Economica最新文献

The Mexican drug war has escalated dramatically since 2007, yet its roots lie in municipal turf wars of the 1990s and early 2000s involving the main drug-trafficking organizations operating in the country. We trace these turf wars to two concurrent shocks: the weakening of the PRI's long-standing dominance in local offices, and PROCEDE, the programme that converted PRI-dominated communal ejidos into individually titled parcels. By transforming untitled land into marketable property, PROCEDE made rural parcels far easier to acquire or extort. At the same time, opposition victories at municipal and state levels dismantled PRI-brokered protection networks, leaving incumbent cartels exposed. Together, marketable land and vanishing political cover created fertile ground for rival organizations to invade and clash. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we show that municipalities exposed to both shocks—the PROCEDE rollout and opposition victories—experienced a rise in organized-crime deaths during 1995–2006. The surge is strongest when an opposition mayor is elected in the same year that the governorship also turns against the PRI, signalling the collapse of protective networks. Cartel-presence data also reveal that these municipalities attract both first-time entrants and multiple rivals, confirming that violence stems from competition over newly contestable territories.

We advance the literature on estimating job matching functions in two ways. Scholars acknowledge that past matching efficiency affects current job search and posting behaviour (i.e. tightness is endogenous); however, they so far ignore that forecast (lead) matching efficiency may also affect tightness. We specify a model that accommodates lagged and lead efficiency to address both endogeneity channels. Scholars also acknowledge that matching efficiency may be region-specific; however, a test to formally evaluate matching heterogeneity is missing, for which we develop a $��{\chi }^2�$-distributed test statistic. Using regional Australian data, we (i) demonstrate that lead matching efficiency indeed endogenizes labour market tightness, and (ii) confirm matching heterogeneity in the Australian regional context. Both innovations have policy relevance, and their application will improve matching efficiency estimates and provide policymakers with a tool to test whether region-specific labour market policy is warranted.

This paper examines how the energy price shock post Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 affected property transactions. Using administrative data on transaction price and energy efficiency in the UK, we explore if buyers adjust behaviour in response to greater energy costs. Using hedonic difference-in-differences models, we find that prices increase by £1000 for high-rated energy efficiency properties and decrease by £2400 for low-rated ones. Properties with higher potential energy efficiency also see value upticks. We also find that high gas-consuming neighbourhoods experience fewer house sales post-invasion. The size of the effect is explained by buyers perceiving the energy price hike as temporary. Our results shed light on the interplay between energy prices and the property market, offering insights into buyer behaviour and the valuation of energy efficiency.

We study whether disability insurance (DI) recipients increase their labour supply after the introduction of an automatic reinstatement policy, i.e. a programme mitigating the risk of losing eligibility for DI benefits due to a trial period of substantially increased work above an individual earnings threshold. Using Finnish administrative data, we identify the policy's impact on partial DI recipients by comparing them to rejected applicants with similar work histories, health impairments and work capacities. Based on our estimation results, automatic reinstatement of benefits may increase working among specific subgroups, but on average is not effective in increasing labour supply. To complement our empirical analysis, we model the perceived risk of losing eligibility for DI benefits as a type of adjustment friction in the institutional context where the budget set includes a notch, and use behavioural elasticity estimates from earlier literature to study the role of financial incentives. Counterfactual simulations reveal that financial incentives play a significant role in the effectiveness of automatic reinstatement of benefits, highlighting the interplay between financial and non-financial aspects of the DI system.

It is well known that unemployment leaves scars after re-employment, but does this scarring effect persist even after retirement? We analyse European data on retirees from the SHARE panel, and show that the wellbeing of the retired continues to reflect the unemployment that they experienced over their working life. These scarring effects are somewhat smaller for older retirees, but larger for those who arguably had higher expectations regarding the labour market when they were active. The lower wellbeing from lifetime unemployment does not reflect lower retirement income. This long-run scarring for those who have left the labour market underlines that contemporaneous correlations significantly underestimate the wellbeing cost of unemployment.

Technological change has led to a decline in the share of routine and physical jobs, and a rise in the share of abstract and social ones at the economy level. However, much less is known about how these trends unfold at the individual level. Do workers' tasks become more or less routine and physical? Do workers shift towards more social and abstract activities? This paper is the first to explore these questions in the context of robotization. We use survey data from 20 European countries to develop worker-level indices of physical, routine, abstract and social tasks, which we link to industry-level robotization exposure. Using instrumental variable techniques, we find that robotization reduces physically demanding tasks but increases routine tasks, while also limiting opportunities for cognitively challenging work and human interaction. This study provides a worker-centric perspective on the relationship between technology and task composition, revealing insights that aggregate analyses miss.

Using German survey data, we show in worker fixed effects estimates that performance pay is associated with a substantially lower gender hours gap. While performance pay increases the work hours of both men and women, the increase is much larger for women than for men. We argue that our finding likely reflects differences in household production and specialization by gender. Thus, we show that performance pay is not associated with increased hours for men with children in the household. Yet, performance pay is associated with a very large increase in hours for women with children in the household.

Two of the most pervasive kinds of public corruption are theft and bribery. I show how a simple common agency model can simultaneously depict both. In one setting, a public official (agent) who has discretion over government revenues can steal some of it and allocate the rest to public spending towards various sectors (principals), some of whom can pay bribes in exchange. I find that there is a threshold level of revenues at and below which the official obtains bribes but does not steal revenues. She only starts stealing revenues above the threshold. In another setting, there are two political candidates (agents), each promising to allocate public spending to various groups of voters (principals), some of whom can pay bribes in exchange. Each candidate then uses the bribes and any government revenues that she expects to steal in office to buy some votes. I find that the candidate who would steal less revenues in office will obtain larger bribes, and vice versa, which suggests that bribe money and stolen revenues are substitute sources of (illicit) campaign funds.

I conduct a (quasi) field experiment in the soccer field with junior players to study if non-professionals satisfy the implications of mixed strategy equilibrium when repeatedly facing the same opponents in the penalty kick game. By having repeated observations on different pairs of soccer players, a rare situation in real life, I can not only deal with the heterogeneity of the optimal strategies across pairs of players, but also study possible interactions between the actions of the players. My empirical results are consistent with the theory, even though the least experienced goalkeepers tend to replicate each other's actions. Interestingly, when all pairs are erroneously treated as a homogeneous one, I find rejections of the equilibrium implications, highlighting the importance of heterogeneity for determining mixed strategy play at the non-professional level.

This paper proposes a simple iterative method—time iteration—to solve linear rational expectation models. I prove that this method converges to the desired stable solution, and provide the conditions under which the solution is unique. Apart from its transparency and simplicity of implementation, the method provides a straightforward approach to solving models with less standard features, such as regime-switching frameworks in which constraints may occasionally bind—for example, the zero lower bound.