•We investigate the effects of the Great Recession on health-compromising behaviours.•We control for state dependence, initial conditions and correlated individual effects.•We focus on the over-50 s ...in England.•Lack of crisis effect upon the probabilities of smoking and physical inactivity.•Both crisis and post-crisis associated with a lower chance of drinking frequently.
Using data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing over the period 2004–2017, this paper explores the effects of the Great Recession and its aftermath upon health-compromising behaviours in adults aged 50 and over. We introduce new techniques into this area of research, namely dynamic random-effects logit estimators which control for initial conditions and correlated individual effects. We observe a lack of crisis effect upon the probabilities of smoking and being physically inactive, as well as of transitioning in and out of these behaviours. In line with other recent literature, this suggests that the relationship between economic recessions and smoking and physical inactivity may have broken down. Alternatively, the over 50s may have been protected from the crisis and subsequent austerity measures. Nonetheless, both the crisis and post-crisis period were associated with a lower probability of drinking frequently.
Despite China being the third largest life insurance market in the world, only 114 m Chinese people out of a population of 1.4 bn hold life insurance. As a result, insurance companies face serious ...problems. This scenario has been described as a ‘growing pain’. Might it be due to the low level of financial literacy prevailing in China? Using two unique nationally representative micro datasets, we investigate how financial literacy relates to the demand for life insurance. We find a positive association between various measures of financial literacy and both the probability of holding life insurance and the premium paid. These findings are robust to using different estimation techniques. We conclude that enhancing financial literacy may be an avenue for China to grow out of the ‘growing pain’.
•We study how financial literacy relates to the demand for life insurance in China.•We focus on both the probability of holding life insurance and the premium paid.•We make use of two unique nationally representative micro datasets.•We use a variety of measures of financial literacy.•We find a positive association between financial literacy and life insurance demand.
We examine the relationship between the degree of foreign ownership and performance of recipient firms, using a panel of 21,582 Chinese firms over the period 2000-2005. We find that joint-ventures ...perform better than wholly foreign-owned and purely domestic firms. Although productivity and profitability initially rise with foreign ownership, they start declining once it reaches a certain point. This suggests that some domestic ownership is necessary to ensure optimal performance. We referred these findings to a model of a joint-venture, where strategic interactions between a foreign and a domestic owner's inputs may lead to an inverted U-shaped ownership-performance relationship.
In this paper, we use a panel of 609 UK firms over the period 1980–2000 to test for the existence of a trade credit channel of transmission of monetary policy, and for whether this channel plays an ...offsetting effect on the traditional credit channel. We estimate error-correction inventory investment equations augmented with the coverage ratio and the trade credit to assets ratio, differentiating the effects of the latter variables across firms more or less likely to face financing constraints, and firms making a high or low use of trade credit. Our results suggest that both the credit and the trade credit channels operate in the UK, and that the latter channel tends to weaken the former.
Objective
Incremental healthcare costs attributed to back pain, and characterisation by patient and clinical factors have rarely been documented. This study aimed to assess annual healthcare resource ...utilisation and costs associated with back pain in primary care.
Methods
Using the IQVIA Medical Research Data (IMRD), patients with back pain were identified (study period: 01 January 2006 to 31 December 2015) using diagnostic records and analgesics prescriptions (n = 133,341), and propensity score matched 1:1 to patients without back pain. The annual incremental costs of back pain associated with consultations and prescriptions were estimated and extrapolated to a national level. Sensitivity analysis was conducted by restricting the study population to the most recent diagnosis of back pain. Variations in cost were assessed stratified by gender, age-groups, deprivation, and comorbidity categories.
Results
The mean age was 57 years, and 62% were females in both the case and control groups. The total incremental healthcare costs associated with back pain was £32.5 million in 2015 (£35.9 million in 2020), with per-patient cost of £244 (£265 in 2020) per year. On a national level, this translated to an estimated £3.2 billion (£3.5 billion in 2020). Eighty percent of the costs were attributed to consultations; and female gender, older age, higher deprivation, and higher comorbidity were all associated with increased mean healthcare costs of patients with back pain.
Conclusion
Our findings confirm the substantial healthcare costs attributed to back pain, even with primacy care costs only. The data also revealed significant cost variations across socio-demographic and clinical factors.
We use a panel of 9381 UK firms to study the links between firms’ global engagement status and their financial health. We estimate inventory investment equations augmented with a financial ...composition variable, and interpret the sensitivity of inventory investment to the latter as a measure of the strength of the financial constraints faced by firms. We find that smaller, younger, and more risky firms; and firms that do not export and are not foreign owned exhibit higher sensitivities. Moreover, global engagement substantially reduces the sensitivities displayed by the former categories of firms: this suggests that it shields firms from financial constraints.
Using a panel of 5999 Belgian small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) over the period 2002-2008, we employ a Bayesian approach to derive firm-varying investment-cash flow sensitivities (ICFS) from ...reduced-form investment equations which include different measures of investment opportunities suitable for unlisted firms. We find that all our models yield similar ICFS, which are significantly related to a wide set of proxies for financing constraints and orthogonal to our measures of investment opportunities. These findings suggest that the ICFS of SMEs do not simply reflect investment opportunities. The investment opportunities bias may therefore have been overstated in previous literature.
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