Suchergebnisse

"Young (2005) argues that HIV related population declines reinforced by the fertility response to the epidemic will lead to higher capital-labor ratios and to higher per capita incomes in the affected countries of Africa. Using household level data on fertility from South Africa and relying on between cohort variation in country level HIV infection, he estimates a large negative effect of HIV prevalence on fertility. However, the studies that utilize the recent rounds of Demographic Health Surveys, where fertility outcomes are linked to HIV status based on testing, find no effect of the disease on the fertility behavior. This paper tries to bridge this gap by revisiting Young's findings. Young (2005) includes data before 1990, when no data are available on HIV prevalence rates. He assigns all the fertility observations before 1990 with HIV prevalence rates of zero, and this appears to drive the significant negative effect found in his study. When one restricts the sample to the period 1990-1998, where actual HIV data are available, the effect of HIV prevalence on fertility turns out to be positive for South Africa. Simulating Young's model utilizing these new estimates shows that the future generations of South Africa are worse off"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

"An NBER digest for this paper is available.There are two leading views on how financial crises turn into recessions. The first view highlights the importance of a troubled banking sector that cannot provide credit to domestic firms. The second view stresses the relevance of short-term borrowing in foreign currency and the associated decline in net worth through a weak balance sheet. Both views underline the role of financial constraints as mechanisms that can lead to an aggregate investment collapse. By utilizing a new firm-level database from six Latin American countries between 1990-2005 and using a differences-in-differences methodology, we empirically test the importance of each view. We find that foreign exporters that hold short-term foreign currency denominated debt, increase investment by 13 percentage points compared to domestic exporters with foreign currency denominated debt. This result only holds when the currency crisis is combined with a banking crisis, implying that the key factor that hinders investment and growth is the decline in the supply of credit"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

"Although recent research shows that the euro has spurred cross-border financial integration, the exact mechanisms remain unknown. We investigate the underlying channels of the euro's effect on financial integration using data on bilateral banking linkages among twenty industrial countries in the past thirty years. We also construct a dataset that records the timing of legislative-regulatory harmonization policies in financial services across the European Union. We find that the euro's impact on financial integration is primarily driven by eliminating the currency risk. Legislative-regulatory convergence explains part of the total effect, whereas trade has no role in explaining the euro's positive effect on integration"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site