This quantitative study investigates the effect of certificate-of-need (CON) regulation on the quality of care in the nursing home industry. It uses county-level demographic data from the 48 contiguous US states that are extracted from the American Community Survey (ACS) and cover the years 2012, 2013, and 2014. In doing so, it employs a new set of service quality variables captured from a variety of county-level data sources. Instrumental variables results indicate that health survey scores for nursing homes that are computed by healthcare professionals are about 18–24% lower, depending on the type of nursing home under consideration, in states with CON regulation. We also find that the presence of CON regulation leads to a substitution of lower-quality certified nursing assistant care for higher-quality licensed practical nurse care, regardless of the type of nursing home under consideration.

This study intends to examine the influence of trade openness on economic growth in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia including government consumption and labor force as control variables. Using time-series yearly data from 1985 to 2019, the study applies the Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) cointegration regression and the Toda-Yamamoto (T-Y) Granger causality check to achieve the objective of the study. The ARDL model estimation discloses the positive contribution of trade openness and labor force to economic growth in the short and long run as well; government consumption causes economic growth positively in the short-run, while in the long its impact is insignificant run. The T-Y Granger causality test outcomes have demonstrated several bidirectional and unidirectional causalities. There are three feedback relations; “trade openness-economic growth,” “economic growth-government consumption,” and “government consumption-labor forces.” Three are an equal number of unidirectional causalities; “labor forces to economic growth,” “labor forces to trade openness,” and “trade openness to government consumption.” The outcomes have implications for the policymaker to boost the Kingdom’s trade openness to benefit further from trade, rationalize its government’s size to promote private sector growth to raise the latter’s effective contribution to GDP, and accelerate income growth.

The study examines the asymmetric influence of exports on economic growth in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia using an augmented neoclassical production function incorporating export earnings and oil rent. It uses time-series yearly data from 1985 to 2019 published by the World Bank, employs the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) approach and Toda–Yamamoto (T–Y) Granger causality test. The outcomes reveal a long-run cointegration among economic growth, exports, oil rents and other variables. Both the exports and oil rents have unveiled asymmetric impacts on economic growth. The overall impact of exports on economic growth remains robust; its positive shock maintains neutrality, while negative shock yields affirmative influence on economic growth in the long run. Similarly, the positive components of oil rents remain neutral, while the negative shocks negatively affect economic growth, with an overall adverse impact. The T–Y causality unleashes that economic growth causes exports negative shocks, and negative shocks cause positive shocks of exports and a feedback relationship between economic growth and positive shock of exports, and thus, validates the NARDL outcomes and verifies their robustness. The outcomes imply that the Kingdom should expand its exports and enhance its nonoil output through product and market diversification measures.

This study analyzes aggregate data on trade flows to examine the performance of bilateral free trade agreements (BFTAs) between the United States and 11 BFTA nations in a two-dimensional approach. In line with the literature, this study applies the gravity model and analyzes the effect of the treatment using Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood (PPML) panel data from 1992 to 2017. We use the PPML as an alternative methodology to an ordinary least squares model, as it can treat zero trade values and lead to unbiased estimates and different consistencies. We consider the trade in goods but excluded services because of the different nature of trade for services. Moreover, this study highlights the quantitative performance of BFTAs without considering the industry level to compare the overall benefits for the trade flows from the U.S. as an exporter to BFTA countries and vice versa. It thus adds to the debate on the effect of FTAs on trade flows and conducts pre-FTA and post-FTA analyses to compare the volumes of exports and imports during both periods. Findings vary according to the direction of trade; notably, some trading partners increased their trading volume to 388%. In sum, this paper provides a collective current state assessment to demonstrate the most plausible reasons for the effects of the 11 BFTAs, in addition to informing policymakers on the lessons learned from each BFTA.