International Studies of Economics最新文献

The high cost of medical care and its association with poverty have given rise to a growing concern for developing countries, but how insurance plans affect household income and alleviate poverty has been rarely discussed. This study aims to bridge this research gap by examining a medical insurance reform in China, a major program of the targeted poverty alleviation (TPA) strategy, which offers higher reimbursement rates and lower medical deductibles for low-income households. We use an administrative data set on impoverished people in a Chinese county to examine how exogenous changes in the medical insurance system affect the income structure of low-income households. We apply a two-part model to a Difference-in-Differences framework, with households that received reimbursement of the insurance reform as the treatment group and others as the control group. Our results imply that the medical insurance reform could increase the overall household income diversity. The mechanism analysis suggests that the medical insurance reform improves the health conditions of patients and encourages caregivers to engage more in off-farm work.

Households that postpone claiming Social Security benefits are, in effect, making additional purchases of the Social Security annuity and acquiring valuable longevity insurance. This paper investigates the impact of plausible variations of subjective mortality beliefs on the value of delayed claiming and the optimal claiming ages of retired workers. Using the Health and Retirement Study data, we show that older individuals could, on average, predict their life expectancy correctly; however, the average variance of age of death calculated from subjective mortality tables is 6.2%–14.4% lower than that from cohort life tables. Using numerical optimization techniques, we further show that, theoretically, older households place a lower value on delaying claiming when they have greater confidence in their ability to forecast their age of death. But the magnitude of this effect is not large enough to change their optimal claiming ages, unless they hold extreme subjective mortality beliefs. As a result, we conclude that subjective mortality beliefs alone cannot explain the prevalence of early claiming behaviors.

This paper proposes an estimation approach following the constructive identification strategy of Athey and Haile, and Gentry and Li with adaption in the context of ascending auctions with selective entry. Our estimators are shown to be consistent in a large sample and to perform well in a finite sample by a simulation study. We apply our estimation approach to the Alibaba online judicial auctions of used cars to recover the bounds of conditional value distribution and the entry cost. The bounds estimates of both conditional value distribution and entry cost are quite tight (resp., relatively wide) for middle-valued (resp., low-valued or high-valued) signal, and the cumulative distribution functions of conditional value distribution given signal comply with the law of ordered dominance. Finally, our counterfactual analysis indicates that (i) the ascending auction yields a higher revenue than the first-price sealed bid auction, and (ii) the revenue can be improved significantly when the entry cost is cut by half.

We use an overlapping generations model to study the challenge in developing countries with a large informal sector and aging population. We use Thailand as a case study and incorporate its labor market structure and its public pension system into the calibrated model. Unlike developed countries, workers in developing countries commonly transit from the formal sector to the informal sector, which can be in the early stage of their working life. This labor market feature crucially limits the coverage of the contributory social security (SS) system. We find that 66% of Thai elderly (aged 60 or over) are ineligible for SS annuity benefits because of an insufficient number of years paying into the SS fund. In addition, we use our model to evaluate two schemes to raise the existing universal basic pension income to the poverty line, namely, uniform benefits and pension-tested benefits. We find that pension-testing effectively improves the targeting efficiency, and nontrivially lowers the cost of the basic pension income program.

This paper presents a dynamic general equilibrium model designed to examine the macroeconomic effects and welfare implications of alternative reforms to the US health insurance system. Specifically, it scrutinizes the extent to which health care reform can mitigate inefficiencies stemming from market imperfections in the health insurance industry. The model considers a stochastic overlapping generations framework, incorporating heterogeneous agents who are subject to uncertain health shocks. These individuals make optimal decisions regarding labor supply, health insurance, and medical services. Given that the optimal levels of medical consumption and hours worked are endogenous, this setting encapsulates general equilibrium effects. The model is calibrated to US data, and numerical simulations suggest that suitable adjustments to the present health insurance system can broaden coverage and enhance welfare. This improvement is achieved by reducing adverse selection, improving overall health status, and lessening tax distortions on labor supply.

This paper uses a heterogeneous-agent overlapping-generations model to examine the fiscal and distributional consequences of introducing a means test in US Social Security. I find that a means test, that is, conditioning benefit payments on a household's earnings or assets, leads to a higher implicit tax on old-age resources, but has desirable distributional effects. A 75% cut in the benefits to households with earnings of more than 200% of the median leads to a 2.3% reduction in the overall size of Social Security, but has almost no effect on average dollar benefits. In contrast, a fiscally comparable payroll tax cut leads to an across-the-board decline of 2% in the average dollar benefits, despite an increase in capital and labor. A fiscally comparable delay in the benefit eligibility age increases benefits for all, but negatively affects capital and labor. Finally, an asset-based means test causes a decline of 1% in the average dollar benefits, but has a large negative effect on capital and the accidental bequests left behind by deceased households.

China's social safety net is still underdeveloped, hence family support in the form of intergenerational transfers often serves as a substitute for the public transfer system. Using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, this paper finds that both upstream inter-vivos transfers (from children to parents) and downstream inter-vivos transfers (from parents to children) are prevalent in urban China. Moreover, the relative income status of the parent and children has an impact on inter-vivos transfers. To investigate what economic factors generate the observed patterns of inter-vivos transfers, this paper adopts a general equilibrium life-cycle model in which overlapping generations are altruistically linked and calibrates the model to match data from urban China. Counterfactual experiments of removing one source of economic risk or modifying the social security replacement rate from the baseline model at a time reveal that intergenerational transfers mainly serve as informal insurance against the income risk of the children.

In the psychological and sociological framework of risk, we establish a static and dynamic equilibrium model for risk-sharing institutional evolution. Particularly, through a comparative study of marine insurance development in China and Europe, we address a wide set of research questions concerning why China and Europe relied on different social organizations for risk sharing.

This paper examines the potential profit of bull flag trading rules in the Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index (SSE) using a template matching technique based on price pattern recognition. This paper fills a gap in the literature by applying a template matching technique for the recognition of bull flag patterns in the Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index (SSE) during the period of 1991–2021. To the best of our knowledge, no previous study has applied bull flag trading rules to the Chinese stock market. Our results indicate that bull flag trading rules can correctly predict the price movement direction of the index most of the time, achieving significantly positive excess profits. Moreover, shorter fitting windows and better quality of price fit values for lower holding periods are associated with better performance. This research may have relevant practical implications for investors who opt for this indicator in their asset allocation decisions.

This paper investigates the dynamic interactions of the cross-section distribution of sectoral price changes and the output growth in the Chinese economy. We compare in depth the results of Granger causality tests, Impulse Response, and Forecast Error Variance Decompositions from Mixed Sampling Frequency Vector Autoregression (MFVAR) with those from common frequency vector autoregression (VAR). It shows that potential causalities for inflation, relative price variability, relative price skewness, and output growth can be successfully detected by the MFVAR. The cross-section distribution of sectoral price changes stands to be a fundamental determinant of fluctuations in the aggregate economy, not only in the short run but also in the long run. Moreover, the empirical results are robust to the identification restrictions imposed as well as to alternative measures for model variables. Our findings are in line with the predictions of a standard sticky-price model, and thus pricing frictions are important factors behind the short-run nonneutrality of nominal shocks. We highlight the primacy of the information contained in the higher-order moments of cross-section distribution of sectoral price changes. We propose that policy authorities should make proper use of all of the valuable information available, particularly those embodied in the distribution of sectoral prices.