Bulletin of Economic Research最新文献

Better broadcasting and sports globalization allow sports fans to watch televised matches from the comfort of home, which means that local geography becomes less of a deciding factor in constraining the professional sports market. In our model, utility-maximizing fans’ decision to watch a game dictates a team's broadcast revenue and allows teams to monetize from non-home fans. When fans watch a series of televised matches, teams’ markets overlap as they are not solely reliant on their home fan base, meaning that the actual difference in market size between teams is smaller, allowing teams with smaller home fan bases to narrow their performance gap against stronger teams.

This study aims to expand Bahmani-Oskooee and Hasanzade's research examining the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on income inequality in the US states. Our study differs from theirs as we use a newly calculated US state-level EPU index, whereas they used the US country-level EPU index in their previous work. While the linear ARDL model finds that the EPU has short-run effects on GINI in 15 US states, the nonlinear model finds it in 22 US states. Similarly, while the nonlinear model finds that EPU has a long-run impact on GINI in five US states, the linear model finds it only in one US state. However, when the CSD is allowed, the linear model finds that EPU impacts GINI in five US states in the long run. While our study finds that decreased uncertainty worsens income inequalities in Texas and Washington, Bahmani-Oskooee and Hasanzade find that uncertainty does not have long-run effects in these US states. Similarly, while we find that increased uncertainty improves inequality in Virginia, they also find worsening effects in this US state. Empirical findings reveal that state-level analysis discovers some hidden impacts of the EPU on GINI that we could not find in country-level analysis.

A decision maker chooses between the status quo and an alternative action under uncertainty. The uncertainty is two-dimensional, and its realization in each dimension is independent. For each dimension, there is an expert who provides information only on that dimension. Both experts strictly prefer the alternative action and simultaneously provide information to the decision maker. We compare the experts' highest equilibrium payoff in this game with the payoff in an auxiliary game where they collude and can choose any information structure. We show that the experts strictly gain from collusion if and only if one of the experts can unilaterally persuade the decision maker to take the alternative action with positive probability.

We examine the relationship between small and medium enterprises’ (SMEs’) productivity and the living standards of low-income groups in the EU27. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that tries to shed light on the link between SMEs’ productivity and poverty in a group of developed economies. Our results from panel estimators suggest a robust positive link between the income—in purchasing power standards (PPS) terms—of the poor population and the productivity (gap) of very small firms, small firms, and SMEs. Such effect also appears to hold true, especially for SMEs, during Covid19. Finally, we explore the same link for the high-tech, knowledge-intensive SMEs and confirm a strong positive relationship before Covid19.

Most economic models of the illegal drugs market focus on demand-side behavior. However, in imperfectly competitive markets such as the illegal drugs market, it is the seller who determines price. Moreover, even models that focus on supply-side behavior often ignore key factors such as risk. This paper develops an expected utility model of a risk-averse seller. We find that under risk aversion, increasing punishment costs (i.e., severity) is more effective than increased enforcement (i.e., certainty) and demand reduction is more effective than interdiction. If risk neutrality is assumed, increases in severity and certainty have the same deterrent effect. Under risk neutrality, the deterrent effect of demand reduction policies dominates all other interdiction policies. These results lend theoretical reinforcement to the growing policy bias in favor of demand-side intervention.

We empirically investigate the impact of global value chain (GVC) linkages on business cycle comovement by using the cross-country panel data covering 43 developing and developed countries over the period 2000–2014 obtained from the World Input-Output Database 2016 Release (WIOD 2016). We find that GVC linkages have a positive impact on business cycle comovement. We also find that the impact of GVC linkages in final goods is larger than that of GVC linkages in advanced intermediate goods and then GVC linkages in basic intermediate goods, indicating the moderating effect of the production length. Moreover, the impact of GVC linkages on business cycle comovement between developing and developed countries is highly significant, implying that GVC linkages may narrow the growth gap between developing and developed countries. These findings suggest the importance of the GVC specialization, the South-North cooperation, and the international risk management.

This paper investigates whether inflation forecasting in emerging economies can be improved with the inclusion of a global inflation component. Focusing on the headline inflation rate of Türkiye, we implement a forecasting exercise using a large dataset describing domestic macroeconomic as well as global inflation dynamics. Our factor-augmented predictive regression results show that incorporating global inflation factors derived from other emerging markets' inflation rates enhances forecasting accuracy of the local headline inflation rate. The results are robust to using alternative dimension-reduction methods, including the elastic net technique. Our findings contribute to the current methodological toolkit available to policymakers for predicting inflation in an emerging market context.