Klaus F. Zimmermann

Using data for young Romanians, a new GLO Discussion Paper finds that it is external religiosity that interacts with weaker addictive behaviors like smoking, drinking and using drugs.

GLO Discussion Paper No. 859, 2021

Religiosity, Smoking and Other Addictive Behaviors – Download PDF
by Roman, Monica & Zimmermann, Klaus F. & Plopeanu, Aurelian-Petruș

Author Abstract: While under communism, identity-providing religion was suppressed, religiosity is strong today even among the youth in post-communist countries. This provides an appropriate background to investigate how external and internal religiosity relates to addictive behaviors like smoking, drinking and drugs among the young. This study shows that not religion as such or internal religiosity, but largely observable (external) religiosity prevents them from wallowing those vices.

GLO Discussion Papers are research and policy papers of the GLO Network which are widely circulated to encourage discussion. Provided in cooperation with EconStor, a service of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, GLO Discussion Papers are among others listed in RePEc (see IDEAS,  EconPapers). Complete list of all GLO DPs – downloadable for free.

The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.

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A new GLO Discussion Paper finds for China that vocational upper secondary graduates face a wage penalty compared to academic upper secondary graduates.

GLO Discussion Paper No. 858, 2021

Does vocational education pay better, or worse, than academic education? – Download PDF
by Chen, Jie & Pastore, Francesco

GLO Affiliate Jie Chen and GLO Fellow Francesco Pastore

Author Abstract: In this paper, we use the Chinese General Social Survey data to analyse the returns to upper secondary vocational education in China. To address possible endogeneity of vocational training due to omitted heterogeneity, we construct a novel instrumental variable using the proportion of tertiary education graduates relative to the entire population by year. Our main finding is that, although returns to vocational upper secondary education appear higher than returns to academic upper secondary education according to the Mincerian equation, the results from the instrumental variable method tell the opposite story: vocational upper secondary graduates face a wage penalty compared to academic upper secondary graduates. The wage penalty is confirmed by an alternative and more recent IV method – the Lewbel method (Lewbel, 2012). Our findings highlight the importance of properly accounting for endogeneity when estimating the returns to vocational education.

GLO Discussion Papers are research and policy papers of the GLO Network which are widely circulated to encourage discussion. Provided in cooperation with EconStor, a service of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, GLO Discussion Papers are among others listed in RePEc (see IDEAS,  EconPapers). Complete list of all GLO DPs – downloadable for free.

The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.

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A new GLO Discussion Paper finds that confidence in public institutions is one of the most important predictors of deaths attributed to COVID-19.

GLO Discussion Paper No. 861, 2021

Confidence in public institutions is critical in containing the COVID-19 pandemic – Download PDF
by Adamecz-Völgyi, Anna & Szabó-Morvai, Ágnes

GLO Fellow Anna Adamecz-Volgyi

More from the GLO Coronavirus Cluster

Author Abstract: This paper investigates the relative importance of confidence in public institutions to explain cross-country differences in the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic. We extend the related literature by employing regression and machine learning methods to identify the most critical predictors of deaths attributed to the pandemic. We find that a one standard deviation increase (e.g., the actual difference between the US and Finland) in confidence is associated with 350.9 fewer predicted deaths per million inhabitants. Confidence in public institutions is one of the most important predictors of deaths attributed to COVID-19, compared to country-level measures of individual health risks, the health system, demographics, economic and political development, and social capital. Our results suggest that effective policy implementation requires citizens to cooperate with their governments, and willingness to cooperate relies on confidence in public institutions.

GLO Discussion Papers are research and policy papers of the GLO Network which are widely circulated to encourage discussion. Provided in cooperation with EconStor, a service of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, GLO Discussion Papers are among others listed in RePEc (see IDEAS,  EconPapers). Complete list of all GLO DPs – downloadable for free.

The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.

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A new paper published ONLINE FIRST freely accessible demonstrate for Italy that supervised machine learning techniques outperform the official statistical method by substantially improving the prediction accuracy of local mortality.

Local mortality estimates during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy

by Augusto Cerqua, Roberta Di Stefano, Marco Letta & Sara Miccoli

Published ONLINE FIRST 2021: Journal of Population Economics
OPEN ACCESS and PDF.

GLO Fellow Marco Letta

Author Abstract: Estimates of the real death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic have proven to be problematic in many countries, Italy being no exception. Mortality estimates at the local level are even more uncertain as they require stringent conditions, such as granularity and accuracy of the data at hand, which are rarely met. The “official” approach adopted by public institutions to estimate the “excess mortality” during the pandemic draws on a comparison between observed all-cause mortality data for 2020 and averages of mortality figures in the past years for the same period. In this paper, we apply the recently developed machine learning control method to build a more realistic counterfactual scenario of mortality in the absence of COVID-19. We demonstrate that supervised machine learning techniques outperform the official method by substantially improving the prediction accuracy of the local mortality in “ordinary” years, especially in small- and medium-sized municipalities. We then apply the best-performing algorithms to derive estimates of local excess mortality for the period between February and September 2020. Such estimates allow us to provide insights about the demographic evolution of the first wave of the pandemic throughout the country. To help improve diagnostic and monitoring efforts, our dataset is freely available to the research community.

Journal of Population Economics
Access to the recently published Volume 34, Issue 3, July 2021.

LEAD ARTICLE OF ISSUE 3, 2021:
The safest time to fly: pandemic response in the era of Fox News
by Maxim Ananyev, Michael Poyker and Yuan Tian

OPEN ACCESS: Free Readlink – Download PDF

The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.

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While under communism, identity-providing religion was suppressed, religiosity is strong today even among the youth in post-communist countries. This provides an appropriate background to investigate how external and internal religiosity relates to addictive behaviors like smoking, drinking and drugs among the young. This study shows that not religion as such or internal religiosity, but largely observable (external) religiosity prevents them from wallowing in those vices.

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