Economic Systems最新文献

Inflation has been at the center of policy debates in Turkey since the 1970s. Although the country experienced a rapid disinflation period during the early 2000s, Turkish inflation has always remained high compared to other developing countries. Disinflationary policies require a long-run commitment of policymakers backed by public consensus and strong institutions. In this paper, we aim to understand the factors that shape the public attitudes of Turkish citizens towards inflation for the period between 2004 and 2020 using Eurobarometer data. We find that belonging to a vulnerable class increases the probability of being inflation averse, while favorable expectations for the future, being on the right of the political spectrum, and trust in politicians decrease inflation aversion.

This paper evaluates the gender differences in intergenerational effects of laid-off parents on children’s adult outcomes. Using the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) over the period from 1991 to 2015, we construct the children’s lengths of exposure to fathers’/mothers’ layoffs from state-owned enterprises (SOEs) retrenchment starting in the 1990 s before they turn 18 years old. We find that, when experiencing fathers’ layoffs for a longer period, only girls suffer a significant reduction in education outcomes and are hence more likely to have manual occupations; when suffering mothers’ layoffs for a longer period, boys’ education levels increase, but this advantage does not reduce their probability of having manual occupations. Although the gender difference in children’s education persists in their occupations, girls do not underperform in adult earnings compared to boys with similar family backgrounds. Instead, for girls with manual occupations, fathers’ layoffs increase their gardening income.

The R&D literature framed in a strategic context shows two unpleasant outcomes for the public goods nature of knowledge: 1) the private R&D activity results in under-investment (with no information leakage – no spillovers) or over-investment (with information leakage – positive spillovers) compared to the social optimum because of appropriability, and 2) the R&D outcome shared by each firm is lower than full disclosure, as innovators are not rewarded for disseminating information. This article departs from De Bondt et al. (1992), who consider the cost-reducing (process) innovation duopoly à la d’Aspremont and Jacquemin (1988, 1990) with non-network goods showing that the (second-best) social optimum requires partial disclosure if products are homogeneous. Unlike these studies, this work finds that, in a network industry, full disclosure becomes optimal depending on the extent of the network externality. Results offer clear policy implications.

Over the last five decades a growing number of governments in developed and developing countries have implemented targeted policies to increase the R&D to GDP ratio. However, there is little evidence regarding the feasibility of achieving large and permanent changes in R&D investment. We study the incidence and effects of episodes of substantial acceleration in R&D expenditure, using a sample of 62 countries with data from 1960 to 2007. Among other exercises, we use propensity score matching, synthetic cohorts, and panel VAR, in order to elucidate the determinants and effects of important increases in R&D intensity. We find that transitions to higher levels of R&D-intensity are a relatively infrequent phenomenon which occurs at relatively high levels of R&D intensity. Looking at long-run changes in R&D, we corroborate that few countries have been able to raise their R&D intensity from the bottom quintile to the top quintile of the global distribution. Our findings indicate that income, physical investment, education, and the size of the manufacturing sector increase the likelihood of transition, whereas country size and FDI decrease it. We find that transitions are positively correlated with subsequent greater income levels, and weakly to TFP growth. Finally, in our Granger tests with panel VAR estimates, we find that R&D acceleration Granger causes GDP growth, the level of patents, high-tech exports, and private and public R&D. In the case of private R&D, there is evidence of bidirectional causality with R&D acceleration.

This paper studies convergence in per capita gross regional products across Russian regions in the period from 1996 to 2017. By applying the system GMM technique we estimate growth equations that are directly derived from the classic Solow model, augmented with human capital and migration and considering possible spatial effects. Our main estimates establish a convergence rate of around 2% per year. While interregional migration and interdependencies of the growth of Russian regions contribute to the convergence process, the role of human capital is ambiguous: when we employ system GMM we do not find any significant impact of human capital on regional growth no matter how we measure human capital, while pooled OLS estimates establish a positive contribution.

Despite extensive econometric evidence, the research literature has been unable to draw firm conclusions regarding the effect of inflation on income inequality. In this paper, we apply meta-regression methods to a novel data set of 1767 estimates reported in 124 published studies that investigate the effect of inflation on income inequality. We distinguish between estimates that examine the effect of inflation on levels of income inequality and those that examine the effect of inflation on differences of income inequality. For level estimates, not controlling for moderator variables points to mild publication bias in favor of positive estimates (i.e., the current literature favors publishing studies that find that inflation increases income inequality), but publication selectivity does not hold once we control for a set of moderator variables. For difference estimates, mild publication bias in favor of negative estimates is found only once we control for moderator variables. In addition, our results suggest that inflation has a (small-to-moderate) inequality increasing effect for both level and difference estimates. Furthermore, we show that several factors influence reported estimates, including researcher choices concerning the measurement of inflation and inequality, the characteristics of data and estimation methods, and controlling for other components of inequality.

High-frequency financial indicators provide more useful information and are efficient at forecasting low-frequency GDP. To this end, we extend the traditional Growth-at-Risk (GaR) framework for mixed frequency data. In this extension, monthly financial indicators are used to forecast quarterly GDP with the mixed data sampling-quantile regression (MIDAS-QR) method. Its ability for high-frequency monitoring of GaR is investigated using Chinese evidence. The evidence shows that our mixed-frequency GaR is promising in terms of good forecasting and nowcasting results, and can offer early warning of GDP downturns.

Different from most studies that analyze command-and-control policies, our paper quantitatively evaluates the effectiveness of one type of economic incentive – environmental subsidies for stimulating corporate environmental investment. Using a representative sample of Chinese manufacturing listed firms, we find that environmental subsidies provided by the government significantly increase corporate environmental investment. The effect of environmental subsidies is also higher for smaller firms and private firms. Moreover, we also find that environmental subsidies have a significant and positive effect on both cleaner production and end-of-pipe investment, with the effect on cleaner production being greater. Further exploration reveals that government subsidies are a signal of endorsement that contributes to increments in firms’ innovation and financial capacity, which encourages an increase in corporate environmental investment.

Despite the intense debate over possible correctives to the propensity of contemporary democracies experiencing population aging to favor the elderly, a formal analysis of the long-term economic implications of introducing such correctives is lacking. This paper bridges the gap by modeling intergenerational redistribution policies by the government through a simple overlapping-generations framework with endogenous fertility. An original feature of our model is that the government policy rule is also endogenized because the weight assigned by the government to the well-being of each living cohort in its objective function changes with both the demographic composition of the voting population and the possibility for young adults to exercise their minor children’s voting rights (called Demeny voting). Within this setup, we study the long-term effects of the introduction of Demeny voting on population growth, capital accumulation, output and consumption per capita, and individuals’ lifetime well-being.

Using a novel database on countries exposed to coastal risks (CR), this paper estimates an augmented neoclassical growth model that encompasses eight other new growth models. To account for uncertainty related to the number of models and choice of growth determinant proxies, we use a Bayesian averaging of classical estimates (BACE) approach. A preliminary examination of the data reveals that a country that faces coastal risks is likely to be a former British colony characterized by a common law legal framework, a parliamentary political system, a high degree of international trade openness, little language and ethnic fractionalization, a low level of public sector corruption, and a high rate of fertility. The BACE-based model selection procedure shows that, in CR countries, the growth determinant proxies typically used in the neoclassical, macroeconomic policy, natural resources, and institutions theories are significantly correlated with growth. These results suggest two implications related to these countries’ coastal ecosystems. First, because they are heavily dependent on natural resources and have high fertility rates, these countries might seek short-term economic gains at the expense of deterioration in their ecosystems. Second, these countries’ good institutions and low levels of ethnic division might be conducive to sustainable management of these ecosystems.