Child labor and agricultural shocks

This paper examines the relationship between household income shocks and child labor. In particular, we investigate the extent to which transitory income shocks lead to increases in child labor and whether household asset holdings mitigate the effects of these shocks. Using data from a household panel survey in Tanzania, we find that both relationships are significant. We investigate mechanisms that could account for these results, including buffer stocks and borrowing.     

Income effects on the trade balance in small open economies

The objective is to determine the causes of the countercyclicality of the trade balance in five small open economies, namely Austria, France, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. In order to investigate the role of permanent and temporary changes in income in the determination of the trade balance, Blanchard-Quah variance decomposition procedure is applied. The results of analysis support the conclusion that transitory income shocks are major reasons for the change in the trade balance, and that negative correlation between the trade balance and income is primarily due to transitory shocks. Thus, these results are more consistent with intertemporal models with the dichotomous view in which the aggregate demand shocks are responsible for cyclical variations in the trade balance and income and aggregate supply is responsible for the long-run growth of the economy.     

Trade,income and the Baltic Dry Index

Does trade improve the income levels of the poor and less developed nations? Focusing on the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) designated by the United Nations, we construct a new measure of trade cost, based on the Baltic Dry Index (BDI), as an instrument for trade. The BDI reflects the cost of utilizing dry bulk carriers, which are specially designed vessels for transporting primary goods internationally, where these goods dominate the output and export sectors of the LDCs. We find that a 1% expansion in trade raises GDP per capita by approximately 0.5% on average. This estimate is much larger than previously found in the literature and its quantitative significance emphasizes the importance of trade towards the economic development of low income countries.     

The Persistence of Income Shocks: Evidence from Rural Indonesia

This paper estimates the persistence of transient income shocks to farm households in rural Indonesia. Persistence is defined as the elasticity of a household's 1997 household per capita income with respect to its 1993 per capita income, controlling for time‐invariant characteristics of the household. Local rainfall levels are used as an exogenous source of transitory variation in 1993 income. Four main conclusions emerge. First, roughly 30% of household income shocks remain after four years. Second, the persistence of negative and positive shocks is approximately equal; if anything, positive shocks last longer. Third, neither positive nor negative income shocks disproportionately affect poor households. Finally, measurement error in income and unobserved household heterogeneity are important sources of bias. These findings cast doubt on common arguments advocating public intervention to stabilize or redistribute income, and suggest that anti‐poverty policy should address more permanent causes of household poverty.     

Trade uncertainty,income, and democracy

Existing studies establish a strong correlation between income and democracy. Little, however, is known about whether income shocks driven by non-economic fundamentals matter for political transitions. This study employs trade uncertainty as a non-economic fundamental and examines the effect that trade uncertainty driven income variations have on democratic transitions over the period 1960–2013. We find that higher income fosters democratic transitions, but this effect works mainly for developing than developed countries. Specifically, using trade uncertainty as an instrument, we find that the Polity2 score, a measure of democracy, increases by at least 2.3 points following a 1 percentage point increase in GDP growth. This positive association is robust to exploiting conditional heteroskedasticity for identification, using different time periods, including lagged Polity2 as a regressor, and using alternative measures of GDP and democracy.     

Inequality and volatility moderation in Russia: Evidence from micro-level panel data on consumption and income

We construct key household and individual economic variables using a panel micro data set from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) for 1994–2005. We analyze cross-sectional income and consumption inequality trends and find that inequality decreased during the 2000–2005 economic recovery. The decrease appears to be driven by falling volatility of transitory income shocks. The response of consumption to permanent and transitory income shocks becomes weaker later in the sample, consistent with greater self-insurance against permanent shocks and greater smoothing of transitory shocks. Finally, expenditure and income inequality in Russia are not far apart.     

Intra- and international risk-sharing in the short run and the long run

We investigate empirically how industrialized countries and US states share consumption risk at horizons between 1 and 30 years. US federal states share about 50% of their permanent idiosyncratic risk through cross-state capital income flows. While insurance against transitory fluctuations in output is virtually complete, OECD countries do not share any of their permanent idiosyncratic risk. Our results suggest that purely transaction cost based theories cannot explain the home bias, since the potential welfare gains from insurance against permanent shocks would by far outweigh that of insuring against transitory variation. We conclude that permanent and transitory shocks constitute two qualitatively different kinds of risk and that various forms of endogenous market incompleteness may render permanent shocks a lot harder to insure, in particular at the international level.     

Fatal fluctuations? Cyclicality in infant mortality in India

This paper investigates the impact of aggregate income shocks on infant mortality in India and investigates likely mechanisms. A recent OECD-dominated literature reports the provocative finding that mortality at most ages is pro-cyclical. Similar analyses for poorer countries are scarce, and both income risk and mortality risk are greater in poor countries. This paper uses data and methods designed to avoid some of the specification problems in previous studies and it explores mechanisms and extensions that have not been previously considered. It uses individual data on infant mortality for about 150,000 children born in 1970-1997, merged by cohort and state of birth with a state panel containing information on aggregate income. Identification rests upon comparing the effects of annual deviations in income from trend on the mortality risks of children born at different times to the same mother, conditional upon a number of state-time varying covariates including rainshocks and state social expenditure. Rural infant mortality is counter-cyclical, the elasticity being about − 0.33. This is despite the finding that relatively high-risk women avert birth or suffer fetal loss in recessions. It seems in part related to recessions stimulating distress labor amongst mothers, in contrast to the case in richer countries, where they discourage labor market participation. Health-care seeking declines in recessions, and this appears to be related to the opportunity cost of maternal time. Disaggregation reveals that the average results are driven by rural households in which the mother is uneducated or had her first birth in teenage, and that it is only girls that are at risk; boys are protected from income shocks. Exposure to poor conditions in the fetal and neonatal period appears to have a larger effect on infant mortality than similar exposure in the postneonatal period.     

Efficiency Wages and Nominal Income Targeting in an Open Economy

Abstract. This paper considers the choice between nominal income and money supply targeting in an open economy with efficiency wages. The results show that, when real unemployment benefits are rigid, both nominal income and money supply targeting have the same stabilizing performance. On the contrary, if nominal unemployment benefits are rigid, then we come to a conclusion that either in the face of goods demand shocks or aggregate supply shocks, a sufficient condition for nominal income targeting to be preferable is that the income elasticity of money demand be less than unity.     

The role of education and household composition for transitory and permanent income inequality–evidence from PSID data

Transitory and permanent shocks to income have been shown to be important determinants of household consumption. This paper shows that there are significant differences in the trends of transitory and permanent income inequality between demographic groups since the 1980s. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, educational attainment and the composition of a household are found to play a key role. While permanent inequality increases steadily for educated households, it is flat over large parts of the sample period for the less educated households. Transitory inequality increases for all households headed by couples whereas it is constant for single households. Altogether, permanent shocks account for a larger part of the income variance of educated households whereas transitory shocks are relatively more important for the less educated. These results are able to shed light on the transmission of changes in income inequality to consumption inequality.     

Trade Policy in the Presence of Economies of Scale and Product Variety*

It is well known that laissez faire may not be the ‘first-best’ policy in a closed economy where economies of scale are present. Corden has shown that this conclusion can carry over into an open economy, though under his assumption that imported goods are perfect substitutes for home-produced goods, interference with international trade could not raise real income. We have shown that where there are economies of scale, and imported goods are not identical to the home produced goods, interference with trade could raise real national income, though such a form of intervention would not normally be optimal. Further, it could even be desirable to support home production of more than one ‘variety’. Measurements of ‘costs of protection’ that aggregate several varieties into one may mislead not only regarding the size of the cost but even regarding its sign.     

From income to consumption: measuring households partial insurance

This article computes the degree of consumption insurance with respect to transitory and permanent income shocks. The lack of income–consumption data in the US surveys forces researchers to use an empirical strategy to impute consumption. This procedure is avoided by using the Spanish Household Budget Continuous Survey, which contains true panel data on consumption and income information in the same survey. We find full insurance for transitory income shocks and partial insurance for permanent shocks for some sub-groups. For the full sample, a 10% permanent income shock induces a 4.8% permanent change in consumption, with higher insurance capacity for college, home-owner and high-wealth households. We also compute the role of durables and family income transfers as smoothing devices. The comparison of insurance level when based on true consumption data versus imputed consumption data shows that the use of imputed consumption underestimates permanent insurance.     

Optimal age‐dependent income taxation in a dynamic extensive model: The case for negative participation tax on young people

We consider optimal age‐dependent income taxation in a dynamic model where the labor‐leisure choice is the extensive margin, each household faces idiosyncratic shocks to labor productivity and a pecuniary cost to work, and there is no insurance market against the shocks. We show that the well‐known property of the optimal participation tax rate in the static model continues to hold in our dynamic economy, that is, the participation tax rates for some income groups with low consumption are likely negative. In dynamic models, the optimal participation tax rate depends on age and on labor income. Our numerical simulations suggest that a negative participation tax should be restricted to young households.     

Equity home bias,incomplete financial markets,and nominal rigidities

Abstract This paper analyzes optimal portfolio decisions in a monetary open‐economy framework. It is found that market completeness and the specific form of nominal rigidities, namely, nominal price vs. nominal wage rigidities, matter for justifying the observed structure of equity holdings. When markets are complete, sticky prices generate a negative correlation between the non‐diversifiable labour income and the profit of domestic firms with respect to the productivity shocks, which explains why households invest little abroad. In contrast, when markets are incomplete, rigidities in goods prices result in a counterfactual ‘super home bias’, because domestic equities provide a good hedge against not only the labour income risk but also the relative price risk. Wage rigidities, however, have the opposite effect. Therefore, nominal rigidities in both goods prices and wage rates are needed to address the empirical composition of gross equity positions under incomplete markets.     

Cointegration and common trends on the West German labour market

In this paper we analyze the West German labour market by means of a cointegrated structural VAR model. We find sensible stable long-run relationships that are interpreted as a labour demand, a wage setting and a goods market equilibrium. In order to study the dynamic behaviour of the model we identify two common trends that push unemployment. We find that goods market shocks have only transitory impacts on unemployment. In the long run, it is almost equally determined by technology and labour supply factors. However, transitory shocks have major importance in the shorter run since adjustment processes are rather sluggish. First version received: Sept. 1998/Final version accepted: Feb. 2000     

Access to liquidity and non‐monetary trade in Russia

This article places non‐monetary trade (NMT), the persistent growth of which in Russia in 1992–98 economists have struggled to explain, within the framework of the credit channel of monetary policy. It shows that producers resorted to NMT responding to increases in the cost and the unavailability of external funds. The article traces the origins of structural breaks in the NMT trend to shifts in state policy that affected financial markets and its transitory fluctuations to temporary shocks in the demand for goods. It concludes that there is significant evidence supporting the existence of the credit channel in the Russian transition.     

两种冲击视角下中国城乡经济波动福利成本研究*

经济波动福利成本的准确测算，一方面能够对经济波动根源的差异化理论做出评判，另一方面也直接关系到政府对于经济政策的选择。本文基于Lucas福利成本模型，采用BN分解公式对消费序列进行分解，估计了暂时性冲击和持久性冲击所造成的经济波动福利成本。本文研究证实，持久性冲击所造成的经济波动福利成本远大于暂时性冲击所造成的福利成本，避免不利供给因素所带来的持久性冲击，是增进城乡居民福祉的重要举措。这与当前所实施的“供给侧结构性改革”相契合。     

How product innovation in the North may immiserize the South : A new look at the Ricardian model with a continuum of goods

The paper proposes a theoretical model investigating the welfare consequences of technological shocks in a Ricardian framework (a la Dornbush, Fisher and Samuelson, 1977). Contrary to the existing literature, the model incorporates a nonhomothetic demand function whose price and income elasticities are endogenously determined by technology. Nonhomothetic preferences are modeled as the result of the hierarchical consumption of luxury and necessity goods. The nature of technical progress determines the consumption pattern and notably the magnitude of the substitution effect between necessities and luxuries. The model is applied to the case of trade between two economies with different development levels. It is shown in particular that the developing country can suffer a fall in utility as a result of technical progress in the developed country biased towards luxury goods. This configuration depends on the size of the development gap and reflects the fact that Southern goods are less attractive, the higher the range of goods consumed. This result suggests that there is an optimal level of development gap to avoid LDCs being harmed by technical progress in the North.     

Earthquakes and terrorism: The long lasting effect of seismic shocks

The literature on the effect of shocks on civil conflicts has grown rapidly over the last decade. In this paper, we study the relationship between earthquakes and terrorism. In the short run, the destruction generated by a medium-range earthquake reduces the opportunity cost of rebelling against the government. Since destruction of infrastructures in these cases is limited, the state keeps most of its coercive capacity, which reduces the chances of full-fledged conflict but leaves open the possibility of low intensity rebellious acts such as terrorism. In the medium run the destruction of tangible assets can lead to the closing down of weak firms, the introduction of new technologies, the improvement of productivity and the increase in wealth inequality We propose a new algorithm to classify terrorism events as domestic or transnational, and show that the likelihood of a domestic terrorist event increases with the previous occurrence of an earthquake. Using earthquakes as an instrument for income, we also show that development has a positive and significant effect on the likelihood of terrorist events.     

Risk sharing in the Middle East and North Africa

This study investigates welfare gains and channels of risk sharing among 14 Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries, including the oil‐rich Gulf region and the resource‐scarce economies such as Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia. The results show that for the 1992–2009 period, the overall welfare gains across MENA countries were higher than those documented for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations. In the Gulf region, the amount of factor income smoothing does not differ considerably when output shocks are longer lasting rather than transitory, whereas the amount smoothed by savings increases remarkably when shocks are longer lasting. In contrast, both factor income flows and international transfers respond more to permanent shocks than to transitory shocks in the non‐oil MENA countries. The results also show that a significant portion of shocks is smoothed via remittance transfers in the economically less‐developed MENA countries, but not in the oil‐rich Gulf and OECD countries. Finally, for the overall MENA region, a large part of the shock remains unsmoothed, suggesting that more market integration is needed to remedy the weak link of incomplete risk sharing.