Yung Hsiang Ying

An Empirical Analysis on Capital Flows: The Case of Korea and Mexico

This paper discusses causes of capital flows in Korea and Mexico. Both countries received substantial amounts of foreign capital in the late 1980s and early 1990s. International capital helped these countries achieve a higher standard of living and faster economic growth. However, undesirable macroeconomic effects such as appreciation of real exchange rate and widening current account deficits usually accompany foreign capital inflows. The vector autoregressive (VAR) method is applied to investigate the underlying shocks causing the capital inflows. The main findings are that the U.S. business cycle and shocks to foreign interest rates account for more than 50% of capital inflows to both countries in the past two decades.

Nationality preferences for labour in the international football industry

This paper tests consumer and co-worker nationalistic preferences by measuring the effect of team nationality composition on fan attendance and overall team quality using professional football teams in the worlds five largest football leagues. Little evidence is found to support the hypothesis that fans or co-workers discriminate based upon the players nationality. Thus, the under-representation of various nationalities can be concluded to originate from a clubs ownership and/or management. These results are similar to the racial bias revealed by English club owners as found by Szymanski and Preston.

A Study of Suicide and Socioeconomic Factors

The topic of suicide has long been an important socioeconomic issue studied in many countries. Suicides inject an atmosphere of unrest into society, and media attention furthers that social uneasiness. From the viewpoint of economics and management, suicide is a waste of human resource: it decreases the labor force in society and deteriorates human capital. This paper provides a series of analyses of suicide rate based on theoretical reasoning and empirical approaches. Aggregate data from G7 countries are obtained and stacked into panel data for analysis. Data are collected for different age groups. Even though suicide issues have been extensively discussed in the past, newly developed econometric tools are applied to her. Beyond previously recognized relationships between economic factors and suicide rates findings include that unemployment strikes men more than women in terms of psychological pressure: for middle age or older women, unemployment may even be positive for the entire family; and female labor force participation exerts pressure on male counterparts and increases its suicide rate. As a result, a low income family with an unemployed man and an employed woman is at high risk for adult male suicide.

The effectiveness of alcohol control policies on alcohol-related traffic fatalities in the United States

Multiple alcohol control policies have been enacted since the early 1980s to keep drunk drivers off the roads and to prevent more alcohol-related traffic fatalities. In this paper, we analyze nine traffic policies to determine the extent to which each policy contributes to effective alcohol-related fatality prevention. Compared with the existing literature, this paper addresses a more comprehensive set of traffic policies. In addition, we used a panel GLS model that holds regional effects and state-specific time effects constant to analyze their impact on alcohol-related fatalities with two distinct rates: alcohol-related traffic deaths per capita and alcohol-related traffic deaths per total traffic deaths. While per capita alcohol-related traffic deaths is used more often in other studies, alcohol-related traffic deaths per total traffic deaths better reflects the impact of policies on deterring drunk driving. In addition, regional analyses were conducted to determine the policies that are more effective in certain regions. The findings of this study suggest that zero tolerance laws and increased beer taxes are the most effective policies in reducing alcohol-related fatalities in all regions.

External benefits of preserving agricultural land: Taiwan's rice fields

Abstract Agricultural production for many countries seems to generate a negative economic profit due to waves of industrialization in the past several decades. One of the main reasons is that the value of the land in non-agricultural uses rises considerably. However, the profitability of agricultural production may be underestimated if the positive externalities associated with farmland are not included. A proper accounting for these positive externalities casts agricultural production in a more favorable light. This paper focuses on paddy rice fields in Taiwan. A double-bounded dichotomous Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) is combined with the selection-bias-correction procedure to estimate the magnitude of the positive externalities. The evidence suggests that the majority of people in Taiwan recognize the externalities of paddy rice fields. Each household is willing to pay on average about

The Effectiveness of Drinking and Driving Policies for Different Alcohol-Related Fatalities: A Quantile Regression Analysis

1777.92 NT annually to sustain the rice fields’ water preservation and land protection functions, which is about 3.57-fold of the intrinsic economic value of rice. Thus, the rising opportunity costs of retaining land in agricultural production is not yet sufficient to justify a reallocation of this resource from agriculture to other uses. The policy prescription favors retention of the land in agricultural production. In fact, if efficiency is the goal of policy makers, men Taiwan can maintain rice field area up to three times more than currently present under the situation without further government subsidy.

Economics and politics in the United States: a state-level investigation

To understand the impact of drinking and driving laws on drinking and driving fatality rates, this study explored the different effects these laws have on areas with varying severity rates for drinking and driving. Unlike previous studies, this study employed quantile regression analysis. Empirical results showed that policies based on local conditions must be used to effectively reduce drinking and driving fatality rates; that is, different measures should be adopted to target the specific conditions in various regions. For areas with low fatality rates (low quantiles), people’s habits and attitudes toward alcohol should be emphasized instead of transportation safety laws because “preemptive regulations” are more effective. For areas with high fatality rates (or high quantiles), “ex-post regulations” are more effective, and impact these areas approximately 0.01% to 0.05% more than they do areas with low fatality rates.

An Empirical Study on Health in Taiwan and its Long-Term Adjustment

We examine state income and government spending data to investigate the role of political parties and elections in state business cycles of the United States, and find strong support for the partisan political business cycles, both traditional and rational versions. The growth rate of per capita real income and government spending tend to be higher (lower) with a Democratic (Republican) governor as well as a Democratic (Republican) president. In case of economic growth, we find some evidence for opportunistic cycles induced by national level politics; meanwhile, both national and state governments seem to generate expansionary policy in election years.

A structural decomposition of business cycles in Taiwan

This paper investigates the dynamic change of the population health status in Taiwan. Specifically, it provides insight into the empirical determinants of health production function and explores the nature of the long-term adjustment in health performance. For these purposes, panel data are used incorporating dynamic effects as well as controls for unobservable area-specific effect and area-invariant time effect. The findings are consistent with the earlier research in terms of the determinants of the health production function. The result of the present paper suggests that after decades of improvement in health care, people in Taiwan have lower age-adjusted mortality rates. Also, the decreases in mortality rates follow a rapid pace of long-term adjustment implying that health-care policy that focuses on the provision of medical care services substantially benefits the nations health.

Air cargo as an impetus for economic growth through the channel of openness: The case of OECD countries

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of foreign and domestic factors on the business cycle of Taiwan. Using a structural vector-autoregressive model of a small open economy (OE), we examine how the influences of these factors differ as a result of trade flows and liberalization efforts. The results suggest that Taiwanese output has remained quite immune to global shocks in spite of the financial liberalization of the 1980s. Furthermore, as Asia has become Taiwans major trading partner, so too has Asia become the major foreign influence on Taiwans business cycle. Indeed, in many ways Taiwan appears to have gained resilience from foreign shocks, rather than forfeited domestic stability.