The US Inflation Reduction Act has sparked concern in the EU that it could shift investments to the US, threatening EU competitiveness in burgeoning green industries. This column argues that this perceived negative impact should be re-evaluated in light of the EU’s own green funding initiatives. With strategic use of available EU funds, member states […]
Government guarantee programmes for bank loans to businesses adopted during the COVID-19 crisis were broad in scope and sometimes quite different in their design and terms. A new CEPR Policy Insight uses a survey of 17 central banks to explore policy lessons by examining the design parameters of the guarantee programmes implemented in their jurisdictions […]
What do politicians think of the ECB? Based on an elite survey of the Members of the European Parliament, this column gauges elected policymakers’ attitudes towards the mandate and policy conduct of the ECB. The political orientation of politicians largely drives attitudes towards the central bank’s mandate and its policy conduct, but less so on […]
The US healthcare system relies on a heavily subsidised and lightly regulated private sector, and despite living in the world’s wealthiest country, millions of Americans remain uninsured, underinsured, or unsure of their coverage. This column examines the rise of private health insurance after WWII, when the American Medical Association – an interest group representing physicians […]
To achieve the internationally agreed temperature targets, increasingly stringent climate policies are of utmost importance. This column argues that theory-based scenarios, termed ‘economic pathways’, are a powerful tool to induce efficient policies. Calibrating a dynamic economic climate model to calculate different economic pathways reveals that deep decarbonisation only moderately delays economic development, while population growth […]
Energy prices have played an important role in the recent surge in inflation. This column analyses the relationship between energy price shocks and inflation expectations of both households and firms. It finds that households extrapolate their personal experience of energy price increases to their view of the overall economy. Meanwhile, firms exhibit significant pass-through to […]
Wage inequality has increased dramatically in the US since the 1970s, largely driven by within-firm earnings inequality. This column uses combined data from three large micro datasets to study the drivers and implications of within-firm inequality. It shows that employees across the entire wage distribution gain from higher firm productivity, but these gains are unequally […]
Vaccine hesitancy continues to pose a challenge not only for low- and middle-income countries, but also for many high-income countries, many of which are confronted with significant within-country variation in vaccine take-up. This column examines the potential role of historical factors and provides evidence that, in the context of Germany, county-level vaccination rates today can […]
Why don’t more households participate in the stock market? The two reasons often cited in the literature are risk aversion and frictions that prevent participation, such as the cost of maintaining a brokerage account or of paying attention to the markets. This column exploits firms switching their default asset allocation from a money market fund […]
Carbon pricing initiatives, in the form of carbon taxes or emissions trading systems, have mushroomed in the last two decades, providing an opportunity to better understand their economic consequences. This column shows that emissions trading systems are associated with larger volatility in consumer price inflation, while no significant impact is found in the case of […]
