The Unassuming Economist

From a paper by Jinfang Pu, and Fangzhou Xia:

“As global climate change intensifies and urbanization accelerates, research on urban climate change has become a global concern. Urban decision-makers must determine optimal city sizes to achieve net-zero emissions. However, previous studies have mainly focused on average relationships between city size and carbon emissions, overlooking non-linear dynamics. This study used urban scaling laws to investigate relationships between city size and carbon emissions from population and land perspective across 294 Chinese cities. Results showed a sub-linear relationship between urban population size (UPS) and carbon emissions and a super-linear relationship between urban land size (ULS) and carbon emissions. Regionally, cities in central regions demonstrated higher carbon emission performance than those in western and eastern regions. The land perspective indicated lower carbon emission performance compared to the population perspective. Both perspectives revealed non-linear relationships between city size and urban scaling exponent for carbon emissions, characterized by multiple minima. Multiple city sizes can achieve optimal carbon emissions; however, only one ULS is ideal for a specific city size to ensure environmental sustainability. This study provides valuable policy insights for decision-makers in formulating reasonable low-carbon strategies.”

From a paper by Dario Guarascio, Jelena Reljic, and Francesco Zezza:

“This paper analyses energy vulnerability and resilience in the EU. First, a comprehensive review of the relevant literature is carried out, discussing key concepts and indicators used to assess countries’ relative positioning vis-à-vis energy shocks. Second, we rely on a large set of indicators (i.e., share of energy intensive industries, import dependency and market concentration, productive and technological capabilities in the renewables domain, policy efforts to increase energy resilience) to provide a thorough mapping of EU Member States’ positioning in terms of energy vulnerability and resilience. Third, we assess industrial and energy policy actions put in place at both the EU and the national level, highlighting relevant heterogeneities and discussing whether policy efforts are consistent with the degree of vulnerability of Member States.”

From a paper by Amit Roy, Pu Chen, and Willi Semmler Sr:

“In European countries carbon pricing is often viewed as a primary strategy to combat climate change and climate risks by reducing carbon emissions and driving investment into cleaner energy sources. Decarbonization has also been suggested by directed technical change, which implements innovative renewable energy technology. We study the eectiveness of both policies for selected Northern EU countries. In a model-based investigation we rst compare optimizing and behavioral drivers of decarbonization with a focus on the two decarboniza-tion policies. Econometrically we employ Local Projection and the VAR method to explore the eects of both policies, carbon tax and directed technical change on GDP and emission reduction. Our results show that though both policies are needed signicant technology-oriented policy actions on the supply side of renewable energy appear to be required to accelerate the decarbonization of the economies. We want to thank Tato Khundadze for extensive research assistance. We also want to thank two reviewers of the article and the editors of the journal for extensive comments.”

From a paper by Luca Bettarelli, Davide Furceri, Loredana Pisano, Pietro Pizzuto:

“This paper investigates the impact of climate change policies on inflation, for a large sample of 177 developed and developing economies, 78 subnational territorial areas and 17 sectors, over the period 1989-2022. We show that carbon taxes lead to inflationary pressures. The effect is not negligible: a one standard deviation carbon tax shock—corresponding to a 5$/tCO2 increase in emissions-weighted carbon taxes—leads to an increase of the price level of about 0.7 percent one year after the implementation of the policy, and between 1.6 and 4 percent in the medium term. These results hold at the national, sub-national and sectoral level. The effect is larger when inflation is initially high, and in regions (sectors) characterized by high emissions and low innovation capacity. In contrast, we find that emissions trading systems as well as non-market-based climate change policies (such as R&D subsidies) do not have statistically significant effects on prices.”

From a paper by Xiaoke Zhu, and Xiaohua Yu:

“This study aims to investigate whether and how food inflation influences U.S. macroeconomic dynamics. To this end, we develop and estimate a heterogeneous dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model incorporating both the food and non-food sectors. Calibration and Bayesian estimation methods are employed to derive the key parameters involved in this model. Our analysis reveals that key macroeconomic variables exhibit significant nonlinear responses to food price shocks. Notably, a quarter of headline inflation can be attributed to food inflation in the post-pandemic era. Furthermore, a higher labor substitution parameter and lower consumption substitution elasticity amplify the economic recession. In response to food price shocks, moderate monetary policies can mitigate declines in real GDP and consumption but potentially exacerbate inflation.”