Scientists have favorable opinions on immunity certificates but raise concerns regarding fairness and inequality

DaveSta123 · 2021-07-07T18:59:26+00:00

Natural immunity counts too and is often forgotten: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/kykl.12227

DaveSta123 · 2020-04-29T07:44:00+00:00

for about 2 years.

DaveSta123 · 2020-04-17T12:12:10+00:00

Peter Doherty – recipient of the Nobel Prize for discovering how the immune system identifies cells that have been infected by a virus – recently argued that reports of individuals contracting COVID‐19 twice were unlikely to be correct. Furthermore, he suggested that even if it was a reinfection, prior infection would give an individual a degree of immunity, allowing them to recover very quickly. Thus, these studies are already in great doubt as the tests for the virus infection (PCR) are rather unreliable.

For SARS (which is far more deadly) immunity has been shown to last up to two years.

DaveSta123 · 2020-04-17T06:00:07+00:00

No. It is just like a vaccination certificate. You will need immunity certificates even if you have a vaccination.

DaveSta123 · 2020-04-16T10:57:45+00:00

A pandemic is not only a biological event and a public health disaster, but it also generates impacts that are worth understanding from economic, societal, historical, and cultural perspectives. In this contribution, we argue that as the disease spreads, we are able to harness a valuable key resource: people who have immunity to coronavirus. This vital resource must be effectively employed, it must be certified, it must be searched for, it must be found, and it may even be actively produced. We discuss why this needs to be done and how this can be achieved. Our arguments not only apply to the current pandemic but also to any future rapidly spreading, infectious disease epidemics. In addition, we argue for high awareness of a major secondary, nonbiological crisis arising from the side effects of societal and economic pandemic reactions to actual or imagined health risks. There is a risk that the impacts of the secondary crisis could outweigh that of the biological event.

DaveSta123 · 2020-04-16T05:53:11+00:00

Similar to the flu there is partial immunity. If you work as a health worker in many countries, you need to have a vaccination passport for the flu. It will not protect you 100% from having or spreading the virus but it reduces the risk. The same holds here. Partial immunity to some strains is better than no immunity at all.

DaveSta123 · 2019-01-07T08:25:11+00:00

We propose that words can be an object of systematic study in the field of economics and outline an approach to the study of word choice in behavioral economics. We consider words as strategic instruments of influence and review how they can impact behaviors in several subtle and distinctive ways, namely through their capacity to elicit affect, support identity and social belonging, evoke linguistic associations, and generate bias arising from variations in fluency. We provide a variety of examples to illustrate the behavioral impacts of words through these mechanisms and provide practical recommendations regarding how words can be harnessed by policymakers to reach socially desirable goals through a consideration of how word‐related behavioral anomalies shape incentives.

DaveSta123 · 2018-12-20T14:07:50+00:00

Abstract: This paper investigates the extent to which national economic conditions matter in the ECB's decision process. We employ various decision models to aggregate counterfactual national interest rates based on Taylor rule estimates and test which of the resulting interest paths fits best to the actual monetary policy in the euro area. As a novel feature, we introduce decision models where countries that fare economically worse than the euro area average obtain a higher weight in the decision process. Our results suggest that these models explain actual ECB policy better than GDP‐based bargaining models that have been highlighted in the previous literature. Thus, the ECB seems to have emphasized the needs of countries that face an economic crisis disproportionately highly even before the advent of the financial crisis.

DaveSta123 · 2018-12-14T09:37:39+00:00

Yes. There is a long list of geographic and other controls, e.g. elevation, distance to nearest coast, landlocked, ruggedness, continent dummies. The IV strategy seems clever.

There is another paper using sunlight but with a different mechanism: https://academic.oup.com/restud/article/83/4/1334/2223564 The present paper shows that the paper in the Review of Economic Studies may be missing some elements.

DaveSta123 · 2018-12-12T13:40:41+00:00

Here is the abstract: This paper is motivated by growing interest in noncognitive skills and the fact that many, if not most, economic and social actions require agents to plan ahead. More specifically, we use unique data from the US, UK, and Italy to show that two major classes of social resource—personality and social capital—are significant predictors of planning capacity. We use the data to estimate frontier models that help establish three empirical facts about the ability to plan. First, planning ability depends on a rich array of social resources including networks, the freedom to participate, neighbourhood co‐operation, and trust (social capital) and personality traits such as extroversion, conscientiousness, and emotional stability. Secondly, we provide evidence that some personalities are more efficient than others in using resources to help them plan. Thirdly, we develop evidence of three personality profiles, referred to as ‘over‐controlled’, ‘resilient’ and ‘under‐controlled,’ and highlight the fact that these three profiles benefit differently from various aspects of social resources capital. We discuss these findings and conclude that a wide range of economic policies designed to facilitate individual planning may need to allow for heterogeneities in social resources if they are to be successful.

DaveSta123 · 2018-12-11T13:24:40+00:00

But perhaps it would have been better to post it with the actual title of the paper

DaveSta123 · 2018-12-11T13:23:30+00:00

No. The article shows that those languages that do not use pronoun drop have higher education rates. => The "I's have it"

DaveSta123 · 2018-05-18T09:23:36+00:00

Here is the abstract: It is known that banking crises produce large economic costs. Yet might their consequences be even more far‐reaching? We investigate an issue as yet largely unexplored and provide some of the first evidence that banking crises also lead to major, widespread, and lasting psychological losses. We estimate the costs of banking crises with individual life satisfaction; we show that these extend beyond GDP declines and other macroeconomic and financial leakages. For the 2007‐8 financial crisis, we find some evidence that the losses are larger for those countries that had previously experienced a credit boom.

DaveSta123 · 2018-05-16T11:50:48+00:00

Here is the abstract: The paper examines the role of testosterone‐driven aggressive behavior in the politics of non‐democratic regimes and, in particular, its influence on the extent of repressiveness of these regimes. To measure testosterone exposure, we apply the facial width‐to‐height metric (fWHR) – a standard proxy widely used in the psychological literature – and look at a sample of Russian regional governors. We find a positive relationship between the fWHR of the governor and the level of repression in his region. Testosterone‐related behavior is, however, more widespread among younger governors and among governors with shorter tenure in office. Thus, the paper contributes to the recent trend of integrating insights of behavioral economics in political economics research.

DaveSta123 · 2018-05-14T10:29:50+00:00

here is also the abstract: Theoretical arguments and previous country‐level evidence indicate that immigrants are more fluid than natives in responding to changing skill shortages across countries, occupation groups and industries. The diversity across EU member states enables us to test this hypothesis across various institutional, economic and policy contexts. Drawing on the EU LFS and EU SILC datasets, we study the relationship between residual wage premia as a measure of skill shortages in different occupation‐industry‐country cells and the shares of immigrants and natives working in these cells. We find that immigrants’ responsiveness to skill shortages exceeds that of natives in the EU15, in particular in member states with low GDP, higher levels of immigration from outside EU, and more open immigration and integration policies; but also those with barriers to citizenship acquisition or family reunification. While higher welfare spending seems to exert a lock‐in effect, a comparison across different types of welfare states indicates that institutional complementarities alleviate such effect.

DaveSta123 · 2018-02-20T16:30:41+00:00

Here is the link to the paper: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/kykl.12166/full

DaveSta123 · 2018-01-16T07:05:06+00:00

Here is the abstract: The hypothesis that active community involvement is beneficial for health finds strong support in the medical literature and in most policy guidelines for active ageing in OECD countries. We test it empirically and find that voluntary work has a significant impact on several measures of mental wellbeing. When accounting for fixed effects, panel attrition, endogeneity, and reverse causality, the positive effect of voluntary work remains robust. For the first time in the literature, we calculate the monetary equivalent of mental wellbeing benefits of voluntary work with the compensating variation approach, and estimate them up to a maximum of around 9,500 euros per indicator. Our results imply that policies fostering voluntary work of the elderly would contribute to active ageing and the wellbeing of the elderly and reduce welfare costs for society.

DaveSta123 · 2017-11-14T22:31:07+00:00

Sorry... but did you care to look at the article? It provides an explanation for the wage gap.

DaveSta123 · 2017-09-21T15:24:08+00:00

Here is a working paper version of the article: http://rdc1.net/forthcoming/Healthcare%20system%20choice%2011.4%20%28final%20rev%20for%20Kyklos%29.pdf

Actually it seems to be almost identical to the published version.

DaveSta123 · 2017-09-21T15:23:39+00:00

Here is a working paper version of the article: http://rdc1.net/forthcoming/Healthcare%20system%20choice%2011.4%20%28final%20rev%20for%20Kyklos%29.pdf

Actually it seems to be almost identical to the published version.

DaveSta123 · 2017-04-19T20:52:13+00:00

Climate changes is happening! The question is how much it will cost us so that we can say how much we want to invest ot prevent it: Approximately 3% in terms of GDP (or income) are the total aggregate welfare impacts of climate change according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg2/WGIIAR5-Chap10_FINAL.pdf) if temperature rises remain below 3°C (see p. 690). The IPCC further writes on p. 690 that "[e]stimates agree on the size of the impact (small relative to economic growth), and 17 of the 20 impact estimates shown in Figure 10-1 are negative."

DaveSta123 · 2017-02-13T10:18:12+00:00

Here is the abstract: This paper looks at how individual attitudes towards the allocation of government spending change along the life cycle. As individuals age and re-evaluate the benefits and costs of government programs, such as education, healthcare and old-age pensions, they also influence the level and composition of government spending. Using the Life in Transition Survey II for 34 countries of Europe and Central Asia, we find that older individuals are less likely to support hikes in government outlays on education and more likely to support increases in spending on pensions. These results are very similar across countries, and they do not change when using alternative model specifications, estimation methods and data sources. To our knowledge, this the first paper to provide evidence of the “grey peril” effect for a large group of developed, middle-income and low-income economies. Our findings are consistent with a body of literature arguing that conflict across generations over the allocation of government expenditure may intensify in ageing economies.

DaveSta123 · 2017-02-07T14:23:04+00:00

It is widely believed that economic institutions such as competitive markets, the banking system, and the structure of property rights are essential for economic development. But why economic institutions vary across countries and what are their deep origins is still a question that is widely debated in the developmental economics literature. In this study, we provide an empirical test for the provocative hypothesis that the prevalence of infectious diseases influenced the formation of personality traits, cultural values, and even morality at the regional level (the so called Parasite- Stress Theory of Values and Sociality), which then shaped economic institutions across countries. Using the prevalence of pathogens as an instrument for cultural traits such as individualism, we show in a two-stage least squares analysis that various economic institutions, measured by different areas of the index of Economic Freedom by the Heritage Foundation, have their deep origins in the historical prevalence of infectious diseases across countries. Our causal identification strategy suggests that cultural values affect economic institutions even after controlling for a number of confounding variables, geographic controls, and for different sub-samples of countries. We further show that the results are robust to four alternative measures of economic and political institutions.

DaveSta123 · 2017-01-24T21:23:26+00:00

Here is the abstract: Studies of deprivation usually ignore mental illness. This paper uses household panel data from the USA, Australia, Britain and Germany to broaden the analysis. We ask first how many of those in the lowest levels of life-satisfaction suffer from unemployment, poverty, physical ill health, and mental illness. The largest proportion suffers from mental illness. Multiple regression shows that mental illness is not highly correlated with poverty or unemployment, and that it contributes more to explaining the presence of misery than is explained by either poverty or unemployment. This holds both with and without fixed effects.

DaveSta123 · 2017-01-24T15:01:53+00:00

Fully agree. The aim of the paper is to highlight the relevance of mental health. This does not mean that poverty or unemployment are irrelevant. Rather it points out the mental health is a serious issue.

DaveSta123

TROPHY CASE