Studies related to the assessment of the non-market values of culture typically employ methods based on stated or revealed preferences. In this paper, we implement a new emerging non-market valuation technique, namely the life satisfaction approach. In particular, we quantify in monetary values, the additional utility that people benefit from cultural experiences, as well as the additional disutility suffered by cultural consumers specifically due to the closure of cultural organisations during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the pandemic provides a unique setting. Using a survey conducted in Denmark in the spring of 2020, we confirm the link between cultural participation and well-being by estimating a life satisfaction model, instrumenting for both income and cultural participation to avoid simultaneity problems. Furthermore, we show that fervent cultural consumers have experienced an additional welfare loss during the lockdown period, controlling for all other known life dimensions affected by the pandemic. Our results aim to highlight the role of cultural participation in sustaining life satisfaction and, consequently, to support a well-being evidence-based cultural policy that facilitate cultural accessibility as a mean to increase the individual well-being.
We present a three sector OLG model with a homogeneous output good that is produced with traditional or robot technology. The traditional sector produces with labor and capital, whereas the modern sector employs robots instead of labor. Robots and workers are modeled as perfect substitutes to investigate whether economic policy under the harshest assumptions is able to prevent the ascent of a robotized economy. While we find that the transition is inevitable, higher taxes on robots and revenues can slow down the process. We also that the economy will switch from an exogenous growth model based on TFP to an endogenous growth model due to constant returns with respect to reproducible factors of production as it becomes fully robotized.
The post-pandemic rise in consumer prices across the world has renewed interest in inflation dynamics after decades of global disinflation. This paper provides a spatial investigation of inflation synchronicity at the city level in Lithuania using disaggregated monthly data during the period 2000-2021. The empirical analysis provides strong evidence that (i) the co-movement of city-level inflation rates-estimated using the instantaneous quasi-correlation approach-is significantly weaker than the extent of synchronization suggested by the simple correlation analysis; (ii) there is substantial heterogeneity in the instantaneous quasi-correlation of inflation subcomponents between city pairs; and (iii) there are significant changes in the degree of city-level synchronization over time, reflecting important economic developments in history such as the global financial crisis, the adoption of euro, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
In The Tyranny of Merit, Sandel recasts the discontent expressed in populism as a rejection of market morality and as an inarticulate plea for the restoration of civic virtue. He argues that a 'market-based globalisation project' has fostered meritocratic ideas which humiliate the victims of that project and undermine the dignity of labour. I question Sandel's claim that meritocracy is a market value and the dignity of labour is not. I argue that his account of a moral alternative to normal market institutions-an economy in which individuals' rewards are somehow aligned with their true merits-is deeply incoherent.