LONGITUDINAL STUDIES OF HUMAN GROWTH AND HEALTH: A REVIEW OF RECENT HISTORICAL RESEARCH

Abstract This paper reviews recent literature using stature and weight as measures of human welfare with a particular interest in cliometric or historical research. We begin with an overview of anthropometric evidence of living standards and the new but fast‐growing field of anthropometric history. This literature is always implicitly and often explicitly longitudinal in nature. We then discuss (i) systematic empirical research into the relationship between conditions in early life and later life health and mortality and (ii) historical evidence on the relationship between body mass, morbidity and mortality. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of historical sources and understandings to health economics and population health.     

Conditional volatility in affine term-structure models: Evidence from Treasury and swap markets

We study the ability of three-factor affine term-structure models to extract conditional volatility using interest rate swap yields for 1991–2005 and Treasury yields for 1970–2003. For the Treasury sample, the correlation between model-implied and EGARCH volatility is between 60% and 75%. For the swap sample, this correlation is rather low or negative. We find that these differences in model performance are primarily due to the timing of the swap sample, and not to institutional differences between swap and Treasury markets. We conclude that the ability of multifactor affine models to extract conditional volatility depends on the sample period, but that overall these models perform better than has been argued in the literature.     

Economic policy uncertainty and demand for money in Australia

The demand for money has received a great deal of attention in the empirical literature. This literature, however, has emphasized factors such as interest rate, income, inflation rate and exchange rate as the primary determinants of money demand. Although an emerging strand of literature examines uncertainty as a potential determinant of money demand, findings have been mixed. Using a news-based Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) index and Australian quarterly data from 1998 to 2017, we study the impact of policy uncertainty on demand for money. Autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) results show that the economic policy uncertainty measure has a negative short-run effect on the demand for money, suggesting the wider public hedge against future expected inflation, and positive long-run effect, whereby the broader public hold more cash to stay liquid during times of economic uncertainty. Also, introducing nonlinearity into the money demand equation, we find an asymmetric effect, more in favour of currency appreciations, supporting the expectations effect of further appreciations in exchange rate movements.     

Growing Incomes,Growing People in Nineteenth-Century Tasmania

The earliest measures of well-being for Europeans born in the Pacific region are heights and wages in Tasmania. Evidence of rising stature in middle decades of the nineteenth century survives multiple checks for measurement, compositional, and selection bias. The challenge to health and stature seen in other settler societies (the ‘antebellum paradox’) is not visible here. We sketch an interpretation for the simultaneous rise of Tasmanian stature and per capita gross domestic product based on relatively slow population growth and urbanisation, a decline in food cost per family member available from a worker's wage, and early recognition of the importance of public health.     

Jockeying for Position in CEO Letters: Impression Management and Sentiment Analytics

This paper evidences the strategic positioning of positive and negative words within a CEO letter as a subtle form of impression management. We find that managers tend to present information in such an order that the reader of the CEO letter has a more positive perception of the underlying message. We uncover a smile in the frequency of positive words within the letter, and a half smile in the intratextual distribution of negative words, with a prevalence of negative words at the beginning of the letter. We also find a significant positive association between this qualitative impression management and the use of abnormal accruals in earnings management. We propose sentiment analytics that can compensate for the strategic management of narrative structure and find that the proposed position weighted sentiment has more predictive power for the firm performance over the next year.     

Private-Pay Demand for Nursing Facilities in a Market with Excess Capacity

Several researchers have modeled the demand for nursing-home care by private-pay patients in markets with excess demand. This paper examines private-pay demand using 2002 data from Texas, a large market where most nursing facilities are underutilized. The demand for private nursing-home care increases with facility size, per-capita income, and the percent of population at least 65 years old. On the other hand, private-care demand decreases in nursing homes operated for profit and in facilities facing greater competition. The price elasticity of demand for private care is estimated to be −0.69. These results are statistically significant at the 10 percent level or better in regressions estimated by instrumental variables using the full sample as well as a sample from which probable outliers have been removed. However, the relationship of demand to the nursing home's case mix is statistically imprecise, and our measure of nursing staff per bed seems to be affected by outlying observations. The findings tend to support previous research showing that private-pay demand reflects economically rational decisions made by nursing-home residents and their representatives.     

Technical efficiency in texas nursing facilities: A stochastic production frontier approach

A rapidly aging U. S. population is straining the resources available for long term care and increasing the urgency of efficient operations in nursing homes. The scope for productivity improvements can be examined by estimating a stochastic frontier production function. We apply the methods of maximum likelihood and quantile regression to a panel of Texas nursing facilities and infer that the average productivity shortfall due to avoidable technical inefficiency is at least 8 percent and perhaps as large as 20 percent. Non-profit facilities are notably less productive than comparable facilities operated for profit, and the industry has constant returns to scale.     

Robust bootstrap procedures for the chain-ladder method

Insurers are faced with the challenge of estimating the future reserves needed to handle historic and outstanding claims that are not fully settled. A well-known and widely used technique is the chain-ladder method, which is a deterministic algorithm. To include a stochastic component one may apply generalized linear models to the run-off triangles based on past claims data. Analytical expressions for the standard deviation of the resulting reserve estimates are typically difficult to derive. A popular alternative approach to obtain inference is to use the bootstrap technique. However, the standard procedures are very sensitive to the possible presence of outliers. These atypical observations, deviating from the pattern of the majority of the data, may both inflate or deflate traditional reserve estimates and corresponding inference such as their standard errors. Even when paired with a robust chain-ladder method, classical bootstrap inference may break down. Therefore, we discuss and implement several robust bootstrap procedures in the claims reserving framework and we investigate and compare their performance on both simulated and real data. We also illustrate their use for obtaining the distribution of one year risk measures.     

FACTOR PRICES AND INCOME DISTRIBUTION IN LESS INDUSTRIALISED ECONOMIES 1870–1939

Global trade expansion after 1870 had potentially powerful effects on income distribution, especially in land-abundant less industrialised economies, by increasing land prices relative to wages. The papers in this issue add evidence on wage–rentals for a range of countries, specifically Australia, Canada, Ghana, India, and Sweden. These new data offer partial support for Jeffrey Williamson's view that the distributional effects of booming global trade to 1914 were powerful and ubiquitous, but they highlight that more attention might be given to geographical boundaries and to other distribution forces including technology and wage bargaining conditions.