This paper provides a review of the development of the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) market, with a particular focus on its pricing determinants, its current applications, and its future opportunities. We investigate the current state of the NFT markets and highlight the perception and expectations of investors toward these products. We summarize and compare the financial and econometric models that have been used in the literature for the pricing of non-fungible tokens with a special focus on their predictive performance. We design a framework that can help to understand the price formation of NFTs. We further aim to shed light on the value-creating determinants of NFTs in order to better understand investors’ behavior on the blockchain.
Many governments subsidize owner-occupied housing by allowing households to deduct housing expenses from their taxable incomes. While these deductions provide considerable financial benefits to homeowners, they also have significant downstream consequences. This article synthesizes a large body of literature that assesses these implications on various aspects of the housing market, including mortgage demand, interest rates, tenure decisions, homeownership rates, housing prices, and welfare. The findings in the literature collectively emphasize the distortive impact of these fiscal deductions on housing consumption and investment, with a growing consensus regarding the deductions' regressivity and negative effects on homeownership rates and welfare.
After the financial crisis of 2008, central banks around the world have increased their communication efforts to reach consumers, with the aim of both guiding and anchoring their inflation expectations. For the expectations channel of monetary policy to work as intended, central banks need a thorough understanding of the formation process of expectations by the general public and of the relationship between expectations and economic choices. This warrants reliable and detailed data on consumers' expectations of macroeconomic variables such as inflation or interest rates. We, thus, survey the available survey data and issues regarding the measurement of macroeconomic expectations. Furthermore, we discuss the research frontier on important aspects of the expectations channel: We evaluate the evidence on whether expectations are formed consistently with standard macroeconomic relationships, discuss the insights with respect to the anchoring of inflation expectations, explore the role of narratives and preferences and lastly, we survey the research on causal effects of central bank communication on expectations and economic choices.
We review the literature in economics and related fields on the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and conflict behavior. Our survey covers the effects of the pandemic on individual-level conflict, group-level conflict, and the impact of existing conflict on the spread of the pandemic. We found an increase in intimate partner violence and a spillover between work-family conflict and domestic violence. Additionally, there was a spike in anti-East-Asian hate crimes. While the group-level conflict counts initially dropped, those eventually returned to pre-pandemic levels. The deteriorating economy and food insecurity associated with the pandemic were major drivers of conflict in developing countries, but appropriate state stimulus reduced such conflicts. The existing history of conflict had a heterogeneous effect on the spread of the pandemic in different societies. We conclude by highlighting future research avenues.
This paper reports a meta-analysis of the relationship between unemployment and health. Our meta-dataset consisted of 327 study results taken from 65 articles published in peer-reviewed journals between 1990 and 2021. We found that publication bias is important, but only for those study results obtained by means of difference-in-differences or instrumental variables estimators. On average, the effect of unemployment on health is negative, but quite small in terms of partial correlation coefficients. We investigated whether the findings were heterogeneous across several research dimensions. We found that unemployment has the strongest impact on the psychological domains of health and long-term unemployment spells are more detrimental than short-term ones. Furthermore, women are less affected, studies dealing with endogeneity issues find smaller effects and the health penalty is increasing with unemployment rate.
This paper reviews the literature providing quantitative and empirical results on capital taxation. In doing this, we differentiate between individual and corporate taxes, respectively. From existing literature, it emerges that capital income taxes for individuals increase with the degree of heterogeneity within the population, market competition, and the economy's maturity, being negative (i.e., subsidy) in the presence of monopolistic competition or developing countries, no higher than 15% in Mirrleesian economies and as high as 45% when coupled with incomplete insurance markets and labor income taxes in competitive-closed economies. Excessively high wealth tax rates for redistributive purposes, however, are prevented by the larger tax elasticity of rich (−1.15) with respect to poor (−0.09) individuals. Negative tax elasticities concerning employment (from −0.5 to −0.2), innovation (from −2.8 to −1.3), and investments (−4.7) suggest low corporate taxes, whose magnitude should be negatively related to the degree of the economy's openness, given also the possibility for firms to relocate abroad. Finally, although still inconclusive, the main conclusions concerning dividend taxes suggest that tax rates increase with the firm's size and, thus, be set at low levels for start-ups.