Changing the way the elderly live: Evidence from the home health care market in the United States

I examine how decreases in government coverage of home health care visits to the elderly in the United States have affected their living arrangements. Specifically, I exploit geographic variation in the Medicare Home Health Care reimbursement rate that arose as a result of legislation passed in 1997 and I identify its impact on the living arrangements of older Medicare beneficiaries. I find that less generous reimbursement policies lead to a greater fraction of elderly giving up independent living. Baseline-model estimates suggest that a decline in reimbursement of one visit per user leads to a 0.98% increase in the fraction of elderly Medicare beneficiaries living in shared living arrangements, that is, living with somebody else, rather than alone or with only the spouse. This estimate implies that a decline in reimbursement of 5.1 visits per Medicare beneficiary increases the fraction of elderly that live in shared living arrangements by 1.12 percentage points. Such an increase is consistent with the time-series increase in the fraction of elderly that live in shared living arrangements between 1997 and 2000.     

Export price adjustments under financial constraints

Exploiting data on the product‐destination‐level transactions of a large panel of Italian firms, we provide evidence that financial constraints affect price variation across exporters. Constrained exporters charge higher prices than do unconstrained firms that export to the same product‐destination market. This pattern is the result of a two‐fold effect. Distressed firms pass on their higher production costs through prices. However, they also charge higher mark‐ups. We explain this evidence referring to models in which rival firms produce different brands of the same product for customers with significant switching costs and producers face capital market imperfections when they need external financing. Our empirical investigations corroborate this explanation: price gaps are higher when switching costs or other forms of demand rigidity are expected to be more relevant.     

Gender inequalities in ownership and control of land in Africa: myth and reality

Lack of clarity behind measurement and interpretation of statistics on gender and land leads to an inability to clearly articulate a policy response to the potential inequalities faced by women and men. This article sets out to explore, conceptually and empirically, the levels and relative inequalities in land rights between women and men in African countries. The first section of the article engages in a conceptual discussion of how to measure gendered‐land outcomes, what ownership and control mean in different contexts, and why attention to these factors is important for the development of gender and land statistics. The second section of the article systematically reviews existing evidence from microlevel large sample studies to summarize recent trends in land access, ownership, and control by sex. The third section presents new statistics from a variety of nationally representative and large‐scale unpublished data on gender and land in Africa. Results provide not only a nuanced understanding of the importance of measuring land indicators for gendered development in Africa and globally but also new statistics on a variety of land outcomes to aid stakeholders in the discussion of gender‐land inequalities.     

Mexico in the 1990s: The Main Cross-Sectional Facts

This paper describes the main cross-sectional facts on individual and household earnings, labor supply, income, consumption and wealth in Mexico in the decade of the 1990s. We use two different data sources: the Mexican Employment Survey (ENEU) and the Mexican Income and Expenditure Survey (ENIGH). The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we integrate the two surveys to provide a complete characterization of the changes in employment, wages, income, consumption and wealth in the 1990s. Second, we highlight some distinctive features that characterize the Mexican economy in this decade. In particular, we focus on the changes in the size of the informal sector and we study the relationship between changes in informality and changes in wage inequality.     

Productivity and the Euro-Dollar exchange rate

This article analyses the impact of productivity developments in the United States and the euro area on the euro-dollar exchange rate. The article presents a new measure of relative average labour, productivity (ALP) which does not suffer from the biases implicit in readily available relative ALP data. Importantly, the patterns of these series differ widely. Employing the Johansen cointegration framework, four models are estimated using four different productivity proxies. Our results indicate that the extent to which productivity can explain the euro depreciation varies with the productivity proxy used: readily available measures explain most, our new, preferred measure least. In all models, however, productivity can explain only a fraction of the actual euro depreciation experienced in 1999–2000. JEL no. F31, C32, O47 The views expressed in this study are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Central Bank or its staff.     

Financing obstacles and growth: an analysis for euro area non-financial firms

This paper investigates the determinants of financing obstacles (FOs) and their impact on firm growth. For this purpose, we rely on both balance sheet data and survey data for a sample of non-financial firms in the euro area. The latter allows us to devise a direct measure of the firms’ probability of facing FOs. First, our results indicate that FOs are linked to characteristics such as the age of the firm, its size, its sales level or the sector in which it operates. Second, we find that, though based on few variables, our measure of FOs appears to be relevant in explaining firm growth in four out of the five countries considered; likewise, growth is found to be positively linked to cash flow.     

Taking Actively Advantage of MNCs’ Presence

In this paper, not only do we posit that the presence of a multinational corporation may entail significant benefits for the host economy and local firms’ performance, but also that these benefits can be actively sought and dynamically reinforced by local firms through the development of intense, embedded customer–supplier relationships. Building on the relational view, we argue that this may happen through the commitment of resources to relation-specific investments. Our hypotheses find support in a sample of SMEs suppliers of ST Microelectronics, the fourth largest producer of microelectronic components in the world. We show that by making relation-specific investments, local firms can grow quantitatively and qualitatively, improve their innovativeness, and acquire new clients.     

The mover’s advantage: The superior performance of migrant scientists

Migrant scientists outperform domestic scientists. The result persists after instrumenting migration for reasons of work or study with migration in childhood to minimize the effect of selection. The results are consistent with theories of knowledge recombination and specialty matching.     

Exploring the Critical Potential of the Borderscapes Concept

The conceptual evolution of borders has been characterised by important changes in the last twenty years. After the processual shift of the 1990s (from border to bordering), in recent years there has been increasing concern about the need to critically question the current state of the debate on the concept of borders. Within this framework, this article explores the critical potential of the borderscapes concept for the development of alternative approaches to borders along three main axes of reflection that, though interrelated, can be analytically distinguished as: epistemological, ontological and methodological. Such approaches show the significant potential of borderscapes for future advances of critical border studies in the era of globalisation and transnational flows, thereby contributing to the liberation of (geo)political imagination from the burden of the ‘territorialist imperative’ and to the understanding of new forms of belonging and becoming that are worth being investigated.