Journal of Comparative Economics最新文献

{"title":"Hospital response to increases in prices of pediatric services: Evidence from China","authors":"Hongqiao Fu ,&nbsp;Jialin Huang ,&nbsp;Ling Li ,&nbsp;Winnie Yip","doi":"10.1016/j.jce.2024.08.005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jce.2024.08.005","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study examined how hospitals responded to increases in the prices of previously underpriced pediatric services. In May 2018, the city of Guangzhou in southern China mandated price increases of 30 % for 408 pediatric service items when children patients aged under 6. Prices for patients aged 6 and over, however, remained unchanged. Using case-level discharge data from public hospitals in Guangzhou, we employed a regression discontinuity design to estimate the differences in health expenditures, treatment intensity, and readmission rate between patients hospitalized just before and after the age of 6. Since we observed no behavioral changes for children aged above 6, and an absence of demand-side response among children aged under 6, the estimated effects can be interpreted as providers' response to increases in pediatric service prices for children aged under 6. We found that the higher service prices significantly increased expenditures on medical services per admission for children aged under 6 by 15.8 %. The magnitude of this estimate provided suggestive evidence that increased expenditures on medical service were mainly driven by the mechanical price effect and the provision of medical services remained largely unchanged, because 408 pediatric services with price increase of 30 % accounted for almost half of the total service expenditures. Moreover, this pricing reform reduced drug expenditures and antibiotics expenditures per admission for children aged under 6 by 21.2 % and 31.8 %, respectively. Given that there was no price change in prescription drugs, the fall in drug and antibiotics expenditures was primarily due to behavioral effects on the supply side. The reduction in drug expenditures nearly offset the increase in expenditures on medical services, resulting in statistically insignificant changes in total expenditures per admission. Furthermore, we observed no measurable changes in treatment intensity or readmission rates around the age of 6. These findings suggested that increased prices for previously underpriced services may reduce the over-prescription of drugs without increasing total health expenditures and sacrificing healthcare quality, highlighting the potential of mitigating distortions in medical prices in improving health system performance.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48183,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Economics","volume":"52 4","pages":"Pages 897-924"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143136123","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The impact of an online game-based financial education course: Multi-country experimental evidence","authors":"Marta Cannistrà ,&nbsp;Kenneth De Beckker ,&nbsp;Tommaso Agasisti ,&nbsp;Aisa Amagir ,&nbsp;Kaire Põder ,&nbsp;Lukáš Vartiak ,&nbsp;Kristof De Witte","doi":"10.1016/j.jce.2024.08.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jce.2024.08.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper evaluates the impact of an online game-based financial education tool on students' financial literacy levels. By conducting a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) involving 2,220 students across four countries in a multi-country experimental setting, we demonstrate that the intervention significantly enhances students' financial literacy levels by 0.313 SD. This study contributes to the emerging academic literature concerning the evaluation of financial education interventions that incorporate learning-by-playing. The participation of students from four countries adds relevance by facilitating cross-comparison of outcomes and stimulating discussions about country-specific factors and peculiarities influencing youth financial literacy.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48183,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Economics","volume":"52 4","pages":"Pages 825-847"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143136126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Management practices and energy efficiency: Evidence from firms in China","authors":"Jing Cao ,&nbsp;Soo Keong Yong","doi":"10.1016/j.jce.2024.08.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jce.2024.08.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Do well-managed firms use energy less intensively in developing countries? Using data from the World Management Survey, we investigate whether there is any relation between firms’ management practices and energy efficiency within China. We find that firms that are competently managed use substantially less electricity: a one standard deviation improvement in management practices is associated with a 14.9% reduction in usage intensity. The management ‘premium’ is also significant after accounting for policy effects, with well-managed firms regulated under an energy policy reducing electricity intensity significantly more than the less-well managed firms. However, the general management-energy relationship is not significant for fossil fuels. Management quality is non-monotonically related to different quantiles of energy intensity usage. Overall, there is evidence of management benefits to energy efficiency, but these are mainly restricted to electricity utilization.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48183,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Economics","volume":"52 4","pages":"Pages 848-870"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143136125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Can digital financial inclusion facilitate intergenerational income mobility? Evidence from China","authors":"Xiaolan Yang ,&nbsp;Lele Zhang ,&nbsp;Xiaoyue Hong ,&nbsp;Wenchao Li","doi":"10.1016/j.jce.2024.09.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jce.2024.09.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We present an empirical study on the impact of digital finance development on intergenerational income mobility. Combining nationally representative Chinese household survey data with indices for digital financial inclusion (DFI), we find that the development of digital finance leads to a lower correlation between children's income and their fathers’ income, significantly enhancing intergenerational mobility. Specifically, a one standard deviation increase in the DFI index is associated with a decrease in intergenerational income elasticity by 0.04–0.05. The effect is particularly pronounced in rural and inland regions. Furthermore, we find that digital finance development stimulates household entrepreneurial activities, which in turn enhance the role of digital finance in reducing intergenerational income correlation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48183,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Economics","volume":"52 4","pages":"Pages 951-962"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143136128","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Land reform and health endowments at birth","authors":"Yawen Ding ,&nbsp;Xiaobing Wang ,&nbsp;Huayu Xu","doi":"10.1016/j.jce.2024.11.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jce.2024.11.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study examines the impact of China's Household Responsibility System (HRS) reform—a significant land reform that boosted labor productivity in rural areas—on birth outcomes. Leveraging the staggered rollout of the reform across counties and data from the earliest available fertility surveys in China, we provide evidence that prenatal exposure to the reform leads to an average increase in birth weight of about 55 grams. Further analyses suggest that this improvement is most likely driven by better nutrition during gestation, rather than improved access to prenatal health care or an increase in selective births. Moreover, this effect is more pronounced in areas where women have a comparative advantage in agricultural production, underscoring the critical role of women's economic standing in shaping child health outcomes.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48183,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Economics","volume":"53 1","pages":"Pages 79-95"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143444981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Pandemic lockdowns and trust in local government in China","authors":"Yucong Zhao ,&nbsp;Ting Wang ,&nbsp;Bing Ye","doi":"10.1016/j.jce.2024.11.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jce.2024.11.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a distinctive opportunity to reassess trust in government by evaluating its performance amidst a critical crisis. This paper employs a generalized difference-in-differences method to probe the causal effects of prolonged lockdown durations on public trust in local governments in China. Drawing on panel data of 44,861 observations from the 2018 and 2020 survey waves, the findings reveal a pervasive decline in government trust caused by extended lockdown durations in China. Specifically, an additional 40 days of lockdown resulted in an average 7.77 % decrease in government trust, with the largest declines seen among individuals with lower education, those born before 1970, those with health issues, and those with rural residence registration. This erosion of trust primarily stemmed from the lockdowns’ detrimental impacts on economic production, financial security, and the conveniences of daily life.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48183,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Economics","volume":"53 1","pages":"Pages 96-117"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143444982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Changes to our editorial board","authors":"Ruben Enikolopov ,&nbsp;Timur Kuran ,&nbsp;Hongbin Li","doi":"10.1016/j.jce.2024.06.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jce.2024.06.002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48183,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Economics","volume":"52 3","pages":"Page 591"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2024-08-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142040518","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Individualism and the legal status of prostitution","authors":"Lewis S. Davis ,&nbsp;Astghik Mavisakalyan","doi":"10.1016/j.jce.2024.07.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jce.2024.07.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>We know very little about why the legal status of prostitution varies across countries. Drawing on central arguments in the normative literature on the legal status of prostitution, in which a central argument concerns the sexual and bodily autonomy of women, we ask whether a country's position on the individualism-collectivism affects the legal status of prostitution. We investigate this question using a panel of 61 countries, finding a robust positive relationship between individualism and the legality of prostitution. In the baseline model, a one-standard deviation increase in individualism is associated with a ten percentage point increase in the likelihood that prostitution is legal. This relationship is robust to controls for institutional structure, other dimensions of culture, and measures of women's economic status and historical patriarchy. It is also robust to the use of instrumental variable analysis to address issues of endogeneity and measurement error. Our results also shed light on two additional aspects of the normative debate over legal prostitution. In particular, we find that prostitution is more likely to be legal in countries in which women enjoy greater economic status, but we fail to find a consistent empirical relationship between historical patriarchy and legal prostitution.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48183,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Economics","volume":"52 3","pages":"Pages 714-732"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142040516","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Bureaucracy-business relationship, corruption and the implications for marketization","authors":"Shaoqing Huang ,&nbsp;Weisi Xie ,&nbsp;Xiaoshu Xu","doi":"10.1016/j.jce.2024.06.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jce.2024.06.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper employs a novel game-theory model to characterize the impact and the resulting welfare implications of a corrupt relationship in the marketization<span> process in an economy with weak institutions. This relationship between a bureaucrat and a domestic firm enables the bureaucrat to share part of the domestic firm’s gain generated by the bureaucrat’s imposition of barriers to deter the entry of foreign firms. When the barrier has an upper bound and both the bureaucrat and the foreign firm have sufficient knowledge regarding the domestic firm’s cost information, the equilibrium level of the barrier would first equal the upper bound and then decrease with the domestic firm’s cost. This result is robust regardless of whether the cost of the domestic firm and the foreign firm are positively correlated or independent. The welfare loss is largest in industries where a firm’s cost relies heavily on its private advantage: e.g., innovation-intensive industries, and when the domestic firm has a relatively large cost disadvantage. This paper provides novel and insightful implications for marketization in countries with weak institutions.</span></p></div>","PeriodicalId":48183,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Economics","volume":"52 3","pages":"Pages 634-644"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141695261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Closing the digital divide: The impact of teachers’ ICT use on student achievement in China","authors":"Junjie Hong ,&nbsp;Wanlin Liu ,&nbsp;Qing Zhang","doi":"10.1016/j.jce.2024.06.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jce.2024.06.003","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p><span>There is growing interest in exploring the use of information and communication technology (ICT) to enhance academic performance. Whereas previous studies have predominantly focused on the direct effects of ICT on education quality, only limited attention has been paid to the interactions between teachers’ use of ICT in the classroom and the students’ use of ICT at home and the role of teachers in the pedagogical process. In this study, we use a nationally representative survey of </span>secondary school students<span> in China to investigate the impact of teachers’ integration of ICT into the instructional process and the impact of the interactions between home ICT resources and school ICT use on students’ academic performance. Our findings indicate that teachers’ increased frequency of ICT use during instruction improves the current and long-term academic performance of students who lack access to computers at home, compared with those with home computers. These positive effects can be attributed to improvements in the quality and preparation time of teachers’ lessons, increased use of interactive teaching methods, and heightened student motivation to learn.</span></p></div>","PeriodicalId":48183,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Economics","volume":"52 3","pages":"Pages 697-713"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141697878","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}