Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics最新文献

The UK's slow productivity growth since 2007 has been referred to as a “puzzle,” as if it were a particularly UK-specific problem. We highlight how the United States and northern Europe experienced very similar slowdowns. In all three regions, the slowdown in total factor productivity (TFP) growth accounts for the slowdown in labor productivity growth. We find no evidence in capital-output ratios, investment rates, or internal rates of return that something substantive changed in the capital-formation process after 2007—other than a slowdown in TFP and output growth that induced slower capital formation. Hence, capital formation is not an important independent factor in the post-2007 productivity slowdown. For the UK, weak investment is a longstanding concern going back to the 1990s, though considerations of non-national accounts intangible assets somewhat ameliorate the investment shortfalls. The common slowdown in TFP growth is fairly broad-based across industry groups. Industry-specific issues, such as in mining, account for some of relative ground lost after 2007 rather than indicating a systematic UK competitiveness problem.

H. Le Forner, “Parents' Separation: What Is the Effect on Parents' and Children's Time Investments?,” Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics 85 (2022): 718–754, https://doi.org/10.1111/obes.12529.

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The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of the Judicial System Reform, which was introduced in Italy in 2012, on the efficiency of the judicial system and the exposure of banks to credit risk in terms of Non-performing loans. To this end, we apply a difference-in-differences approach, using a dataset that covers annual judicial proceedings from 2010 to 2017, supplemented by bank balance sheet data. Our findings indicate that the reform had a detrimental effect on both judicial efficiency and the NPL ratio. The negative impact is especially pronounced in courts that were previously more efficient, suggesting that the court mergers may have resulted in diseconomies of scale.

I study the impact of population diversity, determined predominantly over the prehistorical out-of-Africa migration process of anatomically modern humans, on present-day gender inequality. Leveraging variations across countries and individuals residing in the same country but descending from different prehistorically indigenous ethnic groups, I find that deep-rooted population diversity negatively affects women's economic and political empowerment. I provide several explanations for this finding. First, preindustrial societies with higher interpersonal diversity tended to experience early technological development, which primarily translated into fertility growth associated with lower women's social status during the Malthusian epoch. Second, population diversity was conducive to economic specialization, which co-evolved with and amplified the traditional gendered division of labour particularly in preindustrial societies with long agricultural histories. Finally, the early formation and prevalence of unequal gender roles in preindustrial times would gradually increase intergenerationally transmitted cultural beliefs about gender inequality, leading to wide and persistent disparities in gender roles across the contemporary world.

The common correlated effects (CCE) approach by Pesaran is a popular method for estimating panel data models with interactive effects. Due to its simplicity, i.e., unobserved common factors are approximated with cross-section averages of the observables, the estimator is highly flexible and lends itself to a wide range of applications. Despite such flexibility, however, the properties of CCE estimators are typically only examined under the restrictive assumption that all the observed variables load on the same set of factors, which ensures joint identification of the factor space. In this article, we take a different perspective, and explore the empirically relevant case where the dependent and explanatory variables are driven by distinct but correlated factors. Hence, we consider the case of Distinct Correlated Effects. Such settings can be argued to be relevant for practice, for instance in studies linking economic growth to climatic variables. In so doing, we consider panel dimensions such that as $��(�N�,�T�)�\to �\infty �$, which is known to induce an asymptotic bias for the pooled CCE estimator even under the usual common factor assumption. We subsequently develop a robust bootstrap-based toolbox that enables asymptotically valid inference in both homogeneous and heterogeneous panels, without requiring knowledge about whether factors are distinct or common.

Using a representative sample of Chinese households, this article studies how a non-rich household's consumption is positively affected by the consumption and income of its rich reference group. Exploiting variations in the levels of the top quantiles of county–year consumption and income distributions, we document two central results. First, non-rich households consume more when exposed to a reference group with higher consumption and income. Second, the positive effect is the largest in the low tail of the household consumption distribution, which indicates that the common consumption effect can mitigate consumption inequality. Combining the above two findings, we refer to the impacts of a rich reference group on the consumption of non-rich households as the common consumption effect. We find some supporting evidence that status-signalling theory, not other classical theories, offers the most likely explanation. Relatively high-rank non-rich households are more motivated than low-rank non-rich households to signal status to their reference groups by allocating consumption toward more visible goods and services and drawing on loans. Our results hold under several robustness checks, such as controlling for confounders constant at the county level or household level, accounting for sample attrition and relaxing the exclusion restriction.

Research on the effect of in utero shocks on health at birth may be influenced by in utero selection. This study outlines a conceptual framework and shows that the results of the standard empirical approach are biased if (i) the exposure changes the probability of fetal death and (ii) health differences exist between deceased and surviving fetuses. Furthermore, an empirical example is provided to illustrate the potential importance of fetal selection. Examining the effect of heat on birth weight, I find that accounting for fetal selection substantially increases the heat effect compared to the standard approach. These results suggest that, in some cases, incorporating the distorting effect of fetal losses into the estimations may be critical to providing more informed guidance for public policy.

We address the issue of testing for threshold nonlinearity in the conditional mean in the presence of conditional heteroskedasticity. We propose a supremum Lagrange multiplier approach to test a linear ARMA-GARCH model versus a TARMA-GARCH model. We derive the asymptotic null distribution of the test statistic, and this requires novel results due to nuisance parameters, absent under the null hypothesis, combined with the nonlinear moving average and GARCH-type innovations. We show that tests that do not account for heteroskedasticity fail to achieve the correct size even for large sample sizes. Moreover, the TARMA specification naturally accounts for the ubiquitous presence of measurement error that affects macroeconomic data. We apply the results to analyse the time series of Italian strikes, and we show that the TARMA-GARCH specification is consistent with the relevant macroeconomic theory while capturing the main features of the Italian strikes dynamics, such as asymmetric cycles and regime-switching.

This paper provides evidence that austerity shocks have long-run negative effects on GDP. Our baseline results show that contractionary fiscal shocks larger than 3% of GDP generate a negative effect of more than 5.5% on GDP even after 15 years. Evidence is also found linking austerity to smaller capital stock and total hours worked in the long-run. The results are robust to different fiscal shock datasets, the exclusion of particular shocks, and the use of cleaner controls. The paper also engages with the emerging discussion regarding fiscal multipliers heterogeneity, presenting evidence that the effects of exogenous fiscal measures are nonlinear on the shock size. The results also contribute to the broader discussion on the long-run effects of demand by suggesting that such shocks might permanently affect the economy.