Can the level of Ultra Violet Radiation (UV-R) in your environment affect the number of days it takes to get a misaddressed letter returned to the sender*? Or the degree to which a country’s laws protect private property rights? A new study in the journal KYKLOS examines the effects of sunlight on such indicators of ‘institutional quality’, and on UV-R-induced diseases.
“[…] we contribute to the literature by establishing a reduced-form association between UV-R exposure and institutional quality across countries.”
See: Sunlight, Disease, and Institutions by James B. Ang, Per G. Fredriksson, Aqil Luqman bin Nurhakim and Emerlyn Huiwen Tay, Vol. 71 – August 2018 – No. 3, 374–401.
Also see: Associations : LED street-lighting and breast cancer (new study)
* “This indicator measures the number of days a letter would take to return to the sender, when sent to nonexistent business addresses across 159 countries. Chong et al. (2014) find that, holding per capita income constant, postal services in countries with more democratic, accountable and less corrupt governments return lost letters faster than others. Indicators of “mail efficiency” are found to be positively correlated with measures of government performance such as teacher attendance and regulatory quality.”
[ Research research by Martin Gardiner ]