Empirica最新文献

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.

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.

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.