Research in Economics最新文献

This study investigates the impact of the COVID pandemic on healthcare utilization, spending, and health measures among the U.S. population during the first year of the pandemic. We utilize data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey and employ propensity score matching techniques to analyze the variation in healthcare outcomes due to the pandemic.

Our findings indicate that the pandemic significantly reduced mental health status, the intensity of office, outpatient, and emergency room visits, and a corresponding decline in healthcare spending. On the other hand, we find improvement in health-related quality of life for most individuals, except for blacks, individuals with a high school degree or less, the uninsured, and the low-income population. The findings highlight disparities during the pandemic and the need for increased efforts to promote health equity.

This paper studies economic resilience as the ability of an economic system to respond to adverse shocks. We propose several measures of resilience based on a quantile function representing income dynamics. Applied to the evolution of per capita income, we evaluate the speed and nature of economic adjustments to adverse shocks across countries over the last two centuries. We find evidence of important income effects: low-income countries adjust to adverse shocks better in the short run; but high-income countries adjust better in the longer run. We show that the long run effects dominate: in terms of discounted present value, high-income countries have been able to reduce the effects of adverse shocks on expected future income better than low-income countries. Finally, we find that, over the last 50 years, most of the changes in resilience across countries can be attributed to income effects.

COVID-19 has caused substantial disruptions to the airline industry. This paper analyzes the impact of the pandemic on price dispersion in airfares. The sample includes ticket information from the DB1B database between 2018Q1 and 2021Q4. The fixed-effect panel instrument variable (IV) estimation finds evidence of decreased price dispersion during COVID-19. These results are robust to alternative measures of dispersion and subsamples. Furthermore, the subsample analyes reveal that, as the infection rate rises, the dispersion decreases more in markets where competition is more intense. Specifically, dispersion is lower on routes with the presence of low-cost carriers (LCCs) than those exclusively served by legacy carriers and on short-haul routes ($\le$500 miles) than long-haul routes ($>$500 miles). My analysis adds to the literature by exploiting the impact of changes in market conditions (i.e., demand shocks triggered by the COVID-19 recession) on price and price dispersion using the latest data.

This is the first paper I am aware of to integrate litigants’ investment in pretrial case preparation with the fact that judges experience small costs to processing extra information conveyed by litigants. While a full-scale battle involving high case preparation by both parties would have obtained if litigants were confident that judges would review the extra evidence, costly judicial attention results either in an equilibrium where no one incurs case preparation expenses, or (if parties are relatively malicious, and judicial technology is efficient) in just one litigant, but not both, incurring such expenses. The latter possibility can create incentives for a signaling race. While costly judicial attention lowers case preparation expenses and generally makes litigants better off relative to the full attention case, it can also lead to fewer cases being immediately settled.

This study evaluates the impact of the social security contribution rate, late retirement age, and employment rate on pension replacement rate by using an overlapping generation (OLG) model that provides insightful measures on the endogenous pension replacement of retired employees in China. We conducted empirical analysis, Bootstrap & Sobel Test (BST) for mediating effect and used fixed and mediated effects models on panel data of 31 Chinese provinces to achieve specific employment promotion and pension replacement rates. The late employment rate is positively significant and correlated with the social security contribution rate (SSCR), which shows the late retirement age can significantly reduce SSCR. The optimal combination identified in the late retirement age that decreasing SSCR. The above results indicate that the intermediary effect is significant. Simultaneously, SSCR does play an intermediary role in the relationship between the late retirement age and the employment rate. The late retirement age affects the employment rate through the social security contribution rate; thus, the late retirement age reduces a corporate social security contribution rate and labor cost and then prompts the enterprise to increase employment demand. Furthermore, BST mediating effects show that the SSCR significantly affects the late retirement age and employment rate. We conclude effective policy reforms can alleviate the late retirement age dilemma because a decline in the social security contribution rate causes a 1 % reduction in the social security contribution rate causing the 0.41055 percent late retirement age yearly.

In a two-country model of general oligopolistic equilibrium with technologically heterogeneous sectors, I study how, in a home-market scenario, a unilateral rise in uniform cross-sector import tariffs affects wages, countrywide profits, and welfare. Firms face resource constraints and wages are simultaneously determined. Economy-wide protectionism reduces the foreign wage without affecting the domestic one. Domestic countrywide profits benefit from a small rise in uniform tariffs, whereas the foreign counterpart is damaged. Domestic welfare is unambiguously hindered. Hence, the general-equilibrium cross-sector perspective goes against the textbook version theory of the optimal tariff in partial equilibrium. Rationalization of these effects suggests a political-economy view on tariff formation in general equilibrium. Then I extend the model to segmented markets, considering uniform specific and ad valorem tariffs for bilateral and unilateral trade policies.

The paper sets up a model which reconciles the energy efficiency gap and the decline of the rebound effect with households’ income. It is shown that the two phenomena can be explained in a framework with a utility-maximizing household that enjoys an income-independent endowment of energy services. Energy service endowment is a barrier against the adoption of the most energy-efficient appliances and leads to the so-called energy efficiency gap. Low-income households only use endowments and do not use energy-consuming appliances (cars, wall insulation, etc.). Higr-income households buy an appliance whose energy efficiency depends on the household’s income. Only households with income above a threshold buy the most efficient appliance. For households that replace their appliance with a more efficient one, there will be a rebound effect (the realized energy saving is less than the presumed one). It is shown that the rebound effect is higher at lower income levels because income and substitution effects from a decline in energy service prices are stronger. These stronger effects come from the endowment of energy services. The numerical example shows that the model can reproduce the patterns for the rebound effects of household income groups and their expenditure shares. It is also shown that other causes of the energy efficiency gap, such as credit constraints, do not lead to higher rebound effects at lower income levels.

This paper suggests a demand side analysis of informal employment characterised by incompliances with labour tax regulation, using a general equilibrium model with overlapping generations. A public social insurance provides benefits to formal employees in retirement, while we allow for an informal insurance mechanism for informal employees through a social norm of mutual support. The objective of the paper is to evaluate the impact of auditing policy and social norms on growth and social welfare. We define the private transfer rate to the informal population and provide an analysis on the impact of social norms to wage levels, growth and welfare.

The existing literature in the US-Mexico trade balance reports mixed evidence on the effects of exchange rate shocks. In this paper we propose a new approach of studying exchange rate effects that allows for asymmetries in the balance of trade. Our results show that using either linear modelling or non-linear modelling and zero threshold, there is no evidence of co-integration for the US-Mexico trade. However, using a quantile analysis and median threshold, for the first time in the literature on trade balance, we obtain evidence of co-integration. Indeed, our findings show the existence of a long-run relation between the trade balance and its determinants except for periods of significant deficits, where the trade balance is detached from underlying fundamentals and follows a random walk. A USD depreciation, especially a small one, is effective in the short run in improving the trade balance, while in the long run, any depreciation worsens the trade balance. These findings hold due to the complementarity of the US and Mexican economies and the change in the structure of the Mexican economy towards higher value-added products that have led to income effects outweighing in the long run, any intending short-run effects, of exchange rate depreciation.

Consumer demands and consumption, though seemingly disjoint, are inextricably linked together via intertemporal two-stage budgeting, and cannot be separated. This paper elucidates this budgeting procedure with an illustration using the Linear Expenditure System, and evaluates the traditional analysis of consumer behavior that treats them as independent. We find that the dichotomous treatment of consumption expenditure and relative commodity prices in the traditional analysis creates a bias in the estimation of consumer demands and consumption. We argue that a proper understanding of consumer behavior entails an integration of consumer demands and consumption within a unifying framework, which can be achieved by utilizing the intertemporal two-stage budgeting procedure.