The returns to education and wage penalty from overeducation: New evidence from Vietnam

This study intends to estimate the rate of returns to education in Vietnam, the distributive effects of education on wages, and the wage penalty from the incidence of overeducation in the Vietnamese labor market during 2004–2016. This study employs a pseudo-panel approach to address omitted variables bias and the unconditional quantile regression to identify the heterogeneity of returns to education across the income distribution. Our main finding indicates that the estimated rate of returns to education in Vietnam is approximately 6.5%, showing a downward bias from previous estimates. The returns vary across wage distributions, where a lower rate of return is observed in lower quantiles and a higher rate among those individuals at the higher quantiles. The returns to education have declined since 2008, confirming the oversupply of highly educated workers in the Vietnamese labor market with an estimated wage penalty of 17%. Government assistance measures are needed to reduce the overeducation and the wage penalty issues in the Vietnamese labor market.     

The effect of the Troubles on GDP in Northern Ireland

This paper explores the effect of conflict on GDP in Northern Ireland. A synthetic control region constructed as a weighted average of other UK regions provides an estimate of counterfactual ‘no-conflict’ GDP. Comparing this with actual per capita GDP suggests a negative impact of up to 10%. Excluding the increased grants provided in response to the conflict, a 15–20% reduction is evident. Most forms of terrorist activity had negative effects over the period 1969–1997. Deaths attributable to Republican paramilitary groups or to the State appear to have a greater and more lasting impact on GDP than deaths attributable to Loyalist paramilitaries.     

Technology and regional policy: a case study of Northern Ireland

The importance of technical change, through the innovative activity of industry, has received a lot of attention in the regional economic literature. Regional policy has now begun to reflect the changing emphasis in the recent literature, and especially the key role of inventive activity in achieving long-run self-sustaining regional growth. This paper concentrates on research activities in terms of inventive inputs (R&D) and innovative outputs (especially patented innovations). In general the results suggest that there is a low level of technological activity in Northern Ireland, especially in industries that are characterized as being technologically advanced. This is partly because external ownership reduces R & D activity which in turn reduces innovation outputs but there is also a problem in that companies in Northern Ireland are relatively unsuccessful at producing new products and processes of the type and quality required in the market place. The availability of government-sponsored R & D grants since 1977 has begun to redress the imbalance in terms of R & D activities but there is, as yet, little information to show that the level of technological success has increased.     

Timing and determinants of local residential broadband adoption: evidence from Ireland

This article examines the time path of broadband adoption for households in areas that are offered broadband service for the first time and the socioeconomic characteristics of broadband users generally. Using cross-sectional data on broadband take-up and socioeconomic characteristics of small areas in Ireland, linked to GIS data on ADSL availability over time, I find that local penetration growth rates are elevated immediately after service is offered. Local growth rates then decline towards the national average, reaching it after about 3.6 years. The article also includes estimates of the effect of various household characteristics on adoption, finding effects broadly consistent with the previous literature. Simultaneity in demand and supply are addressed using 2SLS regression.     

The effect of aid on growth: evidence from a Quasi-experiment

The literature on aid and growth has not found a convincing instrumental variable to identify the causal effects of aid. This paper exploits an instrumental variable based on the fact that, since 1987, eligibility for aid from the International Development Association (IDA) has been based partly on whether or not a country is below a certain threshold of per capita income. The paper finds evidence that other donors tend to reinforce rather than compensate for reductions in IDA aid following threshold crossings. Overall, aid as a share of gross national income (GNI) drops about 59 % on average after countries cross the threshold. Focusing on the 35 countries that have crossed the income threshold from below between 1987 and 2010, a positive, statistically significant, and economically sizable effect of aid on growth is found. A 1 percentage point increase in the aid to GNI ratio from the sample mean raises annual real per capita growth in gross domestic product by approximately 0.35 percentage points.     

Intergovernmental grants as a tactical instrument: empirical evidence from Swedish municipalities

Are grants to Swedish municipalities tactical, that is, do parties use these in order to get elected? In this paper, the theoretical model of Lindbeck and Weibull and Dixit and Londregan is tested, using panel data on 255 Swedish municipalities for the years 1981–1995. The empirical implication of the theory is that groups with many swing voters will receive larger grants than other groups. In the paper, a new method of estimating the number of swing voters is proposed and used. The results support the hypothesis that intergovernmental grants are used in order to win votes.     

File sharing as conditional cooperation: evidence from a framed field experiment

In this project, we investigate downloading and sharing behaviour in a novel ‘piracy game’ modelled after standard public good games. We find that willingness to share correlates positively with the sharing by others. By contrast, actual behaviour in the ‘piracy game’ is not correlated with self-reported behaviour.     

Waging Hospitality: Feminist Geopolitics and Tourism in West Belfast Northern Ireland

Many areas of Belfast were considered no-go areas, places where the police had lost jurisdiction, whilst the media designated these neighbourhoods as terrorist enclaves. The urban scars that remain after the signing of the peace agreement, have transformed these marginalised areas into places of hospitality for tourists curious about the past conflict. This paper highlights the interdependent relationship between hospitality and the development of a post-war confidence for a community that had long been stigmatised as a violent enclave. For the purpose of this paper I bring together a feminist geopolitical analysis, with its attention to daily life, with more recent feminist theories of hospitality, observant to issues of inclusiveness. A feminist analysis of this type not only reflects the complicated gender politics of West Belfast, but also exposes a “politics of hospitality” that helps reframe our understandings of security.     

Sport event attendance as a function of education: evidence from the UK

This article studies the role of education in the decision to attend sporting events. The overall objective is to verify whether more educated individuals are more likely to go to sports events than their less educated counterparts. If education socializes persons to focus on sports, it would then partially offset negative alternatives such as alcohol, drug abuse and unlawful behaviours, creating a positive externality. Sport events consumption is extensive, highlighting the potential economic importance of the sports-education externality. To establish the role of education in sport attendance, this article applies a probabilistic linear regression model to data from the UK. The econometric formulation associates sport event attendance in the left hand side with education in the right hand side, while controlling for the socioeconomic variables that are known to affect a consumer’s decision to go to a sport event: gender, age, income, employment status, children, marital status, and geographical location, among others. These findings add to a somewhat limited literature on both the effect of education on sports attendance and secondarily, on the impact of other socioeconomic variables on attendance.     

Improved cooking stoves and firewood consumption: Quasi-experimental evidence from the Northern Peruvian Andes

Over the past few decades, improved firewood cooking stoves have been massively distributed around the world, mainly with the purpose of decreasing fuelwood consumption among rural households. Surprisingly, rigorous “on the field” evidence on the causal impact of these devices is very limited. This paper estimates the impact of an improved stove design distributed in the Northern Peruvian Andes on firewood consumption. To identify the causal effect of improved stoves, it exploits a quasi-experiment related to the improved stove intervention. The evidence indicates that a proportion of households that adopted the new device experienced iron frame failures. These failures were not systematically caused by inadequate usage, installation or maintenance, but by faulty iron frame construction. Moreover, faulty iron frames were randomly distributed, and whether an iron frame was faulty or not, was not ex-ante observable to the beneficiaries. Therefore, an iron frame failure indicator is used as an instrumental variable to identify the causal effect of improved stoves. Improved stove usage appears to reduce firewood consumption by approximately 46% in the study area.     

The identifiable victim effect in charitable giving: evidence from a natural field experiment

We design a natural field experiment to enhance our understanding of the role of the identifiable victim effect in charitable giving. Using direct mail solicitations to 25 797 prior donors of a nonprofit charity, we tested the responsiveness of donors to make a contribution to either an identifiable or a statistical victim. Unlike much previous research, which has used only laboratory experiments, we find that the campaign letter focusing on one identifiable victim did not result in significantly larger donations than the campaign letter focusing on the statistical victim. In addition to the role of the identifiable victim, we investigate the degree to which each of our campaign letters affected donors’ payments to other concurrent and future campaigns and whether there is decreasing marginal returns to campaigning in the sense that receiving a letter crowds out donors’ payments to other future and concurrent campaigns. We find some evidence of crowding out, indicating that charitable giving could be a zero-sum game; however, the treatment letters did not have different effects on other payments.     

The effect of peer observation on consumption choices: evidence from a lab-in-field experiment

We investigate the impact of peer observation on consumption decisions using a lab-in-field experiment. Respondents make consumption decisions either alone or under peer observation. We find evidence for peer effects. We are able to study these further by looking into the mechanism and performing detailed heterogeneity analysis. Concerning the mechanisms, we find evidence for an information channel. Further, we show that the consumption choice is influenced by how many people made the same decision previously, but not by who those people are, hence finding evidence of a psychological channel. Respondents with higher cognitive ability are less susceptible to peer effects, while people living in small villages are more susceptible.     

The effect of a law limiting upcoding on hospital admissions: evidence from Italy

Policy makers have made several attempts to limit hospitals’ upcoding. We investigate the impact of a law introducing a minimum length of stay for discharges with complications. We analyze its effects on the probability of a discharge with complications, on its length of stay and on its reimbursement. We show that the policy has been effective in limiting upcoding, since, after the law, (1) the probability of a discharge with complications has decreased by 3%; (2) its length of stay has risen by 0.17 days more than the observed corresponding variation in the length of stay of a discharge in the control group; (3) the hospital’s revenue on a discharge with complications has decreased by 8.5% more than the observed revenue change on a discharge in the control group. Furthermore, we find evidence of an ownership effect on upcoding, since not-for-profit and for-profit hospitals have been more affected by the law than public hospitals.     

Overconfidence as a social bias: Experimental evidence

The overconfidence bias is discussed extensively in economic studies, yet fails to hold experimentally once monetary incentives and feedback are implemented. We consider overconfidence as a social bias. For a simple real effort task, we show that, individually, economic conditions effectively prevent overconfidence. By contrast, the introduction of a very basic, purely observational social setting fosters overconfident self-assessments. Additionally, observing others’ actions effectively eliminates underconfidence compared to the individual setting.     

Quantifying the trade-reducing effect of embargoes: Firm-level evidence from Russia

In 2014, Russia responded to sanctions imposed by a coalition of Western countries with a retaliatory import embargo. I draw on this unique case study and a customs data set on firm-level import transactions to investigate the ramifications of Russia's counter-sanctions on firm-level foreign trade. Using detailed data and a triple-difference estimation strategy, I examine micro-level dynamics and heterogeneities that aggregate data alone do not reveal. I identify the effects of the embargo on the extensive margin (the probability that a firm imports a particular product from a given country in a particular time period) and the intensive margin (the value of a firm's import transaction) of firm-level trade, as well as its effects on logged unit values. The main findings of this study show that the embargo had statistically significant negative impacts on extensive and intensive margins of firm-level trade. I also pinpoint evidence of multiple exemptions from the embargo and a large degree of heterogeneity of firm-level responses to the embargo based on firm attributes, such as firm size and government connection.     

The stock market effect of air pollution: evidence from China

In financial studies, environmental stimuli such as sunshine, temperature, and daylight are often used as proxies for people’s collective mood swings to test their effects on the stock market. China has experienced serious air pollution problems in recent years, and Chinese public awareness of air pollution has soared. In this paper, we use China as a natural experiment to investigate the effect on stock returns of depressed moods induced by air pollution. Daily air-pollution data from 2005 to 2014 are analysed and the results obtained from the empirical research show that a contemporaneous negative and a two-day lagged positive relationship exists between air pollution levels and stock returns over this time period. The relationship is mediated by the influence of air pollution on investment decisions. The results also indicate that the effect is weakened for companies that protect air quality, but no stronger effect is detected for polluting companies. The findings imply that air pollution is a behavioural factor with some connection to stock returns in China.     

Effectiveness of the reserve option mechanism as a macroeconomic prudential tool: evidence from Turkey

This article assesses the effectiveness of a novel macroprudential tool – the reserve option mechanism (ROM) – which Turkey’s central bank developed during the post-2008 period and has employed to control the risk associated with excessive capital flows. We assess how capital flows have affected economic variable changes since the introduction and usage of the ROM. Empirical evidence gathered from Turkey suggests that the tool decreases the effect of capital flow on capital flow (positive shock to capital flow dies out faster or becomes less persistent) and diminishes the effects of capital flow shocks on exchange and interest rates.     

The shadow rate as a predictor of real activity and inflation: evidence from a data-rich environment

This article examines the predictive content of the shadow rates for US real activity and inflation in a data-rich environment. We find that the shadow rates contain substantial out-of-sample predictive power for inflation in nonzero lower bound and zero lower bound periods. In contrast, the shadow rates are uninformative about future real activity.     

The causal effect of coalition governments on fiscal policies: evidence from a Regression Kink Design

Proportional election systems are widespread across countries and often lead to coalition governments. This creates interest in how the form of government (single-party or coalition governments) causally influences fiscal policies. It is difficult to estimate this causal effect empirically because the form of government is not randomly assigned to political units. I overcome this problem by using a Regression Kink Design which exploits that there is a slope change in the treatment probability at the 50% vote share of the strongest party. This method is applied to a large panel data set of German local governments. I find that contrary to the theoretical prediction, coalition governments significantly decrease expenditures.