This week in research #72

Here's what caught my eye in research over the past week:

• Bauer, Lakdawalla, and Reif develop a theoretical model for valuing health and longevity improvements, and show in calibrated simulation results that sick adults are willing to pay nearly twice as much per quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) to reduce mortality risk as healthy adults, and that reducing the risk of serious illness is valued similarly to reducing the risk of mild illness

In some exciting news, the latest issue of Australasian Journal of Regional Studies (AJRS) has just been published (although it is backdated to December 2024, as for the second year in a row we faced some unexpected issues with completing the issue). This issue has four papers, as well as the editorial:

• Shakir uses a microsimulation model to analyse the impact of two housing programmes that aim to help low- and moderate-income families into homeownership in Australia, finding that the “First home guarantee scheme” (FHGS) increases rates of home ownership by more than the “Help to buy scheme” (HTBS), and attributes the difference to the focus of the HTBS on younger and lower-income households (this paper won the John Dickinson Memorial Award for the best paper published in AJRS in 2024)
• Mangioni et al. looks at how residential land values and housing prices across regional Australia have changed over the past five years, and thematically analyses submissions to the NSW Regional Housing Taskforce 2022, identifying that a shift towards lifestyle living and second dwelling ownership, and a change in workforce demand have increased the demand for regional housing
• Sarkar and Tigga use bootstrap data envelopment analysis to evaluate the efficiency of health expenditures in improving child mortality outcomes across 127 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), and find that 45 percent of LMICs exhibit decreasing returns to scale, meaning that increases in health inputs will generate less than proportionate reductions in child mortality
• Nguyen looks at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the financial services sector across four regions of the US, and finds that before the pandemic, labour determined the revenue differences between regions, while during the pandemic, local, state, and federal taxes played a greater role