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Blog aggregator for economics research

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 [...]

2021-05-01

• Personal income growth - actually heating of a spherical body in a vacuum
  by Ivan Kitov in Economics as Classical Mechanics, 2021-05-01 07:26:00 UTC

  1. Physical intuition behind income growth and fall Here, a microeconomic model is presented, which has been developed to quantitatively describe the dynamics of personal income growth and distribution [ Kitov, 2005a ]. The model is based on one principal assumption that each and every individual above fifteen years of age has a personal capability to work. In essence, the capability to work is equivalent to the capability to earn money. To get money income, individuals have to use one or several means or tools from the full set of options that may include paid job, government transfers, bank [...]

2021-04-29

• Optimal monetary policy with the risk-taking channel
  by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog, 2021-04-29 16:32:18 UTC

  By Angela Abbate and Dominik Thaler http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:snb:snbwpa:2021-09&r=dge Empirical research suggests that lower interest rates induce banks to take higher risks. We assess analytically what this risk-taking channel implies for optimal monetary policy in a tractable New Keynesian model. We show that this channel creates a motive for the planner to stabilize the real rate. This objective conflicts with the standard inflation stabilization objective. Optimal policy thus tolerates more inflation volatility. An inertial Taylor-type reaction function becomes optimal. We then quanti [...]

• Do The Urban Poor Gain from Local Economic Growth?
  by Matthew E. Kahn in Environmental and Urban Economics, 2021-04-29 15:46:00 UTC

  I have c o-authored a new book that argues that the answer is "YES" but there are many people who disagree with this claim. �At Johns Hopkins University, I taught Urban Economics in Spring 2020.� Many of my students were skeptical about the possibility that "gentrification" of cities such as Baltimore would improve the quality of life of local long time residents.� I brought in one speaker from the City Government who told my class that she hoped that no billionaires would move to Baltimore.� On my Twitter feed, I often "meet" people who voice deep concerns about the consequences of "unlocking [...]

• Capital's political power
  by chris in Stumbling and Mumbling, 2021-04-29 12:56:31 UTC

  The Tories are corrupt . That’s the message of handing out PPE contracts to government cronies ; Cameron’s lobbying for Greensill; the murky financing of Johnson’s home “improvements”; and Robert Jenrick’s doing the bidding of Tory donors . All this, says Grace Blakeley, highlights the problem of “politicians and business people being in each others’ pockets.” All this, however, is only part of the story. Even if our politicians were honest and even if the media were unbiased capitalists would still have disproportionate (pdf) power over government . Grace is right to say that “our ‘democracy’ [...]

• On secular relative impoverishment of young people
  by Ivan Kitov in Economics as Classical Mechanics, 2021-04-29 09:58:00 UTC

  T he problem with young people's income deficiency attracts more and more attention from media and politicians. Almost every day one can find a publication in non-negligible (e.g. FT) media resources comparing the current young people generation with historical records. We have explained in this blog and many academic papers that this problem cannot be resolved in the situation with growing real GDP per capita.� Figure 1 describes the growth in average income in the USA for work experience between 4 and 10 years, i.e. for 19 to 25 years of age according to the CPS ASEC conducted by the Census [...]

• Journal round-up: PharmacoEconomics – Open 5(1)
  by Rita Faria in The Academic Health Economists' Blog, 2021-04-29 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 . The issue starts with a commentary by Antony Andrews on the measurement of efficiency of healthcare providers . It makes the important point that healthcare providers cannot operate with maximum efficiency due to the difficulty in responding to changes in demand. After all, healthcar [...]

2021-04-28

• Quel mécanisme d’ajustement carbone aux frontières pour l’UE ?
  by Olivia Grochowicki in Bloc-Notes Eco, 2021-04-28 11:29:03 UTC

  Publié le 28/04/2021 Par Rafael Cezar et Fabio Grieco Si le principe d’un mécanisme d’ajustement carbone aux frontières (MACF) de l’Europe est prévu, son calibrage reste débattu. Ce billet présente trois scénarios faisant varier les modalités de calcul de l’assiette et le périmètre du mécanisme. Ces choix ont des conséquences importantes : les gains en termes de réduction de CO2 peuvent varier du simple au triple selon le scénario choisi. billet_213_vf_final.pdf Graphique 1 : Impact à court terme du MACF sur les importations et les émissions liées aux importations de l'UE Source : [...]

• What Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism for the EU?
  by Gerard EDMOND in Eco Notepad, 2021-04-28 09:24:22 UTC

  Published on 04/28/2021 By Rafael Cezar and Fabio Grieco While the principle of a European Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) has been agreed on, discussions as to its calibration are still underway. This post presents three scenarios in which the calculation of the tax base and the scope of the mechanism vary. These choices have significant consequences: the gains in terms of CO2 reduction can vary by a factor of three, depending on the scenario chosen. billet_213_veng.pdf Chart 1: Short-term impact of the CBAM on EU imports and import-related emissions Source: authors' calculati [...]

• Fourth Franqui Lecture: Energy and the Industrial Revolution
  by noreply@blogger.com (David Stern) in Stochastic Trend, 2021-04-28 01:04:00 UTC

  The video of my fourth Francqui lecture on the energy and the industrial revolution is now on Youtube: � The opening graph of population and GDP per capita in the United Kingdom since 0CE combines data from the Maddison Project at the University of Groningen and data produced by Steven Broadberry . The energy data in the next graph was compiled in a 2007 publication by Paul Warde . The graph of energy use in Europe since 1500 and the graph of the composition of energy use are from " Power to the People " by Astrid Kander, Paolo Malanima, and Paul Warde. The next section of the presentation gi [...]

2021-04-27

• Why is Beautiful California Losing Congressional Seats? Constrained Local Housing Supply Influences National Politics
  by Matthew E. Kahn in Environmental and Urban Economics, 2021-04-27 14:15:00 UTC

  California real estate is desirable.� I own property there.� Zillow teaches us that it has the most valuable land in America with a Zillow average price of $644,000 in April 2021.� � � The national Zillow price is $276,000.� �Is this difference caused by supply or demand? Over the years, I have written several papers about what makes a place such as California so desirable (and thus featuring high demand).� My 2006 Green Cites book - -- on the rising desirability of great places to live.� The rise of Work from Home only enhances this point going forward.� Power Couples are attracted to living [...]

2021-04-26

• Biden Picks Harris To Lead New Pro-Union Task Force
  by Tyler Durden in Zero Hedge, 2021-04-26 19:57:15 UTC

  Biden Picks Harris To Lead New Pro-Union Task Force With the success of "Nomadland" during last night's Oscars Ceremony (which nobody watched), the depredations facing American workers at the hands of Amazon are back in the headlines. Just weeks after workers at the company's Bessemer, Ala. fulfillment center, voted overwhelmingly against unionizing, the plant's workers are suing the NLRB alleging that Amazon "sabotaged" the vote. As Democrats look to shore up organized labor, formerly a cornerstone of their political base, President Biden has just appointed VP Kamala Harris - [...]

2021-04-22

• Literature on Well-Being and Covid Policy
  by Liam Delaney in Economics, Psychology and Policy, 2021-04-22 23:51:00 UTC

  As promised to a number of readers, below some papers that might be useful for those working on well-being in context of covid polices. This is not in any way intended as an exhaustive list but might be useful for people looking to get a grounding in what is becoming quite a large literature. Anand, P. (2020). The economy of wellbeing: a focus on health and wellbeing helps with priority setting . bmj, 370. Anand, P., Blanchflower, D., Bovens, L., De Neve, J. E., Graham, C., Nolan, B., ... & Thoma, J. (2020). Post-Covid 19 economic development and policy: submitted as recommendations to the Sco [...]

• Analysing Bambawale, et. al., 2021 ("Strategic patience and flexible policies: How India can rise to the China challenge")
  by x in Ajay Shah's blog, 2021-04-22 13:23:00 UTC

  by Shubhashis Gangopadhyay. This is the text of my discussant comments at LEPC 4.1 today , which is a session organised around a talk by Gautam Bambawale presenting the recent paper Bambawale et. al. 2021 . The paper makes a strong and convincing argument for the need to create an ecosystem that fosters growth that is fast and sustainable. It focuses strongly on what needs to be done to ensure Indian citizens a desirable future. This future is envisioned as one where we are in control of our own destiny, China notwithstanding. I am in complete agreement with the need for India to grow economi [...]

2021-04-21

• What Three Economists Taught Us About Currency Regimes
  by Jeffrey Frankel in Project Syndicate, 2021-04-21 16:40:48 UTC

  CAMBRIDGE – A generation of great international economists is passing from the scene. Richard Cooper   died on December 23, Robert Mundell on April 4 , and John Williamson on April 11 . All three made important contributions on a variety of topics, and coined memorable terms that remain in use, though not always in their originally intended sense. More specifically, all three played a role in the ongoing debate about optimal currency arrangements. Each was unhappy with the system of market-determined floating exchange rates and proposed reforms. Should central banks fix exchange rates, or even [...]

2021-04-20

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

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

2021-04-19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2021-04-16

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

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

2021-04-15

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

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

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

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

2021-04-14

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

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

2021-04-13

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

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

2021-04-12

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

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

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

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

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

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

2021-04-07

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

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

2021-04-06

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

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

2021-04-05

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2021-04-04

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

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

2021-04-02

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

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

2021-04-01

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

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

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

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

2021-03-31

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

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

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

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

2021-03-29

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

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

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

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

2021-03-27

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

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

2021-03-25

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

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

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

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

2021-03-24

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

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

2021-03-23

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

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

2021-03-22

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2021-03-21

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

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

2021-03-16

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

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

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

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

2021-03-15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2021-03-14

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

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

2021-03-11

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

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

2021-03-08

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

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

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

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

2021-03-06

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

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

2021-03-02

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

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

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

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

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