Positive Income Effect Research Articles

Impact of Gaps in the Educational Levels between Married Partners on Health and a Sustainable Lifestyle: Evidence from 32 Countries

Using original cross-sectional internet survey data from 32 countries covering six continents, we investigated the impact of education gaps between married partners on their health status and sustainable lifestyles using the instrumental variable method. A self-rated health status index, mental health index, and an objective health status index were utilized to assess the health statuses of individuals, and six unique indices were used to investigate the sustainable lifestyles. According to the main findings, work-family conflicts may be severe for both wives and husbands with high education levels, and the hypothesis regarding the positive effect of income was not supported. Two major conclusions were derived. First, in general, as opposed to couples with equal education levels, the probability of reporting a worse health status was higher, and the activities related to sustainable development such as improving environmental sustainability were less for couples with education gaps. Second, a comparison of the effects of education gaps on the health status of couples in various groups reveals that highly educated groups, women, and people in Asian or middle-income countries had a higher negative effect on their health status.

Towards Measuring the Economic Impact of Open Data by Innovating and Doing Business

This paper provides some evidence about the impact open data has in the economic landscape, and therefore, contributes to the limited evidence in this subject. From a panel data corresponding to the period of 2014–2017 and a sample of 27 open data leader countries, the incidence of open data on the economic field is examined. The dependent variable, economic impact, is a latent variable based on innovation and doing business indicators. Results obtained show there is a significant and positive effect of open data, ICT development and income per capita on the economic impact.

Determinants of Active and Healthy Ageing in Sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from Cameroon.

This paper examines the determinants and policy implications of active and healthy ageing in Sub-Saharan Africa, taking the case of Bamenda, in Cameroon. Specifically, the study sought to identify and explore the determinants of active and healthy ageing using a mixed-methods approach involving qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis. Focus group discussions were conducted complemented by a survey (random and snowball sampling) using a structured questionnaire. Narratives and thematic analysis were used to analyze the data generated from the focus group discussion and Tobit regression was employed to analyze the multiple determinants of active ageing by dimensions and on a global scale in Cameroon. Results identified three key dimensions of active and healthy ageing: employment/livelihood options (EL), community support and health (CH) and housing and living in Bamenda (HL). The regression results reveal gender bias in active ageing, a non-effect of education and health on active ageing, and a positive effect of income on active and healthy ageing. This study contributes, among others, to the competence–environmental press theory on active ageing with regards to unbundling context specific determinants of active and healthy ageing. It equally derives policy considerations with regards to gender mainstreaming and the identification of age friendly income earning options to enhance the active and healthy ageing process.

Strategy-proof multi-object mechanism design: Ex-post revenue maximization with non-quasilinear preferences

A seller is selling multiple objects to a set of agents, who can buy at most one object. Each agent's preference over (object, payment) pairs need not be quasilinear. The seller considers the following desiderata for her mechanism, which she terms desirable: (1) strategy-proofness, (2) ex-post individual rationality, (3) equal treatment of equals, (4) no wastage (every object is allocated to some agent). The minimum Walrasian equilibrium price (MWEP) mechanism is desirable. We show that at each preference profile, the MWEP mechanism generates more revenue for the seller than any desirable mechanism satisfying no subsidy. Our result works for the quasilinear domain, where the MWEP mechanism is the VCG mechanism, and for various non-quasilinear domains, some of which incorporate positive income effect of agents. We can relax no subsidy to no bankruptcy in our result for certain domains with positive income effect.

The Determinants of the Choice of Preferred Providers among the Publicly Insured in Chile: an Empirical Analysis

This paper analyses the determinants of the choice of provider among the publicly insured in Chile. The focus is on the Preferred Provider System (PPS) where public insured can opt for a more consumer-oriented environment subject to a higher level of copayments. Using a model of expected utility gain we develop a logit analysis based on a large multipurpose survey, the Encuesta de Caracterización Socioeconómica Nacional, CASEN 1992 (National Survey for Socioeconomic Characterisation). We make use of several socio-economic, demographic and access variables in our econometric estimation. As a whole, our results adjust to the hypotheses formulated. Among others, individuals’ income, the relative value of copayments, waiting time and zone of residence emerge as the most relevant determinants in the decision process. The positive effect of income would indicate some degree of segmentation within the public system, while the impact of the relative value of copayments shows that user charges can act as an important deterrent for some individuals. The unexpected negative effect of waiting time, included in our estimation as a provider’s attribute, would suggest certain level of captivity in the sense that some individuals have no real choices but purely public provision. The result for zone of residence indicates that rural residents are less likely to choose preferred providers than urban residents. This result is explained by the spatial distribution of preferred providers who tend to cluster in urban areas.

The impact of mobile hotel reservation system on continuous intention to use in Jordan

Although Technology-Organization-Environment framework has been commonly used by several researchers for organizational adoption of digital business technologies, there is a lack of academic research tackled the Technology-Organization-Environment in developing countries. This article attempts to fill this gap by investigating the relations among several Technology-Organization-Environment variables at Aqaba five star hotels located in Jordan namely relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, top management support, firm size, technology competence, competitive pressure, critical mass, information intensity, age, gender, educational level, personal income, and work position in enhancing perceived usefulness, and the latter on continuous intention to use mobile hotel reservation system of five star hotels in Aqaba, Jordan. An empirical study among 390 usable responses containing 36 items was analyzed using multiple regression analysis and machine learning techniques to test the research hypotheses. Results expose a positive effect of relative advantage, information intensity, gender, age, and personal income on perceived usefulness, and the latter on continuous intention to use mobile hotel reservation system. This research will enable decision makers to identify which variables should be emphasized in order to impact hotels’ perceived usefulness of adopting mobile hotel reservation system, and in turn on continuous intention to use mobile hotel reservation system in service companies, especially in the hotel sector.

Efficient and Strategy-Proof Multi-Unit Object Allocation with Money: (Non)decreasing Marginal Valuations without Qquasi-Linearity

We consider the problem of allocating multiple units of an indivisible object among agents and collecting payments. Each agent can receive multiple units of the object, and his (consumption) bundle is a pair of the units he receives and his payment. An agent's preference over bundles may be non-quasi-linear, which accommodates income effects or soft budget constraints. We show that the generalized Vickrey rule is the only rule satisfying efficiency, strategy-proofness, individual rationality, and no subsidy for losers on rich domains with non-decreasing marginal valuations. We further show that if a domain is minimally rich and includes an arbitrary preference exhibiting both decreasing marginal valuations and a positive income effect, then no rule satisfies the same four properties. Our results suggest that in non-quasi-linear environments, the design of an efficient multi-unit auction mechanism is possible only when agents have non-decreasing marginal valuations.

Strategy-Proof Mechanism Design With Non-Quasilinear Preferences: Ex-Post Revenue Maximization for an Arbitrary Number of Objects

We consider the multi-object allocation problem with monetary transfers where each agent obtains at most one object (unit-demand). We focus on allocation rules satisfying individual rationality, non-wastefulness, equal treatment of equals, and strategy-proofness. Extending the result of Kazumura et al. (2020B), we show that for an arbitrary number of agents and objects, the minimum price Walrasian is the unique ex-post revenue maximizing rule among the rules satisfying no subsidy in addition to the four properties, and that no subsidy in this result can be replaced by no bankruptcy on the positive income effect domain.

The Labor Market Effects of Expanding Overtime Coverage

This paper studies the employment and income effects of a federal proposal in 2016 to expand overtime coverage to additionally cover salaried workers earning between $455 and $913 per week ($23,660 and $47,476 per annum). Although the policy was unexpectedly nullified a week before its proposed effective date, using detailed administrative payroll data covering one-sixth of the U.S. workforce, I find clear evidence that firms nevertheless responded to the policy by bunching workers' earnings at the new $913 exemption threshold. On average, the base salary of directly affected workers who remain employed increased by 1.4%. Meanwhile, for every hundred workers who would have gained coverage under the policy, 10 jobs were reclassified from salaried to hourly. Preliminary analysis also suggests that there may have been negative employment effects. Examining the distribution of these margins of adjustments, I find that the positive income effect accrued entirely to workers who were bunched at the $913 threshold but would otherwise have earned between $720 and $913 per week, whereas the reclassification and negative employment effects were spread across jobs paying within the entire range of newly covered base salaries.

Exploring the Puzzle of Human Reproduction: Register Data based Evidence from France and Germany

Birth rates differ strongly across European states, despite the deep economic harmonisation process related to European integration. This study uses large scale administrative data from France and Germany to analyse and directly compare fertility patterns in two major European economies over a period of 15 years. Strong evidence is found that opportunity costs play a role in fertility decisions, and for a positive income effect for females with high earnings. Females in Germany adapt their fertility behaviour more strongly in response to economic incentives than their counterpartsin France. This is explained by pronounced differences in the national approaches to childcare support.

Mechanism design without quasilinearity

This paper studies a model of mechanism design with transfers where agents' preferences need not be quasilinear. In such a model, (i) we characterize dominant strategy incentive compatible mechanisms using a monotonicity property, (ii) we establish a revenueuniquenessresult (for every dominant strategy implementable allocation rule, there is a unique payment rule that can implement it), and (iii) we show that every dominant strategy incentive compatible, individually rational, and revenue‐maximizing mechanism must charge zero payment for theworstalternative (outside option). These results are applicable in a wide variety of problems (single object auction, multiple object auction, public good provision, etc.) under suitable richness of type space. In particular, our results are applicable to two important type spaces: (a) type space containing an arbitrarily small perturbation of quasilinear type space and (b) type space containing all positive income effect preferences.

Annuity Markets and Capital Accumulation

Abstract We examine how the absence of annuities in financial markets affects capital accumulation in a two-period overlapping generations model. Our findings indicate that the effect on capital is ambiguous in general equilibrium, because there are two competing mechanisms at work. On the one hand, the absence of annuities increases the price of old-age consumption relative to the price of early-life consumption. This induces a substitution effect that reduces saving and capital, and an income effect that has the opposite effect as households want to consume less when young, causing them to save more. On the other hand, accidental bequests originate from the assets of the deceased under missing annuity markets. The bequest received in early life always has a positive income effect on saving, but the bequest received in old age, conditional on survival, is effectively a partial annuity with both substitution and income effects. We find that when the desire to smooth consumption is high, the income effects dominate, so the capital stock always increases when annuity markets are missing. However, when the desire to smooth consumption is low, the substitution effects dominate, and the capital stock decreases with missing annuity markets.

Revisiting tourism’s additional impact on income

This study revisits the question of whether tourism development is an additional determinant of income or works through other standard income determinants. Both a panel data analysis from 2006 to 2015 and a cross-sectional country average analysis reveal that the incremental effect of tourism is significantly positive, suggesting that tourism is an additional determinant of income. Further analyses show that the income effect of tourism is contingent on some country characteristics: the positive income effect of tourism mainly appears in countries with weak policies or institutions for environmental sustainability or with better quality of overall infrastructure. These findings help enhance the understanding of the significant contribution of international tourism to the economic growth worldwide. The implication is that the governments of destination countries should fully support tourism development.

CONSUMPTION, LEISURE, AND MONEY

This paper takes a parametric approach to demand analysis and tests the weak separability assumptions that are often implicitly made in representative agent models of modern macroeconomics. The approach allows estimation and testing in a systems-of-equations context, using the minflex Laurent flexible functional form for the underlying utility function and relaxing the assumption of fixed consumer preferences by assuming Markov regime switching. We generate inference consistent with both theoretical and econometric regularity. We strongly reject weak separability of consumption and leisure from real money balances as well as weak separability of consumption from leisure and real money balances, meaning that the inclusion of a money in economic models would be of quantitative importance. We also investigate the substitutability/complementarity relationship among different categories of personal consumption expenditure (nondurables, durables, and services), leisure, and money. We find that the goods are net Morishima substitutes, but because of positive income effects they are gross complements. The implications for monetary policy are also briefly discussed.

Absolute Income, Income Inequality and the Subjective Well-Being of Migrant Workers in China: Toward an Understanding of the Relationship and Its Psychological Mechanisms

No study has been conducted linking Chinese migrants’ subjective well-being (SWB) with urban inequality. This paper presents the effects of income and inequality on their SWB using a total of 128,000 answers to a survey question about “happiness”. We find evidence for a satiation point above which higher income is no longer associated with greater well-being. Income inequality is detrimental to well-being. Migrants report lower SWB levels where income inequality is higher, even after controlling for personal income, a large set of individual characteristics, and province dummies. We also find striking differences across socio-economic and geographic groups. The positive effect of income is more pronounced for rural and western migrants, and is shown to be significantly correlated with the poor’s SWB but not for the well-being of more affluent respondents. Interestingly, high-income earners are more hurt by income inequality than low-income respondents. Moreover, compared with migrants in other regions, those in less developed Western China are found to be more averse to income inequality. Our results are quite robust to different specifications. We provide novel explanations for these findings by delving into psychological channels, including egalitarian preferences, social comparison concerns, expectations, perceived fairness concerns and perceived social mobility.

Does working long hours increase the risk of cardiovascular disease for everyone?

IntroductionIt has been suggested that long working hours are associated with cardiovascular disease (CVD). Although studies on health inequality caused by income inequality have been performed, income levels of workers have been considered only as an adjusting factor in the relationship between long working hours and CVD. In the present study, we investigated the modifying effects of household income level in the relationship between working hours and estimated risk of CVD.Materials and MethodsWe analysed a total of 11,602 Koreans who were randomly enrolled in the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2007‐2016) with complete data. Nonparametric associations between weekly working hours and estimated risk of CVD were explored according to quartiles of equalised household income by gender, and the size of linear associations among weekly working hours and estimated CVD risk after stratifying for equalised household income by gender was considered.ResultsA 4.1% increased risk of CVD was associated with 10 hours or longer per day weekly working hours among males with the highest household income after adjusting for age, equalised household income, occupation, and shift work, but such was not associated among lower income groups. Negative associations between equalised household income and estimated CVD risk were observed only among low household income males.ConclusionLong working hours and household income level can have differential effects on the risk of CVD by socioeconomic status. This study shows that positive income effect may dominate the potential negative effect of long working hours with respect to the risk of CVD in the low‐income group.

How effective is local beneficiation policy in enhancing rural income and employment? The case of agro-processing beneficiation in Tzaneen, South Africa

Confronted with a sluggish growth and very high rates of rural unemployment, South Africa has put local beneficiation at the core of its strategy for employment-intensive re-industrialisation. Its industrial policy action plan identified agro-processing as one of the priority areas for this strategy because of its potential employment multiplier in rural areas. Despite the appeal of its industrialisation potential, beneficiation strategy is often contested and its effectiveness as a viable engine of industrialisation in African countries is recurrently questioned. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of the income and employment effects of an agro-processing beneficiation programme launched by the Department of Science and Technology for the processing of abundant mango harvest in the area of Tzaneen in Limpopo province. Using inverse probability weighting estimation on a sample of 385 households residing in and around the beneficiation target area, we find clear positive income effects of the agro-processing project for the beneficiary households. The success of this project in the domestic and international agro-processing markets suggests that local beneficiation strategy can provide a sound basis for rural industrialisation if adequately prepared.

Gains and losses: Does farmland acquisition harm farmers’ welfare?

Based on data from the China Household Income Project in 2013, this study empirically evaluates the income effect and happiness effect of land acquisition. The results show that land acquisition improves household income but reduces individual happiness. Propensity score matching (PSM) methods have proved the robustness of this result. The mechanism analysis shows that (1) land compensation is not enough to generate “labor supply effect”, whereas land acquisition intensity has a dominant effect which promotes households allocate more labor on off-farm labor market, especially on local off-farm activities. The positive income effect is significant only in the eastern region of China. (2) Both the great deprivation of farmland and compensation inequality have a negative effect on happiness level, but various forms of non-pecuniary compensation have no significant effect on happiness improvement. We conclude that the increase in household income cannot offset the negative effect of land acquisition on happiness, the decrease in happiness levels of land-lost farmers may be largely due to the compensatio system which has not provided fair compensation and not sufficiently taken full account of how to secure their property rights and ensure their long-term livelihood. Finally, we provide recommendations on the reform of the current land acquisition system to improve the interests and welfare of land-lost farmers during the process of urbanization.

Impact of contract farming on land productivity and income of maize and potato growers in Pakistan

While the positive income effect of contract farming is well established in the literature, the heterogeneity of effects for different crops has not been widely investigated. This study compares the income and productivity effects of large-scale contract farming under contract schemes for potatoes and maize in Pakistan. In the area of the study, maize is a common staple crop, widely available in the market, while the potatoes produced by contract farmers are a special variety not sold in the market. We find that potato contracting is associated with significantly higher income for participating farmers, while maize contracting has no association with either income or productivity. We found no negative association between contract participation and income from other sources. Taken together, these results show a higher total household income for potato contract farmers. We also show unique evidence that potato contract farmers tend to employ more skilled workers under a salary system for the management of farms, which implies that contract farming may have positive spillover effects in the skilled labor market. Neither scheme, however, is associated with larger employment of agricultural labor for simple tasks.

Attitudes to reform: Could a cooperative health insurance scheme work in Russia?

As for all health systems, in Russia, the demand for medical care is greater than its health system is able to guarantee the supply of. In this context, removing services from the state guaranteed package is an option that is receiving serious consideration. In this paper, we examine the attitudes of the Russian population to such a reform. Exploiting a widely-used methodology, we explore the population's willingness to pay for cooperative health insurance. Distinguishing between socioeconomic and demographic factors, health-related indicators and risk aversion we find, consistent with other literature, positive income and risk aversion effects. We interpret the former as evidence that the Russian population is not opposed to the idea of progressive redistribution, to pool the costs of health-related risks; and the latter as evidence that risk-averse individuals demand more insurance coverage. In exploring these results further, we show that cognitive bias is important: overestimating the benefits leads to the purchase of additional insurance, while underestimating lowers demand for insurance. Our overall conclusion is that the introduction of a supplementary cooperative health insurance scheme in Russia could increase the accessibility of healthcare, lower the tendency for informal payments, incentivize the personal maintenance of good health and create a new source of funding for public healthcare.