This paper examines the link between the health indicators and the environmental variables for a cross-section of countries widely dispersed on the economic development spectrum. While environment ...and income are seen to have an inverted-U shaped relationship (Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis), it is also well established that environment and health are positively related. Our study focuses on the implications of this for the relationship between health and income. In the early phases of income growth, the gains in health and the losses in environmental quality could cancel each other out and this challenges the idea that as incomes increase health would always improve. To empirically analyse these issues, we estimate a two-stage least squares model that focuses on the impact of income and the environment on health status, with environment being an endogenous variable. Our results show that the environmental stress variable has a significant negative effect on health status. At the same time, gross national product (GNP) levels are shown to vary positively with health status variables. We find that the health gains obtained through improved incomes can be negated to a significant extent if the indirect effect of income acting via the environment is ignored. Research findings in this regard would be a useful policy instrument towards maximising both the environmental and health gains that come with economic growth and development.
This paper provides a review of public policy measures implemented in EU countries to support New Technology-Based Firms (NTBFs) during the 1980s and early 1990s. It identifies five policy areas and ...provides a synthesis of the policy developments during this period and an assessment of their effectiveness. The policy areas examined are: Science Parks; the Supply of PhDs in Science and Technology, the relationships between NTBFs and Universities/Research Institutions; Direct Financial Support to NTBFs from National Governments; and the Impact of Technological Advisory Services on NTBFs. Although considered independently, these issues are clearly part of an interdependent `system' of policies and we conclude with an overview of the whole policy area, together with our personal recommendations for its improvement.
This paper examines the link between firm performance, CEO characteristics and changes in corporate governance practices using an unbalanced panel of 1721 firms from 1980 to 1995. This paper provides ...the stylized facts about corporate governance practices and details how governance practices have evolved over time. By 1995, the majority of firms had implemented differing types of charter amendments, poison pills or other governance provisions that are potentially harmful to shareholders. Most firms have adopted multiple and even redundant governance provisions. Shareholders are more likely to approve an increase in the power of the boards of directors of better performing firms, while the boards of poorly performing firms are much more likely to initiate governance changes, such as poison pills, that circumvent shareholder approval. I find no relationship between CEO age, tenure or compensation and governance changes.
The notion of the knowledge-based economy highlights the strategic importance of inter-industrial knowledge flows. Among others, the crucial role of information and communications technology (ICT) ...industry is emphasized. The pattern whereby technological knowledge is created, accumulated and disseminated through the interactive learning among industries can be portrayed as a network. Based on the network theory, this empirical study analyses, from the dynamic perspective, inter-industrial technological knowledge structure of Korean industries during the reference period of early 1980s to mid-1990s. Overall, the density of the network increased over time, implying that the knowledge network has expanded and intensified. The role of the ICT industry in the global network has also increased but needs to be further strengthened, especially informatization of non-ICT industries by the outflow of ICT industrial knowledge in the future. The findings in turn render some important policy implications that should be addressed in developing technology policy.
The effects of patents as indicators for innovations and standards on German trade performance are analysed in general and German-British trade in detail. The latter analysis goes a step further than ...the approach of Swann et al. (
1996
) and is based on a broader and more detailed database. The results show that Germany's export performance can primarily be explained by its innovative capacity and only to a small extent by its strength in standards. Furthermore, the results underscore the common view of the trade-fostering effect of international standards, while 'idiosyncratic' standards have ambiguous effects on exports.
The relationship between economic openness and welfare policies has become increasingly important to policy makers. While scholars have tended to examine conditions under which budgets for social ...welfare programs ebb and flow along with countries' exposure to trade, they have overlooked how governments may compensate domestic labor by subsidizing their employers. To explicitly address the issue of instrument choice, we examine the relative salience of social welfare expenditures to industrial subsidies in a panel of 16 OECD countries from 1980 to 1995. Our results suggest that the relative budgetary salience of social welfare to industrial subsidies is influenced by the interplay between governmental partisan gravity and changes in imports. Unlike Right governments, Left governments tend to favor indirect compensation via industrial subsidies in the wake of negative, zero or moderate increases in imports. Faced with sharp increases in imports, Left governments switch their preferences to compensating workers via more direct and visible policies, namely social welfare.
An analysis of the effect of children and career interruptions on the family gap is based on Danish longitudinal data covering the years 1980-95. The estimated model controls for unobserved ...time-constant heterogeneity. The results show that, when controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, the negative effect of children on mothers' wages disappears. The main effect of children seems to be loss of human capital accumulation during childbirth periods; apart from this, there is no indication that children have long-term effects on the earnings potential of their mothers, holding experience constant.
Divorce rates are higher in cities. Based on Danish register data, this paper shows that of the marriages formed in the city, those couples who remain in the city have a 23% higher divorce rate than ...those who move out. In this paper, we test whether this observation is due to sorting of more stable marriages into rural areas or if there exists a causal effect of living in urban areas on marriage instability. Our identification strategy supplements the timing- ofevents approach with an instrumental variable. Our findings suggest that the effect of living in an urban area on the divorce risks drops substantially and loses statistical significance once we address sorting.
We propose that analysis of purchasing power parity (PPP) and the law of one price should explicitly take into account the possibility of “commodity points”—thresholds delineating a region of no ...central tendency among relative prices, possibly due to lack of perfect arbitrage in the presence of transaction costs and uncertainty. More than 80 years ago, Heckscher stressed the importance of such incomplete arbitrage in the empirical application of PPP. We devise an econometric method to identify commodity points. Price adjustment is treated as a nonlinear process, and a threshold autoregression offers a parsimonious specification within which both thresholds and adjustment speeds are estimated by maximum likelihood methods. Our model performs well using post-1980 data, and yields parameter estimates that appear quite reasonable: adjustment outside the thresholds might imply half-lives of price deviations measured in months rather than years, and the thresholds correspond to popular rough estimates as to the order of magnitude of actual transport costs. The estimated commodity points appear to be positively related to objective measures of market segmentation, notably nominal exchange rate volatility.J. Japan Int. Econ.December 1997,11(4), pp. 441–479. Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720-3880; and Department of Economics, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208-2600.
Over half of money fund managers voluntarily waive fees they have a contractual right to claim. Moreover, as a consequence of fee waivers, funds on average collect one half of reported expense ...ratios. Variation in fee waivers is significant and relates to differences in relative performance. Both low-performing retail and institutional funds waive fees to improve their net performance. More interestingly, high-performing retail, but not institutional, funds use fee waivers to strategically adjust net performance to increase expected fund flows. Despite fund flow incentives, high-performing institutional funds do not waive more because they cannot significantly improve their relative performance.
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