Journal of Economic Surveys最新文献

This survey article provides insights regarding the future of affirmative action by analyzing the implementation methods and the empirical evidence on the use of placement quotas in the Brazilian higher education system. All federal universities have required income and racial-based quotas in Brazil since 2012. Affirmative action in federal universities is uniformly applied across the country, which makes evaluating its effects particularly valuable. Affirmative action improves the outcomes of targeted students. Specifically, race-based quotas raise the share of Black students in federal universities, an effect not observed with income-based quotas alone. Affirmative action has downstream positive consequences for labor market outcomes. The results suggest that income and race-based quotas beneficiaries experience substantial long-term welfare benefits. There is no evidence of mismatching or negative consequences for targeted students' peers.

This paper reviews the literature on dynamic general equilibrium models that incorporate noncompliant behaviors. It organizes contributions according to selected dimensions that denote important pillars of the macroeconomic literature and that are relevant to explaining the nature and role of non-compliant behaviors. These pillars are business cycles, macroeconomic policies, labor markets, income inequality, and financial factors. Starting with studies from the early 2000s, when general equilibrium models first began to include noncompliant behaviors, our study provides a temporal excursus on the evolution of the phenomenon in this literature.

The Phillips-Sul approach to testing the club convergence hypothesis has attracted considerable research interest in recent years due to its advantages over alternative methods. This paper aims to review theoretical papers that extend the Phillips-Sul approach, empirical studies that apply Phillips-Sul approach-based club convergence tests, as well as the software used to execute these methods. The review revealed that, first, the Phillips-Sul approach has seen modifications regarding the procedure of trend extraction from time series, the log t regression and the algorithm clustering panel units into convergence clubs. Second, the Phillips-Sul approach has been widely used not only in economics and finance but also in ecological, energy and health studies. Finally, the paper provides guidance for further development of the Phillips-Sul approach. This review is useful for researchers and practitioners investigating convergence and club convergence processes.

This paper reviews the literature that discusses how liberalization affects emerging stock markets on the cost of equity, stock volatility, stock liquidity, and informational efficiency. The survey consists of two parts, theoretical arguments and empirical evidence. Four primary mechanisms explaining the impacts are risk diversification, information-sharing, friction channel, and market competition. Our survey indicates that liberalization was evidenced to reduce the cost of equity (via risk diversification mechanism), stabilize stock volatility (mainly through risk diversification mechanism), increase stock market liquidity (in both friction channels and informational-sharing mechanisms), and improve the local market's informational efficiency (by informational-sharing mechanism). Also, we suggest some aspects of theoretical arguments that still need further examination by empirical research.

The wage elasticity to corporate income tax (CIT) is an essential parameter for assessing tax policy reforms. This paper applies meta-regression analysis to quantitatively review the growing empirical tax incidence literature that indicates a substantial shift of the tax burden onto employees. While most studies report a large wage-reducing effect of the CIT, our findings suggest that estimates with positive values are published less often than they should. After accounting for the bias, we find no significant average association between wage rates and corporate taxation. We document that the tax variable, econometric method, type of tax variation, and underlying time and country coverage of studies drive the heterogeneity among reported effects. The implied best-practice estimates suggest that the tax elasticity of wages is systematically larger for emerging countries and smaller when tax changes at the subnational level are exploited.

We collected over 1600 estimates on the relationship between bank capital and lending and construct 40 variables to capture the context in which these estimates are obtained. Accounting for potential publication bias, we find that a 1 percentage point (pp) increase in capital (regulatory) ratio results in around 0.3 pp increase in annual credit growth, while changes to capital requirements cause a decrease of around 0.7 pp. Using Bayesian and frequentist model averaging, we show that the relationship between bank capital and lending changes over time, reflecting the post-crisis period of increasingly demanding bank capital regulation and subdued profitability. We also find that the reported estimates of semi-elasticities are significantly influenced by the empirical approach chosen by researchers. Our findings suggest that the literature fails to provide policymakers with reliable estimates of the effects of capital regulation on bank lending, and our study offers insights that could help guide future research.

This paper systematically analyzes and synthesizes the literature on the determinants and consequences of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure. The study is unique in that it synthesizes based on the geographical setting of the original research. We analyzed 135 empirical studies published in Chartered Association of Business Schools (ABS) ranked journals from 1982 to 2020. The results reveal that various global, country-specific, market-specific, and firm-specific factors are important in determining a firm's CSR disclosure policies. These factors are consistently relevant in both developed and developing economies. Furthermore, the synthesis shows that companies achieve various CSR disclosure-related benefits in the form of a better reputation, enhanced financial performance, better access to external finances, better stakeholder management, and enhanced corporate accountability. In terms of theories, we observe a high heterogeneity among various studies examining the same empirical phenomenon. Based on the analysis and review results, we identify avenues for future research.

Inequality is perhaps one of the most challenging issues of our time. Empirical literature, using observational data, indicates that higher inequality is associated with lower social capital. Oftentimes, however, the causal effects of inequality are difficult to establish based on survey and empirical observations. To this end, we review a large body of experimental literature and assess the causal effects of inequality on experimental proxies for social capital. We find compelling evidence that inequality undermines trust, discourages cooperation, and encourages unethical behaviors. The overall effect on generosity is, however, less clear.

This study reviews key policy challenges relating to solo self-employed workers––the segment with increasing shares in the workforce in most developed countries in recent decades. We document that this segment attracts the attention of policymakers within four policy domains: addressing decent work deficits, entrepreneurship and small business policies, activating marginalized groups through self-employment, and improving the well-being of the solo self-employed. We offer an integrative framework enabling the analysis of synergies and contradictions of the various policy initiatives targeting the solo self-employed. The study argues that workers who persistently employ only themselves should be understood as a (third) segment of the labor market qualitatively distinct from the traditionally defined categories of “employee” or “employer.” A policy-oriented segmentation of the contemporary workforce using this “blurred trinary divide” is proposed with size estimates of its key segments and subsegments. Finally, the study discusses the prospects of the solo self-employed in the emerging post-pandemic economy and offers recommendations regarding future research and data collection.

The economics of standards pertains to the investigation of economic problems related to standards. It was established as a field of research between 2000 and 2010 and has developed rapidly since. Focusing on the relevant theories, methods, and issues, this article systematically summarizes and evaluates the extant literature on the economics of standards. The theory section concentrates on the classification, supply–demand, and economic effects of standards. The method section expands on these theoretical and empirical dimensions, while the final issue section focuses on standards alongside economic growth, trade, and innovation. The study's findings have implications for promoting teaching and research on the economics of standards and improving the practice of standardization.