SN Business & Economics

A laborshed analysis examines the available workforce that flows from the surrounding communities into a nodal city. Iowa Workforce Development (“IWD”) currently uses employer survey data to create a laborshed study for the largest communities in each of Iowa’s 99 counties. IWD has surveyed 18,428 Iowans from July 2019 to April 2021 to ask how likely these Iowans are to change jobs if they are currently employed, or how apt they are to rejoin the labor force if they are presently unemployed, recently retired or are a homemaker. The likelihood of changing jobs or re-entering the workforce is modeled through a polytomous response logistic regression, using both demographic information and labor market characteristics obtained from the surveyed Iowans. In this study, prediction of individual potential job applicants, together with estimates of workers for each zip code in-commuting to a nodal city, are detailed. In particular, this study estimates the total number of individuals who are eager to change jobs or regain employment, called the Weighted Labor Force (“WLF”), for any desired laborshed in Iowa. The WLF computation is demonstrated for the Cedar Valley Laborshed, which consists of the nodal cities of Waterloo and Cedar Falls in northeastern Iowa.

This study uses a common trend method of Warne (A common trends model: Identification, estimation and inference, 1993) to identify fundamental and bubble components of stock prices for India, the USA, and Japan. The identified fundamental and bubble components of these stock markets are further evaluated with the Diebold and Yilmaz (Int J Forecast 28:57–66, 2012) return and volatility spillovers along with the wavelet coherency analysis to find out the origin and their relationship in a frequency–time domain. The empirical results from the monthly data for the period April 1994 to July 2018 indicate that during the global financial crisis of 2007–2009, all these stock markets are invariably driven by the bubbles of different sizes. The results from the return and volatility spillover across these stock markets indicate that the major part of the spillover is coming from the fundamentals than the bubble components. Further, the results from the wavelet coherency analysis also show that the fundamental components have consistent longer horizon coherency, while there is none among the bubble components. These results imply that the bubble components of these markets are purely transitory and have no impact across them, so focusing on fundamentals is a better strategy for longer horizon investments.

This paper examines the effects of pandemics on income inequality, specifically those pandemics that claimed more than 100,000 lives. Given that pandemics are events that rarely occur, we have use data spanning over the last 100 years (1915–2017) and relating to four pandemics. The study includes four countries that had income inequality data covering that period. Using panel data methods—fixed effects and augmented mean group estimators—we found a significant effect of these pandemics on declining income inequality. The study argues that based on the characteristics of the COVID-19 pandemic, namely that fatalities are highly concentrated in older age groups, we can neither expect a labor scarcity nor a sharp decline in productivity; however, we could expect a reduction in consumption, the possibility of savings, high unemployment rates, and high public debt ratios. The ultimate effects of COVID-19 on inequality remain unclear so far, as some of its inherent characteristics push for an increase in inequality. In contrast, others push toward a narrowing of the income gap.

This study aims to examine the impact of perceived convenience, service quality and security on consumers’ attitudes and behavioural intentions towards online food delivery services in Bangladesh. The paper proposes an extended theory of the technological acceptance model which includes’ perceived convenience, service quality, and security along with their relationships to evaluate their impact on the mediator consumers’ attitude and dependent variable consumers’ behavioural intention towards online food delivery services. Data were collected from 306 participants. Smart-PLS was used for the data analysis. The results showed that convenience and service quality had significant effects on attitude and behavioural intention. However, no such relationship was found for security.

The objectives of this study were to investigate organization support received by employees during the COVID-19 lockdown and its effect on self-efficacy. The study was conducted in Sri Lanka during the COVID-19 lockdown; a sample of employees who performed work in the form of work-from-home responded to the survey questionnaire. The data were analysed using structural equation modelling techniques. The findings led to identify four organization support practices implemented during the COVID-19 lockdown. These were named as work collaboration and coordination, work direction, psychological wellness, and physical wellness. These four practices significantly enhanced the self-efficacy of employees. The findings of the study imply that the traditional theories of social cognitive theory and positive psychology have enduring theoretical resonance to better understand contemporary phenomena with novel applications.

Climate change and extreme climatic events cause massive food grain loss, which adversely impacts food availability, food import, and other economic factors. Bangladesh has been combating climate variability and extreme climatic events to abate agricultural production loss for a long time. In this article, we investigated the relationship between food grain loss and food security with reference to extreme climatic events in Bangladesh, based on data from 1984 to 2017. We used the vector auto-regression (VAR) model and derivative analyses, and suggested policy implications related to the existing national agricultural policy. Five time-series variables were judiciously considered: food availability, food loss, food import, gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate, and inflation rate. The results show that the variable, food grain loss has a reverse association with food security—it escalates import from the world food market, causing import-dependence. Moreover, food loss significantly instigates inflation. However, the GDP growth rate was found to be a weak provocateur. Overall, climate change and climatic extremes jeopardize the country’s food security and hinder its pursuit of the sustainable development goals, especially stand-alone goals 1 and 2. Therefore, it is concluded that changes in climate and their correlations are detrimental to Bangladesh’s food security and economy.

Prior to 2011, individual life expectancy played no role in the Norwegian old-age pension system. However, after the 2011 reform, life expectancy became a central factor for early pension take-up. Asymmetric information is crucial in most insurance markets, including the new pension system, where employees can flexible claim a public pension from the age of 62. Individuals who expect to live longer than the average for their birth cohort can maximize their pension wealth by deferring pension claiming, while those with a shorter life expectancy should draw their pension as early as possible. This raises concerns that adverse selection may pose a risk to the sustainability of the new pension system. To investigate this issue, we use chronic disease as a proxy for life expectancy and examine its relationship with employment and pension decisions. Our findings show that individuals with a chronic health condition are more likely to draw a pension and continue working when they reach 62 years of age compared to those without a chronic health condition. This suggests potential adverse selection issues in the pension system, although our results suggest small effects after adjusting for unobservables.

The yield curve is perceived to be an indicator of the future state of the economy. For example, an inverted yield curve is considered to be a signal of a forthcoming economic slowdown. Does risk explain the slope of the yield curve as well? In this paper, we explore the dynamics of short-term and long-term interest rate spread to changes in risk and government debt using time-series data. Government-issued bonds are perceived to be risk-free assets. Financial intermediaries consider government-issued securities as a secondary reserve, and they are also used during open market operations. We explore the dynamics while controlling for a potential long-run common trend between the interest rate spread and government debt. We employ the bounds test for cointegration in an auto-regressive distributed lag model and evaluate impulse responses to develop insights into the dynamics. The ARDL bounds test finds evidence of cointegration between the measures interest rate spreads and government debt. A shock to government-issued bonds indicates that the short-term spread decreases, whereas the long-term spread rises by a small margin. We conjecture an upward sloping yield curve resulting from a shock to government debt. A shock to the financial market risk index indicates that the short-term spread decreases for a brief period before returning to its pre-shock level, whereas the long-term spread more or less remains unchanged. We conjecture a downward sloping yield curve resulting from a shock to risk. This conjecture on the impact of risk on short-term and long-term interest rate spreads make the prediction about the inverted yield curve based on the expectation hypothesis and the segmented market theory somewhat weak.