Tinbergen (1975) wanted to reduce inequality through lowering the skill premium by increasing the supply of skilled workers relative to unskilled workers. Tinbergen’s concern with growing inequality between skilled and unskilled workers is as relevant today as it was back in the 1970s. Currently, many Western countries are confronted with sharply increasing skill premiums. The dominant explanation for this phenomenon is skill-biased technological change which causes the demand for skilled workers to increase more rapidly than the supply of skilled workers (Katz and Autor, 1999). In Tinbergen’s (1975) terminology: the race between education and technological development is currently lost by schooling.
We investigate the distribution of trading volume across different venues after a company lists abroad. In most cases, after an initial blip, foreign trading declines rapidly to extremely low levels. However, there is considerable cross-sectional variation in the persistence and magnitude of foreign trading. The ratio between foreign and domestic trading volume is higher for smaller, more export and high-tech oriented companies. It is also higher for companies that cross-list on markets with lower trading costs and better insider trading protection. Domestic trading increases around the cross-listing, and afterwards is negatively correlated with past foreign trading activity. This accords with the “flow-back hypothesis” that declining foreign trading is associated with the gravitational pull of the home market.
Several companies list their shares not only on their domestic exchange but also on foreign stock exchanges –– a fact for which a variety of reasons have been offered and explored (see Karolyi, 1998, Pagano, Röell and Zechner 2002, and Sarkissian and Schill 2004, among others). A motive often advanced for this decision is that a foreign listing facilitates trading by foreign investors and therefore tends to attract them into the ranks of the company’s shareholders. If this is true, then cross-listings should be followed by reasonably large and persistent trading activity in the foreign market.
Over the past twenty years, the United States has experienced divergent trends in birth outcomes, with some key indicators improving and others worsening. In that same time, the level of attention that the federal and state governments have focused on publicly sponsored health insurance for pregnant women has fluctuated, with major efforts to expand health insurance coverage and access to prenatal care concentrated in the early years of this period, and considerably less activity in recent years as child health insurance expansions have been in the policy spotlight.
The last two decades have also witnessed major changes within health care delivery and financing systems, with expansion in the use of managed care as well as new family planning initiatives that target low-income women of childbearing age. Given these trends, the March of Dimes asked the Urban Institute, with its partner the National Academy for State Health Policy, to assess the current “state of the art” of state Medicaid program efforts to reach out to and enroll pregnant women into coverage. The results of this assessment are summarized below.
