1,721,140 research outputs found
La dinamica delle attività agroindustriali nelle fluttuazioni del sistema economico italiano
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Body weight and socio-economic determinants: quantile estimations from the British Household Panel Survey
Full text linkThis work examines the socio-economic determinants of body weight in the United Kingdom by means of two recent waves from the British Household Panel Survey. While the patterns of overweight and obesity have drawn economists’ interest in recent years, our main contribution is to examine the weight determinants on the conditional distribution of body weight across individuals. Are there differing socio-economic causes for gaining weight in highly overweight people compared with underweight ones? For instance, we examine whether reduction in smoking affects differently individuals located among the most and the least of the weight distributions. Our results for significant determinants support some findings in the literature, but also point to new conclusions. In many cases, quantile regression estimates are quite different from OLS regressions ones. Among obese people, our results reveal that they are less so as males do not spend extra-time at work or females increases physical activities. Furthermore, smoking cessation may lead to moderate effects on weight increases only for underweight and normalweight subjects but they are not significant for people affected by higher obesity prevalence rates
Social Protection and Food Security in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Evaluation of Cash Transfer Programmes
No full textThis paper evaluates the eects of cash transfer (CT) programmes introduced during the 1990s and
2000s on food security in a sample of sub-Saharan African countries. We apply the synthetic control
method to compare changes in the post-intervention food insecurity trajectories of economies
aected by CT programmes relative to their unaected counterparts. The results suggest that CT
programmes exert dierential eects on the prevalence of undernourishment. Although the estimates
in the upper-middle income countries in our sample show mixed eects for the application of
CT programmes on food insecurity, these eects appear to be important in low-income and fragile
sub-Saharan countries. Robustness analysis via placebo experiments conrms the soundness of our
results, and their implications for policymakers are discussed
How much and why does the mum matter? Mechanisms explaining the intergenerational transmission of smoking
No full textOffspring whose mother smokes during pregnancy have higher risk of smoking themselves. In this study, epigenetics, antisocial behaviours, and social learning were investigated as potential mechanisms of mother-to-child transmission of smoking among a population sample drawn from the Birth Cohort Study 1970. Findings on daughters showed that the direct epigenetic hypothesis was mediated by social learning mechanisms, suggesting that exposure to maternal smoking across childhood and adolescence strongly explained why the smoking habits of mother and daughter correlate. However, prenatal smoking effects on sons were only partially explained by observational learning of mother smoking habits. Our estimates provided evidence concerning the potential role also played by the child's persistent antisocial behaviours. These results were confirmed after controlling for early life circumstances and current socioeconomic conditions. Policy implications of the results are discussed
Can public spending boost private consumption?
Full text linkOne of the most debated issues in modern macroeconomics relates to the behaviour of private consumption in response to an increase in government spending. Recent empirical studies have found a positive relationship between these two macroeconomic fundamentals. However, such a finding cannot be easily reconciled with simple real business cycle models. In this paper, we develop and estimate a new Keynesian model that is able to predict a rise in consumption in response to an increase in productive public spending. We show the two key elements that lead to a statistically significant positive reaction of private consumption, thereby creating consumption present-value multipliers, are: (i) a productive component in public spending and (ii) nominal rigidities. Our key results remain valid to various robustness checks that include a sub-sample analysis examining the pre-Great Recession period and a sensitivity analysis on the structural, fiscal and monetary policy parameters of the model
Further Evidence on the Effect of Clean Indoor Air Laws on Smoking: The Italian Case
No full textThe evidence about the effectiveness of anti-smoking legislation on smoking behavior is mixed. We provide new estimates for Italy using unexplored data drawn from the Household Budget Survey. We show that the smoking ban introduced in 2005 has a significant effect on smoking incidence. According to our baseline specification, the ban reduces household-based smoking prevalence by 1.3 percentage points. Results are robust to the various empirical strategies proposed in the literature, even accounting for seasonality
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