scholarly journals Trade-off between job losses and the spread of COVID-19 in Japan

Author(s):  
Kisho Hoshi ◽  
Hiroyuki Kasahara ◽  
Ryo Makioka ◽  
Michio Suzuki ◽  
Satoshi Tanaka

AbstractThis paper quantitatively analyzes the trade-off between job losses and the spread of COVID-19 in Japan. We derive an empirical specification from the social planner’s resource constraint under the susceptible, infected, recovered, and deaths (SIRD) model and estimate how job losses and the case growth rate are related to people’s mobility using the Japanese prefecture-level panel data on confirmed cases, involuntary job losses, people’s mobility, and teleworkability. Our findings are summarized as follows. First, we find that a decrease in mobility driven by containment policies is associated with an increase in involuntary job separations, but the high teleworkability mitigates the negative effect of decreased mobility on job losses. Second, estimating how the case growth is related to people’s mobility and past cases, we find that the case growth rate is positively related to an increase in people’s mobility but negatively associated with past confirmed cases. Third, using these estimates, we provide a quantitative analysis of the trade-off between job losses and the number of confirmed cases. Taking Tokyo in July 2020 as a benchmark, we find that the cost of saving 1 job per month is 2.3 more confirmed cases per month in the short run of 1 month. When we consider a trade-off for 3 months from July to September of 2020, protecting 1 job per month requires 6.6 more confirmed cases per month. Therefore, the trade-off becomes worse substantially in the longer run of 3 months, reflecting the exponential case growth when the people’s mobility is high.

2021 ◽  
pp. 089976402199166
Author(s):  
Hans-Peter Y. Qvist

The nature of the relationship between the time people spend on paid work and volunteering remains debated in the social sciences. Time constraint theory suggests a negative relationship because people can allocate only as much time to volunteering as their work responsibilities permit. However, social integration theory suggests a more complex inverse U-shaped relationship because paid work not only limits people’s free time but also plays a key role in their social integration. Departing from these competing theories, this study uses two-wave panel data from Denmark to examine the relationship between hours of paid work and volunteering. In support of time constraint theory, the results suggest that hours of paid work have a significant negative effect on the total number of hours that people spend volunteering, not mainly because paid work hours affect people’s propensity to volunteer but because they affect the number of hours that volunteers contribute.


Author(s):  
Jose Maria Da Rocha ◽  
Javier García-Cutrín ◽  
Maria-Jose Gutiérrez ◽  
Raul Prellezo ◽  
Eduardo Sanchez

AbstractIntegrated economic models have become popular for assessing climate change. In this paper we show how these methods can be used to assess the impact of a discard ban in a fishery. We state that a discard ban can be understood as a confiscatory tax equivalent to a value-added tax. Under this framework, we show that a discard ban improves the sustainability of the fishery in the short run and increases economic welfare in the long run. In particular, we show that consumption, capital and wages show an initial decrease just after the implementation of the discard ban then recover after some periods to reach their steady-sate values, which are 16–20% higher than the initial values, depending on the valuation of the landed discards. The discard ban also improves biological variables, increasing landings by 14% and reducing discards by 29% on the initial figures. These patterns highlight the two channels through which discard bans affect a fishery: the tax channel, which shows that the confiscation of landed discards reduces the incentive to invest in the fishery; and the productivity channel, which increases the abundance of the stock. Thus, during the first few years after the implementation of a discard ban, the negative effect from the tax channel dominates the positive effect from the productivity channel, because the stock needs time to recover. Once stock abundance improves, the productivity channel dominates the tax channel and the economic variables rise above their initial levels. Our results also show that a landed discards valorisation policy is optimal from the social welfare point of view provided that incentives to increase discards are not created.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander M. Gelber ◽  
Damon Jones ◽  
Daniel W. Sacks

We introduce a method for estimating the cost of adjusting earnings, as well as the earnings elasticity with respect to the net-of-tax share. Our method uses information on bunching in the earnings distribution at convex budget set kinks before and after policy-induced changes in the magnitude of the kinks: the larger is the adjustment cost, the smaller is the absolute change in bunching from before to after the policy change. In the context of the Social Security Earnings Test, our results demonstrate that the short-run impact of changes in the effective marginal tax rate can be substantially attenuated. (JEL H24, H31, H55, J22, J31)


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 188
Author(s):  
Yousef Abdel Latif Abdel Jawad ◽  
Issam Ayyash

The study aimed to investigate the factors that affect the solvency of the insurance companies in Palestine and to highlight the nature and strength of the relationship between liquidity, investment, leverage, claims and the solvency of the insurance companies in Palestine.To achieve the objectives of the study, the descriptive and quantitative analysis methods were used in the study. Based on the data of the financial statements of seven insurance companies (out of 9 companies) and by using regression of fixed effects of panel data for 2010-2017, the study found that the claims have a positive effect on the financial solvency and leverage has a negative effect on the solvency of insurance companies in Palestine, while investment and liquidity have an insignificant effect on financial solvency.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurore Picot ◽  
Thibaud Monnin ◽  
Nicolas Loeuille

AbstractAgriculture - cultivation of plants, algae, fungi and animal herding - is found in numerous taxa such as humans, but also ants, beetles, fishes and even bacteria. Such niche construction behaviours have evolved independently from hunter/predation behaviours, though many species remain primarily predators. We here investigate when such a transition from predation/hunter behaviour to agriculture is favoured. In these systems where a consumer has a positive effect on its resource, we can expect an allocative cost of agriculture for the farmer, hence modifying the selective pressures acting upon it. The management of the resource may have a negative effect on its consumption: for instance, when the consumer defends the resource against other predators (exploitation cost). In other situations, the cost may occur on the foraging of alternative resources, for instance if the consumer spends more time nearby the farmed resource (opportunity cost). Here, we develop a simple three-species model constituted by a farmer species that consumes two resource species, one of them receiving an additional positive effect from the consumer. We consider two trade-off scenarios based on how the cost of agriculture is implemented, either as an exploitation cost or as an opportunity cost. We use an adaptive dynamics approach to study the conditions for the evolution of the investment into agriculture and specialization on the two resources, and consequences on the ecological dynamics of the community. Eco-evolutionary dynamics generate a feedback between the evolution of agriculture and specialization on the helped resource, that can lead to varying selected intensity of agriculture, from generalist strategies with no agriculture, to farmer phenotypes that are entirely specialized on the farmed resource, with possible coexistence between those two extreme strategies.


Author(s):  
Mario Menegatti

AbstractThis work examines the effects of different kinds of subsidies on risk prevention from a theoretical standpoint. We show that both a subsidy on the cost of prevention activities and a subsidy on wealth have ambiguous effects on the level of present contemporaneous prevention. Similar kinds of subsidies have however increasing effects on the level of advance prevention and, under plausible assumptions, on future levels of contemporaneous prevention. We also show that social security subsidies may have decreasing effects on prevention activities while a kind of reverse social security has an increasing effects on them. This indicates that there is a trade-off between the social security aim of mitigating the negative consequences of bad events and the prevention aim of incentivizing choices which reduce the probability that these bad events occur.


2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ezequiel Gonzalez-Ocantos ◽  
Chad Kiewiet de Jonge ◽  
Carlos Meléndez ◽  
David Nickerson ◽  
Javier Osorio

How do parties target intimidation and vote-buying during elections? Parties prefer the use of carrots over sticks because they are in the business of getting voters to like them and expect higher legitimacy costs if observers expose intimidation. However, their brokers sometimes choose intimidation because it is cheaper and possibly more effective than vote-buying. Specifically, we contend that brokers use intimidation when the cost of buying votes is prohibitively high; in interactions with voters among whom the commitment problem inherent to clientelistic transactions is difficult to overcome; and in contexts where the risk of being denounced for violence is lower. We probe our hypotheses about the different profile of voters targeted with vote-buying and intimidation using two list experiments included in an original survey conducted during the 2011 Guatemalan general elections. The list experiments were designed to overcome the social desirability bias associated with direct questions about illegal or stigmatized behaviors. Our quantitative analysis is supplemented by interviews with politicians from various parties. The analysis largely confirms our expectations about the diametrically opposed logics of vote-buying and intimidation targeting, and illuminates how both are key components of politics in a country with weak parties and high levels of violence.


2015 ◽  
Vol 112 (49) ◽  
pp. 15113-15118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris R. Reid ◽  
Matthew J. Lutz ◽  
Scott Powell ◽  
Albert B. Kao ◽  
Iain D. Couzin ◽  
...  

The ability of individual animals to create functional structures by joining together is rare and confined to the social insects. Army ants (Eciton) form collective assemblages out of their own bodies to perform a variety of functions that benefit the entire colony. Here we examine ‟bridges” of linked individuals that are constructed to span gaps in the colony’s foraging trail. How these living structures adjust themselves to varied and changing conditions remains poorly understood. Our field experiments show that the ants continuously modify their bridges, such that these structures lengthen, widen, and change position in response to traffic levels and environmental geometry. Ants initiate bridges where their path deviates from their incoming direction and move the bridges over time to create shortcuts over large gaps. The final position of the structure depended on the intensity of the traffic and the extent of path deviation and was influenced by a cost–benefit trade-off at the colony level, where the benefit of increased foraging trail efficiency was balanced by the cost of removing workers from the foraging pool to form the structure. To examine this trade-off, we quantified the geometric relationship between costs and benefits revealed by our experiments. We then constructed a model to determine the bridge location that maximized foraging rate, which qualitatively matched the observed movement of bridges. Our results highlight how animal self-assemblages can be dynamically modified in response to a group-level cost–benefit trade-off, without any individual unit’s having information on global benefits or costs.


2008 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qazi Muhammad Adnan Hye ◽  
Sana Riaz

This study seeks to determine the direction of causality between energy consumption (EC) and economic growth (EG), using annual data from 1971 to 2007. In our empirical analysis, we implement a bounds-testing approach to co-integration and an augmented form of the Granger causality test to identify the direction of the relationship between these variables both in the short and long run. Our findings suggest bidirectional causality between EG and EC in the short run; in the long run we find unidirectional causality from EG to EC. EC does not lead to EG in the long run because higher energy prices (oil prices) increase the cost of business, leading to a negative effect on EG. Additionally, when energy prices fluctuate, they create uncertainty that also affects economic growth. The study recommends direct investment in local energy resources.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (02) ◽  
pp. 34-45
Author(s):  
Naufal Dzikri Afifi ◽  
Ika Arum Puspita ◽  
Mohammad Deni Akbar

Shift to The Front II Komplek Sukamukti Banjaran Project is one of the projects implemented by one of the companies engaged in telecommunications. In its implementation, each project including Shift to The Front II Komplek Sukamukti Banjaran has a time limit specified in the contract. Project scheduling is an important role in predicting both the cost and time in a project. Every project should be able to complete the project before or just in the time specified in the contract. Delay in a project can be anticipated by accelerating the duration of completion by using the crashing method with the application of linear programming. Linear programming will help iteration in the calculation of crashing because if linear programming not used, iteration will be repeated. The objective function in this scheduling is to minimize the cost. This study aims to find a trade-off between the costs and the minimum time expected to complete this project. The acceleration of the duration of this study was carried out using the addition of 4 hours of overtime work, 3 hours of overtime work, 2 hours of overtime work, and 1 hour of overtime work. The normal time for this project is 35 days with a service fee of Rp. 52,335,690. From the results of the crashing analysis, the alternative chosen is to add 1 hour of overtime to 34 days with a total service cost of Rp. 52,375,492. This acceleration will affect the entire project because there are 33 different locations worked on Shift to The Front II and if all these locations can be accelerated then the duration of completion of the entire project will be effective


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