Bookmarks (212)

Policy rates in advanced economies are unusually low. This phenomenon has competing effects: low rates harm bank profits by squeezing interest margins, but also boost the value of long-term assets held by banks. Using a standard banking model, this column determines the policy rate level at which these two forces cancel out, or the ‘tipping point’. Past this tipping point, the net effect of...

In many settings, independent decision makers employed to make determinations in disputes or contests between parties can be subject to public pressure  This column examines the extent to which crowd pressure affects referees’ decisions in Germany’s top football division, exploiting the introduction of video technology as well as the absence of crowds during the Covic-19 pandemic. It finds no evidence of bias in awarding goals...

The adoption of information technology can cause polarisation in the labour market via the displacement of routine cognitive jobs. This column uses data on over 200,000 firms in the US from 1990 to 2015 to show that the labour savings from IT are largest in big cities and metropolitan areas, where wages are higher, so urban firms have the biggest incentives to invest in...

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences has been awarded to David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, “for his empirical contributions to labour economics”, and to Joshua Angrist of MIT and Guido Imbens of Stanford University “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships”. This column explains how the use of natural experiments in empirical economics has ushered in much progress in...

The development of the Swiss highway network from 1960 to 2010 influenced the residential and job compositions of municipalities. The advent of an entrance/exit ramp within 10 km of a municipality caused a long-term 24% increase in the share of top-income taxpayers. The welfare gains of residents of connected municipalities relative to residents in non-connected municipalities range from only 2% for the low-income group...

During the COVID-19 pandemic many countries experienced difficulty obtaining the semiconductors that are vital for smartphones, computers, cars, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and many other applications. This column looks at how Asia gained comparative advantage in this sector and identifies lessons for countries seeking to promote domestic semiconductor manufacturing.

Even after their role in the global financial crisis, globalised, minimally regulated financial markets are still regarded as inevitable and, on balance, good for us. Maurice Obstfeld of Berkeley tells Tim Phillips about the short but action-packed history of financial globalisation and asks whether we should be rethinking this aspect of capitalism too. Read more about the research presented and download the free discussion paper:...

In July, the ECB issued its first Strategic Review since 2003. The latest CfM-CEPR survey investigates one component of the announced policy shift: the new definition of price stability. Most members of the panel of experts on the European economy support the ECB explicitly allowing inflation to exceed its target for extended periods to make up for below-target inflation in the past. This 60% majority has divided views on the optimal alternative...

The Japanese economy has experienced a prolonged slowdown in growth and persistent declines in the real interest rate, while at the same time the country’s labour force has been rapidly ageing. This column explores a novel causal link between the ageing labour force and the low-frequency declining trend in the real interest rate since the 1970s, and suggests that the ageing of the labour...

The way European policymakers solve the policy mix trilemma of asymmetric fiscal rules, no central fiscal capacity and constrained monetary policy in the post-pandemic economy will define the resilience of the euro area in the face of future shocks and the transition to a more sustainable growth model. In a new CEPR Policy Insight, the authors argue that moving to a structured vertical coordination...

With the array of television news networks, the expansion of internet services and the rise of social media, voters see more images daily than at any previous moment in history. And yet, the literature on media bias tends to focus far more on text than photos. This column constructs a dataset of nearly one million image files from the 2016 US election cycle and finds deeply partisan coverage of different candidates. Media bias also varied in response to electoral incentives – in particular when switching from the primaries to...

By boosting labor incomes and asset prices, a monetary easing is often believed to benefit the vast majority of households. This column argues that this intuition is misleading, because the effect of asset price changes for households depends not just on asset holdings, but on their maturity structure, which is largely driven by life-cycle motives. A typical monetary policy easing redistributes welfare from older...

Despite clear economic benefits of new digital technologies, slow median wage growth has led many to worry that these new technologies are failing to deliver for the average worker. This column develops a new model of global automation and technological change to study the long-term consequences of these trends. It finds that automation can boost output and growth, but these benefits are not equally...

Profit shifting has come to the fore with the recently released Pandora Papers. This column uses a new global profit-shifting database covering 95 countries to show that profit shifting on average has gradually declined since 2011 following efforts from governments and international organisations to contain the practice, most notably the OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting initiative. But firms across industries with high shares of intangible assets display an increase in profit shifting. 

Climate change is a defining challenge of our times. This column introduces a special issue of the Journal of Economic Geography on climate change, which provides foundations for well-informed policymaking by addressing two main themes of the economic geography of climate change. First, climate change yields heterogeneous effects across space. Second, a crucial aspect of human adaptation to climate change is geographic mobility. As...

Since the start of the pandemic, inflation has re-entered mainstream discussion. This column reviews the analysis of globalisation and inflation conducted in the context of the ECB strategy review. Although global factors (mainly commodity prices) matter for inflation synchronisation, their role in lowering both inflation and its sensitivity to the business cycle in advanced economies has been limited since the late 1980s. Global shocks...

The recent combination of resurging demand and continuing disruptions in supply chains has led to a worrying return of inflation. In the EU, industry producer prices increased by 12.2% year-on-year in July 2021. This column argues that removing EU antidumping duties would at least partially ease the pressure on input and consumer prices. In contrast, the recent abandonment of China’s differential treatment in the...

US military spending is said to be greater than the next 11 countries combined. However, the conventional use of market exchange rates to compare across countries dramatically overstates US spending relative to other countries. This column introduces a military purchasing power parity exchange rate for 59 countries based on the relative unit cost ratio across counties. This ‘military PPP’ shows that the US military...

In many countries, poorer people have been more exposed to Covid-19 as they cannot afford to stay at home instead of going to work. This column shows that in low- and middle-income countries, emergency income support schemes have significantly reduced differences in rates of contagion due to wealth or poverty status by allowing poorer people to also stay at home. As well as preserving...

The euro area’s economic policy framework was created in the early 1990s, when neutral interest rates were positive and the main risk was excessive inflation. This column argues that today’s world is very different from the 1990s, and thus requires a new  economic policy framework where monetary and fiscal policy can work together effectively to support inflation and growth. The author identifies flaws in the...

The target for global warming agreed on in the 2015 Paris Agreement implies that effective policies must be implemented to reduce emissions for the whole planet as soon as possible and reach net zero in the second half of the 21st century. The contributions in a new CEPR eBook aim to identity, for each of the featured nations, which climate change policies will have the...

More than 130 countries have lined up in favour of a global redesign of corporate taxes. The redesign calls for multinational giants to pay their ‘fair share’ of taxes rather than running off to tax havens. This column argues that as popular as this goal may be, finding practical ways to achieve it remains problematic. Simpler approaches have a better chance of succeeding.

Robots and offshoring are blamed for destroying manufacturing jobs in advanced economies. But could automation also be a way to make domestic manufacturing more competitive? If so, those outsourced jobs may return. Alessandra Bonfiglioli tells Tim Phillips why there may be reasons to welcome our new robot overlords. Read more about the research discussed and download the free discussion paper:Bonfiglioli, A, Crinò, R, Gancia,...

The target for global warming agreed on in the 2015 Paris Agreement implies that effective policies must be implemented to reduce emissions for the whole planet as soon as possible and reach net zero in the second half of the 21st century. This eBook, with contributions from economists working in more than 18 countries, provides timely and concise recommendations on achievable and efficient climate change policies...

Once again, the US finds itself in the midst of a debt ceiling crisis, but what can we learn from previous instances? This column assesses the impact of the 2011 US debt ceiling crisis on US federal government credit risk and on US banks’ funding costs. It estimates that during the first two quarters of 2011, as a result of the disagreement between Republicans and...

In January 2015, Germany introduced a uniform minimum wage of €8.50. Many economists and media outlets predicted that this would have dire consequences for the German economy and result in substantial job losses. This column shows that, in fact, the introduction of the minimum wage boosted pay for low-wage workers without lowering their employment prospects. It also prompted a reallocation of staff towards more...

Some see cryptocurrencies as a potential substitute for fiat money and commercial banking, a new form of exchange resistant to debasement and censorship by governments and financial institutions. This column examines whether cryptocurrency investors are motivated by distrust in fiat currencies or regulated finance, and finds that investors show no differences from the general population in their level of security concerns about either cash...

Since the financial crisis of 2007/08, bank equity regulation has been tightened. This is one reason why broad money supply reacted only weakly to the enormous expansion of the monetary base. With the publication of a new CEPR Policy Insight, this updated column from February 2021 argues that the process of tightening bank equity regulation has come to an end and will not have...

Intangible assets are at the heart of firms’ competitiveness, but financing them is complex for many firms. This column examines the extent to which financing barriers affect productivity outcomes in intangible-intensive sectors, using sector- and firm-level data. The authors demonstrate the existence of a ‘financing gap’ which depresses aggregate productivity growth and resilience, and propose a set of policy options to make each source...

When managing financial imbalances, macroprudential policymakers face an intertemporal trade-off between facilitating short-term expected growth and containing medium-term downside risks to the economy. To help assess this trade-off, this column proposes a risk management framework which extends the well-known notion of growth-at-risk to consider the entire predictive real GDP growth distribution. The authors use a novel empirical model fitted to euro area data to...

Despite climate justice advocates continuing to highlight climate inequities along racial, gender and class dimensions and policymakers’ vague statements in support of a ‘just transition’, there are few concrete plans. This column uses microsimulations of household behaviour from UK data to investigate the efficiency and equity impacts of different ways of recycling carbon tax revenue, focusing on both horizontal and vertical equity dimensions, and...

Proponents of work requirements for social safety net programmes argue that they promote self-sufficiency by encouraging work, while opponents contend that they reduce benefits for the most vulnerable recipients in times of need. This column looks at the impact of the reinstatement of work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in the US following a hiatus during the Great Recession. The authors find that...

The overwhelming majority of publicly listed companies around the world still do not disclose their carbon emissions, and even fewer privately held companies do so. This column introduces a new CEPR Policy Insight in which the authors argue that mandatory carbon disclosures can make an elementary but essential contribution to the global drive towards a net zero economy, and recommend a mandate for the governments represented at COP26...

In turbulent times, trust in our central banks is important. This column uses the survey data on consumer expectations to gauge trust in the ECB during the Covid-19 pandemic. The authors find that trust in the ECB depends on consumers’ financial knowledge and on how severely they are affected by the pandemic, and that this trust and financial knowledge both contribute to better anchoring of consumers’ inflation...

The past three decades have witnessed reform efforts to contain pension expenditures, the cost of which is born mostly by younger generations. This column assesses the sustainability, fairness, and intergenerational equity of pension systems in Europe by comparing the pension contributions and benefits over the lifetime of different cohorts. Reforms legislated in the decade from the onset of the Global Crisis reduced the lifetime...

The approval of several effective covid vaccines in record time shifted the emphasis in rich countries away from availability and the logistics of delivery to the issue of vaccine hesitancy. This column looks at vaccination rates across countries, with a special focus on the French experience. It finds that the introduction of a ‘corona pass’ had a much greater impact on France’s vaccination rate...

There is often an urgent need for humanitarian assistance in low-income countries. But how can it be targeted efficiently and quickly? Joshua Blumenstock tells Tim Phillips how, in Togo, a combination of machine learning and mobile phone data dramatically increased the effectiveness of Covid assistance. Read more about the research discussed and download the free discussion paper: Aiken, E, Bellue, S, Blumenstock, J, Karlan,...

Since the Great Financial Crisis, bail-in has been introduced as an approach to address too-big-to-fail and contagion risk problems. This column uses a multi-layered network model of the European financial system to study the implication of bail-in design on financial stability. It shows that early implementation of a bail-in and stronger bank recapitalisation lead to lower contagion losses. However, current bail-in design seems to...

Scapegoating refers to a social phenomenon whereby members of an aggrieved majority group retaliate against innocent third parties, usually members of vulnerable minority groups. This column uses an experiment set up between May and September 2017 in Eastern Slovakia – where a large Roma minority regularly suffers from discrimination – to measure how an injustice that affects a member of one’s own group shapes the punishment of an unconnected bystander (or scapegoat). The experiment shows that...

Covid-19 has further exposed the growing interdependence between advanced economies and emerging markets. Most of the existing research on cross-border spillovers has focused on the spillover effects from advanced economies to emerging markets. This column shows that spillovers from emerging markets to advanced economies over the past 25 years are about a fifth of those running in the opposite direction, and have increased significantly over time...

Job retention schemes during the pandemic prioritised preservation over reallocation, but evidence on their allocative and productivity consequences is scarce. Using tax data for Australia, this column shows that job reallocation and firm exit remained connected to firm productivity over the course of the pandemic. Australia’s job retention scheme, JobKeeper, initially shielded productive and financially fragile firms, contributing positively to aggregate productivity. But as...

Swap and repo lines have become an integral part of the ECB’s toolkit. During the Global Crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, the ECB announced more than 28 agreements to provide euro liquidity to foreign exchange markets, mainly within Europe. This column shows that the mere announcement instilled confidence in foreign exchange markets, reducing the premium paid by recipient country agents to borrow euros. Moreover,...

The World Bank permanently suspended its Doing Business project earlier this month. This column argues that the suspension puts an end to a very useful data-collection exercise that went astray by focusing on rankings and political publicity. Beyond specific conflicts of interest within the World Bank, the demise of Doing Business reaffirms Goodhart’s Law that when an index becomes a policy target, it ceases to...

During the rapid spread of COVID-19 in Japan, the Japanese government decided to provide a Special Cash Payment of 100,000 yen per person to all residents as a part of its “Emergency Economic Measures to Cope with COVID-19”. This column uses publicly available survey data to estimate the marginal propensity to consume from the cash transfer in order to assess the impact of the policy. It...

Corporate debt has increased substantially in many parts of the world during the pandemic, raising concerns about the effects on investment in the aftermath of the COVID-19 shock. This column uses data for a large panel of US firms to investigate the implications of firm-specific debt booms for investment. It finds that debt booms lead financially constrained firms to decrease capital expenditures and intangibles,...

Despite early predictions of a large collapse, remittance flows to developing countries have been surprisingly resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic. This column describes how migrants appear to have responded positively to rising COVID-19 infection rates in their home countries despite economic challenges in host countries. Fiscal stimulus in host countries played a role in keeping remittances buoyant. Travel restrictions, on the other hand, seem...

The transition to a carbon-neutral economy requires firms and banks to have environmental consciousness, raising the question of how bank financing can contribute to global climate objectives. This column examines whether and how the environmental consciousness (or ‘greenness’) of firms and banks is reflected in the pricing of bank credit. The evidence suggests that firms are indeed rewarded for being green: green firms can get...

If you want your startup to be funded, everybody knows you have to dial up the energy and enthusiasm when you meet investors to the maximum. But is this really good advice for startups, and is a passionate pitch really a reliable signal for an investor? Song Ma of Yale School of Management used machine learning to evaluate thousands of pitches. He tells Tim...

Do countries benefit from servicing their debts during times of sovereign defaults? Colombia is typically regarded as the only large Latin American country that did not default in the 1980s, but this column argues that the case of Colombia is more complex than commonly assumed. Although it had to re-profile its debts, high-level political support from the US allowed Colombia to do so outside...

Quantitative easing is often criticised due to side effects on asset price valuation and risk taking. This column compares the financial side effects of conventional monetary policy to those of quantitative easing, based on the amount of inflation generated by each policy. A systematic comparison of multiple measures of financial side effects for the euro area, the UK, and the US suggests that the...