Economics – Page 5

How do firms adjust to rises in the minimum wage? Survey evidence from Central and Eastern Europe

Publication by Nataša T. Jemec ’09 (Economics) and Ludmila Fadejeva ’11 (Macro)

Nataša Todorović Jemec ’09 (Economics) and Ludmila Fadejeva ’11 (Macroeconomic Policy and Financial Markets) have published a paper in the IZA Journal of Labour Policy, together with a few other colleagues from central banks of new EU member states. The paper, “How do firms adjust to rises in the minimum wage? Survey evidence from Central and Eastern Europe,” studies the transmission channels for rises in the minimum wage using a unique firm-level dataset from eight Central and Eastern European countries.

They wrote the publication within the ECB Wage Dynamics Network (WDN). At the time, Nataša and Ludmila were working at the Central Bank of Slovenia and the Central Bank of Latvia respectively, and they were their banks’ representatives in the WDN. Increase of the minimum wage was a common topic of many new EU members, and they decided to write a paper on that based on the data that they collected through a WDN survey in their countries.

Researchers can use this form to request access to the data of the WDN network which includes many EU countries.

Paper abstract

We study the transmission channels for rises in the minimum wage using a unique firm-level dataset from eight Central and Eastern European countries. Representative samples of firms in each country were asked to evaluate the relevance of a wide range of adjustment channels following specific instances of rises in the minimum wage during the recent post-crisis period. The paper adds to the rest of literature by presenting the reactions of firms as a combination of strategies and evaluates the relative importance of those strategies. Our findings suggest that the most popular adjustment channels are cuts in non-labour costs, rises in product prices, and improvements in productivity. Cuts in employment are less popular and occur mostly through reduced hiring rather than direct layoffs. Our study also provides evidence of potential spillover effects that rises in the minimum wage can have on firms without minimum wage workers.

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About the authors

Nataša T. Jemec ’09 is a Senior Economist at IMAD. She is an alum of the Barcelona GSE Master’s in Economics.

Ludmila Fadejeva ’11 is a Senior Econometrician at the Bank of Latvia. She is an alum of the Barcelona GSE Master’s in Macroeconomic Policy and Financial Markets.

On the evolution of altruistic and cooperative behaviour due to schooling system in Spain

Economics master project by Shaily Bahuguna, Diego Loras Gimeno, Davina Heer, Manuel E. Lago, and Chiara Toietta ’19

Editor’s note: This post is part of a series showcasing BSE master projects. The project is a required component of all Master’s programs at the Barcelona School of Economics.

Abstract

This paper aims to find a pattern in the evolution of altruistic and cooperative behaviour whilst distinguishing across different types of schools in Spain. In specific, we design a controlled laboratory experiment by running the standard dictator game and a public goods game in a public and private (“concertada”) high school. Using a sample of 180 students, we compare 12 and 16 year old children to distinguish the evolutionary pattern and test if there is a significant change by the type of schooling system. Alongside, we control for variants such as parental wealth status, religious views and ethical opinions. Interestingly, evidence from our data highlights that altruism levels rise throughout public school education whilst it falls in private schools. On the contrary, cooperation levels are relatively stable in public schools but rise in private schools. The results from this paper can be exploited to understand how education may influence selfish and individualistic behaviour in our society.

Key results

Diﬀ-in-Diﬀ (Altruism (L) & Cooperation (R))

Our results show that at the initial stage, i.e. for the first year students, the level of altruism is higher in public schools and this prevails throughout the students’ education in a public school. On the other hand, we observe an opposite trend for students attending private school, as over the four years of education, the average level of altruism declines. In regards to cooperation, we find some surprising results. Although students attending a public school initially show higher levels of cooperation than private schools, over the course of their education, this gap is not only reduced but it is also surpassed by the private school. Our results are in line with previous research which state that females are more likely to donate and cooperate than males but contradict the popular view in literature that income has a positive correlation with both dependent variables.

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Authors: Shaily Bahuguna, Diego Loras Gimeno, Davina Heer, Manuel E. Lago, and Chiara Toietta

About the BSE Master’s Program in Economics

An Empirical Framework: Financial Globalization and Threshold Effects

Economics master project by Eimear Flynn, Florencia Saravia, Josefina Cenzon, Nimisha Gupta, and Selena Tezel ’19

Editor’s note: This post is part of a series showcasing BSE master projects. The project is a required component of all Master’s programs at the Barcelona School of Economics.

Abstract

Is financial globalization beneficial to economies at all levels of development? Or are there certain “threshold” levels of financial, institutional and economic development a country must first attain in order to realize the growth benefits of globalization? Kose, Prasad and Taylor (2009) develop a unified empirical framework to answer this question. The debate on the literature is ongoing. Yet few studies have explored these questions in a post-crisis context. In this paper, we replicate and extend their work, paying close attention to the period 2005-2014. Our analysis yields three key results. First, the financial depth threshold above which countries can benefit from financial globalization increases from 66% to 81% when we consider the extended period. Second, the proportion of countries with depth levels above this threshold declines over time. Finally, the coefficients are smaller in absolute value over the period 1975-2014. Taken together, these results imply a breakdown in the relationship between financial depth, openness and growth since the Great Recession. Financial deepening on its own can no longer ensure positive growth effects of financial integration.

Conclusion

In the paper, we examine two periods 1975-2004 and 1975-2014 and test for threshold effects in three variables, financial depth, institutional quality and trade openness. This paper is unique in its inclusion of the years immediately before and following the Great Recession. Following a surge in international financial integration between 2005 and 2007, financial openness plummeted with the onset of the crisis in 2007. This effect was most pronounced in advanced economies. As economic growth rates declined, countries turned their backs on financial globalization. Financial flows have since rebounded, albeit not to their pre-crisis levels. The effect of this volatility on the relationship between financial openness and economic growth however is not well understood.

thresh_FD_Graph — Overall Financial Openness Coeﬃcient and Financial Depth in 1975-2014 vs 1975-2004

We analyze changes in the financial depth threshold over time as well as changes in the proportion of countries with depth levels above this threshold over time. We present three key findings. We first document an increase in the threshold level of financial depth from 66% to 81% when we extend the period to 2014. It follows that the proportion of countries with levels of depth above this threshold decreases over time. Our estimate of 66% for the period 1975-2004 is remarkably close to that of Kose et al. Secondly, the coefficient estimates are smaller and less significant which points to a breakdown in the relationship between financial openness and growth in the post-crisis period. Finally, we identify significant threshold effects of institutional quality.

Together these results point to a weaker relationship between financial openness and growth in the post-crisis period. Our estimates suggest that once a country reaches the threshold level of financial depth, further improvements in depth stop being important quite rapidly. It is now more difficult for countries to attain the benefits of financial integration, not just because the threshold of financial depth is higher but because financial depth alone may no longer be sufficient to ensure growth. The trade-off that further financial deepening can generate between higher growth and a higher risk of crisis needs to be addressed. The Great Recession was a reminder that financial depth and financial stability need not go hand in hand. The risks of financial deepening are more evident than before. Focusing only on the long run growth view overlooks this trade-off. In order to conduct policy relevant research, a new approach that realistically accounts for both the growth and crisis effects of financial deepening is required.

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Authors: Eimear Flynn, Florencia Saravia, Josefina Cenzon, Nimisha Gupta, and Selena Tezel

About the BSE Master’s Program in Economics

Quantification of Instruments’ Strength

Economics master project by Oriol González, Marko Irisarri, Santiago Iglesias, Asier Beristain and Manuel Cabado ’19

Editor’s note: This post is part of a series showcasing BSE master projects. The project is a required component of all Master’s programs at the Barcelona School of Economics.

Abstract

Weak identification is known to yield unreliable standard instrumental variables (IV) inference. A large literature has focused on addressing this issue by proposing methods to detect weak instruments, mainly through the first-stage F-statistic. Our paper evaluates the weak identification in two leading empirical analyses by using the novel alternative approach developed by Ganics, Inoue and Rossi (2018), who base their tests on confidence intervals for the bias of the two-stage least squares estimator, and the size distortion of the associated Wald test. We illustrate the behavior of the tests in empirical settings, and compare how the conclusions differ to those using the standard tests. Our findings suggest that, in our empirical application, the results obtained using this approach are in line with those using previous tests in the literature, confirming it to be a robust alternative. An R package to directly compute these novel tests is also presented.

Main conclusions

The contribution of our paper is mainly twofold. On the one hand, we aim at motivating the usefulness of the novel approach developed by Ganics et al. (2018) to evaluate the robustness of empirical analyses to the potential presence of weak instruments. On the other hand, we make these tests accessible to researchers via the proposed R function. The paper shows how recent tests applied to previous literature unveil new interesting information about the results obtained and hence the conclusions drawn from them. We highlight the consequences of IV estimates displaying both high sampling uncertainty and high specification uncertainty, as minor specification changes can lead to very different estimates, which is in line with current findings in the IV literature (see Yogo, 2004; Kleibergen and Mavroeidis, 2009; Mavroeidis, 2010; Mavroeidis et al., 2014; Ganics, 2017; or Barnichon and Mesters, 2019). Another remarkable issue that arises, mirroring the recent findings in Young (2019), is the importance of the baseline assumptions on the structure of the error variance to correctly interpret the estimation results.

Output retrieved by the proposed girtest function in R

References

Barnichon, R. and Mesters, G. (2019), ‘Identifying modern macro equations with old shocks’, Barcelona GSE Working Paper Series (Working Paper n◦1097).
Ganics, G. (2017), Essays in macroeconometrics, PhD thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Ganics, G., Inoue, A. and Rossi, B. (2018), ‘Conﬁdence intervals for bias and size distortion in IV and local projections-IV models’, Banco de España Working Paper.
Kleibergen, F. and Mavroeidis, S. (2009), ‘Weak instrument robust tests in gmm and the new keynesian phillips curve’, Journal of Business & Economic Statistics 27(3), 293-311.
Mavroeidis, S. (2010), ‘Monetary policy rules and macroeconomic stability: some new evidence’, American Economic Review 100(1), 491-503.
Mavroeidis, S., Plagborg-Møller, M. and Stock, J. H. (2014), ‘Empirical evidence on inﬂation expectations in the new keynesian phillips curve’, Journal of Economic Literature 52(1), 124-88.
Yogo, M. (2004), ‘Estimating the elasticity of intertemporal substitution when instru- ments are weak’, Review of Economics and Statistics 86(3), 797-810.
Young, A. (2019), ‘Consistency without inference: Instrumental variables in practical application’, Unpublished manuscript.

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About the Barcelona GSE Master’s Program in Economics

Bank Assets, Liquidity and Credit Cycles

Forthcoming publication by Federico Lubello ’12 (Economics)

My paper, “Bank Assets, Liquidity and Credit Cycles” with Ivan Petrella (Warwick and CEPR) and Emiliano Santoro (University of Copenhagen) has been accepted at the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control. In the paper, we uncover a close connection between the collateralization of bank loans, macroeconomic amplification and the degree of procyclicality of bank leverage.

Abstract

We study how bank collateral assets and their pledgeability affect the amplitude of credit cycles. To this end, we develop a tractable model where bankers intermediate funds between savers and borrowers. If bankers default, savers acquire the right to liquidate bankers’ assets. However, due to the vertically integrated structure of our credit economy, savers anticipate that liquidating financial assets (i.e., loans) is conditional on borrowers being solvent on their debt obligations. This friction limits the collateralization of bankers’ financial assets beyond that of real assets (i.e., capital). In this context, increasing the pledgeability of financial assets eases more credit and reduces the spread between the loan and the deposit rate, thus attenuating capital misallocation as it typically emerges in credit economies à la Kiyotaki and Moore (1997). We uncover a close connection between the collateralization of bank loans, macroeconomic amplification and the degree of procyclicality of bank leverage.

View the article

Federico Lubello ’12 is a Research Economist at Banque centrale du Luxembourg. He is an alum of the Barcelona GSE Master’s in Economics.

Uncertainty in learning, choice and visual fixation

Paper by Hrvoje Stojić (Economics ’11, GPEFM ’17)

Hrvoje Stojić (Economics ’11 and GPEFM ’17) is co-author on a new paper, “Uncertainty in learning, choice and visual fixation,” now available in pre-print on PsyArXiv.

The authors on the paper illustrate the interdisciplinary nature of this research. Hrvoje and co-author Raymond Dolan are researchers at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research; Jacob Orquin of Aarhus University specializes in the role of eye movements in decision making; Peter Dayan is at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics), and Maarten Speekenbrink is affiliated with the UCL Department of Experimental Psychology.

About the paper

Hrvoje shares an overview of the paper in this Twitter thread:

Get the pre-print

The paper can be downloaded from PsyArXiv.

Hrvoje Stojić (Economics ’11, GPEFM ’17) is a researcher at UCL. He is an alum of the Barcelona GSE Master’s in Economics and PhD from GPEFM (UPF and Barcelona GSE).

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City Design, Planning, Policy Innovations: The Case of Hermosillo

IDB publication co-authored by Miguel Angel Santos (ITFD ’11, Economics ’12)

After a lengthy review process we are proud to announce that our book “City Design, Planning, Policy Innovations: The Case of Hermosillo” is published and available for download from the Inter-American Development Bank. Cutting edge research on cities featuring my work with Douglas Barrios, my colleague at the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School. Thanks to Andreina Seijas and Diego Arcia for the superb coordination and editing work.

About the book

This publication summarizes the outcomes and lessons learned from the Fall 2017 course titled “Emergent Urbanism: Planning and Design Visions for the City of Hermosillo, Mexico” (ADV-9146). Taught by professors Diane Davis and Felipe Vera, this course asked a group of 12 students to design a set of projects that could lay the groundwork for a sustainable future for the city of Hermosillo—an emerging city located in northwest Mexico and the capital of the state of Sonora. Part of a larger initiative funded by the Inter-American Development Bank and the North-American Development Bank in partnership with Harvard University, ideas developed for this class were the product of collaboration between faculty and students at the Graduate School of Design, the Kennedy School’s Center for International Development and the T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Download the book from the IDB library

Miguel Angel Santos (ITFD ’11, Economics ’12) is Director of Applied Research at the Growth Lab at Harvard Kennedy School.

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The UK productivity puzzle

Speech by Gavin Jackson ’12 (Economics) to the Oxford Economics Society

This June, Gavin Jackson ’12 (Economics) returned to his undergrad alma mater, University of Oxford, and gave a talk to the Oxford Economics Society about the slowdown in productivity in the United Kingdom and where productivity in the UK might be headed.

He listed five contributing factors to the slowdown: “changes in financial regulation, the patent cliff, mismeasurement of telecommunications, attempts to cope with climate change, and the troubles with getting more oil out of the North Sea.”

Looking ahead, he remarked, “I don’t think we can or should go back to the past. We do not want to go back on environmental on financial regulation, as the US is doing right now. But what we can do as a society is try to be open to new opportunities and technologies that are coming along and that means investing in the basics of education, infrastructure and research to make sure that we are able to make the most of things like e-commerce and working out what to do about those who lose out from these transitions.”

Full transcript, graphics and charts from this talk are available on Gavin’s Medium post

Gavin Jackson ’12 is an Economics Reporter at the Financial Times. He is an alum of the Barcelona GSE Master’s in Economics.

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Women in Economics seminar

Master’s students Analía García ’19 (ITFD) and Lorena Franco ’19 (Economics) organized the seminar to highlight research by female PhD students and professors

This May, BGSE Master’s students Analía García ’19 (ITFD) and Lorena Franco ’19 (Economics) organized the Women in Economics two-day seminar, which meant to highlight female PhD students and faculty members’ research.

Three students and four Barcelona GSE Affiliated Professors presented their work, which varied from family economics to political economics and experimental economics. More information of the speakers and their topics below.

Organizers Analía García ’19 and Lorena Franco ’19

These efforts, nonetheless, started over two months ago when both students, who are from Latin America and the Caribbean, organized an open forum on International Women’s Day. Having prior work experience and noting the clear lack of female representation in economics and academia, they wanted to expand the conversations on the topic and discuss what we could do to potentially “make it better” within their parameters. The Women in Economics seminar was born from the conversations during the first and second open forums, and thanks to the ideas of Marta Morazzoni and Claudia Meza, both PhD students at GPEFM (UPF and Barcelona GSE).

Putting this together was a challenge given this had not been done at BGSE before, but the organizers hope this was insightful for all those who attended.

More female and racial diversity in economics and academia, please!

The speakers and the titles of the work were the following (listed alphabetically):

PhD Students

Marta Morazzoni “Family Dynamics in Macroeconomics: when the representative household does not represent us anymore”
Marta Santamaría “The Gains from Reshaping Infrastructure: Evidence from the Division of Germany”
Alina Velias “When to Tie Odysseus to the Mast: Costly Commitment Under Biased Expactations”

Professors

Enriqueta Aragonés “Stability of a Multi-level Government: A Catalonia in Spain”
Rosa Ferrer “Consumers’ Costly Responses to Product-Harm Crises” and “Gender Gaps in Performance: Evidence from Young Lawyers”
Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell “Relative Deprivation in Tanzania”
Rosemarie Nagel “Regularities in the Lab, Brain, and Field: A Cognitive Reasoning Model”

View all seminar photos on Flickr

Asymmetric Social Distance Effects in the Ultimatum Game

Publication by Orestis Vravosinos ’18 (Economics) with Kyriakos Konstantinou

A paper by Orestis Vravosinos (Economics ’18, UPF MRes in Economics ’19) and Kyriakos Konstantinou (LSE) has just been published in the Review of Behavioral Economics. Below is an overview of the paper.

The Ultimatum Game

Given that in experiments ultimatum game outcomes are often significantly different from Nash equilibrium predictions under standard assumptions on preferences, many studies have examined the impact of fairness on players’ considerations and how the effect of the sense of fairness on players’ actions may vary, while other factors change. It has been argued that increased stakes (larger sum of money distributed) can reduce sensitivity to fairness of player 2 making it more likely that she accepts lower shares of the total sum, thus, giving player 1 the opportunity to offer a lower share.

Social Distance

Social distance has also been found to affect fairness. In the existing literature, social distance commonly varies only from players being close relatives or friends to complete strangers, even though negatively-valenced relationships can be important from an economic point of view. Our study aims to fill this gap by introducing negatively-valenced relationships between the players. We argue that altruistic and empathetic behavior of the proposer towards the responder may not vary (increase) as significantly in the region of negative relationships compared to the region of positive relationships. Similarly, social distance effects stemming from reciprocity may vary less in the region of negative relationships. Thus, we hypothesize that in the ultimatum game social distance effects are asymmetric with their magnitude varying more in the spectrum of positively compared to negatively-valenced relationships.

Our experimental results support this hypothesis; in the region of positively-valenced relationships, the proposers increase the percentage they offer as relationship quality increases more drastically compared to when the relationship is negatively-valenced, in which case they appear more invariant to relationship effects. Also, by eliciting a minimum share which the responder is willing to accept out of the total sum, we provide clearer results on the social distance and stakes effects on the latter’s behavior. Last, we find a negative effect of relationship quality on the minimum acceptable share. This contradicts a strand of the literature which suggests that closer-“in-group” individuals may be punished more severely, so that cooperation in a group is maintained.

References

Orestis Vravosinos and Kyriakos Konstantinou (2019), “Asymmetric Social Distance Effects in the Ultimatum Game”, Review of Behavioral Economics: Vol. 6: No. 2, pp 159-192.

Orestis Vravosinos ’18 is an MRes student at GPEFM (UPF and Barcelona GSE). He is an alum of the Barcelona GSE Master’s in Economics.

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