Journal of CENTRUM Cathedra. Vol. 03, Issue 01
URI permanente para esta colecciónhttp://54.81.141.168/handle/123456789/194728
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JCC Volume 3 - Issue 1 - 2010
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Ítem Acceso Abierto The Effect of Health Insurance on Health Care Utilization: Evidence from The Medical Expenditure Panel Survey 2000-2005(Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. CENTRUM, 2010) Beuermann, Diether W.This paper exploits the fact that insurance eligibility in the United States changes abruptly at age 65 due to universal coverage provided by Medicare. In that way, we adopt a regression discontinuity design to analyze the effect of health insurance coverage on health care access and utilization. The main findings suggest that groups with lower pre-65 coverage gain higher increases in the probability of being insured at 65. For instance, less educated persons (less likely to have pre-65 health insurance) appear to increase their likelihood of being insured at age 65 by more than their more highly educated counterparts. Furthermore, this increased insurance coverage appears to be associated with reductions in intergroup disparities in health care access. Therefore, the findings suggest that insurance matters in order to access health care services in a way that could potentially reduce inequalities between different ethnic groups.Ítem Acceso Abierto Firms’ Financing, Contract Enforcement, and Liability Dollarization(Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. CENTRUM, 2010) Sosa-Padilla, CésarThis paper analyzes how the presence of liability dollarization, different degrees of contract enforcement, and the possibility to default on debts affect firms’ financing decisions. The framework is a dynamic model of heterogeneous firms. They finance their capital acquisitions using their own income and borrowing from foreign lenders. The set of contracts available incorporates the possibility of default. The incentives to repay or default are determined by the firms’ value relative to the value of default, controlled by the degree of contract enforcement and the presence of liability dollarization. Quantitative evidence is found to support the common wisdom that firms in economies subject to liability dollarization are more likely to default. The presence of liability dollarization increases the likelihood of default by 13%. Weak contract enforcement increases the probability of default by almost 19%. Default regions are determined, with small, highly leveraged firms being more prone to default.Ítem Acceso Abierto Benchmarking Malaysia in the Global Information Society: Regressing or Progressing?(Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. CENTRUM, 2010) Ramasami, RamachandranThe purpose of this paper is to elucidate how the Dalenius-Hodges stratification methodology typically used in sampling, when combined with ranking and index standardization procedures, becomes a powerful policy tool for classifying and benchmarking global information society (GIS) phenomena. The Dalenius-Hodges methodology is preferable to other popular benchmarking methodologies; it has an objective criterion in demarcating strata boundaries and a standardized procedure of compiling indexes irrespective of the nature of the variables and is conceptually simple and easy to compute. For studying GIS phenomena, the paper proposes a socio-technology model, focusing on nine basic variables apportioned under information communications technology (ICT) access, diffusion, usage, and skills. The model uses raw data extracted from 154 International Telecommunication Union (ITU) member countries for 2002 and 2007. For each variable, the countries are ranked and classified under the proposed 8-S Framework, with the most advanced group termed Skaters and the least developed group Sleepers; the other categories are Striders, Sprinters, Sliders, Strollers, Shufflers, and Starters, as determined by the index values, which theoretically range from a minimum score of zero to a maximum of 100. In an attempt to understand the performance of various nations in the GIS ladder, Malaysia’s performance received special attention. After enjoying spectacular growth for more than two decades during the preceding agro-industrial era, Malaysia has been losing its economic advantage to a number of newly liberated economies, in particular, in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI). Malaysia was one of the early adopters of Internet technology among developing nations and pioneered the promulgation of a knowledge-based economy to overcome its loss of investment advantage to a number of low-wage countries in Asia. This has become a major policy concern for Malaysia’s economic performance especially in the wake of new investment factors and criteria related to the information age.Ítem Acceso Abierto Skewed Forward-Looking Monetary Policy Behavior: A Look at the Latin American Inflation Targeting Practice(Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. CENTRUM, 2010) Vega, MarcoEstimation of forward-looking interest rate rules is ubiquitous in the context of developed-economy central banks. In this paper, the five countries in Latin America that have adopted the Inflation Targeting framework are considered, and estimations of forward-looking policy rules are performed via i) standard least-squares criteria and ii) quantile regressions. The estimated standard mean effects indicate that Brazil, Chile, and Mexico are strongly forward-looking for horizons of a year and more. The estimated quantile effects suggest that policy makers in Brazil, Chile, and Mexico are likely to have faced more upside than downside risks to their one-year-ahead inflation forecasts when setting their policies.Ítem Acceso Abierto Towards Sustainable Offshore Outsourcing: A Case Study of Quebec Manufacturing Firms Outsourcing to China(Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. CENTRUM, 2010) Mohiuddin, Muhammad; Su, Zhan; Su, AlbertThe offshore-outsourcing choice is viewed as a source of factory closures and job losses in many developed countries including Canada. The current exploratory paper using qualitative case study methods presents experiences from four Canadian companies based in the province of Quebec. It shows that offshore outsourcing is an important business strategy that can create overall firm-level competitiveness through the generation of more revenues, higher profits, better customer satisfaction, and increased investments in R&D and core competency development.Ítem Acceso Abierto Forecasting Commodity Prices with Switching Regimes: The Case of Fishmeal Prices(Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. CENTRUM, 2010) Tveterås, SigbjørnThe objective of this paper is to present a parsimonious forecasting model of the fishmeal price. The focus is on the impact of the soybean meal market on the fishmeal price together with the stocks-to-use as an indicator of demand and supply conditions. Volatile fishmeal supply due to El Niño events appears to lead to temporal changes in demand conditions and thereby multiple price regimes. In particular, there seem to be two different price regimes: one where the fishmeal price is highly correlated with the soybean meal price and another where fishmeal supply is scarce and the fishmeal price is weakly correlated with the soybean meal price, especially during El Niño events. The results from the Markov-switching autoregression (MS-AR) provide empirical evidence of two such price regimes for fishmeal. In terms of forecasting performance, it is unclear whether the MS-AR model improves over linear models.Ítem Acceso Abierto How Investors Face Financial Risk: Loss Aversion and Wealth Allocation(Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. CENTRUM, 2010) Rengifo, Erick W.; Trifan, EmanuelaWe studied how the capital allocation decisions and the loss version of nonprofessional investors change subject to behavioral factors. The optimal wealth allocation between risky and risk-free assets results within a value-at-risk (VaR) portfolio model, which involves assessing risk individually according to an extended prospect-theory framework. We showed how the past performance and the portfolio evaluation frequency affect investor behavior and prove myopic loss aversion holds across different evaluation frequencies. We also illustrated that 1 year is the optimal evaluation horizon at which, under practical constraints, maximization of risky holdings occurs. Finally, we presented evidence that indicates that researchers using standard VaR significance levels may be underestimating the loss aversion of individual investors.