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This study models local and cross-city transmissions of the novel coronavirus in China between January 19 and February 29, 2020. We examine the role of various socioeconomic mediating factors, including public health measures that encourage social distancing in local communities. Weather characteristics 2 weeks prior are used as instrumental variables for causal inference. Stringent quarantines, city lockdowns, and local public health measures imposed in late January significantly decreased the virus transmission rate. The virus spread was contained by the middle of February. Population outflow from the outbreak source region posed a higher risk to the destination regions than other factors, including geographic proximity and similarity in economic conditions. We quantify the effects of different public health measures in reducing the number of infections through counterfactual analyses. Over 1.4 million infections and 56,000 deaths may have been avoided as a result of the national and provincial public health measures imposed in late January in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the first systematic attempt to investigate the factors affecting time persistence in individual remittance behaviour. By using micro-level longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we apply a wide variety of discrete choice static and dynamic panel models to analyse the decision to remit. Our results provide evidence in favour of an intertemporal strategy. The persistence in remittance decisions is significantly influenced by 'true state dependence': migrants that remitted in the previous year have a significantly higher propensity to remit this year as well. We also show that remittance time patterns depend on both observable and unobservable individual socioeconomic characteristics, and in particular, that the household's transnational composition plays an important role in determining remittance behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides strong evidence that adult mortality has a negative impact on children educational outcomes, both over the short and the long run, in rural Madagascar. The underlying longitudinal data and the difference-in-differences strategy used overcome most of the previous cross-sectional study limitations, such as failure to control for child and household pre-death characteristics and unobserved heterogeneity. This paper also pays special attention to the heterogeneity, robustness, and long-run persistence of effects. Results show that orphans are on average 10 pp less likely to attend school than their nonorphaned counterparts, this effect being even more pronounced for girls and young children from poorer households. Results on adults further show that those orphaned during childhood eventually completed less education. These findings suggest that not only do households suffering unexpected shocks resort to schooling adjustments as an immediate risk-coping strategy, but also that adversity has long-lasting effects on human capital accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, a number of welfare state economies, including Norway, have experienced substantial increases in sickness absence. Using longitudinal individual register data for virtually all Norwegian employees, we examine the remarkable rise since the early 1990s, with emphasis on disentangling the roles of cohort, age, and time. We show that individual age-adjusted absence propensities have risen even more than aggregate absence rates from 1993 to 2005, which casts doubt on the popular hypotheses that the rise was due to the inclusion into the workforce of young or marginal workers with weaker work-norms or poorer health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite similar levels of per capita income, education and technology, the development of labour income shares in OECD countries has displayed different patterns since 1960. The paper examines the role of demography in this regard. We first use a standard overlapping generations model to derive the mechanisms by which demographic change can affect the labour share. It turns out that demographic change can affect the labour share either by altering the domestic capital intensity, by causing factor-biased technological change or in a small open economy framework by creating a gap between domestic savings and investments. The latter affects the country's investments abroad and in return its net foreign asset income which directly leads to changes in the labour share. Empirical estimations based on these insights, provide evidence that an increases in the expected retirement durations and old-age dependency ratios as well as declines in labour force growth rates have indeed been major forces behind the decline in labour shares that took place in many countries. These effects tend to be larger in open economies and pension reforms towards a funded pension system seem to have accelerated the effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More educated parents are observed to have better educated children. However, previous research has found conflicting results regarding the role of fathers and mothers: in most cases, a strong positive paternal effect was found with a negligible maternal effect; in fewer cases, opposite results were found. In this paper, I use a sample of Norwegian twins to evaluate the impact of sample size and sample selection on the estimates' robustness: results concerning the effect of mother's education are very sensitive to the sample size, while the selection of the sample seems to be a key to reconciling previous results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses register-based panel data to examine over-education amongst immigrants in Denmark. Foreign-educated immigrants are found to be more prone to over-education than both native Danes and immigrants educated in Denmark. Labour market experience reduces this risk, whereas periods of unemployment make a person more likely to accept a job for which he is over-qualified. Over-educated workers earn slightly more than their adequately matched colleagues, but less than if they had been appropriately matched in a higher level job. Foreign-educated immigrants gain the least from over-education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how Japanese wives react to their husbands’ involuntary job loss and tests the existence of complementarity of a wife’s labor supply to her husband’s. Utilizing panel data on Japanese households from 1993 to 2004, we found that wives’ labor supply is stimulated when husbands suffer involuntary job loss. The detailed statistics show that not only do working wives raise their labor hours but also nonworking wives begin to participate in the labor market. The added worker effect is evident during the period of job insecurity in Japan following the mid-1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the impact on schooling outcomes of growing up in a non-intact family in Germany. We find that this experience is associated with worse outcomes according to estimates from models that do not control for possible correlations between common unobserved determinants of family structure and educational performance. Evidence of adverse effects emerges also when endogeneity is accounted for. In such cases, however, the point estimates are typically smaller, and their confidence intervals are large enough to include zero, particularly for individuals who grew up in Western Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anecdotal evidence has suggested increased fertility rates resulting from catastrophic events in an area. In this paper, we measure this fertility effect using storm advisory data and fertility data for the Atlantic and Gulf-coast counties of the USA. We find that low-severity storm advisories are associated with a positive and significant fertility effect and that high-severity advisories have a significant negative fertility effect. As the type of advisory goes from least severe to most severe, the fertility effect of the specific advisory type decreases monotonically from positive to negative. We also find some other interesting demographic effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the prevalence and extent of altruism by examining the relationship between parents’ and their adult children’s subjective well-being in a data set extracted from the German Socio-Economic Panel. To segregate the share of parents with altruistic preferences from those who are selfish, we estimate a finite mixture regression model. We control for various sources of potential bias by taking advantage of the data’s panel structure. To validate our modeling approach, we show that predicted altruists indeed make higher average transfer payments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We build a model of migration that considers both observable and unobservable individual characteristics and their returns across locations. We focus on the interprovincial migration patterns of Canadian physicians, in part, because physicians are paid on a fee-for-service basis. Because fees are exogenous, we can estimate a mixed conditional-logit model to determine the effects of individual- and destination-specific characteristics (particularly earnings differentials) on physician location decisions. We find, among other things, that individuals with greater earnings potential based on unobservables are more likely to migrate to provinces where the returns to such unobservables are greater. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In developed countries, immigrants are more likely to be nonemployed and self-employed compared to natives. Based on register data of male immigrants in Denmark, we performed a detailed investigation of the immigrant–native difference in transition patterns across labor market states. We find that a high proportion of immigrants from non-Western countries tend to be marginalized relative to natives, and they tend to use self-employment to escape marginalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom suggests that the generous provision of UI in Europe can account for the low regional mobility rates. Emphasizing the disincentive effect, this hypothesis ignores that UI might also have a positive effect by relaxing liquidity constraints in the presence of mobility and search costs. This paper investigates empirically the effect of UI on geographic labour mobility for five European countries. Overall, the findings suggest that receiving benefits is not associated with lower mobility, and they indicate that the effects might vary depending on the institutional characteristics and the incentive structure of the UI system of each country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]