The Unassuming Economist

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.”

From a paper by Akhilesh Kumar Sharma, and Sushil Kumar Rai:

“The empirical results from the applied models do not confirm an inverse relationship between output growth and the unemployment rate with an unexpected positive sign of Okun’s coefficient. The evidence of preference for more capital-intensive techniques in the Indian economy is also strongly supported by the results of the expanded form of Okun’s law with a statistically significant positive coefficient of GDP and labour productivity.”

From a book chapter by Matthew Cole:

“We live in a world where services dominate employment and form an ever-greater share of GDP. What does the relative decline of manufacturing and the rise of services mean for the present and future of work? There is much debate regarding this question. Recent advances in ICT infrastructure, datafication and artificial intelligence have allowed for a degree of technological substitution in service work that was previously impossible. This chapter argues that recomposition of capital at both the national and global scales has reorganised production and expanded production networks to place certain services as a crucial engine of growth. It proceeds by introducing the concept of services in the classical political economy and labour process tradition. It then addresses one of the key debates around the nature of services under capitalism and deindustrialisation. The chapter concludes that how technological and institutional change will impact the future of work will ultimately depend on the balance of power between capital and labour.”