The Unassuming Economist

From a paper by Julien Pascal:

“This paper reviews the literature examining the consequences of heterogeneity in macroeconomic modeling, especially within the context of monetary and fiscal policy transmission. This review reveals that heterogeneity can significantly alter the transmission mechanisms of monetary policy in macroeconomic models and suggests possible advantages from collaboration between fiscal and monetary policies. The paper also provides a critical evaluation of various analytical (limited-heterogeneity, history truncation, no-trade equilibrium) and numerical methods (forecasting rules, linearization in state-space or sequence-space, global methods) to solve macroeconomic models with heterogeneity, underscoring how these methods relate to each other, while emphasizing the need for a careful methodological choice based on specific circumstances.”

From a paper by Renáta Pitoňáková, Rudolf Kucharčík, and Ladislav Kabát:

“The accession to the European Union, several external shocks, and the questionable state interventions in the country’s business environment significantly impacted economic development of Slovakia. These phenomena were reflected in both the economic and social situation, namely the level of Gross domestic product (GDP) and rate of unemployment. The goal of our paper is to analyze the possible asymmetries in the unemployment-output relationship according to the Okun’s law. We used quarterly data to apply static and dynamic models in their symmetric and asymmetric forms (2009 Q1 – 2023 Q3). The results suggest that the labor market reacts more noticeably to GDP contraction than to GDP expansion. The outcomes are of interest to governing bodies managing labor market policy, primarily in the economic downturn, and for banks in controlling interest rates and inflation.”

From a paper by Kashif Nesar Rather and Mantu Kumar Mahalik:

“The attention surrounding the climate change has gained momentum over the last two decades, with significant stress on its consequential impact on gender inequality. Simultaneously, economies are caught in an environment of heightened uncertainty, potentially exerting influence on gender disparities. Within this framework, this study attempts to empirically investigate the implications of climate change and world uncertainty for gender inequality by using a balanced panel of 100 economies between 1995 and 2021. The novelty of this study lies in its adoption of Gender Inequality Index, a comprehensive measure quantifying gender disparity using three dimensions including reproductive health, economic empowerment, and labour market. Moreover, this study has adopted two different measures: the total ecological footprint to measure environmental pressures and ND-GAIN’s Vulnerability index to capture the climate change vulnerability, thereby ensuring comprehensive proxies for climate change dynamics. The estimated models also control for the effects of globalisation, economic growth, and education expenditure. The panel cointegration tests establish a significant long-run relationship between the variables of the study. Furthermore, the long-run results of PMG-ARDL estimation technique indicate that both climate change and world uncertainty contribute to increasing the gender disparities. Additionally, the results reveal that globalisation, economic growth, and education expenditure play crucial roles in diminishing gender disparities. The reliability of these findings is further confirmed by the PCSEs and DKSE estimation techniques. Moreover, the baseline findings obtained using total ecological footprint as a measure of climate change are consistent when climate change is proxied by Vulnerability Index. Potential policy suggestions for mitigating the detrimental gender ramifications stemming from climate change and rising world uncertainties are also discussed.”

From a book chapter by Sylvio Kappes, Louis-Philippe Rochon, Guillaume Vallet:

“With the recent resurgence of inflation — which had been dormant for the better part of the last 3 decades — monetary policy has once again taken centre stage as the only possible policy solution to inflation or the only game in town. Fiscal policy was never considered, and there has been no mention of the possibility of using fiscal policy to fight inflation except in some heterodox circles. As such, the entire responsibility to fight inflation was laid at the feet of independent central banks.”

From a paper by João Tovar Jalles, and André Teixeira:

“This paper explores the impact of fiscal consolidations on banking behavior, focusing on efficiency and stability. Using a panel dataset covering 194 countries from 1989 to 2020 and employing local projection methods, we find that fiscal consolidations improve bank stability at the expense of efficiency. The decline in efficiency is attributed to reduced operational income, while stability gains stem from improved asset quality and bolstered capital adequacy. The effects are heterogeneous: consolidations have a more substantial negative impact on efficiency in advanced economies, while stability improvements are more pronounced in emerging markets. The size and composition of fiscal adjustments also matter: tax-based consolidations favor stability more than expenditure-based ones. Robustness checks with alternative definitions of fiscal consolidations and non-linear models confirm these findings. The findings emphasize the importance of tailoring fiscal consolidations to country-specific factors to balance stability and efficiency in the banking sector.”