The geographic accessibility of child care subsidies and evidence on the impact of subsidy receipt on childhood obesity

This paper examines the impact of the spatial accessibility of public human services agencies on the likelihood of receiving a child care subsidy among disadvantaged mothers with young children. In particular, we collect data on the location of virtually every human services agency in the US and use this information to calculate the approximate distance that families must travel from home in order to reach the nearest office that administers the subsidy application process. Using data from the Kindergarten cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K), our results indicate that an increase in the distance to a public human services agency reduces the likelihood that a family receives a child care subsidy. Specifically, we estimate an elasticity of subsidy receipt with respect to distance of −0.13. The final section of the paper provides an empirical application in which we use variation in families’ travel distance to identify the causal effect of child care subsidies on children’s weight outcomes. Our instrumental variables estimates suggest that subsidized child care leads to sizeable increases in the prevalence of overweight and obesity among low-income children.     

Determinants of Capital Structure and Adjustment to Long Run Target: Evidence From UK Company Panel Data

This paper examines the empirical determinants of borrowing decisions of firms and the role of adjustment process. A partial adjustment model is estimated by GMM estimation procedure using data for an unbalanced panel of 390 UK firms over the period of 1984–1996. Our results suggest that firms have long-term target borrowing ratios and they adjust to their target ratios relatively fast, which might suggest that the costs of being away from their target ratios are significant. The results also provide support for positive impact of size, and negative effects of growth opportunities, liquidity, profitability of firms and non-debt tax shields on the borrowing decisions of companies.     

Return and volatility spillovers among CIVETS stock markets

Coined in 2009, the CIVETS refers to Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, and South Africa as a new group of frontier emerging markets with young and growing populations and dynamic economies. We provide a first look into the return and volatility spillovers between the CIVETS countries by employing causality-in-mean and causality-in-variance tests. The empirical results indicate that the contemporaneous spillover effects are generally low. Nevertheless, CIVETS stock markets may exhibit higher degrees of co-movements at times. The structure of the causal relationships further suggests the presence of intra-regional and inter-regional return and volatility interdependence effects.