Economics: Research Guide

The regulation of the free movement of workers in the European Union (EU), and specifically EU (migrant) workers’ access to welfare benefits in the host country, has generated considerable political conflicts within and across EU Member States in recent years. These conflicts have the potential to threaten the future political sustainability of unrestricted intra-EU labour mobility and broader processes of European integration. In this paper, we provide an institutional analysis of one specific issue that has been at the heart of these debates: the exportability of child benefits. Under the current EU rules, ‘EU workers’ (i.e. mobile EU citizens who live and work in a Member State wher..

Inflation indices – such as the national Consumer Price Indices (CPI) and the EU Harmonised Indices of Consumer Prices (HICP) – measure price changes for the overall economy, which may not reflect the inflation experience of an individual household or group of households. This paper contributes to previous studies of the distributive impact of recent high inflation in EU Member States. Producing more granular and recent results, this paper finds a substantial rise in effective inflation dispersion across households and confirms that lower-income households continue to experience higher inflation. This inflation gap remains even after energy prices have eased and when controlling for othe..

We study first-order and higher-order inflation expectations of German households and firms elicited from surveys. The data allows to shed light on the relation between different orders of beliefs, and to derivate implications for noisy-information models with infinite regress. Moreover, since the elicited data is identical for households and firms, it also allows studying whether the relation between first-order and higher-order beliefs differs between the two samples. While we find that this relation is mostly identical between households and firms in our data, we identify differences to previously elicited data in the literature. We discuss potential sources for these differences and thei..

Using new data from the European Banking Authority on loan recovery outcomes, we examine how variation in loan recovery efficiency affects the transmission of financial sector and overall economic weakness to firm-level financial and real outcomes. We find that firms linked to under-capitalized banks experience higher debt, employment, and sales growth rates, if they are located in countries with less efficient loan recoveries. Furthermore, during economic downturns zombie firms—insolvent firms that continue to receive credit—achieve higher debt, employment, and sales growth, and fewer defaults if they are resident in such countries. Overall, we find that less efficient loan enforcement ..

We investigate the causal effect of the asymmetric criminalization of prostitution on sex tourism. We exploit legal reforms in five countries that switched from systems where prostitution was legal (Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Canada), or where only buying sex was legal (France), to the “Nordic model” where only buying is criminalized. Using a difference-in-differences approach on data from Google trends and tourism statistics, we estimate the impact of the reforms on tourism flows to neighboring countries and popular sex tourism destinations. We find significant effects for countries where prostitution was legal, but not for France where selling sex was prohibited.

The European Union has committed to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. Reaching this objective implies massive changes in the economies of the region. The biggest challenge of this green transition is to make sure that it happens without sacrificing economic progress and guaranteeing justice and inclusiveness. This pledge requires that every country be capable of addressing the trade-offs between the targets while remaining committed towards the common decarbonisation goal. This paper analyses the success with which European countries are carrying out the energy transition. We propose an enhanced hyperbolic distance function and a stochastic frontier analysis approach t..

This paper provides an assessment of the 2019 minimum-wage hike in Spain, which increased the minimum wage by 22% and directly concerned 7% of dependent employees. The assessment is based on an individual-level analysis that follows the outcomes of workers that were employed in the year before the reform over time. Among directly affected workers, the hike in the minimum wage increased full-time equivalent monthly earnings by on average 5.8% and reduced employment by -0.6%. The wage effects are stronger for workers on open-ended contracts, while the employment effects are stronger for workers on fixed-term contracts.

Using a large survey of euro area consumers, we design an experiment in which respondents report how they would change the decision to participate in the labor market, the hours worked, and their search effort (if not employed) in response to randomly assigned windfall gain scenarios. Windfall gains reduce labor supply, but only if they are significant in size. At the extensive margin, we find no effect for gains below €25, 000, and a decline in the probability of working of 3 percentage points for gains between €25, 000 and €100, 000. At the intensive margin, there is no effect for small gains, and a drop of roughly one weekly hour for gains above €50, 000. Women and workers closer ..

We use a multilevel public goods game to investigate attitudes towards national public budgets and a European public budget in six Member States of the European Union: Italy, Germany, France, The Netherlands, Poland, and Portugal. We test to what extent propensities to contribute to public goods differ across countries. Using two efficiency treatments, we also test whether each country group adjusts its contribution when the relative efficiency of the public goods changes. We find no differences across countries in the propensity to contribute to either public budget. Moreover, all country groups level up their contribution to the European public good following an increase in its relative ef..

Transition to a carbon-neutral economy is necessary to limit the negative impact of climate change and has become one of the world’s most urgent priorities. This paper assesses the impact of three potential transition pathways, differing in the timing and level of ambition of emissions’ reduction, and quantifies the associated investment needs, economic costs and financial risks for corporates, households and financial institutions in the euro area. Building on the first ECB top-down, economy-wide climate stress test, this paper contributes to the field of climate stress testing by introducing three key innovations. First, the design of three short-term transition scenarios that combine ..

Climate change poses serious economic, financial, and social challenges to humanity, and green transition policies are now actively implemented in many industrialized countries. Whether financial markets price climate risks is critical to ensuring that the necessary funding flows into environmentally sound projects and that stranded assets risk is adequately managed. In this paper, we assess climate risks for the European stock market within the context of Alessi et al. (2023) greenness and transparency factor. We show that measures of returns spreads of green vs. brown investment might reflect climate risks and assets' exposition to systematic macro-financial risk factors. These latter fact..

In this study, we use data on European stocks to construct a green-minus-brown portfolio hedging climate risk and to evaluate its performance in terms of cumulative expected and unexpected returns. More specifically, we estimate a Structural Panel VAR fitted to one month return and realized volatility computed for 40 constituents of a green portfolio (i.e., the low carbon emission portfolio monitored by Refinitiv) and for 41 constituents of a brown portfolio (underlying the Oil&Gas and Utilities industry sectors of the STOXX Europe 600). The common shocks underlying the cross-sectional averages, interpreted as portfolio shocks, are retrieved in a first stage of the analysis and they are used..

This research explores two aspects of European insurers’ investment behaviour related to crises. While they are often considered as financial market stabilisers and long-term investors, there is currently a lack of knowledge about insurers’ investment behaviour in crises under the regulatory Solvency II regime implemented in 2016. With assets of nearly €9 trillion and bond holdings of more than €3 trillion in Q2 2022, European insurers are important financial intermediaries and finance European economies. With an empirical study, we investigate their reaction to the asset price shock at the onset of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in the first quarter of 2020 and explore cyclical..

This paper examines the extent to which individuals of Central and Eastern European (CEE) member countries of the EU are left behind compared to individuals from Western European (WE) countries, as well as across CEE countries. To this end, according to the principle of ‘Leaving no one behind’ (LNOB) of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, a fuzzy approach is applied to a multidimensional setting made up of income, material deprivation, and work intensity. Comparing both blocs of countries, three decades after transitions to liberal democracy and market economies of CEE countries, a certain process of convergence between them is observed over the period 2007–2019 esse..

Climate change poses serious economic, financial, and social challenges to humanity, and green transition policies are now actively implemented in many industrialized countries. Whether financial markets price climate risks is critical to ensuring that the necessary funding flows into environmentally sound projects and that stranded assets risk is adequately managed. In this paper, we assess climate risks for the European stock market within the context of Alessi et al. (2023) greenness and transparency factor. We show that measures of returns spreads of green vs. brown investment might reflect climate risks and assets' exposition to systematic macro-financial risk factors. These latter fact..

Several studies argue that the latest advancements in technology could result in a continuous decrease in the employment level, the labour share of income and higher inequalities. This paper investigates policy responses to the rise of labour-saving technologies and their potential negative effects on employment and inequality. Using EUROGREEN (an Input-Output-Stock-Flow model), we assess how three different policy measures – basic income (BI), job guarantee (JG), and working time reduction without loss of payment (WTR) – could affect the economy in the wake of a technological shock. We build different scenarios in which the effects of these policies are implemented against a reference s..

We provide evidence that the ECB system-wide dividend recommendation (SWDR) of March 2020 contributed to sustain lending, had a negative but moderate and transitory impact on bank stock prices and largely operated as a deferral of dividend payouts rather than as a dividend cut. Then, we develop a quantitative macro-banking DSGE model that accounts for this evidence and captures the key mechanism through which SWDRs operate to study the general equilibrium effects of the ECB SWDR. The measure contributed to sustain aggregate bank lending and mitigate the adverse impact of the COVID-19 shock on economic activity by safeguarding euro area banks’ capitalization. Welfare-maximizing SWDRs stabil..

This paper analyses banks’ ability to use capital buffers in the euro area, taking into account overlapping capital requirements between the risk-based capital framework and the leverage ratio capital framework from 2016 to 2022. This analysis is the first to quantify buffer usability in multiple jurisdictions and across various bank types, identify key drivers of buffer usability and assess the impact of various policy measures using longer time series. The paper shows that while both risk-based and leverage frameworks play a key role in enhancing the resilience of the banking system and ensuring financial stability, their simultaneous application creates interactions that may affect..

This paper studies the effect of monetary policy on inflation along the income distribution in several euro area countries. It shows that monetary policy has differential effects and identifies two channels which point in opposite directions. On the one hand, different consumption shares imply that inflation by high-income households responds less to monetary policy. On the other hand, the paper provides novel evidence that there are substantial differences in shopping behaviour and its reaction to monetary policy, which imply that inflation by high-income households responds more to monetary policy.

We study the predictive value of climate risks for subsequent financial stress in a sample of daily data running from October 2006 to December 2022 of thirteen countries, which include China, ten European Union (EU) countries, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US). The climate risk indicators are the result of a text-based approach which combines the term frequency-inverse document frequency and the cosine-similarity techniques. Given the persistence of financial stress as well as the importance of spillover effects of financial stress from other countries, we use random forests, a machine-learning technique tailored to handle many predictors, to estimate our forecasting models..

We assess the drivers of fiscal sustainability in Portugal during the period 1999Q4-2021Q4. We resort to expanding window and Schlicht (2003, 2021)’s time-varying approaches to construct the responses of government revenues to government expenditures and the responses of the primary government balance and the cyclically adjusted primary government balance (CAPB) to the debt-to-GDP ratio. Our results show the prevalence of a Ricardian fiscal regime in Portugal. If the (i-g) differential is positive, the positive response of the primary government balance to the debt-to-GDP ratio is amplified. An improvement in the external accounts, the increase in the European Commission's fiscal rules ind..

This paper applies a penalized synthetic control method to estimate the growth effects of European Union (EU) enlargement. A penalized synthetic control estimator introduces a penalty term in the synthetic matching algorithm that penalizes discrepancies between the treated economy and its synthetic counterpart. We use this estimator to construct counterfactuals of the growth rate of GDP per capita for the EU accession countries. Standard synthetic control results show that a country’s accession into the EU generates an almost uniform positive impact on the level of real GDP per capita. However, by applying the penalized synthetic control estimator to the growth rate, we find that most..

The use of big data analytics (including data mining and predictive analytics) by firms can be expected to increase productivity and reduce trade costs, which should be positively related to export activities. This paper uses firm level data from the Flash Eurobarometer 486 survey conducted in February – May 2020 to investigate the link between the use of big data analytics and export activities in manufacturing enterprises from the 27 member countries of the European Union. We find that firms which use big data analytics do more often export, do more often export to various destinations all over the world, and do export to more different destinations. The estimated big data analytics prem..

Using administrative data on the globally connected super-rich in the UK, we study the effect of a large tax reform on migration behaviour. Prior to 2017, offshore investment returns for 'non-doms' – individuals tax-resident in the UK but with connections to other countries – were untaxed. People making use of that tax status are strongly concentrated at the top of the income distribution: 86% are in the UK top 1% and 29% in the top 0.1% once overseas investment income is taken into account. A reform in 2017 brought long-stayers, who had been in the UK for at least 15 of the last 20 years, into the standard tax system, reducing their effective net-of-average-tax rate by 18%. We find that..

The US and French job polarization appear similar based on employment shares by task. This study shows that they are different when per capita employment by task is used to identify the sources of these structural changes. We build a multi-sectorial general equilibrium model with search frictions, endogenous layoffs, and occupational choices to estimate the relative impact of TBTC (Task-Biased Technological Change) and LMI changes (Labor Market Institutions) on employment patterns. Our analysis suggests that job polarization is mainly driven by TBTC in the US, whereas LMI changes drive job polarization in France.

Germany has become the second-most important destination for migrants worldwide. Using all waves from the microcensus, we study their labor market integration over the last 50 years and highlight differences to the US case. Although the employment gaps between immigrant and native men decline after arrival, they remain large for most cohorts; the average gap after one decade is 10 pp. Conversely, income gaps tend to widen post-arrival. Compositional differences explain how those gaps vary across groups, and why they worsened over time; after accounting for composition, integration outcomes show no systematic trend. Still, economic conditions do matter, and employment collapsed in some cohort..

Using a randomized controlled trial, we study whether showing German respondents a graph plotting the European Central Bank’s inflation target alongside inflation in the euro area from 1999 to 2017 affects respondents’ trust in the ECB. The treatment has, on average, no significant effect on the level of trust in the ECB respondents report, but trust increases among respondents who report no preference for any political party. Within this group, the information about the actual development of the inflation rate, and not information about the inflation target itself, appears to be the main driving force.

We exploit inequality restrictions on higher-order moments of the distribution of structural shocks to sharpen their identification. We show that these constraints can be treated as necessary conditions and used to shrink the set of admissible rotations. We illustrate the usefulness of this approach showing, by simulations, how it can dramatically improve the identification of monetary policy shocks when combined with widely used sign-restriction schemes. We then apply our methodology to two empirical questions: the effects of monetary policy shocks in the U.S. and the effects of sovereign bond spread shocks in the euro area. In both cases, using higher-moment restrictions significantly shar..

Through large-scale asset purchases, widely known as quantitative easing (QE), central banks around the world have reduced the available supply of safe assets. We examine the effects of the European Central Bank’s asset purchases in the 2015-2021 period on an international panel of bond safety premia from four highly rated countries: Denmark, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland. We find statistically significant negative effects for all four countries. This points to a novel and important international spillover channel of QE programs to bond safety premia that operates via changes in the perceived relative scarcity of safe assets across international bond markets.

This article examines the impact of Greece retroactively, via legislation, changing the terms in hundreds of billions of euros worth of Greek government bonds governed by domestic Greek law. As the abrogation of gold clauses in US government bonds by the US Congress in 1933 had been, the Greek action was decried as violative of the rule of law and sure to negatively impact the future ability of Euro area sovereigns to borrow. We test whether the Greek action had negative spillovers on European government debt markets. We find no evidence of increased borrowing for even the most peripheral European economies from the Greek action.