There is a growing friction between state governments and large asset managers over environmental, social, and governance practices. This column investigates whether institutional investors’ voting patterns on socially responsible investing vary according to the political party in control of the state government where a firm is headquartered. It finds that institutional investors are less likely […]
Tensions between fiscal and monetary policies have recently become the focus of macroeconomic policy debates. But by how much have they risen? By introducing a new r-star concept for fiscal policy that can be compared to monetary r-star, this column presents a new framework for measuring fiscal-monetary tensions. Based on 140 years of data for […]
Policy initiatives in several European countries have targeted bank profits to secure public funds. These measures include introducing windfall taxes on excess profits and, in some instances, encouraging higher, taxable dividend pay outs. At face value, the case for taxing banks appears intuitive: people are facing hardship and banks are making record profits. This column […]
Wiki Finance Expo Dubai 2024 will be held on Nov 27th! FinTech, Forex, Crypto, Web 3.0, Metaverse, ESG and AI Will Be in Focus. Taking place on Nov 27, 2024, Wiki Finance Expo Dubai 2024 is one of the largest and most influential FinTech and Web3.0 events in Asia in 2024. Participation is Free Register […]
The threat that organised crime poses to state authorities is particularly conspicuous in Italy, where the Mafia, ‘Ndrangheta, and Camorra have long held sway over local economies and governance. This column explores how exposure to organised criminal violence – as opposed to general criminal violence – affects faith in political institutions and overall social trust […]
Some decades ago, development economists saw their approach as being distinctive compared to mainstream economics in general and better grounded in the reality of actual economies. This column argues that two trends over the last decades – the significant improvement in the average income of what were called developing countries and the homogenisation of economics […]
In the decades immediately after World War II, many private employment agencies in the US were owned by women. This column investigates whether these women-owned agencies helped female jobseekers obtain better jobs. The authors find that women-owned agencies provided more opportunities to women by expanding the agency services available to them, including help finding male-dominated […]
Differences in the attention that households pay to economic news may offer important insights for the business cycle and the propagation of economic shocks. This column uses responses from the ECB’s Consumer Expectations Survey to show that in a high-inflation, high-interest-rate environment, consumers pay much more attention to price developments than to interest rates. The […]
Global poverty has decreased markedly since the 1980s, whilst access to education has improved significantly over the same period. This column uses a novel database and distributional growth accounting model of education to identify the portion of reduced global inequality that can be attributed to widespread education. The author finds that private returns to schooling […]
Increasing geopolitical fragmentation can create dilemmas for neutral countries. This column studies how firms in neutral countries adjusted their supply chains in response to Western sanctions on Russia. Firms in non-sanctioning countries reduced exports of sanctioned products to Russia when their headquarters were in sanctioning countries. However, domestic firms in neutral countries significantly increased exports […]
