Cross-national Information Research Articles

When does women’s political power matter? Women’s representation and legal gender equality of economic opportunity across contexts

AbstractThis article explores how women’s descriptive representation affects legal gender equality of economic opportunity. Building on existing studies on women’s descriptive and substantive representation, we argue that as the proportion of female legislators and ministers increases, legal gender equality of economic opportunity improves. Additionally, we expect that a country’s institutional context significantly shapes the influence of women in different positions of power on legal gender equality. The higher the legislature’s law-making power, the greater the effect of female legislators on legal gender equality; under the same condition, its relative influence compared to female cabinet ministers is also greater. Similarly, we hypothesize that the higher the level of democracy, the more effective female legislators compared to female ministers. To test these arguments, we draw on the database that provides cross-national information on legal discrimination against women in economic opportunities and provide supporting evidence for our arguments.

Corrigendum: Infodemic Pathways: Evaluating the Role that Traditional and Social Media Play in Cross-National Information Transfer

Corrigendum: Infodemic Pathways: Evaluating the Role that Traditional and Social Media Play in Cross-National Information Transfer

Infodemic Pathways: Evaluating the Role That Traditional and Social Media Play in Cross-National Information Transfer

The COVID-19 pandemic has occurred alongside a worldwide infodemic where unprecedented levels of misinformation have contributed to widespread misconceptions about the novel coronavirus. Conspiracy theories, poorly sourced medical advice, and information trivializing the virus have ignored national borders and spread quickly. This information spread has occurred despite generally strong preferences for domestic national media and social media networks that tend to be geographically bounded. How, then, is (mis)information crossing borders so rapidly? Using social media and survey data, we evaluate the extent to which consumption and propagation patterns of domestic and international traditional news and social media can help inform theorizing about cross-national information spread. In a detailed case study of Canada, we employ a large multi-wave survey and a massive data set of Canadian Twitter users. We show that the majority of misinformation circulating on Twitter that is shared by Canadian accounts is retweeted from U.S.-based accounts. Moreover, exposure to U.S.-based media outlets is associated with COVID-19 misperceptions and increased exposure to U.S.-based information on Twitter is associated with an increased likelihood to post misinformation. We thus theorize and empirically identify a key globalizing infodemic pathway: disregard for national origin of social media posting.

COVID-19 opens a window of reflection for comparative health systems and global health research

AbstractThe Covid-19 crisis that led to the loss of thousands of lives and initiated one of the most complex social and economic upheavals has also a created a window of reflection for health systems researchers to revisit our major concepts, frameworks, and underlying assumptions. This commentary reviews two literatures that remain rather separate: comparative health policy and global health. First, I examine whether convergence in circumstances brought about by the spread of Covid-19 creates opportunities for learning “about” as well as unpacking the motivations of policy actors and how they use the cross-national information. However, given the emphasis on national policy actors and processes, this literature may overlook the importance of global actors, institutions and ideas. Second, global health differentiates itself with an emphasis on multilateralism as a political positioning and its multidisciplinary and multi-sectoral approach. However, the global health field is also challenged to consider its mission, political standing on multilateralism, changing relationships between North and South and its commitment to multidisciplinary approach. I argue that health systems scholars should use the window of opportunity created by Covid-19 pandemic to reexamine their methodologies and rearticulate their positioning by acknowledging the voice and agency of the Global South.

Forecasting global equity market volatilities

Motivated by a common belief that the international stock market volatilities are synonymous with information flow, this paper proposes a parsimonious way to combine multiple market information flows and assess whether cross-national volatility flows contain important information content that can improve the accuracy of international volatility forecasting. We concentrate on realized volatilities (RV) derived from the intra-day prices of 22 international stock markets, and employ the heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) framework, along with two common diffusion indices that are constructed based on the simple mean and first principal component (PC) of the 22 stock market RVs, to forecast future volatilities of each market for 1-day, 1-week, and 1-month ahead. We provide strong evidence that the use of the cross-national information reflected by the simple and parsimonious common indices enhances the predictive accuracy of international volatilities at all forecasting horizons. Alternative volatility measures, estimation window sizes, and forecasting evaluation tests confirm the robustness of our results. Finally, our strategy of constructing common diffusion indices is also feasible for international market jumps.

The OECD Family Database: Developing a Cross-National Tool for Assessing Family Policies and Outcomes

The OECD Family database has been developed to collate in one central location information and indicators relating to family outcomes, family policies and children in order to address the growing demand for cross-national information on the situation of families and children. The information is taken from different OECD databases, specifically developed questionnaires and non-OECD sources. The OECD Family database now includes 52 indicators across four broad headings: the structure of families, families and children, the labour market position of families, public policies for families and children, and child outcomes. This paper presents the Family database and discusses data and methodological issues as illustrated by selected example indicators.

Technical trading strategies and cross-national information linkage: the case of Taiwan stock market

This study tests four prevalent moving average technical trading rules for Taiwan stock markets. More notably, cross-national information from the US stock markets is also incorporated in our technical trading rules to project Taiwan stock market movements. We then design trading strategies and investigate their predictive power over buy-and-hold strategy. Our results suggest that technical trading rules are predictive for Taiwan stock markets. Applying the information reflected in the US stock markets to project Taiwan stock market movements is comparable to using Taiwan stock market information in isolation because these two markets are strongly correlated. Finally our results indicate that Leverage/Money strategy helps investors to beat buy-and-hold strategy.

An examination of the concern for information privacy in the New Zealand regulatory context

This study used confirmatory factor analysis on responses from a random sample of 459 New Zealanders to examine the theoretical basis of the concern for information privacy. The results were interpreted using two competing theories to explain differences found in the structural model of the construct when testing it with a non-US sample. Differences between US and New Zealand privacy protection approaches reflected cross-national differences in privacy concerns. The findings should contribute to our understanding of cross-national information privacy concerns and have implications for policy instrument choices.

Interorganizational information systems: New approaches to global economic development

The emergence of cross-national interorganizational configurations (IOCs) has important implications for information resource structuring, planning, and strategy. Findings reported in this paper stem from a review of the literature, a database of cross-national interorganizational configurations formed during the last two years, and a five-year study of information systems resource management in primarily U.S.-based major organizations. This study involves eight subsets of approximately twelve to fifteen organizations examined once each during this period. Within each organization, a field researcher conducted open-ended, semi-structured interviews with the top information systems manager. Findings indicate the need for a paradigm shift to incorporate the IOC as a level of analysis to match the emerging new world economic order and the needs for cross-national information resources structures and strategies.