查看更多>>摘要：Renewable energy generation and storage requires specialized capital goods, embedding critical raw materials (CRM). The scarcity of CRM therefore affects the transition from a fossil based energy system to one based on renewables, necessary to cope with climate change. We consider the issue in a theoretical model, where we allow for a very costly potential substitute, reflecting a backstop technology, and for partial and costly recycling of materials in capital goods. We characterize the main features of the efficient energy transition, and their dependence on the relative abundance of CRM and on the recycling technology. Recycling reduces the cost of the transition. It also calls for having a large stock of recyclable CRM embedded in specialized capital at the time of adoption of the backstop technology. Moreover, we consider constraints on policy tools and myopic regulation, and show how abstracting from the scarcity of CRM, or tightly linking subsidies for renewables to the carbon tax revenue, is misleading in designing climate policy.
查看更多>>摘要：We analyze the impact of local immigration on natives' preferences for "nationalism'' as measured in parties' programs by the Manifesto Project Database in European election data between 2007 and 2016. Using a 2SLS strategy with a shift-share IV based on immigrant shares by origin in 2005 and inflows by education-origin groups, we estimate that larger inflows of highly-educated immigrants were associated with a decrease in the "nationalistic'' vote of natives, while less-educated immigrants produced an opposite-direction shift towards nationalistic parties. The aggregate results derive from individual shifts toward nationalism in response to less-skilled immigration, and from greater participation of young voters and more pro-European attitudes in response to high-skilled immigration.
查看更多>>摘要：This paper investigates household leverage-dependent fiscal policy effects in a two-agent New Keynesian DSGE model with occasionally binding borrowing constraints. Our model successfully replicates empirical evidence showing that fiscal policy's effectiveness differs significantly across the household leverage cycle. Fiscal multipliers are persistently above unity when government spending rises at the peak of the household leverage cycle. In contrast, increases in government spending at the trough of the household leverage cycle imply fiscal multipliers below unity. We test the model's predictions on post-WWII U.S. data.
查看更多>>摘要：We study whether there is a racial bias in ratings of professional football players in Italian newspapers. We find that there is such a bias. Conditional on objective performance indicators black players receive a lower rating than non-black players. This is not a difference across the board but predominantly present at the lower end of the newspaper rating distribution. The best black players are not subject to a racial bias in ratings. We also find that clubs do not have a racial bias in the wages they pay to players. We speculate that for clubs there is sufficient competition to remove racial wage discrimination. Clubs simply want value for money. Newspaper football experts do seem to have a racial bias in their rating of players. We hypothesize that this might be unconscious discrimination related to stereotyping of black players.
查看更多>>摘要：This paper reports the results of a large randomized field experiment that investigates the extent to which nudges can stimulate student participation in teaching evaluations. The three nudges that we used were designed to either: (1) heighten students' perceived impact of teaching evaluations, (2) communicate a descriptive norm of high participation, and (3) use the commitment-consistency principle by asking students to commit to participation. We find that none of the nudges were effective: all treatment effects are insignificant and close to zero in magnitude. Exploring heterogeneous treatment effects, we find evidence that the effectiveness of both the impact and commitment treatments differed across students. The impact treatment had a negative effect on the participation of bachelor-level students, but not on that of master-level students. The commitment treatment increased participation among students with good average grades, whereas it decreased participation for students whose average grades were poor.
查看更多>>摘要：Is opposition to immigration deeply entrenched or is it open to updating in the face of new information? We explore this question by examining how attitudes of native citizens shift following exposure to information that points to potential upsides of immigration. We do so using a large-scale randomized experiment embedded in a text-comprehension study administered in Japan. As part of the study, participants were subtly presented with information on social and economic problems that immigration could help address (e.g., growing elderly population that requires care, labor shortage in certain sectors). Depending on the treatment, information exposure increased support for a more open immigration policy and motivated pro-immigration political action. Notably, effects persisted 10-12 days after the intervention. The results suggest that information campaigns can lessen public opposition to immigration.
Chipeniuk, Karsten O.Katz, Nets HawkWalker, Todd B.
18页
查看更多>>摘要：We examine aggregation in the neoclassical growth model with aggregate shocks and uninsurable employment risk, as well as related environments. We introduce a Walrasian auctioneer whose job is to report to households all possible state-contingent future prices. Households take these as given when forming expectations and making optimal consumption/savings decisions, and the auctioneer adjusts her forecasts until markets clear. This natural dichotomy between the households and the auctioneer allows us to study each problem in isolation as well as to discuss the intersection. On the household side, we separate an explicit expression for the linear permanent income component of savings from a well-behaved nonlinear adjustment arising from precautionary behavior and incomplete markets. Equipped with this decomposition, we then study how economies aggregate in the presence of various auctioneer types that are popular in the literature. The steady-state auctioneer of Huggett (1997) and Aiyagari (1994) offers a paper-and-pencil analysis of aggregation that provides a bound on more complex environments. We provide an economic interpretation of the regression coefficients and explain the lack of time variation in the auctioneer of Krusell and Smith (1998). We also introduce a new numerical method which uses the empirical distribution of auctioneer forecasts to substantially improve solution accuracy in cases where the standard coefficient of determination and other well-known statistics prove to be misleading.
Bredemeier, ChristianJuessen, FalkoSchabert, Andreas
31页
查看更多>>摘要：Estimated fiscal multipliers for the US are typically moderate, despite evidence of the Fed lowering, rather than raising, interest rates after government spending hikes. We rationalize these puzzling observations building on the imperfect substitutability of assets. We find that interest rates important for private borrowing/saving do not follow the response of the monetary policy rate, which is reflected by rising liquidity premia after spending hikes. A model with a structural specification of asset liquidity can replicate these findings and predicts moderate output effects of fiscal expansions even when monetary policy rates fall or are fixed at the zero lower bound.
查看更多>>摘要：Decision makers often face uncertainty about the ability and the integrity of their advisors. If an expert is sufficiently concerned about establishing a reputation for being skilled and unbiased, she may truthfully report her private information about the decision-relevant state. However, while in a truthtelling equilibrium the decision maker learns only about the ability of the expert, in an equilibrium with some misreporting she also learns about the expert's bias. Although truthtelling allows for better current decisions, it may lead to worse sorting outcomes. This occurs if misreporting is principally caused by biased experts driven by their conflict of interest rather than by unbiased experts attempting to signal their type. Whenever lying has these features, it increases the decision maker's expected utility with respect to truthtelling if she is sufficiently concerned about future choices. In these cases, it is optimal to adopt policies aimed at reducing advisors' career concerns and we suggest real world examples in which these could be implemented.
查看更多>>摘要：This paper provides a simple, yet reliable, alternative to the (Bayesian) estimation of large multivariate VARs with time variation in the conditional mean equations and/or in the covariance structure. The original multivariate, n-dimensional model is treated as a set of n univariate estimation problems, and cross-dependence is handled through the use of a copula. This makes it possible to run the estimation of each univariate equation in parallel. Thus, only univariate distribution functions are needed when estimating the individual equations, which are often available in closed form, and easy to handle with MCMC (or other techniques). Thereafter, the individual posteriors are combined with the copula, so obtaining a joint posterior which can be easily resampled. We illustrate our approach using various examples of large time-varying parameter VARs with 129 and even 215 macroeconomic variables.
NSTL
Elsevier