in addition to income and carbon monoxide, we find that sulphur oxide emissions have a statistically significant positive impact on health expenditures.     

Does having a cadre parent pay? Evidence from the first job offers of Chinese college graduates

We estimate the wage premium associated with having a cadre parent in China using a recent survey of college graduates carried out by the authors. The wage premium of having a cadre parent is 15%, and this premium cannot be explained by other observables such as college entrance exam scores, quality of colleges and majors, a full set of college human capital attributes, and job characteristics. These results suggest that the remaining premium could be the true wage premium of having a cadre parent.     

Does corruption slow down innovation? Evidence from a cointegrated panel of U.S. states

I investigate the long-run relationship between corruption and innovative activity using annual data from 48 contiguous U.S. states between 1977 and 2006. Using U.S. data allows me to work with a panel long enough to exploit time series properties of the data. I use two different measures of innovative activity: one measuring the quantity and the other measuring the quality of the patents granted. I also use two different measures of corruption: one based on the number of corruption convictions, the other based on number of corruption stories covered in Associated Press news wires. Following Pedroni (1999, 2000), I estimate the cointegrating relationship between corruption and innovative activity with Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS). The results indicate that corruption indeed slows down innovation in the long-run.     

Does mixed-frequency investor sentiment impact stock returns? Based on the empirical study of MIDAS regression model

We examine whether mixed-frequency investor sentiment affects stock returns. In line with recent evidence from China, we find that the aggregate effect and the individual effect of mixed-frequency investor sentiment are statistically significant, and mixed-frequency investor sentiment is more important than the low-frequency one. Moreover, mixed-frequency investor sentiment, which is mixed by high-frequency data, can be more important than the market premium.     

Does tourism development promote economic growth in transition countries? A panel data analysis

This study examines causal relationships between tourism spending and economic growth in 10 transition countries for the period 1988–2011. Panel causality analysis, which accounts for dependency and heterogeneity across countries, is used herein. Our empirical results support the evidence on the direction of causality, and are consistent with the neutrality hypothesis for 3 of these 10 transition countries (i.e. Bulgaria, Romania and Slovenia). The growth hypothesis holds for Cyprus, Latvia and Slovakia while reverse relationships were found for the Czech Republic and Poland. The feedback hypothesis also holds for Estonia and Hungary. Our empirical findings provide important policy implications for the 10 transition countries being studied.     

Distributive impact of structural change: Does environmental degradation matter?

Vulnerability to reduction of natural capital depends on defensive substitution possibilities that, in turn, are affected by the availability of other productive factors. However in several developing countries asset distribution tends to be highly skewed. Taking into account these elements, this paper proposes a model considering an economy polarized into two classes (the rich and the poor) and characterized by the following stylized facts: income and productivity of the rural poor is highly dependent on natural resources; labour remuneration in rural sector represents the opportunity cost for wage labour; the rich can partially substitute natural capital with physical capital and wage labour. In this context, agents differ for feed back mechanisms and interactions between their choices of production and environmental dynamics. Moreover environmental depletion may trigger economic transition, but the structural change is likely to result regressive.     

Does early bird catch the worm or a lower GPA? Evidence from a liberal arts college

Research in psychology has shown that early morning classes are not conducive to learning because of the peculiar sleep cycles of adolescents and young adults that cause them to be especially groggy in the morning. Our study examines the relationship between the times that classes are offered and the grades that students in these classes earn at a highly selective liberal arts college. Our main findings are that morning classes are harmful for student achievement. Grades are especially lower for classes that were scheduled at 8 am and 9 am. Moreover, while students of both genders are adversely affected by early morning courses, the effects are particularly pronounced for male students. This institution assigns students randomly to different sections of the same course, thus creating a quasi-natural experiment and enabling us to control for unobserved characteristics of students. In addition, we include student and faculty fixed effects.     

Does happiness adapt? A longitudinal study of disability with implications for economists and judges

This paper is an empirical study of partial hedonic adaptation. It provides longitudinal evidence that people who become disabled go on to exhibit considerable recovery in mental well-being. In fixed-effects equations we estimate the degree of hedonic adaptation at — depending on the severity of the disability — approximately 30% to 50%. Our calculations should be viewed as illustrative; more research, on other data sets, is needed. Nevertheless, we discuss potential implications of our results for economists and the courts.     

Does student employment really impact academic achievement? The case of France

Student employment is usually thought to curb academic achievement. Our research relating to a survey at a French university in 2012 emphasizes the significance of the intensity of student working hours. Allowance for the endogeneity of student employment reinforces the negative effects, particularly for young people working more than 16 hours a week. However, the academic achievement of those working fewer than 8 hours per week seems unaffected. The type of employment also affects the chances of success: students with public sector jobs appear to be less prone to failure, possibly because of more flexible working hours.     

Socio economic impact of vegetable production in Senegal：a case study of Niayes area

Vegetable production plays a very important role not only as a source of foreign exchange for Senegal and an appreciation of the dietary needs of populations,but also in the context of the policy of diversification.Thus the aim of this analysis is to measure the important economic impact and vegetable industrial actors,find the limited factors of the horticulture development and the perspectives for improving the vegetable production in the area.Our results show that the National production of fruits and vegetables is estimated approximately at 370,000 tons and the Niayes zone constitutes 80%of the domestic production.Horticulture is a sector which creates employments in that area with important incomes earned by both producers and the various intermediaries（commercial process） .The volume of exports has reached 14,321.588 tons in（2002-2003） against 11,125.132 tons in（2001-2002） witnessing than an increase of 28.7%,but the one of imports is very important and represents an outflow of foreign currency estimated at about 3 billion per year.