Macro-level Evidence Research Articles

Does Universal Long-Term Care Insurance Boost Female Labor Force Participation? Macro-level Evidence

Exploiting the introduction of nationwide long-term care insurance (LTCI) in Japan and utilizing a synthetic control (SC) method, we examine how LTCI introduction has altered the trends of public expenditures on in-kind benefits for the elderly, public health expenditure, and female labor force participation. Estimation results using the panel data of OECD countries (1980s-2010s) suggest that LTCI introduction substantially increased in-kind benefits for the elderly, but we do not find any positive effect on female labor force participation for any age cohort. We also provide extended placebo tests based on permuted treatment assignment, resampled donor pools, and several test statistics to verify the above conclusions.

The State of Nationalism (SoN): Nationalism and International Conflict

Does nationalism increase the probability of international conflict? An affirmative answer has intuitive appeal: Nationalists promote force to protect their land and people from foreign threats. Research on nationalism in international conflict implicates elites, masses, and political interactions between these actors when asserting its status as a powerful force that raises the risk for interstate wars. Yet both micro- and macro-level evidence cautions against drawing broad conclusions about how nationalism affects conflict. Nationalism sometimes prompts aggression. In other contexts, nationalism produces restraint. Systematic knowledge about how nationalism relates to international conflict therefore requires answers to questions about which nationalisms promote conflict and whose nationalism matters. This article first reviews theory and evidence about nationalism’s conflict-causing potential. We discuss the microfoundations that link nationalism to foreign policy attitudes before describing research that implicates nationalism as a cause of militarized conflict. Next, we argue that understanding the complex relationships between nationalism and conflict requires theorizing the causal processes that connect various stakeholders’ nationalism to foreign policy outcomes. Moreover, research on identity content suggests that nationalism is compatible with a variety of foreign policy preferences. Throughout, we centre research that features nationalism as a principal independent variable or causal mechanism precipitating conflict. Any review about nationalism must contend with the delicate matter of conceptualization — the field contains nearly as many definitions for nationalism as articles about nationalism and war. The research we discuss variously describes nationalism as an identity, ideology, or belief, for example. For our purposes, nationalism captures a set of sentiments related to a national group and its superiority. This broad perspective centers the phenomenon implicated in international conflict research.

Energy access and female labor force participation in developing countries

Energy access and female labor force participation in developing countries

Environmental regulation stringency and allocation between R&D and physical capital: A two-engine growth model

Environmental regulation stringency and allocation between R&D and physical capital: A two-engine growth model

The Impact of Food Aid and Governance on Food and Nutrition Security in Sub-Saharan Africa

The paper focuses on the impact of food aid and governance quality (the latter disaggregated in different components) on both food and nutrition security in the SSA region and for a sample of 25 countries over the period 1996 to 2018. The main novelty and contribution of the paper in the relevant literature is by providing macro-level evidence in the SSA region to complement country-specific evidence in this research area. We also use different food and nutrition security outcome measures, which include the average value of food production, average dietary energy supply adequacy, and prevalence of undernourishment. Furthermore, we combine the above with the use of both aggregated and disaggregated governance indicators to examine the impact of governance quality on the outcome variables. We find evidence of a robust relationship between food aid, governance quality, and food and nutrition security outcomes by employing the GMM estimator. We also find that food aid increases food and nutrition security while it reduces undernourishment. Among the various governance quality indicators we have employed, the control of corruption and political stability show a significant relationship with the measured outcomes. However, the composite governance index and food aid jointly have no significant effect on food security, but they significantly increase nutrition security and reduce undernourishment across the various empirical models we have employed in our empirical analysis. An important policy lesson emanating from our empirical findings is that controlling corruption and maintaining political stability may have significant implications for enhancing the impact of food aid on food and nutrition security in the region.

How varying population ageing, urbanisation, and institutional quality affect carbon dioxide emissions in South Asia: macro-level evidence

How varying population ageing, urbanisation, and institutional quality affect carbon dioxide emissions in South Asia: macro-level evidence

A Macro-Level Association of Vaccination Rate with the Number of Confirmed COVID-19 Cases in the United States and Japan.

Aiming to evaluate a macro-level association of vaccination rate as well as booster vaccination rate with the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States and Japan, a cross-sectional study was conducted using data in each jurisdiction. Data on the total number of people who were fully vaccinated as of the end of December 2021, data on the total number of people who have received a booster dose as of the end of March 2022 and data on the cumulative number of confirmed COVID-19 cases were obtained from the website of the national governments. A generalized regression model was used to examine the association. This study showed that a higher vaccination rate was associated with a lower number of confirmed COVID-19 cases per year in 2021 for both the United States and Japan. The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases per 1000 population per year (95% confidence intervals) as a 1% increment of the vaccination rate was −0.74 (−1.29, −0.20), p = 0.007 for the United States and −1.48 (−1.95, −1.00), p < 0.0001 for Japan. A similar association was observed for the booster vaccination rate in 2022, although the association was attenuated in a multivariable model, particularly for the United States. This study provided macro-level evidence that vaccination may reduce the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases.

Female employment and first childbirth in Italy: what news?

In the last decades, female participation in the labour market has been found to be increasingly associated with higher fertility levels in high-income countries—albeit to a lesser extent in countries characterised by poor welfare support to working mothers. Among the latter camp, Italy is an intriguing case study, which is marked by lower female labour force participation and fertility rates when compared to most other European countries. Recent macro-level evidence suggests that a reverse in the female employment/fertility relationship is gradually taking place in Italy, driven largely by the Northern regions. However, the evolution of the relationship between female employment and fertility has (to the best of my knowledge) never been addressed at the micro-level. Through the use of individual-level retrospective data, this study analyses the link between female employment and fertility, paying special attention to differences between Northern and Southern Italy, and its evolution over time. The results suggest that female employment began to be positively associated to fertility at the individual level, both in Northern and Southern Italy (although to slightly different extents), from 2010 onwards.

How to Enhance the Green Innovation of Sports Goods? Micro- and Macro-Level Evidence From China’s Manufacturing Enterprises

This study aims to explore the driving factors of green innovation, and uses the micro- and macro-data from China’s sports goods manufacturing industries. In particularly, sports goods manufacturing enterprises are identified by the textual analysis of information disclosure, and the competitive environment faced by each enterprise is built through their unique closest rivals. Empirically, this study finds that competition and policy can promote green innovation in sports goods manufacturing industries, and industrial policy can moderate the role of product market competition in promoting green innovation. Considering the characteristics of the Chinese market, more industrial policies may intensify the competition among manufacturing enterprises, forcing such enterprises to obtain competitive advantages through innovation outcomes. It is worth noting that the association between product market competition and green innovation changes as financial constraints increase, and this may be caused by the impact of industrial policy on the interactions among enterprises. After implementing the strict environmental policy, product market competition and industrial policy can both promote green innovation. In high-polluting industries, sports goods manufacturing enterprises get more social attention and suffer from higher penalties for environmental violations, so that such enterprises will get more motivations from industrial policies to support green innovation. In addition, we also find that there is a significant inverted-U shape relationship between industrial policy and green innovation in sports goods manufacturing industries. As financial constraints increase, the non-linear relationship between product market competition and green innovation converts from a U shape relationship to an inverted-U shape relationship. Our findings can provide a better understanding of the investment of sports goods manufacturing enterprises in green innovation.

Debate

In this debate the focus is on suicide which is a complex maze, wherein multiple parameters intersect. The first part of the paper questions many basic premises which have been taken as given in the discourse of suicide and currently form the substrate of conversations around suicide. The basic premise is that this societal problem has been expropriated by health professionals. They have assumed ownership without having the wherewithal to address the many contributory factors to suicide – social, economic, cultural, and moral. Suicide prevention plans are ritually rolled out despite a consistent record of repeated failures. There is a need to move against the tide and reimagine the subject in light of macrolevel evidence. The second part posits that for an issue as complex as suicide, it is important to think inclusively rather than looking for simplistic answers in either/or way, and the larger societal, economic and even political issues will need to be factored in.

Does universal long-term care insurance boost female labor force participation? Macro-level evidence

Abstract Although a public long-term care (LTC) program is a potentially important factor for the labor supply of female informal caregivers, there are only a handful of individual-level studies on this topic and the macro-level impacts of LTC programs are still largely unknown. Exploiting the introduction of nationwide long-term care insurance (LTCI) in Japan and utilizing a synthetic control method, we examine how LTCI introduction has altered the trends of public expenditures on in-kind benefits for the elderly, public health expenditure, and female labor force participation. The estimation results using the panel data of OECD countries (1980–2013) suggest that LTCI introduction substantially increased the in-kind benefits for the elderly by around one percentage point of GDP 10 years after LTCI introduction, but we do not find a positive effect on the labor force participation for middle-aged women. The fact that we do not observe any positive LTCI effects on middle-aged female labor force participation on a macro level implies that positive LTCI effects on female labor supply observed in some previous microlevel studies may be cancelled out by some other factors or are small enough to be detected under a general-equilibrium setting.

Does mobile money business influence non-performing loans in the traditional banking sector? Evidence from Ghana

The study analyzes the influence of mobile money business on the growth of non-performing loans in Ghana. Quarterly time-series data from 2000-2018 are used. This secondary data was obtained from the the New International Database of Financial Fragility and the Bank of Ghana online database. In the absence of data on quarterly volumes of mobile money transactions or the estimated number of firms, we present groundbreaking macro-level evidence of how mobile money business operations contribute to the problem of nonperforming loans in Ghana. We estimated an autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) and find that mobile money business operations positively influence non-performing loans in Ghana. This influence persists in the long-run and raises some policy implications for the banking sector in the country. The paper recommends the need for regulators to develop a policy that creates a well-connected and transparent financial system.

Do Voters Respond to Relative Economic Performance?

Abstract An emerging literature suggests that economic voting is driven by incumbents’ relative performance, that is, how the national economy performed relative to recent past outcomes in the country (domestic comparison) and in a cross-national perspective (international comparison). While scholars have presented macro-level evidence in this direction, to date there has been scant micro-level evidence as to whether voters’ evaluations of incumbent competence are shaped by relative performance. This article contributes to the literature by presenting two population-based survey experiments fielded in the United Kingdom and in Istanbul, Turkey. Both British and Turkish voters’ evaluations of incumbent competence are affected by information about how well the economy performed in domestic and international comparisons, though Turkish voters seem to react to international performance comparison to a lesser degree than to a domestic one. In both countries highly educated individuals are more responsive to the incumbent’s relative international performance. These results provide support for macro-level analyses that highlight the importance of incumbents’ relative performance for economic voting.

Fiscal consolidations and electoral outcomes in emerging economies: Does the policy mix matter? Macro and micro level evidence from Latin America

Fiscal consolidations and electoral outcomes in emerging economies: Does the policy mix matter? Macro and micro level evidence from Latin America

Directed technological change, energy and more: a modern story

AbstractReliance of modern economic activities on the use of energy, most of which still comes from non-renewable sources, provokes concerns regarding the most efficient utilization of energy inputs in production. While most theory expects directed technological change to be biased towards the non-renewable input, there is rare macro-level evidence that technological change is actually biased towards energy rather than other main inputs. To fill this gap, we apply stochastic frontier analysis to country data regarding output produced with capital, labor and energy, and estimate a set of indicators for technological change. Findings show that technological change is biased the most towards energy in general. In particular, although different groups of countries exhibit various patterns, there is strong evidence that technological change favors energy more than labor. This is in line with the theoretical expectation that technological change ought to be biased towards the non-renewable input rather than the renewable ones.

Having Their Say: Authority, Voice, and Satisfaction with Democracy

As studies using macrolevel evidence have shown, citizens are more satisfied with democracy when they feel that their instrumental preferences are represented in government, and this feeling is more likely in nonmajoritarian institutional contexts. Scholars have given less attention to whether such institutions also increase satisfaction by providing more inclusive political discourse. Citizens may value having their voice represented in politics, regardless of the resulting authority. This article presents the first microlevel evidence of this mechanism by having subjects experience a simulated election campaign that manipulates both the political discourse and the outcome independently. We find that subjects were less satisfied with democracy when their party lost the election, but this effect disappeared when the campaign discourse featured thorough discussion of an issue that they felt was important. The findings suggest that institutions and party systems that provide more diverse voices may soften the blow of losing elections.

Trade for You Too: Why Is Trade More Important Than You Think?

Trade for You Too: Why Is Trade More Important Than You Think?

The relationship between LGBT inclusion and economic development: Macro-level evidence

The relationship between LGBT inclusion and economic development: Macro-level evidence

Political orientation and physical health: The role of personal responsibility

Political orientation and physical health: The role of personal responsibility

Microfinance and income inequality: New macrolevel evidence

AbstractThis paper addresses the empirical question of whether microfinance has any impact on income inequality at the macrolevel. Very little research has been conducted on the relationship between the macrolevel scale of microfinance and income inequality over time in a country and across countries. Based on panel‐data techniques, with annual data from 85 countries from 2001 to 2012 and a broad theoretical framework on microfinance and inequality, we provide empirical evidence that suggests that increases in the macrolevel scale of microcredit in a country contribute to reducing income inequality within that country over time. Finally, since microfinance may be endogenous, we used instruments from the existing literature to control for this problem.