2022 Working Papers

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1444 - External Instrument SVAR Analysis for Noninvertible Shocks

Mario Forni, Luca Gambetti and Giovanni Ricco

We propose a novel external-instrument SVAR procedure to identify and estimate the impulse response functions, regardless of the shock being invertible or recoverable. When the shock is recoverable, we also show how to estimate the unit variance shock and the ‘absolute’ response functions. When the shock is invertible, the method collapses to the standard proxy-SVAR procedure. We show how to test for recoverability and invertibility. We apply our techniques to a monetary policy VAR. It turns out that, using standard specifications, the monetary policy shock is not invertible, but is recoverable. When using our procedure, results are plausible even in a parsimonious specification, not including financial variables. Monetary policy has significant and sizeable effects on prices.

1443 - Satisfaction and the potentially misleading power of counter-factual reasoning: a field study set before, during and after the COVID-19 lockdown

Thomas Martin & Daniel Sgroi

Does imagining what life could have been in the absence of a shock change current satisfaction? To answer this we collect field data through a survey that covers the period before, during and after the COVID-19 lockdown, exploiting the features of a natural experiment combined with induced variation stemming from a randomized control trial (RCT). Our data covers first year students studying before the COVID-19 pandemic, during the full COVID-19 lockdown period, and during the partial COVID-19 lockdown period. The RCT directs a subset of students to imagine how satisfied they could have been in the absence of COVID-19. The control group are instead asked about their current satisfaction. We find that imagining life in the absence of a shock (COVID-19) can impact current satisfaction : the higher individuals think their satisfaction would have been in the absence of the shock, the lower their current satisfaction. However, the natural experiment component of our study suggests that counterfactual reasoning may mislead. By comparing the satisfaction of COVID-19 students asked to imagine university life without COVID-19, with the reported satisfaction of equivalent students just before the arrival of COVID-19, we show students typically over-exaggerate how satisfied they would have been if a negative shock had not happened.

1442 - Community Networks and Trade

Johannes Boken, Lucie Gadenne, Tushar Nandi & Marta Santamaria

Do community networks shape firm-to-firm trade in emerging economies? We study the role of communities in facilitating firm-to-firm trade and firm outcomes using data on firm-to-firm transactions and firm owners’ community (castes) affiliations for the universe of medium- and large- sized firms in West Bengal, India. We find that firms are substantially more likely to trade, and trade more, with firms from their own caste. Studying the mechanisms underlying this effect, we find evidence consistent both with castes alleviating trade frictions and taste-based discrimination by firms against those outside their community. Guided by these stylized facts, we develop a model of firm- to- firm trade in which communities affect pair productivity and matching costs and estimate the model using our reduced-form estimates. A counterfactual extending the positive effects of castes on trade to all potential supplier-client pairs would increase the number of network links by 60% and increase average firm-to-firm sales by 20%.

1441 - Historical roots, cultural selection and the ‘New World Order

Marcus Miller

Francis Fukuyama’s bold prediction that Western liberal democracy is ‘the final form of human government’ was promptly challenged by Samuel Huntington, who foresaw the future as a continuing clash of civilisations. This latter view has found support in the recent Beijing declaration by China and Russia of a ‘New World Order’ with distinct spheres of influence for different cultures. After discussing the contrast between such historical perspectives (of ‘immaculate convergence’ versus cultural diversity), we outline two accounts of how forms of governance emerge from competitive struggle ( either domestically or between nation states). However, to set the scene for applying these perspectives to current events, the paper begins with a summary of three eras of political economy post World War II - including the current ‘age of the strongman’, to use the terminology of Gideon Rachman. Subsequently, these various perspectives are employed to see what light they may throw on the disastrous turn of events following the Beijing declaration, with a focus on Russia, where the history of a powerful central state has played a crucial role. How enduring the Russian example may prove in the Darwinian struggle of cultural competition is, of course, a key issue for our time.

1440 - Man vs. Machine: Technological Promise and Political Limits of Automated Regulation Enforcement

Oliver R. Browne, Ludovica Gazze, Michael Greenstone & Olga Rostapshova

New technologies allow perfect detection of environmental violations at near-zero marginal cost, but take-up is low. We conducted a field experiment to evaluate enforcement of water conservation rules with smart meters in Fresno, CA. Households were randomly assigned combinations of enforcement method (automated or in-person inspections) and fines. Automated enforcement increased households’ punishment rates from 0.1 to 14%, decreased water use by 3%, and reduced violations by 17%, while higher fine levels had little effect. However, automated enforcement also increased customer complaints by 1,102%, ultimately causing its cancellation and highlighting that political considerations limit technological solutions to enforcement challenges.

1439 - Tax and Occupancy of Business Properties: Theory and Evidence from UK Business Rates

Ben Lockwood, Martin Simmler, and Eddy H.F. Tam

We study the impact of commercial property taxation on vacancy rates and rents in the UK, using a new data-set, and exploiting exogenous variations in property tax rates from reliefs in the UK system: small business rate relief (SBRR), retail relief and empty property relief. We estimate that the retail relief reduces vacancies by 85%, and SBRR relief by up to 49%, while empty property exemption increases them by up to 89%. The effect of retail relief on clusters of urban properties (the "High St") is no different to its overall effect. SBRR increases (decreases) the likelihood that a property is occupied by a small (large) business. We also use data on asking prices for rental properties to study the effect of reliefs on rental rates. Rental rates move in the opposite direction to vacancy rates, except in the case of empty property relief. All these findings are consistent with a novel model of directed search in the commercial property market, also presented in the paper.

1438 - Yardstick Competition in the Digital Age : Unveiling New Networks in Tax Competition

Ben Lockwood, Francesco Porcelli, Michela Redoano & Antonio Schiavone

We exploit a data disclosure project by the Italian government (OpenCivitas) which allowed mayors to view each other’s detailed expenditure data through a dedicated website. We interpret views on the website as generating a directed network. Mayors in the network are on average younger, more educated, they are more likely to come from larger cities which more often are in the northern regions and are more likely to be affliated to traditional parties, although populist parties usually rely more on the web for communication and political activities. Using directed dyadic models we find that mayors tend to form links with mayors of similar age who manage similar-sized cities and most often in their same region. However, links are more likely to be formed when mayors don’t share the same gender, education and party affliation. Mayors in this network do not engage in yardstick competition with neighbouring municipalities while all the other mayors do, and rather compete with each other, despite the physical distance. We show that this network existed before the website opened, but we find that after data disclosure yardstick competition within the network becomes strongly driven by mayors who are up for re-election. This was not the case before data disclosure. For the other municipalities, yardstick competition between neighbours remains uncorrelated with mayors’ term limits.

1437 - How large is the energy savings potential in the UK?

Thiemo Fetzer, Ludovica Gazze, Menna Bishop

Which households will be most affected by the energy price shock? How large are the energy, financial, and environmental benefits of improved energy efficiency of the British residential building stock? How do policies or interventions in price setting in energy markets affect these incentives? We develop a measurement and ex-ante modelling approach using granular property-level micro data representing around 50% of the English and Welsh building stock. This allows us to quantify the likely impact of recent energy price shocks on energy bills and how these bills would look like if energy savings measures were implemented. We find, on average, that the energy price shock acts as a form of progressive taxation hitting better-off regions more than poorer ones, in absolute terms. We estimate that on aggregate, 30% of energy consumption could be saved if buildings were upgraded to their highest energy efficiency standard. At market prices, these savings range between GBP 10 to 20 billion pounds per year with the highest energy savings largely concentrated in the wealthiest parts of the UK However, current policies weaken incentives for households to invest in energy efficiency upgrades. Current policies, such as the energy price cap, appears to be very regressive. Alternative, more targeted policies, are cheaper, easily implementable and could align incentives better.

1436 - FOMC Minutes: As a Source of Central Bank Communication Surprise

Fatih Kansoy

This paper examines whether and to what extent publications of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) minutes contain significant information for the expectation of future monetary policy in the US. We construct measure of new surprise series with intradaily data for the Fed futures contracts and the responses of stock markets, fixed income markets and exchange rates to these surprises during 2004–2017. We find that the release of FOMC minutes affects the market volatility and financial asset prices respond significantly to FOMC minutes announcements. Finally, volatility and the volume of reactions increase during the zero lower bound. Specifically, this research finds that the release of FOMC minutes induces “higher than normal” volatility and shows that financial markets respond quickly and significantly to the release of FOMC minutes.

1435 - Ain't that a Shame: False Tax Declarations and Fraudulent Benefit Claims

Lory Barile, John Cullis & Philip Jones

This paper begins by listing three uncomfortable implications of the standard expected utility model of individual decision-making concerning participation in fiscal crimes : that tax evasion and benefit fraud can be treated identically; fiscal crimes should be endemic; and that all individuals, depending on parameter values, should be either honest or dishonest. Levitt and List’s (2007) utility function relating to decisions with a moral dimension is adapted to offer insight into these implications involving an individuals optimal honesty and moral hinterland. Predictions are developed that include moral costs as a determinant of dishonest intentions and are tested with reference to some 2,942 questionnaire responses to a 2016 national (UK) survey. This paper offers insight into the way moral costs inform perceptions of the intrinsic value of doing the right thing thereby providing a richer analysis of fiscal crimes. The account has particular relevance for policy prescriptions that involve aspects of shame.

1434 - Does Data Disclosure Improve Local Government Performance? Evidence from Italian Municipalities

Ben Lockwood, Francesco Porcelli, Michela Redoano & Antonio Schiavone

We exploit the introduction of an open data online platform - part of a transparency program initiated by the Italian Government in late 2014 - as a natural experiment to analyse the effect of data disclosure on mayors’ expenditure and public good provision. First, we analyse the effect of the program by comparing municipalities on the border between ordinary and special regions, exploiting the fact that the latter regions did not participate in the program. We find that mayors in ordinary regions immediately change their behaviour after data disclosure by improving the disclosed indicators, and that the reaction depends also on their initial relative performance, a yardstick competition effect. Second, we investigate the effect of mayors’ attention to data disclosure within treated regions by tracking their daily accesses to the platform, which we instrument with the daily publication of newspaper articles mentioning the program. We find that mayors react to data disclosure by decreasing spending via a reduction of service provision, resulting in an aggregate decrease in efficiency. Overall, mayors seem to target variables that are disclosed on the website at the expense of variables that are less salient.

1433 - The Social Costs of Keystone Species Collapse: Evidence From The Decline of Vultures in India

Eyal G. Frank & Anant Sudarshan

The loss of a keystone species can theoretically lead to large social costs because their complex ecosystem interactions may be important for environmental quality. We quantify these effects for the case of vultures in India where they play an important public health role by removing livestock carrion from the environment. The expiration of a patent for a common chemical painkiller led to its increased use in cattle, unexpectedly rendering carcasses fatal to vultures, leading to a catastrophic and near-total population collapse. Using habitat range maps for the affected species, we compare high to low vulture suitability districts before and after the patent for the painkiller expired. We find that, on average, all-cause death rates increased by more than 4% in vulture-suitable districts after the vultures nearly went extinct. We find suggestive evidence that feral dog populations and rabies increased, and that water quality deteriorated in the affected regions. These mechanisms are consistent with the loss of the scavenging function of the vultures. Quantifying the costs of biodiversity losses has critical implications for optimal investments into species conservation and rehabilitation.

1432 - Monetary-Fiscal Crosswinds in the European Monetary Union

Lucrezia Reichlin, Giovanni Ricco & Matthieu Tarbé

We study the monetary- fiscal mix in the European Monetary Union. The medium and long-run effects of conventional and unconventional monetary policy are analysed by combining monetary policy shocks identified in a Structural VAR, and the general government budget constraint featuring a single central bank and multiple fiscal authorities. In response to a conventional easing of the policy rate, the cumulated response of the fiscal deficit is positive. Conversely, in response to an unconventional easing affecting the long end of the yield curve, the primary fiscal position barely moves. This is consistent with the long-run effect of unconventional monetary easing on the price index, which is about half that of conventional easing. The aggregate long-run cumulated surplus is mainly driven by Germany's fiscal policy during the period in which unconventional monetary policy was adopted.

1431 - Financing UK democracy : A stocktake of 20 years of political donations

Mirko Draca, Colin Green & Swarnodeep Homroy

Political donations in the UK have been subject to comprehensive disclosure since 2001. We study the data produced as part of this disclosure policy to evaluate the role of private and public political finance over time. Total political donations have grown by 250% since 2001, reaching over £100 million in real terms for the first time in 2019. This increase has been driven by donations from private individuals, who now account for approximately 60% of donations in election years compared to 40-50% up to the late 2010s. Furthermore, ‘superdonors’ (those contributing more than £100,000) have been a prominent driver of the rise, increasing their own share from approximately 36% in 2017 to 46% in 2019. We also show that private donations to Labour fell sharply in the final stages of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Overall, these trends have benefited the Conservative Party, leading to an historic resource gap between the two main parties emerging circa 2019. We calculate that the ‘resource gap’ between parties now stands at approximately £27 million compared to an historic average of £8-10 million (even when taking account of publicly-funded ‘Short’ money provided to the Opposition).

1430 - The midlife crisis

Osea Giuntella, Sally McManus, Redzo Mujcic, Andrew J. Oswald, Nattavudh Powdthavee & Ahmed Tohamy

This paper documents a longitudinal crisis of midlife among the inhabitants of rich nations. Yet middle-aged citizens in our data sets are close to their peak earnings, have typically experienced little or no illness, reside in some of the safest countries in the world, and live in the most prosperous era in human history. This is paradoxical and troubling. The finding is consistent, however, with the prediction -- one little-known to economists -- of Elliott Jaques (1965). Our analysis does not rest on elementary cross-sectional analysis. Instead the paper uses panel and through-time data on, in total, approximately 500,000 individuals. It checks that the key results are not due to cohort effects. Nor do we rely on simple life-satisfaction measures. The paper shows that there are approximately quadratic hill-shaped patterns in data on midlife suicide, sleeping problems, alcohol dependence, concentration difficulties, memory problems, intense job strain, disabling headaches, suicidal feelings, and extreme depression. We believe the seriousness of this societal problem has not been grasped by the affluent world’s policy-makers.

1429 - Climate Change, Gender Equality, and Firm-Level Innovation : Cross-Country Evidence

Eman Abdulla, King Yoong Lim, Diego Morris & Faten Saliba

This paper examines the nexus between gender equality, climate change, and innovation at the firm level. Based on three hypotheses derived from a novel theoretical framework linking climate change and gender equality to within-firm innovation activities, we use a cross-section dataset of 87, 996 firms across 36 industries in 103 countries, surveyed across different waves during the 2010-2020 periods to implement an instrumental variable strategy and show that environmental policies unambiguously induce firm-level process and product innovation, through its influence on the endogenous bargaining power of women in society and firms. We document that female productivity has both a direct effect on innovation (0.1-1.3% increase in the likelihood of innovation) and an indirect effect (serving as the intermediation for the environment-innovation nexus). Contrarily, greenhouse gas emissions by themselves have an ambiguous effect on innovation. The type of greenhouse gas emissions and the measure of innovation both contribute to this ambiguity. Overall, our results show that it is not the physics of climate change that induces innovation but rather the countervailing human responses to policies that mitigate climate change that stimulate innovation.

1428 - Analysis of Twins

Sonia Bhalotra & Damian Clarke

The occurrence of twin births has been widely used as a natural experiment. With a focus upon the use of twin births for identification of causal effects in economics, this chapter provides a critical review of methods and results.

1426 - National Polls, Local Preferences and Voters’ Behaviour : Evidence from the UK General Elections

Eleonora Alabrese

A central challenge for social scientists consists in explaining why people vote and what are the consequences of their behaviour. Exploiting variation in national opinion polls across UK general elections, and in the degree of safeness of British constituencies over time, I provide evidence of a significant impact of pre-election polls on electoral outcomes and shed light on a novel mechanism. I find that opinion polls affect voters’ behaviour via their interaction with the recent electoral history of a constituency : first, turnout decreases when the polls predict non-competitive elections, and this effect is stronger in safe seats. Second, the composition of local vote shares and parties’ performance is also impacted by anticipated election closeness and the effects vary heterogeneously depending on whether polls predictions are aligned with the past electoral outcomes of a constituency. Finally, the causal impact on voters’ participation is confirmed with consistent individual-level evidence.

1425 - Foetal Exposure to Air Pollution and Students Cognitive Performance : Evidence from Agricultural Fires in Brazil

Juliana Carneiro, Matthew A. Cole and Eric Strobl

This paper examines the impact of foetal exposure to air pollution from agricultural fires on Brazilian students cognitive performance later in life. We rely on comparisons across children who were upwind and downwind of the fires while in utero to address concerns around sorting and temporary income shocks. Our findings show that agricultural fires increase P M2.5, resulting in significant negative effects on pupils’ scores in Portuguese and Maths in the 5th grade through prenatal exposure. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that a 1% reduction in P M2.5 from agricultural burning has the potential to increase later life wages by 2.6%.

1424 - The Boss is Watching: How Monitoring Decisions Hurt Black Workers

Costas Cavounidis, Kevin Lang & Russell Weinstein

African Americans face shorter employment durations than similar whites. We hypothesize that employers discriminate in acquiring or acting on ability-relevant information. In our model, monitoring black but not white workers is self-sustaining. New black hires were more likely red by previous employers after monitoring. This reduces firms' beliefs about ability, incentivizing discriminatory monitoring. We confirm our predictions that layoffs are initially higher for black than non-black workers but that they converge with seniority and decline more with AFQT for black workers. Two additional predictions, lower lifetime incomes and longer unemployment durations for black workers, have known empirical support.

1423 - Maternal Investments in Children: The Role of Expected Effort and Returns

Sonia Bhalotra, Adeline Delavande, Paulino Font-Gilabert, and Joanna Maselko

We investigate the importance of subjective expectations of returns to and effort costs of the two principal investments that mothers make in newborns : breastfeeding and stimulation. We find heterogeneity across mothers in expected effort costs and expected returns for outcomes in the cognitive, socio- emotional and health domains, and that this contributes to explaining heterogeneity in investments. We find no significant differences across women in preferences for child developmental outcomes. We simulate the impact of alternative policies on investments. Our findings highlight the relevance of interventions designed to address maternal depression and reduce perinatal fatigue alongside interventions that increase perceived returns to investments.

1422 - Identification and (Fast) Estimation of Large Nonlinear Panel Models with Two-Way Fixed Effects

Martin Mugnier & Ao Wang

We study a nonlinear two-way fixed effects panel model that allows for unobserved individual heterogeneity in slopes (interacting with covariates) and (unknown) flexibly specified link function. The former is particularly relevant when the researcher is interested in the distributional causal effects of covariates, and the latter mitigates potential misspecification errors due to imposing a known link function. We show that the fixed effects parameters and the (nonparametrically specified) link function can be identified when both individual and time dimensions are large. We propose a novel iterative Gauss-Seidel estimation procedure that overcomes the practical challenge of dimensionality in the number of fixed effects when the dataset is large. We revisit two empirical studies in trade (Helpman et al., 2008) and innovation (Aghion et al., 2013), and find non-negligible unobserved dispersion in trade elasticity (across countries) and the effect of institutional ownership on innovation (across firms). These exercises emphasize the usefulness of our method in capturing flexible (and unobserved) heterogeneity in the causal relationship of interest that may have important implications for the subsequent policy analysis.

1421 - Persecution, Pogroms and Genocide : A Conceptual Framework and New Evidence

Sascha O. Becker, Sharun Mukand and Ivan Yotzov

Persecution, pogroms, and genocide have plagued humanity for centuries, costing millions of lives and haunting survivors. Economists and economic historians have recently made new contributions to the understanding of these phenomena. We provide a novel conceptual framework which highlights the inter-relationship between the intensity of persecution and migration patterns across dozens of historical episodes. Using this framework as a lens, we survey the growing literature on the causes and consequences of persecution, pogroms, and genocide. Finally, we discuss gaps in the literature and take several tentative steps towards explaining the differences in survival rates of European Jews in the 20th century

1420 - How to Increase Housing Affordability? Understanding Local Deterrents to Building Multifamily Housing

Amrita Kulka, Aradhya Sood & Nicholas Chiumenti

1419 - Impact of the COVID-19 Crisis on India’s Rural Youth : Evidence from a Panel Survey and an Experiment

Bhaskar Chakravorty, Apurav Yash Bhatiya, Clement Imbert, Maximilian Lohnert, Poonam Panda & Roland Rathelot

This paper presents evidence on the short and long-term impact of the COVID-19 crisis on India’s rural youth. We interviewed about 2,000 vocational trainees from Bihar and Jharkhand three times after the first national lockdown in 2020, between June 2020 and December 2021. We find that a third of respondents who were in salaried jobs pre-lockdown lost their jobs, and half of those who worked out of state returned home shortly after the lockdown. We report a stark difference between men and women: while many male workers took up informal employment, most female workers dropped out of the labor force. In the second part of the paper, we use a randomised experiment to document the effects of a government-supported digital platform designed to provide jobs to low-skilled workers. The platform turned out to be difficult to use and publicised only a few job ads. We find no effect on job search intensity or employment. Our findings suggest that bridging the gap between rural young workers and urban formal labor markets requires more active and targeted policy interventions, especially for female workers

1418 - Small Firm Growth and the VAT Threshold : Evidence for the UK

Li Liu, Ben Lockwood & Eddy Tam

This paper studies the effect of the VAT threshold on firm growth in the UK, using exogenous variation over time in the threshold, combined with turnover bin fixed effects, for identification. We find robust evidence that annual growth in turnover slows by about 1 percentage point when firm turnover gets close to the threshold, and weaker evidence of higher growth when the threshold is passed. Growth in firm costs shows a similar pattern, indicating that the response to the threshold is likely to be a real response rather than an evasion response. Firms that habitually register even when their turnover is below the VAT threshold (voluntary registered firms) have growth that is unaffected by the threshold, whereas firms that select into the Flat-Rate Scheme have a less pronounced slowdown response than other firms. Similar patterns of turnover and cost growth around the threshold are also observed for non-incorporated businesses. Finally, simulation results clarify the relative contribution of "non-crossers" ( firms who eventually register for VAT) and "non-crossers" (those who permanently stay below the threshold) in explaining our empirical findings

1417 - Mistaking Noise for Bias Victimhood and Hutu-Tutsi Reconciliation in East Africa

Arthur Blouin & Sharun W. Mukand

he difficulty in resurrecting inter-ethnic cooperation in the aftermath of violence and genocide is one of the biggest challenges facing post-conflict societies. Using experimental data from post-genocide Rwanda and Burundi, this paper shows that an unwarranted tendency to blame others for negative outcomes is a behavioural barrier that makes reconciliation difficult. We show that individuals systematically (and mistakenly) blame accidental negative shocks (noise) to the deliberate intent of individuals (bias). This victimhood bias wherein individuals ascribe noise to bias is much larger for (a) individuals for whom ethnic identity is salient; (b) for those who have had greater exposure to inter-ethnic violence. Further, we observe that both inter-ethnic contact and economic development are associated with a decline in this victimhood bias. Finally, those with a lower victimhood bias are more likely to behave cooperatively in inter-ethnic relationships. Our results suggest that insurance agreements that limit negative shocks and reduce noise, can encourage reconciliation by mitigating feelings of victimhood.

1416 - Bootstrapping Science? The Impact of a “Return Human Capital” Programme on Chinese Research Productivity

Elliott Ash, David Cai, Mirko Draca & Shaoyu Liu

We study the impact of a large-scale scientist recruitment program – China’s Junior Thousand Talents Plan (青年千人计划) – on the productivity of recruited scholars and their local peers in Chinese host universities. Using a comprehensive dataset of published scientific articles, we estimate effects on quantity and quality in a matched difference-in-differences framework. We observe neutral direct productivity effects for participants over a 6-year post-period: an initial drop is followed by a fully offsetting recovery. However, the program participants collaborate at higher rates with more junior China-based co-authors at their host institutions. Looking to peers in the hosting department, we observe positive and rising productivity impacts for peer scholars, equivalent to approximately 0.6 of a publication per peer scholar in the long-run. Heterogeneity analysis and the absence of correlated resource effects point to the peer effect being rooted in a knowledge spillover mechanism.

1415 - Political Identity and Foreign Aid Efficacy : Evidence from Pakistani Schools

Sanval Nasim & Andreas Stegman

We conduct a field experiment to study whether concerns to preserve an anti-liberal self-image affect low cost, private school owners' willingness to explore a collaboration with a liberal Pakistani NGO. While explicitly revealing the NGO's liberal motivation to school owners has a significant impact on beliefs about the NGO's objectives, on average, we find only limited evidence that treated school owners are less willing to explore a collaboration with our partner NGO. However, heterogeneous treatment effects suggest that differences in political identity cause negative reactions among the minority of school owners expressing conservative beliefs during a seemingly unrelated follow-up survey.

1414 - Deep historical roots, culture choice and the New World Order

Marcus Miller

Gerard Roland examines data going back to 3,000 BC for historical roots that might explain the current division of nations as between cultures of collectivism and individualism. In response to the appeal for theories bearing on the empirical evidence presented - and of recent moves by Russia and China to create a New World Order based on similar cultural division - three contributions are discussed. First is the competing powers perspective of Acemoglu and Robinson, who propose that individualism flourishes where power is evenly balanced between the state and the people : otherwise, either Despotism or Disorder will ultimately prevail. Then there is Ken Binmores study of cooperative social contracts : this offers support for stable societies of each cultural type, based on the folk theorem of repeated games. Finally the notion that dictatorship may be sustained by deception rather than repression - by leaders whom Guriev and Treisman call spin dictators. In the light of these perspectives, what to make of the current drive for a new global order that recognizes different spheres of influence for each of Roland’s cultural types? We look specifically at the case of Russia.

1413 - Import Liberalization as Export Destruction? Evidence from the United States

Holger Breinlich, Elsa Leromain, Dennis Novy & Thomas Sampson

How does import protection affect export performance? In trade models with scale economies, import liberalization can reduce industry-level exports by cutting domestic production. We show that this export destruction mechanism reduced US export growth following the permanent normalization of trade relations with China (PNTR). But there was also an offsetting boost to exports from lower input costs. We use our empirical results to calibrate the strength of scale economies in a quantitative trade model. Counterfactual analysis implies that while PNTR increased aggregate US exports relative to GDP, exports declined in the most exposed industries because of the export destruction effect. On aggregate, the US and China both gain from PNTR, but the gains are larger for China.

1412 - Estimating the Gains (and Losses) of Revenue

Xavier D’Haultfoeuille, Ao Wang, Philippe Février & Lionel Wilner

Despite the wide adoption of revenue management in many industries such as airline, railway, and hospitality, there is still scarce empirical evidence on the gains or losses of such strategies compared to uniform pricing or fully flexible strategies. We quantify such gains and losses and identify their underlying sources in the context of French railway transportation. The identification of demand is complicated by censoring and the absence of exogenous price variations. We develop an original identification strategy combining temporal variations in relative prices, consumers’ rationality and weak optimality conditions on the firm’s pricing strategy. Our results suggest similar or better performance of the actual revenue management compared to optimal uniform pricing, but also substantial losses of up to 16.2% compared to the optimal pricing strategy. We also highlight the key role of revenue management in acquiring information when demand is uncertain.

1411 - Natural Disasters and Local Government Finance : Evidence from Typhoon Haiyan

Joseph Capuno, Jose Corpuz & Samuel Lordemus

This paper examines how natural disasters affect low public nances and their interplay with intergovernmental transfers and external resources. We document the causal effect of a natural disaster on the allocation of local public resources the local government fiscal dynamics by exploiting the random nature of the 2013 Typhoon Haiyan, one of the most devastating natural disasters in recent history. Combining data on local government nance with reports on the level of damages caused by the typhoon, we employ several estimation strategies: we first rely on difference-in-differences and event study designs, and we further address a potential endogeneity concern by instrumenting the intensity exposure to the typhoon with distance to the storm path. We show that local revenue and public expenditures remain largely unaffected, except debt service, which are on average 15% lower in affected cities or municipalities. However, we document important heterogeneity in local revenue responses. We find no support for the moral hazard problem : our results indicate that external aid leads to higher local expenditures, particularly general public services, socioeconomic expenditures, including education and social services, and debt payments. These results highlight the crucial role of central government transfers in supporting local governments and mitigating the geographical economic disparities in the aftermath of exogenous shocks such as natural disasters.

1410 - Awarding gaps in higher education by ethnicity, schooling and family

Gianna Boero, Brian Karanja, Robin Naylor and Tammy Thiele

Previous research has established that undergraduate students in the UK who had attended private schools perform less well at university, on average, than equivalent students who had been educated at a state school prior to university (Smith and Naylor, 2001 and 2005; Crawford, 2014a). This well-known result has provided an evidence base for the use of contextualised offers in admissions across the sector (Schwartz Report, 2004; Hubble and Bolton, 2020) as an instrument for enhancing social mobility. In the current paper, we use a rich dataset for a particular university to examine whether the negative association between private schooling and class of degree awarded holds across all students, independent of ethnicity: we find that it does not. For White students, we obtain the standard result that private schooling is associated negatively with class of degree. However, in stark contrast, among students whose ethnicity is self-reported as either Black, Asian or Mixed Ethnicity, attendance at a private school prior to university is, on average, associated positively with the class of degree awarded. On further exploration, we find this is driven by a strong positive association among Black students and students of Mixed Ethnicity; the overarching category of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnicity conceals substantive differences within the category. Among Asian students, the absence of any association between private schooling and degree class, on average, masks a very strong negative association for those from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds. We discuss and interpret our results in the context of hypotheses within the literatures on schooling effects and on the ethnicity awarding gap in higher education.

1409 - Church and State in historical political economy

Sascha O. Becker & Steven Pfaff

Over many centuries, church and state have grown together, and apart. Sometimes linked like Siamese twins, sometimes in conflict with each other. This chapter discusses the major themes in the literature on church and state, some of the findings in the political economy of religion, and evaluates emerging directions in research on church-state relations.

1408 - Revolution in Progress? The Rise of Remote Work in the UK

Mirko Draca, Emma Duchini, Roland Rathelot, Arthur Turrell & Giulia Vattuone

The pandemic was accompanied by a wave of adoption of remote work practices. This paper uses online job vacancy data to study how UK firms have adopted remote work. Overall, remote work increased by 300%. Our analysis finds little evidence that occupations have fundamentally changed to better accommodate remote work tasks, nor evidence of changes in the occupational composition of jobs. We find that the overall increase in remote working is driven by the increasing use of remote work at the firm level, especially among firms that were less likely to use remote work before the pandemic. This is consistent with changes in organisational practices or updated information about the viability of large-scale remote working.

1407 - How macroeconomic conditions affect systemic risk in the short and long-run?

Zeynep O Kurter

This study quantifies the effects of macroeconomic variables on various market-based systemic-risk measures in 24 European banks over the 2008-2019 period. In a first step, I measure daily systemic risk for banks based on ∆CoVaR, MES, and SRISK frameworks, and examine the contributions of individual banks to aggregate systemic risk during specific stress events. Systemic risk in European banks has risen in the wake of the global financial crisis and the Brexit referendum result. In a second step, I investigate how macroeconomic conditions affect systemic risk in the short and long-run. I find that three systemic risk measures have a long-run stable relationship with EU industrial production, EU inflation, Euribor, and US equity market volatility, but some variables have opposite effects in the short and long-run.

1406 - In the Grip of Whitehall? The Effects of Party Control on Local Fiscal Policy in the UK

Benjamin Lockwood, Francesco Porcelli & James Rockey

This paper uses an instrumental variable approach based on close elections to evaluate the effect of political parties on local fiscal policy in England and Wales over the period 1998-2016. Our main finding is that political control of the council (by Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat parties) has no effect on total expenditure, the composition of expenditure, the property tax rate (council tax per band D property) or total council tax revenue. Thus, our results confirm the widely expressed belief that centrally imposed constraints on local government fiscal policy (rate-capping, and more recently, compulsory referenda) hold local government fiscal policy in a tight grip.

1405 - European Sovereign Bond and Stock Market Granger Causality Dynamics

Pedro Gomes, Zeynep O. Kurter and Rubens Morita

We investigate the lead-lag relationship between weekly sovereign bond yield changes and stock market returns for eight European countries, and how it changed during the period 2008-2018. We use a Markov-Switching Granger Causality method that determines reversals of causality endogenously. In all countries, there were often changes in the direction of the Granger causality between the two markets that coincided with global and idiosyncratic economic events. Stock returns led changes of sovereign bond yields in all countries, particularly during the financial and the Euro Area crisis. Changes of sovereign bond yields occasionally led stock returns in France, Spain and Portugal.

1404 - The Distribution of the Gender Wage Gap : An Equilibrium Model

Sonia R. Bhalotra, Manuel Fernandez and Fan Wang

We develop an equilibrium model of the labor market to investigate the joint evolution of gender gaps in labor force participation and wages. We do this overall and by task-based occupation and skill, which allows us to study distributional effects. We structurally estimate the model using data from Mexico over a period during which women's participation increased by fty percent. We provide new evidence that male and female labor are closer substitutes in high-paying analytical task-intensive occupations than in lower-paying manual and routine task-intensive occupations. We find that demand trends favored women, especially college-educated women. Consistent with these results, we see a widening of the gender wage gap at the lower end of the distribution, alongside a narrowing at the top. On the supply side, we find that increased appliance availability was the key driver of increases in the participation of unskilled women, and fertility decline a key driver for skilled women. The growth of appliances acted to widen the gender wage gap and the decline of fertility to narrow it. We also trace equilibrium impacts of growth in college attainment, which was more rapid among women, and of emigration, which was dominated by unskilled men. Our counterfactual estimates demonstrate that ignoring the countervailing effects of equilibrium wage adjustments on labor supplies, as is commonly done in the literature, can be misleading.

1403 - Measuring and taxing top incomes and wealth

Arun Advani & Andy Summers

Few topics attract such intense political debate as top tax rates : in the UK, this has led to two top income tax rate reforms since the financial crisis. Recently, the measurement of top incomes and wealth has also proved controversial, in both the UK and the US. The chapter by Delestre et al. (2022) examines both of these issues. It first studies the distribution of income in the UK, focusing on the income sources and demographics of those at the top, as well as non-taxable sources of income. It then describes the current taxation of top incomes, and suggests some directions for reform. Mirroring this structure, in this commentary we discuss first the measurement of financial inequalities, focusing on top income and wealth shares, and then the scope for policy reforms to tackle some of the issues raised, also focusing on the UK.

1402 - Missing women in Colonial India

James Fenske, Bishnupriya Gupta & Cora Neumann

We construct novel data on female population shares by age, district, and religion in South Asia from 1881 to 1931. Sex ratios skew male in Northern India and are more balanced in Southern and Eastern India, including Burma. Male-biased sex ratios emerge most visibly after age 10, and this is not specific to any one region, religion, or time period. Sikhs have the most male-biased sex ratios, followed by Hindus, Muslims, and Jains. The female share correlates across religious groups within districts. Evidence that sex ratios correlate with suitability for wheat and rice is weaker than suggested by the existing literature.

1401 - Prerationality as Avoiding Predictably Regrettable Consequences

Peter J. Hammond

Following previous work on consequentialist decision theory, we consider an unrestricted domain of finite decision trees, including continuation subtrees, with : (i) decision nodes where the decision maker must make a move ; (ii) chance nodes at which a “roulette lottery” with exogenously specified strictly positive probabilities is resolved ; (iii) event nodes at which a “horse lottery” is resolved. A complete family of binary conditional base preference relations over Anscombe–Aumann lottery consequences is defined to be “prerational” just in case there exists a behaviour rule that is defined throughout the tree domain which is explicable as avoiding, under all predictable circumstances, consequences that are regrettable given what is feasible. Prerationality is shown to hold if and only if all conditional base preference relations are complete and transitive, while also satisfying both the independence axiom of expected utility theory and a strict form of Anscombe and Aumann’s extension of Savage’s sure thing principle. Assuming that the base relations satisfy non-triviality and a generalized form of state independence that holds even when consequence domains are state dependent, prerationality combined with continuity on Marschak triangles is equivalent to representation by a refined subjective expected utility function that excludes zero probabilities.

1400 - On Target? The Incidence of Sanctions Across Listed Firms in Iran

Mirko Draca, Jason Garred, Leanne Stickland & Nele Warrinnier

How successful are sanctions at targeting the economic interests of political elites in affected countries? We study the case of Iran, using information on the stock exchange listed assets of two specific political entities with significant influence over the direction of Iran's nuclear program. Our identification strategy focuses on the process of negotiations for sanctions removal, examining which interests bene t most from news about diplomatic progress. The results indicate the `bluntness' of sanctions on Iran, but also provide evidence of their effectiveness in generating substantial economic incentives forelite policymakers to negotiate a deal for sanctions relief.

1399 - Dynamic Electoral Competition with Voter Loss-Aversion and Imperfect Recall

Ben Lockwood, Minh Le & James Rockey

This paper explores the implications of voter loss-aversion and imperfect recall for the dynamics of electoral competition in a simple Downsian model of repeated elections. We first establish a benchmark result: when the voters’ reference point is forward-looking, there are a continuum of rational expectations equilibria (REE). When voters are backward-looking i.e. the reference point is last period’s recalled policy, interesting dynamics only emerge when voters have imperfect recall about that policy. Then, the interplay between the median voter’s reference point and political parties’ choice of platforms generates a dynamic process of polarization (or de-polarization). Under the assumption that parties are risk-neutral, platforms monotonically converge over time to a long-run equilibrium, which is always a REE. When parties are risk-averse, dynamic incentives also come into play, and generally lead to more policy moderation, resulting in equilibria that are more moderate than the most moderate REE.

1398 - Hidden hazards and Screening Policy : Predicting Undetected Lead Exposure in Illinois Using Machine Learning

Ali Abbasi, Ludovica Gazze & Bridget Pals

Lead exposure remains a significant threat to children’s health despite decades of policies aimed at getting the lead out of homes and neighborhoods. Generally, lead hazards are identified through inspections triggered by high blood lead levels (BLLs) in children. Yet, it is unclear how best to screen children for lead exposure to balance the costs of screening and the potential benefits of early detection, treatment, and lead hazard removal. While some states require universal screening, others employ a targeted approach, but no regime achieves 100% compliance. We estimate the extent and geographic distribution of undetected lead poisoning in Illinois. We then compare the estimated detection rate of a universal screening program to the current targeted screening policy under different compliance levels. To do so, we link 2010-2016 Illinois lead test records to 2010-2014 birth records, demographics, and housing data. We train a random forest classifier that predicts the likelihood a child has a BLL above 5µg/dL. We estimate that 10,613 untested children had a BLL≥5µg/dL in addition to the 18,115 detected cases. Due to the unequal spatial distribution of lead hazards, 60% of these undetected cases should have been screened under the current policy, suggesting limited benefits from universal screening.

1397 - Forced Displacement in History : Some Recent Research

Sascha O. Becker

Forced displacement as a consequence of wars, civil conflicts, or natural disasters does not only have contemporaneous consequences but also long- run repercussions. This eclectic overview summarizes some recent research on forced displacement in economic history. While many of the episodes covered refer to Europe, this survey points to literature across all continents. It highlights new developments, and points to gaps in the literature.

1396 - Gifted Children Programs’ Short and Long-Term Impact : Higher Education, Earnings, and the Knowledge-Economy

Victor Lavy & Yoav Goldstein

We estimate the short-run and longer-term effects of gifted children programs (GCP) in high schools in Israel. The program tracks the most talented students into gifted children classes, starting 10th grade. They receive more resources in smaller classes, a unique curriculum, access to high-quality teachers, and courses in universities. We use test scores in exams that measure cognitive achievements or intelligence and ability, measured in different ages, to select a comparison group of equally gifted students from other cities where GCP was not offered at the time. Based on administrative data, we follow 22 cohorts of GCP participants who graduated high school in 1992-2013. We measure treatment effects on outcomes, ranging from high school to the labor market in their 30s and 40s. Remarkably, the results we obtain do not vary when using alternative measures of ability or in the age, they are assessed. The evidence on the impact of GCP on academic achievements in high school is mixed, some compulsory subjects are affected negatively, and fewer are affected positively. However, these estimates are very small, implying a tiny effect size. These results stand in contrast to the abundance of educational resources enjoyed by GCP participants, in addition to better peers in terms of SES background and outcomes. We discuss in this context the objective of the program to widen the scope and area of interest of its participants beyond the regular curriculum. We also highlight the potential adverse effect of the Big-Fish-Little Pond Effect. In the longer run, we find meaningful positive effects of GCP on higher education attainment. All gifted children achieve a BA degree, but a much higher share of GCP participants graduate with a double major. The effect of getting a Ph.D. is also positive, driven by more Ph.D. degrees in Elite Universities. GCP participants study more math, computer, and physical sciences but engage less in engineering programs. The net effect on STEM degrees is, therefore, zero. However, a much higher share of GCP participants graduated with two STEM majors. This evidence, along with the significant effect on a double major, suggests that GCP enhances the impact of “multipotentiality,” which characterizes many gifted adolescents. We find no effect of GCP on employment and earnings. Nor do we find that they work more than other equally talented children in the various sectors of the knowledge economy: hi-tech manufacturing, hi-tech services, and academic institutions. Finally, we examine marriage and family formation patterns as mediating effects and find no discerned GCP effects. In the short-term, medium-run, and into adulthood, these comprehensive sets of results are not qualitatively different for females and males gifted children who participated in GCP. Treatment heterogeneity by giftedness level allows us to compare our results to earlier studies that used regression discontinuity designs to identify GCP effects on only marginally eligible students for such programs. We find meaningful differences in treatment effect between marginal and inframarginal gifted children, suggesting that it is essential to examine GCP’s impact over the whole spectrum of Giftedness. Importantly, we find that GCP similarly affects low and high-SES students. Half of the students among the six youngest cohorts in our sample started the program in middle school, while the others did that in high school. We find no differences in GCP effect on high school and university outcomes by the length of the program

1395 - Pandemic Pressures and Public Health Care : Evidence from England

Thiemo Fetzer & Christopher Rauh

This paper documents that the COVID-19 pandemic induced pressures on thehealth care system have significant adverse knock-on effects on the accessibility and quality of non-COVID-19 care. We observe persistently worsened performance and longer waiting times in A&E; drastically limited access to specialist care; notably delayed or inaccessible diagnostic services; acutely undermined access to and quality of cancer care. We find that providers under COVID-19 pressures experience notably more excess deaths among non-COVID related hospital episodes such as, for example, for treatment of heart attacks. We estimate there to be at least one such non-COVID-19 related excess death among patients being admitted to hospital for non-COVID-19 reasons for every 30 COVID-19 deaths that is caused by the disruption to the quality of care due to COVID-19. In total, this amounts to 4,003 non COVID-19 excess deaths from March 2020 to February 2021. Further, there are at least 32,189 missing cancer patients that should counterfactually have started receiving treatment which suggests continued increased numbers of excess deaths in the future due to delayed access to care in the past.

1394 - Institutional Liquidity Demand and the Internalization of Retail Order Flow : The Tail Does Not Wag the Dog

Yashar H. Barardehi, Dan Bernhardt, Zhi Da & Mitch Warachka

The decision of wholesalers to internalize retail order flow primarily reflects institutional liquidity demand. We first use the Tick Size Pilot to highlight this decision’s influence on the retail trade imbalances denoted Mroib by Boehmer et al. (2021). We then show that wholesalers internalize more retail order flow when institutional demand is higher, leading Mroib to be inversely related to institutional order flow. Intraday returns move in the same direction as institutional price pressure but the opposite direction of Mroib. Moreover, |Mroib| is highest when institutional trading costs are highest. Distant future returns display strong ∪-shaped patterns conditional on Mroib, consistent with a permanent liquidity premium driving the positive relation between these returns and the magnitude of |Mroib|.

1393 - Does going cashless make you tax-rich? Evidence from India's demonetization experiment

Satadru Das, Lucie Gadenne, Tushar Nandi & Ross Warwick

This paper investigates the effect of electronic payments technology on firms' tax compliance in a large developing economy. We consider India's demonetization policy which, by limiting the availability of cash, led to a large increase in the use of electronic forms of payments. Using administrative data on firms' tax returns and variation in the strength of the demonetization shock across local areas, we find that greater use of electronic payments leads to firms reporting more sales to the tax authorities. This effect is strong enough to explain roughly half of the large (11%) increase in reported sales observed during demonetization.