Economic Inquiry最新文献

Using individual-level panel data from India, we show that income inequality between high-skilled and low-skilled workers increased following COVID-19 lockdown. Integrating a susceptible, infected, recovered, dead epidemiological model into a general equilibrium framework with high-skilled and low-skilled workers, working either from their offices (onsite) or from their homes (remote), we can explain between 24 and 59 percent of the observed increase in inequality. We also find that disease incidence is higher among low-skilled workers as they choose to work more onsite compared to their high-skilled counterparts. Direct transfers for low-skilled workers reverses this increase in inequality and improves the effectiveness of containment policies.

This paper examines the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) in crude oil amid the “financialization of commodity markets” and the “fracking revolution”. It applies the generalized spectral derivative test (Hong and Lee 2005) on both West Texas Intermediate and Brent spot and futures markets, alongside a stochastic dominance test (Linton et al., 2005) to investigate arbitrage opportunities across markets and benchmarks. The findings indicate that financialization has made each market more efficient but also created more arbitrage opportunities in spot-futures markets at both benchmarks. The fracking revolution has fragmented oil markets but had little impact on EMH in individual markets or across markets.

We use electoral survey data linked to disaggregated geographical data to examine the impact that two external shocks had on the initial development and long-term success of New Zealand First (NZF), one of the oldest populist parties in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, as well as their short and long-run impact on voting and political opinions. We find that people exposed to both structural and immigration reforms were more likely to initially vote for NZF and permanently changed their political attitudes and policy preferences. Exposure to these shocks plays an important role in explaining the rise and continued success of populism in New Zealand.

Using data describing all “Top 5” economics journal publications from 1969 to 2018, we examine what determines which authors produce less as they age and which retire earlier. Sub-field has no impact on the rate of production, but interacts with it to alter retirement probabilities. A positive, tentative, and contemporary writing style increases persistence in publishing. Authors whose previous work was more heavily cited produce slightly more. Those better-cited with more top-flight publications retire later than others. Declining publication with age arises mostly from habit—there is a very significant increasing positive autocorrelation of publication across the decades of a career.

We examine the impact of unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) on fertility. We develop a theoretical model that demonstrates how UCTs affect fertility decisions, time allocations for leisure, labor and childrearing, and child health through health spending. We then empirically examine the impact of UCTs on fertility in Pakistan. Our theoretical model suggests that under certain conditions, UCTs are likely to increase fertility if UCTs increase child health regardless of how they affect parental leisure, labor and childrearing time. The empirical results suggest that UCTs have a positive effect on fertility.

We use a large-scale longitudinal survey with a differences-in-differences research design to estimate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health in the United Kingdom. We report substantial increases in psychological distress for the population overall during the first wave. These impacts were not uniformly distributed, with the mental health costs being more pronounced for females, younger cohorts, the black, Asian and minority ethnic community, and migrants. We also identified characteristics capable of predicting resilience to the mental health effects. We find that people with financial worries, loneliness or living in overcrowded dwellings experienced significantly worse mental health deterioration during the first wave.

A large literature documents a positive correlation between parental income and child test scores. In this paper, we study whether this relationship, the dependence of the cognitive skills of children on the socioeconomic resources of their parents, varies across race. Using education data linked to tax records, we find that the income-achievement gap is small for East Asian children while significantly larger for Indigenous children. School-level factors explains a large portion of the variation in the gap across race. Our results suggest that the large income-achievement gap for Indigenous students stems partially from inequality in special needs diagnoses.

Satellite-detected night lights data are widely used to evaluate economic impacts of sanctions. Such data should be free from political manipulation. However, measurement errors in these data, from blurring and bottom-coding, are rarely considered. To study such errors, we use a difference-in-differences analysis of impacts of closing the Kaesong Industrial Zone in North Korea—a sanction South Korea imposed in 2016. Luminosity in the affected region declined by a precisely estimated 50 percent. When using the popular Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) night lights data the apparent impacts are imprecisely estimated and far smaller. Measurement errors in DMSP data may distort evaluations of sanctions.

This paper explores the impact of the political hierarchies of cities in China from different perspectives. First, we examine the economic disparities between prefectural cities and municipalities. Furthermore, this paper draws upon a quasi- experiment to analyze the impact of upgrading Chongqing to a municipality in 1997 using the synthetic control method. The city-upgrading policy significantly increased Chongqing's gross domestic product (GDP) in the following 4 years. Finally, we find that the policy increased GDP in treated cities within 1200 km of Chongqing by about 10%–13% relative to the control cities.