How COVID-19 Changed the Culture of Work

The COVID-19 pandemic created a historic disruption to contemporary society including how, where, and when we work. Given the ubiquity of human capital, most if not every society was crippled by the displacement of the workforce with historic impacts on productivity; GDP in the UK will be at its lowest in 300 years, requiring the largest peacetime debt accumulation in history. Stimulus packages occurred in many countries as a result of the inability to access the workplace, particularly school, restaurant, or travel. Airline travel in the US fell by a precipitous 93% at its nadir, the cruise industry collapsed, and trans-national crossing all but ceased to exist. Along with the freeze in people movement, supply chains were disrupted including components necessary for both treatment and vaccination. The shrinkage of the world we had grown up with became the catalyst for the first pandemic in a century.

Defence Spending and Sovereign Debt in Greece: A Long-Term Historical Perspective

The paper sets out to examine the military spending-public debt nexus in the case of Greece. Unlike previous studies that exclusively focus their analyses in the post-WWII period, the empirical investigation conducted herein covers almost the entire two hundred years of the modern Greek state. The estimations using an ARDL framework cover the period 1848–2018 as well as sub-periods therein. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to approach this issue in the case of Greece with such a long-term perspective. In broad terms, the findings do not unearth a statistically traceable effect of defence expenditures on public debt accumulation. The results indicate that this was very much driven by debt dynamics and the need to draw funds to service existing loans. This finding is consistent across both the entire period under scrutiny here as well as the various sub-periods.

Unpaid Tuition Balances at Community Colleges: An Exploratory Analysis Delinquent Tuition Debt and Graduation

The rising cost of higher education has led to increased tuition costs for students and their families, forcing more students to secure larger amounts of debt to finance their educational pursuits. Although scholars have explored how student loan debt accumulation influences higher education persistence and graduation, an unexplored area of higher education finance and debt is the relationship between unpaid tuition balances on community college student graduation. This analysis attempts to illuminate this gap by utilizing a unique institutional dataset with data from the National Student Clearinghouse to analyze the relationship between unpaid tuition balances and postsecondary graduation for community college students. Results suggest that having an outstanding tuition balance dramatically decreases the likelihood of graduation 3 years out from the unpaid balance. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

Macroeconomic Determinants of External Debt Accumulation in Ethiopia: An ARDL Bound Testing Approach

This study attempts to explore the major macroeconomic determinants of external debt stock growth in Ethiopia prompted by a continuous increase in government external borrowing over the period 1981-2018. For this purpose, the study employed the ARDL bound testing approach and all the necessary time series diagnostic tests were conducted. The long run model estimation result revealed that per capita GDP growth has a positive and significant effect on the country’s external debt stock. The result also revealed that the budget deficit and political instability put a significant upward pressure on the external debt stock growth of the country both in the short run and long run. Consistent with some existing empirical evidence, the study revealed negative and significant influence of openness and infrastructure development on the external debt stock growth. Consequently, the government should embark on prudent borrowing to achieve structural transformation.

Age and Support for Public Debt Reduction

Many scholars and policymakers see the continuing rise of debt burdens in the advanced industrialized world as the product of aging populations and increasing dependency ratios. In fact, many prominent theoretical models of government debt accumulation -- often used to justify fiscal rules and austerity measures -- make explicit assumptions that individuals will have different preferences for debt reduction as they age. While such models have been influential, the fundamental assumption regarding the relationship between age and preferences for growing debt has not been test empirically. Using a decade's worth of data from the Eurobarometer survey across 33 countries, we find that age has a modest, non-linear impact on concern for national debt burdens. In general, the middle-aged show the most concern for debt reduction, while the young and the old are less likely to view reducing government debt as a policy priority. Notably, the relationship is strongest in countries with more generous old-age benefits.

Patterns of oxygen debt repayment in cardiogenic shock patients sustained with extracorporeal life support: a retrospective study

Cardiogenic shock is the most frequent shock in cardiac intensive care, and cardiac dysfunction and sever hypoxia are often seen in critically ill patients. Inadequate organ and tissue perfusion and hypoxia result in anaerobic metabolism with hyperlactatemia and oxygen debt accumulation. However, the role of accumulated oxygen debt in course of cardiogenic shock and hypoxia is not clearly described. Here we first described the existence of several patterns of oxygen debt repayment in cardiogenic shock patients maintained by extracorporeal life support system. Oxygen debt was computed from the lactate concentration at five time points, covering the first 26 hours of ECLS. The patterns as the basic pathophysiological processes are independent from the cause of primary insult. The groups of patients classified to the specific patterns differed by survival rate from 51.5% to only 4.6%. It is very important that initial class does not predetermine the fate and can change in the course of treatment due to ‘between clusters migration’. We believe that our finding of patterns of oxygen debt repayment in cardiogenic shock patients may offer a new insights for a more rational, goal-directed treatment of such highly morbid conditions as hypoxia and cardiogenic shock.