American Journal of Economics and Sociology最新文献

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is a significant component of the global governance structure and considered a gold standard international body with 193 member states and scientific divisions expected to adhere rigorously to objectivity and political neutrality. However, OPCW's reputation has recently been tarnished. Dissenting scientists from within the organization have raised serious questions about the integrity of an OPCW fact-finding mission (FFM) investigating the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria on April 7, 2018. The OPCW FFMs are tainted in three ways: (1) they rely upon information provided via intermediaries connected to states that are belligerents in the war in Syria; (2) the organizational structure of an FFM excludes scientific and verification divisions of the OPCW; and (3) control of FFMs is held by a bureaucratic office staffed by career diplomats who are from states involved with the Syrian war. Furthermore, officials involved with the Douma FFM investigation report the following anomalies: (a) an original interim report was secretly altered in order to make an unsubstantiated suggestion that an alleged attack had occurred; (b) A U.S. delegation was allowed to brief the FFM, an action prohibited by the Chemical Weapons Convention; and (c) formal attempts by the inspectors to obtain transparency and dialog was rejected by the OPCW. Meanwhile, the United States and its allies have dismissed questions as Russian “disinformation” or as a “conspiracy theory.” Overall, analysis of the alleged Douma attack and the OPCW's FFM supports the thesis that key international organizations have been effectively captured, or at the very least heavily influenced, by particular states that assume their own impartiality. This shortcoming poses a risk to international peace and security.

This study empirically examines the impact of leverage and capital structure on firm value for the US hotel industry from 1991 to 2017. We find strong evidence that leverage positively relates to firm value for firms in the hotel industry. This relationship is most robust for hotel firms with low financial health, consistent with the theory that firms signal positive information through capital structure. We also find that the relationship between leverage and firm value was weakened during the financial crisis, particularly for firms close to financial distress. Our results suggest that hotel management, creditors, and investors should pay attention to the magnifying effect of leverage on firm performance and the impact of financial crises on the value of debt. This study's empirical results also support the idea that firms in the hotel industry signal to outside investors through debt.

Prison overcrowding is a major public policy issue with roughly 2.2 million individuals currently incarcerated in the United States. In the absence of reductions in the prison population, the only way to address overcrowding are the expansion of current facilities or the construction of new prisons. Previous research has demonstrated that factors unrelated to the law can affect the decisions made by prosecutors and judges. We investigate the effect of newly constructed prisons in Florida on the probability of defendants being sentenced to prison within 6 months of the prison receiving inmates. The results reveal that these defendants have a greater likelihood of being incarcerated in prison compared to similar defendants whose cases were resolved before the prison became operational. This indicates the potential for a regional-level substitution between jail and prison incarceration.

Stratification economics has emerged as a field that puts historically and institutionally determined intergroup hierarchies at the forefront of distributive analysis. However, most of the existing theoretical and empirical literature has focused on studying the US stratification regime, limiting the potential application of this analytical framework to other geographies. This paper applies the theoretical framework of stratification economics to analyze the Mexican distributive regime. In the process, we show that expanding the regional focus of stratification economics requires incorporating several insights from other traditions of stratification analysis. Furthermore, we show that a stratification economics approach overcomes several pitfalls of more traditional approaches to analyzing the Mexican distributive regime, such as the human capital approach that anchored several public policy interventions deployed at the beginning of the XXIst century.

This paper first develops a theoretical model of the returns to daycare, which attempts to show that families enroll their children into daycare based on its expected benefits and costs. The paper then moves to an empirical study that seeks to determine whether enrolling an infant in daycare affects his or her later-in-life employment and poverty status. To identify the causal effect of interest, the econometric approach employs a recently developed panel estimator that accommodates the dynamic nature of later-in-life employment and income, while also controlling for unobserved heterogeneity. The main finding is that, although infant daycare enrollment appears to correlate with positive later-in-life outcomes, addressing potential bias in that link renders the estimated effects highly imprecise, such that one cannot confidently conclude whether daycare helps or hinders later-in-life outcomes.

In the United States, there exist enormous geographic differentials in the cost of living. A sound, basic understanding of factors that influence such geographic living-cost differentials is important to help formulate useful policies to address various contemporary economic and social problems such as public-school funding across counties. In this exploratory study of the effects of tax freedom on geographic living-cost differentials, the following hypothesis is investigated using panel data for the period 2009 through 2020. The higher the average overall freedom from taxation in a state in the forms of personal income taxation, property taxation, and sales taxation, the lower the overall cost of living in the state. In this exploratory study, strong empirical support is obtained for this heretofore effectively overlooked hypothesis.

Primary healthcare (PHC) governance model, namely its financing scheme, might impact the health outcomes, particularly in chronic conditions, through avoidable hospital admissions (AvH). Therefore, the study aims to assess how the PHC financial governance model determines AvH, as well as how this interacts with the health system financing (HSF) scheme. An observational study comparing the GP employment type (publicly and self/privately) with asthma and COPD, and Diabetes AvH per 100,000 habitants in 26 countries of the European Region, was performed. It considered 4 regression models with structural determinants, service delivery and HSF schemes. GP self/privately employed group associated with social health insurance scheme was significantly associated with higher total AvH (OR = 28.27 [CI 95% 2.34–77.54]), and for asthma and COPD AvH (OR = 21.88 [CI 95% 6.69–180.18]). Diabetes AvH were significantly associated with increasing GP outpatient coverage (model 1) and GP availability (model 2) under a GP self/privately employed group (respectively, OR = 17.01 [CI 95% 3.67–20.63] and OR = 17.80 [CI 95% 8.12–130.35]). The study evidenced that publicly employed GPs working in a tax-based HSF scheme ensure better health outcomes for the population. Although some limitations of equity and categorisation, the results show that the governance model might influence population health outcomes.