European Economic Review最新文献

This paper examines the impact of the 2014–2017 ‘Refugee Crisis’ in Italy on voting behavior and the rise of right-wing populism in national Parliamentary elections. Our analysis exploits unique administrative data on refugee reception centers across Italian municipalities and exogenous variation in refugee resettlement induced by the Dispersal Policy. We find a positive and significant effect, although small in magnitude, of the share of asylum seekers on support for radical-right anti-immigration parties, which runs in parallel with a decline in public support for center-left parties. We further examine the mechanisms underlying this shift in political preferences and provide causal evidence that anti-immigration backlash rather than being rooted in adverse economic effects is triggered by radical-right propaganda and hate-speech.

This paper studies the heterogeneous impacts of carbon pricing on European regions. I follow the approach of Känzig (2023) and identify carbon policy shocks from changes in carbon futures price around regulatory events. The shock series is then combined with granular data on economic activity at the city- and county-level in Europe. I document that poorer regions are significantly more exposed to these shocks. Two years after a carbon policy shock, the output of regions in the bottom quartile of the gross value added per capita distribution decreases 0.4 percentage points more relative to the output of regions in the top quartile. I investigate which channels might explain this result and find that the most important driver is across- rather than within-country variation. The empirical evidence provided strongly encourages better coordination among European countries to avoid the economic costs of carbon pricing being unequally borne.

How can we measure the welfare benefit of ongoing stabilization policies? We develop a methodology to calculate the welfare cost of business cycles taking into account that observed consumption is partially smoothed. We propose a decomposition that disentangles consumption into a mix of laissez-faire and riskless components, decoupled by a parameter that captures the span of stabilization power. We estimate this parameter profiting from two distinct variance regimes measured in the historical consumption data and an identification strategy for the mapping between the span for each of these periods. In our preferred specification, we find that the welfare cost of total fluctuations is 11 percent of lifetime consumption, of which 82 percent is smoothed by the status quo policies, yielding a residual 1.8 percent of consumption to be tackled by policymakers.

In a simple New Keynesian open economy setting, we analyze how local input shortages influence policy transmission and equilibrium determinacy. Shortages increase the elasticity of the local price of the scarce factor to domestic economic activity, affecting the cyclicality of marginal costs and incomes. As a result, the slope of both the Phillips and the IS curve is altered, crucially influencing monetary and fiscal policy transmission. These changes are affected by factor ownership and propensities to consume. Theoretically, shortages can also raise the risk of self-fulfilling fluctuations if a rising price of the constrained factor boosts incomes for agents with high propensities to consume. We illustrate these channels for the 2022 German energy crisis.

Using quarterly narrative evidence, the paper examines the macro-economic impact of reforms of unemployment benefits (UB) and employment protection legislation (EPL) in the euro area from a Bayesian narrative panel VAR. The approach complements micro-econometric approaches by assessing aggregate effects and aligning short- and medium-term effects in a unified framework. I find that liberalizing reforms of UB and regular contract EPL resulted in temporary wage declines and persistent increases in economic activity and employment.

Is the effect of US monetary policy on stock price bubbles asymmetric? To explore this question, we compute a range of measures of excessive stock price movements that are unrelated to fundamentals. We find that the effects of monetary policy are asymmetric, so that responses to tightening and easing shocks must be distinguished. The effects of monetary policy tightening are stronger than the effects of monetary policy easing. We also find evidence that the asymmetric effect of monetary policy is state-contingent and depends on monetary, financial and business cycles.

Climate change will impact current and future generations in different regions very differently. This paper develops the first large-scale, annually calibrated, multi-region, overlapping generations model of climate change and carbon policy. It features region-specific temperature and damage functions with the phased impact of emissions on global and regional temperature calibrated to the latest scientific evidence. Absent policy, climate change may, under high-damage scenarios, dramatically reduce GDP in most regions, with India, Brazil, and the South Asian Pacific suffering long-term catastrophic damages. Carbon taxation, coupled with region- and generation-specific transfers, can both correct the carbon externality and raise the welfare of all current and future agents across all regions by 4.3 percent. The impact on the use and duration of fossil fuels is dramatic as is the reduction in the path of global emissions. However, achieving completely uniform welfare gains leaves future generations in particular regions facing exceptionally high compensatory payments. Fortunately, a carbon tax-cum redistribution policy that limits this burden for any generation in any region to less than 10 percent, measured on a consumption-equivalent basis, can deliver a 4.0 percent or higher welfare gain for all peoplekind — present and future. However, carbon taxes set through time, at carbon’s marginal social cost, do far too little to mitigate climate change unless all major emitters, particularly China, adopt them and do so immediately.

Children’s time investments in various activities may be important for reducing socioeconomic status (SES) gaps in educational and mental health outcomes. Using detailed time use diaries of Australian children aged 4–14, we observe that children from low SES backgrounds spend more time on digital media and less time on out-of-school enrichment activities, organised or for leisure. We explain the SES gap by employing a human capital development panel model and find that this difference contributes about 3% to the observed SES gap in numeracy skills. The results are supported by exogeneity tests and numerous robustness checks. The contribution is larger for males, older age groups, and if the cumulative effect on learning is considered. No clear results are found for literacy skills and mental health outcomes. The findings imply that interventions promoting a shift away from digital media towards out-of-school enrichment activities could help reduce the SES gap in human capital.

This paper examines vaccination as a descriptive social norm in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Using a large-scale survey experiment in Turkey, we first elicit respondents’ vaccination attitudes and show that political affiliation is a strong predictor of it. We then use economic games to measure the extent of outgroup discrimination induced by respondents’ attitudes towards vaccination. We find that while both pro- and anti-vaxxers discriminate against each other substantially, the pro-vaxxers discriminate more than the anti-vaxxers do. This polarization intensifies when pro- and anti-vaxxers perceive a political difference between them. Using randomized informational treatments, we show that a reminder or priming of external threats, appealing to a broadly shared social identity, might mitigate such outgroup discrimination.

We examine how intercity road connection affects the policy choices of local governments, using the construction of China’s national expressway as a natural experiment. We show that peripheral counties reduced the level of spending and changed the spending composition since the expressway connection. They became less involved in spending competition, increased the effective tax rate on private firms, and slowed down the privatization of state-owned firms. These results are consistent with the view that mobile capital tends to relocate from peripheral areas to core regions with a lower trade cost. We further show that such changes in government policies contribute significantly to the output decline in these regions after the expressway connection.