Using three waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, this paper examines whether financial transfers from adult children to elderly parents affect the latter's mental health. Both OLS and instrumental variable (IV) estimates show that financial transfers significantly attenuate depressive symptoms of elderly individuals, with a much larger size of the IV estimates. We also examine the income and cultural channels through which intergenerational transfers work and further discuss the explanatory powers of these two channels through a decomposition analysis. The results suggest the cultural channel accounts for a larger proportion of the financial transfer effect. This means that the unique beneficial impact of intergenerational financial transfers on the mental health of older adults cannot be fully substituted in the foreseeable future.

In 2015, about 20.5 million babies were born with low birthweight (LBW), with the majority from low- and middle-income countries. The use of antenatal care (ANC) is a recommended health policy measure to reduce the risk of LBW. However, there is limited evidence for its effectiveness in reducing LBW in sub-Saharan Africa, although the region accounts for almost one-quarter of LBW babies, second only to Asia. Moreover, while the number of LBW in other regions is reducing, the number of LBW babies in sub-Saharan Africa is increasing. We therefore use data from Ghana (a sub-Saharan African country with a high incidence rate of LBW) to investigate the effect of using ANC on birthweight. The number of ANC visits and the month of ANC initiation were used as indicators for ANC utilisation. We applied an extended linear regression technique to deal with the potential sample selection bias and endogeneity associated with the use of ANC. The results from the study indicate that early ANC initiation and having more ANC visits are both associated with an increase in birthweight; however, the estimated effect of an early ANC visit is larger than having an additional visit. Therefore, we recommend that policies aimed at tackling the problem of LBW should mostly be geared towards promoting ANC utilisation, especially early ANC initiation. We also find that estimating the effect of ANC on birthweight without accounting for sample selection bias and endogeneity of ANC underestimates the effect of ANC on birthweight.

Whether private healthcare providers should be encouraged over public providers remains unclear. On the one hand, because private providers are profit-driven, they are more motivated to compete for demand by enhancing quality if demand is elastic. However, because they are more motivated to maximize revenue, they may sacrifice quality to maximize profit. A crucial factor in determining whether private providers should be encouraged is the extent to which their quality exceeds or falls short of that of the public provider. This study, therefore, investigates whether the public and private differ in providing quality healthcare services using the 2014 Ghana Demographic and Health Survey. Our measure of healthcare quality is based on patient satisfaction level with nine healthcare services (cleanliness, waiting time, comfort and safety, consultation time, privacy, listening, explanation, treatment advice and confidentiality) provided by public and private healthcare facilities. We applied an instrumental variable approach to account for endogeneity issues related to the patient’s choice of healthcare provider. We find that private facility users have a higher probability of being very satisfied with “waiting time”, “consultation time”, “listening”, “cleanliness”, “comfort and safety”, “confidentiality”, and “privacy” than public users, thus suggesting that private facilities provide better service than public. We thus recommend encouraging the private sector to enter the healthcare market. We also find that failing to account for endogeneity in provider choice when estimating the effect of healthcare facility ownership on healthcare service quality underestimates the effects.

The relationship between membership in Ghana's national health insurance scheme and out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure (OOPHE) was quantified using data from two rounds of the Ghana Living Standards Survey for 2013 and 2017. Censored quantile regressions were evaluated with and without instrumental variables. The results show that going from having no insured household member to all insured predicted less OOPHE (by 19% at the median). We find statistically significant differences between the 2013 and 2017 estimates. Insurance reduced OOPHE in 2013 but had a statistically insignificant effect in 2017. The effect on spending on outpatient care was greater than that related to medicine and medical supplies. There was no statistically significant relationship with hospitalisation fees. Falling government health spending and growing reliance on private healthcare financing have been observed. The insurance scheme has become less generous, and it was therefore less effective in 2017.

An extensive literature has examined the economic effects of non-violent political instability events. Nonetheless, the issue of whether economies react differently over time to such events remains largely unexplored. Using synthetic control methodology, which constructs a counterfactual in the absence of political instability, we estimate the output effect of 38 regime crises in the period 1970-2011. A crucial factor is whether crises are accompanied by mass civil protest. In the crises accompanied by mass civil protest, there is typically an immediate fall in output which is never recovered in the subsequent five years. In crises unaccompanied by protest, there are usually no significant output effects. It is unclear, however, whether mass civil protest causes the greater fall in output or is simply an indicator of a more severe political crisis.

Abstract People save more in response to future income uncertainties, meaning health insurance could crowd out savings by reducing medical spending. This relationship has yet to be emphasised in the sub-Saharan African context, where income variability is pronounced. We quantify the relationship between health insurance and household savings using censored quantile regressions with and without instrumental variables. Data were obtained from the last two Ghana Living Standards Survey rounds: 2013 & 2017. We find a positive relationship between health insurance and household savings. Ghana’s health insurance generally reduces out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure. But insurance-induced utilisation and unofficial healthcare payments are observed, as well as falling public healthcare spending and increasing dependence on private healthcare financing. The insured perhaps save more to complement the cover provided by health insurance since complete coverage is not guaranteed. JEL classification: D91; E21; I3; I18; G22

This paper examines whether childcare choice affects the early childhood development of children aged 7-59 months. Using the data from Chinese Family Panel Studies, we look at household choices between parental and grandparental cares and the timing of four key early life achievements - walking, talking, counting and toilet training. We conceptualize early childhood development within a household production model, which enables us to identify the impacts of childcare. Our results suggest that compared with parental care, grandparental care delays the achievement of all four outcome measures. Grandparental care is particularly disadvantageous for children who are 'left-behind' by migrant parents.

This paper evaluates the heterogeneous effect of health insurance on out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure (OOPHE), using merged data from the Ghana Living Standards Survey and Ghana Health Service reports. It applies conditional-mixed process and censored quantile instrumental variable estimators to tackle censoring and endogeneity. We instrument household insurance rate with community insurance rate (exclusive of the observed household) and control for community unobservables. The quantile regression allows the insurance effect to differ across the distribution of OOPHE. We further perform separate analyses by the types of OOPHE and selected covariates. The results show that insurance reduced OOPHE and the incidence of catastrophic OOPHE in 2013, but not in 2017. Besides, households in the higher expenditure quantiles benefitted more from coverage than those in the median and lower quantiles did in 2013. Also, the insurance benefits accrued exclusively to the wealthiest households, households with older heads, and users of outpatient services in 2013. Lastly, the 2013 survey reveals that families with female heads and those whose heads had primary education benefitted more from health insurance than their counterparts in the other subgroups did. The paper concludes that same health insurance can have varied financial risk implications at different periods, across the distribution of OOPHE, and among various household categories.

We investigate whether changes in life circumstances lead to long-lasting changes in subjective well-being using a medical intervention that provided orthotic equipment to Ugandan adults with lower limb disabilities. The intervention had a positive effect on mobility and physical health, and treated patients reported a significant improvement in life satisfaction in the first few months after the treatment. However, the effect on subjective well-being was not prolonged. After one year, life satisfaction returned to the pre-treatment levels. The evidence of adaptation is also supported by evidence of changes in patients' reference levels, in the form of aspirations measured as both the level of income considered sufficient to live well, and the minimum income to make ends meet.

In this study we investigate the effect of framing on bribery behaviour. To do this, we replicate Barr and Serra (Exp Econ, 12(4):488–503, (2009) and carry out a simple one-shot bribery game that mimics corruption. In one treatment, we presented the experiment in a framed version, in which wording was embedded with social context; in the other, we removed the social context and presented the game in a neutral manner. The contribution of this paper is that it offers a comparison of framing effects in two highly corrupt countries: China and Uganda. Our results provide evidence of strong and significant framing effects for Uganda, but not for China.

This paper attempts to examine the labour force participation decisions and earnings across employment sectors and how it varies by gender in Sri Lanka. The labour market is disaggregated into 5 sectors –public, formal private, informal private, self-employed and agriculture. Using the Labour Force Survey 2013, this paper adds to existing literature in two ways. Firstly, the paper deals with two forms of potential biases which have not been simultaneously explored for the case of Sri Lanka – sample selectivity and endogeneity of education in earnings. Secondly, it adds to the literature by including the self-employed in the analysis. The determinants of sector choice are analysed using a multinomial logit. The findings of this paper suggest that individuals with the highest levels of education get into the public and formal private sectors, whereas the least educated are likely to join the informal and agricultural sectors. The earnings functions suggest that the returns to education vary greatly across the sectors. The differences across sectors confirm the importance of disaggregating the sectors of employment to examine choices of labour force participation.

The rapid growth of informal employment in China in recent decades has attracted attention, but to understand its implications, the concept of informality must be deconstructed. We reclassify employment status into three categories: salaried workers who have long-term contracts; the self-employed; and causal workers without long term contracts (working in either the formal or the informal sector). The monthly earnings of the self-employed are much (47%) higher than those casual employees. Self-employment is not necessarily a misfortune and the flexibility it provides may be optimal for some kinds of workers. For example, the self-employed are more likely to be disabled and to have young families.Institutionally, it is still difficult for casual workers and most rural-urban migrant workers to embark on business ownership. Although a large group of rural-urban migrants are employees with longer term contracts, their rural registration (hukou) means they lack the social protection of urban residents. The labour force with rural hukou is more likely to fall into the informal sector and, within that sector, is most likely to be engaged in casual labouring jobs. Policies to support small businesses may be warranted given the detrimental impacts of informality on casual workers. Experimental interventions could be tried along the lines of those used in Peru to provide funds to support entrepreneurial activities by this group to lift themselves out of a poverty trap into more sustainable employment. Skill training, encouragement for innovation, tax credits and reducing institutional constraints on starting up small business should be all considered.

This paper explores the urban-rural welfare gap in 2002 and 2009/10 for the case of Sri Lanka. This was a period of high growth and falling poverty rates in the country. The paper attempts to explore three issues: (a) what are the determinants of urban and rural household welfare, (b) does the urban-rural welfare gap rise or fall between 2002 and 2009/10, and (c) what factors contribute towards the widening or narrowing of the urban-rural welfare gap over time. The paper contributes to existing literature using a new method of unconditional quantile regression to examine the determinants of per capita expenditure for urban and rural households across the expenditure distribution. Further, this method enables us to isolate and identify the characteristics that contribute towards the urban-rural divide in welfare. For this, a variant of the threefold Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition is applied directly to the estimation results of the unconditional quantile regression. We find the urban-rural welfare gap to have fallen considerably between 2002 and 2009/10. At a given point in time, the welfare gap is larger between richer urban and rural households relative to poorer households.

This paper explores the rates of return to education in Sri Lanka across the sexes and different types of employment during 2009/10. The endogeneity bias suggests that education may be associated with other characteristics such as ability and family background – excluding such attributes could lead to biased estimates of the return to education. To deal with this form of bias, the paper uses an Instrumental Variables (IV) approach to measure education. Our results reveal that the OLS estimates are downward biased, in comparison to the IV estimates. Further, we add to the literature by exploring the return to education across levels of education – primary, secondary and tertiary – and how it varies across sexes and types of employment. Finally for the self-employed, we analyse the association between inputs (land, raw materials, labour and capital), education and output using a household-level production function – for those in agriculture and non-agricultural activities. The results suggest that education at higher levels have a positive association with non-agricultural output, but not with agricultural output.

In nationally representative household data from the 2008 Chinese Rural to Urban Migration Survey, nearly two thirds of rural-urban migrants found their employment through family members, relatives, friends or acquaintances. This paper investigates why the use of social network to find jobs is so prevalent among rural-urban migrants in China, and whether migrants face a wage penalty as a result of adopting this job search method. Using a switch regression approach, we find evidence of positive selection effects of the use of networks on wages. Users of networks tend to be older, to have migrated longer ago and to be less educated. In addition, married workers and those from villages with more out-migrant are more likely to use networks, while those without local residential registration status are less likely. Controlling for selectivity, we find a large negative impact of network use on wages. Using job contacts brings access to urban employment, but at the cost of markedly lower wages.

We use Synthetic Control Methodology to estimate the output loss in Tunisia as a result of the “Arab Spring.” Our results suggest that the loss was 5.5 percent, 5.1 percent, and 6.4 percent of GDP in 2011, 2012, and 2013 respectively. These findings are robust to a series of tests, including placebo tests, and are consistent with those from an Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model of Tunisia’s economic growth. Moreover, we find that investment was the main channel through which the economy was adversely impacted by the Arab Spring.

We empirically deconstruct informal employment in China into private business owners and casual workers without job contracts. Survey data from 2007 and 2013 document a rise in informal employment to the point where it exceeds formal employment, potentially an unintended consequence of the 2008 New Labour Contract Law. Compared with formal employees and business owners, casual workers report the lowest monetary and subjective wellbeing although business owners work longer hours with less social protection. Descriptive statistics and multivariate modelling reveal formal employees tend to have more favoured characteristics, often being educated, male, healthy and able bodied. Casual workers are more likely to have the characteristics of vulnerable groups, so the growth of casual employment is particularly concerning. There are indications that running small business is not always a sign of vulnerability and it may provide job flexibility for those with dependents to care for.

本文使用CHIP（中国家庭收入调查）数据和分位数回归方法考察了中国城镇工资结构及其差距变化。我们使用Machado＆Mata（2005）分解方法发现,在1988-1995年和2002-2008年两个时期里城镇职工工资收入不平等显著扩大,这主要归因于工资报酬结构的变化。分位数回归结果包括不同分位点上的教育和工作经验回报、性别工资差距和党员工资溢价及其变化,还有所有制、职业、产业部门等对工资收入的影响及其变化等。在2002-2008年这一时期,教育和工作经验回报的下降使收入趋于平等化,而导致工资差别的其他因素,如性别、职业、所有制、产业部门、省份等都扩大了收入差距。性别、白领与蓝领、制造业与其他产业部门间工资差距持续上升。

This paper examines the effect of the public sector and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) on wage inequality in urban China using China Household Income Project data. It applies quantile regression analysis, the Machado and Mata decomposition to investigate how urban wage inequality was affected by the changes in wage structure and employment shares of the public sector and SOEs. We find that since the radical state sector reforms designed to reduce overstaffing and improve efficiency in the late 1990s, urban wage gaps were narrowed due to the reduction in the employment share of the state sector; the wage premium of the state sector in comparison with the non-state sector increased significantly; and changes in the wage structure of the labour market caused the rise in urban wage inequality.

This paper examines change in wage gaps in urban China from 1988 to 2008 by estimating quantile regressions on CHIPS data. It applies the Machado and Mata (2005) decomposition, finding sharp increases in inequality largely due to changes in the wage structure. During 2002–08, changes in the returns to education and experience have been equalizing. However, changes in other categories of wage differential—by sex, occupation, ownership, industrial sector, and province—widened inequality. The gender gap continued to rise, as did the gap between white collar and blue collar workers, and between manufacturing and other sectors.