Inland valley wetlands in West African countries are considered to hold immense potential for rice-based production systems. Policies to increase rice production in inland valleys have until now not lived up to expectations. Previous studies have examined biophysical factors that affect the adoption of inland valley farming, but little empirical work has explored the socio-economic drivers of adoption. This study explores the determinants of farmers’ decisions to adopt inland valley farming and rice production in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana using probit model with data collected from 742 farmers. We show that owners of perennial tree crops are less likely to adopt inland valley farming and rice production than non-owners. This could be because perennial tree crops yield higher economic returns and provide financial stability, also for the next generation, than inland valley farming and rice production. Furthermore, farm size positively correlates with inland valley farming, but households with larger farms tend not to opt for rice production. Our results underscore that the relation between farm size and agricultural production decisions may depend on the type of agricultural practice. These results suggest that policymakers could strengthen local institutions and service providers to target specific groups of farmers when promoting inland valley farming and rice production.

This article studies the principal component analysis (PCA) estimation of weak factor models with sparse loadings. We uncover an intrinsic near-sparsity preservation property for the PCA estimators of loadings, which comes from the approximately (block) upper triangular structure of the rotation matrix. It suggests an asymmetric relationship among factors: the sparsity of the rotated loadings for a stronger factor can be contaminated by the loadings from weaker ones, but the sparsity of the rotated loadings of a weaker factor is almost unaffected by the loadings of stronger ones. Then, we propose a simple alternative to the existing penalized approaches to sparsify the loading estimators by screening out the small PCA loading estimators directly, and construct consistent estimators for factor strengths. The proposed estimators perform well in finite samples, as shown by a set of Monte Carlo simulations.

This study examines paid and unpaid childcare distribution connected to gender relations and inequalities. We ask: what are the gender consequences of childcare distribution in Mexico? To answer this enquiry, we apply Razavi’s diamond model, examining the social dimensions of the family/household, the State, the Market, and not-for-profit (NFP) sectors. We utilise national statistics and representative surveys from the Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), complemented with published studies on Latin America and Mexico.

The article is structured as follows. First, we provide a literature review on the model related to welfare and care provision. Second, we summarise important aspects of the Mexican context. Our analysis is structured in subsections following each dimension of the diamond. We discuss our findings through a graphic representation of the model applied to Mexico, and conclude with final remarks.

Our concrete application of the model shows how the distribution of – paid and unpaid – childcare has consequences in (re)producing and strengthening gender inequalities in a myriad of spaces, dynamics, and arrangements. Key findings indicate a reduction in public childcare provision, transferring responsibilities to the household and the NFP dimensions, enhancing gendered expectations. Additionally, there is an increased protagonism of market relations within the domestic sphere and unequal conditions for those with resources.

We contribute to current studies on gender inequalities connected to welfare systems – and the lack thereof – by offering conceptual elements to develop research pathways sensitive to context-specificities, closely aligned with countries and societies within the Global South.

Irrigation can enhance yields and serve as a climate adaptation strategy. In the Southeastern U.S., where water resources are relatively abundant, irrigation has experienced significant growth. However, despite the region’s capacity for further expansion, irrigation adoption rates remain low. This study estimates the influence of peer effects on farmers’ decisions to adopt irrigation in South Carolina, using a unique parcel-level dataset on irrigation withdrawals. We find that adoption increases as farmers observe more peer adopting irrigation – social interactions – and as peers’ pumping increases, such as during drought periods, when the benefits of irrigation become more visible, facilitating social learning.

During World War II, condom consumption increased in both belligerent and non-belligerent countries, including Sweden. Yet the relationship between state-led initiatives and commercial marketing in driving this trend has received little scholarly attention. The main sources in this article consist of wartime public health campaigns and condom advertisements. Applying the concepts of social and consumer engineering, the article examines how government interventions, specifically through public health measures, influenced condom marketing practices. The findings show that wartime campaigns sought to engineer citizens’ sexual behavior and that businesses strategically aligned their messaging with government propaganda. This convergence was instrumental in positioning condoms as essential tools for public health and facilitated a more permissive attitude toward condoms as prophylactics, bridging state-led public health efforts with commercial objectives. By examining this dynamic, the article contributes to understanding how wartime policies shaped consumer behavior and forged enduring connections between public health and market strategies.

This study proposes a specific channel through which labor markets facilitate firm growth: the occupational alignment between an establishment’s workforce and local skills. Using occupational employment statistics, we construct an index that compares each establishment’s occupational mix to that of its local market. Establishments with higher alignment grow faster in sales and employment. This growth comes primarily through lower adjustment costs and higher capital investment. We also show that the effects are most pronounced in establishments with a higher share of skilled workers and industries with higher idiosyncratic cash flow risk. This employee–firm matching channel helps explain how local labor markets translate into competitive advantage.

Empirically, the effect of corporate tax rates on leverage has been smaller than expected based on trade-off theory. In this article, I show that tax avoidance functions as a non-debt tax shield, reducing the benefits of the debt tax shield. I find that higher tax rates cause higher non-debt tax avoidance, which crowds out the debt tax shield. Moreover, I show that the strength of the relationship between debt and tax rates depends on the level of tax avoidance. A 1-standard-deviation higher tax rate implies 2.8% higher leverage for low tax avoidance firms, but has a negative effect for high tax avoidance firms.

In a recent paper, Juodis and Reese (2022, Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, 40, 1191–1203) (JR) show that the application of the CD test proposed by Pesaran (2004, General diagnostic tests for cross-sectional dependence in panels, CWPE 0435, Cambridge) to residuals from panels with latent factors results in over-rejection. They propose a randomized test statistic to correct for over-rejection, and add a screening component to achieve power. This article considers the same problem but from a different perspective and shows that the standard CD test remains valid if the latent factors are weak. A bias-corrected version, CD$^{\ast}$, is proposed which is shown to be asymptotically standard normal under the null of error cross-sectional independence which has power against network-type alternatives. This result is shown to hold for pure latent factor models as well as for panel regression models with latent factors. The case where the errors are serially correlated is also considered. Small sample properties of the CD$^{\ast}$ test are investigated by Monte Carlo experiments and are shown to have satisfactory small sample properties. In an empirical application, using the CD$^{\ast}$ test, it is shown that there remains spatial error dependence in a panel data model for real house price changes across 377 Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the United States, even after the effects of latent factors are filtered out.

The liberal order, as first articulated by Hobbes, depends upon an unnatural disembedding of both the economy and the polity from society. The economic and the political are keep apart. While the economy is seen as a private matter, the polity is conceived as a public one. The socially relational and mediating groups are squeezed out. Yet this involves contradiction. Is property primarily a matter of primary seizure or legal underwriting? Either the economic captures the political or vice-versa. A bad corporatism follows. The only alternative is a good corporatism recognising the priority of the social, of groups and their representation.

This article investigates crash risk premiums in individual stocks using skewness swaps. These swaps involve buying a stock’s risk-neutral skewness and receiving the realized skewness as a payoff. The strategy’s returns, which measure the skewness risk premium, are found to be consistently large and positive. This suggests investors are concerned about potential crashes in individual stocks and require substantial compensation for bearing this risk. Notably, significant results are mainly observed after the 2007/2009 financial crisis, indicating changes in post-crisis option market dynamics. Cross-sectional determinants of skewness swap returns include measures of systematic crash risk and stock overvaluation.

With rising environmental awareness, public attention has become an important external force shaping corporate green behaviour. Using Baidu search data to measure public green attention (PGA), this paper examines its impact on green technological innovation (GTI) among 1543 Chinese listed firms from 2011 to 2022. Employing a high-dimensional fixed-effects model, we find that PGA significantly promotes GTI, and the conclusion holds under alternative specifications. Heterogeneity analysis shows that this effect is stronger in firms and regions with more favourable conditions. Mechanism analysis indicates that PGA stimulates GTI mainly by strengthening environmental regulation, enhancing corporate social responsibility and reducing agency costs. Further analysis reveals that PGA-induced GTI leads to better Environmental, Social and Governance performance, lower business risk and improved operational outcomes. Overall, the results highlight the important role of public attention in advancing corporate green innovation and sustainability.