This paper uses panel data of OECD countries during the period 1995–2003 to examine how corruption affects fertility. The Corruption Perceptions Index is used to measure the degree of corruption. Fixed effects IV estimation and the Arellano-Bond dynamic panel estimation are employed to control...

Using individual-level data for China, Korea, and Japan for 2006, this research examines how the age of children influences marital satisfaction for males and females in East Asian countries. Our results show that the marital satisfaction of males is barely affected by a child of the...

Societies in Western civilisation enforce their rules through formal institutions such as secularism (SES), whereas in less developed civilisations often rely on informal institutions such as religion (RES). The present paper attempts to explain the determinants of societies’ choice between...

In light of the recent financial and economic crisis the present paper analyzes the determinants of loan default. We employ a unique firm-level panel data of 700 bank loans given to small and medium sized enterprises in Slovakia between 2000 and 2005 to investigate three loan default hypothesis....

This paper aims to explore how social capital is related to self-rated health status in Japan and how this relationship depends on the extent to which a person is embedded into the community. This study used data from 3079 adult participants in Japan’s Social Policy and Social Consciousness...

The present paper studies the land use change impacts of fuels and biofuels. We test the theoretical hypothesis, which says that changes in fuel prices cause changes in land use both directly and indirectly and, because of price inter-dependencies, biofuels reinforce the land use change impacts....

Kahn (2005) found that ethnic heterogeneity reduces the number of deaths caused by natural disasters, a finding that is contrary to theoretical predictions. This paper casts doubt on this finding and uses cross-country data from 1965 to 2008 to conduct a re-estimation. To alleviate omitted...

The Great Hanshin-Awaji (Kobe) earthquake struck Japan in 1995, causing devastating damage to the economic landscape of south-central Japan. The earthquake also caused people to realize the importance of social capital in Japan. Based on a large, individual-level database comprising 488,223...

This is the first paper that estimates the global land use change impact of growth of the bioenergy sector. Applying time-series analytical mechanisms to fuel, biofuel and agricultural commodity prices and production, we estimate the long-rung relationship between energy prices, bioenergy...

Since the end of the 1990s, local governments in Japan have enacted Information Disclosure Ordinances, which require the disclosure of official government information. This paper uses Japanese prefecture-level data for the period 1998–2004 to examine how this enactment affected the rate of...