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2021-04-20

• Voter en temps de pandémie : l’enseignement des municipales de 2020
  by The Conversation in Contrepoints, 2021-04-20 02:40:01 UTC

  Par Olivier Gergau 1 , Abdul Nour 2 et Abel Françoi 3 . Un article de The Conversation Le gouvernement français a prévu d’organiser les 20 et 27 juin prochains les élections régionales et départementales après des hésitations quant à leur maintien ou report éventuel, dans un contexte sanitaire compliqué. Le débat sur la pertinence du maintien de ces élections enfle dans le pays autour de plusieurs questions portant essentiellement sur la faisabilité du scrutin et de la campagne électorale, alors que les questions relatives à la participation électorale et aux choix de vote sont largement ignor [...]

2021-04-19

• Uncertainty and Monetary Policy during the Great Recession
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2021-04-19 16:48:30 UTC

  By Giovanni Pellegrino; Efrem Castelnuovo; Giovanni Caggiano http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_8985&r=dge We employ a nonlinear VAR framework and a state-of-the-art identification strategy to document the large response of real activity to a financial uncertainty shock during and in the aftermath of the great recession. We replicate this evidence with an estimated DSGE framework featuring a concept of uncertainty comparable to that in our VAR. We then use the estimated framework to quantify the output loss due to the large uncertainty shock that materialized in 2008Q3. We find such a s [...]

• Capitalists against competition
  by ? in Stumbling and Mumbling, 2021-04-19 15:26:55 UTC

  Capitalists hate competition. That’s the message of plans by several big clubs – as well as Sp*rs – to form a “super”leaguein which they’ll be protected from the danger of relegation or from competition from emerging teams.The smarter capitalists have of c [...]

• New Yimby City: A Roundtable Q&A with Open New York (Part II)
  by Jason Barr in Skynomics Blog, 2021-04-19 12:22:15 UTC

  Jason M. Barr ( @JasonBarrRU )           April 19, 2021 Editor’s Note: In the Skynomics Blog , I frequently discuss the subject of housing affordability in New York City. It thus piqued my interest when I learned about a group of New Yorkers who have become politically engaged through their organization, Open New York , to increase the city’s housing stock. This is Part II of a two-part roundtable Q&A with four of their members. Part I is here . The Panelists Casey Berkovitz is an Open New York board member and senior associate at The Century Foundation, a public policy organization. He twee [...]

• Stopping central banks from being prisoners of financial markets
  by Steve Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz in Money, Banking and Financial Markets, 2021-04-19 12:12:24 UTC

    "I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody." James Carville, President Bill Clinton’s political adviser, Wall Street Journal, February 25, 1993 . Central banks are on the front lines in the fight to limit the impact of the pandemic. They are supporting virtually every aspect of the economy and the financial system. Going well beyond traditional policies aimed at stimulating aggregate activity, central banks have lent to ban [...]

• Journal round-up: Applied Health Economics and Health Policy 19(2)
  by karanshahk2 in The Academic Health Economists' Blog, 2021-04-19 06:00:07 UTC

  Our authors provide regular round-ups of the latest peer-reviewed journals. We cover all issues of major health economics journals as well as other notable releases. Visit our journal round-up log to see past editions organised by publication title. If you’d like to write a journal round-up, get in touch . This issue of Applied Health Economics and Health Policy covered diverse topics on cost-effectiveness, price regulation, utility weights, and COVID-19 related studies. A systematic review on the cost-effectiveness of kidney replacement therapy suggested kidney transplantation to [...]

2021-04-16

• Friday Links
  by Jason Shafrin in Healthcare Economist, 2021-04-16 23:31:48 UTC

  Urgent care vs. ED . FDA review of old drugs . R&D incentives and innovation spillovers . Pharmaceuticals and the Developing World . Care managers vs cost centers . [...]

2021-04-15

• Thesis Thursday: Eleanor Grieve
  by Chris Sampson in The Academic Health Economists' Blog, 2021-04-15 06:00:04 UTC

  On the third Thursday of every month, we speak to a recent graduate about their thesis and their studies. This month’s guest is Dr Eleanor Grieve who has a PhD from the University of Glasgow . If you would like to suggest a candidate for an upcoming Thesis Thursday, get in touch . Title Conceptualising, measuring and valuing the impact of health technology assessment Supervisors Andrew Briggs , Olivia Wu , Hannah Hesselgreaves Repository link http://theses.gla.ac.uk/81864 Why do we lack a good understanding of the impact of HTA? Many reasons, but two weightier issues are that it is m [...]

• Tullock Lottery Contests with Direct and Covert Discrimination
  by Matthew Wildrick Thomas in Matthew Wildrick Thomas, 2021-04-15 00:00:00 UTC

  These notes summarize concepts introduced in Nti (1999) , Fang (2002) , Nti (2004) , and Epstein et al (2013) about revenue maximization in Tullock lottery contests. Introduction Contests are models of conflict where risk neutral players exert costly effort to win a prize. A lottery contest is any contest where there is not a deterministic relationship between effort and victory. For example, scores could be measured incorrectly or there could be some randomness in the relationship between effort and the final scores. Alternatively, you can interpret lottery contests as giving each player a [...]

2021-04-14

• Prince Philip & the communist ideal
  by chris in Stumbling and Mumbling, 2021-04-14 14:37:35 UTC

  One unintended and unremarked effect of the eulogies to Prince Philip is that they have reminded us of Marx’s vision of communism. What I mean is that several of his admirers describe him as a “ renaissance man” on account of his wide range of interests. This, however, is an example of a common error – of ascribing to agency what is in fact the result of economic forces. Prince Philip could afford to pursue so many different passions because the day he married the Queen he was freed from what Marx called “the dull compulsion of economic relations.” For most of the rest of us, however, this co [...]

2021-04-13

• Why Climate Economics Continues to Succeed
  by Matthew E. Kahn in Environmental and Urban Economics, 2021-04-13 14:41:00 UTC

  A blog post that responds to Noah Smith's provocative piece titled Why Has Climate Economics Failed Us? .� �It raises a deep question.� What is the point of climate economics research?� I will respond below.� Dr. Smith's piece also throws some low blows.� My friend Richard Tol is singled out for reasons I don't understand.� Go to Professor Tol's Google Scholar webpage and read his work. First, a preamble.� I am a microeconomist.� I do not write down Integrated Assessment Models. I agree with Robert Pindyck's points in this tough JEL piece.� The Lucas Critique demolishes these IAM models.� My n [...]

2021-04-12

• Capital Tax Reforms With Policy Uncertainty
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2021-04-12 18:36:30 UTC

  By Arpad Abraham, Pavel Brendler and Eva Carceles http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nys:sunysb:21-01&r=dge One important feature of capital tax reforms is uncertainty regarding their duration. We use the Bush Tax cuts as the leading example to illustrate how uncertainty about reform duration may affect the economy’s path and erode political support for the reform. We model policy uncertainty by assuming that the reform may be either repealed or made permanent with some probability at a predetermined date. We show that policy uncertainty is a critical ingredient that can explain why the Bush tax cut [...]

• Social Capitalism
  by Edoardo Campanella in Project Syndicate, 2021-04-12 15:45:10 UTC

  MILAN – The COVID-19 pandemic has damaged the stock of physical and human capital. Firms have postponed or canceled investment projects, and laid-off or furloughed workers’ skills have deteriorated. The crisis, however, has boosted the oft-overlooked variable of social capital, elevating its role as a key source of economic growth. Popularized in the 1990s by Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam, social capital refers to “the features of social organizations, such as networks, norms, and trust that facilitate action and cooperation for mutual benefit.” A somewhat nebulous conc [...]

• From PPI to CPI
  by ? in FRED blog, 2021-04-12 13:00:00 UTC

  The consumer price index (CPI) measures the cost of a fixed bundle of consumer goods relative to the cost of those same goods in a chosen reference year. Inflation is the percent change in the index from one year to the next and reflects how prices are changing for consumers. The producer price index (PPI) is a similar construct that measures the price that producers get for their wares. It was formerly called the wholesale price index (WPI). Because many of these goods are intermediate goods and thus inputs to the production of final consumer goods, one might hypothesize that changes in the [...]

2021-04-07

• Climate adaptation and the great reset for Africa
  by ? in Interview: Kurdish independence and Turkey-KRG ties, 2021-04-07 14:42:22 UTC

  By Ede Ijjasz, Aloysius Uche OrduThe pandemic has created the opportunity for a “great reset” of Africa’s economies. As Foresight Africa 2021 highlights, Africa needs bold action for an economic revival from the COVID-induced estimated 3 to 5.4 [...]

2021-04-06

• Climate adaptation and the great reset for Africa
  by ? in PreventionWeb News & Announcements, 2021-04-06 23:00:00 UTC

  The pandemic has created the opportunity for a “great reset” of Africa's economies. [...]

2021-04-05

• Globalization, Trade Imbalances, and Labor Market Adjustment
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2021-04-05 21:16:45 UTC

  By Rafael Dix-Carneiro, João Paulo Pessoa, Ricardo Reyes-Heroles and Sharon Traiberman http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:upj:weupjo:21-345&r=dge We study the role of global trade imbalances in shaping the adjustment dynamics in response to trade shocks. We build and estimate a general equilibrium, multicountry, multisector model of trade with two key ingredients: 1) consumption-saving decisions in each country commanded by representative households, leading to endogenous trade imbalances, and 2) labor market frictions across and within sectors, leading to unemployment dynamics and sluggish transiti [...]

• Local Projections vs. VARs
  by Francis Diebold in No Hesitations, 2021-04-05 13:24:00 UTC

  Interesting paper, showing an interesting LP (higher variance) vs. VAR (higher bias) tradeoff. The authors conclude that " Unless researchers are overwhelmingly concerned with bias, shrinkage via Bayesian VARs or penalized LPs is attractive. "   A key point in terms of whether researchers are " overwhelmingly concerned with bias " is that it's not so much about researchers' preferences (innate feelings about bias) as it is about the data -- dynamic environments with large moving-average roots force concern with bias, for example, because that's where low-ordered VARs are poor approximations, i [...]

• New Yimby City: A Roundtable Q&A with Open New York (Part I)
  by Jason Barr in Skynomics Blog, 2021-04-05 12:11:16 UTC

  Jason M. Barr ( @JasonBarrRU )           April 5, 2021 Editor’s Note: In the Skynomics Blog , I frequently discuss the subject of housing affordability in New York City. It thus piqued my interest when I learned about a group of New Yorkers who have become politically engaged through their organization, Open New York , to increase the city’s housing stock. This is Part I of a two-part roundtable Q&A with four of their members. The Panelists Casey Berkovitz is an Open New York board member and senior associate at The Century Foundation, a public policy organization. He tweets at @caseyberk . [...]

• Journal round-up: PharmacoEconomics 39(3)
  by Chris Sampson in The Academic Health Economists' Blog, 2021-04-05 06:00:12 UTC

  Welcome to the first edition of the latest incarnation of our journal round-up format. We have abandoned our weekly fixed schedule. This is to provide greater flexibility for contributors and scope for an in-depth discussion of articles. Each journal round-up will summarise a single issue of a journal. Our authors provide regular round-ups of the latest peer-reviewed journals. We cover all issues of major health economics journals as well as other notable releases. Visit our journal round-up log to see past editions organised by publication title. If you’d like to write a journal round-up, [...]

2021-04-04

• Third Francqui Lecture
  by noreply@blogger.com (David Stern) in Stochastic Trend, 2021-04-04 21:39:00 UTC

  The video of my third Francqui lecture on the rebound effect is now on Youtube: The first part of the presentation – "What is the Rebound Effect" – mostly comes from my teaching material on the rebound effect. The graph of the macroeconomic price effect comes from Gillingham et al. (2016) . In the following two slides, I modified it to show infinitely elastic (assumed by Lemoine (2020) for example) and totally inelastic energy supply, which results in 100% rebound. The next section – "The Economy-wide Rebound Effect: Evidence" – starts with a graph from my 2017 paper in Climatic Change : " Ho [...]

2021-04-02

• Boosting India’s COVID-19 vaccination drive
  by Padmanesan Narasimhan in East Asia Forum, 2021-04-02 23:00:33 UTC

  Author: Padmanesan Narasimhan, UNSW India is one of the worst affected countries by COVID-19, with an estimated 11.4 million cases and over 160,000 deaths as of 30 March . New Delhi pursued aggressive measures to control the pandemic and the swift implementation of restrictions across the country contained some of the spread. India was also one of the earliest countries to test and produce COVID-19 vaccines. The country’s strong manufacturing base, especially in pharmaceuticals , helped accelerate co-patented vaccine production and the manufacturing of new vaccines. India now supplies more t [...]

2021-04-01

• The Great Climate Change Race Between The Rising Threat and Our Increasing Ability to "Take a Punch"
  by Matthew E. Kahn in Environmental and Urban Economics, 2021-04-01 14:16:00 UTC

  In their important book: The Race Between Education and Technology,� Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz use a supply and demand framework to discuss changes in the U.S labor markets over the last 100 years.� �For decades in the middle of the 20th Century when manufacturing was thriving in the U.S,� the wage premium for being highly educated was steady over time and more Americans were graduating from high school and these two facts combined meant that income inequality was declining.� �My old friend Bob Margo wrote this great pape r with Claudia on the "Great Compression" . Most of our income is ge [...]

• FRED adds interplanetary data
  by ? in FRED blog, 2021-04-01 13:00:00 UTC

  FRED pushes the boundaries of data availability. It currently boasts close to 800,000 times series, including international data that are mappable with GeoFRED . But FRED hadn’t featured any interplanetary data until now. The FRED Team has collaborated with the Scientific Knowledge in Extra-Terrestrial Content Hub, Youngstown (SKETCHY) to integrate some of the data from the NASA Mars exploration rovers . FRED has scores of socio-economic time series, the most basic data category. And that is the first type of Martian data to be added to FRED. This series starts with data from the fi [...]

2021-03-31

• In PNG, women’s economic autonomy goes with income, but not with a bank account
  by Rohan Fox in Development Policy Blog, 2021-03-31 19:00:29 UTC

  Women’s empowerment is a key issue in PNG. However, there is still limited PNG-based evidence on “what works” when it comes to empowering women. In a recent paper , I look at one important component of empowerment, economic autonomy—in particular, women’s level of control over their own and their household’s spending decisions. To find out which factors were linked with economic autonomy I used data from one of the largest surveys on financial access and capability conducted in PNG. The survey was conducted by the PNG Institute of National Affairs in 2014 and is representative of two of the la [...]

• Why South Korea is balking at the Quad
  by Kuyoun Chung in East Asia Forum, 2021-03-31 11:00:14 UTC

  Author: Kuyoun Chung, Kangwon National University As great power competition intensifies, South Korea is coming under pressure to choose between the United States and China. At the same time, recognising its waning dominance in the region, Washington is probing the willingness of allies and partners to join a like-minded democratic coalition in confrontation with China. The anti-access environment — layered by Chinese anti-ship cruise and ballistic missiles, armed combat aircraft and submarines — is weakening the US capacity to maintain stability in the region. China is realigning the US-led [...]

2021-03-29

• Time Preferences over the Life Cycle and Household Saving Puzzles
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2021-03-29 21:52:42 UTC

  By Wataru Kureishi; Hannah Paule-Paludkiewicz; Hitoshi Tsujiyama; Midori Wakabayashi http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_8935&r=dge Most economic models assume that time preferences are stable over time, but the evidence on their long-term stability is lacking. We study whether and how time preferences change over the life cycle, exploiting representative long-term panel data. We provide new evidence that discount rates decrease with age and the decline is remarkably linear over the life cycle. Decreasing discounting helps a canonical life-cycle model to explain the household saving puzz [...]

• Chris Sampson’s journal round-up for 29th March 2021
  by Chris Sampson in The Academic Health Economists' Blog, 2021-03-29 11:00:13 UTC

  Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of the latest peer-reviewed journal publications. We cover all issues of major health economics journals as well as some other notable releases. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch . Health Economics Volume 30, Issue 4 There’s a lot of mental health research in the latest issue of Health Economics , which is great for me. An analysis of some real-world data attempts to identify the impacts of psychotherapy for schizophrenia . The authors used hospital data and employed an instrumental variable approach t [...]

2021-03-27

• Complicated motives
  by chris in Stumbling and Mumbling, 2021-03-27 13:18:31 UTC

  This week Boris Johnson claimed that the roll-out of the vaccine was the result of capitalism and greed; Goldman Sachs workers complained about long hours; and I got my jab. There’s a link here. All three episodes shed light on the role of motivations. Johnson is of course wrong . The Oxford vaccine was discovered by academics and is being produced by AstraZeneca at cost, and the Biontech vaccine was discovered by people who were already billionaires. It’s nearer the truth to say that the vaccines’ discovers were motivated less by greed and more by intellectual curiosity. And this, of course, [...]

2021-03-25

• Are we expecting too much inflation? : CPI vs. University of Michigan’s survey of consumers’ inflation expectations
  by ? in FRED blog, 2021-03-25 13:00:00 UTC

  This FRED graph compares expected inflation and actual inflation. In recent years, expectations (in red) have been consistently above realizations (in blue). Why? How people form expectations is a fascinating topic, as expectations drive so many economic decisions. One important point here is that, individually, we notice relatively few prices in an inflation measure. That is, individuals buy fewer goods than are included in the basket that determines the CPI. Also, we tend to recall only a few of the prices we encounter, in particular those that changed or changed more than we might have exp [...]

• Policymaking Is Not a Science (Yet) (Ep. 405 Rebroadcast)
  by Stephen J. Dubner in Freakonomics, 2021-03-25 03:00:27 UTC

  Why do so many promising solutions — in education, medicine, criminal justice, etc. — fail to scale up into great policy? And can a new breed of “implementation scientists” crack the code? Listen and subscribe to our podcast at  Apple Podcasts ,  Stitcher , or  elsewhere . Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post. *      *      * Most episodes of Freakonomics Radio involve, or are even built around, academic research. Obviously we think this research is interesting, even i [...]

2021-03-24

• Second Francqui Lecture
  by noreply@blogger.com (David Stern) in Stochastic Trend, 2021-03-24 02:38:00 UTC

  The video of my second Francqui lecture on energy and economic growth is now on Youtube: The first part of the presentation comes from my teaching material on the biophysical foundations of economics. There are a couple of slides of energy units and energy flows from the Global Energy Assessment . The slide of the Earth and economic system is from Perman et al . The next section of the lecture on the "stylized facts" is based on my 2016 paper with Zsuzsanna Csereklyei and Mar Rubio published in the Energy Journal . I updated the data from 2010 to 2018 using the Penn World Table and Internatio [...]

2021-03-23

• Skyscrapers and Housing Affordability: Debunking Misconceptions
  by Jason Barr in Skynomics Blog, 2021-03-23 12:10:58 UTC

  Jason M. Barr             March 23, 2021 Erin go Tweet On March 9, 2021,  Professor Ronan Lyons , an economist at Trinity College Dublin,  tweeted about  one of my  research papers  on global tall building construction. [1]  Dr. Lyons has 24,000 followers (two orders of magnitude more than me, but you can follow me on Twitter  here ). His tweet mentioned the paper’s findings for Ireland. This set off a tweetstorm, with no shortage of opinions— mostly against —about skyscrapers in ancient Dublin town. This post is my response to that tweetstorm. The Paper Before I get to Ireland, let us turn to [...]

2021-03-22

• Risk shocks and divergence between the Euro area and the US in the aftermath of the Great Recession
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2021-03-22 18:49:17 UTC

  By Thomas Brand and Fabien Tripier http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpm:docweb:2101&r=dge Highly synchronized during the Great Recession of 2008-2009, the Euro area and the US have diverged in the period that followed. To explain this divergence, we provide a structural interpretation of these episodes through the estimation for both economies of a business cycle model with financial frictions and risk shocks, measured as the volatility of idiosyncratic uncertainty in the financial sector. Our results show that risk shocks have stimulated US growth in the aftermath of the Great Recession and have [...]

• Chris Sampson’s journal round-up for 22nd March 2021
  by Chris Sampson in The Academic Health Economists' Blog, 2021-03-22 12:00:01 UTC

  Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of the latest peer-reviewed journal publications. We cover all issues of major health economics journals as well as some other notable releases. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch . The European Journal of Health Economics Volume 22, Issue 2 This issue of EJHE opens with an editorial on the use of telemedicine after COVID-19 . The pandemic has forced a shift towards remote consultations and the like, particularly in primary care. So, could primary care look radically different in Europe, post-pandemic? [...]

• Thoughts on Deposit Insurance
  by Steve Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz in Money, Banking and Financial Markets, 2021-03-22 11:48:22 UTC

  “If we require that financial institutions pay in good times for the guarantees they receive ex post, in all likelihood, this will organically cause financial firms to no longer take unsound risks.”  Viral Acharya and Matthew Richardson, “ Government Guarantees: Why the Genie Needs to be Put Back in the Bottle ,” The Economists Voice , November 2009. “The FDIC charges premiums based on the risk that the insured bank poses, and it inspects, or examines, banks further to manage that risk.” Diane Ellis, “ Deposit Insurance Funding: Assuring Confidence ,” FDIC Staff Paper, November 2013. Governmen [...]

• Nonlinear War of Attrition with Complete Information
  by Matthew Wildrick Thomas in Matthew Wildrick Thomas, 2021-03-22 00:00:00 UTC

  These notes are about nonlinear war of attrition models with two players. The formulation we consider is a simplified version of Hendricks, Weiss, and Wilson (1988) . These models are popular for modeling conflict that occurs in continuous time including wars, filibusters, bribes, and competition for standards and monopolies. Basics The war of attrition is a second price all-pay auction. That is, an auction where players pay a function of the second highest bid. The story is that two players enter into a battle royal to win some reward. Each moment that they fight, they must pay some cost. E [...]

2021-03-21

• Nyfödda barn med muslimska namn
  by Niclas Berggren in Nonicoclolasos, 2021-03-21 07:00:00 UTC

  Nyligen larmade Sverigedemokraternas nyhetsförmedling Riks om följande: Inlägget implicerar ogillande. Kan en sådan negativ attityd till ett typiskt muslimskt namn påverka hur muslimska föräldrar väljer att namnge sina barn? Man kan ju tänka sig att sådana föräldrar tolkar attityden som ett tecken på trolig diskriminering av barn med muslimska namn. En ny fransk studie, ”The Economic Incentives of Cultural Transmission: Spatial Evidence from Naming Patterns across France” , tyder på att muslimska föräldrar i hög grad avstår från att ge sina barn muslimska namn pga. en förväntad ekonomi [...]

2021-03-16

• The Resurgent Consumer City by Fall 2021
  by Matthew E. Kahn in Environmental and Urban Economics, 2021-03-16 22:29:00 UTC

  �I really like Paul Krugma n's NY Times piece from today .� �It focuses on his predictions about the short term future of cities.� �Here is a quote from the Nobel Laureate.� "So the best bet is that life and work in, say, 2023 will look a lot like life and work in 2019, but a bit less so. We may commute to the office less than we used to; there may well be a glut of urban office space."� In the early 2000s,� Ed Glaeser and I wrote two papers about the rise of suburban employment.� The papers are available here and here. A majority of metro area people both live and work in the suburbs of the c [...]

• Land is back – it should be taxed, it can be taxed
  by ? in VoxEU.org, 2021-03-16 00:00:00 UTC

  Housing wealth is now between two and four times as large as GDP in many Western economies. This column reintroduces land and housing structures to the theory of optimal taxation, and finds that first-best taxation is achieved through a property tax on lan [...]

2021-03-15

• Why a Standard Time Activist Thinks Losing an Hour is Actually a Big Deal
  by ? in Slate Blogs, 2021-03-15 22:31:05 UTC

  "I stay on Standard Time year-round. I’ve been doing that for 30 years." [...]

• There’s a popular backlash against experts. Here’s why that matters
  by ? in Forum:Blog, 2021-03-15 20:18:51 UTC

  What's the role of expertise in democracies and how should science inform political decisions? [...]

• Imperfect Banking Competition and Macroeconomic Volatility: A DSGE Framework
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2021-03-15 15:55:09 UTC

  By Jiaqi Li http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bca:bocawp:21-12&r=dge This paper studies the impact of imperfect banking competition on aggregate fluctuations using a DSGE framework that features a Cournot banking sector. The paper highlights a new propagation mechanism of imperfect banking competition that operates via the dynamics of the expected marginal product of capital. Since capital is partly financed by bank loans, a higher expected return on capital implies that firms are more willing to borrow to invest in capital, making their capital and thus loan demand more inelastic. Market power ena [...]

• Chris Sampson’s journal round-up for 15th March 2021
  by Chris Sampson in The Academic Health Economists' Blog, 2021-03-15 12:00:14 UTC

  Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of the latest peer-reviewed journal publications. We cover all issues of major health economics journals as well as some other notable releases. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch . American Journal of Health Economics Volume 7, Number 1 We’ve featured numerous studies in the round-ups recently that concern the impact of parental (especially maternal) health and circumstances on children. But could a child’s education affect their parents’ health ? That’s obviously a tricky question; healthy parents are [...]

2021-03-14

• Sobre a nova edição do livro Economia da ciência, tecnologia e inovação
  by Hugo da Gama Cerqueira in Meu gabinete de curiosidades, 2021-03-14 15:11:00 UTC

  Recebi com enorme satisfação o convite dos organizadores para participar da segunda edição, revista e ampliada, do livro Economia da ciência, tecnologia e inovação: fundamentos teóricos e a economia global , editado pelos meus colegas e professores Márcia Rapini, Janaina Ruffoni, Leandro Alves Silva e Eduardo da Motta e Albuquerque. Lançado originalmente em 2017, por iniciativa de pesquisadores do Cedeplar-UFMG, o livro reuniu contribuições de autores ligados a diferentes instituições universitárias. Oferecia uma apresentação de um amplo leque de temas sobre a relação entre o progresso tecno [...]

2021-03-11

• How to Fund Open Source
  by Matthew Wildrick Thomas in Matthew Wildrick Thomas, 2021-03-11 00:00:00 UTC

  I recently came across an interesting paper published in Management Science that proposes Quadratic Finance ( QF ), a mechanism to fund public goods such as open source software. This has generated an understandable amount of excitement and there are already several cases in which it has been implemented. FundOSS Gitcoin Grants Downtown Stimulus clr.fund This mechanism has also been referred to as Liberal Radicalism or LR . I wanted to take the time to clarify a few common misconceptions about QF and explain what it actually is and is not. Moreover, implementations of QF have modi [...]

2021-03-08

• Sovereign default and imperfect tax enforcement
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2021-03-08 15:27:23 UTC

  By Francesco Pappadà and Yanos Zylberberg http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-03142208&r=dge The effect of fiscal policy on default risk is mitigated by the response of tax compliance. To explore the consequences of this stylized fact, we build a model of sovereign debt with limited commitment and imperfect tax enforcement. Fiscal policy persistently affects the size of the informal economy, which impacts future fiscal revenues and default risk. The interaction of imperfect tax enforcement and limited commitment strongly constrains the dynamics of optimal fiscal policy and leads [...]

• Chris Sampson’s journal round-up for 8th March 2021
  by Chris Sampson in The Academic Health Economists' Blog, 2021-03-08 12:00:01 UTC

  Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of the latest peer-reviewed journal publications. We cover all issues of major health economics journals as well as some other notable releases. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch . Health Economics Volume 30, Issue 2 Yet again, we see a collection of studies on the impact of environmental or political events on infant health. Have these studies always dominated, or am I only just noticing? Evidence from China shows that droughts are associated with poorer outcomes for children in the short and long ter [...]

2021-03-06

• Por qué no hay que hacer caso a quienes nos digan que hay que invertir ahora que la bolsa baja o cuando sube: contra el market timing
  by Alejandro Nieto González in Elblogsalmon, 2021-03-06 10:01:25 UTC

  Llevamos unas jornadas de mercado bajista en las bolsas. De hecho el S&P500 está en negativo en lo que llevamos de 2021 . Los motivos pueden ser fundamentales (hay perspectivas negativas) o no (simplemente se están deshinchando un poco las cotizaciones), pero lo cierto es que siempre que hay bajadas hay nerviosismo entre los que están invertidos y también hay quienes recomiendan invertir aprovechando la situación. ¿A quién hacer caso? ¿A los que se asustan con las bajadas y venden o a los que dicen que es precisamente el momento de comprar ? Y al contrario, ¿qué hay que hacer [...]

2021-03-02

• A defence of maths in economics
  by chris in Stumbling and Mumbling, 2021-03-02 14:05:47 UTC

  What’s the point of maths in economics? I ask because of this : Much of the mathematics used in economics is simply performance. Despite the sometimes undue attention given to mathematical methods, the actual mathematics economists use often contradicts their economic conclusions. The mathematics in economics is simply a tool to keep out outsiders: economists themselves do not take it that seriously. I suspect this is sometimes (often?) true. But I want to give a counter-example. It comes from a source some of you don’t like, John Cochrane. It’s this equation (pdf) for predicting long-run re [...]

• Uncertainty and voting in monetary policy committees
  by BankUnderground in Bank Underground, 2021-03-02 09:00:00 UTC

  Alastair Firrell and Kate Reinold The right stance for monetary policy is highly uncertain, and so it is no surprise that members of monetary policy committees – like the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) – regularly disagree about the best course of action. Asking a committee to decide allows different opinions to be aired and challenged, with a majority vote needed to determine policy. But how should we expect those disagreements and votes to change in periods of higher uncertainty? Should we expect more 9–0 unanimous votes? Or more 5–4 close contests? We address thes [...]

2021-03-01

• Universal Basic Income in Developing Countries: Pitfalls and Alternatives
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2021-03-01 17:46:32 UTC

  By Pedro Cavalcanti Ferreira, Marcel Cortes, Peruffo and André Cordeiro Valério http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fgv:epgewp:821&r=dge This article studies the short -and long-term effects of Universal Basic Income programs – a uniform transfer to every individual in society – in the context of a developing economy and compares this policy with other schemes that condition the transfer on household characteristics such as income and education. We construct a dynastic heterogeneous-agent model, featuring uninsurable idiosyncratic risk, investment in physical and human capital, and choice of labor ef [...]

2021-02-25

• Noise, interests & democracy
  by ? in Stumbling and Mumbling, 2021-02-25 14:10:23 UTC

  Tim Fenton writeshereabout Tracy Ann Oberman’s “faux victimhood”. I don’t want to get into this particular case, but the concept of faux victimhood is surely a useful one. And it highlights a problem with actually-existing liberal democracy.The problem is [...]

• The Pandemic Tsunami: How COVID-19 Swept Across America
  by Jason Barr in Skynomics Blog, 2021-02-25 13:08:22 UTC

  Jason M. Barr and Troy Tassier             February 25, 2021 The Great Equalizer?   In March 2020, during the salad days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., many people, from  Madonna  to New York Governor  Andrew Cuomo , believed the virus was a “great equalizer,” hitting rich as likely as poor, and White as likely as Black or Hispanic.   In short order, however, it became clear that these pronouncements were wrong; people of color and the poorer members of society were hit at rates over their proportion in the population, particularly in the large cities of the Northeast as well as New Orl [...]

2021-02-23

• 45. Women´s Quality of Labour, Social Visibility and Quality of Life. Euro-American Report year 2020
  by MCG Blogs de Economía in Euro-American Association: World Development, 2021-02-23 11:29:00 UTC

  Here we present a short version of section 4 of the article by Guisan and Aguayo(2020) 4. Quality of Labour, female social visibility and quality of life. 4.1. Quality of labour and its impact on quality of life      Women workers lifes are sometimes more stressed than lifes of men workers, due to the problems to conceal family life and labour hours. The consequence is that women workers usually have fewer hours of leisury activities per week. In spite of that, the majority of women are happy to find a job, with quality of labour, not only because paid work provides some degree of income and i [...]

2021-02-22

• “Mom, Dad: I’m staying”. Initial labor market conditions, housing markets, and welfare
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2021-02-22 21:26:46 UTC

  By Rodrigo Martínez-Mazza http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ieb:wpaper:doc2020-14&r=dge Young individuals are currently living with their parents more than at any other point in time, while also spending more on housing. In this paper, I first show how labor market entry conditions affect housing tenure and affordability in the long term, by using the unemployment rate at the time of graduation as an exogenous shock to income. I perform this analysis across Europe for the last 25 years. Results indicate that a 1 pp increase in the unemployment rate at the time of graduation leads, one year after, [...]

2021-02-21

• 歪められた最低賃金の議論
  by himaginary in himaginaryの日記, 2021-02-21 02:43:58 UTC

  タイラー・コーエンが要旨を 紹介し 、ノアピニオン氏が批判的に 取り上げている （ 邦訳 ）David Neumark（UC アーバイン ）とPeter Shirley（ウ エス ト バージニア州 議会）の 論文 「Myth or Measurement: What Does the New Minimum Wage Research Say about Minimum Wages and Job Loss in the United States?」を、ケイトー研究所のRyan Bourneが表題の記事（原題は「The Distorted Minimum Wage Debate」）で クルーグマン 叩きに 援用している 。 It sometimes feels as if advocates and opponents of minimum wage hikes are talking in different universes. In large part, that stems from completely opposite interpretations of the balance of the academic literature on the subject. Research on the minimum wage in the U [...]

2021-02-19

• Why Labour should talk about productivity
  by chris in Stumbling and Mumbling, 2021-02-19 14:31:06 UTC

  If you buy a goldfish, you shouldn’t be disappointed that it doesn’t catch mice. It is therefore pointless to criticize Starmer’s speech yesterday for being insufficiently critical of capitalism. There is however one curious but important omission from his speech – one which is odd for a technocratic social democrat. I’m referring to the lack of any discussion of, or remedy for, our productivity problem. Just before the pandemic, real wages were actually lower than they were in 2007. The average worker has gone 13 years without a pay rise. This is not because capitalists have taken a bigger s [...]

2021-02-17

• It's not the 90s any more
  by ? in Stumbling and Mumbling, 2021-02-17 14:01:11 UTC

  Sir Keir Starmer wants to party like it’s 1999. That seems to be his motive for seeking the advice of Peter Mandelson. There is, however, a big problem with this. It’s not the 1990s any more. There have been huge socio-economic changes since then, which re [...]

• Would Americans Have More Babies if the Government Paid Them?
  by ? in NYT > Politics, 2021-02-17 10:00:21 UTC

  One policy goal of a child allowance is to reverse declines in fertility, but some experts say improving families’ well-being is more important. [...]

2021-02-15

• A Buffer-Stock Model for the Government: Balancing Stability and Sustainability
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2021-02-15 19:09:58 UTC

  By Jean-Marc Fournier http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2019/159&r=dge A fiscal reaction function to debt and the cycle is built on a buffer-stock model for the government. This model inspired by the buffer-stock model of the consumer (Deaton 1991; Carroll 1997) includes a debt limit instead of the Intertemporal Budget Constraint (IBC). The IBC is weak (Bohn, 2007), a debt limit is more realistic as it reflects the risk of losing market access. This risk increases the welfare cost of fiscal stimulus at high debt. As a result, the higher the debt, the less governments should smooth the cy [...]

• Otra mirada al salario mínimo
  by ? in Nada es Gratis, 2021-02-15 14:00:01 UTC

  Hablar del salario mínimo es sinónimo de interés. Un ejemplo: ¿ven el Gráfico 1? Pues también lo vieron 300.000 personas en un día cuando lo colgué en Twitter. Mientras sufría con el partido Betis-Barcelona, Messi y yo compartíamos ingresos, aunque los mío [...]

• Is Inflation Coming?
  by Steve Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz in Money, Banking and Financial Markets, 2021-02-15 12:42:50 UTC

   Money money money money, money… Don’t let, don’t let, don’t let money fool you For the Love of Money, The O’Jays , 1973 “[W]ith inflation running persistently below 2 percent, our policy will aim to achieve inflation outcomes that keep inflation expectations well anchored at our 2 percent longer-run goal.” Federal Reserve Vice-Chair Richard Clarida , January 8, 2021. Over the past quarter century, disagreements about monetary policy have been narrow. A broad consensus developed that central banks should be independent, with a primary focus on price stability. Furthermore, nearly everyone agre [...]

• Chris Sampson’s journal round-up for 15th February 2021
  by Chris Sampson in The Academic Health Economists' Blog, 2021-02-15 12:00:01 UTC

  Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of the latest peer-reviewed journal publications. We cover all issues of major health economics journals as well as some other notable releases. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch . Journal of Health Economics Volume 75 This month we have another dozen articles from JHE on a variety of topics. But no COVID! A few papers look at maternal and infant health. One study focused on the impact of maternity ward crowding in Denmark between 2000 and 2014. As you might expect, the delivered care changes accord [...]

2021-02-13

• Choosing charlatans
  by chris in Stumbling and Mumbling, 2021-02-13 12:55:24 UTC

  People choose to listen to charlatans even when it is against their interest to do so. That’s the message of some recent experiments . Aristotelis Boukouras and colleagues got subjects to take a multiple choice exam during which they could choose to take help from one of two computerized advisors. One of these was an expert, who gave the answers that a panel of economists would. The other gave the answers that had been most popular with other people who had taken the test. They found that most people chose to take advice from the latter – even after they had been told that it was only giving t [...]

2021-02-12

• Two papers on monetary theory where the Friedman Rule is not optimal
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2021-02-12 19:23:26 UTC

  Nominal Contracts and the Payment System By Hakime Tomura http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wap:wpaper:1923&r=dge This paper introduces into an overlapping generations model the courts inability to distinguish different qualities of goods of the same kind. Given the recognizability of fiat money for the court, this friction leads to the use of nominal debt contracts as well as the use of fiat money as a means of payment in the goods market. This result holds without dynamic inefficiency or lack of double coincidence of wants. Instead, money is necessary because it is essential for credit. However, [...]

• Why income inequality is the key predictor of COVID-19 death rates, according to 3 Kellogg School professors
  by insider@insider.com (Katie Gilbert) in Business Insider, 2021-02-12 14:00:00 UTC

  Researchers found a staggering difference in death rates between low- and high-income people. Blake Nissen/The Boston Globe/Getty Images Kellogg School professors conducted research on why COVID death rates are higher in certain countries and US states.  Considering factors like population age, share of doctors, and climate conditions didn't reveal a correlation.  Instead, they found that higher death rates tended to occur in places with higher pre-COVID income inequality. Visit the Business section of Insider for more stories . As the coronavirus pandemic rages on, the wide chasm between [...]

2021-02-11

• You’re sad, I’m sad, we’re all sad. Is there a way out?
  by Eve Andrews in Grist Business and Technology, 2021-02-11 11:33:35 UTC

  Q. Dear Umbra, How can I get others out of a funk if I am deep in one too? –Sorry, Also Down A. Dear SAD, The pressure you are putting on yourself to be a joy-dispensing pandemic Tinkerbell is deeply ingrained in our culture: American social graces are all about projecting a “friendly and upbeat” vibe — even though that feels so definitively disingenuous at this moment that it’s hard to keep up. And you’re definitely onto something. Humans take cues from each other: It’s basically how society functions. We are wired to change our behavior, mannerisms, way of dress, and even beliefs based on w [...]

2021-02-10

• Choices, capabilities, and unanswered questions
  by Chris Sampson in The Academic Health Economists' Blog, 2021-02-10 07:00:04 UTC

  Sometimes research gets left in a drawer. The virtual equivalent can happen to blog posts. In clearing out some old drafts, I found a blog post on capabilities that it seems I wrote in May 2014. I don’t remember what was going on in my life back then. But it was before I had embraced the Oxford comma (I have added one to the title). It seems that this blog post is not entirely useless or, at least, it will be no more useless if released into the wild. So, here it is, an unintended time capsule. Why I didn’t finish it, I don’t remember. Perhaps I thought it would be superseded by my writing [...]

2021-02-08

• Rita Faria’s journal round-up for 8th February 2021
  by Rita Faria in The Academic Health Economists' Blog, 2021-02-08 12:00:01 UTC

  Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of the latest peer-reviewed journal publications. We cover all issues of major health economics journals as well as some other notable releases. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch . Medical Decision Making Volume 41, Issue 1 There are quite a few interesting studies in this month’s issue of Medical Decision Making . There is a study showing that offering COVID-19 testing in US post offices reduces travel distance and improves accessibility to testing; a study reporting a simulation model for obesity in [...]

• Hazara Representation in Popular Culture
  by Anya Magotra in India at LSE, 2021-02-08 07:47:37 UTC

  This post explores the representation of the Hazara community in popular culture, using the examples of a novel The Kite Runner , a TV talent show Sitara-e Afghan ( Afghan Star) , and a documentary Laila at the Bridge . Rabia Khan discusses the gradual change in perceptions about Hazara identity, especially in terms of community consciousness and individual agency, and highlights the manner in which contemporary depictions of the Hazaras reflect more intricate forms of engagement with the historical, political and social realities of the community. In July 2020, Netflix released Stateless , a [...]

2021-02-07

• That Mystical Monetary Theory
  by Tyler Durden in Zero Hedge, 2021-02-07 22:50:00 UTC

  That Mystical Monetary Theory Authored by Joakim Book via The American Institute for Economic Research, MMT, or Modern Monetary Theory, is on everyone’s lips – and it seems that everyone is keen on this long-obscure idea of how our public finances really work.  In an article in the latest issue of  Economic Affairs , I try to condense the argument into four propositions that form the core of MMTers’ understanding of the world. I do this by reviewing  Stephanie Kelton’s book  from June of last year, Kelton being the most vocal and well-known persona in the field. I show that th [...]

2021-02-05

• Reply to Academic Agent on Austrian Economics and Price Rigidity
  by LK in Social Democracy for the 21st Century: A Post Keynesian Perspective, 2021-02-05 09:27:00 UTC

  Academic Agent lost a bet to me on Twitter and was forced to respond to my post here on Austrian economics and the reality of relative price rigidity. He has now produced two videos in this debate. Here is Academic Agent’s first video response to my post: Before he uploaded the video, I predicted that his video would contain the following: (1) he would misrepresent the actual theories of Austrian economics; (2) he would attack straw-man misrepresentations of my post; (3) he would focus on minor arguments and weak evidence and largely ignore major arguments and strong evidence. These predictio [...]

• A fistful of dollars: transmission of global funding shocks to emerging markets
  by BankUnderground in Bank Underground, 2021-02-05 09:00:00 UTC

  Aakriti Mathur and Shekhar Hari Kumar Emerging markets (EMs) have become more exposed to the global financial cycle in recent years. Positive liquidity shocks – that is, a loosening of global funding market conditions – have led to exchange rate appreciations, reductions in long-term bond yields, stock market booms, and increased gross capital flows to EMs ( Bhattarai et al (2018) ). Negative liquidity shocks on the other hand constitute a tightening of financial conditions, reducing lending and real investment ( Bruno and Shin (2015) and Avdjiev et al (2018) ). In a recent pape [...]

2021-02-02

• The Welfare and Distributional Effects of Fiscal Volatility: A Quantitative Evaluation
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2021-02-02 05:00:29 UTC

  By Rüdiger Bachmann, Jinhui Bai, Minjoon Lee and Fudong Zhang http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:wsuwpa:2020_002&r=dge This study explores the welfare and distributional effects of fiscal volatility using a neoclassical stochastic growth model with incomplete markets. In our model, households face uninsurable idiosyncratic risks in their labor income and discount factor processes, and we allow aggregate uncertainty to arise from both productivity and government purchases shocks. We calibrate our model to key features of the U.S. economy, before eliminating government purchases shocks. We then ev [...]

2021-02-01

• This Decade’s Growth Champions
  by Kaushik Basu in Project Syndicate, 2021-02-01 15:38:41 UTC

  ITHACA – With 2021 still young, and hope in the air thanks to new COVID-19 vaccines and a new occupant of the White House, we can finally stop covering our eyes in horror and peer furtively into the future. As the decade unfolds, which countries are likely to be the biggest economic success stories? My bet is on South Korea, Vietnam, and Mexico, three countries at markedly different stages of development. South Korea is an advanced economy, while Vietnam is what the World Bank calls a lower middle-income economy, like India or Bangladesh. Mexico, an upper middle-income country like Colombia, B [...]

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