European Economic Review最新文献

In this study, we examine the political effects of the breakup of East Prussia into what is today Poland, Russia, and Lithuania. We expect that East Prussian legacies of nationalist and conservative political preferences persist in the respective partitions of Poland, Russia, and Lithuania. We find that there is no pattern of persistence in the Polish partition of former East Prussia, whereas East Prussian persistence appears to be robust in the Lithuanian and Russian partitions. In the context of forced migration, comparative human capital between outgoing refugees (Germans) and incoming settlers (Soviets, Poles) predicts patterns of long-run political development. Hence, higher literacy rates of incoming settlers in the Russian partition (Kaliningrad) predict higher levels of support for conservative and nationalist political parties. The opposite is observed in the Polish partition. The persistence of East Prussian legacies in Eastern Europe relates to settler literacy.

An increase in the riskiness of a technology will raise economy-wide expected output: large productivity realizations lead to gains while small realizations are mitigated by using alternative technologies. Some usage of even the riskiest technologies can therefore bring Pareto improvements. The observed expected output of risky technologies can nevertheless be less than that of safer technologies: empirical estimates of expected output are therefore a poor measure of efficiency. Firms will adopt the efficient riskier technologies when markets are competitive, contrary to the view that innovation requires a monopoly reward. These results require a suitable definition of risk for general equilibrium models and a refinement of competitive equilibrium that allows for information discovery. The efficiency gain of increases in risk is related to real options theories of investment but applies even to single-period economies.

We examine workers’ reported productivity, which we validate against external metrics, over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. On average, workers report being at least as productive as before the pandemic’s onset. However, this average masks substantial heterogeneity, which is linked to job quality, gender, the presence of children, and ease of working from home. As the pandemic progressed, those who previously performed well at home were more likely to remain there. Building on these findings, we estimate factors affecting productivity outcomes across locations controlling for endogenous selection. We find that those in ‘good’ jobs (with managerial duties and working for large firms) were advantaged specifically in the home environment. More generally we find an effect of key personality traits – agreeableness and conscientiousness – on productivity outcomes across locations.

We investigate how individuals select sources of information about peers’ behavior and normative views, and the influence of this social information on individual behavior and both empirical and normative expectations. This is explored through two experiments (N=1,945; N=2,414) using a lying game, with and without known political identification. Our findings reveal a self-serving bias in the selection of information sources, with a preference for lenient sources (i.e., those presenting more tolerant empirical or normative information about lying), particularly when these sources align with an individual’s political identity. We observe that being exposed to information that suggests lying is more socially acceptable increases lying behavior. Additionally, while people’s normative expectations are not swayed by observing their peers’ actions, these expectations are influenced by information about what peers believe is the right thing to do, underscoring the role of normative information in shaping social norms.

We provide a revelation principle for a class of single-agent dynamic mechanism design settings in which the agent’s private information evolves stochastically over time and the designer can only commit to short-term mechanisms. We restrict attention to Markov environments, in which (i) the agent’s type in period $t+1$ depends only on her period-$t$ type and the period-$t$ allocation, (ii) the designer’s and the agent’s payoffs are time-separable, and (iii) their period-t payoffs depend only on period-$t$ type and the period-$t$ allocation. We show all equilibrium payoffs can be attained with the designer using flow direct Blackwell mechanisms, which consist of a mapping from the agent’s current type report to posterior beliefs about the current type, and a mapping from these beliefs to allocations. Furthermore, all equilibrium payoffs can be attained with strategies in which the agent participates and truthfully reports her type, and the beliefs that result from the mechanism correspond to the designer’s equilibrium beliefs. This result greatly simplifies the search of optimal dynamic and sequentially rational mechanisms in dynamic mechanism design problems, which include dynamic Mirrlees and social insurance models.

This paper explores the contagion effects of norm-violating behavior across decision situations. Through a series of laboratory and field experiments, we empirically establish the conditions under which norm-breaking behavior in one decision situation leads individuals who observe this to violate norms in other, distinct decision situations. Our laboratory findings show that these spillover effects are more pronounced when the norms underlying the decision situations are perceived to be similar. However, spillovers can also affect decision situations governed by relatively dissimilar norms if the observers of norm violations have had the opportunity to first violate the same norm as the observed violator themselves. In an accompanying field experiment, we underscore the economic importance of norm similarity for spillover effects. When workers are exposed to information about celebrities evading taxes, they exhibit significantly higher rates of workplace theft than those in the control group, yet this exposure does not negatively affect work morale.

This paper traces the existence of an energy transmission channel of temperature anomalies to Euro-Area inflation. We show that, on average, warmer temperature shocks elicit a negative energy demand shift, exerting moderate deflationary pressure. By looking into several asymmetries and macroeconomic indicators, we rationalize that evidence as signaling that the “turn-off-heating” effect in Europe outweighs the “turn-on-cooling”. This result becomes clearer when energy market responses are decomposed into gas and electricity components. Weak inflationary effects from non-energy items are at play when the shock hits during warm seasons. A persistent inflationary tendency manifests when food and energy prices rise, an outcome emerging only when negative anomalies – cold spells – hit. These findings shed new light on monitoring price stability due to global warming.

This study finds that the Green Revolution (GR), which began in the 1960s, substantially increased grain imports and reduced economic growth in many developing countries. Using the exogenous timing of the GR across crops cultivated in different countries, this study estimates that, for an average developing country with an adoption rate of GR crops below the developing world average, the GR more than tripled its grain imports. This, in turn, reduced its GDP per capita by about one-third from 1965 to 2000. The substantial damage can be mostly explained by the resulting lower agricultural outputs, higher fertility, and lower human capital investment. Combining this effect with the previously estimated direct gains from the GR, it turns out that about half of the developing countries were harmed by the GR. A counterfactual analysis shows that, without the GR, Asian developing countries would not have experienced any faster growth, on average, than African countries. This study suggests that increasing agricultural productivity is the most pertinent way to accelerate the stagnant growth historically experienced by developing countries damaged by the GR.

This paper presents a stochastic overlapping generations model with endogenous health investment to study the transition from the existing hybrid health insurance system in Germany towards a uniform system, financed by either funded or unfunded premiums or payroll taxes.

Our simulation results highlight the insurance properties of payroll taxes, but also their cost in terms of labor supply distortions and moral hazard. We find that compulsory deductibles decrease aggregate welfare in Germany, although they reduce moral hazard and increase private health investment. Reform models with premiums also induce precautionary behavior and increase labor supply, but at the same time increase exposure to productivity risk. Since the introduction of a funded system is costly for transitional cohorts, unfunded premiums provide the highest efficiency gains in our framework.

This paper uses Austrian social security records to analyze the effects of ECB monetary policy on the labor market. Our focus is on the role of worker and firm wage components, defined by an Abowd et al. (1999) wage regression. We find that monetary tightening causes the largest employment losses for low-paid workers who are employed in high-paying firms before the tightening. Monetary tightening further causes a reallocation of workers to lower-paying firms. In particular low-paid workers who were originally employed by low-paying firms are prone to falling down the firm wage ladder.