An 82-year-old male Bangkokian with hypertension, diabetes mellitus, end-stage renal disease, and coronary artery disease for many years, was hospitalized due to deterioration of a 3-day influenza-like-illness with one-day chest oppression and respiratory failure. At the emergency room, oxygen saturation was 79% on room air Chest X-ray revealed bilateral diffuse pulmonary infiltrates. He was in...

We explore the effects of local ethnic and religious diversity on individual donations to private charities. Using 10-year neighborhood-level panels derived from personal tax records in Canada, we find that diversity has a detrimental effect on charitable donations. A 10 percentage point increase in ethnic diversity reduces donations by 14%, and a 10 percentage point increase in religious diver...

This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. Using available data on the distribution of HIV/AIDS prevalen...

The spread of high-speed Internet epitomizes the digital revolution, affecting several aspects of our life. Using German panel data, we test whether the availability of broadband Internet influences fertility choices in a low-fertility setting, which is well-known for the difficulty to combine work and family life. We exploit a strategy devised by Falck et al. (2014) to obtain causal estimates ...

Immigrants and Demography: Marriage, Divorce, and Fertility This is a draft chapter for B. R. Chiswick and P. W. Miller (eds.) Handbook on the Economics of International Migration. It discusses some of the data and methodological challenges to estimating trends in family formation and union dissolution as well as fertility among immigrants, and examines the evidence collected from the main stud...

Did the 2007 Legal Arizona Workers Act Reduce the State’s Unauthorized Immigrant Population? We test for an effect of Arizona’s 2007 Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA) on the proportion of the state population characterized as foreign-born, as non-citizen, and as non-citizen Hispanic. We use the synthetic control method to select a group of states against which the population trends of Arizona ca...

Minority and Immigrant Homeownership Experience: Evidence from the 2009 American Housing Survey Using data from the 2009 American Housing Survey and Hazard Model, this paper provides empirical evidence that the homeownership experience during the recent housing boom and housing bust was not homogenous across all groups in the U.S. The recent deterioration of underwriting practices and a boom in...

Slower growth of the labour force and an increase in old-age dependency will reduce the growth of aggregrate output and output per capita in many developed countries. However, a major question is whether there is any systematic link between demographics and the productivity of those who will still be active during the up-coming period of demographic ageing. As productivity is difficult to inves...

Upcoming new regulation on regulatory required solvency capital for insurers will be predominantly based on a one-year Value-at-Risk measure. This measure aims at covering the risk of the variation in the projection year as well as the risk of changes in the best estimate projection for future years. This paper addresses the issue how to determine this Value-at-Risk for longevity and mortality ...

The United Nations Millennium Development Goals have highlighted the usefulness of the infant mortality rate as a measure of progress in improving neonatal health care services, and more broadly as an indicator of basic health care overall. However, prior research has shown that infant mortality rates can be underestimated dramatically, depending on a particular country’s live birth criterion, ...