The World Health Organization defines female genital cutting as any procedure that removes or injures any part of a female's external genitalia for nonmedical reasons (1). Cutting brings no documented health benefits and leads to serious health problems. Across six African countries, for example, a cohort of 15-year-old girls is expected to lose nearly 130,000 years of life because of cutting (2). We report data that question an influential approach to promoting abandonment of the practice.
Das Bundesamt für Gesundheit erwägt eine Anpassung der Franchisenstufen. Es gehe um eine Reduktion der grossen Anzahl an Einzelprämien. In Wirklichkeit geht es wohl darum, die höchsten Franchisenstufen abzuschaffen, um die Solidarität in der sozialen Krankenversicherung zu stärken. Wir zeigen aber, dass eine Reduktion der Wahlfranchisen auch diejenigen schädigt, die von der stärkeren Solidarität profitieren sollten.
In this paper we use cross-state panel data to show that top income inequality is (at least partly) driven by innovation. We first establish a positive and significant correlation between various measures of innovativeness and top income inequality in cross-state panel regressions. Two distinct instrumentation strategies suggest that this correlation (partly) reflects a causality from innovativeness to top income inequality, and the effect is significant: for example, when measured by the number of patent per capita, innovativeness accounts on average across US states for around 17% of the total increase in the top 1% income share between 1975 and 2010. Finally, we show that innovation does not increase broader measures of inequality which do not focus on top incomes, and that innovation is positively correlated with social mobility, but less so in states with more intense lobbying activities.
This paper builds a two-country, two-sector (polluting, nonpolluting) trade model with directed technical change, examining whether unilateral environmental policies can ensure sustainable growth. The polluting good generates more or less emissions depending on its relative use of a clean and a dirty input. I show that a unilateral policy combining clean research subsidies and a trade tax can ensure sustainable growth, while unilateral carbon taxes alone increase innovation in the polluting sector abroad and generally cannot ensure sustainable growth. Relative to autarky and exogenous technical change respectively, the mechanisms of trade and directed technical change accelerate environmental degradation either under laissez-faire or with unilateral carbon taxes, yet both help reduce environmental degradation under the appropriate unilateral policy. I characterize the optimal unilateral policy analytically and numerically using calibrated simulations. Knowledge spillovers have the potential to reduce the otherwise large welfare costs of restricting policy to one country only.
Do contractual frictions matter when firms are engaged in repeated interactions? This paper argues that long-term relationships, which allow firms to (partly) overcome the static costs associated with low contractibility, will under certain circumstances create dynamic inefficiencies. We consider the repeated interaction between final good producers and intermediate input suppliers, where the provision of the intermediate input is noncontractible. A producer/supplier pair can be a good match or a bad match, with bad matches featuring lower productivity. This allows us to build a cooperative equilibrium where producers can switch suppliers and start cooperation immediately with new suppliers. Every period, one supplier has the opportunity to innovate, and in the baseline model, innovations are imitated after one period. We show that (i) innovations need to be larger to break up existing relationships in the cooperative equilibrium than in either a set-up where the input is contractible or when we preclude cooperation in long-term relationships, (ii) the rate of innovation in the cooperative equilibrium is lower than in the contractible case, and may even be lower than in the non-cooperative equilibrium and (iii) cooperation may reduce welfare. Next, we assume that the frontier technology diffuses slowly to suppliers (instead of after one period). In that case, for sufficiently slow diffusion, the innovation rate in the cooperative equilibrium may be higher than even in the contractible case. Finally, we show that cooperation may also increase relationship specific innovations.
In a new survey we ask respondents, after a standard Subjective Well‐Being (SWB) question, if they can think of changes in their lives that would improve their SWB score. If the SWB score is just one argument among others in the respondents’ goals in life, they should easily find ways to improve it, at the expense of other dimensions they care about. Our results suggest that close to 90% of the respondents actually seek to maximize their SWB. The life satisfaction question appears the best contender as the “maximand” in the contest, before the ladder‐of‐life question and felt happiness. Among the other goals that people pursue and for which they are willing to sacrifice some of their SWB, the prominent appear to be about their relatives and about their future self.
Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a leading diagnosed health condition among children in many developed countries but the causes underlying these high levels of ADHD remain highly controversial. Recent research for the U.S., Canada and some European countries shows that children who enter school relatively young have higher ADHD rates than their older peers, suggesting that ADHD may be misdiagnosed in the younger children due to their relative immaturity. Using rich administrative health insurance claims data from Germany we study the effects of relative school entry age on ADHD risk in Europe's largest country and relate the effects for Germany to the international evidence. We further analyze different mechanisms that may drive these effects, focusing on physician supply side and demand side factors stemming from the production of education. We find robust evidence for school-entry age related misdiagnosis of ADHD in Germany. Within Germany and internationally, a higher share of misdiagnoses are related to a higher overall ADHD level, suggesting that misdiagnoses may be a driving factor of high ADHD levels. Furthermore, the effects in Germany seem to be driven by teachers and parents in an attempt to facilitate and improve the production of education.
We provide evidence that unemployment insurance affects equilibrium conditions in the labor market, which creates significant "market externalities." We provide a framework for identification of such equilibrium effects and implement it using the Regional Extension Benefit Program (REBP) in Austria which extended the duration of UI benefits for a large group of eligible workers in selected regions of Austria. We show that non-eligible workers in REBP regions have higher job finding rates, lower unemployment durations, and a lower risk of long-term unemployment. We discuss the implications of our results for optimal UI policy.
Does the economy influence the way people bring up their children? How can we determine and measure a child’s utility? How can parenting styles be categorized in an economic model? These are the questions that Professor Fabricio Zilibotti of the University of Zurich addressed in his honorary lecture ‘Parenting with Style’, which he delivered at the April International Academic Conference during the 5th LCSR international workshop ‘Social and Cultural Changes in Cross-National Perspective: Subjective Well-being, Trust, Social capital and Values’. The session was moderated by Prof. Konstantin Sonin.
Wer glaubt, dass sich das Problem Griechenland nur mit Härte lösen lasse, riskiert, dass im Namen falsch verstandener ökonomischer Prinzipien grosser Schaden entsteht.
