This paper explores the interactions between the risk of food insecurity and the decision to health insure in the Palestinian Territories. The risk of adverse health conditions is insurable; the risk of food insecurity is a background risk and no market insurance exists. The vulnerability to food...

This paper explores behavioural changes resulting from the presence of a back-ground risk. Due to markets incompleteness, not all risks are insurable. The literature suggests that, according to the structure of preferences, agents bearing a background uninsurable risk are less willing to bear...

This paper explores behavioural changes resulting from the presence of a background risk. Due to markets incompleteness, not all risks are insurable. The literature suggests that, according to the structure of preferences, agents bearing a background uninsurable risk are less willing to bear...

In this paper, we assess the effects of the Italian labour market reforms which began in 2001 and which led to widespread deployment of temporary work contracts. Using a hitherto unexploited administrative dataset of work histories for the period 2003-2010, we estimate transition probabilities...

We propose a causal analysis of the mother’s educational level on the health status of the newborn, in terms of gestational weeks and weight. The analysis is based on a finite mixture structural equation model, the parameters of which have a causal interpretation. The model is applied to a...

This work examines the socio-economic determinants of body weight in the United Kingdom by means of two recent waves from the British Household Panel Survey. While the patterns of overweight and obesity have drawn economists’ interest in recent years, our main contribution is to examine the...

In this paper we examine the role of relative food prices in determining the recent increase in body weight in Italy. Cross-price elasticities of unhealthy and healthy foods estimated by a demand system provide a consistent framework to evaluate substitution effects, when a close association is...

The predictions that economic freedom is beneficial in reducing corruption have not been found to be universally robust in empirical studies. The present work reviews this relationship by using firms' data in a cross-country survey and argues that approaches using aggregated macro data have not...

Evaluation of corrupt activities is incrementally based on administration of questionnaires to firms in business, and generally involves a large number of items. Data collected by questionnaires of this type can be analyzed by Latent Class (LC) models in order to classify firms into homogeneous...

The debate over the economic effects of military spending continues to develop, with no consensus, but a deepening understanding of the issues and limitations of previous work. A recent survey has suggested that the inclusion of post Cold War data has tended to make finding a negative effect...