‘HAVE YOU FELT ANGRY LATELY?’: A NOTE ON UNFAIR WAGE PERCEPTIONS AND THE NEGATIVE EMOTION OF ANGER

The author analyses the nexus between unfair wage perceptions of workers and the frequency of the negative emotion of anger. For this purpose, German household panel data for the years 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2013 are used. Angry feelings in the last four weeks have occurred significantly more frequently for workers who perceive their wage as unfair, whereas the own absolute hourly wage is not significantly correlated with the frequency of having felt angry. The results further indicate that workers have felt more often angry if working hours are larger; but the economic significance seems rather small compared to unfair wage perceptions.     

BUILDING THE MANAGERIAL CAPITAL OF AGRICULTURAL COOPERATIVES IN AFRICA

Agricultural cooperatives in Africa tend to be community‐based organizations defined by principles of inclusion, voluntarism, democracy, equity, autonomy, mutuality and solidarity. This means that they generally operate in accordance with the principles endorsed by the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA). However, only a few of these organizations are successful in commercializing the agricultural produce of their members. In this study, we argue that growth‐problems leading to commercial failure and organizational degeneration in these cooperatives can be attributed to a lack of managerial capital. Drawing on the literature and evidence from the field we set out key management solutions for counterbalancing cooperative principles in the context of rural Africa. These solutions were taught to the leaders and managers of 362 cooperatives at four training events held in Madagascar, Malawi and twice in Uganda. Using a production function for cognitive achievement and key informant interviews, we find that our training contributed to the adoption of the proposed solutions by some of the cooperatives. Using the Ugandan sub‐ sample, we estimate an OLS regression and a PSM model to show that the training translated into higher revenues per member generated through collective commercialization.     

Private Information in Life Insurance,Annuity, and Health Insurance Markets

Economic theory predicts that private information on risks in insurance markets leads to adverse selection. To counterbalance private information, insurers collect and use information on applicants to assess their risk and to calculate premiums in an underwriting process. Using data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), this paper documents that differences in the information used in underwriting across life insurance, annuity, and health insurance markets attenuate private information to different extents. The results are in line with – and might help to reconcile – the mixed empirical evidence on adverse selection across these markets.     

Health insurer market power and primary care consolidation

This paper analyzes how health insurance market concentration impacts the market structure of primary care physicians. In more concentrated insurance markets, physicians are found to work in larger practices and their practices are more likely to have a hospital with an ownership interest. Physicians are also less likely to report being in a competitive physician market, consistent with practice consolidation. Our results suggest that consolidation in insurance markets impacts the competitive structure of physician markets.     

Country Differences in Material Deprivation in Europe

This paper assesses to what extent differences in the characteristics of individuals (micro‐level perspective) and country‐specific factors (macro‐level perspective) can explain country differences with respect to material deprivation levels. Thus, our work aims to simultaneously consider the macro dimension and the predominantly individually‐oriented study field of material deprivation using multilevel techniques. We make use of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions. Our results show that country‐specific factors seem to be much more relevant than individual effects in explaining country differences in material deprivation. We estimate that the introduction of country‐specific factors reduces the proportion of total variance due to between‐country differences in deprivation by 72.7 percent, while individual‐level variables reduce this proportion by only 9.4 percent. We also show, through interaction variables, that the effect of sociodemographic characteristics can be shaped by institutional and structural factors, especially by the level of GDP.     

Measuring the Level and Inequality of Wealth: An Application to China

We construct and compare three distinct measures of household asset wealth that complement traditional income‐ or expenditure‐based measures of socioeconomic status. We apply these measures to longitudinal household survey data from China and demonstrate that household asset wealth has been increasing over time, a theme consistent with many previous studies on the process of development in China. Unlike other studies that have shown rising income inequality over time, however, we show that asset wealth inequality has actually been declining in recent years, indicating widespread participation in the benefits of economic reforms. Furthermore, the evolution in the cumulative distribution of household welfare is such that social welfare has been increasing with the passage of time, despite rising inequality in the early years of the survey.     

User Fee Abolition and the Demand for Public Health Care

This research examines the effect of the abolition of user fees in South Africa, a policy implemented in 1994 for uninsured children under the age of six and the elderly uninsured, as well as pregnant and nursing mothers. The analysis focuses on the implementation of the policy and the use of curative public healthcare services by children following strict and fuzzy regression discontinuity designs. The estimates point to statistically insignificant average and local average policy effects, even though the policy appears to have been implemented reasonably effectively, albeit imperfectly. In other words, the policy did not, on average, affect the use of curative public healthcare, at least for those children who should have benefited from the policy.     

SNAP and Paycheck Cycles

It is well documented that individuals do not spend the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits smoothly over the month after receipt. Rather, recipients spend a disproportionate share of benefits at the beginning of the benefit month. This has costs for recipients and stores. There is also evidence that other income streams, such as Social Security and paychecks, are not spent smoothly. The presence of these other income streams may bias estimates of the effects of this SNAP cycle on consumption for working SNAP beneficiaries and those who receive other government benefits. We use data from United States Department of Agriculture's National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey to explore how the SNAP cycle is affected by accounting for these other income streams. We find suggestive evidence that the cycle is more pronounced for workers who are paid on a weekly or monthly basis, but little evidence that cycles in other income streams mitigate or exacerbate the SNAP cycle.     

Teaching teenagers in finance: Does it work?

Many initiatives worldwide aim at improving financial literacy through targeted education programs, yet there is little evidence regarding their effectiveness. We examine the impact of a short financial education program on teenagers in German high schools. Our findings reveal that the training program significantly increases teenagers’ interest in financial matters and their financial knowledge, especially their ability to properly assess the riskiness of assets. Behaviorally, we observe a decrease in the prevalence of self-reported impulse purchases, but at the same time find no evidence of a significant increase in savings.