European Economic Review最新文献

Politicians’ behavioral changes as an election nears have typically been attributed to the incentive effects of an election. I document that behavioral changes can occur even for unelected judges, using data from 1925 to 2002 on U.S. appellate judges, who are appointed for life. Exploiting monthly campaign ads in judges’ states of residence, dissents increase with campaign advertisements in states where judges reside. Elections can explain 23 % of all dissents. I rule out a number of incentive-based explanations. Topic of dissents, replication in concurrences (disagreement about reasoning), and placebo checks using milestones of case development support a transient priming mechanism. If elite U.S. judges are in fact susceptible to priming via the partisan nature of electoral cycles, then highly trained individuals may be susceptible to other forms of priming regardless of their professional commitments to be unbiased.

Beliefs, alongside preferences, are an important driver of behaviour. While preferences are often inferred by the choices made, measuring beliefs is not straightforward. We design a giving experiment to compare different methods of measuring beliefs, with and without monetary incentives. Consistent with a simple theoretical framework, we find that elicited beliefs about the giving decisions of others are biased and self-serving when no incentive is offered, with non-donors reporting that giving is rare. Offering a simple incentive does not reduce the bias in beliefs; however, this bias is not observed when using an incentivised method which makes the monetary outcome associated with accurately predicting beliefs more prominent. Our findings suggest that when self-interested motivations compete with accuracy incentives, beliefs are sensitive to how they are measured.

This paper investigates the impact of reforms extending paid parental leave on mothers’ progress to the upper echelons of their companies. Using employer–employee matched data and examining a series of reforms between 1987 and 2005 in Norway, we find that longer parental leave neither helped nor hurt mothers’ chances to be at the top of their companies’ pay ranking or in the C-suite up to 25 years after childbirth. This holds true also for highly educated women and high performers across all sectors. Key career determinants, such as hours worked and promotions, are unaffected in the short and long run. Finally, fathers’ career progression and within-household gender wage gaps have also remained unaltered.

We develop a measure of climate transition risk for regional economies in the U.S., based on the mix of firms that produce emissions in each region. To quantify transition risks, we consider the introduction of an emissions tax levied on companies emitting greenhouse gases and estimate changes in the market values of industries due to a carbon tax using Merton's (1974) model. We find that transition risks are highly concentrated in a few sectors and counties with heavy exposures to transition-sensitive sectors. The size and geographic concentration of the tax effects depend significantly on assumptions about the elasticity of demand for inputs in the production chain. When applying county-level estimates for transition risks to banks’ deposit footprint, we find mild to moderate transition risks for community banks as a whole, although transition risks are high for a few banks.

Aggregate events often start locally with households learning about the unfolding of events through social communication. Using plausibly exogenous variation in counties’ social network exposure to geographically remote regions during the COVID-19 pandemic, we quantify the propagation of idiosyncratic COVID-19 social network weighted shocks to consumption spending. We present a wide array of tests that directly control for the role of physical mobility, and physical distance, and isolate the role of geographically distant counties to show that the detected consumption responses were primarily through the channel of expectations, rather than physical infection risks or other common economic and policy shocks.

Allowing migration as an integral part of demographic transition and economic development, we construct a dynamic competitive migration equilibrium framework with rural agents heterogeneous in skills and fertility preferences to establish a location-fertility trade-off and explore its macroeconomic consequences. We characterize a mixed migration equilibrium where an endogenously determined fraction of high-skilled agents with high fertility preferences or low-skilled agents with low fertility preferences ultimately moves. By calibrating the model to fit the data from China, whose migration and population control policies offer a rich array of issues for quantitative investigation, we find strong interactions between migration and fertility decisions – the location-fertility trade-off – and rich interplay between the joint responses of these choices to changes in migration and population control policies. Our results indicate that both output per capita and urbanization rates are more responsive than Total Fertility Rate (TFR) to migration and population policies: A one-percent decrease in TFR corresponds to an over one-percent increase in output per capita and a more than two-percent rise in urbanization rates. Overlooking the location-fertility trade-off may thus lead to nonnegligible biases in assessing the implications and effectiveness of government policies.

The role of climate change on output has been studied extensively in the empirical literature. However, its distributional implications have received little attention. This paper attempts to fill this gap by investigating if climate shocks affect income inequality. Using a Vector Autoregression for a large cross-country panel, we identify the climate shock in the frequency domain as the shock that explains the bulk of the variance of climate variables in the long-run. An adverse climate shock is associated with an increase in measures of income inequality, affecting mostly low income households. The impact of the shock is larger in magnitude for low income, hot countries with a significant agricultural sector and low degree of adaptation to climate change.

We estimate individual country real GDP per capita growth responses to country, global, and idiosyncratic temperature shocks. Negative growth responses to country and global temperature at longer horizons are found for all Group of Seven countries. Positive country (global) responses are found for approximately eight (seven) of the nine poorest countries at longer horizons. Both country and idiosyncratic temperature shocks have more negative than positive effects on growth across countries, but it is more evenly split for the global temperature shock. After controlling for average temperature, positive growth responses to global temperature shocks are more likely for countries that are poorer, have experienced slower growth, are more educated (higher high school attainment), and more open to trade.

Fiscal policy is made in parliaments. We go to the roots of changes of fiscal policy in Germany and use a novel data set on all parliamentary speeches in the Bundestag from 1960 to 2021. We propose an embedding-based approach, which allows the representation of words and documents in a shared vector space, in order to measure fiscal policy-related sentiment in parliamentary debates at a scale from contractionary to expansionary. We also distinguish between sentiment related to exogenous and endogenous fiscal policy. We put fiscal sentiment into a series of recursively-identified vector autoregressive models to show that a change in fiscal sentiment causes a shift in government spending and has significant effects on the macroeconomy. The results support the notion that the debate in parliament contains information for the identification of government spending shocks.

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.