Economica最新文献

Preventing a COVID-19 health crisis had unintended consequences on domestic abuse victimization. Using event methodology and individual-level call data, we examine domestic abuse patterns during the first nationwide COVID-19 lockdown in Greater London, and find that the lockdown changed both the nature of reporting and the type of relationship within which the abuse occurs. Abuse by current partners and family members increased on average by 8.5% and 16.4%, respectively, during the COVID-19 lockdown, while abuse by ex-partners declined by 9.4%. We address possible changes in domestic abuse reporting using information on the caller type and the timing of abuse. We show that the increase in domestic abuse calls is driven by third party reporting, which is 32% higher in high density areas where neighbours can overhear abuse, while no comparable changes occur in victim reporting. These findings highlight the importance of environmental factors, such as exposure, in affecting domestic abuse victimization across different types of relationships.

Why are tax systems complex despite a conventional wisdom that simplification is desirable? We study attitudes towards tax simplification using new survey and experimental data. We first document that most respondents generally desire tax simplification. Using various survey techniques (including survey experiments and open-ended questions), we show that people are not fully aware of the objectives, implications and trade-offs involved in tax simplification. Overall, our findings suggest that people generally support tax simplification, but have preferences to keep certain complexity-adding elements of the tax system, particularly those that compensate for circumstances (rather than choices). Our results imply that tax complexity is generally not desired per se, but potentially arises as an unintended consequence of many individually demanded tax expenditures.

History has repeatedly shown that periods of military disarmament are often followed by periods of rearmament when new geopolitical tensions arise. This paper analyses the causes of these cycles in a theoretical model. Two competitors compete in a repeated contest. They invest and build up a capital stock to increase their probability of winning each contest. Any positive or negative adjustment of the capital stock inherited from the previous contest leads to additional adjustment costs. Reducing the capital stock can be beneficial, as the upkeep costs of preserving the capital stock are reduced. The analysis reveals that the adjustment costs can create rigidity in the relative strength of the two competitors. This model can explain various phenomena observed in the real world, such as the emergence of peace dividends or dynasties in military conflicts, overinvestment by competitors in sports competitions, and rigidities within educational systems.

We use heterogeneity-robust difference-in-differences (DiD) methods to evaluate the impact of membership in the European Union (EU) single market on international trade. On the policy front, we provide evidence that: (i) on average, the EU has been very effective in promoting trade among its member states; (ii) the trade effects of the EU have been long-lasting, but heterogeneous across EU cohorts; and (iii) while the EU has benefited both ‘old’ and ‘new’ members, the increase in the exports from the ‘old’ members to the ‘new’ joiners has been disproportionately larger. From a methods and practical perspective, the contribution of this paper is to introduce a new, fast and flexible estimation command that combines leading estimation techniques from the gravity literature with recent methods from the heterogeneity-robust DiD literature.

Between 2000 and 2020, the EU granted 14 so-called adequacy decisions, permitting EU citizens' personal data to flow freely between the EU and the respective trading partners, including among the countries accorded adequacy. Most adequacy decisions are unilateral, complementing the more commonly observed and analysed mutual recognition arrangements for technical regulations. Using structural gravity to assess the relationship between EU adequacy decisions and digital trade, and applying different approaches to define digital trade, we find that adequacy increases bilateral digital trade between the EU and the adequate countries by 7–9% compared to non-digital trade. We also provide evidence of a ‘club effect,’ with digital trade increasing between countries that have been granted adequacy, but only to the extent that the USA is part of the club. Using synthetic control methods, we show that the magnitude of the club effect varies across countries.

We study repayment in the context of an alternative financial product that enables the purchase of a large asset—a solar panel home system—while offering complete repayment flexibility. Using a large administrative dataset on daily repayment of 38,400 borrowers in Tanzania over 5.5 years, we perform unsupervised pattern analysis to classify repayment behaviour. We show that borrowers with fluctuating incomes make more use of the loan's flexibility, and adjust their repayment to cash flow. In further analysis, we show that in particular, farmers use the flexibility provided by the loan contract to adjust to seasonal fluctuations and to deal with unexpected shocks. Our results indicate that low-income households can finance large assets through innovative financial approaches that allow aligning payments to financial circumstances.

Remote working has rapidly become the new norm in many sectors, at least some of the time. Remote working changes where workers spend much of their time and the geographical location of demand, particularly for local personal services (LPS). Our main contribution is to systematically quantify this change for England and Wales using a new nationally representative survey of nearly 35,000 working-age adults, which captures (pre-pandemic) LPS spending while at work and permanent changes in remote working. On average, our work shows that neighbourhoods where people commute 20% less often experience a decline in LPS spending of 5%. There is a clear geographic pattern (the ‘donut’ effect) to these spending changes, but our granular analysis shows that they are uneven: large decreases in LPS demand are concentrated in a small number of city-centre neighbourhoods, while increases in LPS demand around the periphery are more dispersed. Further analysis of neighbourhoods by geographical and sociodemographic characteristics shows that the least affluent are most likely to benefit the least from remote work, increasing inequality.

A substantial portion of the recent increase in wage inequality in advanced economies is attributed to the rise in between-firm wage inequality. At the same time, growing empirical evidence shows a rising reliance on intangible assets in the production process. We demonstrate that these two trends are related. Using industry-level data for European countries for the period 2000–2020, we show that intangible intensity positively affects between-firm wage inequality. When decomposing overall intangible capital into subcategories, we find that the effect is mainly driven by innovative property assets, such as R&D, licences and designs. Robustness checks and an instrumental variables strategy provide further support to these results. We interpret these findings as the outcome of technology-based effects arising from the distinctive characteristics of intangible assets and R&D, including their scalability and critical role in competitive advantage, which favour large and frontier firms.

We study the causal impact of theocratic regimes on women's age at first marriage. We leverage spatial variation of the first Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and temporal variation in women's timing of marriage, relative to the establishment of the regime in a difference-in-differences estimation framework. We find that exposure to the Taliban government reduced women's age at first marriage by nearly 9 months, and this is accompanied by a concomitant reduction in age at first birth. Likelihood of experiencing intimate partner violence was also higher among women exposed to the regime. The regime's ban on women accessing education led to lower educational attainment, reinforcing these effects even after its fall. Our results underscore the detrimental consequences of regimes that restrict women's civil rights.