APARC Publications

A quarter century ago in a seminal paper, Hart, Shleifer and Vishny (NBER1996, QJE1997) developed a theory of the ‘Proper Scope of Government.’ Oliver Hart, 2016 Nobel Laureate, reflects on that framework and its place in economics, as well as the inspiration for his more recent work on norms, guiding principles, and contracts as reference points.

In one of the first studies of service sector robotics using establishment-level data, we study the impact of robots on staffing in Japanese nursing homes, using geographic variation in robot subsidies as an instrumental variable. We find that robot adoption increases employment by augmenting the number of care workers and nurses on flexible employment contracts, and decreases difficulty in staff retention. Robot adoption also reduces the monthly wages of regular nurses, consistent with reduced burden of care.

Health systems globally face increasing morbidity and mortality from chronic diseases, yet many - especially in low- and middle-income countries - lack strong chronic disease management in primary health care (PHC). We provide evidence on China’s efforts to promote PHC management using unique five-year panel data in a rural county, including health care utilization from medical claims and health outcomes from biomarkers.

Background. People with chronic conditions are disproportionately prone to be affected by the COVID-19 pandemic but there are limited data documenting this. We aimed to assess the health, psychosocial and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on people with chronic conditions in India.

During the past eight months of the global COVID pandemic, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been active in promoting China’s claims in the South China Sea.  This essay evaluates PLA statements, military exercises and operations, and deployment of relevant platforms and weapons in the South China Sea during this period. I leverage Chinese-language sources in addition to my own operational knowledge from over a decade of military experience to provide greater context for these activities.

Yong Suk Lee and Charles Eesley examine how university entrepreneurship programs affect entrepreneurial activity using a unique entrepreneurship‐focused survey of Stanford alumni. OLS regressions find a positive relationship between program participation and entrepreneurship activities. However, endogeneity hinders causal interpretation. They utilize the fact that the entrepreneurship programs were implemented at the school level.

India’s COVID-19 lockdown is widely believed to have disrupted critical health services, but its effect on non-COVID health outcomes is largely unknown. Comparing mortality trends among dialysis patients in the eight months around the lockdown with the previous year, we document a 64% increase in mortality between March and May 2020 and an estimated 22-25% total excess mortality through July 2020. The mortality increase is greater among females and disadvantaged groups.

Main Argument

Southeast Asia is arguably the most diverse region in the world. Accordingly, rather than addressing the exact same question, the contributors to this volume have — as experts on Southeast Asia-China relations — explored the matters they see as most important and most deserving of exploration and exposure. After the editor’s introduction, the chapters proceed in pairs. Each pair and a closing chapter cover a distinctive theme in Southeast Asia’s interactions with China.

**See our dedicated book page for more information about the book, including praise, reviews, and author commentary.**

South Korea (hereafter Korea) is following global trends as it slides toward a “democratic depression.” Both the spirit of democracy and actual liberal-democratic standards are under attack. The symptoms of democratic decline are increasingly hard to miss, and they are appearing in many corners of Korean society, the hallmarks of zero-sum politics in which opponents are demonized, democratic norms are eroded, and political life grows ever more polarized.

Accurate future projections of population health are imperative to plan for the future healthcare needs of a rapidly aging population. Multistate‐transition microsimulation models, such as the U.S. Future Elderly Model, address this need but require high‐quality panel data for calibration. We develop an alternative method that relaxes this data requirement, using repeated cross‐sectional representative surveys to estimate multistate‐transition contingency tables applied to Japan's population.

To explore how business leaders and entrepreneurs in China responded to the COVID-19 lockdown and how they’re planning for the future, the China Program conducted a survey in coordination with the Stanford Center at Peking University and Stanford Business School alumni Christopher Thomas and Xue (Xander) Wu.

To explore how business leaders and entrepreneurs in China responded to the COVID-19 lockdown and how they’re planning for the future, the China Program conducted a survey in coordination with the Stanford Center at Peking University and Stanford Business School alumni Christopher Thomas and Xue (Xander) Wu.

Effective as of July 1, 2018, South Korea set a new cap on employees’ weekly working hours, decreasing the maximum number from 68 to 52. In this study, we comprehensively analyze the effectiveness of the law’s implementation by observing changes in work time, health status, health care utilization, health behavior, monthly expenses, and satisfaction between pre- and post-implementation periods (2014–2017 vs. 2019). We find evidence of both intended and unintended consequences—and, in this last category, some are beneficial and some not.

COVID-19 presents humanity with not just a health crisis but also a governance crisis as leaders around the globe confront the challenges of stemming the spread of the virus. Various governments have responded in various ways to slow the transmission of the virus. Ideally, the leaders of a country should approach the crisis with a two-pronged attack. The first is to flatten the epidemic curve (epi curve), which is simply a graphical representation of the number of cases and date of onset of the illness, and the second is to raise or strengthen the capacity of the health system. 

The intention to pay for human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination among women of childbearing age in Vietnam, where cervical cancer remains a significant public health concern, has been mostly lacking. To examine this issue, we conducted a cross-sectional study of 807 pregnant women in an urban and a rural district (Dong Da and Ba Vi) of Hanoi, Vietnam. The vast percentage of our respondents expressed a firm intention to vaccinate, especially women in rural areas (over 90.0%).