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Employment Economy Featured News World

Industrial policy and retaliatory protection under the WTO: Lessons from China

Industrial policy is increasingly implemented worldwide, with many policymakers and researchers highlighting its benefits. However, the cost of industrial policy remains less understood. Using Chinese firm-level data, this column shows that higher industrial subsidies raise the likelihood and severity of foreign anti-dumping and countervailing duties at each investigation stage. These retaliatory tariffs wipe out roughly […]

Finance Banking Featured News World

Chat Bankman-Fried: An experiment on LLM ethics in finance

As large language models gain traction, it is important to ensure that decisions delegated to them comply with ethical and legal principles. This column reports on an experiment in which state-of-the-art large language models were prompted to impersonate the CEO of a fictitious financial firm needing to repay corporate debt urgently with no funds available […]

trade Economy Featured News World

From battlefield to market: How disruptions in Ukraine affected grain price trends

Commodity price spikes at the outset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine contributed significantly to global inflation in 2022-23, which caught many policymakers off guard in both its intensity and persistence. This column uses a nonstationary competitive storage model to demonstrate that, beyond the temporary surge, the war-induced reduction in Ukraine’s acreage caused an upward […]

Banking Economy Featured Finance News World

The Federal Reserve, the new administration, and the outlook for the economy and monetary policy

The new US administration has made the Federal Reserve’s monetary policymaking more complicated both because of the elevated uncertainty regarding administration policies and because of the extraordinary political pressure put on the central bank. This column describes how, thus far, the Fed has followed a cautious path for policy, waiting for more information on policy […]

Employment Education Featured News World

Information and the labour market

Workers often remain in their jobs even when they know they may get higher wages elsewhere, raising questions about the effectiveness of pay transparency laws. This column draws on a large German survey to examine how information frictions shape labour market outcomes. The findings suggest that workers are better informed than many policymakers assume, but […]

Education Featured News World

When beliefs shape policy outcomes: Lessons from preferential college admissions in Chile

Preferential college admission is gaining traction worldwide as a means to address inequality in higher education, drawing greater attention to the design of such policies. This column analyses a programme for disadvantaged high schools in Chile that offers guaranteed college admission to top-performing students. The programme increased enrolment in selective colleges but reduced pre-college academic […]

Climate Environment Featured Innovation Productivity

Adjusting productivity for carbon emissions: A new perspective on the growth slowdown

Productivity growth has been lacklustre over the past 20 years in most advanced economies. But standard productivity measures ignore the progress that some economies have made in terms of lowering carbon dioxide emissions. This column proposes a method to embed those efficiency gains into existing productivity measures. For traditional (small) estimates of the cost of […]

Education Employment Featured World

Revisiting the consequences of job displacement

Decades of research have confirmed that job displacement causes significant and persistent earnings losses. This column presents new evidence from workers displaced during firm closures in West Germany between 2000 and 2005 which suggests that these losses are in fact much more heterogeneous than previously documented, and that the large average losses documented in previous […]

Economy Banking Featured Finance

Global shocks, institutional development, and trade restrictions: Learning from crises and recoveries between 1990 and 2022

During the past 20 years, the world economy has suffered two major crises in the form of the Global Financial Crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. This column identifies the turning points of recessions and expansions in 101 advanced and developing economies between 1990 and 2022 and analyses the drivers of economic recovery. Across the sample, […]