Economica最新文献

We develop a model in which vaccine-producing firms from different developed countries supply vaccines to the developing world during a pandemic. Exporting countries experience a negative externality from incomplete global vaccination, which they try to mitigate by exporting vaccines to developing countries. A cooperative export policy is compared to the alternative regimes of non-cooperation and non-intervention. When the negative externality is low, cooperation among exporting countries is worse for global welfare than non-intervention. However, at high externality levels, export policy cooperation is globally superior to non-cooperative export subsidization. It then even has the potential to maximize global welfare.

Using uniquely rich administrative matched employer–employee data for Italy from 2008 to 2018, we investigate the impact of firms' formal network agreements (FNAs) on firm performance and employee wages. We find an overall significant and economically relevant positive effect of FNAs on various measures of firm performance, but there are no tangible benefits for the workers, and wages decrease slightly, on average. There is, however, marked heterogeneity in the impact on both firms and workers. Estimated rent-sharing equations, as well as other tests that exploit unionization data, suggest that the negative effects on wages can be explained by a decrease in workers' bargaining power following the introduction of FNAs.

Using high-frequency identification, we provide evidence that Fed communication surprises have larger macroeconomic effects than surprise actions. Three ingredients are central to show this: structurally distinguishing between Fed actions and communication, controlling for the Fed information effect, and including the surprise measures directly in a vector autoregression (VAR) system instead of using them as instruments. We also compare the macroeconomic effects of Fed communication surprises relating to varying horizons into the future. Fed communication with a two-year horizon appears most powerful during the effective lower-bound period, consistent with theoretical predictions regarding Fed forward guidance.

This study examines the influence of gender norms on household behaviour and welfare. Using Japanese household data, we find that households with a conventional norm on gender roles spend more time on housework and less money on family-common goods. To understand the underlying mechanism, we construct a collective labour supply model that explicitly introduces gender norms. We show that an inefficient ratio of wives' household time to that of husbands leads to an increase in the shadow price of domestic goods, through which the norm distorts the time and money allocated to home production and decreases household welfare.

Trust is key for economic and social development. But why do we trust others? We study the motives behind trust in strangers using an experimental trust game played by 7236 participants, in six samples representative of the general populations of Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the UK and the USA. We examine the broadest range of potential determinants of trustor sending to date, including risk tolerance, preferences for redistribution, and conformity. We find that even though self-interest, indicated by expected returns, is relevant for trustor behaviour, the most important correlate of sending is participants' altruism or fairness concerns, as measured by giving in a dictator game. We also find that in our large and representative sample, behaviour in the trust game and responses in a trust survey are significantly correlated, and that similar correlates—altruism in particular—are relevant for both.

Policymakers have increasingly turned to ‘in-work transfers’ to boost incomes among poorer workers and strengthen work incentives. One attraction of these is that labour supply elasticities are typically greatest at the extensive margin. Because in-work transfers are normally subject to earnings-related phase-outs, they tend to most strongly incentivize part-time work, weakening incentives to increase hours beyond that. But if part-time work generates relatively little in the way of human capital and career progression, then policy design should factor in the longer-term consequences of labour supply choices along the intensive margin. To that end, we use a dynamic model of female labour supply with endogenous human capital accumulation, and study actual and hypothetical welfare reforms in the UK. We show that for a given expansion in the government budget, those reforms that incentivize full-time work can do considerably more to increase incomes, including among poorer households, and to raise welfare. Our results suggest that in-work transfers could be refined by paying greater attention to the intensive margin effects through the design of their phase-outs.

This paper analyses how intensified Chinese competition in export markets affects firms' coping strategies. Using a novel identification approach that exploits changes in China's product-specific export policies across industries, we find that Chinese export competition reduces the aggregate value of product- and destination-specific exports of Finland, primarily by putting a downward pressure on export prices. The firm-level analysis using Finnish administrative data shows that firms undertake larger price cuts for homogeneous products than for differentiated export products. We analyse further export firms' coping strategies on product range margin, and find that firms drop their marginal products as the Chinese export competition intensifies. Our results highlight the increasing importance of competition with China for exporters from developed countries.

How common are wage–price spirals, and what has happened in their aftermath? We construct a new historical database of wage–price spirals—identified as episodes with consumer price inflation and average nominal wage growth rising jointly for at least a year—going back to the 1960s for a large sample of advanced economies. We find that only about a quarter of such episodes were followed by sustained accelerations in wages and prices. Instead, nominal wage growth and inflation tended to stabilize at a higher level on average, and then gradually revert, with real wage growth broadly unchanged. A decomposition of average wage dynamics during wage–price spiral episodes using a wage Phillips curve suggests that nominal wage growth normally stabilizes at levels consistent with observed inflation and labour market tightness. After historical episodes exhibiting rising inflation, falling real wages, and tightening labour markets—similar to what was observed in the early post-COVID-19 recovery in 2021—inflation tended to decline and nominal wage growth to rise, allowing real wages to gradually catch up. Our findings suggest that an acceleration of nominal wages against a backdrop of rising inflation does not necessarily signal that a persistent wage–price spiral dynamic is taking hold.

This paper presents a general equilibrium model incorporating heterogeneous firms and a perfectly competitive labour market to explore the desirability of minimum wages. We demonstrate that a low minimum wage could enhance social welfare, assuming equal weighting for all individuals. This occurs because the introduction of minimum wages has the potential to mitigate the goods market distortions arising from imperfect competition, firm heterogeneity and free entry. Additionally, we illustrate that the optimal minimum wage is positively associated with the preference intensity for differentiated products relative to the numeraire and population size, while it negatively correlates with the degree of love for variety, entry cost, and upper bound of marginal labour requirements.

We analyse economic (EI) and financial (FI) integration, and their effects on international consumption risk sharing (RS) across 40 countries, including 21 developed (DEV) and 19 emerging (EM) markets, from 1995 to 2019. Utilizing the metric for EI and FI of Akbari et al. (2020, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 55, 2270–303), and various RS proxies, we find that increasing EI reduces RS in EM, while FI enhances it. Conversely, there is no evidence that EI or FI influences RS in DEV, contradicting theoretical predictions from international business cycle models. These results remain robust when controlling for trade and financial openness and capital flow restrictions. Additionally, we investigate the direct influence of capital controls on market integration. Relaxing equity inflow controls significantly enhances market integration, specifically boosting EI in DEV, and FI in EM. In contrast, equity outflow restrictions and controls on other asset categories do not significantly impact market integration. Our findings challenge the idea that simply removing legal restrictions on international capital flows is sufficient or necessary to achieve greater market integration and improved RS. This underscores the perspective that adjustments in capital controls alone may not ensure macro-financial stability.