Policy learning and cross-national diffusion in social long-term care insurance: Germany, Japan, and the Republic of Korea

Recently, many developed countries have moved toward comprehensive Long-Term Care (LTC) systems. Along with the conventional explanations of these policy changes based on domestic factors, learning from abroad should be considered. We focus on the social insurance model of LTC, particularly how Japan learned from Germany and the Republic of Korea learned from Japan. Some approaches for how to think about policy learning in general as well as cross-border learning are suggested.     

Society and Social Security in France

An overview is given of some salient demographic characteristics in the dramatically changing socio-economic environment of France. Examination of social security and medical insurance provision shows how social welfare benefits have become more or less vital in the French family's maintenance of improved living standards. It is concluded that French social security services now compare favourably with provisions in other countries, but that birth-rate problems and other social effects of rapid developmental change remain to be overcome.     

The Effects of Financial Incentives in Experiments: A Review and Capital-Labor-Production Framework

We review 74 experiments with no, low, or high performance-based financial incentives. The modal result has no effect on mean performance (though variance is usually reduced by higher payment). Higher incentive does improve performance often, typically judgment tasks that are responsive to better effort. Incentives also reduce “presentation” effects (e.g., generosity and risk-seeking). Incentive effects are comparable to effects of other variables, particularly “cognitive capital” and task “production” demands, and interact with those variables, so a narrow-minded focus on incentives alone is misguided. We also note that no replicated study has made rationality violations disappear purely by raising incentives.     

A critical evaluation of competing representations of the relationship between formal and informal work

Analysing the extensive literature on informal work reveals multiple, often contradictory, views regarding its relationship with formal work. The aim of this paper is to evaluate critically these competing claims. Evaluating in turn the predominant views of informal work as a residue, by-product, complement and/or alternative to formal work, reveals that universal generalizations are not possible and that all of these articulations only apply in specific contexts. However, rather than simply conclude that these contrasting readings of the relationship between informal and formal work are therefore context-bound generalizations, two features common to all these perspectives are identified that necessitate a more fundamental rethinking of the relationship between formal and informal work. These relate to the way in which all firstly, simplistically attribute one form of work with positive features (e.g. modernization, virtue and progress) and the other with negative attributes (e.g. tradition, backwardness, exploitation) and, secondly, delineate formal and informal work as discrete and separate entities. The paper concludes by setting out a research agenda to not only highlight the political values underpinning each of these representations but also achieve a fuller and finer-grained understanding of the relations between informal and formal work.     

The Irish macroeconomic response to an external shock with an application to stress testing

The Irish economy has recently endured a period of turbulence as a result of the collapse of the domestic property market bubble and the onset of the global financial crisis. There are two critical vulnerabilities in the Irish economy at present. The first is the potential for sluggish economic growth due to a slowdown in external demand, which impacts on the government's ability to meet budgetary targets. The second concern relates to the financial stability of the banking system given the escalating mortgage crisis. Our results show that Irish economic growth is highly sensitive to the performance of its trading partners and any international slowdown will hinder Ireland's growth prospects. The model used suggests that the appropriate policy response is to pursue further gains in competitiveness. We estimate the impact of an external slowdown on mortgage delinquency using a new dataset on the loan books of the commercial banking sector. The results suggest that a negative one standard deviation shock to US GDP growth leads to an increase of 1600 in the number of mortgages in arrears for at least 90 days. Arrears are driven by unemployment and negative equity in the model. We discuss policies to contain the mortgage crisis by improving these intermediate target variables.     

Bayesian inference for a partially observed birth–death process using data on proportions

Stochastic kinetic models are often used to describe complex biological processes. Typically these models are analytically intractable and have unknown parameters which need to be estimated from observed data. Ideally we would have measurements on all interacting chemical species in the process, observed continuously in time. However, in practice, measurements are taken only at a relatively few time‐points. In some situations, only very limited observation of the process is available, for example settings in which experimenters can only observe noisy observations on the proportion of cells that are alive. This makes the inference task even more problematic. We consider a range of data‐poor scenarios and investigate the performance of various computationally intensive Bayesian algorithms in determining the posterior distribution using data on proportions from a simple birth‐death process.