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Japanese women doctors in the hospital system: Gender gap, professional burnout, and the impact of the COVID 19 pandemic.
Get PDFJapan’s national hospital system, which consists of a combination of private, national, prefectural and metropolitan hospitals, is the largest employers of the of the doctors. The article provides details on the women doctors’ discontinuous workforce participation in the Japanese hospital system, the dominance of part-time work patterns, and the nature of inflexibility in the work structures that disallow the maintenance of separate work and life spheres. This paper further discusses the effects of the COVID 19 pandemic on Japanese healthcare provision structures in hospitals and the extensive inhibitions that the pandemic placed on the careers of women doctors. The article details the nature of the chronic doctor shortage in Japan, and professional burnout incidences among the women doctors, and how the COVID 19 pandemic intensified these two factors.
The analysis herein raises the policy issues at government and workplace level. The article argues that the establishment of free and universal childcare facilities, and family caregiving mechanisms via government fiscal restructuring would assist in the dissolution of gendered work patterns
The international spillover effects of US Quality of Political Signals: A Global VAR approach
Get PDFWe investigate the influence of US quality of political signals (USQPOLS) on advanced and emerging markets using the Global Vector Autoregressive (GVAR) model that also accommodates the macroeconomic conditions of the shock recipient markets. We show an immediate negative impact on the equity markets with about 1.5% response to a 1 standard deviation shock due to the USQPOLS. However, we find impulse responses that transcend the immediate period for the high and low quality of political signals, albeit with contrasting evidence. Additional evidence involving Global Economic Policy Uncertainty (GEPU) suggests a direct and instantaneous effect on real equity prices. We are able to trace our evidence to the exchange rate channel and document important implications for policy and practice
Leisure and consumption in three dimensions
No full textThe separability rule is unable to distinguish between two commodities fulfilling the same need and those fulfilling different needs, for utilities displaying only diminishing marginal utility.
An S-shaped utility, bounded below and above, represents the stages of an individual’s fulfilment of a need, including deprivation (increasing marginal utility), subsistence, sufficiency (diminishing marginal utility) and satiation.
A utility function is created by adding two (S-shaped) normal cumulative distribution functions for consumption and leisure, each with a subsistence and an intensity-of-need parameter and satiation at infinity. Its indifference curve map features a straight-line indifference curve separating concave- from convex-to-the-origin indifference curves. The utility function is then maximised subject to a budget constraint to produce consumption demand and labour supply equations. These two functional forms are dependent on only two independent variables – the real wage rate and endowments of unearned consumption. Thus, both consumption demand and labour supply are 3-dimensional figures, which ideally would be presented as 3-D models.
The typical demand/supply and Engels diagrams are only two dimensional, representing a dependent variable as a function of only one of its two independent variables, from which the 3-D figure is very difficult to envisage. The aim of this paper is to present the third 2-D diagram for each dependent variable, presented as contours on a map of the real wage rate vs endowments. They highlight the instability of labour and consumption around the intersection of the ‘survival endowment’ and ‘equilibrium wage/price’ created by the straight-line indifference curve
Heterogeneous effects of socioeconomic status on postsecondary educational outcomes: Evidence from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002
Get PDFThere is extensive economic literature on the returns to higher education, finding substantial benefits. However, access to higher education in the United States is unequal, with students of lower socioeconomic status (SES) attending and completing college at lower rates. This paper studies the effects of SES on these two postsecondary educational outcomes, utilizing data on a cohort of students from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002). Employing both linear probability and probit maximum likelihood models, we analyze the ways SES influences college attendance and completion, while controlling for critical variables such as prior academic performance, high school quality, parental education, and demographic factors to isolate the effects to the financial resources and social capital associated with higher SES. Higher SES is associated with increased probabilities of both attending and completing college, though the marginal effects vary across the range of SES. The average partial effect of a unit increase in the SES variable (which ranges from -2.11 to 1.98) is a 7.3 percentage point increase in the probability of college attendance, and a 7.6 percentage point increase for bachelor’s degree completion. There is significant heterogeneity across the range of the independent variable of interest: changes in SES have the highest (lowest) impact on attendance for low (high)-SES students, while the effect on degree completion is strongest for high-SES students and weakest for low-SES students. These results are tested for robustness to model specifications restricted by gender and race. The findings of this study highlight the continuing inequality in college access and degree attainment, with implications for policymakers and universities
Numerical Simulation of Economic Inequality Widened by the Persistent Effects of Temporary Rent Income
Get PDFThere has been a deep-rooted view that economic rents are the main cause of high levels of economic inequality, but if economic rents are temporary, they may not be the cause. By employing numerical simulations, I show that even if economic rents are temporary, they can generate a high level of economic inequality that persists over a long period. Temporary economic rent incomes have two properties that can generate a high level of persistent economic inequality: (1) they follow a random walk process and (2) they gradually decrease. The numerical simulations employed use (1) a simulation method created on the basis of the concept of maximum degree of comfortability and (2) a newly created method that focuses only on the property of gradual decreases. The results show that these properties can increase economic inequality persistently and eventually generates extreme economic inequality. The origin of this temporary rent driven economic inequality is heterogeneity in the timings of obtaining randomly given temporary rent incomes among households. The simulation results strongly suggest that a government should intervene to restrain economic inequality from considerably widening even if rent incomes are only temporary
Employee age structure and firm innovation
Get PDFThe age-innovation relationship is studied at the firm level, using ten waves of Finnish innovation surveys linked to register data on firms and their employees. A negative age-innovation relationship exists for a wide range of average employee ages. This is robust to using employee age group shares instead of average age, using fixed effects and continuous treatment effects estimation, and using six different measures of innovative behavior. Employee age diversity is, however, not related to innovativeness
Marshall Meets Lewis: Efficiency of Sharecropping in the Presence of Surplus Labor
Get PDFOur paper revisits the Marshallian inefficiency but from a different perspective in the presence of surplus labor in the farm household. We investigate the (in)efficiency of sharecropping relative to owner cultivation and fixed-rent cultivation in terms of total factor productivity (TFP), which is another important departure from the existing literature. We use an unbalanced panel dataset at the farm household level consisting of 4,206 rice cultivating plots for two major rice cropping seasons in Bangladesh. Our main identification strategy is based on a controlled experiment in which we take two plots cultivated by each farm household—one owned and another rented-in, either under a sharecropping or a fixed-rent contract. After controlling for time-varying household fixed effects, season fixed effects, plot-level characteristics such as soil quality, land elevation and provision for irrigation, and shocks that might damage crops, we find that TFP is about 4.2 percent lower in sharecropping than in owner cultivation, while there is no difference between fixed-rent and owner cultivation. It is labor than capital and material inputs per unit of land that is less intensively used in sharecropping plots. The important result is that the difference in TFP and labor use between sharecropping and owner cultivation decreases with the endowment of (male) working-age members at the household and ceases to exist after a threshold (3 or more working-age male members). Explanations of the results are discussed
Sticky information and price controls: Evidence from a natural experiment
Get PDFWe test the predictions of the sticky information model using a survey dataset by comparing shoppers’ accuracy in recalling the prices of regulated and comparable unregulated products. Because regulated product prices are capped, they are sold more than comparable unregulated products, while their prices change less frequently and vary less across stores and between brands, than the prices of comparable unregulated products. Therefore, shoppers would be expected to recall the regulated product prices more accurately. However, we find that shoppers are better at recalling the prices of unregulated products, in line with the sticky information model which predicts that shoppers will be more attentive to prices that change more frequently
Foreign exchange intervention and exchange rate exposure: evidence from South Africa and Japan
Get PDFForeign exchange (forex) interventions by central banks have become increasingly frequent in emerging markets. While the effects of these interventions on exchange rate volatility are well-documented, their implications for broader country-level outcomes remain underexplored. This study posits that forex interventions should affect a country’s sensitivity to currency movements, particularly influencing its cash flows. It examines this hypothesis by analysing the impact of forex interventions on exchange rate exposure in South Africa, an emerging market, and Japan, a developed economy, using quarterly data from January 1996 to December 2023.The study utilizes the Kalman filter to estimate time-varying exchange rate exposure and applies quantile regression to explore the relationship between forex interventions and exchange rate exposure. The findings reveal that interventions generally have a negative effect on the absolute values of exchange rate exposure. Specifically, in South Africa, negative central bank interventions show a significant negative effect at the 50th quantile. In Japan, however, these interventions exhibit a positive effect from the 50th to the 90th quantile. Additionally, the study examines the effect of currency depreciation during periods of negative intervention but does not find statistically significant results. The research underscores the importance of credible communication from policymakers regarding the objectives of central bank interventions, as this could help firms better manage potential currency risks
Health Expenditure Benefit Incidence: WHO International Classification of Diseases-wise Analysis of India
Get PDF‘Fiscal policies and inequality’ is an elusive area of research. This study examines disease-wise
utilisation of publicly subsidised healthcare in India using benefit incidence analysis. Quite
contrary to the earlier studies on benefit incidence analysis based on aggregate public health
spending, our study attempts the benefit capture by mapping the classification of diseases
extracted from the unit record data of the latest 75th National Sample Survey health rounds
with the latest International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-11 of version 2024 produced by
World Health Organisation (WHO). Our broad findings based on the WHO_ICD disease-
specific benefit incidence analysis revealed that the public health subsidy appears to be pro-
poor or progressive in distribution for WHO_ICD categories, however with evident gender
differentials. The disaggregated benefit incidence analysis based on ICD also showed that there
is no “elite capture” in the public health financing in India. This inference has policy
implications for strengthening the role of fiscal policy in further ensuing equality and social
justice in access and utilisation of health care in India