Unemployment, skills, and incentives - an overview of the safety net system in the Slovak Republic

The author studies the potential disincentive effects of unemployment insurance, and social assistance payments on the duration of unemployment in the Slovak Republic. For this purpose, she uses new, very detailed data on receipt of benefits from the Unemployment Registry (1990-2000) and the Labor Force Survey (1996, 1999, and 2000). She employs a flexible methodology that makes it possible to identify behavioral changes that may occur as the quantity, and duration of the benefits change over time, as well as behavioral differences between recipients, and non-recipients. This approach, she argues, constitutes a more accurate test for the presence of incentive, and disincentive effects, than those presented before in the literature. She expands the scope of her analysis, to study the effect of receiving benefits on several outcomes in addition to exit from unemployment (for example, job seeking behavior, and duration of unemployment). She finds important behavioral differences between those who receive benefits, and those who do not. Recipients tend to spend more time unemployed, but they also look for employment more actively than their counterparts, have more demanding preferences with respected to their future jobs, and find jobs in the private sector more often. In addition, these jobs turn out to be better matches than those obtained by non-recipients (with the quality of the match measured by its duration). Moreover, the behavior of recipients varies tremendously depending on whether they are actually receiving benefits, or not. Once their benefits are exhausted, they exit the Unemployment Registry at a higher rate, search more actively, and move into private sector jobs more often. So when these workers are used as their own control group, there is strong evidence that both unemployment insurance and social assistance, or support have important disincentive effects, not only on the duration of unemployment, but also on job seeking behavior, and on exit to employment. Analyzing the effect of unemployment insurance, and social assistance on poverty, the author concludes that these programs bear most of the burden in the fight against poverty. But this protection does not come free, since significant disincentive effects are associated with receiving benefits. Thus any reform plan should take into account both of these aspects of the programs, along with the government's goals for the programs.Labor Policies,Services&Transfers to Poor,Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Health Promotion,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Youth and Governance,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Safety Nets and Transfers,Services&Transfers to Poor

Off and running? Technology, trade and the rising demand for skilled workers in Latin America

The authors describe the evolution of relative wages in five Latin American countries-Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. They use repeated cross-sections of household surveys, and decompose the evolution of relative wages into factors associated with changes in relative supply and relative demand. The authors have three main conclusions: 1) Increases in the relative wages of the most skilled (university-educated) workers took place concurrently with increases in their relative abundance in all of the countries except Brazil. This is strong evidence of increases in the demand for skilled workers. 2) Increases in the wage bill of skilled workers occurred largely within sectors, and in the same sectors in different countries, which is consistent with skill-biased technological change. 3) Trade appears to be an important transmission mechanism. Increases in the demand for the most skilled workers took place at a time when countries in Latin America considerably increased the penetration of imports, including imports of capital goods. The authors show that changes in the volume and research and development intensity of imports are significantly related to changes in the demand for more skilled workers in Latin America. Their research complements earlier work on the effects of technology transmitted through trade on productivity and on the demand for skilled labor.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Labor Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Public Health Promotion,Economic Theory&Research,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Inequality,Curriculum&Instruction,Environmental Economics&Policies

Short but not sweet - new evidence on short duration morbidities from India

India spends 6 percent of its GDP on health-three times the amount spent by Indonesia and twice that of China-and spending on non-chronic morbidities is three times that of chronic illnesses. It is normally assumed that the high spending on non-chronic illnesses reflects the prevalence of morbidities with high case-fatality or case-disability ratios. But there is little data that can be used to separate out spending by type of illness. The authors address this issue with a unique dataset where 1,621 individuals in Delhi were observed for 16 weeks through detailed weekly interviews on morbidity and health-seeking behavior. The authors'findings are surprising and contrary to the normal view of health spending. They define a new class of illnesses as"short duration morbidities"if they are classified as non-chronic in the international classification of disease and are medically expected to last less than two weeks. The authors show that short duration morbidities are important in terms of prevalence, practitioner visits, and household health expenditure: Individuals report a short duration morbidity in one out of every five weeks. Moreover, one out of every three weeks reported with a short duration morbidity results in a doctor visit, and each week sick with such a morbidity increases health expenditure by 25 percent. Further, the absolute spending on short duration morbidities is similar across poor and rich income households. The authors discuss the implications of these findings in understanding household health behavior in an urban context, with special emphasis on the role of information in health-seeking behavior.Health Systems Development&Reform,Public Health Promotion,Disease Control&Prevention,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Economics&Finance,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Economics&Finance,Health Systems Development&Reform,Environmental Economics&Policies,Housing&Human Habitats

Promoting eyewitness recall through sketching in the self-administered interview

The Cognitive Interview (CI) is a widely researched investigative method that promotes accurate and detailed recall from eyewitnesses. The Self-Administered Interview (SAI; Gabbert, 2009) is a booklet emulating the CI without the need for trained interviewers. Both the SAI and CI highlight the importance of context reinstatement, meaning that if the context of encoding is recreated at retrieval, then there will be an increase in the number of details recalled (Tulving & Thomson, 1973). The present study investigates the role of mental reinstatement of context (MRC) through sketching within the SAI. The three conditions are: MRC, MRC plus sketch, and no MRC. The current study hypothesizes the MRC plus sketch condition would recall more accurate details and fewer inaccurate details than the MRC or no MRC conditions. It was expected that drawing a sketch would serve as an external aid to working memory, allowing more cognitive effort to be available to recall additional details about a witnessed event. A total of N = 69 participants from the University of Central Oklahoma completed the study online by watching four convenience store security videos. Participants completed the SAI about a non-violent crime committed in one of the videos. After considering duration on task as a covariate, the results indicated there was no significant difference in accurate details recalled between any of the three conditions. Nor was there a difference in the number of memory errors between the three conditions. The hypotheses were not supported. Overall, participants recalled more accurate details about the people and actions involved in the crime compared to details about the setting or objects. The results of the current study may suggest that a sketch is not necessary to elicit accurate details after witnessing a crime. Future research should investigate this topic further in a more naturalistic setting, with longer retention intervals, and more complex crimes

The impact of recall periods on reported morbidity and health seeking behavior

Between 2000 and 2002, the authors followed 1621 individuals in Delhi, India using a combination of weekly and monthly-recall health questionnaires. In 2008, they augmented these data with another 8 weeks of surveys during which households were experimentally allocated to surveys with different recall periods in the second half of the survey. This paper shows that the length of the recall period had a large impact on reported morbidity, doctor visits, time spent sick, whether at least one day of work/school was lost due to sickness, and the reported use of self-medication. The effects are more pronounced among the poor than the rich. In one example, differential recall effects across income groups reverse the sign of the gradient between doctor visits and per-capita expenditures such that the poor use health care providers more than the rich in the weekly recall surveys but less in monthly recall surveys. The authors hypothesize that illnesses -- especially among the poor -- are no longer perceived as"extraordinary events"but have become part of"normal"life. They discuss the implications of these results for health survey methodology, and the economic interpretation of sickness in poor populations.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Systems Development&Reform,Disease Control&Prevention,Gender and Health,Housing&Human Habitats

Changes in Returns to Education in Latin America: the Role of Demand and Supply of Skills

Changes in the relative wages of workers with different amounts of education have profound implications for developing countries, where initial levels of inequality are often very high. In this paper we use micro data for five Latin American countries over the 1980s and 1990s to document trends in men's returns to education, and to estimate whether the changes in skill premia we observe can be explained by supply or demand factors. We propose a model of demand for skills with three production inputs, and we allow the elasticity of substitution between the different educational inputs to be different using a nested CES function. Using this model, we show that the dramatic expansion in secondary school in many countries in Latin America depressed the wages of workers with secondary school. We also show that there have been sharp increases in the demand for more skilled workers in the region.returns to education, demand and supply of skills

Does eurosclerosis matter ? - institutional reform and labor market performance in Central and Eastern European countries in the 1990s

This paper examines the labor market dynamics of six CEE countries over the last 10 years, paying special attention to the nature of labor market institutions these countries have adopted and their impact on labor market performance. This paper finds that, compared to EU countries, CEE countries fall in the"middle"of the flexibility scale regarding their employment protection legislation. While the effect of labor market institutions is hard to uncover, it should not be disregarded and they are likely to play an important role in the coming years.Environmental Economics&Policies,Labor Markets,Banks&Banking Reform,Health Economics&Finance,Municipal Financial Management

Assessing poverty and distributional impacts of the global crisis in the Philippines : a microsimulation approach

As the financial crisis has spread through the world, the lack of real-time data has made it difficult to track its impact in developing countries. This paper uses a micro-simulation approach to assess the poverty and distributional effects of the crisis in the Philippines. The authors find increases in both the level and the depth of aggregate poverty. Income shocks are relatively large in the middle part of the income distribution. They also find that characteristics of people who become poor because of the crisis are different from those of both chronically poor people and the general population. The findings can be useful for policy makers wishing to identify leading monitoring indicators to track the impact of macroeconomic shocks and to design policies that protect vulnerable groups.Rural Poverty Reduction,Regional Economic Development,Labor Policies,Achieving Shared Growth,Economic Theory&Research

Assessing ex ante the poverty and distributional impact of the global crisis in a developing country : a micro-simulation approach with application to Bangladesh

Measuring the poverty and distributional impact of the global crisis for developing countries is not easy, given the multiple channels of impact and the limited availability of real-time data. Commonly-used approaches are of limited use in addressing questions like who are being affected by the crisis and by how much, and who are vulnerable to falling into poverty if the crisis deepens? This paper develops a simple micro-simulation method, modifying models from existing economic literature, to measure the poverty and distributional impact of macroeconomic shocks by linking macro projections with pre-crisis household data. The approach is then applied to Bangladesh to assess the potential impact of the slowdown on poverty and income distribution across different groups and regions. A validation exercise using past data from Bangladesh finds that the model generates projections that compare well with actual estimates from household data. The results can inform the design of crisis monitoring tools and policies in Bangladesh, and also illustrate the kind of analysis that is possible in other developing countries with similar data availability.Rural Poverty Reduction,Regional Economic Development,Achieving Shared Growth,Economic Theory&Research