Militant rhetoric and the business cycle: the case of the American Federation of Labor‐Congress of Industrial Organization

During economic downturns, when the strike becomes less of an option, labour unions may use militant rhetoric to target often electorally vulnerable actors in the political system. I find that labour's rhetorical intensity is largely determined by the business cycle and the partisanship of administrations, and provide evidence of its political effect.     

Growth and Risk: Methodology and Micro Evidence

How exposure to risk affects economic growth is a key issuein development. This article quantifies both the ex ante andex post effects of risk using long-running panel data for ruralhouseholds in Zimbabwe. It proposes a simulation-based econometricmethodology to estimate the structural form of a micro modelof household investment decisions under risk. The key findingis that risk substantially reduces growth in this particularsetting: the mean capital stock in the sample is (in expectation)46 percent lower than in the absence of risk. About two-thirdsof the impact of risk is due to the ex ante effect (that is,the behavioral response to risk), which is usually not takeninto account in policy design. These results suggest that policyinterventions that reduce exposure to shocks or that help householdsmanage risk could be much more effective than is commonly thought.     

Child Growth in the Time of Drought

This paper examines the impact of rainfall shocks on a measure of child health, growth in height, drawing on a unique household panel data set from rural Zimbabwe. We find that children aged 12 to 24 months lose 1.5-2 cm of growth in the aftermath of a drought. Catch-up growth in these children is limited so that this growth faltering has a permanent effect. By contrast, there is no evidence that older children experience a slowdown in growth. There is some evidence that the loss in growth is unequally distributed with children residing in poorer households and offspring of women who are daughters of the household head appearing to be especially vulnerable.     

The effect of competition on the practice of outpatient services for diabetes patients at different levels of hospitals in Taiwan

This paper empirically analyses hospital non-price competition in a market characterized by a government accreditation system in Taiwan. Outpatient services for diabetes patients were used to measure the quality of patient care in outpatient departments in three types of hospitals. The hypothesis that an increase in the number of highest accredited hospitals – medical centres – would improve the quality of care in other types of hospitals is rejected. However, after carefully controlling endogeneity and measurement error of the hospital competition index by using instrumental variables, empirical findings based on the National Health Insurance Research Database from 1997 to 1999 show that different types of hospitals may respond to competitive pressure from the various levels of hospitals differently. Positive spillover effects were found from competition from regional and district hospitals. These findings may deserve serious consideration when forming policy to allocate medical resources to different levels of hospitals.     

Information Exchange and Strategic Behavior in Supply Chains: Application to the Food Sector

Information technology (IT) facilitates information exchange between retailers and suppliers. Based on evidence from food industry, information strategies under uncertainty are analyzed, using game theory. Some key results are under certain conditions, retailers withhold valuable sales data from suppliers even if this means less supply coordination; a revealed equilibrium exists where suppliers learn retailers' market data despite retailers' withholding of such data; this leads either to full information convergence or, surprisingly, incomplete information convergence with some informational asymmetry left; retailers with greater market power and numerous suppliers are more inclined to share, rather than to withhold, information.