International Studies of Economics最新文献

{"title":"A sweet burden? The effect of bride prices on parents' health","authors":"Yuan Chen,&nbsp;Yue Ding,&nbsp;Jingwei Huang,&nbsp;Xun Li,&nbsp;Kaidi Wu","doi":"10.1002/ise3.78","DOIUrl":"10.1002/ise3.78","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The bride price, as an informal institution originated from traditional culture, is pervasive in many areas of the developing world in a form of a payment from the family of the groom to that of the bride at marriage. We study the effects of bride price on parents' health in China. Using information on bride price payment and various health measures from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, we find that the bride price significantly reduces self-reported health among the grooms' parents after addressing the endogeneity issue with average sex ratio within a family computed as an instrumental variable. The reductions are heterogenous across urban and rural areas. Mechanism analysis suggests the negative health outcomes are driven by family debt, heavier psychological stress and longer work hours caused by bride price payments.</p>","PeriodicalId":29662,"journal":{"name":"International Studies of Economics","volume":"19 3","pages":"431-447"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ise3.78","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140998665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Bank tail risk in China","authors":"Huan Yang,&nbsp;Jun Cai,&nbsp;Lin Huang","doi":"10.1002/ise3.76","DOIUrl":"10.1002/ise3.76","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this study, we investigate the tail dependency between bank stocks in China and 35 common risk factors. We measure univariate and multivariate conditional tail risk probabilities. The evidence indicates that tail events from risk factors in the banking, security trading, real estate, and energy industries have the largest effects on the realization of extreme returns from Chinese bank stocks. The univariate conditional tail risk is considerably higher than the unconditional tail risk. The impact of multiple tail events from several risk factors occurring simultaneously is much stronger than tail events from one single risk factor. In general, there is a stronger cross-market tail linkage between emerging market risk factors and bank stocks in China when compared with developed market risk factors. However, the cross-market tail linkage between developed market risk factors and bank stocks in China rose sharply during the 2008 financial crisis.</p>","PeriodicalId":29662,"journal":{"name":"International Studies of Economics","volume":"19 2","pages":"186-222"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ise3.76","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141008014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Government subsidies and corporate environmental, social and governance performance: Evidence from companies of China","authors":"Pei Peng,&nbsp;Mengzi Sun","doi":"10.1002/ise3.79","DOIUrl":"10.1002/ise3.79","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance is crucial for companies to attain sustainable development, which is a key reference for assessing the value and growth potential of a company. Government subsidies can provide incentives for companies to prioritize environmental preservation, meet their social duties, and improve their governance performance. This paper empirically examines the effects and mechanisms of government subsidies on corporate ESG performance, using an Ologit multiple ordered regression model based on data from Chinese listed companies. We find that not only do total government subsidies significantly improve firms' ESG performance, but both environmental and non-environmental subsidies also have the similar effect, albeit with different impact mechanisms. The analysis of the mechanism suggests that government subsidies can enhance corporate ESG performance by promoting green innovation, alleviating financing constraints, increasing charitable donations, and attracting social attention. This paper holds significant practical value as it presents empirical findings as a basis for reforming China's subsidy policies, showcasing the actual impact of diverse subsidy policies and the heterogeneity.</p>","PeriodicalId":29662,"journal":{"name":"International Studies of Economics","volume":"19 3","pages":"374-405"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ise3.79","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141011072","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ecology versus economic development: Effects of China's Yangtze River Economic Belt strategy","authors":"Guan Gong,&nbsp;Yu Zhao","doi":"10.1002/ise3.75","DOIUrl":"10.1002/ise3.75","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This study employs China's Yangtze River Economic Belt strategy as a quasi-natural experiment to investigate the impact of prioritizing green development on economic growth. Our empirical findings show that the strategy significantly reduces urban industrial wastewater discharge. It helps transition the region's industries towards technology-driven service sectors while maintaining a steady economic growth rate. On average, cities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt see a 21.9% decrease in annual industrial wastewater discharge, a 1.9% increase in economic growth rate, a 4.9% rise in the proportion of service industries' contribution to GDP, and a 2.4% increase in the number of employees in productive service industries. Moreover, our empirical results highlight the heterogeneity in the effects of the strategy across different regions, which can be attributed to factors such as population density, infrastructure, levels of human capital, and government governance. The implementation of the Yangtze River Economic Belt strategy offers valuable insights for developing countries on how to balance between economic development and environmental protection.</p>","PeriodicalId":29662,"journal":{"name":"International Studies of Economics","volume":"19 3","pages":"330-352"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ise3.75","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139959772","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Population aging, health care, and the macroeconomy: An introduction","authors":"Kevin X. D. Huang,&nbsp;Kai Zhao","doi":"10.1002/ise3.74","DOIUrl":"10.1002/ise3.74","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Relationship between health and the macroeconomy has received increasing attention in practice. National health is not only a key measure of macroeconomic development in the United Nations Human Development Index, its interaction with macroeconomic development is also at the core of the World Health Organization Commission on Macroeconomics and Health. The macroeconomic causes and implications of rising health-care expenditures have frequently made to headline news. According to recent polls from Gallup, this issue tops America's “most important problem” list. The US Congressional Budget Office has placed it at the center of the sustainability issue concerning the nation's fiscal system going forward. As Alan Blinder (i.e., Blinder, &lt;span&gt;2013&lt;/span&gt;) puts it: “If we can somehow solve the health care cost problem, we will also solve the long-run deficit problem. But if we can't control health care costs, the long-run deficit problem is insoluble. Simple, right? Impossible? We'd better hope not.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In recent years, the academic literature has also paid increasing attention to the related issues. Not surprisingly, a growing literature focuses on understanding the rising health spending and longevity (e.g., Fonseca et al., &lt;span&gt;2021&lt;/span&gt;, Hall &amp; Jones, &lt;span&gt;2007&lt;/span&gt;, Zhao, &lt;span&gt;2014&lt;/span&gt;). Recent studies also explain why health spending is higher even though life expectancy is lower in the United States than in Europe (e.g., He et al., &lt;span&gt;2021&lt;/span&gt;), and why, on the one hand, there is a positive relation between health and long-run growth while, on the other hand, for industrialized economies, national health status tends to be negatively correlated with macroeconomic performance in the short run, improving in recessions and worsening in booms, though health spending generally declines during contractions and rises during expansions (e.g., He et al., &lt;span&gt;2023&lt;/span&gt;). Incidentally, the implications of health for social welfare play a central role in the recent macrohealth literature (e.g., Hall &amp; Jones, &lt;span&gt;2007&lt;/span&gt;, Jones &amp; Klenow, &lt;span&gt;2016&lt;/span&gt;, Murphy &amp; Topel, &lt;span&gt;2006&lt;/span&gt;). Increasing attention has also been paid to understanding the implications of health risks for consumption, health spending, and allocation of wealth among bonds, stocks, and housing (e.g., Finkelstein et al., &lt;span&gt;2013&lt;/span&gt;, Yogo, &lt;span&gt;2016&lt;/span&gt;), and the trade- offs of provision of health-related social insurance on risk-sharing against dynamic disincentive (moral hazard) effect of health investment (e.g., Cole et al., &lt;span&gt;2019&lt;/span&gt;), and to linking health and the labor market (e.g., Fang &amp; Gavazza, &lt;span&gt;2011&lt;/span&gt;, Feng &amp; Zhao, &lt;span&gt;2018&lt;/span&gt;, Hosseini et al., &lt;span&gt;2021&lt;/span&gt;, Huang &amp; Huffman, &lt;span&gt;2014&lt;/span&gt;). Recent academic investigations have also started to explore the role of health as a special type of human capital, in complementing or substituting the other types of capital, such a","PeriodicalId":29662,"journal":{"name":"International Studies of Economics","volume":"19 1","pages":"2-5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ise3.74","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139963407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fertility decisions and the norm of intergenerational support to aging parents","authors":"Minchung Hsu,&nbsp;Thu Trang Le","doi":"10.1002/ise3.73","DOIUrl":"10.1002/ise3.73","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper examines the impact of the social norm of intergenerational support to aging parents on fertility decisions in developing economies. The traditional expectation of receiving support from adult children in old age has historically been a significant factor in the decision to have children, especially in developing countries. The study develops a life cycle model that endogenizes fertility choices and incorporates the expectation of transfers from children based on the filial responsibility norm. We utilize household survey data from Indonesia to estimate earnings profiles and uncertainties over the life cycle, and to estimate the transfers from adult children to parents to indicate the current strength of the norm in 2000s. We conducted counterfactual experiments to explore the impact of the filial responsibility norm on fertility and found that a weakening of the norm could account for a significant proportion of the decline in the total fertility rate.</p>","PeriodicalId":29662,"journal":{"name":"International Studies of Economics","volume":"19 1","pages":"151-165"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ise3.73","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139849449","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Tests of goods market integration between China and African BRI countries","authors":"Shu-kam Lee,&nbsp;Paul Kwok-ching Shum,&nbsp;Kai-yin Woo","doi":"10.1002/ise3.71","DOIUrl":"10.1002/ise3.71","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The Chinese Government has promulgated the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) to increase trade flows and integrate goods markets between China and BRI countries. The validity of purchasing power parity (PPP) implies well-integrated goods markets, a precondition for further economic convergence, and the next stage of economic integration in factor, service, and financial markets. Our study aims to examine the validity of the PPP and the extent of goods market integration between China and selected BRI countries in Africa. Since the functional form of the cointegrating relationship may not be exact or linear, we adopt the nonparametric rank tests for analysis without prior knowledge and specification of the functional form. We also address the rank problems that occur in multivariate rank tests. Our empirical results provide strong evidence of an unrestricted PPP relationship with reasonably strong evidence of nonlinearity in the data. We also find that some African BRI countries have experienced goods market integration with China during the second-half period only. This indicates that the introduction of the BRI in 2013 and China's active involvement in African economic development through BRI projects are leading to enhanced goods market integration between China and Africa. The results indicate favorable prospects of closer economic cooperation in the factor, service, and financial markets to build a free trade area or common markets with BRI countries in Africa.</p>","PeriodicalId":29662,"journal":{"name":"International Studies of Economics","volume":"19 2","pages":"223-246"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ise3.71","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139150766","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Medical insurance, labor supply, and anti-poverty initiatives: Micro-evidence from China","authors":"Li Su,&nbsp;Mingxiao Sha,&nbsp;Ruixue Liu","doi":"10.1002/ise3.70","DOIUrl":"10.1002/ise3.70","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The high cost of medical care and its association with poverty have given rise to a growing concern for developing countries, but how insurance plans affect household income and alleviate poverty has been rarely discussed. This study aims to bridge this research gap by examining a medical insurance reform in China, a major program of the targeted poverty alleviation (TPA) strategy, which offers higher reimbursement rates and lower medical deductibles for low-income households. We use an administrative data set on impoverished people in a Chinese county to examine how exogenous changes in the medical insurance system affect the income structure of low-income households. We apply a two-part model to a Difference-in-Differences framework, with households that received reimbursement of the insurance reform as the treatment group and others as the control group. Our results imply that the medical insurance reform could increase the overall household income diversity. The mechanism analysis suggests that the medical insurance reform improves the health conditions of patients and encourages caregivers to engage more in off-farm work.</p>","PeriodicalId":29662,"journal":{"name":"International Studies of Economics","volume":"19 2","pages":"268-292"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ise3.70","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135326315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"How do subjective mortality beliefs affect the value of social security and the optimal claiming ages?","authors":"Tiantian Dai,&nbsp;Wei Sun,&nbsp;Anthony Webb","doi":"10.1002/ise3.69","DOIUrl":"10.1002/ise3.69","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Households that postpone claiming Social Security benefits are, in effect, making additional purchases of the Social Security annuity and acquiring valuable longevity insurance. This paper investigates the impact of plausible variations of subjective mortality beliefs on the value of delayed claiming and the optimal claiming ages of retired workers. Using the Health and Retirement Study data, we show that older individuals could, on average, predict their life expectancy correctly; however, the average variance of age of death calculated from subjective mortality tables is 6.2%–14.4% lower than that from cohort life tables. Using numerical optimization techniques, we further show that, theoretically, older households place a lower value on delaying claiming when they have greater confidence in their ability to forecast their age of death. But the magnitude of this effect is not large enough to change their optimal claiming ages, unless they hold extreme subjective mortality beliefs. As a result, we conclude that subjective mortality beliefs alone cannot explain the prevalence of early claiming behaviors.</p>","PeriodicalId":29662,"journal":{"name":"International Studies of Economics","volume":"19 1","pages":"92-116"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ise3.69","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136068712","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Nonparametric estimation of English auctions with selective entry: An application to online judicial auctions","authors":"Nianqing Liu,&nbsp;Kexin Xu","doi":"10.1002/ise3.68","DOIUrl":"10.1002/ise3.68","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper proposes an estimation approach following the constructive identification strategy of Athey and Haile, and Gentry and Li with adaption in the context of ascending auctions with selective entry. Our estimators are shown to be consistent in a large sample and to perform well in a finite sample by a simulation study. We apply our estimation approach to the Alibaba online judicial auctions of used cars to recover the bounds of conditional value distribution and the entry cost. The bounds estimates of both conditional value distribution and entry cost are quite tight (resp., relatively wide) for middle-valued (resp., low-valued or high-valued) signal, and the cumulative distribution functions of conditional value distribution given signal comply with the law of ordered dominance. Finally, our counterfactual analysis indicates that (i) the ascending auction yields a higher revenue than the first-price sealed bid auction, and (ii) the revenue can be improved significantly when the entry cost is cut by half.</p>","PeriodicalId":29662,"journal":{"name":"International Studies of Economics","volume":"19 2","pages":"247-267"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ise3.68","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135923269","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}