It has long been challenging to assess local residents’ quality of life, which is affected by numerous natural and man-made amenities. We develop a novel compensating differential model of quality-of-life rankings applicable to developing countries by introducing farm income into the household budget alongside housing and labour market differentials. We apply this model to Indonesia using detailed household data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey for two different time periods and combining estimates of agricultural, off-farm labour and housing market differentials. We find heterogeneous amenity impacts across the agricultural and off-farm labour sectors. We use our model to show how significant changes in rankings across time are consistent with contemporaneous internal migration patterns in Indonesia. These rankings yield important information for policymakers on expected changes in migration and can be used to help inform public investment.

The recent advancements in digital technologies have made remote work a core aspect of modern organizations, bringing opportunities and challenges for employee well-being. Drawing on the Job Demands-Resources model, the study investigates key stressors undermining employees’ well-being within digitalized settings. Fuzzy total interpretive structural modeling (F-TISM) and MICMAC analysis are employed to understand the hierarchical interrelationship and classify the stressors according to their driving and dependence power. The findings reveal low supervisor support, unrealistic supervisor expectations, digital overload, digital fatigue, and constant connectivity as critical drivers undermining remote workers’ well-being in these work practices. The proposed health impairment process of the JD-R model provides theoretical insights into how high job demands in digitalized settings undermine the well-being of remote workers, amid the growing emphasis on digital transition and flexible work models. The developed decision model provides actionable insights for practitioners and policymakers.

Awards are widely used as incentives. This paper situates awards in the broader incentives landscape and shows how the motivational value of awards can be understood through a framework that considers three sources of value: the tangible component of an award, the social signals it emits, and its self-signaling function. We identify and discuss several major characteristics of awards through the lenses of these three dimensions: the audience, scarcity, the giver’s status, and the selection process. Based on our framework, we integrate the awards literature published across economics, psychology, management, and sociology journals to elucidate what has been learned and offer a roadmap for future experimental research on awards and incentives.

The European Union (EU) is currently overhauling its pharmaceutical regulations, seeking to mature a single market for medicines as part of a ‘European Health Union’. We reflect on the interactions between regulations and markets in these reforms and investigate what this single market for medicines may mean in practice. We note how the proposed reforms aim to ensure equitable access to innovative treatments, yet at the same time, tie this access directly to regulatory exclusivities, limiting price competition. The reforms also do not seek full pricing transparency: prices will remain largely opaque and be set at the national levels rather than created through market exchange and open competition at the EU level. The envisioned single market for medicines thus remains a market that operates without direct reference to price − a situation not addressed head-on by the proposed reforms.

We examine the role of systematic mispricing and risk compensation in explaining cryptocurrency returns using instrumented principal component analysis. We demonstrate that both elements make meaningful contributions to the variation in returns through distinct economic mechanisms. Mispricing primarily operates through behavioral channels, capturing speculative demand and liquidity frictions. A pure-alpha strategy delivers large and significant Sharpe ratios, confirming the economic importance of mispricing. Risk compensation is driven by fundamental factors, including past performance and exposures to both cryptocurrency and equity market risk. Consistent with this equity exposure, we document increasing correlation between cryptocurrency and equity returns over time.

Compounded by 14 years of public welfare austerity, health equality presents a challenge that extends beyond healthcare in isolation because it also engages the more recondite politics of public health. Recent policy has addressed the issue by requiring National Health Service (NHS) bodies to integrate their services with those of local authorities. We consider how this adds significant new difficulty to the already complex process of NHS resource allocation. We argue that these duties require a new framework to gauge the values, evidence and criteria needed to set priorities for public health; not simply as a desirable objective, but a necessity in law. We consider current approaches to priority setting for medical treatment, and the responses already offered by current ethical frameworks. We then discuss the new ethical, political, and practical challenges posed by public health priority setting for health equality. Informed by this context, we engage an intersectional lens to explore a ‘non-ideal’ solution grounded in Professor Sir Michael Marmot’s framework to reduce health inequalities.

Both skill-biased and routine-biased technological changes risk disrupting employment in Australia, particularly through persistent effects after an economic downturn. Soft skills are considered valuable for employees to reduce unemployment risk from these technological biases, as these skills contribute to employment in skilled and non-routine jobs that are difficult to automate. We investigate how soft skills affected the risk of unemployment from the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) using the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) longitudinal dataset to understand whether these skills could reduce unemployment risk and similar negative employment outcomes for workers during economic disruptions, including the following years during the recovery. We find that the soft skill measures of social capital and low task repetitiveness are associated with lower unemployment, overskilling, and underutilisation risk. The association between social capital and underemployment also strengthened after the downturn. This did not begin immediately after the GFC but instead from 2013 onwards, after the end of the mining boom that had supported Australia during the GFC.

Environmental issues have an international dimension, with causes and consequences that extend beyond national borders—including the effects of the policies designed to address them. This paper investigates how different levels of environmental regulation influence the long-term spatial distribution of firms and households. The results suggest that only highly asymmetric regulations align with the Pollution Haven Hypothesis, causing firms to cluster in areas with lax environmental standards. In contrast, moderate differences in regulation tend to improve environmental quality across regions and can generate positive spillovers for countries adopting greener policies, such as attracting new residents and stimulating investment. While this lends support to the Porter Hypothesis, it does so through a less conventional mechanism. Rather than fostering innovation, stringent regulations enhances regional attractiveness by expanding the market size.

Understanding how households adapt to hurricanes is increasingly important as these events become more frequent and severe. This paper examines how past hurricane exposure influences current household preparedness, focusing specifically on the stockpiling of bottled water. Leveraging scanner data on bottled water purchases for households in the Southeastern United States, we employ a difference-in-differences event study framework to analyze how repeated hurricane experiences affect consumer behavior. Our results indicate that households exposed to hurricane warnings do not increase their preparedness in the subsequent hurricane season, and those experiencing a landfall event underprepare. These results suggest limited learning from past events.

We design an experiment to study the implications of introducing position uncertainty in a social dilemma where eight players decide to contribute to a public good sequentially. Contributions are significantly higher when players make sequential decisions to contribute or not, are uncertain about their position in the sequence, and observe a sample of their predecessors’ choices compared to the simultaneous-move game. Yet, contribution rates remain invariant to the number of agents sampled. Consequently, contributions don’t unravel even with position certainty, and there is no incremental benefit of introducing position uncertainty, contrary to the theoretical prediction. Furthermore, controlling for the sum of contributions observed, individuals contribute less the later in the sequence they are.

This paper uses a dynamic general equilibrium approach that takes into account the macroeconomic implications of the green transition and its consequences for public finances. It shows that when the government relies too heavily on expenditure-based measures, it threatens the sustainability of public debt, by increasing the probability of sovereign default, leading to higher interest rates on government bonds. This higher public default risk has potentially significant repercussions on investment financing conditions for the private sector, and increases the cost of the transition to a net-zero economy. On the other hand, carbon pricing policies make the transition more viable for public finances, at the expenses of similarly high economic costs, while remaining effective in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The welfare-maximizing optimal policy mix results in a balanced approach, with the public sector’s contribution to the total mitigation effort increasing gradually, ranging from 25% to 40% between 2030 and 2050.

We investigate the properties of the linear two-way fixed effects (FE) estimator for panel data when the underlying data generating process (DGP) does not have a linear parametric structure. The FE estimator is consistent for some pseudo-true value and we characterize the corresponding asymptotic distribution. We show that the rate of convergence is determined by the degree of model misspecification, and that the asymptotic distribution can be non-normal. We propose a novel autoregressive double adaptive wild (AdaWild) bootstrap procedure applicable for a large class of DGPs. Monte Carlo simulations show that it performs well for panels of small and moderate dimensions. We use data from U.S. manufacturing industries to illustrate the benefits of our procedure.

Emerging labour crises highlight the detrimental impact of overtime work cultures, such as the 996 working system, which violates the Labour Law of China and mirrors modern labour slavery. Simultaneously, despite China’s Three-Children Policy aimed at increasing national labour force growth, the national fertility rate has remained persistently low over the past decade. Workers require family time and financial security to plan for having children. Changes in family structures and fertility expectations, shaped by social pressures and the government’s advocacy, heavily impact labourers’ household financial behaviour. In response to a high-pressure overwork environment, labourers adopt conservative financial strategies to safeguard their families’ well-being and birth plans. This cautious approach often involves avoiding digital financial tools associated with riskier investments. This study examines the intersection of labour overwork, fertility, and the adoption of digital finance in shaping Chinese families’ investments. Drawing on the Theory of Planned Behaviour, this study analyses the panel data from 7,582 family observations in China between 2018 and 2020. The findings reveal that although digital finance positively influences household financial investment, the 996 work system acts as a moderator to shape this relationship negatively. Moreover, fertility in households further weakens this relationship. These findings provide critical theoretical insights into the dynamics of labour history by portraying a modern slavery picture of overworked labourers and their families in China: too exhausted and financially strained to have babies. It offers practical insights for policymakers aiming to improve labour policies, fertility rates, and household financial resilience.

Carbon labelling has been proposed as a strategy to encourage cafeteria diners to reduce meat consumption, choose lower carbon-emitting meals and contribute towards global climate change targets. However, field-experimental evidence for label effectiveness is largely limited to trials in universities with student samples. This study evaluated whether the beneficial effects of carbon labelling observed in universities could be replicated in the wider workplace population through a natural field experiment in four call-centre cafeterias in Northern England. Baseline vegetarian uptake in the call-centre cafeterias was significantly lower than in previous university trials (7% vs 15–66%), potentially reflecting a more meat-attached population. The introduction of labels resulted in a 1.5 percentage-point shift from meat to vegetarian meals compared to 1.7–4.6 percentage-point shifts observed in university trials. The increase was almost entirely driven by higher vegetarian sales during the first week of the intervention, with little to no effect observed in subsequent weeks. No statistically significant changes were found in average cafeteria emissions. The findings suggest that carbon labels are not a panacea, and where worksite cafeterias have ambitious emissions targets, labels will need to be implemented alongside other measures.

We contribute to the recent debate on the instability of the slope of the Phillips curve by offering insights from a flexible time-varying instrumental variable (IV) approach robust to weak instruments. Our robust approach focuses directly on the Phillips curve and allows general forms of instability, in contrast to current approaches based either on structural models with time-varying parameters or IV estimates in ad-hoc sub-samples. We find evidence of a weakening of the slope of the Phillips curve starting around 1980. We also offer novel insights on the Phillips curve during the recent pandemic: The flattening has reverted and the Phillips curve is back.

This study examines sea loans in the Portuguese Empire (1600–1800). Structured as contingent contracts, this kind of credit served as a risk-sharing agreement for financing transoceanic trade routes. Using notarial protocols and court records, the study examines how maritime regulations, international political relations, and information problems influenced the pricing of loan agreements. The study demonstrates that the introduction of the convoy system, which distinguished Portugal–Brazilian connections, coincided with a downward trend in sea loan rates, which converged with those of safer short-term lending instruments. In contrast, periods of war and free navigation increased uncertainty, making maritime insurance and sea loans complementary instruments for risk management.