Empirical Economics最新文献

This paper (re-)evaluates the effectiveness of central bank asset purchases in the euro area given their prominent role in the ECB’s response to the pandemic as well as the evidence from the US suggesting diminishing returns of this policy measure over time. We analyse their macroeconomic impact in the euro area using a time-varying parameter structural vector autoregression with stochastic volatility and perform identification via sign and zero restrictions of Arias et al. (Econometrica 86:658–720, 2018), their fusion with high-frequency information approach akin to Jarociński and Karadi (Am Econ Macroecon 12:1–43, 2020) and a novel method which merges high-frequency identification with narrative sign restrictions of Antonlin-Diaz and Rubio-Ramirez (Am Econ Rev 108:2802–2829, 2018). We find that the potency of the ECB’s asset purchases to lift inflation has indeed considerably declined over time with several factors contributing to a more muted response of prices to central bank asset purchases. Our results show that the reanchoring channel is no longer active while the counterproductive effects via the mechanism outlined in Boehl et al. (Working Paper No. 691, 2020), which we dub the capacity utilization channel, have emerged lately and are further complemented with disinflationary effects stemming from the cost channel. Also, the effects passed through more standard transmission channels of central bank asset purchases like portfolio rebalancing and signalling, while still significant, appear to be less persistent recently. Overall, our findings point to a diminishing return of the ECB’s asset purchases to stabilize inflation and its expectations in the euro area.

Driven by higher education’s challenges in maintaining student motivation and achievement during the recent pandemic-induced shift to online learning, we investigate the effectiveness of text messages as a nudging tool to increase academic performance. To do so, we use a nonplacebo randomized controlled trial in which the treatment group directly receives SMS texts that review lecture content and give deadline reminders, while the control group only has access to the same information on the course page. Our findings suggest that the reception of motivating SMS messages per se, rather than the content review, has a positive effect on examination outcomes.

Return event studies generally involve several firms but there are also cases when only one firm is involved. This makes the relevant testing problems, abnormal return and cumulative abnormal return, more difficult since one cannot exploit the multitude of firms (by using a relevant central limit theorem, say) to design hypothesis tests. We propose a permutation test which is of nonparametric nature and more generally valid than the tests that have previously been proposed in the literature in this context. We address the question of the power of the test via a brief simulation study and also illustrate the method with two applications to real data.

In this paper we examine how the financial performance of telecommunications firms is affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and investigate the role of capital expenditures in this relationship. The full sample consists of 383 unique telecommunications firms from 72 countries. Empirical models are estimated using ordinary least squares regression with the Driscoll–Kraay standard errors method. We find that the financial performance of telecommunications firms, on average, decreased slightly during the pandemic period. However, firms with higher capital expenditures have increased their financial performance in the pandemic era. We attribute this evidence to fewer agency problems and managerial myopia, since managers investing to meet demand surge in uncertainty may prioritize the long-term sustainability of their firms. We further find that telecommunications firms that have been most adversely affected by the repercussions of COVID-19 are those with lower capital expenditures operating in countries with less economic development and weaker institutional environments. Our main findings are robust to potential endogeneity issues, reverse causality, and alternative dependent variables. The findings have implications for company managers, investors, regulatory bodies, and policymakers.

We use recently developed difference-in-differences methodologies and a panel of US states over the period 1960–2015 to examine how bank branching deregulation impacted state-level income inequality. Existing research relying on traditional two-way fixed effects estimates and event studies provide mixed results. However, these results potentially suffer from biases due to treatment effect heterogeneity and the failure to account for multiple related treatments. Using bias-corrected difference-in-differences procedures and properly accounting for the timing of treatment, we find evidence that the combined effect of intrastate and interstate banking deregulation increased the income share of the top 10%, 5%, and 1% of income earners, respectively. Conversely, we find no evidence that intrastate branching deregulation in isolation impacted income inequality.

This paper investigates the impact of macroprudential policy announcements on financial stability in Europe. Our three financial (in)stability proxies are systemic risk measures that cover all types of financial institutions and consider various financial market segments. We find that the announcements of macroprudential policy actions only contain banking systemic risk with the latter computed based on market data. However, when measuring systemic risk by including both market and balance sheet data, we observe an increase in the systemic risk of all financial institutions, banks and non-banks. This last result is confirmed when considering non-diversifiable risk across financial market segments.

In theory, changes in a host country exchange rate can be a cause or consequence of changes in its level of foreign direct investment (FDI), and recent incidences suggest that government stability may have sizable implications for the interactions between FDI and the exchange rate. This paper uses a semiparametric system of simultaneous equations to empirically characterize the relationship between FDI and the exchange rate, with each country’s level of government stability serving as a moderator. The results suggest that across developed and developing economies the most prevalent type of symbiosis between FDI and the exchange rate is a positive effect of FDI on the exchange rate, but no effect of the exchange rate on FDI. This significant FDI effect is heterogeneous, with an interquartile range of 1.241. At the median, a 10% increase in FDI inflows relative to GDP causes approximately a 13.29% increase in the annual change in the exchange rate. Government stability acts as a moderator variable by strengthening the relationship between FDI and the exchange rate in some countries, but eliminates the relationship in other countries.

Growing literature documents that jump variations are important for comprehending the evolution of asset prices. In this paper, we provide a novel insight on the jump components. Specifically, we forecast the equity premium using the weighted least squares (WLS) approach that assigns the inverse of variance weight to observations, and detect the role of jump contributions in it. The results indicate that the WLS models with jump-robust variance weights generate superior out-of-sample performance both statistically and economically relative to that with the jump-involved weights, suggesting that eliminating the jump variation in the variance weight helps to predict the stock returns. The predictive source of the jump-robust variance stems from its efficient measure of the continuous price process and forecast error variance reduced. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the jump component in the variance weight should rather be dumped than collected in terms of minimizing the forecast losses.