European economic review

2023年第10期

——更多動態(tài)，請持續(xù)關注gzh：理想主義的百年孤獨

01. Revealed in transition: The political effect of planning's legacy

作者：Timur Natkhov, William Pyle

摘要：Decades of investment decisions by central planners left communist societies with structures of production ill-prepared for competitive markets. Similar to the effects identified in the “China shock” literature, post-market-shock outcomes reflect pre-market-shock industrial geography. Tracking presidential voting in Russia at the district level in the 1990s, we document asymmetric reactions to the rapid liberalization of markets in 1992. Electoral support for the pro-market incumbent, as well as nighttime light intensity, declined more in districts whose inherited structures of production made them more vulnerable to reforms. By controlling for provincial fixed effects, we plausibly filter out the impact of post-1992 policy variation, allowing us to shed new light on an old debate about the importance of “initial conditions” to the trajectories of post-communist societies.

文章鏈接：https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292123001952

02. Monetary policy and the wage inflation-unemployment tradeoff

作者：Ricardo Duque Gabriel

摘要：Using newly assembled data for 18 advanced economies between 1870 and 2019, I study how monetary policy affects wage inflation and unemployment and document two key findings regarding their tradeoff. First, the wage Phillips curve displays a time-varying slope. Second, the tradeoff becomes weaker in low price inflation environments due to a stronger unemployment rate and a muted wage inflation response to monetary policy. These findings lend support to the idea that monetary policy has state-dependent effects with the central banks’ ability in exploring the tradeoff being impaired by a low price inflation environment.

文章鏈接：https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292123001939

03. Asymmetric heterogeneities and the role of transfers in a public goods experiment

作者：Ann-Kathrin Koessler, Julia Müller, Sonja Zitzelsberger

摘要：Previous experimental research has shown that cooperation is especially challenging in situations involving heterogeneous actors. Here, we investigate the effect of allowing unconditional transfers in a public goods game when actors differ asymmetrically in their endowments and productivity levels. Under this setup, full efficiency, in terms of highest maximum group payoff, can only be achieved with the full transfer of resources from the players with high endowment and low productivity to the players with high productivity but low endowment. We show that, in this setting, the availability of transfers enhances public good provision and cooperation. The voluntary transfer serves as a powerful cooperative signal, leading to high contribution rates among the recipients. However, if the transfer possibility is given but not used, cooperation erodes.

文章鏈接：https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292123001897

04. Improving children's food choices: Experimental evidence from the field

作者：Gary Charness, Ramón Cobo-Reyes, Erik Eyster, Gabriel Katz, ... Matthias Sutter

摘要：We present a field experiment to study the effects of different information conditions on food choices of 282 children in elementary schools. Previous interventions have typically paid participants for healthy eating, but this often may not be feasible. We introduce a system where food items are graded based on their nutritional value, involving parents or classmates as change agents by providing them with information regarding food choices. We find parents’ involvement in the decision process to be particularly beneficial in boosting healthy food choices, with very strong results that persist months after the intervention.

文章鏈接：https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292123001903

05. Renegotiation, discrimination and favoritism in symmetric procurement auctions

作者：Leandro Arozamena, Juan-José Ganuza, Federico Weinschelbaum

摘要：In order to make competition open, fair and transparent, procurement regulations often require equal treatment for all bidders. This paper shows how a favored supplier can be treated preferentially (opening the door to home bias and corruption) even when explicit discrimination is not allowed. We analyze a procurement setting in which the optimal design of the project to be contracted is unknown. The sponsor has to invest in specifying the project. The larger the investment, the higher the probability that the initial design is optimal. When it is not, a bargaining process between the winning firm and the sponsor takes place. Profits from bargaining are larger for the favored supplier than for its rivals. Given this comparative advantage, the favored firm bids more aggressively and wins more often than standard firms. Finally, we show that the sponsor invests less in specifying the initial design, when favoritism is stronger. Underinvestment in design specification is a tool for providing a comparative advantage to the favored firm.

文章鏈接：https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292123001940

06. Reversal interest rate and macroprudential policy

作者：Matthieu Darracq Pariès, Christoffer Kok, Matthias Rottner

摘要：Could a monetary policy loosening in a low interest rate environment have unintended recessionary effects? Using a non-linear macroeconomic model fitted to the euro area economy, we show that the effectiveness of monetary policy can decline in negative territory until it reaches an endogenous turning point, where monetary policy becomes contractionary. The framework demonstrates that the risk of hitting the rate at which the effect reverses depends on the capitalization of the banking sector. The possibility of the reversal interest rate gives rise to a novel motive for macroprudential policy. We show that macroprudential policy in the form of a countercyclical capital buffer, which prescribes the build-up of buffers in good times, substantially mitigates the probability of encountering the reversal rate and increases the effectiveness of negative interest rate policies. This new motive emphasizes the strategic complementarities between monetary policy and macroprudential policy.

文章鏈接：https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292123002003

07. Persistent external deficits and balance of payments crises

作者：Damián Pierri, Gabriel Montes-Rojas, Pablo Mira-Llambi

摘要：Persistent external deficits are a recurrent phenomena in low and middle income countries. We define a new empirical measure to study balance of payment crises related to the accumulation of persistent external deficits. Using a non-parametric difference-in-differences estimator we estimate a critical value for the accumulated current account deficits associated with a crisis. Countries that have increased their net external indebtedness by an accumulated amount of at least 26%–31% of the GDP in a time span of 3 to 5 years are more vulnerable to suffer a crisis, which includes a consumption fall of 3.1% and a current account reversal of 4.9 percentage points of GDP. These crises are far more severe than an average sudden stop. Thus, our empirical results suggest that fast accumulation of external debt though current account deficits is related to severe crises.

文章鏈接：https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292123001964

08. Corporate tax evasion: Evidence from international trade

作者：Adrien Bussy

摘要：This paper investigates how firms misreport their imports and exports to lower their reported taxable profits and evade corporate income taxes (CIT), which I call the trade evasion channel. Based on correlations between tax rates and mirror statistics of trade flows between countries at the product level, I find evidence suggesting that firms under-report exports (sales) and imports (costs) simultaneously to lower reported taxable profits while maintaining consistent income statements. For a representative firm, the resulting elasticity of reported taxable profits is 0.24, which suggests that the trade evasion channel is quantitatively important. Multinational firms do not exploit this channel, nor do firms in countries with a large informal economy, where other evasion options are available.

文章鏈接：https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001429212300199X

09. (Dis)honesty and the value of transparency for campaign promises

作者：Matthias Lang, Simeon Schudy

摘要：Promise competition is prevalent in many economic environments, but promise keeping is often difficult to observe. We study the value of transparency for promise competition and ask whether promises still offer an opportunity to honor future obligations when outcomes do not allow for observing promise keeping. Focusing on campaign promises, we show theoretically how preferences for truth-telling shape promise competition when promise keeping can(not) be observed and identify the causal effects of transparency in an incentivized experiment. Transparency leads to less promise breaking but also to less generous promises. Rent appropriations are higher in opaque institutions though only weakly so when not fully opaque. Instrumental reputational concerns and preferences for truth-telling explain these results.

文章鏈接：https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292123001885

10. The effects of seemingly nonbinding price floors: An experimental analysis

作者：Stephen Salant, William Shobe, Neslihan Uler

摘要：Price floors are common policies in markets for storable goods such as commodities, bankable emissions permits, and currencies. Hard price floors are implemented as unlimited government buybacks and prevent the price from falling below the floor; soft floors, whether implemented as limited buybacks or as reserve prices in emission permit auctions, allow the market price to fall below the floor. We specify and then test in the laboratory a two-period model with the same properties as our infinite-horizon model, Salant et al. (2022). Theory predicts that asset prices will respond to price floors even in a set of circumstances where the floor seems nonbinding. Most of our experimental findings are consistent with theoretical predictions: a seemingly nonbinding floor can cause the price and carryover to jump up, the jump is higher with a hard floor than a soft one, and when the floor is so low that the theory predicts no effect, none is observed. In contrast to theoretical predictions, however, the soft floor fails to increase the carryover and market price in our experiment.

文章鏈接：https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292123002118

11. Risk without strike: Nuclear crisis and corporate investment

作者：Yichuan Hu, Chang Xue, Xiaoyu Zhou

摘要：While prior works of literature have noted that a crisis brings in not only a strike but also risk, empirical studies on crisis management are largely focusing on the impact of the strike. In this study, we estimate the pure effect of disaster risk on corporate decisions by using the setting of the North Korea nuclear crisis, which brought risk but no actual strike to the neighboring countries. We find that the nuclear tests are significant events for corporate investments and the risk of these tests will lead firms to postpone their long-term investments. The negative impact spreads from the test site and dwindles when firms locate further away, and the geodesic distance rather than the driving distance to the test site matters. Our further analyses show that the negative impact on corporate investment decisions is channeled by the fear of environmental pollution, instead of the geopolitical concern like the outbreak of a war.

文章鏈接：https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292123002179

12. A dynamic quantile model for distinguishing intertemporal substitution from risk aversion

作者：Luciano de Castro, Lance D. Cundy, Antonio F. Galvao, Rafael Westenberger

摘要：This paper uses a dynamic quantile model to estimate the elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS) and risk attitude using large disaggregated data from the NielsenIQ Consumer Panel. This data is transactional at the consumption purchase level, which minimizes measurement error, and the final sample contains more than two million observations. In the quantile model, the risk attitude is captured by the quantile and is, therefore, separable from the EIS. To estimate the parameters of interest we use the Euler equation along with instrumental variables quantile regression. First, we estimate the model across different levels of risk attitude. Empirical results document evidence of monotonically decreasing EIS along quantiles. For large risk aversion, the EIS is greater than one, whereas for small risk aversion it descends into negative values. Subsequently, we estimate the risk attitude and the EIS simultaneously. The results substantiate a risk attitude close to the median, with EIS consistently positive and smaller than one.

文章鏈接：https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292123002155

13. General equilibrium models with rationing: The making of a ‘European specialty’

作者：Romain Plassard, Matthieu Renault

摘要：Unlike the U.S., Europe was a hotbed for general-equilibrium models with rationing (GEMR). Our goal is to explain how and why GEMR became a “European specialty” (Portes, 1987: p. 1332). We show how research on GEMR took off and developed in France and Belgium from the mid-1970s, before expanding all around Europe. We also argue that three main factors enabled the deployment of GEMR in Europe over the 1970s and 1980s. First, GEMR opened up research opportunities in areas in which European economists had specific interests (e.g., general equilibrium theory). Second, GEMR benefited from the support of some leading academic figures who mobilized institutional resources to keep stimulating research over years (e.g., Jacques Drèze, at the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics). Third, there were problems specific to the Old Continent that stimulated research on GEMR, namely persistent unemployment in Western Europe and planning in Eastern Europe.

文章鏈接：https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292123001988

14. The natural rate of unemployment and the NAIRU

作者：Roger E. Backhouse, James Forder, Christina Laskaridis

摘要：The usages of the terms ‘natural rate of unemployment’ and 'NAIRU' (Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment) in English-language publications are considered and compared. It is argued that contrary to what has sometimes been suggested, there is no consistent difference in the economic theory underlying the two ideas. However, there is, to a significant extent, and particularly in the 1980s, a difference in the way the two terms were used: choice of language typically depended on the questions being addressed. That difference, in turn, arose substantially from the different macroeconomic experiences of the US and Europe. In the 1980s, faced with persistently high unemployment, European economists developed structural econometric models seeking to understand the determination of 'the NAIRU'. In later years, as economic circumstances changed, usage became more homogeneous and choices about it seem to have been much more a matter of personal taste or habit.

文章鏈接：https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292123001915