Impact of commuting by workers on household dietary diversity in rural India

Drawing insights from the literature on transformation of rural non-farm employment, pathways from agriculture to nutrition, and linkages between migration and nutritional status of household, we seek to understand differences in dietary diversity across three mutually exclusive types of rural Indian households: where all members work in rural areas, at least one member commutes to urban areas, at least one member has no fixed place of work. Our analysis is based on a nationally representative data set from India for the year 2009–10 and we use propensity score matching methods. We find that as compared to households with no commuters, households with rural–urban commuters have higher dietary diversity; whereas households with no fixed place workers have lower dietary diversity. We also find differences in dietary diversity across households which differ by their primary source of income.     

Factors affecting delinquency of household credit in the U.S.: Does consumer sentiment play a role?

In this study, we provide both theoretical and empirical evidence on the determinants of household loan delinquency for home ownership, credit card and auto loans for the U.S. states in a panel framework over a period from 2003 through 2017. In particular, we examine the impact of consumer sentiments on loan delinquency rates. We show that improved current consumer sentiment significantly induce lower mortgage, credit card and automobile loan defaults in the American states subdivided into four different regions. We also find that the higher overall and expected consumer sentiment raise loan delinquencies. Implicit in this finding is the apparently excessive and inappropriate expansion of loans in the U.S. economy in the face of consumers’ optimism, which in turn, provides an intuitive understanding of the circumstances that could precede a depression or outbreak of anomalies in the financial sector. Our general findings further exhibit significant positive effect of unemployment rate and mostly adverse effect of per capita income on mortgage and automobile loan delinquency rates. The results provide some compelling evidence with regard to the effect of consumer confidence on household credit delinquency rates across various states in the U.S. and are robust to alternative measures of income and mortgage rates.     

中国邮储银行大连分行网点转型下客户服务模式创新研究

随着社会大众对金融服务的要求不断增多,银行网点转型已经成为一个必然趋势。信息时代背景下,银行网点的转型大多向智能化的方向转变,而随着网点转型,其客户服务模式也在不断创新。论文以邮储银行大连分行为例,对银行网点智能化转型的影响进行了分析,探究了邮储银行大连分行网点智能化转型存在的问题,并且提出了相关的转型建议,最后对邮储银行大连分行智能化网点转型下客户服务模式的创新情况进行了研究,希望能够在银行网点智能化转型的背景下,促进其客户服务水平的不断提升。     

A Different Perspective on the Evolution of UK Income Inequality

This paper scrutinizes the conventional wisdom about trends in UK income inequality and also places contemporary inequality in a much longer historical perspective. We combine household survey and income tax data to provide better coverage of all income ranges from the bottom to the very top (and make our estimates available to other researchers). We make a case for studying distributions of income between tax units (i.e. not assuming the full income sharing that goes with the use of the household as the unit of analysis) for reasons of principle as well as data harmonization. We present evidence that income inequality in the UK is as least as high today as it was just before the start of World War 2.     

Household responsibility system and China's agricultural Growth revisited: Addressing endogenous institutional change

The rise of the Household Responsibility System has been widely viewed as a significant contribution to China's agricultural growth. However, this empirical conclusion is rested upon a convenient but doubtful presumption that the process of institutional change, also known as decollectivization, is exogenous. We contribute to this literature by explicitly recognizing the endogeneity of institutional changes, and exploit exogenous variations in lagged weather shocks and initial fixed assets for consistent estimation. With improved data on irrigation, mechanization, weather and institutional changes in a provincial panel data during 1970–1987, the results of panel instrumental estimations reveal that the Household Responsibility System had a significantly positive effect on China's agricultural growth, which was larger than indicated by OLS estimates that suffer from adverse selection and attenuation biases.     

Comparative analysis of health care costs in Japan and the United States: a simulation of productivity and savings behavior

Japan and the United States, though contrastive in terms of the percentage of the elderly in their population and the ratio of their health care costs to GDP, both face soaring medical expenditures. Sato et al. [Health Care Systems in Japan and the United States: A Simulation Studies and Policy Analysis. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Hingham, MA] developed a model to solve this problem by increasing the productivity of the non-health care sector. This study has applied that model to estimate national savings, and compared these savings with estimated health care costs. The results show that in order for savings to exceed expenditures the US needs to have a higher savings rate and a higher interest rate than Japan.     

Italian households’ debt: the participation to the debt market and the size of the loan

This paper analyses Italian households’ participation to the debt market, separating the probability of demanding a loan from the probability of being rationed by lenders; on the supply side of the market specific attention is paid to enforcement costs of the loan contract when customers default. A new result is that the age of the household head acts essentially as a demand factor, rather than a variable influencing the lender’s choice. Both current and future households’ income increase the demand for loans and reduce credit rationing. Self-employed workers are more rationed by lenders. Credit constraints are also linked to the area where the household lives, partly because of different enforcement costs. The final part of the paper analyses the equilibrium quantity of the loan, for households who have a loan and are not constrained. The loan size is positively linked to household net wealth and income profile. An important contribution of this paper is the finding that, not only the participation to the debt market, but also the loan size is negatively affected by enforcement costs.      

Which firms engage small, foreign, or state banks? And who goes Islamic? Evidence from Turkey

We study a representative dataset from Turkey that identifies firm–bank connections. Banks in Turkey differ not only in size and nationality, but also in ownership and orientation (non-Islamic versus Islamic)—resulting in at least six distinct bank types. We estimate a multinomial logit of the choice by the firm of bank type. We document a strong correspondence between bank type and firm characteristics that is not always the same as has been documented so far for US datasets. For example, small firms engage large rather than small banks. Young, large, multiple-bank, and industry-diversified firms, that are located in or close to Istanbul, team up with foreign banks. Islamic banks mainly deal with young, multiple-bank, industry-focused and transparent firms.     

The crowding-out effect of elderly support expenditure on household consumption from the perspective of population aging: Evidence from China

The pace of aging in China is accelerating, from the introduction of family planning to the liberalization of the two-child policy, with a growing proportion of families in the 4–2-1 structure. With filial piety in mind, most adult children will live with their elderly parents and share income and expenditure. Concurrently, due to the inadequacy of the social security system, a heavy supplementary burden of supporting the elderly has been placed on adult children. Based on data from the 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2017 Chinese Social Survey (CSS) of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), this study analyzes the objective factors affecting household elderly support expenditure using the ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation method. It also examines the crowding-out effect of elderly support expenditure on the consumption of different types of households through a panel generalized method of moments (GMM) approach. Finally, the crowding-out effect of elderly support expenditure is discussed in a sub-sample according to the number of households needing to support the elderly aged 60 and above. The empirical results illustrate that there is a crowding-out effect of elderly support expenditure on household consumption, and the magnitude of the crowding-out effect varies for diverse consumption. Our study reveals that the crowding-out effect of elderly support expenditure on core consumption is the largest in a sample with different numbers of elderly persons in families. The empirical results for the sub-sample show that the larger the elderly population, the stronger the crowding-out effect of elderly support expenditure on core consumption and the less pronounced the effect on marginal consumption.     

Food scandals,media attention and habit persistence among desensitised meat consumers

Consumer reactions to food scandals and their resulting economic implication are well documented. However, studies have typically neglected the roles that consumption habits and media usage behaviours may play in explaining household’s response to food safety incidences. In this study we develop a model of heterogeneous media usage intensity, information impacts and decay over time to estimate household’s behavioural responses to the 2011 German Dioxin scandal. We are specifically interested in determining the degree of heterogeneity in household’s short-term adjustments demand patterns versus persisting long-term consumption habits of meat products (chicken and pork) directly affected by the incident. The empirical analysis employs detailed household-level retail scanner and media usage data collected by the GfK Consumer Scan panel for a total of 16,023 households over a period of 104 calendar weeks. Results of dynamic correlated random effect Tobit models indicate an important role of unobserved heterogeneity in explaining household responses during the food scandal. We find strong empirical evidence supporting our hypothesis that short-term marginal adjustments in demand and propensity to buy affected products triggered by the negative impact of household media exposure were over-compensated by habit persistence. The question of how consumption patterns evolve over time in the presence of food scandals is expected to be of interest for both policy makers and the food industry. The potential biases in the projection of economic impacts resulting from simplifying assumptions of household’s response patterns to a proliferating numbers of food safety incidences has implications for risk management and public policy.