Contemporary Economic Policy最新文献

Economic freedom plays a crucial role in fostering economic activities by creating opportunities and reducing transaction costs. However, its impact on entrepreneurship often differs by gender. This study examines the causal relationship between economic freedom and the ratio of female-to-male entrepreneurship using the matching method. The findings reveal that economic reforms have no short-term impact on the ratio but reduce the gender gap over time while supporting opportunity-driven ventures in the short run. A larger government and sound monetary policies are positively associated with female entrepreneurship, whereas regulatory reforms demonstrate short-term advantages but pose long-term challenges.

Vertical identification laws (VILs)—which require state drivers' licenses issued to individuals under age 21 to be vertically oriented—have been adopted widely across the United States. We find no evidence that VIL adoption has a statistically significant or economically important effect on teenage drinking and smoking. This result persists using Callaway and Sant'Anna estimates and extends to binge drinking, marijuana use, and drinking and driving. Finally, we show that prior estimates reported in the literature are sensitive to sample period studied, choice of Youth Risk Behavior Survey dataset, and accounting for heterogeneous and dynamic treatment effects.

We analyze the introduction of new Medicare billing codes for Chronic Care Management (CCM) and Transitional Care Management (TCM). We first show that new code take-up occurs gradually and varies across space and physician characteristics. Second, we study how the codes correlate with other services, focusing on two case studies. Illustrating code substitution, we show TCM services predict fewer traditional office visits following hospital discharges, suggesting crowd out. Illustrating code complementarity, we show TCM and CCM services predict increases in annual wellness visits. Take-up frictions and the relationship between new and existing codes are important for evaluating payment reforms.

Spatial mismatch between patients and physicians constrains access to medical care and contributes to differential health outcomes. Health Professional Shortage Area (HPSA) designations identify areas where there are too few primary care physicians to treat the local population. State and federal programs are used to incentivize an increase in primary care services for designated communities. Propensity score matching methods estimate the effect of county-level primary care HPSA designation on mortality. Designated counties experience an average three percent decline in overall mortality, a six percent decline in the cancer mortality rate and a 13% decline in the stroke mortality rate.

Business dynamics—the creation and destruction of businesses—drive economic development, innovation, and income distribution. While business dynamics are linked to migration internationally, this relationship at the U.S. metropolitan level is unclear. We hypothesize that net domestic migration may influence business dynamics by expanding the labor force and increasing local demand, fostering new business creation and incumbent business expansion. Using Internal Revenue Service and IPUMS-CPS data (1997–2017) for 358 U.S. metros, our fixed-effects estimates show a positive relationship between net migration and business creation but no significant relationship with business destruction.

This paper examines the impact of imports from developed countries on industry-specific employment in India between 1983 and 2010. The identification strategy relies on comparing differential changes in import exposure across regions to the differential changes in employment within industries. The variation in the changes in imports to other developing countries is used to identify the component of the changes in imports driven by world demand. The results suggest that the increase in import exposure during the post-liberalization period reduced agricultural employment but increased employment in manufacturing, business, and social services. No significant impacts were found in the pre-liberalization period.

In an effort to achieve greater efficiency and reduce corruption in government procurement, in 2009, the Mexican government reformed its public procurement law and introduced framework agreements, a centralized purchasing strategy. This paper finds that the mandatory switch from individual agency purchases to framework agreements generated substantial public savings for the purchase of payroll services to disperse year-end bonuses. Relative to the pre-framework agreement period, mandating framework agreements virtually eliminated paying commissions. Further analysis suggests that additional competitors and a shift to digitalized payroll services by agencies, in response to the agreement to be large drivers of the effects.

We explore the interactive effect of economic freedom and perceived obstacles (corruption, crime, and political instability) on the probability of having females as top managers using Indian firm level data. Our analysis shows that when economic freedom is lower, higher levels of these perceived obstacles correspond to a lower probability of having a female top manager. However, this negative effect is eliminated at higher levels of economic freedom. In some cases, at higher levels of economic freedom, we observe a significantly positive marginal effect of an increase in perceived obstacles on the probability of having a female top manager.

This study employs China's comprehensive standardization reform as an exogenous policy shock to investigate the impact of the standard system on corporate labor employment. The findings indicate that comprehensive standardization reform facilitates corporate labor employment by reducing transaction costs, enhancing operational efficiency, and improving the financing environment. The heterogeneity analysis reveals that the effects of comprehensive standardization reform on corporate labor employment are more pronounced in firms with non-state ownership, operating in competitive industries, located in regions with lower levels of marketization, and exhibiting significant gender disparities. Overall, this study highlights the employment externalities associated with the standard system.

Trust in political institutions and their officials is crucial for implementing policies, enacting reforms, and facilitating collective action. This paper examines how corruption investigations influence trust in local cadres. Using data from China's anti-corruption campaign, which increased corruption case disclosures, we find positive signals about checks and balances outweigh negative ones only when corruption cases are few. However, as investigations increase, trust diminishes due to heightened perceptions of corruption and lower evaluations of local governments, especially among those who lacked prior beliefs about local corruption levels before the campaign.