Economics & Politics最新文献

This paper focuses on circumstances and consequences of health payers' configuration in Poland and Czechia since the 1990s. It aims to identify the differences in healthcare financing between the two neighboring countries that had started from a similar position, but eventually incorporated different arrangements of payers. The paper conducts comparative analysis of four distinctive elements: the configuration of contracting and payment methods, the power of the payers, coverage and contributions, and the dominant anchor's search attempts. The results map the evolution of healthcare in both countries with a focus on the payers' role, show the payers' economic position and behavior to providers, citizens and health policy authorities. Polish single-payer system was identified as cheaper and more effective for administratively based expenditure control, while the Czech multipayer one showed higher institutional stability and a wider coverage paid by public health insurance. The paper brings an empirical assessment of existing theoretical knowledge concerning the options for a payers' configuration, demonstrating that the choice and adjustments thereof are country-specific and depend on the preferred priorities of health policy.

The 1975 Voting Rights Act (VRA) extended voting rights protections to language minority groups. Employing a triple difference design, we find that language minority voter turnout remained stable in VRA-shielded counties while it eroded elsewhere. This led to a reallocation of state educational funds away from unshielded counties. As a result, shielded counties experienced preferable changes in their high school graduation rates, white-collar job attainment, and income. We find most of these differences were driven by the VRA's preclearance provision.

This study explores the role of digital inclusive finance in company digital transformation within China, particularly examining the variances among companies with differing levels of technological intensity and financialization. Using A-share Chinese data from 2011 to 2022, we find that regions with superior digital inclusive finance exhibit enhanced corporate digital transformation, regardless of the provincial or municipal level. Subindexes, including the coverage breadth, use depth, and degree of digital inclusive finance, confirm that they are all significantly positively related to digital transformation. These effects are more pronounced in companies with lower technological intensity, and corporate financialization serves as a mediating factor.

The integration of algorithmic decision-making into daily life gives rise to a need to understand public attitudes toward this phenomenon. This study uses online experiments to explore how decision scenarios and roles influence public preferences for algorithms. In-depth interviews were conducted to examine interpretations of algorithmic fairness. The findings indicate a preference for algorithms, yet a stronger preference for human decision-making in ethically complex scenarios. Decision-makers demonstrate greater acceptance of algorithms. Participants perceive algorithmic fairness from social and technical perspectives, emphasizing autonomy and transparency. Despite a general preference for algorithms, concerns persist, revealing a nuanced view of algorithmic fairness as a form of societal power.

We examine the political conditions mediating the effect of vertical fiscal imbalance (VFI) on local government fiscal discipline in Ghana. Based on a panel dataset of 216 local governments in Ghana over the period 1994–2018, we adopt both a static and dynamic approach, in addition to a regression discontinuity design. From the results, while alignment may give “free pass,” local governments could leverage same for effective tax efforts. Further, the benefits of lower political competition may reduce where local governments place reliance on central government grants. There is consistent evidence of a negative effect of VFI on fiscal discipline.

U.S. presidential approval is a topic that has long attracted the interest of political pundits, journalists, candidates, and academics. This study focuses on quarterly U.S. presidential approval and measures of the U.S. macroeconomy. This research will expand, update and reinvestigate this relationship using new data, additional variables and the IVX predictive regression model of Kostakis, et al. (2015), specifically developed for time series data with mixed orders of integration such as we have here. We found that (as measured by Gallup data) U.S. presidential approval is a stationary mean-reverting variable with a long-term mean of approximately 50%. Our results also suggest that presidential party and the business cycle have no impact on the mean of quarterly presidential approval as standalone variables. However, using a comprehensive set of macroeconomic variables in a single study, we found that macroeconomic variables make a difference in applying predictive regression models to indicate significance. Specifically, before and after controlling for other macroeconomic variables, political party and the business cycle, more immediate “pocketbook issues” like gasoline prices and inflation expectations are important issues to American voters' presidential approval rating. Simply put, our regression results suggest rising prices and the expectation of rising prices consistently lower presidential approval in our sample data. This is a result that will likely interest political practitioners and academics alike.