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In this paper, we evaluate the preventive behaviors for middle age people in Taiwan through survey wave comparisons for the period 1993–2007. We first investigate the determinants of preventive behavior and how their effects change over time by using the seemingly unrelated bivariate probit model. Evidence shows that income and education levels do have a significantly positive relation with preventive behavior models, while reported poor health, inpatient and outpatient services, and regions are essential determinants of preventive behaviors. Then, we investigate the impact of Taiwan's National Health Insurance (NHI) on preventive behaviors based on the difference-in-difference (DID) analysis. The results show a lack of evidence for the moral hazard effect on preventive care and regular exercise panels over the period 1993–2007. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research hand-collects data on family CEOs of family-controlled firms (named family management) to investigate the relation between family management and corporate bond spreads in Taiwan with a sample of 1,660 firms for the period 1996–2015. We show new evidence on the impact of financial constraints and CEOs' characteristics on corporate bond spreads. Results find an impact of family management on increasing corporate bond spreads after considering firms' and bonds' characteristics. Moreover, the effect of family management on higher bond spreads is offset by firms under foreign or government ownership, as interacting family management with such ownership effect would give outside investors more assurance and protect minority shareholders from exploitation. Finally, firms' financial constraints and CEOs' weak characteristics lead to a detrimental impact of family management on bond spreads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Should firms decrease or increase their debt capacity after professional CEO succession? Examining a sample of all publicly traded firms from 1991 to 2016 in Taiwan, this research finds that firms with professional CEO successors tend to raise less debt and consider the succession of professional managers to be more conservative because they are afraid of being monitored more severely. From the perspectives of firms' characteristics, those with professional CEO successors and high cash holdings and investment levels are more likely to increase their debt capacity, while those of a larger size and higher post-succession profitability volatility decrease their ability at raising debt. Finally, we hand-collect data and develop a novel method to identify the real founders and reconfirm our empirical evidence. Our findings present financial implications for boards of directors which they can evaluate firms' cash holdings, investment level, firm size, and profit volatility before deciding on whether to name a CEO successor to take over their firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article employs second-generation random coefficient (RC) modeling to investigate the time-varying behavior and the predictability of the money demand function in Taiwan over the period from 1982Q1 to 2006Q4. The RC procedure deals with some of the limitations of previous studies, such as unknown functional forms, omitted variables, measurement errors, additive error terms, and the correlations between explanatory variables and their coefficients. Our main findings are as follows. First, the empirical results indicate that the values of the elasticities in the RC estimation are significantly different from those in other studies, because of the use of coefficient drivers. Second, by observing the time-varying behavior of the coefficients, we find some specific points in our time profile of coefficients; that is, we can make an association with real events occurring in Taiwan, such as the financial liberalization after 1989 and the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998. Finally, we compare the predicted values via the time intervals and different specifications and find that we should adapt different specifications of the RC model to estimate each interval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of asymmetry and nonlinearity in the context of economic voting was proposed as far back as the 1970s. The aim of this paper is to revisit the economic voting phenomenon by investigating the asymmetric cointegration between government popularity and economic conditions in Taiwan over the period from 1992 to 2007. We employ an advanced threshold autoregressive model and find strong evidence of threshold cointegration relationships between our observed variables. Furthermore, an asymmetric error correction model indicates that voters use different economic indicators to evaluate government popularity in different regimes and the speed of adjustment to the long-run equilibrium is more rapid in the lower regime and slower in the higher regime. Finally, the evidence shows that the economic voting behavior is supported by the presence of the threshold effects. Based on the nonlinear, asymmetric and threshold effects, we are able to provide several critical implications concerning the governance of the incumbent political party, particularly, in relation to the promotion of economic policy aimed at improving its popularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the stationarity properties and long-run relationship of Taiwan’s regional house prices from 1993Q1 to 2009Q2. It applies the recent unit-root test of the panel seemingly unrelated regressions augmented Dickey–Fuller (SURADF) test developed by Breuer et al. The empirical results illustrate that Taiwan’s regional house prices are a mixture of stationary and non-stationary processes, showing that the stationarity properties of these prices are dependent on the structure and properties of the various regions. Secondly, the findings of the cointegration test provide substantive evidence for a long-run relationship among all regions except Taipei City, implying a diffusion of regional house prices among each regional market except Taipei City. Finally, the results of the weak exogeneity test indicate that uni-directional causality relationships exist for three regions—Taipei County, Taoyuan-Hsinchu and Tainan-Kaohsiung—towards Taichung. The regional house price efficiently diffuses itself among these regions, caused by a much smaller public housing sector and the pre-sale system in Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The secularization thesis is based on the idea that a country becomes more secular as it becomes richer and more industrialized. In order to investigate whether this hypothesis is valid, we examine the relationship between religion in Taiwan and economic development across 23 counties by adopting the panel data approach for the period 1998 to 2003. We select six religious activity proxy variables and five economic development variables in a cross-county panel data framework. The evidence indicates that the ratio of females to males has a significantly positive effect and that the literacy rate and population density each have a significantly negative effect on the religious variables. Finally, except for the Christian culture, the unemployment rate has a positive effect on the religious variables. Our findings thus support the view that the religious secularization hypothesis is valid in Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the importance of political expenditures as the primary determinants of vote shares for the Taiwan 2004 legislator campaigns with multi-member districts. Our main findings are as follows. First, advertising spending, candidates in the same party as the mayor, the education level of voters and the degree of race competition had a strong effect on the candidates' vote shares but not on economic performance. Second, the advertising spending of both incumbents and challengers had a significant effect on vote shares, but the effects were greater for challengers than for incumbents. Third, the two major political camps, that is, the Pan-Blue and Pan-Green, showed that spending exerts a corresponding influence on vote shares. Fourth, we also discovered that the spending coefficients for the winners were larger than those for the losers. Finally, the logit model demonstrates the result of the impact of advertising expenditures on the predicted probability of winning the election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using time-series data for Taiwan's agricultural sector and with the government's public investment in the agricultural sector serving as a proxy variable for nonfarm current inputs aside from the original labour and capital input variables usually taken into consideration, this article examines the relationship between public investment in agriculture (public investment/land) and agricultural land productivity (output/land) in Taiwan. Our main findings are as follows. First, the cointegration test reveals that public investment in agriculture and the productivity of agricultural land exhibit a significant positive relationship in the long run, where the elasticity of land productivity in relation to public investment in agriculture is 0.55. Second, when controlling for endogenous structural breaks, the long-run equilibrium relationship for the productivity of the agricultural land model is still supported. Third, the results of the weak exogeneity test indicate that a causal relationship exists in the long run between public investment in agriculture and the productivity of land, indicating that the growth of the agricultural sector must in the long run be based on the government's public investment in the agricultural sector. Furthermore, as the agricultural sector grows, this growth is able to stimulate public investment on the part of the government in the agricultural sector, so that the two affect each other. Fourth, from the short-run error correction model estimation, it is found that public investment in agriculture is a major means of adjusting for the disequilibria that occur within the system. Fifth, in the short run, the unidirectional causal relationship in terms of the productivity of agricultural land on public investment in agriculture is established, otherwise it is not established. From this it can be seen that in the short run, the government is unable to reveal the effectiveness of its public investment in agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies on the nonlinearity of the money demand function focus only on short-run dynamics and assume that the long-run cointegrated relationship is linear, which, according to economic theory, need not be the case. Thus, this article focuses on the variables that make up the long-run money demand function in Taiwan and their determinants by using the cointegrating smoothing transition regression (CSTR) test developed by Choi and Saikkonen (2004). This model is more general than the previous STR model in that it may contain several transition functions and has more than a single transition variable. We demonstrate our empirical results for robustness and adopt two models to ascertain whether or not the stock price should be added as a determinant of the demand for money. Our empirical results show the existence of a stationary long-run relationship among real money demand functions for the period from 1976Q1 to 2005Q1 and the robustness test covers the 1980Q1-2005Q1 period in Taiwan. By comparing the two types of model, we find more evidences of a long-run nonlinear cointegrated relationship for the money demand function when we consider stock prices as one of its variables. Finally, the empirical results give rise to some critical policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper considers the possibility of both a linear effect and nonlinear effect of energy consumption on economic growth, using data for the period 1955–2003 in Taiwan. We find evidence of a level-dependent effect between the two variables. Allowing for a nonlinear effect of energy consumption growth sheds new light on the explanation of the characteristics of the energy-growth link. We also provide evidence that the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth in Taiwan is characterized by an inverse U-shape. Some previous studies support the view that energy consumption may promote economic growth. However, the conclusion drawn from the empirical findings suggests that such a relationship exists only where there is a low level of energy consumption in Taiwan. We show that a threshold regression provides a better empirical model than the standard linear model and that policy-makers should seek to capture economic structures associated with different stages of economic growth. It is also worth noting that the energy consumption threshold was reached in the case of Taiwan in the world energy crises periods of 1979 and 1982. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The Armey curve developed by [Armey, R. (1995). The freedom revolution. Washington, DC: Rognery Publishing Co.] and [Vedder, R. K., & Gallaway, L. E. (1998). Government size and economic growth. Joint Economic Committee] demonstrates that there is a non-linear relationship between government size and economic growth. In order to search for the threshold effects, this paper employs [Hansen, B. E. (2000). Sample splitting and threshold estimation. Econometrica, 68(3), 575–603] threshold regression model to test whether the Armey curve exists in Taiwan, allowing for endogenous government size thresholds. We apply the two-sector production function developed by [Ram, R. (1986). Government size and economic growth: A new framework and some evidence from cross-section and time-series data. American Economic Review, 76(1), 191–203] to construct the threshold regression model. Three classifications of government size are tested in sequence as threshold variables. The result indicates that all three classifications of government size have a threshold effect and that a non-linear relationship of the Armey curve exists in Taiwan. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper examines the lead-lag relationships and the dynamic linkages among four regional house price indices in Taiwan. We employ the Johansen cointegration technique, Toda and Yamamoto’s Granger causality test, the generalized impulse response approach, and variance decomposition analysis to find out the extent and the magnitude of their relationships. The estimated long-run relationship between regional house prices appears to have remained stable throughout the sample period. Our empirical results show a bidirectional relationship between house prices in the most important economic center, Taipei City, and its suburban area, Taipei County. However, there are no causalities of house prices between Taipei City and other megacities in Taiwan. The mutual impacts of the shocks between house prices in Taipei City and Taipei County are significantly positive, while these impacts on Kaohsiung City, far from Taipei City, are insignificant. Finally, the results of the generalized impulse response approach indicate that the house prices indices of Taipei City are the most exogenous while those for Taipei County are the most endogenous. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]