We are living through a period of high inflation, driven by rising energy prices. Price hikes have an uneven impact on society, affecting low-income households in a particularly severe manner (Menyhert 2022). This, in turn, calls for mitigation policies that are at least partly targeted towards society’s most vulnerable groups, such as social tariffs or […]
Starting with the 2007-2009 crisis and continuing with the Covid-19 pandemic, financial markets have faced a series of adverse liquidity shocks. As a result, central banks expanded their policy frameworks as enhanced lenders of last resort and market makers of last resort. This column summarises the key features of these expanded policy toolkits and how […]
Western support for Ukraine against the unprovoked aggression by Russia since 24 February 2022 is often presented as a form of solidarity with, or even charity towards, the innocent victims of this brutal and cruel act of Russian imperialism. From that perspective, Ukraine’s continuous requests for financial and military help against the Russian aggressor are […]
Precision medicine has been widely heralded for its potential to transform both the practice of medicine and the economics of healthcare. Also known as personalised medicine, precision medicine targets treatments to patients based on their genetic, biological, or clinical characteristics. Examples include using biomarkers and genetic testing to personalise cancer treatment (Banerjee et al. 2020) […]
The aftermath of the 2007-2009 financial crisis resulted in the widespread adoption of tougher bank regulation, exemplified by the 2010 Accord of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, known as Basel III. However, a concern has emerged about the possibility that the effectiveness of the new regulation may be hindered by a shift of intermediation […]
The 1930s are the classic period of deglobalisation and protectionism: a trade policy disaster (Irwin 2011). And yet, detailed quantitative studies of interwar trade policy remain relatively scarce. Early studies, based on very aggregate measures such as average tariffs or trade bloc dummy variables, tended to conclude that the impact of protectionism was surprisingly small (Irwin 1998, […]
Technological and organisational change is seen as one of the most critical factors driving the decline in the employment share of routine jobs (i.e. jobs that are predominantly repetitive and prescriptive in the tasks required). This is illustrated in a strand of papers (e.g. Autor et al. 2003, Goos and Manning 2007, Acemoglu and Autor […]
A recent trend in research emphasises the implications of monetary policy not only for aggregate outcomes like inflation or the unemployment rate, but also for inequality. The trend has motivated, for example, several columns on Vox discussing the empirical impact of monetary shocks on the distribution of income and wealth (e.g. Ampudia et al. 2018, […]
The COVID-19 pandemic brought a large, lasting shift to work from home (Barrero et al. 2021b, Aksoy et al. 2022, and Schwellnus et al. 2022). Clearly, this shift reduces the amount of time that workers spend commuting. But how much time does work from home actually save? And how do workers allocate their time savings? […]
Since the late 1980s, many countries have reformed the legal frameworks governing central banks to protect these institutions from undue political influence and safeguard price (and financial) stability (Grilli et al. 1991, Cukierman et al. 1992, Romelli 2022). However, legal or de jure independence does not necessarily translate into actual or de facto independence. Laws […]
