Band 13, Heft 1

The influence of politics on economic policy is not fully understood. The challenge to ensure political inclusiveness and economic prosperity remains. Perhaps, one way to attain this objective is by increasing political competition. This paper gathers empirical evidence from Pakistan, a country with a checkered political history characterized by episodes of representative, non-representative, and indirectly elected governments. In recent years, the country has witnessed a gradual strengthening of democratic rules with economic progress. Focusing on nine elections held over 1970 to 2015 the authors measure political competition and estimate its impact on economic policy. Contrary to popular conceptions about Pakistan’s economy, they find a positive association between lack of political competition and poor economic policy. This finding holds at national as well as subnational levels in Pakistan and withstands a number of robustness tests.

In this study, the author explores the effect of industry competition on public R&D subsidy effectiveness. He finds a non-linear threshold effect of industry competition on R&D subsidy effectiveness. Specifically, R&D subsidy effectiveness reaches its peak when industry competition lies between two estimated thresholds.

This paper applies the statistical concepts of σ -convergence and unconditional β -convergence to institutional development within several country groups hierarchized to the degree of European integration (e.g., euro area). Two sets of indicators are employed to measure institutional development: first, the Worldwide Governance Indicators, and second, the product market regulation indicator of the OECD and the Doing Business distance to frontier indicator of the World Bank. The authors can clearly confirm institutional β -convergence within the EU and its aspirants, which is mainly driven by the new Member States and acceding, candidate, and potential candidate countries. However, euro-area countries converge only in the area of product market and business regulation— not in the area of governance. In fact, the authors show evidence for β -divergence in rule of law within the first twelve euro-area members. Concerning σ -convergence, the results are less clear. Only the EU including the EU-aspirants reduced the cross-country variance in all aspects of institutional development.

The recent vote by Britain to quit the European Union (EU) and the political pressures in some member countries to exit the EU necessitates a critical evaluation of the long-run economic benefits of economic integration or union to member countries. Consequently, this paper examines recent empirical studies on the nexus between economic integration and economic growth in developed and developing countries. It also investigates the literature concerning the impact of financial integration on economic growth. Evidence from the study shows that although other views exist, there is overwhelming support for the growthenhancing effects of economic integration, albeit common currency adoption has an insignificant effect on economic growth. The channels through which economic integration exerts its influence on economic growth include capital accumulation, productivity growth, trade, and financial integration. However, the study shows that the impact of financial integration on economic growth is inconclusive. Based on the findings, the study draws some implications and policy options.

A correlation curve is introduced as a tool to study the degree of intergenerational income mobility, i.e. how income status is related between parents and adult child. The method overcomes the shortcomings of the elasticity of children’s income with respect to parents’ income (i.e. its sensitiveness to different dispersion among the generations) and the correlation coefficient (i.e. its inability to capture nonlinearities). The method is particularly suitable for comparative studies and in this study labour earnings are compared to disposable income. The correlation between the parental income and the child’s adult disposable income becomes stronger for higher percentiles in the income distribution of the parents. Above the median the correlation is found to be stronger than for labour earnings. Interestingly, the elasticity is higher for labour earnings for most part of the distribution and complementing the elasticity with correlation curves provides a much more complete picture of the intergenerational income mobility.

The authors examine the impacts of quality of institutions, border and transport efficiency, physical and communication infrastructure on overall and intra-Africa trade covering 44 African countries and their 173 trade partners for the periods 2000–2014. Aggregate indicators are derived for the quality of economic institutions, border and transport efficiency, physical and communication infrastructure using principal component analysis. The findings disclose that intra-Africa and overall Africa's trade robustly determined by the quality of institutions, border and transport efficiency, physical and communication infrastructure. The estimates also indicate that the marginal effect of the quality of institutions, physical and communication infrastructure on trade flow appears to be increasing in GDP per capita. In contrast, the marginal effect of border and transport efficiency on trade decreases in GDP per capita. The authors compute the simulation of improving each indicator to the best performer in the sample. Their findings are robust to estimation method conducted to account for potential endogeneity.

While there seems to be a well-established consensus about the underlying causes to the Greek crisis, less is known about internal and external transmission mechanisms that ultimately caused unemployment to increase rapidly over this period. Motivated by the structural slumps theory in Phelps ( Structural slumps, 1994), the paper attempts, therefore, to uncover the dynamic mechanisms behind prices, interest rates, and external imbalances that contributed to the severity and the length of the crisis. The authors find that the strongly increasing real bond rate and unemployment rate together with an persistently appreciating real exchange rate and a deterioration of competitiveness in the eurozone have contributed to persistently growing structural imbalances in the Greek economy. As the lack of confidence in the Greek economy grew steadily, the scene was set for a monumental structural slump. Over the crisis period, all variables exhibited self-reinforcing feedback adjustment somewhere in the system except for inflation rate. Unemployment took the burden of adjustment when the bond rate sky rocketed, competitiveness deteriorated, and confidence fell.

The aim of this study is to investigate sources of food prices volatility. The analysis uses daily series for volatility of corn, soybean, wheat, rice, US dollar, crude oil, and SP500 futures spanning the period January 4, 2000 to April 1, 2017. The authors employ the generalized vector autoregressive framework in rolling sample approach in order to capture the time-varying nature of volatility spillovers. The results reveal that: volatility spillovers measures change over time; most of the volatility spillovers are observed within the two groups of markets: food markets and “non-food” markets; corn market is net volatility transmitter.

Do short-term contracts facilitate the transition into permanent contracts? We use a rich administrative database for the Emilia-Romagna northern region in Italy from 2008 to 2012 to run a stepping-stone analysis and evaluate which contractual agreement is more likely to lead to a permanent working position. We find that individual specific characteristics make it more likely for a worker to be employed with a specific contractual agreement and that the contribution towards more working stability varies with the previous contract. We conclude that fixed-term positions act more as stumbling blocks than building blocks for open-ended contracts.

The study aims at providing new evidence with respect to the still unresolved question, whether the innovation behaviour of firms reflects industry-specific characteristics (“technological regime approach”), or whether it is the outcome of firm-specific strategies to gaining a competitive edge (“strategic management view”). To this end, the author firstly identifies a set of innovation strategies (cluster analysis), whose adequacy he evaluates using the “economics of innovation” as reference. Secondly, the author investigates the dynamics of innovation strategies to get some insights into structural change of the economy. Thirdly, he examines, based on a large number of 4-digit industries, the intra-industry heterogeneity of innovation strategies. Finally, the author analyses in a production function framework the relative importance of a company’s innovation strategy and its industry affiliation as determinants of firm performance. The third part of the paper tends to support the “strategic management view” (high intraindustry heterogeneity), while the final one is rather in line with the “technological regime approach” (industry affiliation is more important as a factor determining firm performance). These opposite findings indicate that a company has a certain room of manoeuvre to choose an innovation strategy in line with its specific capabilities, but some structural characteristics at industry level restrict its strategic options.

This study illuminates the difference in the intraday return-volume relationships of spot and index futures. The quantile regression analyses show that the widening effect of the spot trading volume on the distribution of spot returns disappears within a short period of time, whereas that of the futures trading volume on the distribution of spot returns remains over the relatively long term. The short-term effect of the spot volume and the long-term effect of the futures volume are consistent for trading volume shocks. The findings suggest that the spot volume is primarily induced by the demand for hedging or differences of opinion, whereas the futures volume contains information about price movements.

There is an increasing need for analysing the demand for skills in the labour market. While most studies aggregate skills in groups or use available proxies for them, the authors analyse the demand by employers for individual competences. Such an analysis better reflects reality because companies usually require job candidates to have particular competences, rather than generally defined groups of skills. However, no method exists to analyse on a large scale which competences are required by employers. At a detailed level, there are hundreds of competences; thus, this demand cannot be measured in a sample survey. The authors propose a method for conducting a continuous and efficient analysis of the demand for competences of prospective employees. The method involves collecting online job offers and analysing them with data mining and text analysis tools. The authors use this method to analyse transversal competences in the Polish labour market. Their findings indicate that companies typically required only certain competences—especially ‘language and communication competences’—while neglecting others. The number of job candidate requirements was counter-cyclical. However, the structure of the competences demanded did not change during the analysed period.

The one-child policy was implemented in September 1980 and abolished in late 2015. With this change in the demographic policy, the fertility decision of families also changed. Such decisions can result in an increase in the number of siblings in a family. Individuals' educational outcomes may be affected by a change in their parents' fertility decision. The objective of this paper is to provide evidence of the difference of educational outcomes between the only-child and the non-only child. The authors try to estimate the change of educational outcomes when the only child of a family turns to the child with siblings. Moreover, they estimate different channels to interpret these effects. They employ the data set of China Education Panel data in this paper. In the part of mechanism check, the Sobel-Good test is used for checking the mediation effects of different channels. The authors found the only child has significant higher educational outcomes comparing to a child who has siblings. To explain these effects, the authors use four channels to interpret: (1) money resource, (2) parenting time, (3) closeness of parent-child relationships, and (4) personality traits. The policy implication is to help the policymaker estimate and predict the impact of new demographic policy.

In this paper the authors investigate the statistical properties of some cryptocurrencies by using three layers of analysis: alpha-stable distributions, Metcalfe’s law and the bubble behaviour through the LPPL modelling. The results show, in the medium to long-run, the validity of Metcalfe's law (the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system) for the evaluation of cryptocurrencies; however, in the short-run, the validity of Metcalfe’s law for Bitcoin is questionable. According to the bidirectional causality between the price and the network size, the expected price increase is a driver for more investors to join the Bitcoin network, which may lead in the end to a super-exponential price growth, possibly due to a herding behaviour of investors. The authors then used LPPL models to capture the behaviour of cryptocurrencies exchange rates during an endogenous bubble and to predict the most probable time of the regime switching. The main conclusion of this paper is that Metcalfe’s law may be valid in the long-run, however in the short-run, on various data regimes, its validity is highly debatable.

In this paper, the authors present an EOQ model with substitutions between products and a dynamic inventory replenishment policy. Their key assumption is that many products in the market are substitutable at different levels, and that, in most cases, a customer who discovers that a desired product is unavailable will choose to consume a product with similar attributes or functionality, rather than not purchase at all. Therefore, given a firm that stocks multiple substitutable products, the authors assume that a stock out of one product has a direct impact on other products’ demand. The main purpose of our model is to enable inventory managers to develop ordering policies that ensures that, in the event that a specific product runs out and cannot be replenished due to unforeseen circumstances, the consequent increase in demand for related products will not cause further stock out incidents. To this end, the authors introduce a dependency factor, a variable that indicates the level of dependency, or correlation, between one product and another. The dependencies among the various products offered by the firm are embedded into the EOQ formula and assumptions, enabling managers to update their ordering schedules as needed. This approach has the potential to generate more practical and realistic purchasing and inventory optimization policies.

This work examines in depth the hypotheses explaining the tax capacity of regional governments, also determining their tax effort and explanatory factors. The study is done for the Spanish regions, using different techniques which have rarely been applied in this area. The results show that these jurisdictions have exercised their tax autonomy responsibly, in response to different budget and demographic factors and to the economic cycle. Also, an asymmetrical tax behaviour linked to income is observed: some regions have practically exhausted the possibilities of current sub-central taxes, while others still have ample fiscal space.

The analysis of open macroeconomies typically assumes (implicitly or explicitly) that resource allocation decisions are taken by domestic agents. The Portfolio Theory of Inflation (PTI) developed in this study assumes that some critical allocation decisions are taken by global investors and investigates how such decisions affect the effectiveness of macroeconomic policy in open and highly financially integrated economies. The PTI adopts a modified version of the portfolio balance approach to exchange rate determination and incorporates optimal intertemporal choices from global investors who allocate resources internationally based, inter alia, on the perceived policy credibility of the national authorities and their policies. The PTI shows that when a country has low credibility and is heavily indebted, investors hold its economy to a tighter intertemporal budget constraint and policies aimed to stimulate output growth do in fact dissipate into currency depreciation and higher inflation, with limited or no impact on output. On the other hand, high credibility creates space for effective and non-inflationary macro policies with limited impact on nominal variables.

The authors use US data on media coverage of politics and individual survey data to document that citizens exposed to more politicized newspapers have more extreme political preferences. This polarization effect of media is mainly driven by individuals who harbor liberal opinions reading more newspapers, as opposed to individuals endorsing rather conservative positions. More politicized media also reinforce other aspects of citizens’ political sophistication such as political knowledge. This enhanced political sophistication materializes in observable involvement in politics, measured by campaign contributions.

Most economists measure labor productivity based on activities conducted at places of work and do not consider leisure time in their calculations. In contrast, psychologists and sociologists argue that leisure has a positive role in the production process: leisure can improve individuals’ labor productivity by affecting their self-development. Using empirical data from 21 OECD countries, this study finds that leisure time has a dual effect on labor productivity in terms of per capita per hour GDP. Moreover, leisure time is nonlinearly associated with labor productivity (inverted U-shaped). When leisure time reaches the optimal level (5,813 hours), leisure has a compensatory effect on work and can positively influence labor productivity, but when leisure time exceeds the optimal value, leisure has a substitution effect on work and can negatively influence labor productivity.

Persistent house price increases are a likely candidate for consideration in fertility decisions. Theoretically, higher housing prices will cause renters to desire fewer additional children, but home owners to desire more children if they already have sufficient housing and low substitution between children and other “goods”, and fewer children otherwise. In this paper, the authors combine longitudinal data from the Canadian Survey of Labour Income and Dynamics (SLID) and averaged housing price data from the Canadian Real Estate Association to estimate the effect of housing prices on fertility in a housing market that has historically been less volatile and more conservative than its American counterpart has. They ask whether changes in lagged housing price affect the marginal fertility of homeowner and renter women aged 18–45. They present results both excluding and including those who move outside their initial real estate board area, using initial area housing prices as an instrument in the latter case. For homeowners, but not renters, the authors predominantly find evidence that lagged housing prices have a positive effect on marginal fertility and possibly on completed fertility. These pro-natal effects are confined to non-movers.

The authors analyze to what extent and how the tax burden should be shifted towards top income earners in order to reduce income inequality. Starting from Lambert and Aronson (Inequality decomposition analysis and the Gini coefficient revisited 1993) and Alvaredo (A note on the relationship between top income shares and the Gini coefficient 2011) decomposition by income groups, they prove that for three types of revenue-neutral linear personal income tax reforms (PIT) based on Pfähler (1984) the redistributive effect is always higher than before the reform; and when the size of the rich group is sufficiently small (e.g. 1%), the best option is allocating tax changes proportionally to net income, and the worst doing it proportionally to tax liabilities. An empirical illustration of the theoretical results is provided using micro data from the Spanish PIT.

This article brings empirical evidence on the effect of fiscal consolidation in decentralized countries. The focus on Spain is justified by three reasons. First, it is one of the OECD countries most affected by the Great recession in terms of both GDP and public deficit. Second, Spain is one of the most decentralized countries in the world. Third, compliance with fiscal consolidation targets has been very diverse across regions. Using both time series econometrics and the Synthetic Control Method approach (SCM), we show that compliance with fiscal targets at the regional level has not involved lower GDP growth rates in the short-run. Openness and economic integration of regional economies involve that fiscal multipliers tend to fade. Hence, while a fiscal stimulus would not work on this scale, the opposite is also true: the potentially negative demand effects of a stronger regional fiscal consolidation strategy would be exported to other regions.

The authors analyze financial interactions between chartists with bounded leverage and fundamentalists within a heterogeneous agent model, focusing on the role of fundamentalists to stabilize prices. While many related studies are solely based on simulations, the authors analytically prove that the existence of fundamentalists is insufficient to avoid asset price bubbles for a certain setup of a feedback trader model. Moreover, similar studies very often face the criticism that chartists might run out of money before the emergence of bubbles, as these studies typically analyze the role of chartists with unbounded leverage. In the work at hand, however, the authors prove that even in an environment where chartists have limited access to finance, their investment behavior can lead to exploding prices. The chartists under study are so-called positive feedback traders, whose leverage is bounded. Additionally, the authors derive upper boundaries for positive feedback traders’ initial investment necessary to avoid exploding prices. In order to stabilize stock/asset markets, intervention measures might be helpful.

Dividend policy is still a largely discussed issue in corporate finance literature. One of the main indicators used in analysing the dividend policy is the dividend payout ratio. Using a database consisting of 12,085 companies operating in 73 countries, for the period 2008–2014, the authors found that the dividend payout ratio follows a Tweedie distribution, and not a normal one. This distribution is stable over time for the entire analysed period. In addition, it describes the case of almost all the countries included in the sample. Thus, a better estimation of the probability that dividend payout ratio is lower or higher than a benchmark can be provided. Also, an analysis of dividend policy, distinctly considering payer versus non-payer companies, can offer additional important information for both practitioners and academics.

As the problem of carbon emissions is becoming increasingly more serious around the world, how to balance carbon emissions reduction and economic growth has become an important issue in the field of environmental economics. China is the world's largest carbon dioxide emitter, and China's Low-Carbon Pilot (CLCP) policy has significantly reduced carbon dioxide emissions and achieved expected benefits. However, is environmental quality improving at the expense of economic growth? This article selects macro panel data of 286 Chinese prefecturelevel cities and micro data of Chinese industrial enterprises from 2001 to 2013, takes the CLCP policy implementation by five provinces and eight cities as a quasi-natural experiment, uses difference-in-differences (DID) method to investigate the causal effect of CLCP policy on regional economic growth and enterprise behavior. The results are as follows. First, the CLCP policy significantly promotes regional economic growth. Moreover, as the implementation time of the policy continues, environmental regulation has a greater effect of promoting economic growth. Second, although the CLCP policy significantly increases various production costs, it also promotes the growth of enterprises' output and benefits. Third, under the pressure of enterprise cost increase caused by environmental regulation, enterprises choose the positive way of strengthening internal management, improving efficiency and increasing innovation instead of choosing the negative way of trans-regional transfer, and finally achieve an improvement in output and benefits.

The authors investigate whether the home advantage in soccer differs by various dimensions of distance between the (regions of the) home and away teams: geographical distance, climatic differences, cultural distance, and disparities in economic prosperity. To this end, the authors analyse 2,012 recent matches played in the UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League by means of several regression models. They find that when the home team plays at a higher altitude, they benefit substantially more from their home advantage. Every 100 meters of altitude difference is associated with an increase in expected probability to win the match, as the home team, by 1.1 percentage points. The other dimensions of distance are not significantly associated with a higher or lower home advantage. By contrast, the authors find that the home advantage in soccer is more outspoken when the number of spectators is higher and when the home team is substantially stronger than the away team.

This paper extends the traditional analysis of the output effect under monopoly (third-degree) price discrimination to a multimarket oligopoly. The author shows that under oligopoly price discrimination, differences in competitive pressure, measured by the number of firms, across markets are more important than the relative demand curvature when determining the effect on total output.

This paper studies the role of personal characteristics, perceptual variables and country- level conditioning (financial environment, government quality and support, education quality and entrepreneurship know-how, innovation environment and support, business infrastructure, entrepreneurial culture and society, and gender roles) in explaining the export propensity and intensity of nascent entrepreneurs in four Southern European countries (Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece), using Total Early-stage Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) dataset in 2003–2010. Due to the nascent nature of the business, export activity is starting or about to start at the time of the survey and, for that reason, it cannot be studied using theoretical frameworks based on productivity heterogeneity, which has not yet been measured. In this sample of nascent businesses, there is no evidence of a selection effect into exporting and the individual-level factors influencing export propensity and intensity are identical. The most relevant individual-level variables facilitating export activity are new products, new technology, graduate education, and entrepreneurship networks. The most relevant country-level factors facilitating export activity are the availability of funding, the national government’s macroeconomic support, and the support for new technology.

This paper puts forward a proposal to help monetary policies confront the challenge of the “normalisation” of money creation and interest rates. The difficult unwinding of years of unorthodox policies put financial stability at risk in major monetary centres and in EMEs. The authors argue that global coordination is crucial to facing this challenge. They propose to convene appropriate official meetings to coordinate in an explicit, formal, and wellcommunicated way the process of normalisation and the discussions on the needed longterm changes in the strategy and institutional setting of monetary policies.

In this paper the authors propose that G20 countries endorse and facilitate the creation of a T20 digital platform for “Accelerating the Jobs of the Future”. In a world driven by a new wave of technological change, the platform would revalue the role of think tanks, research institutions and knowledge hubs to move the global agenda in an issue of central importance for the future of society: the creation of the jobs of the future. Building on and complementing existing experiences, the T20 platform would be a digital hub for producing knowledge, informing policies and connecting potential partners to accelerate the jobs of the future, within the context of an increasing integrated global economy. It would also contribute to the development of consensual views among the research community, allowing to discard extreme visions about the jobs of the future, dispelling both overly optimistic visions with no evidence base and unwarranted fears.

The relationship between many G20 governments and organized civil society has become more complex, laden with tensions, and such that both have to find more optimal modes of engagement. In some instances, state-civil society relations have worsened, leading some experts and activists to speak of a “shrinking space” for civil society. How wide-spread is this phenomenon? Are these more isolated occurrences or indeed part of a more general development? How can countries achieve and maintain an enabling environment for civil society? The authors suggest that much of the current impasse results foremost from outdated and increasingly ill-suited regulatory frameworks that fail to accommodate a much more diverse and expanded set of civil society organizations (CSO). In response, they propose a differentiated model for a regulatory framework based on functional roles. Based on quantitative profiling and expert surveys, moreover, the paper also derives initial recommendations on how governments and civil society could find ways to relate to each other in both national and multilateral contexts.

Despite the headway the world has experienced over the last couple of years in terms of a substantial increase in digital access, there are still significant challenges to overcome in ensuring women are included in the transformation to a digital society, which in turn will enhance productivity and social development. Efforts to increase internet adoption access through broadband plans and legislative reforms have yielded improvements in use and adoption. However, there is still a stark and pervasive gender inequality in terms of access, ownership of digital devices, digital fluency as well as the capacity to make meaningful use of the access to technology. Even though affordability is a key source of exclusion, there are also significant socio-cultural norms that restrict access for women. This paper brings forward the argument that access alone is not enough, women need agency and capacity to leverage access. The authors thus highlight the need to make an assessment of the global gender gap and develop meaningful indicators that contribute to the design and implementation of effective policies that drive adoption. We need effective promotion of women´s digital adoption not only from the government but also from the private sector and civil society in order to lead the digital adoption of best practices for women around the world.

Governments use tax expenditures to boost investment, innovation and employment. However, these schemes are largely opaque, costly and often ineffective in reaching their stated goals. They also frequently trigger unwanted side effects. In order to improve the performance of these tools, the authors present three concrete policy proposals: First, governments should increase transparency on tax benefits. G20 members should take the lead on this with frequent and comprehensive tax expenditure reports. Second, G20 governments should improve the design of tax incentives with the aim of minimizing the generation of windfall profits and negative spillover effects within and across (in particular, on poorer) countries. Third, governments should phase out tax expenditures that are environmentally harmful, including tax incentives for fossil fuels and other schemes that promote an unsustainable use of natural resources.

Green fiscal reforms would contribute to climate change mitigation, increase the economic efficiency of national tax systems and provide additional public revenues. Some countries in Latin America have already taken first steps towards green fiscal reforms. This outlook article provides an overview of the major challenges for the successful implementation of such reforms and discusses how they could be overcome.

This paper may be summarized by the following points. First, the crisis of the liberal world order arises from a misalignment of our social, economic and political domains of activity, along with a resulting destabilization of our physical environment. The integration of the global economy has generated problems that extend beyond our current bounds of social and political cooperation. Second, extending our social cooperation – on which basis our political cooperation can be extended as well – requires the creation of the appropriate moral narratives. These narratives must guide business strategies, public policies and civic activities. Third, these narratives must be supplemented by multilevel governance structures that address challenges at the scale – micro, meso and macro – at which these challenges arise. Finally, past human experience in developing moral narratives, supported by multilevel governance structures, suggests guidelines for a future form of multilateralism that enables us to meet this challenge.

This paper argues that the traditional social contract that underlies the free market economy has run its course and needs to be replaced by a new contract, based on a new conception of the “empowering economy.” Whereas different social contracts are relevant to different societies, all these contracts have some features in common, addressing some basic human needs that are common to all. These are needs that every thriving society must satisfy. In the presence of current global problems – such as climate change and financial crises – satisfying these needs can also generate the popular approval for multilateral agreements to tackle these problems. The paper identifies three inconvenient truths for the existing social contract: (i) economic performance involves more than material prosperity, (ii) free markets naturally generate inequality, and (iii) human progress rests primarily on cooperation. In response, the paper proposes a new social contract that can be promoted through three policy approaches: (1) policy that focuses not just on material prosperity, but also on personal empowerment and social solidarity, (2) automatic stabilizers that reduce inequalities of economic power and (3) policy that develops the human capabilities of cooperation.

International cooperation in support of a global energy transition is on the rise, and official development assistance (ODA) in the energy sector is increasingly being directed to renewable energy sources. Nevertheless, it is widely acknowledged that investment towards achieving the SDG 7 on clean and affordable energy is insufficient. Moreover, investment in clean energy remains heavily concentrated in a small number of frontrunner countries and overwhelmingly targets grid-connected electricity generation. Worryingly, significant share of international public sector financeing, most notably by export-credit agencies, is still allocated to coal and other fossil-based technologies. Against this background, this paper makes three recommendations for strengthening international cooperation in support of a global energy transition. (1) Promote investment in clean energy and end support for coal-based energy infrastructure. OECD and G20 countries should lead the way by discontinuing all public investment support for new coal-based energy infrastructure and establish guidelines for support to other fossil-based investments. (2) Promote evidence-policy dialogue on the socio-economic dimension of the global energy transition. International cooperation should play an active role in mobilising socio-economic benefits and address potential risks by supporting evidencebased policy dialogue based on robust assessments at both the country and global levels. (3) Provide early market support to promote challenge-based energy innovation. SE4ALL or Mission Innovation should create multi-stakeholder, challenge-based initiatives to promote clean energy innovation in developing and emerging economies and foster early market demand for related products or services.

In July 2017, Economics: The Open Access, Open Assessment E-Journal issued a call for papers for a special issue on “The Practice of Replication.” In that call, the journal explained that there was no generally accepted procedure for how to do a replication. Likewise, there was no generally accepted standard for determining whether a replication “confirms or disconfirms” an original study. Accordingly, the journal called for papers to identify principles for how to do a replication and how to interpret its results; and to apply those principles in crafting a replication plan for a study of the author’s choosing. The hope was that this exercise would produce some progress on “the practice of replication.” The special issue is now complete with a total of eight journal articles. This commentary places the respective articles within a common framework and identifies observations and lessons learned from the respective studies.

In a standard Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides labour market with frictions, the authors seek to determine when there is more employment with individual wage bargaining than with collective wage bargaining, using a wage equation generated by the standard total surplus sharing rule. Using a Cobb-Douglas production function, they find that if the bargaining power of the individual is high compared to the bargaining power of the union, there is more unemployment with individual wage setting and vice versa. When the individual worker and the union have the same bargaining power, if the cost of opening a vacancy is sufficiently high, there is more unemployment with individual wage setting. Finally, for a constant marginal product of labour production function AL , when the individual worker and the union have the same bargaining power, individual bargaining produces more unemployment.

The purpose of the paper is to examine the direct and indirect links between democracy and economic growth. To do so, the authors estimate a dynamic panel simultaneous equations model on a sample of 16 Arab countries during the period 2002–2013. This study focuses on two particular channels through which democracy affects growth, namely FDI inflows and public consumption expenditure. The results show that there is no clear relationship between democracy and economic growth in the Arab countries, which confirms the skeptical approach. The ambiguity of this relationship can be explained by the fact that democracy promotes growth indirectly by stimulating FDI inflows and hinders growth by generating higher public consumption expenditure.

This study shows that when there is multinational competition for foreign acquisition, the strategic use of a consumer welfare argument in regulating foreign market entry leads to a preemptive foreign acquisition. Even under fierce competition, foreign acquisition will emerge as part of a non-cooperative equilibrium (although multinationals would have gained more had they been able to credibly commit to a cooperative equilibrium of independent foreign sales, either via greenfield investment or trade under complete liberalization) which increases local welfare by more than both the case without foreign market entry and the case with foreign market entry via independent foreign sales.

This study is the first to estimate a system of simultaneous gravity equations for Chinese exports, imports and foreign direct investment (FDI) using a sample of 167 countries over the period 2003–2012. The main results indicate that trade and outward FDI are complementary. In particular, the authors show that outward Chinese FDI is related to higher exports and imports and that China trades more with countries hosting Chinese FDI. Results are also robust to the use of instrumental variables. Therefore, Chinese investment seems to foster trade.

The paper evaluates the effect of Double Taxation Treaties (DTTs) on Spain’s inward and outward Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) for the period 1993–2013. Estimates produce positive and statistically significant coefficients. However, there are some differences between the inbound and outbound samples, the type of DTT and the group of developed and developing FDI partner countries. Moreover, interpretation of results differs depending on the fixed or random effects estimation technique used. The paper also analyses the effect on FDI of the rules agreed in DTTs and applied by the investors’ residence country in order to correct international double taxation. The authors conclude that the tax saving derived from the application by Spain of the territorial system is positively related to investment from this country to abroad. However, the tax saving provided by the application by the partner countries of the territorial system does not have a significant effect on the investment of these countries into Spain.

This essay addresses the recent deceleration in the pace of global FDI and asks whether multinational corporations are actually in retreat. It identifies the forces that are slowing the expansion of FDI, and sketches the role that multinational corporations will play in the future.

This paper offers an introduction to the special issue on FDI and multinational corporations: http://www.economics-ejournal.org/special-areas/special-issues/fdi-and-multinational-corporations. It summarizes the contents of the five papers included, and relates them to the recent literature on the subject.

The authors investigate the desirability of income taxes when the objective is to mitigate wasteful conspicuous consumption generated by people's status-seeking behavior. They consider the joint role of pre-tax wage inequality and of social norms determining how social status is assigned. They find that when social status is ordinal (i.e., only one's rank in the income distribution matters) inequality and taxation are substitutes. Instead, when status is cardinal (i.e., also the shape of the income distribution matters) inequality and taxation can be complements, although the relationship is in general non-monotonic. This is because the value of social status is endogenous, potentially giving rise to a perverse selfreinforcing mechanism where more waste in conspicuous consumption induces a greater competition for status and vice versa.

The recovery from the Global Financial Crisis was characterized by sluggish output growth and by inflation remaining persistently below the inflation targets of central banks in many advanced economies despite an unprecedented monetary expansion. Ten years after the Global Financial Crisis, GDP remains below its pre-crisis trend in many economies and interest rates continue to be very low. This raises the question of whether low GDP growth and low interest rates are a temporary phenomenon or are due to a decline in long-run growth prospects (potential output growth) and equilibrium real interest rates (natural interest rate). Addressing this question is important for central banks for conducting monetary policy and adjusting their strategy. In this paper, the authors address this question based on a review of the literature and an evaluation of the most recent data and discuss implications for monetary policy.

Two systems in the brain that are involved in emotional and economic decision-making are described. The first is an evolutionarily old emotion-based system that operates on rewards defined by the genes such as food, warmth, social reputation, and having children. Such decisions are often based on heuristics, such as being highly sensitive to losses, because a single loss might influence one's reproductive success. This is a multidimensional system with many rewards and punishers, all of which cannot be simultaneously optimized. The second route to decision-making involves reasoning, in which it is assumed that utility can be accurately assessed and logical reason can be applied, though the human brain is not naturally computationally good at logical assessment. When decisions are taken, all those factors apply, and in addition there is noise introduced into the system by the random firing times of neurons for a given mean firing rate. The implications for economic decision-making are described. In macroeconomics, it is assumed that the economy behaves like one “representative” agent who can take rational and logical decisions, and who can maximize utility over a constraint. Given the neuroscience of decision-making, the situation is more complex. The utility function may be multidimensional, the reward value along each dimension may fluctuate, the reasoning may be imperfect, and the decision-making process is subject to noise in the brain, making it somewhat random from occasion to occasion. Moreover, each individual has a different set of value functions along each dimension, with different sensitivities to different rewards and punishers, which are expressed in the different personalities of different individuals. These factors underlying the neuroscience of human decision-making need to be taken into account in building and utilizing macroeconomic theories.

Both mathematical modelling and simulation methods in general have contributed greatly to understanding, insight and forecasting in many fields including macroeconomics. Nevertheless, we must remain careful to distinguish model-land and model-land quantities from the real world. Decisions taken in the real world are more robust when informed by estimation of real-world quantities with transparent uncertainty quantification, than when based on “optimal” model-land quantities obtained from simulations of imperfect models optimized, perhaps optimal, in model-land. The authors present a short guide to some of the temptations and pitfalls of model-land, some directions towards the exit, and two ways to escape. Their aim is to improve decision support by providing relevant, adequate information regarding the real-world target of interest, or making it clear why today’s model models are not up to that task for the particular target of interest.

Unrealistic assumptions underlying neo-classical economic theory have been challenged by both behavioral economics and studies of moral economy. But both challengers share certain features with neo-classical theory. Complementing them, recent work in the anthropology of ethics shows that economic behavior is not reducible to either individual psychology or collective norms. This approach is illustrated with studies of transactions taking place at the borders between market rationality and ethically fraught relationships among persons—organ donation and sex work. The paper argues that the inherent value accorded to social relations tends to resist instrumentalization and that the biases that dealing with other people introduce into reasoning are not flaws but part of the core functions of rationality.

Behavioral economics aspires to replace the agents of neoclassical economics with living, breathing human beings. Here, the author argues that behavioral economics, like its neoclassical counterpart, often neglects the role of active sense-making that motivates and guides much human behavior. The author reviews what is known about the cognitive science of sense-making, describing three kinds of cognitive tools—hypothesis-inference heuristics, stories, and intuitive theories—that people use to structure and understand information. He illustrates how these ideas from cognitive science can illuminate puzzles in economics, such as decision under Knightian uncertainty, the dynamics of economic (in)stability, and the voters’ preferences over economic policies. He concludes that cognitive science more broadly can enhance the explanatory and predictive quality of behavioral economic theories.

The author studies the evolution of the number of coexisting beliefs in a financial market. Crucially, he undertakes to do so in a framework where the paradigms, beliefs, and models driving agents behavior are left totally unspecified; i.e., the author does not make any parametric or non-parametric model assumptions. The overreaching aim of this exercise is to characterise the dynamic of the variety of beliefs in an auction-based financial market independently of any assumptions on agents behaviors. The resulting framework may be seen as an abstract agent-based model. In a computer experiment the authors exhibits a cycle between two states, so that either all agents act according to the same belief, or there is no leading belief; i.e., there is one dominating belief, or none. Further, the author finds that the frequency of this cycle is positively linked to the quality of the information available to the agents.

Macroeconomic data have been shown to vary substantially between sources, especially so for low-income countries. While the impact of data revisions on inference is well documented for cross-country studies, there is no systematic analysis of the robustness of results obtained from time series analysis. This is despite the fact that time series analysis is an integral part of the econometric toolkit of government analysts, and informs policy decisions in many areas of macroeconomics. This study fills this gap for the notoriously controversial aid-effectiveness debate using the statistical framework by Juselius et al. (2014, Oxf Bull Econ Stat ): by adopting alternative sources of GDP data in 36 sub-Saharan African countries the author finds that results remain robust across datasets in two thirds of the countries, but sometimes drastically change in others. These findings suggest that robustness checks such as those carried out here should become standard procedure for macroeconomic analysis using single-country time series.