44,778 research outputs found
Higher Education and Membership of Voluntary Groups
This research uses the British National Child Development Study to examine the effect of higher education on individual membership of voluntary groups and organizations. Gender differences in the education effects are given emphasis. We apply parametric and nonparametric econometric methods to isolate the influence of confounding variables. There is strong evidence of education endogeneity in the female sample and we observe a negative education effect on women's group membership. Education endogeneity does not cause serious estimation bias in the male sample. Higher education is a significantly positive determinant of men's group membership. Further investigations from a mid-life perspective reveal that the boost of female participation in the workforce and their attitudes towards employment are key factors in the negative association between higher education and women's group membership. Our research provides clues for the divergence in the enrolment in higher education and social participation behavior in Western countries.
Policy Evaluation in Uncertain Economic Environments
This paper develops a decision-theoretic approach to policy analysis. We argue that policy evaluation should be conducted on the basis of two factors: the policymaker's preferences, and the conditional distribution of the outcomes of interest given a policy and available information. From this perspective, the common practice of conditioning on a particular model is often inappropriate, since model uncertainty is an important element of policy evaluation. We advocate the use of model averaging to account for model uncertainty and show how it may be applied to policy evaluation exercises. We illustrate our approach with applications to monetary policy and to growth policy.
Emission-aware Energy Storage Scheduling for a Greener Grid
Reducing our reliance on carbon-intensive energy sources is vital for
reducing the carbon footprint of the electric grid. Although the grid is seeing
increasing deployments of clean, renewable sources of energy, a significant
portion of the grid demand is still met using traditional carbon-intensive
energy sources. In this paper, we study the problem of using energy storage
deployed in the grid to reduce the grid's carbon emissions. While energy
storage has previously been used for grid optimizations such as peak shaving
and smoothing intermittent sources, our insight is to use distributed storage
to enable utilities to reduce their reliance on their less efficient and most
carbon-intensive power plants and thereby reduce their overall emission
footprint. We formulate the problem of emission-aware scheduling of distributed
energy storage as an optimization problem, and use a robust optimization
approach that is well-suited for handling the uncertainty in load predictions,
especially in the presence of intermittent renewables such as solar and wind.
We evaluate our approach using a state of the art neural network load
forecasting technique and real load traces from a distribution grid with 1,341
homes. Our results show a reduction of >0.5 million kg in annual carbon
emissions -- equivalent to a drop of 23.3% in our electric grid emissions.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure, This paper will appear in the Proceedings of the
ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems (e-Energy 20) June
2020, Australi
System-wide impacts of hospital payment reforms : evidence from central and eastern Europe and central Asia
Although there is broad agreement that the way that health care providers are paid affects their performance, the empirical literature on the impacts of provider payment reforms is surprisingly thin. During the 1990s and early 2000s, many European and Central Asian countries shifted from paying hospitals through historical budgets to fee-for-service or patient-based-payment methods (mostly variants of diagnosis-related groups). Using panel data on 28 countries over the period 1990-2004, the authors of this study exploit the phased shift from historical budgets to explore aggregate impacts on hospital throughput, national health spending, and mortality from causes amenable to medical care. They use a regression version of difference-in-differences and two variants that relax the difference-in-differences parallel trends assumption. The results show that fee-for-service and patient-based-payment methods both increased national health spending, including private (out-of-pocket) spending. However, they had different effects on inpatient admissions (fee-for-service increased them; patient-based-payment had no effect), and average length of stay (fee-for-service had no effect; patient-based-payment reduced it). Of the two methods, only patient-based-payment appears to have had any beneficial effect on"amenable mortality,"but there were significant impacts for only a couple of causes of death, and not in all model specifications.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Systems Development&Reform,Health Economics&Finance,Health Law,Population Policies
Business Takeover or New Venture? Individual and Environmental Determinants from a Cross-Country Study
Whereas the determinants of entrepreneurial choice have been thoroughly analyzed in the literature, little is known about the preferred mode of entry into entrepreneurship, such as taking over an existing business or starting a new venture. Using a large international dataset, this study reports considerable differences in takeover preferences across 33 countries. Hierarchical (multi-level) regressions are performed to explore individual-level and country-level determinants of the preferred mode of entry. At the individual level, a person’s human capital, risk attitude, and inventiveness influence the preference for starting a new venture versus taking over an existing business. At the country level, the culture-inherent level of risk tolerance, the country’s level of innovation output, and the administrative difficulty of starting a new business are found to explain the between-country variation in the preferred mode of entry. Implications of our findings for research and practice are also discussed.entrepreneurship;occupational choice;business takeover;entry mode;new venture start;multi-level analysis
Interdisciplinarity and research on local issues: evidence from a developing country
This paper examines the role of interdisciplinarity on research pertaining to local issues. Using Colombian publications from 1991 until 2011 in the Web of Science, we investigate the relationship between the degree of interdisciplinarity and the local orientation of the articles. We find that a higher degree of interdisciplinarity in a publication is associated with a greater emphasis on local issues. In particular, our results support the view that research that combines cognitively disparate disciplines, what we refer to as distal interdisciplinarity, is associated with more local focus of research. We discuss the policy implications of these results in the context of national research assessments targeting excellence and socio-economic impact
Enforcement and Environmental Compliance: A Statistical Analysis of the Pulp and Paper Industry
This paper explores empirically the impact of changes of enforcement efforts on environmental compliance. Our strategy is to link observed fines and other enforcement actions to subsequent compliance behavior. We find that, on the margin, the impact of a fine for water pollutant violations is about a two-thirds reduction in the statewide violation rate in the year following a fine. This surprisingly large result obtains through the regulator’s enhanced reputation. We find that the deterrence impact on other firms in a state is almost as strong as the impact on the sanctioned firm. In contrast to fines, non-monetary sanctions contribute no detected impact on compliance.Fines, Reputation, Pollution, Compliance, Enforcement
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