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Blog aggregator for economics research

2021-07-28

• Ma qualcuno pensa alle assunzioni?
  by Emiliano Mariotti in La Voce, 2021-07-28 11:50:29 UTC

  Si è discusso molto della salvaguardia di posti di lavoro spesso senza futuro e poco della necessità di recuperare il milione e mezzo di assunzioni mancate durante la pandemia. Che servirebbero anche a riassorbire gli inevitabili esuberi strutturali. Il dibattito sui licenziamenti Il confronto pubblico sul lavoro in Italia sembra concentrato soltanto sui licenziamenti. Del tutto ignorate le assunzioni. In realtà i licenziamenti sono stati molto contenuti durante il Covid e, come mostrato su lavoce , al momento non ci sono segni di accelerazioni dopo la fine del blocco dei licenziame [...]

2021-07-27

• El salario mínimo en Colombia: nueva evidencia empírica sobre sus efectos y algunas consideraciones económicas y éticas
  by Nicolás de Roux in Foco Económico, 2021-07-27 21:11:03 UTC

  El salario mínimo es uno de los temas de política pública más debatidos alrededor del mundo. Esto es particularmente cierto en Colombia, donde ronda un valor cercano al 90% del salario mediano, el valor más alto si se lo compara con el de otros países de la OECD o de Latino América ( Mondragón-Vélez et al. 2010 ). En este blog presento resultados de dos investigaciones recientes en cuya elaboración participé y que considero que son pertinentes para el debate sobre este tema. La primera de ellas encuentra un efecto causal negativo de aumentos del salario mínimo en el empleo de las industrias de [...]

2021-07-26

• The QE Ratchet
  by Steve Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz in Money, Banking and Financial Markets, 2021-07-26 11:56:27 UTC

  “ [Quantitative easing] tends to be deployed in response to bad news, but isn’t reversed when the bad news ends. As a result, the stock of bonds held by central banks ratchets up, expanding their balance sheets into the longer term.” Former Bank of England Governor Mervyn King, Baron of Lothbury , July 20, 2021. When it comes to quantitative easing (QE), where you stand definitely depends on where you sit. That is among the conclusions of the important new report of the Economic Affairs Committee of the UK House of Lords . The report provides an excellent survey of how it is that central bank [...]

• Journal round-up: PharmacoEconomics – Open 5(2)
  by Rita Faria in The Academic Health Economists' Blog, 2021-07-26 06:00:01 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 June issue has a bumper 18 articles from systematic reviews to cost-effectiveness analyses and many more. The systematic reviews are both on health economic evidence, one on point-of-care testing and the other on mantle cell lymphoma . There is also a protocol for a review on th [...]

2021-07-24

• Why China and the United States aren’t cooperating on COVID-19
  by Xirui Li in East Asia Forum, 2021-07-24 12:00:37 UTC

  Author: Xirui Li, NTU Intergovernmental cooperation between the United States and China was an important part of the fight against Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003. Yet serious collaboration to combat COVID-19 is yet to materialise. The state of US–China bilateral relations and the failure to cooperate has arguably worsened the pandemic. Despite similarities between the two initial outbreaks, COVID-19 seems to have deepened the antagonism and rivalry between the United States and China. Many attribute the lack of pandemic cooperation to a preoccupation with the ongoing trade a [...]

2021-07-23

• Esto es lo que pasa cuando crees que aciertas con el momento de vender las acciones en bolsa cuando ésta cae
  by Alejandro Nieto González in Elblogsalmon, 2021-07-23 08:01:47 UTC

  Llevamos unos días en los que las bolsas bajan . De hecho ya se habla de que ha llegado la corrección después de meses de subidas, y que es el momento de vender las acciones para esperar de nuevo a las subidas. Sin embargo, aunque puede parecer una estrategia adecuada (vender cuando empieza a caer y comprar cuando empieza a subir), no podemos predecir el futuro y posiblemente estaremos haciendo lo contrario . Los estudios empíricos dicen que no se acierta en el market timing Si la bolsa cae... mejor no hacer nada Imaginemos que somos unos expertos en acertar cuándo el merca [...]

2021-07-22

• Does emigration hurt businesses in migrant-sending countries?
  by Ryan Edwards in Development Policy Blog, 2021-07-22 20:00:31 UTC

  When people leave their countries to work abroad, firms, industry groups, and even policy-makers often raise concerns about so-called skills shortages and brain drain. I discussed this in detail in three earlier blogs ( here , here , and here ). These perceptions, whether valid or not, often lead to nationalistic policies that create barriers to labour mobility and economic integration, limiting the freedoms of citizens and broader economic and social progress. One key issue that has for a long time been neglected in the evidence on migration and brain drain is whether emigration actually has [...]

2021-07-20

• Evaluaciones recientes de los efectos del Salario Mínimo Interprofesional
  by ? in Nada es Gratis, 2021-07-20 05:00:06 UTC

  Por Juan Luis Jiménez y Ángel Martínez El Salario Mínimo Interprofesional es la cuantía mínima que, según el Gobierno de un país, debe percibir cualquier trabajador por cuenta ajena como retribución a su desempeño laboral. Este se aplica en muchos países ( [...]

• Jeff Bezos offers a vision of flying through space colonies with our own wings. But is that the best way to save the human race?
  by insider@insider.com (Abigail Higgins) in Business Insider, 2021-07-20 04:01:00 UTC

  Jeff Bezos unveiling the "Blue Moon" lunar lander on May 9, 2019. Jonathan Newton / The Washington Post via Getty Images In 2019, Jeff Bezos posed the question: "What happens when unlimited demand meets finite resources?" Bezos sees space as a place where the weather could be like "Maui on its best days" and, without gravity, where people would "fly with their own wings." Is the billionaire Amazon founder the best person to be lecturing about overconsumption in a world of finite resources? See more stories on Insider's business page . Jeff Bezos has been warning us for years that humans c [...]

2021-07-16

• Journal round-up: PharmacoEconomics 39(5)
  by Don Husereau in The Academic Health Economists' Blog, 2021-07-16 06:00:06 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 . The May 2021 (Volume 39, Issue 5) issue of Pharmacoeconomics features two economic evaluations, two economic burden/resource utilization studies, two country-specific valuation studies, and two systematic reviews. The reviews provide syntheses of ‘societal costs’ in women with breast [...]

2021-07-12

• Trillions of Dollars of Retirement Wealth Have Been Mislaid
  by ? in Econlog, 2021-07-12 00:35:24 UTC

    And once they are accounted for, measured wealth inequality plummets.  One reason that the illiquid and non-market resources of DB [defined benefit] pensions and Social Security are typically excluded from studies of wealth concentration is that they are not directly available in household-level survey data. Our work addresses this issue by taking data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), estimating work histories to predict future Social Security income streams, and combining these results with estimated accrued DB assets and other market wealth holdings to form an expanded wealth me [...]

2021-07-11

• A Few Thoughts About Economic Growth as a Climate Change Adaptation Strategy
  by Matthew E. Kahn in Environmental and Urban Economics, 2021-07-11 13:32:00 UTC

   John Cochrane has posted an important blog post about adapting to climate change.   His piece mainly focuses on macroeconomic issues.  For decades, John was colleagues with Bob Lucas and those familiar with Robert Lucas's optimistic work on economic growth will see a correlation.  While John makes many points, his main point is;  "if a world's economy grows by 3% per year out to the year 2100 --- it will be rich enough to handle any of Mother Nature's shocks at that point or along the way".   He points to the growth of China's economy as an example.  John is optimistic about our future; "The [...]

• Challenging the Orthodoxy: Race, Racism and the Reconfiguration of Economics
  by stefanouma2443 in Development Economics, 2021-07-11 07:47:00 UTC

  Books abound on what is wrong with economics ( Chang 2014 ;  Keen 2011 ;  Nelson 2018 ,  Mazzucato 2018 ,  Raworth 2018 ,  Stanford 2015 ), and what we would have to do to change it. Given the little change we have seen in economics training and policy-effective economic thinking since  the global finance crisis  of 2007/08, and in light of the global environmental, inequality and health crises, it is to be seen whether these interventions can make any meaningful impact. What is good though: Half of these impactful books were written by female economists. Despite this ‘wind of change’ in [...]

2021-07-08

• Nationalbankens litteraturgennemgang tyder pÃ¥, at nedlukningerne har beskeden effekt
  by Jonas Herby in Punditokraterne, 2021-07-08 05:30:00 UTC

  To økonomer fra Nationalbanken har gennemgået en del af den forskning , der ser på effekten af nedlukninger på smittespredningen. [1] Deres tilgang er en smule anderledes end min egen litteraturgennemgang , men det overordnede resultat ser ud til at være det samme. Nedlukninger er ikke den mirakelkur mod COVID-19, som mange har gjort dem til. Inden vi ser på resultaterne i Nationalbankens litteraturgennemgang, er der to centrale pointer, der er vigtige at få på plads. Selv hvis nedlukningen redder mange liv, er effekten af frivillige adfærdsændringer sandsynligvis vigtigst Mit eget l [...]

2021-07-05

• Welcome to Uneasy Money, aka the Hawtreyblog
  by David Glasner in Uneasy Money, 2021-07-05 14:51:00 UTC

  UPDATE: I’m re-upping my introductory blog post, which I posted ten years ago toady. It’s been a great run for me, and I hope for many of you, whose interest and responses have motivated to keep it going. So thanks to all of you who have read and responded to my posts. I’m adding a few retrospective comments and making some slight revisions along the way. In addition to new posts, I will be re-upping some of my old posts that still seem to have relevance to the current state of our world. What the world needs now, with apologies to the great Burt Bachrach and Hal David , is, well, another blog [...]

2021-07-03

• Recycling Carbon Tax Revenue to Maximize Welfare
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2021-07-03 15:34:04 UTC

  By Stephie Fried, Kevin Novan and William Peterman http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedgfe:2021-23&r=dge This paper explores how to recycle carbon tax revenue back to households to maximize welfare. Using a general equilibrium lifecycle model calibrated to reflect the heterogeneity in the U.S. economy, we find the optimal policy uses two thirds of carbon-tax revenue to reduce the distortionary tax on capital income while the remaining one third is used to increase the progressivity of the labor-income tax. The optimal policy attains higher welfare and more equality than the lump-sum rebate app [...]

2021-07-02

• Covid-19 briefing: working from home and worker productivity
  by BankUnderground in Bank Underground, 2021-07-02 08:00:00 UTC

  John Lewis, Andrea Šiško and Misa Tanaka The Covid pandemic has led to a large enforced shift towards working from home (WFH) as a result of ‘stay-at-home’ policies in many countries. This led to a resurgence in interest in, and new reignited discussion about, the consequences of greater WFH. In this briefing we review the literature on the impact of WFH on productivity. Across a very diverse literature the key lessons are: impacts depend on the nature of tasks, the share of WFH matters, and there is big difference between enforced versus voluntary WFH. And the caveats are important to [...]

2021-07-01

• What’s different for working women in Canada? : For Canada Day, the FRED Blog compares OECD data on women in the U.S. and Canadian workforces
  by ? in FRED blog, 2021-07-01 13:00:00 UTC

  Today is Canada Day, a good opportunity to compare the U.S. with its neighbor to the north. In many ways, the Canadian and U.S. economies are similar, foremost from the fact that they’re so intertwined. But there are also some stark differences. One difference that’s received a good amount of attention is women in the labor force. The FRED graph above tracks the labor participation rate of Canadian and American women. In both countries, it has increased since the 1960s, thanks to household technology and emancipation. In 1998, it stalled in the U.S. but it has continued to progress in Canada [...]

2021-06-30

• Hold the Check: Overdrafts, Fee Caps, and Financial Inclusion
  by Blog Author in Liberty Street Economics, 2021-06-30 11:02:00 UTC

  Jennifer Dlugosz, Brian Melzer, and Donald P. Morgan Editor’s Note: Our series continues tomorrow with an examination of “Credit, Income, and Inequality.” The 25 percent of low-income Americans without a checking account operate in a separate but unequal financial world. Instead of paying for things with cheap, convenient debit cards and checks, they get by with “fringe” payment providers like check cashers, money transfer, and other alternatives. Costly overdrafts rank high among reasons why households “bounce out” of the banking system and some observers have advocated cappi [...]

2021-06-29

• Das House Kapital
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2021-06-29 17:39:22 UTC

  By Volker Grossmann, Benjamin Larin and Thomas Steger http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fri:fribow:fribow00523&r=dge The housing wealth-to-income ratio has been increasing in most developed economies since the 1950s. We provide a novel theory to explain this long-term pattern. We show analytically that house prices grow in the steady state if i) the housing sector is more land-intensive than the non-housing sector. Despite growing house prices and housing wealth, the housing wealth-to income ratio is constant in steady state. We hence study the dynamics in the housing wealth-to-income ratio by comp [...]

2021-06-27

• Symptoms of stagnation
  by chris in Stumbling and Mumbling, 2021-06-27 12:15:35 UTC

  This morning, I got a call about my recent road accident, which of course I never had. Which highlights an important fact – that capitalist stagnation is not merely about arid aggregate data on flatlining productivity , real wages and business investment but about everyday life. If the cold calls aren’t about non-existent accidents, they’re about my computer viruses, unpaid tax, my pension , or the impending disconnection of my broadband. Fraud and mis-selling are on the rise . Why? Because in a world of secular stagnation there are fewer legitimate business opportunities – which diverts some [...]

• Universal Basic Income: A Dynamic Assessment
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2021-06-27 05:10:37 UTC

  By Diego Daruich and Raquel Fernández http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:14869&r=dge The idea of universal basic income (UBI)—a set income that is given to all without any conditions—is making an important comeback but there is no real evidence regarding its long-term consequences. This paper provides a very inexpensive evaluation of such a policy by studying its dynamic consequences in a general equilibrium model with imperfect capital markets and labor market shocks, in which households make decisions about education, savings, labor supply, and with intergenerational linkages via skill [...]

2021-06-25

• Why investors fell in love with SPACs—and how the bubble burst
  by ? in Co.Exist, 2021-06-25 10:00:22 UTC

  Unicorns’ new favorite way to go public are also weirdly similar to bitcoin. What do Taylor Swift’s record company and Asian “superapp” Grab have in common? They are both part of Wall Street’s recent dealmaking fad: spec [...]

2021-06-24

• Are low-paid jobs really a stepping stone to better pay? A new study suggests it’s not that simple
  by ? in Forum:Blog, 2021-06-24 10:52:27 UTC

  Data from New Zealand illustrates the real difficulty in climbing the wage ladder for those in long-term low-paid work, contrary to previous research. [...]

2021-06-23

• Impronta idrica per salvaguardare l’acqua*
  by Alessio Garau in La Voce, 2021-06-23 09:28:11 UTC

  L’acqua è una risorsa essenziale per la vita umana e per molteplici attività economiche. Ed è anche un paradigma di economia circolare. In Italia è necessario migliorare i modelli gestionali e premunirsi dai rischi dei cambiamenti climatici. La situazione attuale dei servizi idrici L’acqua è una risorsa essenziale sia direttamente per la vita umana che indirettamente per il suo ruolo in molteplici attività economiche, dall’agricoltura, all’industria e al terziario. La sostenibilità ambientale è inscindibilmente legata al ciclo dell’acqua che, infatti, rappresenta pienamente il parad [...]

2021-06-22

• 85. Salario real, Productividad y Tasa de Empleo: Comparación de España con Estados Unidos y otros países, 1965-2019
  by MCG Blogs de Economía in Economía y desarrollo de España y Galicia, 2021-06-22 15:16:00 UTC

    Estos gráficos muestran la gran relación positiva existente entre Productividad del trabajo y salario real, con datos de Estados Unidos en el período 1965-2018 y de España en el período 1965-2019. España tiene una Productividad y un Salario real medio mucho menores que Estados Unidos y otros países de elevado nivel de producción por habitante. El aumento de la producción real por habitante es esencial para incrementar, al mismo tiempo, la Productividad, el Salario y la Tasa de Empleo.  Más información en el documento: Guisán, M.C. (2021)  La Economía Española 2021: Informes De Industria, Pro [...]

• Six Policy Ideas for the Next Mayor of New York City
  by Jason Barr in Skynomics Blog, 2021-06-22 12:11:35 UTC

  Jason M. Barr              June 22, 2021 Today is primary day, and New Yorkers are heading to the polls. This year, the Big Apple is using ranked choice voting , a bold new experiment in democracy. It shows that New York is still capable of adjusting policies when the need arises. And now that the state has eliminated nearly all pandemic-related restrictions , the city is poised for a rebound. The next mayor will need to deal with several issues put aside because of the pandemic: Improving housing affordability and fixing transportation. These problems stem from decisions made over sixty years [...]

2021-06-20

• Marx’s law of profitability after Capital
  by michael roberts in Michael Roberts Blog, 2021-06-20 08:58:37 UTC

  The G lobal Marxism series organized by SSK in Korea has delivered a number of important presentations and papers on aspects of Marxist economics. I participated in the second round with a paper on the Economics of Modern Imperialism . Recently Hideto Akashi of Komazawa University, Tokyo returned to the fray with a presentation on Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.  As is well known in the small circles of Marxian economics, leading Marxist scholar, Michael Heinrich, the author of a detailed account of Marx’s Capital , has argued in the past that Marx’s law of profi [...]

• Powerless Texas vs. Government
  by Wayne Lusvardi in MasterResource, 2021-06-20 06:00:08 UTC

  “ ERCOT is Enron ” – Alex Jones, conspiracy propagator, Infowars.com “You ask, ‘How do we know climate change is responsible?’ Shut up, denier. Likewise, because the weather inflicted painful blackouts on millions of voters, politicians hinted that market manipulation by energy traders may play a role. These manipulators will never be found. But shut up about that too”. — Holman Jenkins, Texas Cold’em; Power Outages are Political , WSJ, Feb. 16, 2021. “ Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them ” – Ronald Reagan The predictable electricity grid freeze in Tex [...]

2021-06-15

• Servizi pubblici: migliorarli è sempre un vantaggio*
  by Alessio Garau in La Voce, 2021-06-15 09:14:08 UTC

  I servizi pubblici “costano” in Italia il 20 per cento del Pil. Misurarne l’efficacia è perciò importante, ma non facile. I divari di qualità ed efficienza tra diverse aree sono ampi. Però un loro miglioramento offre vantaggi potenzialmente rilevanti. Un problema di misura Le risorse pubbliche destinate a finanziare la fornitura di servizi ai cittadini sono considerevoli: in Italia ammontano a circa il 20 per cento del Pil. Alcuni servizi – come, per esempio, la difesa nazionale e l’illuminazione pubblica – sono “beni pubblici”, altri presentano esternalità positive. In presenza di “ [...]

• Journal round-up: PharmacoEconomics 39(4)
  by Chris Sampson in The Academic Health Economists' Blog, 2021-06-15 06:00:05 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 . There are four original research articles, a couple of reviews, and a handful of letters and editorials in this issue of PharmacoEconomics. A few of the studies are concerned with methods for economic evaluation, and therefore of interest to me. The leading editorial outlines a frame [...]

2021-06-14

• New Paper From Richard Tol: The Economic Impact of Weather and Climate
  by ? in Climate Science, 2021-06-14 10:55:58 UTC

  Richard Tol has a new paper out. Abstract I propose a new conceptual framework to disentangle the impacts of weather and climate on economic activity and growth: A stochastic frontier model with climate in the production frontier and weather shoc [...]

• Financial Blowout Ahead: Lobotomized Economists Clash On The Deck Of The Titanic
  by Tyler Durden in Zero Hedge, 2021-06-14 03:00:00 UTC

  Financial Blowout Ahead: Lobotomized Economists Clash On The Deck Of The Titanic Authored by Matthew Ehret via The Strategic Culture Foundation, Under the new world order of “stakeholder capitalism” citizens will learn to own nothing and be happy... As the geniuses running the western financial bubble sometimes called an “economy” continue to double down on their obsession to pump a dead financial system with ever more trillions in stimulus spending, arguments are raging among brainwashed economists living in denial over the oncoming systemic collapse. The thought of engineers [...]

2021-06-11

• Dai nipoti ai nonni: la pandemia circola in famiglia
  by Alessio Garau in La Voce, 2021-06-11 21:27:09 UTC

  Più stretti i legami familiari e più alto il tasso di contagio del coronavirus in tutto il mondo. Vaccino a parte, la diffusione del Covid-19 può essere contrastata solo con misure di distanziamento sociale. Come già avvenuto in passato. L’esperienza del passato per un virus poco conosciuto Un anno e mezzo dopo che l’Organizzazione mondiale della sanità ha dichiarato il coronavirus una pandemia, e nonostante l’ampia diffusione di diversi vaccini, abbiamo ancora una conoscenza limitata del virus Sars-CoV-2. Non sappiamo ancora con certezza quale sia stata la sua origine, quali sono i [...]

• The Paradoxes of the Bangladesh Miracle
  by Arvind Subramanian in Project Syndicate, 2021-06-11 12:35:14 UTC

  NEW DELHI – Ravaged periodically by natural calamities, long dependent on foreign aid and remittances, and a perennial source of refugees and emigrants, Bangladesh was once “a basket case of misery,” as Zia Haider Rahman put it in his great debut novel, In the Light of What We Know . But on the 50th anniversary of its independence, Bangladesh is fast becoming a development paragon – a Miracle on the Meghna. Among the country’s achievements is a dramatic improvement in its citizens’ average standard of living. According to the most recent data from the International Monetary Fund , Bangladesh’s [...]

• Whoopee: New Economics Foundation will research a problem solved long ago.
  by Ralph Musgrave in Ralphonomics, 2021-06-11 07:53:00 UTC

      Details are in an article on the Brave New Europe site entitled  “We don’t need cuts to pay back pandemic debt.” The author is NEF researcher Dominick Caddick. One of the central claims in the article is that a rise in interest rates would not matter for government finances because the Bank of England can always buy up debt and pay less interest to the resulting holders of reserves at the BoE, or indeed pay them no interest at all. See the two paras starting “In addition a side effect….”   Thus, so the article claims, “So even if interest rates were to rise, there would be many options for [...]

2021-06-10

• On economic intuitions
  by chris in Stumbling and Mumbling, 2021-06-10 13:45:15 UTC

  Recently on Twitter Will Bott asked : “a piece of string is wrapped tightly around the Earth. In order for the string to be lifted an extra metre in each direction, roughly how much longer would it need to be?” Less than half of respondents got this right*, and 37% were wrong by a factor of 10,000. Which tells us that our intuitions can be not just wrong, but wrong by orders of magnitude. This is not the only evidence here. Shane Frederick has devised a cognitive reflection test – three questions in which there is an intuitive but wrong answer and a non-intuitive but right answer. He has found [...]

2021-06-08

• Project Link update: The evolution of the distribution of income in Canada, 1944-2010
  by Stephen Gordon in Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, 2021-06-08 19:19:47 UTC

  Project Link has been updated; the Excel file with the data updated through to June 2021 is available here . I skipped the 2020 update for Project Link for a couple of reasons. There was obviously the distraction of the pandemic, but mainly because I hadn't yet finished the next extension. Every year, I try to extend the data base, and the latest extension took more time than I had originally expected. This year's extension is the data set behind this animation I posted on twitter a while ago; the details are below the fold.  The Statistics Canada data tables for the Canadian inc [...]

2021-06-07

• Understanding How Central Banks Use Their Balance Sheets: A Critical Categorization
  by Steve Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz in Money, Banking and Financial Markets, 2021-06-07 11:57:45 UTC

  This comment is jointly authored by Stephen G. Cecchetti and Sir Paul M.W. Tucker . Central banks have been reinvented over the past decade, first in response to the financial crisis, and then as a consequence of Covid-19. While trying to maintain monetary stability and promote economic recovery, their balance sheets have ballooned. In 2007, the central banks in the United States, euro area, United Kingdom, and Japan had total assets from 6% to 20% of nominal GDP. By the end of 2020, the Fed’s balance sheet was 34% of GDP, the ECB’s 59%, the Bank of England’s 40%, and the Bank of Japan’s 127%. [...]

2021-06-06

• Week in review – science edition
  by ? in Climate Science, 2021-06-06 22:07:30 UTC

  by Judith Curry A few things that caught my eye these past few weeks. A new study finds a large, previously unknown contribution to climate change through human conversion of peatlands for agriculture [link] Accelerating deployment of offshore [...]

• Week in review – science edition
  by ? in Iowa Climate, 2021-06-06 18:36:51 UTC

  by Judith Curry A few things that caught my eye these past few weeks. A new study finds a large, previously unknown contribution to climate change through human conversion of peatlands for agriculture [link] Accelerating deployment of offshore wind energ [...]

• Week in review – science edition
  by ? in Climate Etc., 2021-06-06 18:20:48 UTC

  by Judith Curry A few things that caught my eye these past few weeks. A new study finds a large, previously unknown contribution to climate change through human conversion of peatlands for agriculture [link] Accelerating deployment of offsho [...]

2021-06-03

• Do Energy Efficiency Improvements Reduce Energy Use? Empirical Evidence on the Economy-Wide Rebound Effect in Europe and the United States
  by noreply@blogger.com (David Stern) in Stochastic Trend, 2021-06-03 04:36:00 UTC

  We have just posted a new working paper on RePEc and SSRN extending our structural vector autoregression methodology for estimating the economy-wide rebound effect and applying it to several European countries as well as the United States. I coauthored the paper with Anne Berner at University of Göttingen, Stephan Bruns at Hasselt University, and Alessio Moneta at the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa.  We developd this approach as part of our DP16 Australian Research Council funded project on energy efficiency. This is a multivariate time series model using time series for energy u [...]

2021-05-31

• The Macroeconomic Effects of a Carbon Tax to Meet the U.S. Paris Agreement Target: The Role of Firm Creation and Technology Adoption
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2021-05-31 21:39:06 UTC

  By Alan Finkelstein Shapiro and Gilbert Metcalf http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:feemwp:311095&r=dge We analyze the quantitative labor market and aggregate effects of a carbon tax in a framework with pollution externalities and equilibrium unemployment. Our model incorporates endogenous labor force participation and two margins of adjustment influenced by carbon taxes: firm creation and green production-technology adoption. A carbon-tax policy that reduces carbon emissions by 35 percent – roughly the emissions reductions that will be required under the Biden Administration’s new commitment und [...]

• Climate Finance
  by Steve Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz in Money, Banking and Financial Markets, 2021-05-31 11:38:10 UTC

  Investors don’t have the consistent, comparable and reliable disclosure that they need to efficiently price risk and allocate capital, and issuers likewise are beset by numerous and sometimes conflicting demands for information under the various voluntary frameworks or in the form of bespoke requests from investors, raters and others.” SEC Commissioner Allison Herren Lee,  Remarks to Stern Volatility and Risk Institute Conference , April 30, 2021. Climate change is the topic of the day. The World Meteorological Organization tells us that the 2011-20 decade was the warmest on record . Earlier t [...]

• Fractional reserve banks create money / liquidity?
  by Ralph Musgrave in Ralphonomics, 2021-05-31 11:00:00 UTC

    Douglas Diamond, Philip Dybvig and Raghuram Rajan have claimed over the years that while fractional reserve banking gives rise to bank fragility and bank failures (not to mention bank crises like the 2007/8 one which lead to tens of millions losing their jobs worldwide) there is at least the compensating advantage that fractional reserve creates money / liquidity. See abstract of their NBER working paper No 7430. Unfortunately there’s a flaw in that argument which is that governments and central banks can create any amount of money any time simply by pressing buttons on computer keyboards an [...]

2021-05-29

• more air for MCMC
  by xi'an in R-bloggers, 2021-05-29 22:21:35 UTC

  [This article was first published on R – Xi'an's Og , and kindly contributed to R-bloggers ]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here ) Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't. A ki Vehtari, Andrew Gelman, Dan Simpson, Bob Carpenter, and Paul-Christian Bürkner have just published a Bayesian Analysis paper about using an improved R factor for MCMC convergence assessment. From the early days of MCMC, convergence assessment has been a recurring (and recurrent!) question in the community. First leading to a flurry of p [...]

2021-05-28

• Closing the gap between innovation and development in the Philippines
  by Kristoffer Daniel Li in East Asia Forum, 2021-05-28 12:00:45 UTC

  Author: Kristoffer Daniel Tan Li, GRIPS The Philippines celebrated its first National Innovation Day on 21 April 2021. By global measures, there is much to be celebrated: the Global Innovation Index (GII) ranked the Philippines as the 50th most innovative economy in 2020 — up from 100th in 2014. Among the world’s lower-middle-income economies, the Philippines ranks 4th behind Vietnam, Ukraine and India, with above average performance in business sophistication, knowledge and technology outputs. But innovation’s promise to deliver superior economic performance and development outcomes remains [...]

• Cautionary Tales – Do NOT pass GO!
  by Tim Harford in Undercover Economist, 2021-05-28 05:05:00 UTC

  (Self promotion: the paperback of  How To Make the World Add Up  is now out worldwide (except North America). Please consider an early order, which is disproportionately helpful in winning interest and support for the book. Thank you!) The woman who was key to the creation of Monopoly was denied of her share of the credit and the profits.  Lizzie J. Magie (played by Helena Bonham Carter) should be celebrated as the inventor of what would become Monopoly – but her role in creating the smash hit board game was cynically ignored, even though she had a patent. Discrimination has [...]

2021-05-26

• Trade Credit and Sectoral Comovement during the Great Recession
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2021-05-26 23:17:01 UTC

  By Jorge Miranda-Pinto and Gang Zhang http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:qld:uqmrg6:47&r=dge We show that, unlike any other recession after World War II, sectoral output comovement significantly increased during the Great Recession. On the other hand, trade credit supply, as measured by the ratio of account receivables to the total value of outputs, collapsed during the Great Recession. We show that sectoral comovement was larger for sectors connected through trade credit. We then develop a multisector model with occasionally binding credit constraints and endogenous supply of trade credit to explai [...]

• Book Review: Star Trek, History and Us: Reflections of the Present and Past Throughout the Franchise by A.J. Black. McFarland, 2021
  by Jason Barr in Skynomics Blog, 2021-05-26 12:29:04 UTC

  Jason M. Barr            May 26, 2021 Peace on Earth In the 23 rd century, humanity has finally found peace. The hatred and violence inflicted upon each other for millennia are finally gone. From the ashes of war and conflict and through the beneficial use of technology, Planet Earth is united into one global nation. Its people are now free to explore themselves and the rest of the galaxy. Such was the inheritance bequeathed to us from the mind of Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991), who, with no minor difficulty, created  Star Trek  in 1966. The universe he initiated would live long and prosper. Sta [...]

2021-05-25

• Così l’invecchiamento abbassa i tassi di interesse
  by Andrea Papetti in La Voce, 2021-05-25 21:55:46 UTC

  L’invecchiamento della popolazione spinge al ribasso i tassi di interesse reali. La crescente scarsità della forza lavoro riduce infatti la domanda di investimenti, mentre l’allungamento dell’aspettativa di vita porta le famiglie a risparmiare di più. Due fenomeni paralleli La maggior parte delle economie avanzate è da decenni su un sentiero difficilmente deviabile di decrescita dei tassi di natalità e mortalità, un fenomeno di lungo periodo che la pandemia non ha arrestato, come l’ Istat ha recentemente chiarito per l’Italia. Secondo le proiezioni delle Nazioni Unite (che tengono conto di pos [...]

• Parents: My child may need to repeat a grade
  by Joanne in Linking and Thinking on Education by Joanne Jacobs, 2021-05-25 16:45:51 UTC

  Failure rates have soared this school year due to remote, part-time and interrupted education, writes Catherine Gewertz in Education Week . How many students will be held back? “Many parents want the option of holding their kids back,” she writes. “In a March poll by the National Parents Union, 63 percent said they wanted their schools to let them decide whether to move their children to the next grade.” Retention is controversial, but “some studies show that holding elementary students back can work , but only if they get key supports, such as tutoring, summer programs, or high-quality teach [...]

2021-05-21

• Apart but Connected: Online Tutoring and Student Outcomes during the COVID-19 Pandemic
  by maximorossi in NEP-LTV blog, 2021-05-21 20:10:08 UTC

  By: Carlana, Michela ;  La Ferrara, Eliana Abstract: In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, the governments of most countries ordered the closure of schools, potentially exacerbating existing learning gaps. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of an intervention implemented in Italian middle schools that provides free individual tutoring online to disadvantaged students during lock-down. Tutors are university students who volunteer for 3 to 6 hours per week. They were randomly assigned to middle school students, from a list of potential beneficiaries compiled by school principals. Using orig [...]

• A Policy Matrix for Inclusive Prosperity
  by maximorossi in NEP-LTV blog, 2021-05-21 20:07:57 UTC

  By: Dani Rodrik ;  Stefanie Stantcheva Abstract: One of the biggest challenges that countries face today is the very unequal distributions of opportunities, resources, income and wealth across people. Inclusive prosperity – whereby many people from different backgrounds can benefit from economic growth, new technologies, and the fruits of globalization – remains elusive. To address these issues, societies face choices among many different policies and institutional arrangements to try to ensure a proper supply of productive jobs and activities, as well as access to education, financial means, [...]

• Homophily, Peer Effects, and Dishonesty
  by maximorossi in NEP-LTV blog, 2021-05-21 20:05:50 UTC

  By: Liza Charroin  (Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne – Université Paris 1);  Bernard Fortin  (Laval University (Québec), CIRPEE, CIRANO and IZA (Bonn));  Marie Claire Villeval  (Université de Lyon, CNRS, GATE and IZA (Bonn)) Abstract: If individuals tend to behave like their peers, is it because of conformity, that is, the preference of people to align behavior with the behavior of their peers; homophily, that is, the tendency of people to bond with similar others; or both? We address this question in the context of an ethical dilemma. Using a peer effect model allowing for homophily, we desi [...]

• India's supply chain vulnerability with Chinese APIs: Industrial policy vs. sophisticated policy design
  by x in Ajay Shah's blog, 2021-05-21 13:00:00 UTC

  by Gautam Bambawale, Vijay Kelkar, Raghunath Mashelkar, Ganesh Natarajan, Ajit Ranade, Ajay Shah. India has a remarkable drugs industry. This involves a high dependence upon Chinese manufacturers of `active pharmaceutical ingredients' (APIs). Given the willingness of the Chinese state to behave in unusual ways in economic engagement (e.g. rare earths ), there is a certain supply chain risk that is faced by Indian firms. Should state power be used in addressing this problem? And if so, how should this be done? How do we avoid the long decades of failure in industrial policy, i.e. the experime [...]

2021-05-19

• Twenty-year economic impacts of deworming.
  by maximorossi in NEP-LTV blog, 2021-05-19 16:29:08 UTC

  By: Hamory, Joan ;  Miguel, Edward ;  Walker, Michael ;  Kremer, Michael ;  Baird, Sarah Abstract: Estimating the impact of child health investments on adult living standards entails multiple methodological challenges, including the lack of experimental variation in health status, an inability to track individuals over time, and accurately measuring living standards and productivity in low-income settings. This study exploits a randomized school health intervention that provided deworming treatment to Kenyan children, and uses longitudinal data to estimate impacts on economic outcomes up to 2 [...]

• The Great COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout: Behavioral and Policy Responses
  by maximorossi in NEP-LTV blog, 2021-05-19 16:26:34 UTC

  By: Auld, C. ;� Toxvaerd, F.M.O. Abstract: Using daily data on vaccinations, disease spread, and measures of social interaction from Google Mobility reports aggregated at the country level for 112 countries, we present estimates of behavioral responses to the global rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. We first estimate correlates of the timing and intensity of the vaccination rollout, finding that countries which vaccinated more of their population earlier strongly tended to be richer, whereas measures of the state of pandemic or its death toll up to the time of the initial vaccine rollout had litt [...]

• Hate Is Too Great a Burden to Bear: Hate Crimes and the Mental Health of Refugees
  by maximorossi in NEP-LTV blog, 2021-05-19 16:14:31 UTC

  By: Daniel Graeber ;  Felicitas Schikora Abstract: Against a background of increasing violence against non-natives, we estimate the effect of hate crime on refugees’ mental health in Germany. For this purpose, we combine two datasets: administrative records on xenophobic crime against refugee shelters by the Federal Criminal Office and the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees. We apply a regression discontinuity design in time to estimate the effect of interest. Our results indicate that hate crime has a substantial negative effect on several mental health indicators, including the Mental Compone [...]

2021-05-18

• Doves for the Rich, Hawks for the Poor? Distributional Consequences of Systematic Monetary Policy
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2021-05-18 17:16:37 UTC

  By Nils Gornemann, Keith Kuester and Makoto Nakajima http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ajk:ajkdps:089&r=dge We build a New Keynesian business-cycle model with rich household heterogeneity. In the model, systematic monetary stabilization policy affects the distribution of income, income risks, and the demand for funds and supply of assets: the demand, because matching frictions render idiosyncratic labor-market risk endogenous; the supply, because markups, adjustment costs, and the tax system mean that the average profitability of firms is endogenous. Disagreement about systematic monetary stabiliza [...]

• Sex and the Chinese Economy
  by Shang-Jin Wei in Project Syndicate, 2021-05-18 12:50:13 UTC

  NEW YORK – China’s recently released population census confirms the persistence of the country’s alarming excess of males relative to the global norm. This numerical imbalance from birth onward has several significant economic implications – and not only for China. Because women live longer than men on average, most countries’ populations have more females than males. In the United States, for example, there were 96 males per 100 females in 2020. China, by contrast, has 105 males for every 100 females, according to the latest census. Chinese women live about three years longer than Chinese men [...]

• DUAN & REED: How Are Meta-Analyses Different Across Disciplines?
  by replicationnetwork in The Replication Network, 2021-05-18 03:13:56 UTC

  INTRODUCTION Recently, one of us gave a workshop on how to conduct meta-analyses. The workshop was attended by participants from a number of different disciplines, including economics, finance, psychology, management, and health sciences. During the course of the workshop, it became apparent that different disciplines conduct meta-analyses differently. While there is a vague awareness that this is the case, we are unaware of any attempts to quantify those differences. That is the motivation for this blog. We collected recent meta-analyses across a number of different disciplines and rec [...]

2021-05-17

• Ricchezza sempre più concentrata anche in Italia
  by Salvatore Morelli in La Voce, 2021-05-17 10:24:05 UTC

  Dalla metà degli anni ’90 è in atto una vera e propria inversione delle fortune, con lo 0,1% più ricco della popolazione che ha visto raddoppiare la ricchezza netta media. Una disparità che rischia di cristallizzarsi, a scapito dell’uguaglianza di opportunità. In molti si chiedono come siano distribuiti i patrimoni delle famiglie italiane. In un nuovo lavoro , svolto in collaborazione con Paolo Acciari e Facundo Alvaredo, mostriamo come il nostro paese sia stato investito da una vera e propria inversione delle fortune a partire dalla metà degli anni 90 e fino al 2016: lo 0,1 per cento più ric [...]

2021-05-16

• Should we Revive PAYG? On the Optimal Pension System in View of Current Economic Trends
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2021-05-16 18:28:22 UTC

  By Ed Westerhout, Lex Mijdam, Eduard Ponds and Jan Bonenkamp http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tiu:tiucen:63418f60-e248-4dc9-aac8-ffefd6da93a4&r=dge In many countries, both pay-as-you-go (PAYG) and funding are used to finance pensions, although the balance between the two principles differs a lot between countries. Over the last decades, many countries made a gradual transition to more funding. In this paper, we develop an analytical framework that includes three models of pension design, allowing us to study the role of efficiency aspects, redistributional aspects a [...]

2021-05-13

• How Does Applied Microeconomic Research Accelerate Climate Change Adaptation?
  by Matthew E. Kahn in Environmental and Urban Economics, 2021-05-13 14:39:00 UTC

  In May 2021, I am quite aware that I am now an "old guy" in the academic economics profession. While this has obvious costs, it offers at least one benefit.� I can blog and offer "big thoughts".�� With that preamble, let's begin.� �We face a serious climate change adaptation challenge.� How does economics research inform our path forward?� I encounter such pessimism among the young about their future.� �They are wrong to doubt the ability of our society to continue to flourish in the face of climate change.� Capitalism offers tremendous potential for coping with emerging risks.� This is the ma [...]

2021-05-12

• Für eine sozial-liberale Klimapolitik
  by ? in Makronom, 2021-05-12 12:24:01 UTC

  Die öffentlichen Debatten zur Klimapolitik werden von der Theorie des progressiven Liberalismus dominiert. Doch nur eine sozial-liberale Politik kann Klimaschutz mit wirtschaftlichem Wohlstand und sozialer Gerechtigkeit verbinden. Ein Essay von Tom Krebs. [...]

• Fifth Francqui Lecture: Econometric Modeling of Climate Change
  by noreply@blogger.com (David Stern) in Stochastic Trend, 2021-05-12 02:03:00 UTC

  The video of my fifth and final Francqui lecture on the economic modeling of climate change is now on Youtube:   The lecture begins by introducing the issue of global climate change. The first image of the Earth's energy balance is from an IPCC assessment report. Probably, the 4th Assessment Report . The graph of global temperature is the Berkeley Earth combined land and sea series . The graph of CO2 concentration is based on the data we used in our Journal of Econometrics paper updated with recent observations from Hawaii . Teh original source of the global CO2 emissions series is the now [...]

• Public Policy Schools in the Asia-Pacific Ranked
  by noreply@blogger.com (David Stern) in Stochastic Trend, 2021-05-12 00:52:00 UTC

  I have a new paper with my Crawford School colleague Bjoern Dressel published in Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies (open access). The data and figures for the article are on Figshare . Bjoern has been interested for a while in ranking public policy schools in the Asia-Pacific region.� But a comprehensive ranking seemed hard to achieve. Recently, I came across an article by Ash and Urquiola (2020) that ranks US public policy schools according to their research output and impact. Well, we thought, if they can rank schools just by their research output and not by their education and public policy [...]

2021-05-11

• The Birth and Growth of Modern Zoning (Part I): From Utopia to FARtopia
  by Jason Barr in Skynomics Blog, 2021-05-11 12:18:12 UTC

  Jason M. Barr ( @JasonBarrRU )        May 11, 2021 Author’s note: This post is Part I of a four-part series on the birth and growth of modern zoning, focusing on the planning tool the Floor Area Ratio (FAR).  Part I is about the birth of the FAR in the 1920s. Part II will be about how the FAR was formalized and popularized during the Great Depression. Following that, Part III will cover how the FAR came to be adopted citywide in the 1961 New York City Zoning Resolution. Finally, Part IV will discuss how FAR regulations spread to the rest of the world. My three-part series on the 1916 New York [...]

2021-05-10

• Journal round-up: Social Science & Medicine 275
  by Will Sullivan in The Academic Health Economists' Blog, 2021-05-10 06:00:13 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 . A journey into April’s edition of a journal that aims to provide an international and interdisciplinary forum for the dissemination of social science research on health … not a cost-effectiveness analysis in sight! Of the 15 original research articles comprising the body of this e [...]

2021-05-07

• 46. CO2 Total Emissions in the World 1970-2015 by geeographical areas
  by MCG Blogs de Economía in Euro-American Association: World Development, 2021-05-07 11:43:00 UTC

  Source: Guisan and Exposito(2020). Applied Econometrics and International Development, Vol.20-2� T he article shows that 87% of increase in Total World CO2 Emissions, for the period 1970-2015, were due to Population Growth while the World average of CO2 Emissions per capita explains only 13% of the total increase. Besides it is important to have into account the effects of Wild Fires, because excluding the effect of those fires, the average per capita diminished from 4.23 to 4.0 Tm per inhabitant. Accordingly to Guisan, Aguayo and Exposito (2001), Guisan and Neira(2006) and other studies, it i [...]

2021-05-06

• Workers with a disability : A closer look at disability in the U.S. civilian labor force
  by ? in FRED blog, 2021-05-06 13:00:00 UTC

  The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law 31 years ago. The FRED Blog has used data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to show that the fraction of people outside of the labor force because of disability is approximately constant . Today we revisit the general topic by looking at the percentage of people with a disability inside the labor force. As a reminder, the civilian labor force is made up of workers who either (i) have a job or (ii) don’t have a job but are actively looking for one. And like it sounds, the civilian labor force doesn’t count those in the [...]

2021-05-04

• Center-periphery relationships of pharmaceutical value chains
  by Cristina Reis in Development Economics, 2021-05-04 09:30:00 UTC

  By Cristina Fróes de Borja Reis and José Paulo Guedes Pinto It is well known that, during the 20 th century, the pharmaceutical industry became extremely powerful at the international level, alongside financial, energy, technology, and manufacturing companies (Wells, 1984). The internationalization of the pharmaceutical industry only rose after the internationalization of patent protection in the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs Agreement) ( Haakonsson, 2009 ). This industry is highly concentrated around a small number of very large transnationa [...]

2021-05-03

• Collateral Framework: Liquidity Premia and Multiple Equilibria
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2021-05-03 16:46:21 UTC

  By Yvan Lenwiler and Athanasios Orphanides http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bsl:wpaper:2021/06&r=dge Central banks normally accept debt of their own governments as collateral in liquidity operations without reservations. This gives rise to a valuable liquidity premium that reduces the cost of government finance. The ECB is an interesting exception in this respect. It relies on external assessments of the creditworthiness of its member states, such as credit ratings, to determine eligibility and the haircut it imposes on such debt. We show how such features in a central bank’s collateral framework [...]

• Optimal Settlement Speed
  by Steve Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz in Money, Banking and Financial Markets, 2021-05-03 13:20:03 UTC

  “In the world of one-click purchasing, instant payments, and two-hour delivery, many investors find it counterintuitive that securities trades in the United States can take two days to complete or settle.” Michael Bodson, President and CEO of DTCC, Business Insider , April 2, 2021. Over the past year, a series of events has shifted the attention of both experts and laypersons to the arcane processes that support trading and settlement in the U.S. securities markets. The massive volume of U.S. Treasury sales in March 2020 at the start of the COVID crisis boosted liquidity needs at precisely the [...]

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