Speech by Gavin Jackson ’12 (Economics) to the Oxford Economics Society
Image: OES
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.”
Blog post for AIER by Brian C. Albrecht ’14 (Economics of Public Policy)
Brian Albrecht is a PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota and a graduate of the Barcelona GSE Master’s Program in Economics of Public Policy, as well as a past editor of the Barcelona GSE Voice. He is also a contributor to the Sound Money Project, a blog from the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER).
In a recent post, Brian talks about a recent paper by Barcelona GSE professors Davide Debortoli, Jordi Galí, and Luca Gambetti, “On the Empirical (Ir)Relevance of the Zero Lower Bound Constraint.” He writes:
Many economics writers, including Ben Bernanke, Neil Irwin, and Justin Wolfers, worry that the Fed will not be able to combat the next recession. Current interest rates, the sad story goes, are already close to zero. Since a downturn will push the economy to the zero lower bound (ZLB), the Fed will not be able to lower rates further, thereby prolonging the recession.
Of course, for such a story to make sense, the ZLB must be a fundamental constraint that inhibits monetary policy. In a new NBER working paper, Davide Debortoli, Jordi Galí, and Luca Gambetti consider whether the ZLB was actually the problem during the last recession. They say the ZLB was irrelevant. The authors come to this conclusion by studying two types of evidence: measures of macro volatility, and the response of macro variables to aggregate shocks through a vector autoregression.
Read Brian’s full post on this paper and find a list of all his recent posts over on the AIER website.
Brian C. Albrecht ’14 is a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Minnesota. He is an alum of the Barcelona GSE Master’s in Economics of Public Policy.
Publication by Orestis Vravosinos ’18 (Economics) with Kyriakos Konstantinou
Comic author: Zach Weinersmith
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.
Economics ’18 master project turned working paper by alumni Mariel Bedoya, Karen Espinoza, Bruno Gonzaga, and Alejandro Herrera Jiménez
What started out as a Barcelona GSE master project has developed into a full-fledged working paper by four alumni of the Master’s in Economics Class of 2018: Mariel Bedoya, Karen Espinoza, Bruno Gonzaga, and Alejandro Herrera Jiménez.
The team after submitting their Economics master project, June 2018
The paper, “Setting an example? Spillover effects of Peruvian Magnet Schools,” is now part of the Development Research Working Paper Series of the Institute for Advanced Development Studies (INESAD), a research center in La Paz, Bolivia.
Mariel explains that the idea to research this topic occurred to her because before doing the master in BGSE, she worked in the Ministry of Education of Peru, in the Impact Evaluation Division.
“The topic was interesting for us because although there is plenty of literature studying these selective schools’ first order effects (that is, effects on the students who directly benefited from the creation of these schools), we found scarce evidence about second-order effects (effects on students who shared environments with the high achieving student previously). Even more, analyzing externalities seemed of importance for a program such as COAR in Peru since the expenditure per student for the program is relatively high,” Mariel says.
The team has presented their research in three seminars so far, two in Peru and one in Bolivia.
“We aim to continue this research project in the near future. We got the opportunity of presenting findings of our research for public servants within the Ministry of Education last year, including the Director of the Division of Specialized Education Services, who is in charge of the COAR Program. This research complements ongoing efforts of the Ministry of Education of evaluating COAR’s first order effects. They seemed keen on helping us, especially because we do not have yet the necessary data to conclude on the mechanisms that may be driving the results we find, and they would like us to tell them more about this point in particular. We hope to have a new version of this paper by the end of the year.”
A good read for all those interested in understanding the extent to which the relationship between the changing nature of work and income inequality is influenced by national labor market institutions.
Paper abstract
Recent work in comparative political economy has found that labour market institutions can mitigate the inequality-enhancing effects of the transition to the knowledge economy (Hope and Martelli 2019). While this work enhances our understanding of the role and importance of labour market institutions in the post-industrial era, it cannot tell us much about the underlying mechanisms. This paper aims to fill that gap in the literature by undertaking a micro-level econometric study on Denmark using a unique longitudinal dataset with linked employer-employee data, the Integrated Database for Labour Market Research (IDA). The central analysis in the paper will explore the influence of union membership and collective bargaining on within and between firm inequality in knowledge-intensive sectors. It will also test competing hypotheses as to why labour market institutions have been able to damp down the effects of the transition to the knowledge economy on income inequality.
A couple of takeaways
The transition to the knowledge economy began in earnest after the crisis of Fordism in the 1970s. Figure 1 (below) shows the employment expansion in knowledge-intensive service sectors, such as finance, insurance, business services, and telecommunications, between 1970 and 2006. Growth of knowledge employment was ubiquitous in the advanced democracies over this period; the average employment expansion was close to nine percentage points. The rise of the knowledge economy is clearly demonstrated by this substantial shift in economic structure away from traditional industries and toward ICT-intensive service sectors.
Figure 2 (below) shows that for the income share of the top 1 percent, an increase in knowledge employment is associated with an increase in inequality when wage coordination and collective bargaining coverage are very weak, but has little or no effect when they’re at their highest levels.
Antonia Esser ’11 (International Trade, Finance, and Development)
I started to work on remittances around three years ago when
I joined my current organization, the Centre for Financial Regulation and
Inclusion (or Cenfri in short) as a
researcher. We are an independent, not-for-profit think-and-do-tank based in
Cape Town, South Africa, trying to answer complex questions around the role of
the financial sector in improving individuals’ welfare in emerging economies.
Remittances is one of our key focus areas and we have received donor funding
from Financial Sector Deepening Africa (FSDA)
to understand why the cost of sending funds into Africa is still the highest in
the world.
According to the World Bank, the average cost of sending remittances globally stood at just under 7% of the total value of the transfer in the first quarter of this year; in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), consumers had to pay on average 9.25% – by far the most expensive region in the world. The SDGs want to bring down the cost to between three and five percent. Most disturbingly, intra-Africa transfers can cost way more than 15% in some corridors, even when the countries are neighbours (e.g. Nigeria and Cameroon where a transfer can cost 15%). The following graphic shows the average prices some time in 2017 between the UK and selected African countries.
The cost of sending remittances to and within Africa are the highest in the world. Sources: FSDA (2017) and The World Bank (2017)
When one considers that around 80% of African migrants stay
within Africa, this is an incredibly high burden in terms of cost that reduces
the positive impact of these essential flows for recipients. Many migrants are
therefore forced to use informal mechanisms that are often cheaper, more
trusted and more convenient. Yet informal mechanisms can be fronts for illicit
financial flows, including money laundering and the financing of terrorism.
They also indirectly influence competition as they mask the true size of a
remittance corridor, deterring providers from entering the market.
Formal remittance flows are now higher than the value of
official development assistance (ODA) and foreign direct investment (FDI). They
have shown to have significant positive impact as they flow directly in the
hands of those that rely on these funds as a primary source of income, and they
tend to be more stable than ODA or FDI.
Based on all this evidence, FSDA asked us to understand the cost
drivers and why it is still so expensive to send money to and within the
continent despite all the innovations in the FinTech space with apps from
players such as WorldRemit. We embarked
on a journey to collect evidence through stakeholder interviews (with private
sector players such as money transfer organisations, banks, FinTechs, and post
offices, as well as regulators, policy makers and experts), mystery shopping, speaking
to consumers, and ploughing through existing literature. We travelled to
important remittance markets such as Nigeria, Ethiopia, Côte d’Ivoire and
Uganda last year to understand the situation on the ground.
What I’ve learned since then is that remittances are an
incredibly complicated business. It consists of providers in the first mile
(where cash sending happens), the middle mile (where the processing of payments
happens) and the last mile (where the recipient collects the money). The value
chain is therefore very long and brings with it not only partnership complications
but also technical issues. Cross-border money transfers are heavily regulated
due to money laundering fears and severe risk exposure, but especially in
Africa capital outflows of any kind are also heavily controlled in many markets
still. To get a money transfer license can sometimes take a decade, we heard
from some providers.
Overall, there were many interesting insights but at the end of the day we narrowed the reasons for the high costs down to four categories: business case barriers, regulatory barriers, infrastructure barriers and consumer-facing barriers. We then evaluated the number of citations and their impact on cost and access for the consumer to show how severe the barrier is for both providers and consumers:
From these insights we produced a range of reports, that you
can access here,
if you are interested, with the aim to disseminate them at key events and bring
them into relevant discussions with the various stakeholders.
One avenue we are pursuing is to reduce the regulatory
burden for providers to stimulate competition, especially in intra-Africa
corridors. Many cross-border corridors are still dominated by one or two
companies such as Western Union or MoneyGram that can set their prices freely.
They are helped by the regulation as the licensing requirements in some cases
can be incredibly high. For example, you may need to show capital of USD 20
million, be operational in at least seven countries for at least ten years. Of
course, none of the newer players that can offer cheaper remittances through
using apps, for example, can meet all
these requirements.
We were therefore on the hunt to influence regulators to revise some of the regulations. And a lot of regulation touches cross-border remittances: payment system act, banking act, foreign exchange act, agent banking regulation, e-money regulation, telecommunications regulation, cross-border transfer regulation etc – the list goes on and on. Every country seems to have their own set of rules and regulations that need to be made interoperable or at least harmonise to reduce the regulatory burdens in a value chain that can cross many jurisdictions. Definitely not an easy task! Many African countries are still heavily dependent on natural resources, such as Nigeria on oil for example. Their exchange rate with the dollar is fixed by the central bank. Yet, the Nigerian Naira is overvalued, leading to a parallel shadow market where one can get better rates for dollars on the streets of Lagos, impacting the use of formal remittance channels. But of course, the regulator is very concerned with financial stability and the impact a devaluation could have on foreign exchange reserves, inflation etc. Attracting more formal remittances does not sway the regulator enough to change the exchange rate policies. All of these realities need to be taken into consideration when approaching the regulators to try and achieve change based on research, and of course protocols play a huge role.
As part of this effort to reach regulators and based on the
research we had done, I was recently invited to attend the inaugural meeting of
experts, organized by the African Institute for Remittances (AIR), which is a programme established by
the African Union. We were called from all over the continent based on our
research and professional experience to build a cohort that would give
technical assistance to willing African regulators. Last month we met in
Mombasa, Kenya, and learned more about the planned interventions. On the one
hand, we want to achieve better remittance data quality in the individual
countries as the data can be questionable, but on the other hand we want to
assist with writing the right kind of regulation that fosters innovation,
reduces cost without reducing the access for consumers, and incentivise the
uptake of formal remittance mechanisms.
Looking foreward to three days of learning, sharing experiences and plotting the way forward with colleagues from all over Africa with @_AfricanUnion and African Institute for Remittances #remittancepic.twitter.com/kERFXsVpVC
I learned which data point to allocate to which balance of
payment code at the central bank to make sure there is consistency across
countries. I also learned how we will go about understand the regulatory
background, as of course there is a difference between de jure and de facto
regulation, i.e. we need to understand how regulation is interpreted from a
stakeholder point of view.
So far it has been an exciting journey to see how we can
take our insights into regulatory change. Some countries have already shown
interest in being assessed and assisted and we will receive a list of our
country missions as the expert cohort soon. Judging from our past work with
regulators, this process can take many months, years if not decades but the
potential impact of such fundamental changes is immense, especially for the
individual person on the ground. System-level impact takes patience and
perseverance.
ITFD taught me to be precise and on-point with my research to effect change – policy makers do not want to read 300 pages no matter how well-researched the material is. Insights need to be relatable and digestible, yet you also need to be able to raise funding for important interventions even if they seem cumbersome. We are lucky that FSDA has such a mandate and I look forward to continuing this journey with them and the African Union. Hopefully I will be able to report a significant drop in remittance prices due to regulatory change soon..ish.
It’s our second roundup of articles by Barcelona GSE Alumni who are now working as research assistants and economists at CaixaBank Research in Barcelona (see Vol. 1).
This roundup includes posts and videos from the second half of 2018 and early 2019, listed in reverse chronological order. Click each author’s name to view all of his or her articles from CaixaBank Research in English, Catalan, and Spanish.
Ricard Murillo ’17 (International Trade, Finance, and Development)
The importance of education for people’s well-being throughout all stages of their lives is beyond any doubt. At the economic level, individuals with higher levels of education tend to enjoy higher employment rates and income levels. What is more, all the indicators suggest that in the years to come, the role of education will be even more important. The challenges posed by technological change and globalisation have a profound effect on the educational model.
Faced with the major transformation of the productive system brought about by technological change and globalisation, as well as the challenges posed by an ageing population, it is important to take action to strengthen social cohesion – an indispensable element if we are to carry out reforms that foster an inclusive and sustained form of growth.
The US and the euro area are at different stages of their financial cycles: while the Fed’s monetary policy is close to becoming neutral or even restrictive, the ECB remains in clearly accommodative territory. However, to some extent, both are facing a common risk: the decoupling between their monetary policy and the financial conditions. The two institutions will try to manage their tools carefully, in order to facilitate a gradual adjustment of the financial conditions in the US and, in the case of the euro area, to keep them in accommodative territory.
Gerard Arqué ’09 (Macroeconomic Policy and Financial Markets)
Thanks to the implementation of the measures introduced following the financial crisis, today the financial sector is more robust than before. This will help to minimise the impact to the economy and financial stability in periods of upheaval, since countries with better-capitalised banking systems tend to experience shorter recessions and less contraction in the supply of credit. However, the outstanding tasks we have mentioned should be properly addressed sooner rather than later.
Central banks are facing the challenge of removing the extraordinary measures imposed during the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the subsequent economic recession. In normal times, central banks would simply raise interest rates up to the desired level. However, monetary policy is currently in a rather unconventional cycle.
IND+I Science award for research by Kinga Tchorzewska ’15 (Economics)
I am honoured and overjoyed to have received the IND+I Science award in the category of “Green Industry for Sustainable Growth.” Big thank you to Magdalena Dominguez ’17 and Rodrigo Martinez ’17 for representing me at the award ceremony! So delighted and motivated even more to work hard towards research on public policies and green innovation!
Moltes gràcies! Thank you so much for the recognition! It is an honour and such joy to realise that your research can be interesting to others and appreciated! We need new ideas for policy design that encourage firms' green investment. #GREENGROWTH#ECOTAXhttps://t.co/BxVH0Se3si
Fellow BGSE alum Magdalena Domínguez ’15 collects the prize on Kinga’s behalf
About the paper
This paper investigates the effectiveness of environmental taxation at stimulating adoption of energy efficient and pollution abating technologies across manufacturing firms.
To that aim, we use the fact that Spain does not have a consolidated environmental taxation policy at the national level, instead there exist significant differences between regions in implementation of the environmental taxes e.g. air pollution taxes, waste taxes and others. We use categorical treatment matching to study the heterogenous effects of different levels of taxation on adoption of green technologies. We assess the effects between firms forced to pay environmental taxation (treated) and those that did not have to pay such taxes (controls) as well as between different levels of environmental taxation (small, medium, large). We control for time and firm fixed effects thanks to the use of a panel data set of 2,562 Spanish firms between 2008 and 2014.
We find that environmental taxation is ineffective at stimulating green technologies adoption at low levels of environmental taxation. As we increase the level of taxation the effect increases. Additionally, we find that even low levels of environmental taxation can be effective if combined with public financing. In that case the effect is stronger than from providing public financing alone.
The research leading to these results has received funding from RecerCaixa (RecerCaixa project 2016: The climate change challenge: policies for energy transition) and it is supervised by my advisor Prof. José Garcia-Quevedo.
I would also like to add that I will be awarded a SEBAP Research Mobility Grant this month, which is financing my current stay at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working with Prof. Tatyana Deryugina.
A poster by Carlo Borella ’17 (Economics) has won the Festival Prize at the 2019 LSE Research Festival.
A poster created byCarlo Alessandro Borella ’17 has won the Festival Prize at the 2019 LSE Research Festival. This prize was awarded to the shortlisted submission that best engaged with the LSE Festival theme “New World (Dis)Orders” as judged by LSE Director Minouche Shafik.
Carlo’s poster is based on a paper of that same title that he wrote with fellow Barcelona GSE alum, Diego Rossinelli ’17 (Economics). That paper was published in SocioEconomic Challenges a few months after they graduated from the Barcelona GSE Master’s.
Carlos receives the award at the LSE Research Festival
About the paper
Nowadays, it is hard to venture online without coming across a heated discussion over “Fake News”; as a result, people are finding hard times moving through an entirely new distorted era of misinformation. In this paper, we investigate the effect of fake news on people’s opinion polarisation.
Book chapter by Daniele Alimonti ’16 (Economics of Public Policy)
While working as a research assistant at the Barcelona GSE, Daniele Alimonti ’16 (Economics of Public Policy) co-authored this chapter of the book “Green Public Procurement Strategies for Environmental Sustainability” curated by Rajesh Kumar Shakya (The World Bank, USA) and published by IGI Global. His co-authors are professors and researchers from Tor Vergata University in Rome, Italy.
Daniele shares this summary of the article:
The article aims to highlight the advantages of Green Public Procurement (GPP) practices to address the environmental and economic problems during the different stages of the tendering procedure. Laying on the experiences of the European countries, the research has the objective to reconstruct the state of the art of green public procurement through the lens of a cross-country comparative analysis. After introducing a systematic review of the literature and the core regulations of the GPP practice, the article underlines the results of a multidimensional analysis on a cluster of 80 practices, identified by the European Union and implemented by governments in 25 countries at a central, regional, or local government level. The framework of the analysis builds on several dimensions, mapping the main results on the following levels: geographic origin, government level, implementation period, main criteria used for implementation, as well as environmental and economic impact of such practices.
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