The Unassuming Economist

Ironically, in the big data age of today, a significant barrier to women’s inclusion in formal economies is made up of the lack of sex-disaggregated data at the high level. Within this, the lack of more granular data to base models and policies on, the lack of data on related services like internet access, use of bank accounts, feature phones and smartphones, or even inclusion in the national identification process is hard to come by.

In a recent blog detailing ideas for their new project, Strengthening Gender Statistics, officials from the World Bank Group write about challenges to accessing quality gendered data and how to tackle them. They try to understand the vast variety of challenges by grouping them into three categories- challenges to data production, analysis, and dissemination.

Read also:

Making Women and Girls Visible: Gender Data Gaps and Why They Matter (2018), UN Women

Closing gender data gaps in the world of work- role of the 19th ICLS standards (2020), ILO

Source: NBER Working Paper

Standard macroeconomic models that explain business cycles in the economy, like the real business cycle or Solow model, usually propound the existence of a momentary economy-wide equilibrium, a long-run steady-state equilibrium, and a unique convergent path to arrive at that steady-state equilibrium. However, in this paper for NBER, economists Tomohiro Hirano and Joseph Stiglitz demonstrate using the life cycle model with production a situation where multiple equilibria can exist. They suggest that this multiplicity of equilibria can give rise to “wobbly macro-dynamics”, i.e. a dynamic situation for the economy wherein it can bounce around infinitely without converging, all the time doing so in ways perfectly consistent with rational expectations. They further go on to add, “this wobbly macro-dynamics is driven by people’s beliefs or sentiments, and doesn’t even have regular periodicity”. “As a result, laissez-faire market economies can be plagued by repeated periods of instabilities, dynamic inefficiencies, and unemployment.”

On cross-country:

• What happened to global house prices in 2021? – Knight Frank
• Demographia International Housing Affordability 2022 – Demographia

On the US:    

• The impact of Treasury’s pilot program on stemming the tide of dirty money into US real estate – Brookings  
• Early signs of Russian pullback in real estate – Axios
• The Threat of Environmental Hazards to the Rental Stock – Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies
• Home mortgage and insurance systems encourage development in climate-risky places, and we all pay the price – Brookings
• U.S. Housing Wealth Skewed Even More Toward Affluent Over Past Decade. From 2010 to 2020, about 71% of increase in housing wealth was gained by high-income households, says National Association of Realtors report – Wall Street Journal
• Stagflation Is Already Here in the Housing Market. Soaring prices and low inventory are causing headaches for homebuilders and buyers but benefiting owners — and therein lies the Fed’s predicament as it seeks to lower inflation. – Bloomberg  

On China

• China’s Banking Regulator Welcomes Home Price Adjustments. Guo says current moves are good as long as not too volatile. Home prices have fallen for five months amid industry crisis – Bloomberg
• Shanghai homebuyers looking to capitalise on eased credit policies have to act fast amid expectations of price rise. Eased credit has prompted potential homebuyers to actively chase flats, property agent says. Average price of secondary homes sold last month was 0.5 per cent higher than in January, and 8.5 per cent higher year on year – South China Morning Post

On other countries:  

• [Norway] Coming of Age: Renovation Premiums in Housing Markets – SSRN
• [Singapore] Pricey Singapore rents go through the roof even as population dips – Reuters
• [United Kingdom] Help to Buy’s legacy: higher prices and richer builders. Now is a good time to pick over the bones of the UK government’s controversial equity loan scheme – FT
• [United Kingdom] Goodbye Londongrad: Russian Oligarchs Put Pressure on U.K. Property Market. Russian oligarchs stormed London’s high-end property market. Now they are under pressure and so is the city’s real-estate sector. – Wall Street Journal
• [United Kingdom] Cost versus availability of loans: which matters more for mortgagors? – Bank of England

From a new paper by Deniz Igan, Emanuel Kohlscheen and Phurichai Rungcharoenkitkul:

“House prices rose strongly in advanced economies during the pandemic, breaking with typical post-recession patterns. These developments support domestic demand in the short term but carry risks to the outlook if they reverse. Rapid economic recovery, fiscal support and high saving rates amid negative real interest rates explain part of the strong housing demand. Pandemic-induced demand for space, structural supply constraints and increased demand from investors provide additional support for house prices. The monetary policy response to inflationary pressures will be a relevant factor when assessing housing market risks. Moderate increases in interest rates could help forestall speculative demand.”

Source: Ideas for India

In a recent column for the Ideas for India blog, development economist Jean Dreze writes about the perils of experimental policymaking. While data-based policy design is quite the rage now with randomized control trials (RCTs) being used to gather evidence on “what works” and then scaling up whatever does, Dreze writes how a more comprehensive approach to policymaking would be one where insights from data are interspersed with a sound mix of understanding the issues, value judgments, and deliberation on inclusivity.

He makes a case for this argument by discussing an experiment conducted in the Indian state of Bihar during 2012-13 to study a new financial management system in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (Banerjee, Duflo, Imbert, Mathew, and Pande (2020). From delivering counter-productive results in the form of reducing, not enhancing, the baseline expenditure on this scheme to delays in workers’ payments and the lack of significant differences between outputs of the treatment and control groups, this article draws attention to the challenges associated with hasty rollouts of interventions and subsequent conclusions based on them without negating the learnings. It concludes with some best practices for engaging with governments, conducting experiments at scale, and ensuring that the “do no harm” principle of RCTs stays put.