The Unassuming Economist

From a paper by Munseob Lee, Claudia Macaluso, and Felipe Schwartzman:

“Our paper addresses the heterogeneous effects of monetary policy on households of different races. The cyclical volatility of real income differs significantly for households of different races and income levels, reflecting differential exposure to fluctuations in employment and consumer prices. All Black households are disproportionately affected by employment fluctuations, whereas price volatility is only particularly pronounced for Black households with income above the national median. The latter face 40 percent higher price volatility than both poorer households of the same race and white households of similar income. To evaluate the effects of policy, we propose a New Keynesian framework with heterogeneous exposure to employment and price volatility. We find that an accommodative monetary stance generates asymmetric outcomes within race groups. Low-income households experience unemployment stabilization benefits, while high income ones incur real income volatility costs. Differences are especially large among Black households. Reducing the volatility of unemployment by 1 percentage point engenders a 1.17 percentage point reduction in overall income volatility for poorer Black households, but an increase of 0.6 percentage points in income volatility for richer Black households.”

From a paper by Won Joong Kim, Juyoung Ko, Won Soon Kwon, and Chunyan Piao:

“Different crises, such as the GFC, COVID-19 pandemic, and RU-UA war, lead to the common economic consequences: fluctuations in global inflation. In a globalized world, global inflation matters because it also affects the national economy. Although the literature provides determinants of inflation at national and regional levels, no studies have measured global inflation and analyzed its sources of fluctuations during the GFC, COVID-19, and RU-UA war periods. To fill this void, we measure monthly global inflation and estimate its dynamics using a time-varying parameter structural vector autoregression model with stochastic volatility. The results from global data show that global inflation during crisis periods is greatly affected by the monetary and the oil price shocks. Finally, the application to the EMU member countries implies that high EMU inflation rates in recent years were dominantly caused by excessive expansionary monetary policy in the EMU system.”

From a dissertation paper by Sebastian Stephan Leue:

“The three economic drivers of globalization are the free flow of labor, goods, and capital. Together they have shaped three waves of globalization over the last 200 years. This dissertation encompasses all three waves of globalization between 1877 and 2020, and it investigates its three main economic drivers: International migration, trade, and investment. Every chapter brings forward new insights to each of the three drivers separately. Chapters 1 and 2 provide novel and causal solutions to open questions to our fundamental understanding of migration and international trade, by exploiting two natural experiments over the long run. Chapter 1 contributes to the fundamental understanding of the causal effect of income on migration in the context of economic development. Chapter 2 revisits the distance puzzle in international trade. Chapter 3 examines the role of politics in Chinese exports of critical medical goods during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, Chapter 4 evaluates the economic impact of the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. This dissertation further aims to provide new perspectives to all three economic drivers through causal empirical research. It introduces four spatially and temporally granular datasets that provide the foundation of novel insights to the globalization nexus through quasi-experimental methods.”

From a paper by Constantin Burgi, Shoghik Hovhannisyan, and Camilo Mondragon-Velez:

“Economic growth is often associated with welfare gains through job creation. However, the number and quality of new job opportunities created in a growing economy vary across countries and sectors, due in great part to changes in labor productivity. This paper provides estimates of country and sector-specific GDP-employment elasticities based on data from the past two decades, including an evaluation of the predictive power among alternative methodological approaches. The results show that employment elasticities of growth vary significantly across countries and sectors, but are in most cases below 1.0, implying that employment grows less than GDP due to increasing productivity. Across sectors, agriculture has mostly lower elasticity values, becoming negative for more than one-third of developing countries. In addition, increases in labor productivity are associated with reductions in informal employment. These empirical results are in line with the implications of a theoretical model about the relationship between GDP growth, job creation, and labor productivity in economies with varying levels of productivity and informality.”