Empirica最新文献

Jobs are essential for social inclusion, raising taxes, and guaranteeing the financial resilience of (welfare) states. At the same time, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement, and the European Green Deal require the greening of our economies and labor markets. This paper assesses how labor market policies can green employment. The paper analyses the potential effects of eight different policy strategies on four dimensions of the Taxonomy of Sustainable Employment: conversion of plants and businesses, environmental labor law, climate decommodification, socio-ecological job guarantee, vocational guidance and retraining, distribution of employment time, alternative income sources, and equalization of income. All eight strategies have the potential of greening employment but feature different intensities in the four dimensions. In the light of environmental crises, the results suggest widening the toolbox of labor market policies for a green and just transition.

Due to inspiring growth over the past 20 years, the dynamics of Chinese exports have been the focus of many researchers. In contrast to current literature, this study examines the quadratic relationship between China's real exports to 154 partner countries and the income of trading partners from 1996 to 2019. The findings obtained from the second generational econometric analysis confirm cross-section dependence and heterogeneous slope among panel members. Second, while the GDP per capita of partner countries has a positive impact on China's exports, the quadratic of GDP per capita has a negative impact. These findings indicate an inverted U-shaped relationship between China's exports and GDP per capita of its partner countries-thus, validating the trading Kuznets curve (TKC) hypothesis. The appreciation of the Renminbi (RMB) has statistically significant negative effects on China's exports. From a policy perspective, Chinese policymakers could consider the TKC hypothesis when determining market and export strategies. Additionally, the Chinese monetary authority could consider stabilizing the value of the RMB.

The paper contributes to the debate on natural interest rates and potential growth rates. We build a model-based projection of the world's most significant economies/areas to improve understanding of their change over the long run and the factors behind their decline. We use a general equilibrium overlapping generation model to understand the simultaneous role of demographics, technology, and globalization. The novelty of the model lies in the way it constructs a human capital index based on UN population projections and an estimated increasing returns production function for major economies worldwide. We find that the decline in interest rates is well explained through labor market dynamics and the increasing obsolescence of capital goods. We also find that a reduced share of labor income has caused movement in the opposite direction, leading to an increase in natural interest rates, which runs counter to the empirical evidence. Moreover, the dynamics of economic integration predict an endogenous adjustment of global imbalances over the long run, with an increasing weight of the Chinese economy and, consequently, a phase of weakness in United States growth between 2030 and 2040. The model is also used to perform shock scenario analysis. We find that demographic decline can adversely affect the growth dynamics for European countries, while a change in the dynamics of globalization can have serious consequences, especially for the United States, with significant benefits for European countries and China.

Public investment is low and has declined in many EU countries since the global financial crisis. This paper estimates the effects of the various European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) on public investment in the EU countries. The analysis is run on annual data from 2000 to 2018 using dynamic panel data specifications. Funding from the Cohesion Fund, the EU's facility for its less developed members, has had an almost one-to-one effect on public investment in the short term, and more in the longer term. Funding from the European Regional Development Fund may have had some effect, but it cannot be estimated precisely. Funding from other ESIF funds does not seem to have been related to public investment in the EU countries.

We examine the relationship between the risk premium markets demand to hold the Treasury Bonds of a given country and the sustainability of the public finances of the country. We inquire to what extent do markets use the dynamic evolution of the public-debt-to-gdp ratio as an indication of the likelihood of a public debt default. Specifically, our empirical research design involves the following steps: (i) we use the dynamic equation of the public-debt-to-gdp ratio to build forecasts of future values of this ratio in the eurozone countries; (ii) we then use these forecasts in a regression to see how important they are to explain the risk premium implicit in the treasury bond yields. We find that projections of future values of the public-debt-to-gdp ratio do impact current 10 year bond spreads. According to our regressions, markets seem to give more weight to forecasts with a horizon smaller than 10 years. Our results suggest that agents use a relatively simple mechanism to forecast the public debt-to-gdp ratio, a mechanism which can be used while updated forecasts from international organizations are not yet available. On the other hand, according to our estimations, euro area sovereign debt markets ceased to significantly discriminate countries based on their public debt prospects after the 2012 'Whatever It Takes" speech and the announcement of the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) program-suggesting that these events had a significant calming effect on the markets.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10663-022-09547-8.

This paper expands the analysis of the cyclical characteristics of social spending by providing information on its joint behaviour across OECD countries. With this aim we propose the use of dynamic factor analysis and recursive models to estimate synchronization and cyclicality of social policies within a broad perspective. By considering the synchronization of social spending it is possible to assess the short-run characteristics of the joint response to changes in the economic cycle. We find that synchronization of social spending was only possible for advanced economies, achieving the highest countercyclical stabilization effect during the Global Financial Crisis. Emerging market economies are not able to join the synchronized response, maintaining independent and, in most cases, procyclical stances in the behaviour of their social policies.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10663-022-09545-w.

This paper explores liquidity management practices in Czech open-ended bond and equity funds. I reconstruct cash flows stemming from investors and securities, and cash flows related to purchases and sales in portfolios and margin calls to study liquidity transformation and liquidity management in investment funds. I study how portfolio illiquidity and current market conditions influence the joint behavior between investor redemptions and funds' liquidity management. I point to a strong propensity to reduce the liquid buffers rather than sales of securities to meet redemptions in bond funds. The propensity increases with portfolio illiquidity. I show equity funds historically tended to dash for cash in response to investor redemptions during a severe market turmoil.

Few data sources provide information on private transfers between generations and gender. We use a novel approach based on the National Transfer Accounts methodology to estimate the value of intra-family transfers between generations by age, gender and parental status in Austria 2015. The paper considers monetary transfers together with transfers of consumption goods and transfers of services produced by non-market work. Our results show that parents use one third of their disposable income and up to four hours of daily non-market work for their children. The total size of the intra-family transfers corresponds to 38 per cent of primary income.