A detailed review of the education sector in Australia as in the data provided by the 2006 edition of the OECD's annual publication, 'Education at a Glance' is presented. While the data has shown that in almost all OECD countries educational attainment levels are on the rise, with countries showing impressive gains in university qualifications, it also reveals that a large of share of young people still do not complete secondary school, which remains a baseline for successful entry into the labour market.

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Education at a Glance

Countries in recession experience high unemployment rates and a decline in living conditions, which, it has been suggested, negatively influences their populations’ health. The present review examines the recent evidence of the possible association between economic recessions and mental health outcomes. Literature review of records identified through Medline, PsycINFO, SciELO, and EBSCO Host. Only original research papers, published between 2004 and 2014, peer-reviewed, non-qualitative research, and reporting on associations between economic factors and proxies of mental health were considered. One-hundred-one papers met the inclusion criteria. The evidence was consistent that economic recessions and mediators such as unemployment, income decline, and unmanageable debts are significantly associated with poor mental wellbeing, increased rates of common mental disorders, substance-related disorders, and suicidal behaviours. On the basis of a thorough analysis of the selected investigations, we conclude that periods of economic recession are possibly associated with a higher prevalence of mental health problems, including common mental disorders, substance disorders, and ultimately suicidal behaviour. Most of the research is based on cross-sectional studies, which seriously limits causality inferences. Conclusions are summarised, taking into account international policy recommendations concerning the cost-effective measures that can possibly reduce the occurrence of negative mental health outcomes in populations during periods of economic recession.

/pdf/mental-health-outcomes-in-times-of-economic-recession-a-21rictdx6w.pdf

Mental health outcomes in times of economic recession: a systematic literature review.

Fixed effects estimators of panel models can be severely biased because of the well-known incidental parameters problem We show that this bias can be reduced by using a panel jackknife or an analytical bias correction motivated by large T We give bias corrections for averages over the fixed effects, as well as model parameters We find large bias reductions from using these approaches in examples We consider asymptotics where T grows with n, as an approximation to the properties of the estimators in econometric applications We show that if T grows at the same rate as n the fixed effects estimator is asymptotically biased, so that asymptotic confidence intervals are incorrect, but that they are correct for the panel jackknife We show T growing faster than n1/3 suffices for correctness of the analytic correction, a property we also conjecture for the jackknife

Jackknife and analytical bias reduction for nonlinear panel models

[Litiere, S.; Alonso, A.; Molenberghs, G.] Univ Hasselt, Interuniv Inst Biostat & Stat Bioinformat, Diepenbeek, Belgium. [Molenberghs, G.] Katholieke Univ Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.

The impact of a misspecified random-effects distribution on the estimation and the performance of inferential procedures in generalized linear mixed models (vol 27, pg 3125, 2008)

Background: The impact of unemployment and precarious employment on the health of young people is not well understood. However, according to social causation, higher socio-economic positions and th...

How unemployment and precarious employment affect the health of young people: A scoping study on social determinants:

The considerable increase of non-standard labor contracts, unemployment and inactivity rates raises the question of whether job insecurity and the lack of job opportunities affect physical and mental well-being differently from being employed with an open-ended contract. In this paper we offer evidence on the relationship between self-reported health and the employment status in Italy using the Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW); another aim is to investigate whether these potential inequalities have changed with the recent economic downturn (time period 2006-2010). We estimate an ordered logit model with self-reported health status (SRHS) as response variable based on a fixed-effects approach which has certain advantages with respect to the random-effects formulation: the fixed-effects nature of the model also allows us to solve the problems of incidental parameters and non-random selection of individuals into different labor market categories. We find that temporary workers, first-job seekers and unemployed individuals are worse off than permanent employees, especially males, young workers, and those living in the center and south of Italy. Health inequalities between permanent workers and job seekers widen over time for male and young workers, and arise in the north of the country as well.

https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/55788/1/MPRA_paper_55788.pdf

Employment status and perceived health condition: longitudinal data from Italy

The considerable increase of non-standard labor contracts, unemployment and inactivity rates raises the question of whether job insecurity and the lack of job opportunities affect physical and mental well-being differently from being employed with an open-ended contract. In this paper we offer evidence on the relationship between Self Reported Health Status (SRHS) and the employment status in Italy using the Survey on Household Income and Wealth; another aim is to investigate whether these potential inequalities have changed with the recent economic downturn (time period 2006-2010). We estimate an ordered logit model with SRHS as response variable based on a fixed-effects approach which has certain advantages with respect to the random-effects formulation and has not been applied before with SRHS data. The fixed-effects nature of the model also allows us to solve the problems of incidental parameters and non-random selection of individuals into different labor market categories. We find that temporary workers, unemployed and inactive individuals are worse off than permanent employees, especially males, young workers, and those living in the center and south of Italy. Health inequalities between unemployed/inactive and permanent workers widen over time for males and young workers, and arise in the north of the country as well.

We illustrate the R package cquad for conditional maximum likelihood estimation of the quadratic exponential (QE) model proposed by Bartolucci and Nigro (2010) for the analysis of binary panel data. The package also allows us to estimate certain modified versions of the QE model, which are based on alternative parametrizations, and it includes a function for the pseudo-conditional likelihood estimation of the dynamic logit model, as proposed by Bartolucci and Nigro (2012). We also illustrate a reduced version of this package that is available in Stata. The use of the main functions of this package is based on examples using labor market data.

cquad: An R and Stata Package for Conditional Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Dynamic Binary Panel Data Models

We propose a test for state dependence in binary panel data under the dynamic logit model with individual covariates. For this aim, we rely on a quadratic exponential model in which the association between the response variables is accounted for in a different way with respect to more standard formulations. The level of association is measured by a single parameter that may be estimated by a conditional maximum likelihood approach. Under the dynamic logit model, the conditional estimator of this parameter converges to zero when the hypothesis of absence of state dependence is true. This allows us to implement a Wald test for this hypothesis which may be very simply performed and attains the nominal significance level under any structure of the individual covariates. Through an extensive
simulation study, we find that our test has good finite sample properties and it is more robust to the presence of (autocorrelated) covariates in the model specification in comparison with other existing testing procedures for state dependence. The test is illustrated by an application based on data coming from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.

https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/48233/1/MPRA_paper_48233.pdf

Testing for state dependence in binary panel data with individual covariates

http://docs.dises.univpm.it/web/quaderni/pdf/397.pdf

Claudia Pigini

Papers

Employment status and perceived health condition: longitudinal data from Italy

Employment status and perceived health condition: longitudinal data from Italy

cquad: An R and Stata Package for Conditional Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Dynamic Binary Panel Data Models

Testing for state dependence in binary panel data with individual covariates

A simple and effective misspecification test for the double-hurdle model ☆