IntroductionCompared to developed countries, influenza vaccines have lower popularity in developing countries and are generally not given much attention. This paper analyzes the effect of China's policy of providing free influenza vaccine for the population aged 60 and above on vaccination take-up and health outcomes.MethodsUsing nationwide survey data and combining differences across registered residence with differences across age cohorts included by the program. The identification strategy of difference-in-difference estimated the impact of free influenza vaccination policy on vaccination take-up, physical health, and mental health, and explore its impact mechanism.ResultsThis policy can increase the influenza vaccination take-up among the older population by 23% points, and yields significant improvements in both physical and mental health. Crucially, due to the time interval between vaccination and investigation, these health benefits are not driven by the vaccine's direct biological protection, but rather arise through indirect behavioral and belief pathways. Specifically, the policy reduces the probability of reporting that health limits daily activities by 16.9% points, and increases the likelihood of feeling energetic by 28.1% points.DiscussionThe findings of this article provide experience for promoting influenza vaccine in developing countries and discover the indirect physical and mental health improvements that influenza vaccination may bring.

Crude oil is a critical resource for modern industrialized societies and is heavily affected by geopolitical factors. However, existing studies on oil security assessment often overlook the interdependence among evaluation indicators and dimensions, leading to biased estimations. Furthermore, few studies have examined the varying impacts of geopolitical risks on oil security, ignoring potential heterogeneous impacts. To address these gaps, we propose a novel analytical framework. First, we introduce an innovative approach to evaluate oil security using a refined multi-level nested copula, which captures the dependence structure among indicators and dimensions. Second, we employ copula functions to explore how geopolitical risks affect a nation's oil security and uncover their transmission channels. Empirical analysis using data from China shows that geopolitical risks significantly weaken oil security, with a symmetric tail dependence between them, indicating consistent effects regardless of geopolitical fluctuations. Moreover, we identify diminishing supply security as the primary pathway through which geopolitical risks impact oil security. These findings offer valuable policy insights for strengthening energy security amidst geopolitical uncertainties.

This paper aims to empirically study the short-term relationship between robot adoption and the labor market across a diverse set of advanced and emerging economies. Additionally, it seeks to analyze the impact of macroeconomic and institutional factors on this relationship. This study reveals robot adoption promotes employment growth in advanced economies, while it has a negative effect on employment in emerging economies. This heterogeneity can be attributed to both direct and indirect linkages between robots and labor in production. Directly, robots can either substitute or complement human labor. Indirectly, robot adoption stimulates output growth, leading to increased labor demand. We also show that the robot–labor relationship is influenced by macroeconomic variables such as development stage, unemployment rate, and education level, as well as institutional variables such as business regulation and structural reforms. These findings suggest the need for a more inclusive and sustainable approach to the advancement of robot adoption and automation.

Using the near universe of online job postings from 2007 to 2019, we construct a firm-level metric of local labor market competition. We find that firms hiring in more competitive labor markets tend to have lower financial leverage. To establish causality, we exploit the establishment of Amazon HQ2 in Crystal City, Virginia as an exogenous shock to the local labor market competition, and find results that are consistent with our baseline result. Furthermore, the negative relation between labor market competition and leverage is more pronounced when the firm competes for high-skilled labor, high-paid jobs, and in the geographical regions with low GDP growth.

We show that an increase in the cost of unskilled labor leads to more labor-saving innovation. Larger minimum wage increases are associated with larger increases in automation patent applications and citations received by automation patents. These findings are stronger in states with a higher binding wage percentile, i.e., where the minimum wage increase has more ‘bite’. The increase in automation patents following minimum wage hikes contributes to poorer employment outcomes for unskilled workers employed in routine tasks. We conclude that minimum wage legislation spurs innovation that displaces the very same workers the legislation was designed to help.

This paper presents evidence that the exposure to automation technologies has a positive impact on a firm’s financial leverage. The effects are more pronounced in firms with greater labor costs, routine task intensity, firing costs, and union coverage. The results are robust when we instrument a firm’s exposure to automation technologies using the robotics adoption in European countries. Our analysis suggests that the exposure to automation technologies creates a replacement threat that weakens workers’ bargaining power, compressing their wage premiums for bearing financial distress risk and reducing wage rigidity, both of which allow firms to increase financial leverage.

Using minimum wage changes as an exogenous shock to the cost of low-skill labor, we show that corporate innovative output declines after the shock, especially in industries dependent on unskilled labor. The substitutability between technology and unskilled labor plays a key role in the response of innovative output to minimum wage shocks. We identify technology that reduces the demand for unskilled labor either through automation or due to capital-skill complementarity. We find that minimum wage shocks have a less deleterious impact on the innovative output of firms developing technology that reduces the demand for unskilled labor.

With regards to the interchanging features of agricultural pollution and its negative impacts on China's eco-environment such as environmental degradation, this paper, by fully taking into consideration the gap in environmental technology, incorporated the extended SBM directional distance function and Metaconstraints effi ciency function to estimate China's agricultural environmental effi ciency (roughly three regions: eastern, central, and western China), and employed the panel model to study the environmental Kuznets curve's (EKC) characteristics and the causes of regional differences in agricultural environmental effi ciency under levels of different environmental technology.The study showed that, due to the signifi cant differences in agricultural environmental production technology among the three different regions, agricultural environmental effi ciency presented a pattern of progressive decline, for instance; eastern China > western China > central China.Although the agricultural environmental technology of eastern China can reach 96.92% of the potential meta-constraint technology level, agricultural environmental technology of central and western China only reach 83.71% and 79.37% of the potential meta-technology constraint, respectively.The EKC curve of agricultural environmental effi ciency was proved to be supportive of the circumstances in China; however, as a result of the gap in environmental technology, the EKC curves of different regions presented different turning points and stages.In addition to agricultural economic growth, openness of trade, proportion of agriculture, agricultural technological level, income gap, and fi scal support to agriculture have a signifi cant effect on agricultural environmental effi ciency, but both the impact direction and the impact extent of these factors on agricultural environmental effi ciency are different.

Constrained by the dual mission of supporting industrial growth and reducing emissions, China׳s traditional, emission reduction-oriented environmental policies unavoidably face a dilemma. This study adopts the GML index to calculate China׳s industrial productivity by considering environmental factors. In addition, based on the assumption of industry heterogeneity, the author examines the non-linear relationship between China׳s environmental regulation and environmental productivity and calculated the optimal regulation environment for industries. According to this study, when impact of undesirable outputs (pollutant emissions) is considered, environmental regulation and environmental productivity are positively correlated, which to some degree validates the Porter Hypothesis. At present, environmental regulation has significant positive effects on clean production industries but shows a lag effect on pollution-intensive industries. The degree of environmental regulation and environmental productivity show an “inverted U”-shaped relation and display three thresholds. It should be noted, however, that the relationship between regulation and productivity may vary across industries. These findings have clear policy implications: rather than continually increasing the level of environmental regulation, the government should establish standards for individual industries that emphasize flexibility.

This paper aims at evaluating the sources of differences among countries' innovative performances in the renewable energy (RE) sector. Namely, we focus on the national innovative capacity, the knowledge developed abroad and the related knowledge spillovers. We claim that a country is more likely to develop RE innovation: (i) the larger the knowledge stocks of other countries in the same sector; (ii) especially when those other countries share established linkages with the focal country. Relying on a knowledge production function, we model country-level innovative performances in the RE sector for 18 OECD countries in the period 1990–2006. Our findings confirm that, once controlling for climate-energy policies, international knowledge spillovers contribute significantly to RE innovation, and their effect is comparable with domestic R&D and human capital. In addition, international spillovers are more likely if countries share stronger linkages.

This paper investigates the role of cross-country spillovers in renewable energy technologies. The balance between international and domestic knowledge sourcing in energy innovation is still an open question. Recent studies show that a few countries develop new high-quality technologies, but follower countries cannot limit to import them, as they should also undertake adaptive and absorptive R&D efforts. Relying on a knowledge production function, we model the innovation dynamics of 18 OECD countries throughout the period 1990-2006. Our findings show that, after controlling for climate-energy policies, domestic R&D determines renewable energy innovations, but international knowledge spillovers are also relevant. Additionally, the latter are more likely to occur the stronger the connections/linkages among countries. Jelcodes:O33,F20