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The purpose of this study is to regard winter heating as a quasi-natural experiment to identify the possible causal effects of winter heating on population mobility. However, there are scant research studies examining the effect of atmospheric quality on population mobility. There also exists some relevant research studies on the relationship between population mobility and environmental degradation (Lu et al., 2018; Reis et al., 2018; Shen et al., 2018), and these studies exist still some deficiencies.

The notorious atmospheric quality problems caused by coal-fired heating in winter of northern China have an aroused widespread concern. However, the quantitative study on the effects on population mobility of winter heating is still rare. In this study, the authors regard the winter heating as a quasi-natural experiment, based on the of daily panel data of 58 cities of Tencent location Big Data in China from August 13 to December 30 in 2016 and August 16 to December 30 in 2017, and examine the impacts of winter heating on population mobility by utilizing a regression discontinuity method.

The findings are as follows, in general, winter heating significantly aggravates regional population mobility, but the impacts on population mobility among different cities are heterogeneous. Specifically, the effects of winter heating on population mobility is greater for cities with relatively good air quality, and the effects is also more obvious for big and medium-sized cities than that in small cities. In addition, different robustness tests, including continuity test, different bandwidth tests and alternative empirical model, are adopted to ensure the reliability of the conclusion. Finally, the authors put forward corresponding policy suggestions from the three dimensions of government, enterprises and residents.

First, regarding winter heating as a quasi-natural experiment, a regression discontinuity design method is introduced to investigate the relationship between winter heating and population mobility, which is helpful to avoid the estimation error caused by endogeneity. Second, the authors use the passenger travel “big data” based on the website of Tencent Location Big Data, which can effectively capture the daily characteristics of China's population mobility. Third, this study discusses the population mobility from the perspective of winter heating and researches population mobility before and after winter heating, which is helpful in enriching the research on population mobility.

Regression discontinuity (RD) design is a sophisticated quasi-experimental approach used for inferring causal relationships and estimating treatment effects. This paper aims to educate human resource development (HRD) researchers and practitioners on the implementation of RD design as an ethical alternative for making causal claims about training interventions.

To demonstrate the key features of RD designs, a simulated data set was generated from actual pre-test and post-test diversity training scores of 276 participants from three organizations in the USA. Parametric and non-parametric analyses were conducted, and graphical presentations were produced.

This study found that RD design can be used for evaluating training interventions. The results of the simulated data set yielded statistically significant results for the treatment effects, showing a positive causal effect of the training intervention. The analyses found support for the use of RD models with retrospective training intervention data, eliminating ethical concerns from random group assignment. The results of the non-parametric model provided evidence of the plausibility of finding the right balance between precision of estimates and generalizable results, making it an alternative to experimental designs.

This study contributes to the HRD field by explicating the implementation of a sophisticated, statistical tool to strengthen causal claims, contributing to an evidence-based HRD approach to practice and providing the R syntax for replicating the analyses contained herein.

Despite the growing number of scholarly articles being published in HRD journals, very few have used experimental or quasi-experimental design approaches. Therefore, a very limited amount of research has been devoted to uncovering causal relationships.

With an increasing number of Chinese private firms establishing primary level CPC Party committees, it is important to study the role of Party organizations in these firms. Using a nationwide survey of private firms in 2006, we empirically study the firm-level CCP committee's effect on workers' benefits and firm performance.

To overcome the potential endogeneity, we employ the regression discontinuity approach by utilizing the following rule from the Constitution of the CCP: Primary party committees should be established in any basic work unit with more than 3 full party members.

Our empirical results show that party committees in private firms have positive and statistically significant effects on many types of workers' benefits, including pension, unemployment insurance and workplace safety.

This paper highlights CCP committees as an important alternative mechanism in coordinating labor relationships in China when formal labor protecting institutions are weak.

The goal of the paper is to investigate how reservation wages of older unemployed welfare recipients change once they are no longer subject to standard job search requirements.

The authors apply a regression discontinuity design.

Consistent with theoretical predictions, the authors’ findings indicate that eliminating job search requirements will tend to increase reservation wages.

The results correspond to previous findings in the literature that monitoring leads to lower accepted wages and increased exits rates from unemployment, and that it may be a successful policy measure to keep older workers in the labor market.

Monitoring of job search effort has been shown to be an effective method of activating unemployed people, but little evidence has been found on the effect of activation measures on older workers.

Prior research on additions to the S & P 500 and the smaller MidCap 400 and SmallCap 600 indexes reach different conclusions regarding the key variables that explain the cross-section of announcement period abnormal returns. Most notable in this regard is that liquidity measures, long thought to be of importance, do not appear to explain abnormal returns of the S & P 500 when other factors are controlled for. By contrast, they do appear to matter for additions to the smaller stock indexes. To explore this difference, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the abnormal returns upon announcement that a stock will be added to the Nasdaq-100 Index in a cross-sectional manner, controlling for several possible alternative factors.

This paper analyzes abnormal returns upon announcement that a stock will be added to the Nasdaq-100 Index. The authors consider several possible sources of the positive price effects in a multivariate setting that controls simultaneously for measures of liquidity, arbitrage risk, operating performance and investor interest and awareness. The authors then analyze both trading volume and the bid-ask spreads. The authors finally examine analyst and investor interest, focussing on changes in analyst coverage.

The authors find that only liquidity variables are significant, but that factors representing feedback effects on the firm’s operations and level of managerial effort are not. The authors find that the average bid/ask spreads of stocks added to the Nasdaq-100 index are lower after the addition. The authors also find that the number of analysts following a stock increases significantly after addition, verifying increased analyst interest. Both forms of evidence are consistent with the hypothesis that the additions are associated with enhanced liquidity for the stocks.

The authors conclude that what does happen to a Nasdaq stock when it is announced that it will be added to the Nasdaq-100 Index is that more analysts are drawn to it, and its market liquidity is enhanced. The authors conclude that what does not happen is that there is no evidence of significant effects of enhanced managerial effort or operating performance associated with the inclusion. This difference is noteworthy because it suggests that a certification effect of additions to the S & P indexes associated with S & P’s selection process are unique to it and do not apply to the Nasdaq-100 Index additions based on market cap alone. The results provide indirect evidence on the existence and significance of the certification effect associated with additions to the S & P indexes.

One of the features of the New Zealand secondary schools system is that achievement closely reflects the taught curriculum. The National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) directly assesses student achievement on the secondary school curriculum through a combination of criterion‐based internal and external assessments. The nature of NCEA means school‐level results not only reflect student achievement but also the ability of leaders to organise, deliver, and monitor a relevant curriculum for students. This paper aims to describe how NCEA data were used to develop a simple but fair system to assess the relative performance of secondary schools.

No standardised measures of performance prior to Year 11 are available in New Zealand. Nor are student‐level data available. In the absence of these, multiple indicators of gross performance, added value and improvement over time were analysed using a schools‐of‐similar‐type methodology.

Results indicated that schools in the low and middle SES communities were more likely to be improving than others, but these improving schools were also more likely to be already high‐ or mid‐performing. Low‐performing schools were least likely to be improving.

Some advantages of this methodology are its ability to be utilised with any publicly available standards‐based achievement data, its validity as an indicator of leadership and organisational performance, and its ability to track school performance trends over time.

With the growing popularity of sports in Taiwan, the Sports Administration under the Ministry of Education introduced the Taiwan iSports Corporate Award campaign. This emphasised sports for employees and assisted in developing and supporting corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities in the sports industry through collaboration with firms, thereby enhancing their corporate image, facilitating the recruitment of high-quality employees and highlighting healthy human resources and brand value. Can sports-based CSR performance reflect firms' market values and reduce their market risks? This study regards Taiwan iSports Corporate Award announcements as important sports-based CSR disclosures and incorporates financial econometrics to examine the relationship between the announcement of sports-based CSR performance and firms' market values and risks.

An event study is conducted to clarify the reactions of the Taiwan iSports Corporate Award announcement event on the abnormal returns of award-winning firms during the 2016–2021 period, and a regression discontinuity design (RDD) model is employed to verify the robustness of the empirical results using the event study method.

Taiwan iSports Corporate Award announcements are not significantly reflected in the positive abnormal returns of award-winning firms. No causal relationship is found between the two. However, there are signs of relatively less systematic risks when investing in award-winning firms than in the market.

This study provides empirical evidence and managerial implications for Taiwan iSports Corporate Award-winning firms. It effectively enables business operators, sponsors or investors to understand the reactions of announcing sports-based CSR performance on the financial market and provides references for corporate organizations' CSR and sustainable development.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of school attendance on learning and child labour in Ghana.

The paper uses a nationally representative sample of household and individual data in 2005/06 and 2011/12 for the analysis. Regression discontinuity, the capitation grant in 2005 as exogenous, is used to estimate the impact of school attendance on child labour and learning outcomes.

The study found that children who were exposed to the capitation grant spent more hours in school and were more likely to enrol in primary school. School attendance was found to increase the likelihood to read and write a standardised test in English. Also, the improvement in children’s school attendance was found to enhance the likelihood of performing a written calculation. The authors could not find any evidence that school attendance affected child labour.

This research is the first causality analysis in sub-Saharan Africa that uses a nationally representative dataset to study the impact of school attendance on child labour and learning outcomes using a regression discontinuity estimator to deal with endogeneity issues.

The purpose of this paper is to isolate and evaluate the causal effect of the changes in eligibility criteria on labor force participation (LFP) and exit to retirement of the cohorts affected by the reform that canceled most of the early pensions in Poland in 2009. At the individual level the reform created a huge discontinuity in treatment of different generations.

The authors rely on Polish Labor Force Survey and employ regression discontinuity design to evaluate the change in participation subsequent to the eligibility reform among the treated cohorts.

The authors find a statistically significant, but economically small discontinuity at the timing of the reform. The placebo test shows no similar effects in earlier or later quarters. Yet, the pure treatment effects are insignificant in vast majority of the specifications.

There are some limitations of the data used in the research. It does not cover total population and some panel attrition can be expected. Authors also needed to cope with the lack of required details in survey questions. The main limitation of the method lies in the measurement of the immediate (short-term) effects while in many cases people require more time that 1–2 quarters for the decision after policy change.

The reduction of outflows to retirement was much less pronounced than could have been expected, largely due to already relatively lower propensity to retire early.

There are two main policy implications of the study. First, constraining the pension eligibility criteria for retirement are frequently opposed by social actors. It is often considered that early retirement is a privilege – awarded on a basis of occupation or even simply employment in an industry. In many countries – e.g. France, Italy, Germany – attempts to make the eligibility criteria more strict resulted in general strikes and Poland was no exception from this rule. If treatment effects of the large and radical eligibility reform are small in participation rates and pension take-up rates, then immediate fiscal effects are bound to be small as well, even if in the desirable direction. This may explain why – given the strong social resistance – in many countries eligibility reforms are delayed or narrowed in scope. Second, the economic rationale for strong social resistance to eligibility reforms builds on assuming either a relatively high valuation of leisure time after exiting the labor market or a relatively high subjective valuation of the unemployment risk after passing the early retirement age threshold. If leisure preference is overstated, reducing eligibility may be opposed as such, but eligibility alone is irrelevant for household decision making. Meanwhile, unemployment risk may be mitigated via alternative instruments, such as employment protection legislation, as is the case in Poland. Depending on a specific composition of the two factors in a given country, the effects of the eligibility reforms may be as high as in Switzerland or as low as in Poland.

First, the authors provide an analysis of discontinuities in transitions from activity to retirement, rather than focusing on the labor market status. The panel dimension of the data permits to observe directly the flows into retirement/inactivity, controlling for age and birth cohort. Second, the authors complement a pure discontinuity in cohort analysis with a fuzzy design, because in addition to age eligibility the authors also analyze the effects of changes in occupational eligibility. Third, the authors provide a benchmark for the estimates in the actual quarter of the reform by a series of placebo and conditional specifications. This allows to evaluate the (immediate) size and heterogeneity of the treatment effects. The authors find small effects of age eligibility reduction and effectively no effects of occupational eligibility. Hence, increased LFP of the elderly, observed even prior to the reform, seems to be driven by factors unrelated to early pension eligibility.

Using a regression discontinuity design in tandem with a difference-in-discontinuities analysis, the study finds that increasing the minimum wage reduces the employment probability of young males by 2.5–3.1 percentage points.

The authors exploit an age-specific minimum wage rule – which sets a lower minimum wage for workers of age 15 than the adult minimum wage paid to workers of age 16 and above – and its abolition to estimate the causal effect of a minimum wage increase on youth employment and education in Turkey.

The authors also document that, initially, the minimum wage increase does not lead to a major change in high school enrollment, while the likelihood of transitioning into “neither in employment nor in education and training” (NEET) category notably increases. However, in the medium term, the NEET effect is transitory; school enrollment increases over time and absorbs the negative employment effect.

The authors argue that policy effects have mostly been driven by demand-side forces rather than the supply side.