Does governance matter for aggregate health capital?

The point of departure of our analysis is the seminal work of Rodgers (1979) on the absolute and relative income hypotheses. We find that substituting the governance index for the Gini index is statistically the preferred regression model. Our findings lend support to the argument that governance matters. Further investigation provides evidence for two types of threshold effects: in terms of both absolute income and governance. For those countries below a threshold, absolute income is the most significant determinant of health, while for those above it, governance matters the most. The regression analyses are conducted on a sample of 112 states, which is representative of a wide range of absolute income and governance levels.

Does atypical work help the jobless? Evidence from a CAEAS/CPS cohort analysis

Atypical employment, such as temporary, on-call and contract work, has been found disproportionately to attract the jobless. But there is no consensus in the literature as to the labour market consequences of such job choice by unemployed individuals. Using data from the Current Population Survey, we investigate the implications of the initial job-finding strategies pursued by the jobless for their short- and medium-term employment stability. At first sight, it appears that taking an offer of regular employment provides the greatest degree of employment continuity for the jobless. However, closer inspection indicates that the jobless who take up atypical employment are not only more likely to be employed 1 month and 1 year later than those who continue to search, but also to enjoy employment continuity that is not less favourable than that offered by regular, open-ended employment.

Why do people non-demand reveal in hypothetical double referenda for public goods?

Hypothetical contingent valuation surveys used to elicit values for environmental and other public goods often employ variants of the referendum mechanism due to the cognitive simplicity and familiarity of respondents with this voting format. One variant, the double referendum mechanism, requires respondents to state twice how they would vote for a given policy proposal given their cost of the good. Data from these surveys often exhibit anomalies inconsistent with standard economic models of consumer preferences. There are a number of published explanations for these anomalies, mostly focusing on problems with the second vote. This article investigates which aspects of the hypothetical task affect the degree of nondemand revelation and takes an individual-based approach to identifying people most likely to non-demand reveal. A clear profile emerges from our model of a person who faces a negative surplus i.e. a net loss in the second vote and invokes non self-interested, non financial motivations during the decision process.

Neural network forecasts of input-output technology

A significant part of the literature on input-output (IO) analysis is dedicated to the development and application of methodologies forecasting and updating technology coefficients and multipliers. Prominent among such techniques is the RAS method, while more information demanding econometric methods, as well as other less promising ones, have been proposed. However, there has been little interest expressed in the use of more modern and often more innovative methods, such as neural networks in IO analysis in general. This study constructs, proposes and applies a Backpropagation Neural Network (BPN) with the purpose of forecasting IO technology coefficients and subsequently multipliers. The RAS method is also applied on the same set of UK IO tables, and the discussion of results of both methods is accompanied by a comparative analysis. The results show that the BPN offers a valid alternative way of IO technology forecasting and many forecasts were more accurate using this method. Overall, however, the RAS method outperformed the BPN but the difference is rather small to be systematic and there are further ways to improve the performance of the BPN.

Cheap and expensive alternatives in stated choice experiments: are they equally considered by respondents?

When analysing choice experiments respondents are assumed to attend all attributes and alternatives in the same way. However, because of the important role that the price of the alternatives can play in the decision-making process, the level of price of a specific alternative may have consequences on the level of consideration given to the remaining attributes of the alternative. In this article, we propose the use of a discrete mixtures logit approach to accommodate respondents ignoring alternatives in stated choice experiments. Our results indicate a higher propensity for respondents to ignore attributes when they face cheap rather than expensive alternatives. We also find that allowing for this leads to substantial improvements in the model performance.