Empirical Economics最新文献

This article revisits the paper “The Historical State, Local Collective Action, and Economic Development in Vietnam” written by Dell, Lane, and Querubin in 2018. The 2018 paper investigates the role of historical state on long-run economic performance in Vietnam. The authors use a historical border in Vietnam, which was in place following the 1698 event and separated two regions: Dai Viet to the north and Khmer to the south. With distinct institutional characteristics on the two border sides, the historical division is said to lead to persistent differences in economic and social outcomes. This article disputes some aspects of the core assumption in their analysis, including the shape and dynamics of the 1698 border, and replicates the statistical outcomes. Results suggest that historical state plays little to no role in determining the social and economic differences among the observations.

This paper aims to evaluate how changing patterns of sectoral gender segregation play a role in accounting for women’s employment contracts and wages in the UK between 2005 and 2020. We then study wage differentials in gender-specific dominated sectors. We found that the propensity of women to be distributed differently across sectors is a major factor contributing to explaining the differences in wages and contract opportunities. Hence, the disproportion of women in female-dominated sectors implies contractual features and lower wages typical of that sector, on average, for all workers. This difference is primarily explained by “persistent discriminatory constraints”, while human capital-related characteristics play a minor role. However, wage differentials would shrink if workers had the same potential and residual wages as men in male-dominated sectors. Moreover, this does not happen at the top of the wage distribution, where wage differentials among women working in female-dominated sectors are always more pronounced than those among men.

In this paper, we provide an assessment of the evolution of markups in Italy in the last twenty years. To this aim, we resort to both macro- and micro-data and estimation techniques, namely reduced forms accounting measures (price–cost margins) and production function model-based indicators. When using aggregate data, we present a comparative study with respect to the other main Euro area countries, whereas the micro-level analysis focuses on the markup dynamics across and within Italian firms. According to our findings, (i) aggregate markups show flat/slightly decreasing dynamics across EU countries, settling to a 1.1 level on average; (ii) the aggregate dynamics hide substantial cross-sector and cross-firm heterogeneity; (iii) the within-firm component is the most relevant driver of markup dynamics; and (iv) no superstars-driven dynamics emerge: although firms with higher markups show slightly more variation over time, there is no evidence of an increasing trend. Finally, we compare our results with those obtained by De Loecker and Eeckhout (Global market power, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, 2018) and show that they differ mainly because our sample, including non-listed firms, is more representative of the EU corporate sectors. Our study has important policy implications: it warns against blindly extending the conclusions valid for specific contexts to others with different characteristics, while inviting a careful assessment of the actual competitive landscape, based on representative datasets and robust analyses.

Educational hypogamy—the practice of men marrying women who are more educated than themselves—has been increasing in rural India over the last two decades. Can this explain rural India’s declining female labor force participation rate (FLFPR)? We examine this question by testing whether women in hypogamous marriages are less likely to participate in the labor force than women in non-hypogamous marriages in rural India. This could be the case since women in hypogamous marriages are viewed as ‘gender norm deviant’ which is likely to cause their marriage quality to be worse than that of women in non-hypogamous marriages. This might make participation in labor force costlier for the former than the latter. To estimate the causal relationship between hypogamy and women’s labor force participation, we employ a nonparametric bounds approach. We find that, indeed, compared to women in non-hypogamous marriages, women in hypogamous marriages are significantly less likely to participate in the labor force. Further, we provide suggestive evidence that this is likely because marriage quality of women in hypogamous marriages is relatively worse. Overall, therefore, our results suggest the rise in hypogamy is likely an important reason for the decline in FLFPR in rural India.

We use survey data on Italian small- and medium-sized enterprises collected during the COVID-19 pandemic to explore the relationship between the adoption of work from home (WFH) practices and organizational performance. In so doing, we investigate several dimensions of organizational performance, including measures of labor productivity and workers’ concentration and motivation, the level of absenteeism, the organization of work through management by objectives (MBO), and the presence of coordination and communication costs. We obtain several results. First, we find a significantly enhanced capability of firms that adopted WFH during the pandemic to sustain the overall organizational performance, particularly when such a work practice is used intensively. Less deteriorated labor productivity and workers’ concentration and motivation, decreased absenteeism, and a substantial rise in the adoption of MBO practices seem to be important aspects behind the detected benefits related to WFH. Third, when WFH is used at medium levels of intensity, it is associated with augmented coordination and communication costs, which nonetheless do not appear to overcome the benefits associated with WFH.

This study investigates the effects of procurement tools to support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in public contracts by analysing contract awards for public works published on Tenders Electronic Daily in 2018–2022. Focusing on dividing contracts into smaller lots, a key feature of the 2014 EU modernised procurement framework, this study’s findings reveal that splitting contracts might not necessarily attract SMEs to bid but increases their chances of winning such contracts. Other factors, such as using open and unrestricted bidding procedures and allowing SMEs to showcase their specialisation by awarding contracts based on the best price-quality ratio, positively affect the SMEs’ bidding. The findings of this study emphasise the importance of thoroughly considering individual contract characteristics and overall procurement settings to accommodate SMEs’ limited resource capacities and foster their performance in the public procurement marketplace.

This article revisits the relationship between economic growth and exchange rate misalignments. We aim to test whether undervaluation's impact on growth depends on institutional quality, as suggested in the previous literature. In our analysis, we focus on recent decades characterized by globalization. We use the framework of cross-country growth regressions estimated using the recently developed two-stage instrumental variable method, which allows accounting for cross sectional dependence. In addition, we use external instruments to address the potential endogeneity between economic growth and undervaluation. Our results confirm the positive relationship between undervaluation and growth across all income groups from low-income to high-income countries. The role of institutions in the transmission of undervaluation on growth appears consistently only among lower-middle-income countries. Therefore, while our results point to the positive effects of undervaluation, the support for the hope that countries can successfully compensate for poor institutional quality via the undervaluation of currencies is weaker and limited to specific stages of economic development.

The objective of the paper is to understand the role of workers’ bargaining for the labor share in transition economies. We rely on a share-capital schedule, whereby workers’ bargaining power is represented as a move off the schedule. Quantitative indicators of bargaining power are supplemented with self-constructed qualitative indices derived from textual information describing the legal environment enabling bargaining in each country. Due to multiple data constraints, we employ a cross-sectional empirical model estimated using instrumental variables (IV) methods, where former unionization rates and the time since the adoption of the ILO Collective Bargaining Convention serve as instruments. The sample comprises 23 industrial branches across 69 countries, including 28 transition economies. In general, we find the stronger bargaining power to influence higher labor share, when the former is measured either quantitatively or qualitatively. Conversely, higher bargaining power is associated with a lower labor share in transition economies. This is likely a matter of delayed response to wage pushes, a function of the structural transformation of transition economies, and reconciled with the increasing role of MNCs which did not confront the workers’ power rise per se, but introduced automation and changed market structure amid labor market flexibilization, which eventually deferred bargaining power’s positive effect on labor share.

Using insights from the literature on psychology and medicine, we examine the impact of stress induced by terrorism on child sex at birth. The psychological and social stressors associated with terrorist events prior to conception may trigger changes in parental hormones that have an implication for birth outcomes. We extract data on 11,331 live births conceived between 2007 and 2012 from Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey 2012–2013 and match these data with household information, monthly terrorist incidents at home district, and other district-level characteristics. Our analysis shows that parental exposure to terrorism prior to conception reduces the likelihood of a male birth. We examine the birth outcome of siblings by exploiting the variation in exposure to terrorism across pregnancies for a given mother and confirm our finding. The results provide microeconomic evidence of the potential long-term impact of terrorism on population dynamics and development.

Using a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model, we demonstrate that the response of consumer prices in oil-producing Canadian provinces to oil market shocks is similar to that of consumer prices in non-oil-producing provinces, though the magnitudes and durations vary. In particular, the effects of oil supply and oil-specific demand shocks lead to significant consumer price increases while unanticipated expansions in global demand only lead to modest increases in consumer prices across both sets of provinces. Our results suggest that oil market shocks are transmitted from consumer prices in oil-producing provinces to non-oil-producing ones largely through changes in the labor market. Further, we find that roughly 41% of the long-run variation in consumer price inflation in oil-producing provinces is attributable to oil market shocks while it is about 46% in non-oil-producing provinces on average. Finally, we show that historically, oil market shocks have contributed to fluctuations in consumer price inflation in each province with different signs at different points in time. Consequently, our results suggest that policymakers should pay close attention to the effects of oil market shocks on subnational consumer prices in order to curb the impacts of adverse supply shocks and to mediate demand-side forces.