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2020-05-29

• A Plucking Model of Business Cycles
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2020-05-29 21:02:28 UTC

  By Stéphane Dupraz, Emi Nakamura and Jón Steinsson http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bfr:banfra:748&r=dge In standard models, economic activity fluctuates symmetrically around a “natural rate” and stabilization policies can dampen these fluctuations but do not affect the average level of activity. An alternative view–labeled the “plucking model” by Milton Friedman–is that economic fluctuations are drops below the economy’s full potential ceiling. If this view is correct, stabilization policy, by dampening these fluctuations, can raise the average level of activity. We show that the dynamics of the [...]

• Covid-19: Does rich-country lockdown raise poor-country child mortality?
  by ReibReisen in ShiftingWealth, 2020-05-29 15:55:00 UTC

  Does the German "lockdown" [1] endanger millions of children around the world? Tübingen's Mayor Boris Palmer (Greens) had provoked at the end of April: "The shutdown, as we operate it, tries to prolong the lives of very old, seriously ill people in the rich countries and costs the lives of a much larger number of children in poor countries". Is this true? As lively as the general outrage about Palmer's thesis was, the connection "lockdown here, dead children there" prima facie cannot be dismissed. After all, Germany is an important part of the globalised economy, closely interwoven in world tr [...]

2020-05-27

• Can Pandemic-Induced Job Uncertainty Stimulate Automation?
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2020-05-27 19:07:41 UTC

  By Sylvain Leduc and Zheng Liu http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedfwp:87950&r=dge The COVID-19 pandemic has raised concerns about the future of work. The pandemic may become recurrent, necessitating repeated adoptions of social distancing measures (voluntary or mandatory), creating substantial uncertainty about worker productivity. But robots are not susceptible to the virus. Thus, pandemic-induced job uncertainty may boost the incentive for automation. However, elevated uncertainty also reduces aggregate demand and reduces the value of new investment in automation. We assess the importance o [...]

• Poor and black ‘invisible cyclists’ need to be part of post-pandemic transport planning too
  by ? in DJG Blogger, 2020-05-27 17:52:52 UTC

  A cyclist uses New York's bike-share program. Noam Galai/Getty Images As states and workplaces prepare to open up after the lockdown, many people are looking for alternatives to public transit to get to work. The National Association of City Trans [...]

2020-05-26

• The Price is Not Right: Measuring Inflation in a Pandemic
  by Steve Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz in Money, Banking and Financial Markets, 2020-05-26 11:06:49 UTC

  [W]hen you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it … your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.” Lord Kelvin, Popular Lectures , Vol. I, p. 73. Are prices really plummeting? If you watch the official government gauge of prices in the economy, you would think so. Between March and April, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) dropped by 0.8 percent―that’s a decline of 9.1 percent at an annual rate! Even if we exclude food and energy, prices still fell at half that rate. And, both price measures already h [...]

2020-05-25

• Se restano a corto di liquidità le imprese produttive
  by Tortuga in La Voce, 2020-05-25 10:59:46 UTC

  Nell’emergenza sanitaria ed economica è certamente utile prendere provvedimenti che garantiscano liquidità alle imprese, per permettere loro di sopravvivere. Ma bisogna occuparsi anche del “dopo crisi”, per evitare effetti negativi sulla produttività. La liquidità in tempi d’emergenza Per frenare l’espandersi della pandemia di Covid-19, il governo ha preso misure sempre più stringenti, fino ad arrivare, a inizio marzo, alla chiusura di tutte le attività produttive non strategiche. Un provvedimento necessario, il cui impatto economico è stato messo in conto. E infatti già si manifesta un primo [...]

2020-05-24

• Yoo-Mi Chin and Scott Cunningham (PubEc, 2019). “Revisiting the effect of warrantless domestic violence arrest laws on intimate partner homicides.”
  by ireadeconpapers in I Read Econ Papers, 2020-05-24 22:28:37 UTC

  I haven’t posted in a while, mainly because I started work last week and was working on a few other side projects prior to that and things have just been a little hectic. Today, I post about Chin and Cunningham’s (2019) work on the effect of domestic violence arrest legislation (whether arrest is discretionary, preferred, or mandatory) on spousal homicides in five slides. The full paper may be found here . I’ll try to update more in the coming days! [...]

2020-05-23

• The Urban Economics of Big City Mayors
  by Matthew E. Kahn in Environmental and Urban Economics, 2020-05-23 17:57:00 UTC

  In early June 2020, Baltimore's Democratic Primary will take place and the winner will be highly likely to be elected mayor in November.� Here is a profile of the key candidates. � In this brief blog post, I want to sketch out a few thoughts about Mayors.� What do Mayors do?� They are the city's leader but are they like a CEO?� What powers do they really have? Perhaps surprisingly, urban economists have not written much about urban elections.� Joe and Fernando have done the be st work (see here).� � �I co-authored a 2017 paper t hat examined how urban leaders affects the cost of public transit [...]

• Austerity, power & BBC bias
  by chris in Stumbling and Mumbling, 2020-05-23 11:43:21 UTC

  George Osborne gave a revealing interview ( 1'52" in ) to Radio 4 yesterday - revealing, not untypically for the BBC, for what it did not say. Osborne said that sometime in the "next two or three years": Markets, and indeed the country, will look to governments to set out plans for how they are going to eventually bring balance back to the public finances. The first thing that was not said here - and certainly not by his fawning interviewer - is that the more educated parts of the country will be looking for no such thing. Intelligent economists (as well as me ) agree that fiscal austerity w [...]

2020-05-21

• Thesis Thursday: Martin Eden
  by Chris Sampson in The Academic Health Economists' Blog, 2020-05-21 06:00:06 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 Martin Eden who has a PhD from the University of Manchester . If you would like to suggest a candidate for an upcoming Thesis Thursday, get in touch. Title Evaluating the economic benefits of complex interventions: accounting for non-health effects Supervisors Katherine Payne , Graeme Black , Gavin Daker-White Repository link https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/evaluating-the-economic-benefits-of-complex-interventions-accounting-for-nonhealth [...]

2020-05-20

• Emerging Markets’ Hidden Debt Risk
  by Mitali Das in Project Syndicate, 2020-05-20 15:17:47 UTC

  WASHINGTON, DC/LONDON – Stark warnings about the COVID-19 shock’s potentially devastating effects on emerging markets (EMs) have become ubiquitous. With the pandemic engulfing ever more countries, EMs face a mass exit by foreign investors seeking safe assets. As a result, capital outflows and currency depreciations have become unprecedentedly synchronized. A first round of policy interventions to blunt the pandemic’s financial and economic impact on EMs is already underway. But although these actions – mainly aimed at alleviating stress in foreign-exchange (FX) markets – are welcome, the ongoi [...]

2020-05-19

• Border Crossings: The Spread of COVID-19 across U.S. Counties
  by Jason Barr in Skynomics Blog, 2020-05-19 12:11:10 UTC

  Jason M. Barr and Troy Tassier       May 19, 2020 Pandemic 2020 The COVID-19 pandemic rages on with no end in sight. How long it will take to return to normal, at this point, is anybody’s guess. But since the Federal Government has ceded coordination on further mitigation efforts to individual states means there is going to be a hodgepodge of different policies . Each governor has been left to decide on a suite of strategies for its residents. Some states are on a path to almost full reopening, while others are taking a more cautious approach. This week, most states will loosen at least some r [...]

2020-05-18

• Chris Sampson’s journal round-up for 18th May 2020
  by Chris Sampson in The Academic Health Economists' Blog, 2020-05-18 11:00:07 UTC

  Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot . If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch . Socioeconomic factors and happiness: evidence from self-reported mental health data . Empirical Economics [ RePEc ] Published 7th March 2019 Empirical Economics is not a journal that I regularly visit, bu [...]

2020-05-17

• Euro Area in the Age of COVID-19
  by Steve Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz in Money, Banking and Financial Markets, 2020-05-17 11:53:03 UTC

  “The policy of European integration is a matter of war and peace in the 21st century.” Helmut Kohl, Speech at Catholic University , Leuven, February 2, 1996. "We can never forget what Jacques Delors said before the introduction of the euro. We need a political union; a currency union alone will not suffice. We have taken some steps forward, but we have not made sufficient progress. That is perfectly evident. This means that there needs to be more, rather than less, integration.”   German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Responding to questions in the Bundestag , May 13, 2020 (authors’ translation). T [...]

• Private Nursing Homes, Product Differentiation and Reducing COVID-19 Contagion Risk
  by Matthew E. Kahn in Environmental and Urban Economics, 2020-05-17 01:44:00 UTC

  At dinner tonight, my wife told me that between 1/3 to 1/2 of COVID-19 deaths have taken place at nursing homes. I asked her a Chicago Price Theory question.� I said; "If up to date COVID-19 Nursing home specific death rates are posted, won't private nursing homes devote more effort to reducing their death rate to better compete for customers?"� �The net effect of this competition among differentiated products will be lower COVID-19 contagion risk for the elderly who live in these homes.� �The children of the elderly have strong incentives to research the relative risk at these nursing homes a [...]

2020-05-14

• The Real Killer Is COVID-Lockdown-Driven Unemployment
  by Tyler Durden in Zero Hedge, 2020-05-14 17:45:00 UTC

  The Real Killer Is COVID-Lockdown-Driven Unemployment Tyler Durden Thu, 05/14/2020 - 13:45 Authored by Christopher Dembik, head of Macro Analysis at Saxo, Summary :    Today, the U.S. Federal Reserve will release a survey confirming the economy is doomed for a long and painful downturn. Chairman Powell said in a webinar at the Peterson Institute for International Economics yesterday that one of the main findings, which is similar to that of many other surveys, is that lower-income Americans have been the most affected by the consequences of the virus. According to Pow [...]

• 19 Tage lang 1. August
  by admin in BATZ.ch, 2020-05-14 13:00:27 UTC

  Yvan Lengwiler Dieser Blog ist auf https://unibaswwzfaculty.blog/ erschienen. Der Inhalt basiert auf einer ausführlicher dokumentierten Studie, welche hier verfügbar ist: https://ideas.repec.org/p/bsl/wpaper/2020-07.html Am 24. Februar 2020 wurde die erste Infektion mit SARS-CoV-2 in der Schweiz registriert. Am 5. März war das erste Opfer zu beklagen. Am 16. März verfügte der Bundesrat die Schliessung wesentlicher Teile der der Volkswirtschaft [1] . Solche annähernd kriegswirtschaftlichen Massnahmen können für die Wirtschaft nicht folgenlos bleiben. Bei der Gestaltung der Massnahmen stehen mit [...]

2020-05-12

• 42. Selected Data of Coronavirus in Spain, United States, Europe, America and other areas, year 2020: Statistics of Cases and Hospital beds
  by MCG Blogs de Economía in Euro-American Association: World Development, 2020-05-12 09:25:00 UTC

                    Map of Coronavirus. Source: RTVE  We have selected data from reliable sources, although in many cases the information is only provisional and expect to revise if there are statistical revisions in the next months. Revision from Maria-Carmen Guisan (University Professor of Econometrics and Honorary Professor at USC, Spain). We highlight the following questions. 1) Data from Our World In Data (OWID)  (Oxford, UK). That interesting Website includes data by day of cases, deaths and related variables. From this source we have calculated the percentage of Deaths on the number of Ca [...]

2020-05-11

• Qu’aurait fait Roosevelt face à la crise économique du Covid19 ?
  by nadine in Bloc-Notes Eco, 2020-05-11 16:57:57 UTC

  Publié le 12/05/2020 Par Jean Barthélemy et Vincent Bignon Roosevelt reste dans l’histoire comme ayant réussi à sortir les États-Unis de la Grande Dépression. Pour cela, il communique afin de répondre aux inquiétudes des américains et modifie la politique économique. Son but ? Briser le cercle vicieux dans lequel le pessimisme amplifie la récession. Ce billet tire les leçons de cette stratégie pour la crise actuelle, même si les crises sont différentes. billet_161_vf_1.pdf Franklin D. Roosevelt lors d’une « conversation au coin du feu » en 1934 Source : photographie de Harris & Ewing, Li [...]

• Dynamic Beveridge Curve Accounting
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2020-05-11 13:40:36 UTC

  By Hie Joo Ahn and Leland Crane http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedgfe:2020-27&r=dge We develop a dynamic decomposition of the empirical Beveridge curve, i.e., the level of vacancies conditional on unemployment. Using a standard model, we show that three factors can shift the Beveridge curve: reduced-form matching efficiency, changes in the job separation rate, and out-of-steady-state dynamics. We find that the shift in the Beveridge curve during and after the Great Recession was due to all three factors, and each factor taken separately had a large effect. Comparing the pre-2010 period to th [...]

• Chris Sampson’s journal round-up for 11th May 2020
  by Chris Sampson in The Academic Health Economists' Blog, 2020-05-11 11:00:06 UTC

  Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot . If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch . Economic theory and medical assistance in dying . Applied Health Economics and Health Policy [ PubMed ] [ RePEc ] Published 6th May 2020 The ethics, politics, and economics of medically assisted death is [...]

2020-05-10

• Helicopters to the Rescue?
  by Steve Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz in Money, Banking and Financial Markets, 2020-05-10 14:41:52 UTC

  “Helicopter Money Is Here!” Forbes , March 17, 2020. “Helicopter money: The time is now,” VoxEU.org , March 17, 2020.“ ” The Helicopters Are Coming ,” Project Syndicate , March 26, 2020. “We Need to Start Tossing Money Out of Helicopters” The Atlantic , March 31, 2020. “U.S. needs more ‘helicopter money’ to cushion coronavirus impact.”   CNBC , April 9, 2020. Is helicopter money here? Do we need it now? Is it coming? The short answer to these questions is that it is not here and we currently do not need it, but should the economic disaster brought on by COVID-19 continue for much longer, that [...]

2020-05-09

• The Wealth Effects of Bailouts: A Quantitative Assessment
  by Pirmin Fessler, Martin Schürz in INET Blog, 2020-05-09 15:56:00 UTC

  A side effect of the 2008 financial crisis was that the average taxpayer had to dig deep into her and her children’s pockets to save many financial assets. Given the uneven concentration of financial assets, this rescue mission was in fact a bailout of the rich. At the time, advocates argued that these side effects were warranted in the interest of the common good, for the sake of stabilizing and ensuring the future income of everybody in society. Ultimately, though, private wealth was saved for the benefit of its owners. As the markets recovered in the fo [...]

2020-05-07

• Marina Agranov, Jacob Goeree, Julian Romero, and Leaat Yariv (JEEA, 2018). What makes voters turn out: The effects of polls and beliefs.
  by ireadeconpapers in I Read Econ Papers, 2020-05-07 21:08:53 UTC

  In this post, I summarize the experimental design and main findings of a very cool paper on voter behavior in five slides. The paper can be found here . [...]

2020-05-06

• Dollar invoicing, global value chains, and the business cycle dynamics of international trade
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2020-05-06 15:16:11 UTC

  By David Cook and Nikhil Patel http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bis:biswps:860&r=dge Recent literature has highlighted that international trade is mostly priced in a few key vehicle currencies, and is increasingly dominated by intermediate goods and global value chains (GVCs). Taking these features into account, this paper reexamines the business cycle dynamics of international trade and its relationship with monetary policy and exchange rates. Using a three country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) framework, it finds key differences between the response of final goods and GVC trade [...]

• Technocrats & class
  by ? in Stumbling and Mumbling, 2020-05-06 13:07:59 UTC

  Are centrists even more utopian than socialists? I’m prompted to ask by a passage at the end of Anne Case and Angus Deaton’sDeaths of Despair. They write:We believe that capitalism is an immensely powerful force for progress and for good, but it needs to s [...]

2020-05-04

• Chris Sampson’s journal round-up for 4th May 2020
  by Chris Sampson in The Academic Health Economists' Blog, 2020-05-04 11:00:06 UTC

  Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot . If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch . Learnings for health economics from the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic . PharmacoEconomics – Open [ PubMed ] [ RePEc ] Published 10th April 2020 I’ve included several editorials and brief commentar [...]

2020-05-03

• Central Bank to the World: Supplying Dollars in the COVID Crisis
  by Steve Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz in Money, Banking and Financial Markets, 2020-05-03 17:16:37 UTC

  “ While the world economy is being reordered, the U.S. dollar remains as important as when Bretton Woods collapsed.” Mark Carney, former Bank of England Governor, Jackson Hole speech , August 23, 2019. In his comments at Jackson Hole last year, then-Bank of England Governor Mark Carney highlighted the continuing dominance of the U.S. dollar: it accounts for one-half of global trade invoicing; two thirds of emerging market external debt, official foreign exchange reserves, and global securities issuance; and nearly 90 percent of (one leg of) foreign exchange transactions. It also is the basis f [...]

2020-05-01

• Melissa Dell and Benjamin Olken (REStud, 2020). The development effects of the extractive colonial economy: The Dutch Cultivation System in Java.
  by ireadeconpapers in I Read Econ Papers, 2020-05-01 13:13:01 UTC

  I didn’t want to leave this space untouched for too long, so I thought I would squeeze in a quick post before my last final of this semester (and my undergraduate candidature!) in NUS. Source I summarize a paper by Melissa Dell, 2020 JBC medal winner , in this post. Since this is a summary, I do not cover everything in the paper, and do not describe the robustness checks performed. If you are curious about the details, the paper can be found here . Research Question Acemoglu and Robinson’s (2012) Why Nations Fail (a debater starter pack book) drew vivid contrasts between diff [...]

2020-04-30

• COVID-19 and Higher Education: some of the effects on students and institutions and how to alleviate them
  by LSE BPP in British Politics and Policy at LSE, 2020-04-30 09:00:43 UTC

  Monica Langella discusses some potential negative effects of the pandemic on higher education, particularly those pertaining to online assessment, university offers, and labour market outcomes. She offers evidence-based suggestions for how these impacts may be mitigated. After some initial uncertainty , higher education institutions in the UK switched to online teaching in March, not without some debate accompanying the decision. Even if technology enables distance learning in a relatively smooth way, the fact that by the end of March most universities decided to close at least part of their c [...]

2020-04-27

• Ewan Gray’s journal round-up for 27th April 2020
  by Ewan Gray in The Academic Health Economists' Blog, 2020-04-27 11:00:00 UTC

  Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot . If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch . The journal Health Economics has recently launched a special online-only issue , which brings together previously published studies related to pandemics. Current events are sure to have sparked new interest [...]

• Health versus Wealth: On the Distributional Effects of Controlling a Pandemic
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2020-04-27 04:06:14 UTC

  By Andrew Glover, Jonathan Heathcote, Dirk Krueger and Jos�-V�ctor R�os-Rull http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pen:papers:20-014&r=dge To slow the spread of COVID-19, many countries are shutting down non-essential sectors of the economy. Older individuals have the most to gain from slowing virus diffusion. Younger workers in sectors that are shuttered have the most to lose. In this paper, we build a model in which economic activity and disease progression are jointly determined. Individuals differ by age (young and retired), by sector (basic and luxury), and by health status. Disease transmission [...]

2020-04-26

• Economics after COVID-19
  by Francesc Trillas in Real Progress, 2020-04-26 20:25:00 UTC

  During and after the last global financial crisis, there was a lot of soul searching among economists, and although the reaction was slow and far from universal, some fruits have emerged from that. A higher concern for inequality, a turn to more empirical methods (facilitated by technology), new pedagogical projects such as CORE , and more dialogue with other disciplines. I do not remember well what happened in the early days of the crisis in 2008, but now perhaps because there is even a more intense use of social networks (because of technology supply but also because of technology demand in [...]

• Inflation is not (and should not be) a key worry today
  by Steve Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz in Money, Banking and Financial Markets, 2020-04-26 15:54:37 UTC

  “ We believe the Federal Reserve's large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called "quantitative easing") should be reconsidered and discontinued. […] The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed's objective of promoting employment. ” Letter from a group of 24 economists to Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, November 15, 2010. A very simple version of 1960s monetarism has two elements. First, controlling money growth is necessary and sufficient to control inflation. Second, leaving aside a financial crisis, the monetary base―the sum of curre [...]

2020-04-24

• Impact Investment’s Pandemic Challenge
  by Tolullah Oni in Project Syndicate, 2020-04-24 15:27:05 UTC

  CAMBRIDGE – The COVID-19 pandemic will have dangerous, far-reaching implications long into the future, especially if it derails recent improvements in many countries’ historically weak health systems. To avoid that outcome, we urgently need to move beyond merely “protecting the needy” in times of crisis. Episodic donations are not enough. Now is the time to start removing the structural and systemic barriers that have long stood in the way of sustained improvements in global health. Following global emergencies, the international community tends to revert to “business as usual,” rather than pr [...]

• Risk in capitalism
  by chris in Stumbling and Mumbling, 2020-04-24 13:01:30 UTC

  One thing this crisis is demonstrating is that in modern capitalism it is workers and small businesses that bear risk to a greater extent that does larger capital. As Paul Evans points out, some of the biggest losers are freelance workers who are ineligible for furlough schemes. And Charles Gascon at the St Louis Fed adds that it is low-paid workers who are most at risk of losing their jobs: The occupations at the highest risk of unemployment also tend to be lower-paid occupations. The average annual earnings of the low-risk occupations is $64,600, about 75% higher than earnings in the high-r [...]

2020-04-23

• Liberalising foreign capital flows in Government debt: No time for incrementalism
  by Anurodh in Ajay Shah's blog, 2020-04-23 14:12:00 UTC

  by Radhika Pandey , Rajeswari Sengupta and Bhargavi Zaveri . On March 30, 2020, the Reserve Bank of India announced a "Fully Accessible Route" (FAR) that gives unlimited access to foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) to a select set of government securities (G-Secs), specified by the RBI from time to time. To the extent this initiative facilitates the liberalisation of India's capital account and aids market development, it is a step in the right direction. Opening up a set of G-Secs to unrestricted foreign investment may contribute to the depth and diversity of the market and also impose great [...]

2020-04-22

• extended q & a with daniel beunza about taking the floor: models, morals, and management in a wall st. trading room
  by katherinechen in orgtheory.net, 2020-04-22 22:27:14 UTC

  Following 9/11, Wall St. firms struggled to re-establish routines in temporary offices .  Many financial firms subsequently made contingency plans by building or renting disaster recovery sites.   As we see now,  these contingency plans relied upon certain assumptions that did not anticipate current pandemic conditions : The coronavirus outbreak threw a wrench into the continuity planning that many Wall Street companies had put in place since at least the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Those plans were largely built around the idea that if trading at a bank headquarters was knocked off-line, g [...]

• The CARES Act and the Tantalizing Promise of a Universal Basic Income
  by Miranda Fleischer in Truth on the Market, 2020-04-22 15:00:00 UTC

  [ TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here . This post is authored by Miranda Perry Fleischer, (Professor Law and Co-Director of Tax Programs at the University of San Diego School of Law); and Matt Zwolinski (Professor of Philosophy, University of San Diego; founder and director, USD Center for Ethics, Economics, and Public Policy; founder and contributor, Bleeding Heart Libertarians Blog) ]  This week, Americans began receiving cold, hard c [...]

2020-04-21

• An introduction to the economics of platform competition – Part 3
  by Paul Belleflamme in IPdigIT, 2020-04-21 06:19:10 UTC

  In the first two episodes of this series, I examined what brings markets with platforms to be dominated by a single or by a few winners. I conclude here by discussing the critical influence of interoperability and multihoming on the competition that takes place in markets with platforms. Competing ‘for’ or ‘in’ the market As we learned in the previous post of this series, interoperability is a critical game-changer in network markets. Basically, when platforms agree to be interoperable with one another, it is as though they were agreeing to share the market, as network sizes stop conferring a [...]

2020-04-20

• Moving towards targeted anti-poverty programs: lessons from Indonesia
  by Alifia Firliani and Aulia Larasati in Development Policy Blog, 2020-04-20 20:00:49 UTC

  Governments across the developing world have continued to expand their anti-poverty programs to lift millions of people out of poverty. In Indonesia today, the country's social safety net programs assist more than 90 million individuals. Indonesia, like more than 60 other countries , has shifted its anti-poverty strategy over the past two decades, gradually moving from subsidising basic commodities such as food and electricity to targeted assistance programs for the poor. Recent research from Indonesia and Peru has shown that effectively targeting social safety net programs to those who need [...]

• What’s That, You Want to Run an Online Experiment?
  by ? in social science space, 2020-04-20 15:46:50 UTC

  A few months back, over at blog.prolific.ac, we published a post exploring the options open to researchers when recruiting participants for online research. In case you’ve been living in a cave for the last few years, online human data collection [...]

• 337. Developing-country farmers: how are they different?
  by David Pannell in Pannell Discussions, 2020-04-20 15:00:21 UTC

  One of the papers in the recent AEPP Special Issue of papers on adoption of agricultural innovations is about how smallholder farmers in developing countries differ from larger and wealthier farmers, and how these differences affect the farmers’ responses to new agricultural practices and technologies.  The paper is by Rick Llewelly from CSIRO in Australia and Brendan Brown from CIMMYT in Mexico, who have worked together on this issue for a number of years. You can hear my interview with Rick about the paper here . My conversation with Rick is available as an episode of the AEPP podcast series [...]

• The Murder-Suicide of the Rentier: Population Aging and the Risk Premium
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2020-04-20 14:54:02 UTC

  By Joseph Kopecky and Alan Taylor http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:26943&r=dge Population aging has been linked to global declines in interest rates. A similar trend shows that equity risk premia are on the rise. An existing literature can explain part of the decline in the trend in safe rates using demographics, but has no mechanism to speak to trends in relative asset prices. We calibrate a heterogeneous agent life-cycle model with equity markets, showing that this demographic channel can simultaneously account for both the majority of a downward trend in the risk free rate, while al [...]

• Escape from New York?: Density and the Coronavirus Trajectory
  by Jason Barr in Skynomics Blog, 2020-04-20 11:55:21 UTC

  Jason M. Barr and Troy Tassier        written on April 3, 2020, posted on April 20. Note: A shorter version of this post was written for Scientific American , which was posted on April 17 th . The Density Paradox Anyone who follows the journalist Matt Yglesias on Twitter knows his style. He’s sardonic, facetious, and relies on barbs to make his point. His recent tweet on March 23, 2020 , at 8:10 pm EST is a perfect example: The moral of corona virus is that we should adopt the kind of low-density living patterns associated with Asian countries like South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore tha [...]

• Ian Andrew Cromwell’s journal round-up for 20th April 2020
  by Ian Cromwell in The Academic Health Economists' Blog, 2020-04-20 11:00:26 UTC

  Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot . If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch . Wow has the world ever changed since my last round-up! Both for me personally and for pretty much everyone else on the planet. It’s never been a more interesting time to be a health services researcher and m [...]

2020-04-19

• COVID-19 Economic Downturn: What do cyclical norms suggest?
  by Steve Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz in Money, Banking and Financial Markets, 2020-04-19 18:42:37 UTC

  “But the universal nature delights in change, and in obedience to her all things […] from eternity have been done in like form, and will be such to time without end.”  Marcus Aurelius, Meditations , Book Nine Business cycle downturns come in many forms. Some are big, others small. Some are long, some are short. Some result from policy errors or euphoric booms, while others are the consequence of external events. Fortunately, unlike Marcus Aurelius’ classically stoic view of all things, they are not eternal. Nevertheless, downturns have some common features and regularities. Among those that ha [...]

2020-04-16

• When rules don't apply
  by chris in Stumbling and Mumbling, 2020-04-16 13:02:57 UTC

  It’s a cliché that this is a crisis. But what exactly is a crisis? I like Richard Bookstaber’s idea – that it is a time when normal economic rules don’t apply. For example, in normal times investors can reasonably think about valuations and corporate earnings. But in crises what matters instead is risk and liquidity. In normal times, negative feedback loops dominate: cheap assets will rise in price. But in crises, there’s a heightened danger of positive feedback whereby selling begets more selling. In the 2008 crisis, for example, some opposed bank bailouts fearing a moral hazard problem. But [...]

• Andrei Hagiu and Julian Wright (MS, 2015). Marketplace or Reseller?
  by ireadeconpapers in I Read Econ Papers, 2020-04-16 12:34:15 UTC

  I write about the basic formulation in Hagiu and Wright (2015)’s paper modelling the choice an intermediary makes between being a marketplace and a reseller to revise for my Industrial Organization II final. Professor Julian Wright taught the model in this paper to us this semester, and I’m going to try my best to do it justice here (hope I haven’t misunderstood anything!) Sidenote: Prof Wright is very clear and very, very , patient, and if you’re an NUS Economics student reading this, I highly recommend EC4324 Economics of Competition Policy and EC4322 Industrial Organization II! I learn [...]

2020-04-14

• The Logistical Hell of Postponing the Olympics for One Year
  by ? in Slate Blogs, 2020-04-14 21:04:57 UTC

  Pushing back the Tokyo Games requires so much, all in the face of an unpredictable pandemic. [...]

• Agriculture After the Pandemic
  by Wandile Sihlobo in Project Syndicate, 2020-04-14 13:30:54 UTC

  PRETORIA – As the COVID-19 pandemic forces countries to close their borders, their agricultural sectors are confronting major challenges. Even in countries that are unlikely to face food insecurity – such as those in Europe and North America – farms are facing severe labor shortages, owing to new barriers that keep low-cost workers out. And the impact of the disruption on the supply of workers is likely to spur permanent shifts within the sector after the pandemic ends. The risks inherent in depending on foreign seasonal workers have materialized in several European countries, including France [...]

2020-04-13

• Keisuke Hattori and Yusuke Zennyo (2018). Heterogeneous Consumer Expectations and Monopoly Pricing for Durables with Network Externalities.
  by ireadeconpapers in I Read Econ Papers, 2020-04-13 20:16:53 UTC

  This is an explanation of the model and some of the basic results in Hattori and Zennyo’s (2018) working paper “Heterogeneous Consumer Expectations and Monopoly Pricing for Durables with Network Externalities” . I do not go into all the results and proofs, but the paper is linked at the end of this post. Some background first: while I was studying for my Industrial Organization final and looking for alternative environments in which the concepts I was taught may be applied, I came across this paper and decided to write about the model here for fun! I sacrifice brevity here and end up repea [...]

• Chris Sampson’s journal round-up for 13th April 2020
  by Chris Sampson in The Academic Health Economists' Blog, 2020-04-13 11:00:00 UTC

  Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot . If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch . A simple decision analysis of a mandatory lockdown response to the COVID-19 pandemic . Applied Health Economics and Health Policy [ PubMed ] [ RePEc ] Published 5th April 2020 Some national policymakers h [...]

• Should Germany Have Built a New Wall? Macroeconomic Lessons from the 2015-18 Refugee Wave
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2020-04-13 04:09:32 UTC

  BY Christopher Busch, Dirk Krueger, Alexander Ludwig, Irina Popova and Zainab Iftikhar http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hka:wpaper:2020-020&r=dge In 2015-2016 Germany experienced a wave of predominantly low-skilled refugee immigration. We evaluate its macroeconomic and distributional effects using a quantitative overlapping generations model calibrated using German micro data to replicate education and productivity differentials between foreign born and native workers. Workers are modelled as imperfect substitutes in aggregate production leading to endogenous wage differentials. We simulate the dy [...]

2020-04-12

• The Fed Goes to War: Part 3
  by Steve Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz in Money, Banking and Financial Markets, 2020-04-12 15:52:32 UTC

  “Our emergency measures are reserved for truly rare circumstances, such as those we face today. When the economy is well on its way back to recovery, and private markets and institutions are once again able to perform their vital functions of channeling credit and supporting economic growth, we will put these emergency tools away.” Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome H. Powell , April 9, 2020.  For the second time this century, the Federal Reserve is a crisis manager. In this role, policymakers can lend to solvent but illiquid intermediaries (as the lender of last resort). They can backstop fin [...]

• What centre?
  by chris in Stumbling and Mumbling, 2020-04-12 10:07:41 UTC

  The election of Keir Starmer as Labour leader has caused some leftists to fear that the party will move to the centre. Such fears, though, miss the point – that there is no centre. By this I don’t just mean that there are no votes there, as the LibDems and CUK (or whatever they called themselves) discovered in December. I also mean that there are no ideas there either. One feature of CUK was its utter lack of economic thinking and obliviousness to the fact that the economy has changed a lot since the 90s and so requires new policies. Almost the only substantive thought in its launch document w [...]

2020-04-11

• Notas técnicas dos grupos de pesquisa do Cedeplar-UFMG sobre a Covid-19
  by Hugo da Gama Cerqueira in Meu gabinete de curiosidades, 2020-04-11 14:43:00 UTC

  Nas últimas semanas, os grupos de pesquisa do Cedeplar, da Faculdade de Ciências Econômicas da UFMG, produziram notas técnicas sobre diferentes temas relacionados à pandemia de Covid-19, desde projeções sobre a disponibilidade de leitos hospitalares e equipamento de ventilação mecânica até a discussão dos efeitos da crise sobre as populações das periferias urbanas e as medidas que poderiam atenuá-los. Estes relatórios estão reunidos agora numa série  e podem ser consultados na maior base bibliográfica da área de economia, o RePEc. No momento em que escrevo, a íntegra das oito primeiras notas t [...]

2020-04-10

• Coronavirus will test US’s civic health too
  by ? in DJG Blogger, 2020-04-10 12:15:57 UTC

  A worker washes the sidewalk near San Francisco's City Hall. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images The immediate concerns of the coronavirus are clear: an unprecedented health crisis and economic devastation. But it isn’t just hospitals and businesses feeli [...]

2020-04-09

• Will Richer People Further Increase their Social Distancing in Post COVID-19 Urban Life?
  by Matthew E. Kahn in Environmental and Urban Economics, 2020-04-09 13:52:00 UTC

  Many urban scholars have noted that richer people tend to suburbanize.� Bob Margo's 1 992 paper makes this point in a straightforward way. � � The usual explanations focus on the demand for newer, larger homes an d fears of center city taxes and center city quality of life challenges (crime and pollution).� In recent years as crime has fallen in many center cities and with the rise in the sharing App economy, consumer center city living has boomed.� Will a loss of trust in the post COVID-19 era, increase the demand for low density living again? When one gets on a public transit bus, or sends a [...]

• When Plagues Pass: Slower Growth, Social Unrest, & Labor Gets The Upper Hand
  by Tyler Durden in Zero Hedge, 2020-04-09 10:30:00 UTC

  When Plagues Pass: Slower Growth, Social Unrest, & Labor Gets The Upper Hand Authored by John Authers, op-ed via Bloomberg.com, As the Black Death scythed through Europe in 1348 and 1349, workers across the continent discovered that they had power for the first time in their lives. Textile workers in St. Omer in northern France asked for and received three successive wage rises within a year of the Great Plague’s passing. Many workers’ guilds struck for higher pay and shorter hours. When the French government tried to cap these demands in 1351, it still allowed pay rises of as m [...]

2020-04-08

• Demographics and the decline in firm entry: Lessons from a life-cycle model
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2020-04-08 17:16:55 UTC

  By Oke Röhe and Nikolai Stähler http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:bubdps:152020&r=dge Since the mid-1970s, firm entry rates in the United States have declined significantly. This also holds for other OECD countries over the past years. At the same time, these economies experienced a gradual process of population aging. Applying a tractable life-cycle model with endogenous firm dynamics, we show that falling US firm entry rates can be explained by demographic transition. Specifically, our model simulations suggest that aging can account for up to one third of the observed decrease in US firm ent [...]

2020-04-06

• M4A Would Deliver Authoritarian, Unaffordable, Low-Quality Care
  by Michael F. Cannon in Cato Unbound, 2020-04-06 10:25:00 UTC

  Michael F. Cannon The far left has made “Medicare for All” its rallying cry. Medicare is the 55-year-old federal program that provides health insurance— if that’s the right term —to 58 million elderly and disabled U.S. residents. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has introduced, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has endorsed, legislation that would expand Medicare by enrolling all 319 million or so lawful permanent U.S. residents, subsidizing more health services (e.g., long-term care), and making all covered services “free” by eliminating all patient cost-sharing. Attempting to describe the scope, c [...]

2020-04-05

• Low Carbon Suburban Living in 2021 in our "Post-COVID19" World
  by Matthew E. Kahn in Environmental and Urban Economics, 2020-04-05 23:04:00 UTC

  A growing group of urban scholars are now considering the long run effects of COVID-19 on optimal urban density patterns.� Will the population spread out into more suburban living to reduce future contagion risk?� If high density (apartment and public transit intensive) living becomes less attractive, will greenhouse gas emissions rise as more of the population suburbanizes?� Will there be greater opposition to carbon pricing because suburbanites consume more fossil fuels and thus will be more likely to oppose such carbon pricing? In a series of past papers, I have explored these themes; 1.� E [...]

• Coronavirus: location-tracking apps could stop the disease – here's how
  by ? in PreventionWeb News & Announcements, 2020-04-05 23:00:00 UTC

  Apps tracking people's movements that help identify and isolate anyone in contact with an infected person could be critical in avoiding or leaving lockdown. [...]

2020-04-04

• South Africa needs to mitigate the worst of its inequalities in tackling coronavirus
  by ? in PreventionWeb News & Announcements, 2020-04-04 23:00:00 UTC

  South Africa's lockdown illuminates how spatial, economic and social inequalities characteristic of the apartheid continue post-apartheid. [...]

2020-04-03

• How Many Jobs Can Be Done at Home? In the United States, It’s 34 percent
  by Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman in Pro-Market, 2020-04-03 18:29:12 UTC

  Evaluating the economic impact of “social distancing” measures taken to arrest the spread of Covid-19 raises a fundamental question about the modern economy: How many jobs can be performed at home? Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman classified the feasibility of working at home for all occupations: In the United States, it’s 34 percent of jobs.     Evaluating the economic impact of “social distancing” measures taken to arrest the spread of Covid-19 raises a number of fundamental questions about the modern economy: How many jobs can be performed at home? What share of total wages are paid to su [...]

2020-04-02

• Do Social Networks Increase or Decrease the COVID-19 Contagion Rate?
  by Matthew E. Kahn in Environmental and Urban Economics, 2020-04-02 14:57:00 UTC

  Do Social Networks Increase or Decrease the COVID-19 Contagion Rate? Dora L. Costa Kenneth T. Sokoloff Professor of Economic History UCLA Costa@econ.ucla.edu .  Matthew E. Kahn Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Economics and Business Director of the 21st Century Cities Initiative mkahn10@jhu.edu Each nation will face less contagion risk if we as individuals engage in social distancing.    But some people are choosing to continue to live their lives under business as usual.    Behavioral economics assumes that many of us, like the college students who stormed the beaches [...]

2020-04-01

• Vite salvate dagli open data
  by Francesco Billari e Alberto Bisin in La Voce, 2020-04-01 15:58:41 UTC

  La battaglia contro il coronavirus si combatte anche attraverso analisi statistiche della dinamica dell’epidemia, sulla base delle quali prendere decisioni di politica sanitaria o economica. È indispensabile però che siano resi disponibili dati adeguati. L’epidemia e il ruolo della statistica La battaglia alla pandemia Covid-19 si combatte e si vince in molti luoghi: negli ospedali, ovviamente, nei laboratori medici e farmaceutici, nelle fabbriche di materiale per la protezione degli operatori della sanità, nei comuni in lockdown e così via. La battaglia si combatte anche fornendo dati all’opi [...]

2020-03-31

• Fiscal Policy during a Pandemic
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2020-03-31 03:24:07 UTC

  By Miguel Faria-e-Castro http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedlwp:87616&r=dge I use a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to study the effects of the 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic in the United States. The pandemic is modeled as a large negative shock to the utility of consumption of contact-intensive services. General equilibrium forces propagate this negative shock to the non-services and financial sectors, triggering a deep recession. I use a calibrated version of the model to analyze different types of fiscal policies: (i) government purchases, (ii) income tax cuts, (iii) unemploym [...]

2020-03-30

• COVID-19 Stress Test
  by Steve Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz in Money, Banking and Financial Markets, 2020-03-30 12:08:06 UTC

  “[The 2019 stress test results] show that our financial system remains resilient [….] The largest and most complex banks […] demonstrated [their] ability to withstand a severe and lasting economic downturn and still be able to lend to households and businesses.” FRB Vice Chair for Supervision Randal K. Quarles, “ Stress Testing: A Decade of Continuity and Change ”, July 9, 2019 “Banks worked hard to build their capital buffers following the crisis. It is imprudent to reduce the loss absorbing capital at the core of the system at this point in the cycle, when […] payouts have been exceeding ear [...]

2020-03-26

• 6 post-Corona Institutional questions
  by Paul Frijters in Club Troppo, 2020-03-26 12:34:59 UTC

  The mass hysteria of the corona crisis is raging, with the resulting self-isolation of whole economies and populations. The loss seems greater with every new forecast on the economic collapse than I initially though t, and the benefit of imprisoning and terrorizing the population smaller than I initially thought , leading courageous little Sweden to forego these options . High-level media and calm commentators are waking up to the longer-term implications, though the population is still too overcome by fear. I want to share 6 areas where we should think of international institutional reform to [...]

2020-03-25

• Will the US Pandemic Response Strengthen Workers?
  by Teresa Ghilarducci in Project Syndicate, 2020-03-25 11:37:27 UTC

  NEW YORK – Despite the deep polarization of American politics, there appears to be more agreement than disagreement over how to deal with the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. The US Federal Reserve is already pursing bold monetary-policy measures, and Congress is quickly working toward a large fiscal-stimulus package featuring government bailouts with equity stakes in private companies and one- or two-time cash infusions to households. But this rare moment of bipartisanship will turn out to have been a missed opportunity if it does not also reverse the long decline of worker protec [...]

2020-03-23

• This Time Truly Is Different
  by Carmen M. Reinhart in Project Syndicate, 2020-03-23 13:05:29 UTC

  CAMBRIDGE – While pandemics are comparatively rare, and severe ones rarer still, I am not aware of a historical episode that can provide any insight as to the likely economic consequences of the unfolding global coronavirus crisis. This time truly is different. A key feature of this episode that makes it unique is the policy response. Governments around the world are giving priority to measures that limit the spread of disease and save lives, including the complete lockdown of a region (as in China) and even of entire countries (Italy, Spain, and France, for example). A much longer list of cou [...]

• Fourth large-scale asset purchases program: A new hope
  by ? in FRED blog, 2020-03-23 13:00:00 UTC

  We’ve previously discussed the tapering of the three large-scale asset purchase programs popularly known as “ quantitative easing .” On Sunday, March 15 , the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) brought back this unconventional monetary policy tool. The FOMC directed the New York Fed’s Open Market Trading Desk (the Desk) to purchase at least $500 billion worth of Treasury securities and at least $200 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities. These asset purchases are called unconventional policy measures to distinguish them from the management of the federal funds rate through open market [...]

• The Fed Goes to War
  by Steve Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz in Money, Banking and Financial Markets, 2020-03-23 12:14:54 UTC

  “This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition; it is a war of peoples and of causes. There are vast numbers, not only in this island but in every land, who will render faithful service in this war but whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded. This is a war of the Unknown Warriors; but let all strive without failing in faith or in duty….” Winston Churchill, BBC Broadcast, London, 14 July 1940. Over the past two weeks, the Federal Reserve has resurrected many of the policy tools that took many months to develop during the Great Financia [...]

• Supply Chain Disruptions, Time to Build, and the Business Cycle
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2020-03-23 03:19:51 UTC

  Bt Matthias Meier http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2020_160 We provide new evidence that (i) time to build is volatile and countercyclical, and that (ii) supply chain disruptions lengthen time to build. Motivated by these findings, we develop a general equilibrium model in which heterogeneous firms face non-convex adjustment costs and multi-period time to build. In the model, supply chain disruptions lengthen time to build. Calibrating the model to US micro data, we show that disruptions, which lengthen time to build by 1 month, depress GDP by 1% and aggregate TFP by 0.2%. Stru [...]

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