Research in Economics最新文献

The article aims to examine the potential effect of Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) on the mean and variance of carbon (CO2) emissions by employing a novel nonparametric causality-in-quantiles and quantile-on-quantile on the dataset comprising of 17 economies to test our hypothesis. The results of causality-in-quantiles find that EPU offers a significant yet mixed ability to impact the carbon emissions of most economies. These mixed patterns of impact pertain not only to mean and variance but also across regions. The results of quantile-on-quantile reveal that high EPU leads to an augmented level of carbon emissions. This causality may indicate that macroeconomic and institutional factors influence the carbon emission for all analyzed countries. These findings are particularly useful for practitioners, policymakers, academic researchers, and traders in the carbon market as they could promote the realization of carbon reductions targets by maintaining stable economic policies that have tangible ramifications for carbon emissions behavior.

This paper suggests that ageing has divergent effects on housing prices, and the divergence sources from both aspects of ageing and housing. For the ageing, a fall in fertility and a rise in survival rate could have opposite effects on housing prices. For the housing, the prices of the two components – land and structure – respond to fertility rate decline and survival rate increase to different extent. Therefore, the effect of ageing on housing prices does not have a definite pattern in the long run. In the short run, the results suggest that ageing can produce a turning point in the price dynamics. To the left of the peak, ageing boosts prices while to the right, it has the opposite effect, therefore the impacts of ageing on housing prices are different with time.

In a two-country model of general oligopolistic equilibrium with technologically heterogeneous sectors, I study how, in a home-market scenario, a unilateral rise in uniform cross-sector import tariffs affects wages, countrywide profits, and welfare. Firms face resource constraints and wages are simultaneously determined. Economy-wide protectionism reduces the foreign wage without affecting the domestic one. Domestic countrywide profits benefit from a small rise in uniform tariffs, whereas the foreign counterpart is damaged. Domestic welfare is unambiguously hindered. Hence, the general-equilibrium cross-sector perspective goes against the textbook version theory of the optimal tariff in partial equilibrium. Rationalization of these effects suggests a political-economy view on tariff formation in general equilibrium. Then I extend the model to segmented markets, considering uniform specific and ad valorem tariffs for bilateral and unilateral trade policies.

In this paper, we compare the scenarios of exclusive licenses and cross-licenses under the existence of partial vertical integration. To do this, a successive duopoly model is proposed, with two owners and two firms competing in a differentiated product market. Each technology owner has a share in one of the competing firms, so that competition is also extended to the upstream R&D sector. We propose a novel analysis where differences in the size of their innovation process are allowed, extending the results in Sánchez et al. (2021). We find that the cross-licensing scenario is preferred when the size of the innovation is small; this occurs regardless of the participation in the competing companies and how many innovate. If the innovation is very large, the owners may be better off with exclusive licenses.

Motivated by the weak response of the inflation rate to the tight labor market, the Federal Reserve (Fed) Bank stepped away from its longstanding preemptive policy to fight inflation as the economy approached full employment. This paper aims to reevaluate the relationships of four measures of inflation with the unemployment rate. We accomplish this task by allowing the Phillips curve (PC) slope to vary over time and depend on the magnitude of the unemployment gap. Assessed by both PC convex specification assessment and the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimation method, we confirm the convexity of the PC when the unemployment gap is negative. In addition, we show that the slope of the PC more than doubled when we allow the coefficient on the economic slack to vary over time. Thus, our study shows that PC is still a relevant tool for guiding monetary policy.

This is the first paper I am aware of to integrate litigants’ investment in pretrial case preparation with the fact that judges experience small costs to processing extra information conveyed by litigants. While a full-scale battle involving high case preparation by both parties would have obtained if litigants were confident that judges would review the extra evidence, costly judicial attention results either in an equilibrium where no one incurs case preparation expenses, or (if parties are relatively malicious, and judicial technology is efficient) in just one litigant, but not both, incurring such expenses. The latter possibility can create incentives for a signaling race. While costly judicial attention lowers case preparation expenses and generally makes litigants better off relative to the full attention case, it can also lead to fewer cases being immediately settled.

During the COVID-19 pandemic governments and individuals alike faced incentives to limit the spread of the disease. Our objective is to assess the extent to which government mandates and private actions influenced time allocated to specific activities and the social interactions of individuals. Information on how individuals spent their time before and during the early stages of the pandemic come from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), which identifies time use for a 24-hour period and includes each individual's activities, locations and companions. We combine the time diary data with data on state-level restrictions from the Kaiser Family Foundation and state-level COVID-19 infection and death rates from Johns Hopkins University. Our findings suggest that private actions in response to reported death rates are comparable to the effects of state-level public mandates on the outcome variables of time alone and time at home. In evaluating effects based on sex and age, we find that young males experienced the largest disruption in time use, significantly changing both their location and their companions. We also find important age profile differences between males and females.

COVID-19 has caused substantial disruptions to the airline industry. This paper analyzes the impact of the pandemic on price dispersion in airfares. The sample includes ticket information from the DB1B database between 2018Q1 and 2021Q4. The fixed-effect panel instrument variable (IV) estimation finds evidence of decreased price dispersion during COVID-19. These results are robust to alternative measures of dispersion and subsamples. Furthermore, the subsample analyes reveal that, as the infection rate rises, the dispersion decreases more in markets where competition is more intense. Specifically, dispersion is lower on routes with the presence of low-cost carriers (LCCs) than those exclusively served by legacy carriers and on short-haul routes ($\le$500 miles) than long-haul routes ($>$500 miles). My analysis adds to the literature by exploiting the impact of changes in market conditions (i.e., demand shocks triggered by the COVID-19 recession) on price and price dispersion using the latest data.

This paper studies economic resilience as the ability of an economic system to respond to adverse shocks. We propose several measures of resilience based on a quantile function representing income dynamics. Applied to the evolution of per capita income, we evaluate the speed and nature of economic adjustments to adverse shocks across countries over the last two centuries. We find evidence of important income effects: low-income countries adjust to adverse shocks better in the short run; but high-income countries adjust better in the longer run. We show that the long run effects dominate: in terms of discounted present value, high-income countries have been able to reduce the effects of adverse shocks on expected future income better than low-income countries. Finally, we find that, over the last 50 years, most of the changes in resilience across countries can be attributed to income effects.

This study investigates the impact of the COVID pandemic on healthcare utilization, spending, and health measures among the U.S. population during the first year of the pandemic. We utilize data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey and employ propensity score matching techniques to analyze the variation in healthcare outcomes due to the pandemic.

Our findings indicate that the pandemic significantly reduced mental health status, the intensity of office, outpatient, and emergency room visits, and a corresponding decline in healthcare spending. On the other hand, we find improvement in health-related quality of life for most individuals, except for blacks, individuals with a high school degree or less, the uninsured, and the low-income population. The findings highlight disparities during the pandemic and the need for increased efforts to promote health equity.