Conventional explanations for the post-1991 growth of India's manufacturing sector focus on goods trade liberalisation and industrial delicensing. We demonstrate the powerful contribution of a ...neglected factor: India's policy reforms in services. The link between these reforms and the productivity of manufacturing firms is examined using panel data for about 4,000 Indian firms for the period 1993–2005. We find that banking, telecommunications, insurance and transport reforms all had significant positive effects on the productivity of manufacturing firms. Services reforms benefited both foreign and locally owned manufacturing firms, but the effects on foreign firms tended to be stronger.
The overall electricity consumption, treated as a primary guideline for electricity system planning, is a major measurement to indicate the degree of a nation's development. The electricity ...consumption forecast is especially important with regard to policy making in developing countries (Asian countries in this work). However, since the economic growth rates in these countries are usually high and unstable, it is difficult to obtain accurate predictions using long-term data, and thus forecasting with limited (short-term) data is more effective and of considerable interest. Grey theory is one approach that can be used to construct a model with limited samples to provide better forecasting advantage for short-term problems. The forecasting performance of AGM(1,1), based on grey theory, has been confirmed using the Asia-Pacific economic cooperation energy database, and the results, compared with those obtained from back propagation neural networks (BPN) and support vector regression (SVR), show that the proposed approach can effectively deal with the problem of forecasting electricity consumption when the sample size is limited.
Over the last two decades, communication has become an increasingly important aspect of monetary policy. These real-world developments have spawned a huge new scholarly literature on central bank ...communication—mostly empirical, and almost all of it written in this decade. We survey this ever-growing literature. The evidence suggests that communication can be an important and powerful part of the central bank's toolkit since it has the ability to move financial markets, to enhance the predictability of monetary policy decisions, and potentially to help achieve central banks' macroeconomic objectives. However, the large variation in communication strategies across central banks suggests that a consensus has yet to emerge on what constitutes an optimal communication strategy.
We investigate whether physicians' financial incentives influence health care supply, technology diffusion, and resulting patient outcomes. In 1997, Medicare consolidated the geographic regions ...across which it adjusts physician payments, generating area-specific price shocks. Areas with higher payment shocks experience significant increases in health care supply. On average, a 2 percent increase in payment rates leads to a 3 percent increase in care provision. Elective procedures such as cataract surgery respond much more strongly than less discretionary services. Non-radiologists expand their provision of MRIs, suggesting effects on technology adoption. We estimate economically small health impacts, albeit with limited precision.
We examine the effect of international regulations governing the market for corporate control (MCC) on firm risk‐taking using the staggered enactment of country‐level merger and acquisition (M&A) ...laws of 34 countries. Consistent with the theoretical argument of deterrence, we show that the MCC leads to unintended consequences by discouraging value‐relevant corporate risk‐taking. Our investigation of real earnings management suggests that the MCC induces real earnings smoothing and also provides evidence of short‐termism. This reduction in corporate risk‐taking is associated with a decrease in real investments, an increase in cash‐holding, an increase in debt employment, and a propensity to diversify in M&A. Further examination of the heterogeneous effect of the quality of national governance institutions on the relationship between the MCC and risk‐taking shows that the country‐level investor protection and transparency levels positively moderate the effect of the MCC. Our study highlights that there could be complementary roles played by national institutional features and the MCC in encouraging value‐relevant corporate risk‐taking.
We present in this paper evidence about the effects and mechanisms of gender peer effects in elementary, middle, and high schools. For identification, we rely on idiosyncratic variations in gender ...composition across adjacent cohorts within the same schools. We find that an increase in the proportion of girls improves boys and girls' cognitive outcomes. These academic gains are mediated through lower levels of classroom disruption and violence, improved inter-student and student-teacher relationships, and lessened teachers' fatigue. We find no effect on individual behavior, which suggests that the positive effects of girls on classroom environment are mostly due to compositional change.
We study the mechanisms through which the entry into the euro delayed, rather than advanced, key economic reforms in the eurozone periphery and led to the deterioration of important institutions in ...these countries. We show that the abandonment of the reform process and the institutional deterioration, in turn, not only reduced their growth prospects but also fed back into financial conditions, prolonging the credit boom and delaying the response to the bubble when the speculative nature of the cycle was already evident. We analyze empirically the interrelation between the financial boom and the reform process in Greece, Spain, Ireland, and Portugal and, by way of contrast, in Germany, a country that did experience a reform process after the creation of the euro. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
I study the impact of stress resulting from the unexpected death of a child on parents' mortality risk. Using a flexible approach and allowing for time‐varying treatment effects, I find no impact on ...the short‐run mortality risk. However, I estimate a substantial increase in the long‐run, particularly among men. I provide evidence that this group likely resorts to risky health behaviours such as heavy smoking and drinking as coping mechanisms. Assessing the possible protective effects of mental health support, I find evidence that it lowers the mortality risk for women. Mental health support has a smaller impact for men. I show that this is likely due to underutilization by those who would benefit the most. Finally, I present robustness of my results to specific departure from my identifying assumptions.
We evaluate returns to General Educational Development (GED) certification for high school dropouts using state administrative data. We apply a fuzzy regression discontinuity method to account for ...test takers retaking the test. For women we find that GED certification has no statistically significant effect on either employment or earnings. For men we find a significant increase in earnings in the second year after taking the test but no impact in subsequent years. GED certification increases postsecondary school enrollment by 4–8 percentage points. Our results differ from regression discontinuity approaches that fail to account for test retaking.
Among the many technology forecasting indicators, patents and patent citations are useful and important indicators. The more frequently a certain patent is cited by subsequent patents, the more the ...related technology can be said to be diffused, implying that the technology is more widely applied and thus more valuable. This paper analyzes the business methods technology which retrieves patents from the USPTO database. There are two purposes of this paper: 1. establish the indicators for finding basic patents and measure the relationship of these basic patents; 2. classify the basic patents and explain the groups of technology diffusion. Finally, this study identifies the two mainstreams in business method technology: one is focused on marketing technology, and the other one stresses on data security. Both are important for Internet data processes or e-commerce activities.
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