Recent evaluations of the impact of Turkish healthcare reforms on the efficiency of public hospitals suffer from simultaneous structural changes in the healthcare sector as well as from lack of data on some of the key ingredients of the reform. In this note, we analyze the major obstacles in a fair evaluation of the efficiency of public hospitals taking Sulku(2011)’s data envelopment analysis a...

This paper proposes a new unit root test in the context of a random autoregressive coefficient panel data model, in which the null of a unit root corresponds to the joint restriction that the autoregressive coefficient has unit mean and zero variance. The asymptotic distribution of the test statistic is derived and simulation results are provided to suggest that it performs very well in small s...

This study examines the effect of a tightening US air quality standard for lead in 2009 on relocation battery recycling to Mexico and infant health Mexico. In United States, airborne dropped sharply near affected plants, most which were battery-recycling plants. Exports used batteries rose markedly. Mexico, production increased at plants relative comparable industries, birth outcomes deteriorat...

This study identifies the causal effect of pension generosity on women’s fertility behavior. It capitalizes Brazil’s expansion system to rural workers, whose wealth subsequently more than tripled. Difference-in-difference, instrumental variable, and event methods show that reform reduces propensity childbearing women fertile age by 8 percent in short run. Completed declines 1.3 children within ...

Earnings are riskier and more unequal for households born in the 1960s 1980s than those 1940s. Despite improvements financial conditions, younger generations less likely to be living their own homes older at same age. By using a life-cycle model with housing portfolio choice that includes flexible earnings risk aggregate asset price risk, I show changes dynamics account large part of reduction ...

This paper examines whether the average level of human capital in a region affects the earnings of an individual residing in that region in a manner that is external to the individual’s own human capital. I find little evidence of an external effect of human capital, which suggests that human capital spillovers of the form postulated by the new growth literature are unlikely to matter much in p...

In this paper, I derive an expression for the asymptotic bias in the OLS estimator of the partial effect of a regressor on the dependent variable when there is reverse causality and all variables in the model are covariance stationary. I show that the sign of the asymptotic bias depends only on the signs of the bi-directional causal effects. JEL Codes: C10, C30.

We establish the validity of subsampling confidence intervals for the mean of a dependent series with heavy-tailed marginal distributions. Using point process theory, we study both linear and nonlinear GARCH-like time series models. We propose a data-dependent method for the optimal block size selection and investigate its performance by means of a simulation study. JEL CLASSIFICATION NOS: C10,...

We take a fresh look at Theil’s BLUS residuals and ask why they have gone out of fashion. All our simulation experiments indicate that tests based on BLUS residuals have higher power than those based on the more popular recursive residuals, even in those cases (structural breaks) where intuition would favour the recursive residuals. JEL Classification: B23; C10; C13; C20

Peninsular Malaysia has gone through fast development during recent decades resulting in the release of large amounts of petroleum and its products into the environment. Aliphatic hydrocarbons are one of the major components of petroleum. Surface sediment samples were collected from five rivers along the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia and analyzed for aliphatic hydrocarbons. The total concen...