Economica最新文献

Using a mix of household- and employer-based survey data from 46 countries, we provide novel evidence that workers in larger establishments perform more non-routine analytical tasks, even within narrowly defined occupations. Moreover, workers in larger establishments rely more on the use of information and communication technologies to perform these tasks. We also document a 15% raw wage premium that workers in larger establishments enjoy relative to their counterparts in smaller establishments. A mediation analysis shows that our novel empirical facts on the task content of jobs are able to explain 5–20% of the establishment size wage premium, a similar fraction to what can be explained by selection of workers on education, gender and age.

We evaluate the efficacy of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) Recommendations 2012, which set the global standard on combating money laundering and terrorist financing, by exploiting its staggered adoption in 16 East and South African countries. Using the trade gap as a proxy for trade-related fraud activities, such as trade-based money laundering, we find that the adoption of the FATF recommendations is correlated with a 15.3% reduction in trade-related fraud. The FATF is particularly effective within countries with capable state and low corruption. The amount by which FATF adoption can reduce trade-related fraud depends on a country's compliance level. Our results are robust to a series of robustness checks and contribute to a lively policy debate surrounding the role of international organizations in combating the financing of organized crimes.

Bachmann, R., Baqaee, D., Bayer, C., Kuhn, M., Löschel, A., Moll, B., Peichl, A., Pittel, K. and Schularick, M. (2024). What if? The macroeconomic and distributional effects for Germany of a stop of energy imports from Russia. Economica, 91(364), 1157–1200. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecca.12546.

We thank Anne Helene Beck for pointing out the error below.

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We exploit a dataset of criminal trials in 19th century London to evaluate the impact of an accused's right to counsel on convictions. While lower-level crimes had an established history of professional representation prior to 1836, individuals accused of committing a felony did not, despite the prosecution being conducted by professional attorneys. The Prisoners' Counsel Act 1836 remedied this and first introduced the right to counsel in common law systems. Using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy, we identify the effect of the universal right to defence counsel. We find the surprising result that the professionalization of the courtroom led to an increase in the conviction rate. We argue that this effect was a consequence of the Act inducing a shift in the beliefs of jurors, who grew more likely to believe the evidence put before them once it could be challenged in an adversarial courtroom. We go further, and employ a topic modelling approach to the text of the transcripts to provide suggestive evidence on how the trials changed when the right to defence counsel was fully introduced, documenting a movement towards increased usage of precise and detailed language when discussing details of alleged offences.

We investigate the deterrent effects of a firm-targeted sanction and a politician-targeted sanction deployed by mainland China against Taiwan to deter support for ‘Taiwan independence’. In the short run, we find that the signal sent by the targeted sanctions generated deterrence to firms that were not directly sanctioned, but were politically inclined towards ‘Taiwan independence’. Specifically, we find that those firms that donated more to the party that supports ‘Taiwan independence’, while investing in mainland China before the sanction, experienced a decrease in stock return. In terms of magnitude, for those firms entirely leaning towards ‘Taiwan independence’, their stock returns are expected to decrease by around 1.3–1.5 percentage points after the sanction events, which translates into a decrease in the overall market value of sampled firms by 0.305–0.604%. In the medium to long run, we find no evidence that firms affected by the deterrence of the sanction reduced their investment in mainland China as a behaviour response.

This study analyses firms' adjustment behaviour when facing higher labour costs. The empirical research design considers several outcomes, and exploits, as a source of variation in labour costs, discontinuities in the growth of contractual wages set by Italian collective bargaining institutions. The results indicate that adjustment channels are highly heterogeneous across the firms' productivity distribution. Employment, revenue, productivity and the profit margin are negatively related to contractual wage growth among relatively less efficient companies. Instead, most efficient firms do not downsize, they substitute high- with low-wage workers while preserving their productivity, and they may even increase (or at least keep constant) their profitability. We conclude that more efficient companies, which adjust through cost-saving and labour-hoarding strategies, may benefit from cleansing effects, as their product market shares increase when costs of more constrained rivals are raised.

Coyle, D., McHale, J., Bournakis, I. and Mei, J.-C. (2024). Recent trends in firm-level total factor productivity in the UK: new measures, new puzzles. Economica, 91(364), 1320–1348. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecca.12541

Please make sure that the right affiliation for Ioannis Bournakis appears as “SKEMA Business School - University of Côte d'Azur, France.” This must be one affiliation NOT two.

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A minimum wage increase could lead to adverse employment effects for certain subgroups of minimum wage workers, while leaving others unaffected. This heterogeneity could be overlooked in studies that examine the overall population of minimum wage workers. In this paper, we test for heterogeneous effects of a minimum wage increase on the hours worked of minimum wage employees in Ireland. For all minimum wage workers, we find that a 10% increase in the minimum wage leads to a one-hour reduction in weekly hours worked, equating to an hours elasticity of approximately −0.3. However, for industry workers and those in the accommodation & food sector, the impact is larger, with elasticity −0.8. We also find a negative impact on the hours worked among men on minimum wage, with no significant effect for women. This is due to the disproportionate number of men working in sectors that show the greatest impact on hours. In line with suggestions from the recent literature, we attempt to identify directly those in receipt of minimum wage using hourly wage data, while also studying the dynamic impact on hours worked over multiple time periods using a fully flexible difference-in-differences estimator.

The COVID-19 pandemic took place against the backdrop of growing political polarization and distrust in institutions. Did deficiencies in government performance further erode trust? Did citizens' ideology interfere with how they processed information on government performance? To investigate, we conducted a pre-registered online experiment in Spain in November 2020. The treatment group was provided with information on the number of contact tracers in their region, a policy under the control of regional governments. We find that individuals greatly overestimate the number of contact tracers. When we provide the actual number, we find declines in trust in governments, willingness to fund public institutions, and COVID-19 vaccine acceptance. We also find that individuals endogenously change their attribution of responsibilities when receiving the treatment. In regions where the regional and central governments are ruled by different parties, sympathizers of the regional incumbent react to the negative news on performance by attributing greater responsibility to the central government. We call this the ‘blame-shifting effect’. In these regions, the negative information does not reduce voting intention for the regional incumbent government. These results suggest that political accountability may be particularly difficult in settings with high polarization and where areas of responsibility are not clearly delineated.

Retention of skilled workers is essential for labour-intensive organizations like hospitals, where an excessive turnover of doctors and nurses can reduce the quality and quantity of services provided to patients. Exploiting a unique and rich panel dataset based on employee-level payroll and staff survey records from the universe of English NHS hospitals, we investigate empirically the role played by two non-pecuniary job factors, staff engagement and the retention of complementary co-workers, in affecting employee retention within the public hospital sector. We estimate dynamic panel data models to deal with reverse causality bias, and validate these estimates through unconditional quantile regressions with hospital-level fixed effects. Our findings show that a one standard deviation increase in nurse engagement is associated with a 16% standard deviation increase in their retention; and also that a 10% increase in nurse retention is associated with a 1.6% increase in doctor retention, with this co-workers' complementarity spillover effect driven by the retention of more experienced nurses. Nurse and doctor engagement is positively associated with managers who have effective communication, involve staff in the decision-making process, and act on staff feedback; in particular, older nurse engagement is responsive to managers caring for staff health and wellbeing.