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Does labor court uncertainty and judge subjectivity influence firms’ performance? We study the economic consequences of judge decisions by collecting information on more than 145,000 Appeal court rulings, combined with administrative firm-level records covering the whole universe of French firms. The quasi-random assignment of judges to cases reveals that judge bias has statistically significant effects on the survival, employment, and sales of small low-performing firms. However, we find that the uncertainty associated with the actual dispersion of judge bias is small and has a non-significant impact on their average outcomes.
We propose a dynamic production function of population health and mortality from birth onwards. Our parsimonious model provides an excellent fit for the mortality and survival curves for both primate and human populations since 1816. The model sheds light on the dynamics behind many phenomena documented in the literature, including (i) the existence and evolution of mortality gradients across socio-economic statuses, (ii) non-monotonic dynamic effects of in-utero shocks, (iii) persistent or “scarring” effects of wars and (iv) mortality displacement after large temporary shocks such as extreme weather.
Prioritizing populations most in need of social assistance is an important policy decision. In the Eastern Caribbean, social assistance targeting is constrained by limited data and the need for rapid support in times of large economic and natural disaster shocks. We leverage recent advances in machine learning and satellite imagery processing to propose an implementable strategy in the face of these constraints. We show that local well-being can be predicted with high accuracy in the Eastern Caribbean region using satellite data and that such predictions can be used to improve targeting by reducing aggregation bias, better allocating resources across areas, and proxying for information difficult to verify.
We provide systematic evidence on cartels’ characteristics, using novel data on cases investigated by the French Competition Authority. These practices are widely spread across sectors and cartel members are typically among the top firms in their industries. In a model with heterogeneous firms and collusion, cartels amplify misallocation by charging supracompetitive markups. Breaking down French cartels would increase aggregate productivity by 2%, welfare by 3.5%, bringing the economy 37% closer to the efficient frontier. These numbers shed light on the aggregate importance of collusion.
The pathways to economic development are changing. Environmental sustainability is no longer a choice but a necessity to maintain a competitive edge in the global economy. Just like in nature, where survival hinges on adaptation, this Element shows how nations adjust to -and take advantage of- the new dynamics of structural transformation induced by climate change. First, by analysing the uneven industrial geography of decarbonisation, the inadequate state of climate financing and rise of green protectionism, it demonstrates that the low-carbon economy stands to increase economic disparities between nations, unless action is taken. Then, by examining green industrial policies and their varied success, it explains how governments can still join the green industrialisation race. Finally, it examines how to adapt green industrial policy to different starting points, market sizes, productive structures, state-business relations dynamics, institutional layouts, and ecological contexts. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
We provide a consistent empirical framework to estimate the net joint effect of emigration and remittances on the migrants’ countries of origin key economic variables (GDP growth and labor force participation), while addressing the endogeneity concerns using novel “shift-share” instrumental variables in the spirit of Anelli and others (2023). Understanding this joint impact is crucial for the Latin America and the Caribbean region that has seen a continuous growth in remittances over the past decades, due to steady emigration, and where remittances represent the largest capital inflows for many countries now. Focusing on the past two decades (1999-2019), this study finds that on averag...
This paper addresses the puzzling decline of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) levels in rapidly growing economies, such as Singapore, despite advancements in technology and high GDP per capita growth. The paper proposes that TFP growth is not negative; instead, standard growth decompositions have underestimated TFP growth by overestimating the contribution of capital, failing to account for the substantial part of capital income directed to urban land rents. This leads to an overestimation of changes in capital stock's contribution to growth and thereby an underestimation of TFP growth. A revised decomposition suggests that TFP growth in economies with high land rents and rapid capital stock growth, such as Singapore, has been considerably underestimated: TFP levels have not declined but increased rapidly.
Tracing the history of economic sanctions from the blockades of World War I to the policing of colonial empires and the interwar confrontation with fascism, Nicholas Mulder combines political, economic, legal, and military history to reveal how a coercive wartime tool was adopted as an instrument of peacekeeping by the League of Nations.This timely study casts an overdue light on why sanctions are widely considered a form of war, and why their unintended consequences are so tremendous.
The paper builds a unique industry-level dataset by combining Mexico’s nationally sourced inputoutput data (INEGI) with cross-country sources (WIOD, UN Comtrade). Using this dataset to exploit higher supply linkages across a larger number of industries than what is available in cross-country sources, the paper estimates the trade diversion effect on Mexico’s exports to the U.S. from two episodes, with a focus on the first: the U.S.-China trade tension in 2018 and the U.S. sanctions on Russia in 2014. Difference-in-differences, local projections and few other empirical methodologies are used. For the first episode, the paper finds higher trade diversion effects than estimates in literatur...