Economica最新文献

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.

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.