Wealth Effects Research Articles

The burden of vaccine hesitancy for routine immunization in Yaounde-Cameroon: A cross-sectional study.

Immunization is the most cost-effective health intervention in the world yet, vaccination uptake is still low with less than 50% of children aged 12-23 months fully vaccinated in Cameroon by 2018. The objective of this study was to estimate the burden of vaccine hesitancy associated with routine vaccines in Yaounde-Cameroon. A two-stage cross-sectional cluster survey was conducted in Yaoundé in November 2021, targeting parents/guardians of children 0-59 months. Clusters were selected with probability proportionate to size (PPS) and household's selection done using a restricted sampling method. Data collection was done using an interviewer-administered questionnaire, "Core Closed Questions" and "Likert Scale Questions" proposed by the WHO Vaccine Hesitancy Technical Working Group in 2014. Vaccine hesitancy was analyzed as proportions of parent's/guardian's self-reported vaccine refusal or delay in vaccination with 95% confidence interval. This was stratified by household wealth level and tested using Chi-Square test to appreciate the effect of household wealth on vaccine hesitancy. A total of 529 participants were enrolled out of 708 visited, giving a non-response rate of 25%. In total, vaccine hesitancy was reported in 137(25.90[22.35-29.80] %), and oral polio vaccine(OPV) was the most affected vaccine with hesitancy of 10%. Vaccine hesitancy prevalence did not vary significantly across different households' wealth levels (p-value = 0.3786). However, in wealthy households' refusal of vaccines (14%) was less than in poorer households (20%). Lack of trust was reported as the leading cause of vaccine refusal (43%). Vaccine hesitancy prevalence in Yaounde is high and oral polio vaccine(OPV) was the most affected vaccine. The level of weath does not affect vaccine hesitancy and lack of trust was the leading cause of vaccine hesitancy related to routine immunization in Yaounde-Cameroon. We, recommend that the burden of vaccine hesitancy should be assessed at national scale and root causes investigated.

Emigration and fiscal austerity in a depression

What is the role of emigration in a deep recession when the government implements fiscal consolidation? To answer this question, we build a small open economy New Keynesian model with matching frictions and emigration. In simulations for the Greek Depression, fiscal austerity accounts for almost 1/3 of the GDP decline and 12% of emigration. A no-migration scenario under-predicts the bust in output by 1/6 and the rise in the debt-to-GDP ratio by 8 percentage points. The link between emigration and austerity is bi-directional. Emigration increases the labour tax hike and time required to reduce the debt ratio due to endogenous revenue leakage. In turn, tax hikes intensify emigration, while unproductive government spending cuts have a mild, ambiguous impact as they exhibit opposite demand and wealth effects. However, productive spending cuts display a fiscal multiplier above one, which incentivizes emigration. Emigration then amplifies the productive spending multiplier through internal demand. Similarly, the cumulative labour tax multiplier after five years rises from 0.86 without migration to 1.27 when the unemployed emigrate and 1.47 when both the unemployed and the employed emigrate.

Identifying household finance heterogeneity via deep clustering.

Households are becoming increasingly heterogeneous. While previous studies have revealed many important insights (e.g., wealth effect, income effect), they could only incorporate two or three variables at a time. However, in order to have a more detailed understanding of complex household heterogeneity, more variables should be considered simultaneously. In this study, we argue that advanced clustering techniques can be useful for investigating high-dimensional household heterogeneity. A deep learning-based clustering method is used to effectively handle the high-dimensional balance sheet data of approximately 50,000 households. The employment of appropriate dimension-reduction techniques is the key to incorporate the full joint distribution of high-dimensional data in the clustering step. Our study suggests that various variables should be used together to explain household heterogeneity. Asset variables are found to be crucial for understanding heterogeneity within wealthy households, while debt variables are more important for those households that are not wealthy. In addition, relationships with sociodemographic variables (e.g., age, education, and family size) were further analyzed. Although clusters are found only based on financial variables, they are shown to be closely related to most sociodemographic variables.

Cash to spend: IPO wealth and house prices

AbstractThis study demonstrates the impact of initial public offerings (IPOs) on local house prices. Applying spatial difference‐in‐differences methods to IPOs in California from 1993 to 2017, we find house prices increase by 0.7%–0.9% near an IPO firm's headquarters around filing and issuing dates. Upon lockup expiration, price changes depend on postissuance returns. Treating the San Francisco Bay as a commuting barrier, we identify sustained price increases after filings and temporary increases after issuing and lockup expiration. We also confirm post‐IPO price divergence between the treatment and synthetic control areas. Our findings indicate the effect of liquid wealth under mild financial constraints.

Household Wealth and Individuals' Mental Health: Evidence from the 2012-2018 China Family Panel Survey.

Based on the data from the 2012–2018 China Family Panel Survey, this study examines the impact of household wealth on individuals’ mental health using a two-way fixed effects model. The findings indicate that household wealth exerts a significant positive effect on individuals’ mental health. Furthermore, this study shows that the impact of household wealth on individuals’ mental health is nonlinear but inverted U-shaped. Considering the possible endogeneity problem, this study further examines the effect of household wealth on residents’ mental health using two-stage least squares, and the conclusions remain robust. The results of the heterogeneity analysis indicate that household wealth has a greater impact on the mental health of residents in the low-education group and western region. Furthermore, the results of the mechanisms reveal that household wealth affects mental health by influencing insurance investment and individuals’ labor supply. Moreover, this study finds that household wealth affects individuals’ mental health not only in the short term but also in the medium and long terms. This study provides policy implications for the government toward improving individuals’ mental health.

CEO overconfidence and bondholder wealth effects: Evidence from mergers and acquisitions

This study explores the influence of chief executive officer (CEO) overconfidence on acquirer bondholder wealth in mergers from 1994 to 2019. We find that CEO overconfidence benefits acquirer bondholders. Overconfident CEOs are likely to choose targets with lower return correlations rather than targets with lower risk than acquirers. We further show there is a positive wealth effect during announcement periods as well as firm risk reduction and a positive long-run bond market reaction subsequent to merger completion when overconfident acquirers merge with targets that are less correlated. Overall, the coinsurance effect dominates the liquidity effect on overconfident acquirer bondholder wealth during a merger.

패널자료를 이용한 밀레니얼 세대의 주택점유형태 결정요인 분석

This study examines the determinants of housing tenure choice decisions of Millennials.
 Using KLIPS panel data from 2014 to 2020, a correlated random effects probit model and a fixed effects logit model were estimated to control for endogeneity problem associated with time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity. Estimation results showed that net wealth, relative housing cost, marital status of household heads were major determinants of housing tenure choice decisions. Permanent income, one of key variables on the housing tenure choice, was not significant, indicating that net wealth rather than income is more important to homeownership decisions of Millennials. However, the effect of net wealth on the probability of home owning was estimated to decrease over the observation period because the increase in net wealth could not catch up with the rise of housing price. A sharp decrease of the effect of net wealth on the probability of home owning in recent years was attributable to a dramatic increase in housing price and more stringent mortgage regulations.

비행경험 청소년의 자아존중감이 공격성에 미치는 영향

In the case of early adolescents, it has been reported that if they do not adequately radiate aggression, they are more likely to cause delinquency in the future. In addition, aggression in adolescence can predict not only current maladaptation but also future maladaptation, and is highly likely to continue as adult aggression. In addition to this, many studies claim that aggression is a major factor in adolescent delinquency. Regarding aggression, many scholars argue that self-esteem and social withdrawal are related to aggression. In other words, when self-esteem is high, aggression is low, and when the degree of social withdrawal is high, aggression is high. In this study, the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between the two, namely, to examine whether social withdrawal has a mediating effect in the process of self-esteem affecting aggression. As a result of the study, self-esteem was found to have a significant effect of wealth on social withdrawal. Also, social withdrawal was found to have a significant positive effect on aggression, and self-esteem was found to have a significant positive effect on aggression. Therefore, it can be seen that social withdrawal has a mediating effect in the process of self-esteem affecting aggression. As a result of bootstrapping to verify the mediating effect, the indirect effect of social withdrawal was significant in the process of self-esteem affecting aggression, indicating that self-esteem affects aggression through social withdrawal.

Impacts of Chinese’s household financial asset allocation on consumption

With the development Chinese economy in recent years, property income plays an important role on the income sources of Chinese households. It is inevitable to pay more attention on property income. Property income mainly comes from the financial asset income and real assets income. Both of income sources are transmitted to the mechanism through the wealth affect the consumption status of urban residents. This paper will analyze how the wealth effect of financial assets and physical assets to affect the whole economy and consumption, and then put forward corresponding policy recommendations.

Crisis stress for the diversity of financial portfolios — evidence from European households

In this paper, we investigate how European households changed the diversity of their financial portfolios in response to the Great Financial and the subsequent European Debt Crisis. For this purpose we apply a Difference-in-Differences (DiD) approach estimated as a correlated random effects (CRE) model to six waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). We find that households holding risky assets responded to the twin European financial crises with lower levels of diversity in their financial portfolios. We also reveal their flight to liquid and safe bank accounts at the expense of mutual funds and stocks. The downward trend peaked in 2015. Only after 2015, when the Eurozone debt crisis was definitely over, those households’ financial portfolios became more diverse again. The findings are highly robust across gender, income, and wealth quartiles, as well as across most countries. Such behavior is most likely a mistake with negative wealth consequences for the households and for the society. Programs to increase portfolio diversity literacy could support households in avoiding such behavior in the next crisis.

Does depression co-occur within households? The moderating effects of financial resources and job insecurity on psychological contagion

The empirically related psychopathologies of stress and depression exact an enormous economic toll and have many physical and behavioral health effects. Most studies of the effects of stress and depression focus on their causes and consequences for a single, focal individual. We examine the extent to which depression, as indicated by filling antidepressant prescriptions (SSRI and Benzodiazepines), co-occurs across spouses, constituting a negative spillover effect. To better understand the conditions that affect within-household contagion of depression, we examine whether the stress and uncertainty occasioned by job change and financial stress (net worth) increases spillover effects among spouses.We use panel data from various Danish administrative registers from the year 2001–2015 with more than 4.5 million observations on more than 900,000 unique individuals and their spouses from Danish health registers.Spouses in a household with their partner using antidepressants have a 62.1% higher chance of using antidepressants themselves, with the one year lagged effect being 29.3% and a two-year lagged effect of 15.1%. The effects become larger by 14.8% contemporaneously and 20% in the two-year lagged model if the focal individual changed employers. There was also a substantively unimportant effect of lower financial wealth to increase inter-spousal contagion.

The effects of market size, wealth, and network effects on digital piracy and profit

The effects of market size, wealth, and network effects on digital piracy and profit

“Empirical Corporate Finance: Opportunities and Challenges”—Editorial Synthesis of the Special Issue

This concept paper synthesises the special issue with an integrated discussion of all four papers published therein, from the viewpoint of the theme of this special issue: opportunities and challenges for future empirical research in corporate finance. The four papers highlight that future empirical research faces the challenge of acknowledging fundamental paradigms in the literature. These include analytical models of capital structure, agency theory, the literature on Initial Public Offering anomalies and earnings valuation. An opportunity for future empirical research is to use these foundations to contribute to emerging paradigms. The latter include the empirical evidence of the shareholder wealth effects of government investment, managerial overinvestment and the acknowledgement of unlisted entities within capital markets research.

INVESTMENT DYNAMICS OF SINGAPORE STOCK AND REAL ESTATE MARKETS

This paper examines investment dynamics of six major Singapore asset markets (general stock, property stock, residential, office, retail and industrial) over the last 45 years by focusing on their dynamic correlations, varying spillover-connectedness, Granger causal dependence and selective frequency return connectedness to understand better the changing market relationships among the six markets, as well as the wealth effects between the stock and housing markets. We find that the six asset markets have not become more correlated over time. The 2007–2009 global financial crisis has created the most severe contagion among the markets and was followed by Singapore economic recession. Although these six markets were quite moderately connected in their returns and risk, the return and risk connectedness index measures reached their respective low levels in recent years. The net directional connectedness of the six markets varies in different periods of domestic economic development, external financial crisis and domestic economic recession. Moreover, the housing market leads significant causal interactive roles (linear and nonlinear) over other property and stock markets. On the other hand, the stock market is a strong return transmitter for most of the research periods. The long-term horizon was the most important in contributing to the leadership position in return connectedness of housing market during the Asian financial crisis. Finally, a key message derived from this “long-period” study is that an in-depth understanding of the various investment dynamics is crucial to help maximize mixed portfolio diversification benefits and managing risk in Singapore stock and property markets in the long run.

Nowcasting growth using Google Trends data: A Bayesian Structural Time Series model

This paper investigates the benefits of internet search data in the form of Google Trends for nowcasting real U.S. GDP growth in real time through the lens of mixed frequency Bayesian Structural Time Series (BSTS) models. We augment and enhance both model and methodology to make these better amenable to nowcasting with large number of potential covariates. Specifically, we allow shrinking state variances towards zero to avoid overfitting, extend the SSVS (spike and slab variable selection) prior to the more flexible normal-inverse-gamma prior which stays agnostic about the underlying model size, as well as adapt the horseshoe prior to the BSTS. The application to nowcasting GDP growth as well as a simulation study demonstrate that the horseshoe prior BSTS improves markedly upon the SSVS and the original BSTS model with the largest gains in dense data-generating-processes. Our application also shows that a large dimensional set of search terms is able to improve nowcasts early in a specific quarter before other macroeconomic data become available. Search terms with high inclusion probability have good economic interpretation, reflecting leading signals of economic anxiety and wealth effects.

Household Wealth and Inheritance Transfers: Evidence from the Euro Area.

The accumulation of wealth by households is an essential contributor towards macroeconomic and financial stability and resilience, while also affecting social mobility. The aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between household wealth and the receipt of inheritances and intergenerational transfers. We use detailed micro-level data from the 2017 vintage of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) for households across the Euro Area in order to explore this relationship in detail, analyzing various classes of assets and liabilities, together with inflows of inheritances and gifts between 2014 and 2017, as well as any associated wealth effects. The results show that inheritance flows are positively and significantly-associated with net overall household wealth, primarily via increases in the value of liquid assets like publicly-traded shares and the value of existing self-employment business, while reducing mortgage debt, particularly outstanding loans related to the household’s main residence. We find no evidence of any wealth effects from inheritances in terms of increased consumption expenditure, leisure spending or motor vehicle ownership. These findings collectively suggest that households anticipated the bequests received, with behavior in line with predictions emanating from standard rational expectations life cycle income hypothesis models.

The health-wealth nexus for the elderly: Evidence from the booming housing market in China

A large body of literature has investigated the health-wealth nexus. Most studies exploit exogenous shocks to wealth, such as lottery prizes and inheritances, to investigate the causal effects of wealth on health, especially in developed countries. This paper draws on data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) to first examine the impacts of wealth on the health of the elderly in China. Following the method of Lovenheim and Mumford (2013), I use growth in household housing wealth driven by prefecture-level housing market as an exogenous variation in household-level wealth in China. The findings indicate that wealth has causal effects on individual health-related outcomes. Surprisingly, the growth in housing wealth imposes mixed effects on health conditions and, in fact, reduces healthy activities and healthcare utilisation. As their housing wealth increases, people with lower education levels generally suffer worse physical health and engage in fewer healthy behaviours than those with higher education levels, making health literacy a possible explanation for the mixed health-wealth nexus for the elderly in China.

Maternal exposure to intimate partner violence and uptake of maternal healthcare services in Ethiopia: Evidence from a national survey.

BackgroundWomen exposed to Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) often do not utilize maternal health care optimally both because of stigma and other social problems. The current study aims to explore an association between maternal healthcare seeking and violence exposure among Ethiopian women and to assess if educational attainment and wealth status moderate this association.MethodsThe analyses included 2836 (weighted) currently married women with one live birth. We focus on the five years preceding the 2016 Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey (EDHS) who participate, in the domestic violence sub-study. Exposure was determined by maternal reports of physical, emotional, sexual IPV or any form of IPV. The utilization of antenatal care (ANC) and place of delivery were used as proxy outcome variables for uptake of skilled maternal healthcare utilization. Women’s education attainment and wealth status were selected as potential moderators, as they can enable women with psychological and financial resources to counteract impact of IPV. Multilevel logistic regression analyses were used to explore the association between spousal IPV and maternal health outcomes. Moderation effects by education and wealth status were tested, and the data stratified. Using statistical software Stata MP 16.1, the restricted maximum likelihood method, we obtained the model estimates.ResultsAbout 27.5% of the women who reported exposure to any form of IPV had a health facility delivery. While 23.4% and 22.4% visited four or more antenatal care services among mothers exposed to emotional IPV and sexual IPV, respectively. After adjusting for potential confounding factors, only the association between maternal exposure to emotional IPV and adequate use of ANC was statistically significant (OR = 0.73, (95% CI:0.56–0.95)). But we found no significant association between IPV and utilization of health facility delivery. Some moderation effects of education and wealth in the association between IPV and maternal healthcare service utilization outcome were found.ConclusionExposure to emotional IPV was associated with poor uptake of maternal health care service utilization for married Ethiopian women. While developing interventions to improve women’s maternal healthcare service use, it is crucial to consider the effects of socio-economic variables that moderate the association especially with the intersection of IPV.

COVID-19, food insecurity and dietary diversity of households: Survey evidence from Nigeria.

The policy measures of the government of Nigeria to restrain the spread of COVID-19, particularly in the initial three months (April – June 2020) led to significant disruptions to household livelihoods and food security. We investigate the effects of COVID-19 on food security and dietary diversity of households; focusing on the pathways through which income loss, endowments of wealth, social capital, and safety net programs moderate the severity of households’ food security and dietary diversity. Primary data obtained from a telephone survey of 1,031 Nigerian households were analyzed using ordered logit and negative binomial models. Our results show that income losses due to the COVID-19 restrictive measures had pushed households into a more severe food insecurity and less diverse nutritional outcomes. Regarding wealth effects, livestock ownership significantly cushioned households from falling into a more severe food insecurity amid the pandemic. We found that because of the pandemic’s indiscriminate effect across communities, the potential of social capital as an informal support mechanism might have been eroded to enable households to cope with shocks. Furthermore, safety net programs by the government and NGOs did not provide significant protection to households from falling into severe food insecurity and malnutrition amid the pandemic. We suggest three policy propositions – prioritize investment in local job creation to curb income loss; build the wealth base of households (e.g., land tenure security or livestock) to enhance resilience to shocks; and target safety nets and other social support programs spatially, temporally, and across social groups to enhance the effectiveness of such programs amid shocks.

Do house prices affect campaign contributions?

AbstractIndividual campaign contributions are the largest source of financing for U.S. presidential and congressional candidates, though the body of research examining why people give remains small. To help understand these decisions, we estimate the causal impact of house prices on donations across campaigns and parties using an instrumental variables strategy. Our results indicate that an increase in house prices increases ZIP code‐level donations to Democratic presidential and congressional candidates, with minuscule or no effect for Republican candidates. The effects in areas with a greater proportion of renters are larger than areas with more homeowners. Since this population is likely to experience higher rents as a result of house price increases, this suggests that pleas for policy may inspire giving. Further, areas with the highest fraction of college educated residents also see the largest effects, when compared to less‐educated areas, suggesting a wealth effect exists as well.