Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it has become increasingly important to evaluate the economic costs of trade sanctions for both the sanctioned and sanctioning countries. This column introduces a new approach to assessing the consequences of trade sanctions that is easy to implement from available data and accessible to the public on a web-based […]
The modern business cycle features long expansions, short recessions, and significant international co-movement. This column explores the changing nature of the business cycle using historical national accounts for nine European economies between 1300 and 2000. The modern business cycle emerged at the end of the 18th century and the crucial change for long-run economic performance […]
Government purchases of goods and services are composed of many transactions distributed across diverse industries. Using the universe of federal US procurement contracts, this column shows that sectoral spending results in higher employment, prices, and wages in industries that receive public procurement and in those supplying intermediate inputs to them. However, downstream in the production […]
The European electricity market remains fragmented into national wholesale markets. Most neighbouring countries are connected by transmission lines, but in most cases this transmission capacity is occasionally congested, resulting in different prices in different markets. In other words, one country might have cheaper generation units available, but these are not running because not enough transmission capacity is […]
Women and racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented amongst US economics undergraduates, PhDs, and academic faculty relative both to the US population and to many other academic disciplines. This column focuses on socioeconomic diversity, and documents that US economics PhDs have more highly educated parents than PhD recipients in other disciplines and that the lack […]
The impact of productivity on employment stirs debate amid fears of the technology’s negative effect on labour demand. This column discusses how productivity growth affects employment dynamics at various levels of aggregation, based on data from 13 countries spanning the last two decades. The findings uncover a positive association between productivity growth and employment as […]
By most measures the oil market is the weakest it has been since late June before Saudi Arabia and its OPEC⁺ partners reduced by crude production by more than 1 million barrels per day. Front-month prices and calendar spreads have retreated sharply since the end of September, reversing much of the spectacular increase over the […]
Alphabet’s Google, Meta Platforms and TikTok on Thursday won backing from Europe’s top court in their fight against an Austrian law requiring them to delete hate speech or face fines of up to ($10.69 million). The Austrian law, enacted in 2021 and which obliges Big Tech to publish regular reports of illegal content, comes amid mounting concerns […]
An EU tribunal made legal errors when it ruled in favour of Apple over a 13-billion-euro ($14 billion) tax order and should review the case again, an adviser to Europe’s top court said on Thursday, in a potential setback for the iPhone maker. The tax case against Apple was part of EU antitrust chief Margrethe […]
The issues of whether and how banks penalise climate risk in their lending activities, and how monetary policy affects this, are key for policymaking. This column uses credit register data for euro area banks and carbon emission data for firms to show that banks charge higher lending rates to high-emission firms and lower rates to […]
