This paper provides causal evidence on the effect of credit crunches on political polarization. We combine data on bank-firm connections and electoral outcomes at the city-level during the 2008-2014 Spanish Financial Crisis. First, we show that firms in a relationship with weak banks experience a reduction in their loan supply and employment growth. Next, we estimate the effects of unemployment on ...
With the so-called 'long summer of migration' of 2015, there was an urgent need to accommodate many refugees in Germany. This situation was framed as a 'refugee reception crisis', and it revealed diametrically opposed stances within German society. Within this debate, anti-refugee sentiment is often explained with the placement of nearby refugee reception facilities. Conclusive evidence of this claim ...
Adjusting green public support programmes to green premiums can reduce public spending, yet this is challenged by uncertainty. Underfunding green technologies can delay the green transition, and overfunding them can increase transition costs. Both risks of under- and overfunding can be reduced using responsive adjustments.
While countries increasingly commit to pricing greenhouse gases directly through carbon taxes or emissions trading systems, indirect forms of carbon pricing—such as fuel excise taxes and fuel subsidy reforms—remain important factors affecting the mitigation incentives in an economy. Taken together, how can policy makers think about the overall price signal for carbon emissions and the incentive it ...
How does a monetary union alter the impact of business cycle shocks at the household level? We develop a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian model of two countries (HANK2) and show in closed form that a monetary union shifts the adjustment to a shock horizontally—across countries—within the brackets of the union-wide wealth distribution rather than vertically—that is, across the brackets of the union-wide ...
Multivariate Adaptive Regression Spline (MARS) is a simple and powerful non-parametric machine learning algorithm that automatizes the selection of non-linear terms in regression models. In this study, we propose using MARS in a spatial regression framework to account for potential non-linearities and spatial effects in spatial regression models. Using a relatively large data set of 17,000 dwellings ...
We construct a global index of epidemic news based on text analysis of newspapers from 17 countries. We apply the index to study the economic consequences of epidemics on the world economy in structural vector autoregressions. Epidemic shocks exert significantly and persistently negative effects on output and prices that last for up to two years. There is no quick recovery and no overshooting. The ...
