查看更多>>摘要：The global financial cycle has raised concerns about the ability of emerging markets to insulate their economy from international spillovers. Using dynamic Local Projections we show that capital controls are as potent as floating exchange rates in dampening the response of international financial shocks on domestic financial variables and the real economy. We relate this finding to muted boom-bust cycles in short-term non-resident capital flows. However, the benefits of floats or capital controls are reaped in isolation, that is, either tool is enough. We attribute this pattern to nominal frictions in domestic labor markets.
查看更多>>摘要：Are schools triggering the diffusion of the Covid-19? This question is at the core of an extensive debate about the social and long-run costs of stopping the economic activity and human capital accumulation from reducing the contagion. In principle, many confounding factors, such as climate, health system treatment, and other forms of restrictions, may impede disentangling the link between schooling and Covid-19 cases when focusing on a country or regional-level data. This work sheds light on the potential impact of school opening on the upsurge of contagion by combining a weekly panel of geocoded Covid-19 cases in Sicilian census areas with a unique set of school data. The identification of the effect takes advantage of both a spatial and time-variation in school opening, stemming from the flexibility in opening dates determined by a Regional Decree, and by the occurrence of a national referendum, which pulled a set of poll-station schools towards opening earlier or later September 24th. The analysis finds that census areas where schools opened earlier observed a significant and positive increase in the growth rate of Covid-19 cases between 2.5-3.7%. This result is consistent across several specifications, including accounting for several determinants of school opening, such as the number of temporary teachers, Covid-19 cases in August, and pupils with special needs. Finally, the analysis finds lower effects in more densely populated areas, on younger population, and on smaller class size. The results imply that school reopening generated an increase of one third in cases.
查看更多>>摘要：Based on a new survey of German households, we investigate the role that information channels and lifetime experience play in households' inflation expectations. We show that the types of information channels that households use to inform themselves about monetary policy are closely related to their socioeconomic characteristics. These information channels, in turn, have a major influence on the level of perceived past and expected future inflation, as well as on the uncertainty thereof. The expected future change in inflation and the unemployment rate, however, is strongly influenced by individual experience of these variables. Similarly, the expected response of inflation to a change in the interest rate is also shaped by experience. We propose the interpretation that households obtain inflation numbers from the media, but their 'economic model' is shaped by experience.
查看更多>>摘要：The partnership dissolution literature has almost entirely focused on the properties of exit mechanisms in isolation taking other features of the break-up process as given. We consider a simple, two-stage model of the dissolution process where both the decision to dissolve and the roles the partners play in the exit mechanism are endogenously determined according to a "triggering rule."We find certain pairings of triggering rules and exit mechanisms can lead to a war of attrition which inefficiently prolongs the dissolution process. However, since these theoretical predictions require sophisticated reasoning and backward induction, it is unclear whether the theory has any empirical validity. We therefore conduct a laboratory experiment to explore this question. Treatments are selected to test the main predictions of the model using combinations of exit mechanisms and triggering rules commonly seen in practice. The experimental results are largely supportive of the underlying theoretical predictions.
查看更多>>摘要：We analyse the impact of interest-bearing central bank bills on financial market variables in Switzerland. The unique institutional setting allows us to identify the causal effects of two orthogonal shocks occurring on days with central bank bill auctions through heteroscedasticity: an overnight interest rate shock and a signalling shock. The first shock raises the overnight interest rate and modestly appreciates the exchange rate. The signalling shock appreciates the exchange rate more strongly. In addition, it lowers stock prices, long-term interest rates, as well as inflation expectations, and it raises corporate bond spreads. The signalling shock is economically more important for forward-looking variables than the overnight rate shock. The results suggest that liquidity-absorbing operations between official monetary policy decisions affect financial market variables by revealing information about the central bank's future policy actions.
查看更多>>摘要：We study the dynamics of equilibrium participation in an international environmental agree-ment aimed at increasing the stock of a global public good such as climate change mitigation. In contrast with previous studies, we assume partial cooperation among signatories and show that the coalition size can be large and increase over time, even when the initial coalition size is small. We highlight a novel trade-off between agreements that are narrow-but-deep-and-long-lived and those that are broad-but-shallow-and-short-lived. Our results show that loose cooperative agreements, which are broad-but-shallow-and-short-lived, are both welfare-and Pareto-superior to tight cooperative agreements, which are narrow-but-deep-and-long-lived. We also show that conditions exist under which the equilibrium coalition size is efficient.
查看更多>>摘要：While the conventional policy prescription for dealing with commodity price shocks is the adoption of a flexible exchange rate regime, a view popularized by Friedman (1953), in practice many emerging economies decide to intervene in the foreign exchange market. In this paper, we evaluate the optimal exchange rate policy response to commodity price shocks in a small open economy model with learning-by-doing (LBD) externalities. We find that the optimal policy response to a commodity boom involves a large and sustained increase in the stock of foreign exchange reserves aimed at stabilizing the real exchange rate and tradable production. Moreover, the optimal policy resembles the actual dynamics of foreign exchange reserves observed in many emerging commodity-exporting economies during recent episodes of commodity booms. We also show that solely relying on monetary policy for dealing with commodity price shocks provides limited macroeconomic stabilization gains, as the policy rate is an ineffective instrument for addressing LBD externalities.
查看更多>>摘要：We consider how work norms affect the likelihood of people receiving Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) in response to worsening economic conditions. By focusing on immigrants in the US, we can examine the influence of work norms in a person's home country, which we argue are exogenous to labor market prospects in the US. We find that the probability of receiving SSDI benefits is more sensitive to economic downturns among immigrants from countries where people place less importance on work. We also provide evidence that this result is not driven by dif-ferential labor market sensitivities to the business cycle or differences in other characteristics that might be correlated with norms.
查看更多>>摘要：This paper investigates the possible dynamics that may emerge in an economy in which agents adapt to environmental degradation by increasing the produced output to repair the damages of environmental degradation. The analyzed economy is characterized by both positive and negative externalities. On the one hand, an increase in production-related environmental degradation lowers the net income left at disposal for consumption and investment; on the other hand, it induces an increase in labor and capital to repair environmental damages from production, which enhances the positive externalities occurring in the production process. From the analysis of the model we show that there can be two steady states but only the one with lower capital level can be locally attractive. Both local and global indeterminacy may arise in the model, even with decreasing returns to scale. It follows that one cannot predict a priori which path the economy will follow when converging to an equilibrium, nor the equilibrium the dynamics will eventually converge to. In particular, the trajectories emerging from the model may eventually lead the economy to be trapped in a Pareto-dominated equilibrium with lower capital and higher environmental degradation levels. Moreover, the interplay between positive and negative externalities generates a rich set of possible trajectories that may lead to opposite extreme outcomes, namely, either infinite growth or the collapse of the economy.
查看更多>>摘要：This paper examines the role of public information communication in dynamic self-enforcing climate agreements. We consider a framework with implicit contracts but also a dynamic coalition formation context. In a stochastic game, where the social cost of Greenhouse Gasses (GHG) is an unknown random variable, an information sender, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), controls the release of verifiable information about the unknown state variable to the countries. The equilibrium communication strategy of the IPCC takes a threshold form, above which the IPCC reveals all the information available, even if it hurts the prospect of approaching the socially optimum level of emissions. The case where the IPCC remains silent, below the threshold, vanishes as the sender gets perfectly informed about the underlying social cost.
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Elsevier