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.     

The Economics and Financing of Hospitals in Australia

The Australian hospital industry is described and it is noted that the term ‘hospital’ is applied to a wide range of institutions. The main problems and issues associated with hospitals are discussed, including the lack of adequate methods of measuring their ‘products’ and of allocating funds to them. The role of the medical staff in influencing the ‘demand’ for hospital beds and in resource allocation is emphasised as a major influence on hospital behaviour. In a study of the determinants of the costs of Victorian public hospitals it was found that the complexity of the case-mix as measured by diagnosis related groups (DRGs) was a major determinant of teaching hospital costs but not of those of other large hospitals. DRG-based funding and costing of hospitals is recommended as a strategy for achieving increased efficiency.     

Reform of European Merger Policy

The paper highlights the main drivers for merger policy reform in the European Union, including the consequences of the recent appeal court reverses. It discusses some of the substantive and procedural issues that the reform package should address, and outlines the reforms in progress. The author concludes that much of the reform package will be beneficial, but some important opportunities have been missed in this inevitably patchwork process.     

Disentangling the Dividend Information in Splits: A Decomposition Using Conditional Event-Study Methods

While folklore in finance holds that split valuation effectsare due to dividend increases associated with splits, littleis known about magnitudes of dividend and nondividend componentsof split announcement effects. We find that splits and dividendsare indeed informational substitutes, a notion we characterizemore precisely, but a significant portion of split valuationeffects, 46% according to our estimates, cannot be attributedto dividend information in splits. Our techniques extend theliterature on conditional event-study methods and we illustratetheir practical value in testing hypotheses and analyzing datanot amenable to analysis by standard procedures.     

东北亚能源合作的期待效果与中国的作用

20世纪80、90年代一度稳定的国际石油价格,自2004年起呈上升趋势,维持了历史上最高纪录。国际油价以迪拜油为基准,2003年每桶平均26.8美元,而2004年高达33.64美元,比上年增长25.6%,直至2005年第三季度为止平均价格比2004年增长了64.8%。国际油价的暴涨源于中东产油国的动荡不安,储蓄及美元贬值而引起的投机资金大量地流入世界石油市场及由台风引起的美国石油设施的破坏等因素。固然存在这些原因,但是,最根本的原因还在于世界石油市场供给不足,即目前世界石油生产及炼油能力还属于停滞阶段,但对石油的需要却在暴涨。这种供给不足的情况短期内…     

Economic Growth and Productivity Gains from Capital Inflow: A Rejoinder

Journal of Quantitative Economics -     

Lies,damned lies and statistics: the accuracy of survey responses

That survey research is error prone is not a new idea and different varieties of non-sampling error have been investigated in the literature as well as consideration being given in many statistics textbooks to the issue of sampling error. The paper here considers research upon corporate environmental reporting. It compares information provided by corporate environmental reports with information that survey respondents claim their organization’s environmental report contains. This enables the accuracy of the claims to be assessed. Consideration is given to two different industries the Water industry and the Energy industry. Errors due to inaccurate reporting by survey respondents are shown to be relatively infrequent and respondents appear just about as likely to claim they report information that they do not, in fact, report as to fail to indicate that they report information that is, in fact, actually reported.