Empirical Economics最新文献

Using a finite mixture regression approach, we identify two groups of individuals, family- and career-oriented. Depending on whether the employment status is treated as a binomial or trinomial (with part-time work) variable, 55–70% of women and 4–10% of men belong to the family-oriented group. Children variables are the main source of differences between the two identified groups and between the family-oriented group and the average woman. Treating all women as one group leads to averaged-out estimates of children effects and underestimates the importance of part-time work for family-oriented women. Our results are important for studying women’s labour supply and for designing policies aimed at encouraging women’s labour market involvement.

This paper investigates the causal effect of co-payment exemption on the number of specialist visits in the Italian National Health System. Exploiting a discontinuity in the multiple eligibility criteria, we apply multiple regression discontinuity in a quasi-experimental setting, considering both age and income requirements. Differently from the standard regression discontinuity, this twofold discontinuity allows to identify the effect of co-payment on a particularly needy sub-population of less wealthy people and how it changes according to the eligibility criteria. We find positive effects of co-payment exemption and the effects are stronger for less wealthy and older individuals. The result may be useful to the policy maker to tailor ad-hoc policies aimed at disadvantaged sub-populations.

Since the seminal paper of Nelson and Plosser (J Monet Econ 10(2):139–162, 1982), analyzing the nature of shocks to macroeconomic and financial data has attracted great attention and it continues to be up-to-date, especially, in conjunction with the advances in unit root literature. This paper examines the persistence in macroeconomic and financial variables for Turkey by means of the recent developments in the quantile autoregression models to account for non-normal distributions, structural changes, and asymmetric dynamics. The results show that while the conventional unit root approaches fail to reject the null hypothesis of unit root for most the of 30 macroeconomic and financial time series, the nonlinear quantile unit root test with smooth structural changes supports evidence on a stable long-run equilibrium for 23 variables. It further reveals asymmetric persistence in most of the Turkey’s macroeconomic and financial data, implying that the effect of an economic shock in inflationary state is different than that in recessionary state.

Abstract

This paper examines the relative significance of oil supply, oil demand, and monetary policy shocks in explaining US macroeconomic variations. We analyze impulse response functions and variance decomposition to assess the relative importance of these shocks. Using a Bayesian structural VAR framework and the penalty function approach, we identify the shocks of interest. We find that oil supply shocks explain less than 3% of the variation in output, but have a relatively larger impact on inflation, accounting for around 13% of the inflation variation. Oil demand shocks explain 3% of output variation, but contribute significantly to inflation variation (around 16%). In contrast, monetary policy shocks have a greater influence on output, explaining approximately 13% of the observed variation. Monetary policy shocks are also the most influential source of inflation variation, contributing over 24% to the overall variation. Based on historical variance decomposition, we find that the recent inflation surge is attributable to both monetary expansion and oil supply factors. Overall, the study highlights the dominance of monetary policy shocks in explaining US macroeconomic fluctuations, with oil supply and demand shocks playing secondary roles.

Abstract

Private school students outperform their public school peers on standardized tests. Extensive effort has been devoted to testing whether the private–public gap is attributable to the schools themselves or simply due to peer effects or positive selection into private schools. Receiving far less attention is the extent to which the return to specific schooling inputs differs between private and public schools. We find evidence of an overall positive effect of class time on academic achievement and little evidence of a premium to time in private schools. Indeed, the benefit of added time appears similar in both settings. The lack of a private school premium to class time is consistent with the notion of positive selection into private schools.

Over the last two decades, social security reforms in several European countries have turned early retirement routes for older workers increasingly difficult. The size of the effects of these reforms on labour supply and social security transfers, and how these effects interact with workers’ characteristics have yet to be measured. This article sheds light on this issue by exploring the consequences of postponing access to an old-age unemployment programme—from age 58 to 60—in Belgium. The programme provides laid-off workers with a combination of unemployment benefits and a monthly supplement paid by the employer until the full retirement age. Exploiting register data on the universe of workers and using a difference-in-difference identification strategy, the authors find that UCS eligibility negatively affects employment participation but also mitigates older workers’ participation in other social security programmes.

We investigate the long-run impact of education on longevity using data for England and Wales from the Health and Lifestyle Survey. Longevity is modelled by survival analysis using a mixed proportional hazard model. For identification we propose a Regression Discontinuity Design implied by an increase in the minimum school leaving age in 1947 (from 14 to 15) combined with a principal stratification method for estimation of the mortality hazard rate. This method allows us to derive the causal effect of extended education on longevity. In line with earlier studies we do not find credible evidence of a causal impact of the additional years of schooling that were induced by the reform on longevity.

This study examines the characteristics of Japan’s dual labor market, which consists of standard and non-standard employment. I conduct labor stock and flow analyses using Japanese Labour Force Survey data from 2002 to 2022. The stock analysis suggests that, in the long run, non-standard employment improves labor market conditions, such as employment and unemployment rates. Changes in the composition of standard and non-standard employment reduce the average hours per worker in the long run but play a limited role over the business cycles. The flow analysis reveals that inflows and outflows involving non-standard employment have relatively significant effects on changes in employment and unemployment rates. This feature of non-standard employment is more pronounced for females and young individuals. The flow analysis also shows that within-employment reallocation, that is, transitions between standard and non-standard employment, primarily determines the changes in the share of non-standard employment. The sluggish movement between these two types of contracts leads to a persistently high level of non-standard employment in Japan.

Building on the GJR-GARCH model, this paper uses the mixed-data sampling (MIDAS) approach to link monthly realized volatility of EU carbon future prices and macroeconomic variables to the volatility of EU carbon futures market and proposes the GJR-GARCH-MIDAS model incorporating macroeconomic variables including the economic sentiment indicator of the EU, the harmonized index of consumer prices of the EU, the European economic policy uncertainty index and ECB’s marginal lending facility rate (GJR-GARCH-MIDAS-X models). An empirical analysis based on the monthly macroeconomic variables and daily EUA futures data shows that the above four low-frequency macroeconomic variables have significant positive or negative impacts on the long-term volatility of EUA future prices, respectively. The GJR-GARCH-MIDAS-X models significantly outperform other competing models, including the GJR-GARCH model, GARCH-MIDAS model and standard GJR-GARCH-MIDAS model, in terms of out-of-sample volatility forecasting, which suggests that macroeconomic variables contain important information for EUA future price volatility forecasts. In particular, the GJR-GARCH-MIDAS model with harmonized index of consumer prices (HICP) (GJR-GARCH-MIDAS-HICP model) performs best in out-of-sample volatility forecasting, and our findings are robust to different forecasting windows.

Abstract

The article presents a robust quantitative approach for determining significant economic factors for sex trafficking in the United States. The aim is to study monthly counts of sex trafficking-related convictions, and use a wide range of economic variables as covariates to investigate their effect on conviction counts. A count time series model is considered along with a regression setup to include economic time series as covariates (economic factors) to explain the counts on sex trafficking-related convictions. The statistical significance of these economic factors is investigated and the significant factors are ranked based on appropriate model selection methods. The inclusion of time-lagged versions of the economic factor time series in the regression model is also explored. Our findings indicate that economic factors relating to immigration policy, consumer price index and labor market regulations are the most significant in explaining sex trafficking convictions.