Year-end and quarter-end effects in the term structure of sterling repo and Eurepo rates

Griffiths and Winters [Griffiths, M., Winters, D., 1997. On a preferred habitat for liquidity at the turn-of-the-year: evidence from the term-repo market, Journal of Financial Services Research 12, 21–38] find a year-end preferred habitat for liquidity for US repo rates, and, later [Griffiths, M., Winters, D., 2005. The-turn-of-the-year in money markets: tests of the riskshifting window dressing and preferred habitat hypotheses, Journal of Business 78, 1337–1364] find a similar preferred habitat for US money market instruments. Kotomin et al. [Kotomin, V., Smith, S., Winters, D., 2008. Preferred habitat for liquidity in international shortterm interest rates, Journal of Banking and Finance 32, 240–250] document the preferred habitat in LIBOR for the major world currencies, excluding the British pound. We examine the robustness of these results using pound sterling and euro repo rates and find a year-end preferred habitat for liquidity in the euro repo rates. The British interest rates continue to behave differently, and we provide a possible explanation as to why this occurs.     

Institutional deficit and health outcomes in post-communist states

In this paper we draw upon the unique natural experiment of post-communist transitions to show how the interaction between democratization and economic liberalization impacts health. We argue that, if occurring simultaneously, these transformations reduce overall uncertainty and thus improve health. Two concrete mechanisms are at work: first, people suffer less from stress-related diseases, and second, they start investing more in their own health. To capture the proposed theoretical mechanisms, we use stress-caused mortality and private expenditures on health as our dependent variables. Empirically, we employ mediation analysis with country and time fixed effects. We find that, ceteris paribus, democratization and economic liberalization exert a cumulatively positive impact upon health. Our findings should be relevant to other countries that undergo politico-economic transitions.     

Income and bargaining effects on education and health in Brazil

This study examines the impacts of the 1991 reform of Brazil's rural pension system on schooling and health indicators. We conclude that the reform had significant positive effects on schooling, especially on literacy for girls co-residing with a male pensioner. We were unable to find similar results for children living with a female pensioner. We further investigated whether these results were driven by bargaining power differences within households; our findings suggest that this explanation is plausible.     

The impact of restructuring and deregulation on gas rates

This article evaluates the impact of consumer choice programs, price caps, and sliding scale plans on consumer prices of gas using a custom survey of public service commissions and data from the Department of Energy. A seemingly unrelated regressions model estimates residential, commercial and industrial prices jointly, controlling for potentially endogenous demand. Consumer choice programs are estimated to lower residential and commercial prices significantly, by bringing competition to markets with smaller consumers. Prices fall even before deregulation as utilities build consumer loyalty and fight competition. Sliding scale plans are estimated to lower prices of small consumers while raising industrial prices. Price caps lead to overall higher prices, with unclear ranking across consumer classes.      

Private sector employment in Russia: Scale, composition and performance

In Russia, as across Central and Eastern Europe, privatization and the establishmemt of new private firms have been viewed as key factors in labour market adjustment during the transition period. This paper considers the overall employment developments in the private sector in Russia and the extent to which the private sector employment performance is differentiated from that of other sectors in five Russian regions. The analysis is based on a fresh look at these issues using official statistics published by Goskomstat and drawing on microdata from the March 1996 Russian Labour Force Survey (LFS). A special questionnaire attached to the LFS in the study regions provides supplementary information.
The paper highlights shifts in the sectoral composition of employment, including growth in private sector employment. Compared to other forms of ownership, the analysis confirms a tendency for private sector ownership in the study regions to be associated with stronger employment performance with respect to hours worked and, in some cases, timely payment of wages. Private sector firms appear to have relatively flexible employment patterns, utilizing more fixed-term or part-time employment than other types of firms and experiencing greater labour turnover. Also, private sector employees tend to be somewhat younger and probably more adaptable people. However, there is significant variation across the study regions and substantial exceptions exist with respect to the above-mentioned tendencies. With respect to employment issues, the differentiation between sectors appears to be less pronounced than one might have expected.