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We examine the roles of sample initial conditions and unobserved individual effects in consistent estimation of the dynamic binary response panel data model. Different specifications of the model are estimated using female welfare and labor force participation data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation. These include alternative random effects (RE) models, in which the conditional distributions of both the unobserved heterogeneity and the initial conditions are specified, and fixed effects (FE) conditional logit models that make no assumptions on either distribution. There are several findings. First, the hypothesis that the sample initial conditions are exogenous is rejected by both samples. Misspecification of the initial conditions results in drastically overstated estimates of the state dependence and understated estimates of the short- and long-run effects of children on labor force participation. The FE conditional logit estimates are similar to the estimates from the RE model that is flexible with respect to both the initial conditions and the correlation between the unobserved heterogeneity and the covariates. For female labor force participation, there is evidence that fertility choices are correlated with both unobserved heterogeneity and pre-sample participation histories.

This chapter reviews the existing empirical evidence on how social insurance affects health. Social insurance encompasses programs primarily designed to insure against health risks, such as health insurance, sick leave insurance, accident insurance, long-term care insurance, and disability insurance as well as other programs, such as unemployment insurance, pension insurance, and country-specific social insurance programs. These insurance systems exist in almost all developed countries around the world. This chapter discusses the state-of-the art evidence on each of these social insurance systems, briefly reviews the empirical methods for identifying causal effects, and examines possible limitations to these methods. The findings reveal robust and rich evidence on first-stage behavioral responses (“moral hazard”) to changes in insurance coverage. Surprisingly, evidence on how changes in coverage impact beneficiaries’ health is scant and inconclusive. This lack of identified causal health effects is directly related to limitations on how human health is typically measured, limitations on the empirical approaches, and a paucity of administrative panel data spanning long-time horizons. Future research must be conducted to fill these gaps. Of particular importance is evidence on how these social insurance systems interact and affect human health over the life cycle.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the history and strategies used by Synthroid producers, currently Abbott Laboratories, one of the top drug companies in the world through the use of stakeholder theory.

News releases and The Wall Street Journal from similar dates were compared and contrasted for examples of Donaldson and Preston's three typologies of stakeholder theory, which include descriptive accuracy, instrumental power, and normative validity.

Illustrations of stakeholder typologies reveal that public relations messages can be used to influence stakeholders. However, the examples also illustrate that ethics may be a separate issue.

When consumers rely on products, such as prescription drugs, for good health and even life itself, there is a fine line between product and drug product.

This paper demonstrates the value of Donaldson and Preston's typology in evaluating the market health of organizations.

Air quality, noise and proximity to urban infrastructure can arguably have an important impact on the quality of life. Environmental quality (the price of good health) has become a central tenet for consumer choice in urban locales when deciding on a residential neighbourhood. Unlike the market for most tangible goods, the market for environmental quality does not yield an observable per unit price effect. As no explicit price exists for a unit of environmental quality, this paper aims to use the housing market to derive its implicit price and test whether these constituent elements of health and well-being are indeed capitalised into property prices and thus implicitly priced in the market place.

A considerable number of studies have used hedonic pricing models by incorporating spatial effects to assess the impact of air quality, noise and proximity to noise pollutants on property market pricing. This study presents a spatial analysis of air quality and noise pollution and their association with house prices, using 2,501 sale transactions for the period 2013. To assess the impact of the pollutants, three different spatial modelling approaches are used, namely, ordinary least squares using spatial dummies, a geographically weighted regression (GWR) and a spatial lag model (SLM).

The findings suggest that air quality pollutants have an adverse impact on house prices, which fluctuate across the urban area. The analysis suggests that the noise level does matter, although this varies significantly over the urban setting and varies by source.

Air quality and environmental noise pollution are important concerns for health and well-being. Noise impact seems to depend not only on the noise intensity to which dwellings are exposed but also on the nature of the noise source. This may suggest the presence of other externalities that arouse social aversion. This research presents an original study utilising advanced spatial modelling approaches. The research has value in further understanding the market impact of environmental factors and in providing findings to support local air zone management strategies, noise abatement and management strategies and is of value to the wider urban planning and public health disciplines.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate if and how firm performance in corporate social responsibility (CSR) is related to corporate payouts and how competition in product markets influences this relation.

Logit and Tobit regressions are used to estimate the relation between firm performance in CSR and corporate payouts.

The empirical results show that firm performance in CSR is positively related to the propensity and level of dividends, repurchases and total payouts (dividends plus repurchases). However, the positive relation between CSR performance and corporate payouts is significant only for firms that operate in low competition markets. In high competition markets, CSR performance does not seem to have any significant relation with corporate payouts.

This study uses MSCI social ratings data to measure net scores on CSR. There is no systematic conceptual reason for measuring social performance using MSCI social ratings. Future research should use other measures of social performance (e.g. Dow Jones Sustainability Index, Accountability Ratings and Global Reporting Initiative to estimate the relation between CSR and corporate payouts).

CSR firms are more likely to choose higher payouts when they operate in low competition markets.

This study contributes to the stream of research that evaluates the payout choices of CSR firms and competition in product markets. To the author's knowledge, this is the first study that documents the impact of market competition on the relation between firm performance in CSR and corporate payouts.