Ethnic discrimination in hiring,labour market tightness and the business cycle - evidence from field experiments

Several studies using observational data suggest that ethnic discrimination increases in downturns of the economy. We investigate whether ethnic discrimination depends on labour market tightness using data from correspondence studies. We utilize three correspondence studies of the Swedish labour market and two different measures of labour market tightness. These two measures produce qualitatively similar results, and, opposite to the observational studies, suggest that ethnic discrimination in hiring decreases in downturns of the economy.     

Is Acting Prosocially Beneficial for the Credit Market?

This article argues that behaving prosocially reduces regional finance differentials in terms of interest and insolvency rates. This is because prosociality implies more transparent information and cooperation among the parties engaged in a financial contract. The context of study is Italy, well known for its regional economic and financial disparities. The analysis is developed through a cross-regional two period panel model during the years 1998 and 2003. Empirical evidence shows that regions with a higher proportion of prosocial individuals report lower interest and insolvency rates. When legal enforcement is included in the specified model, evidence suggests that more efficient third-party enforcement can transmit a stronger sense of legal abidance and facilitate the internalisation of social norms of cooperation.     

The Environmental Tax: Effects on Inequality and Growth

Environmental and Resource Economics - Within an R&D-driven growth model, this paper studies how an environmental tax and its cost both for firms and consumers affect individuals’...     

Firm–bank credit network,business cycle and macroprudential policy

We present an agent-based model to study firm–bank credit market interactions in different phases of the business cycle. The business cycle is exogenously set, and it can give rise to various scenarios. Compared to other models in this literature strand, we improve the mechanism according to which the dividends are distributed, including the possibility of stock repurchase by firms. In addition, we locate firms and banks over a space and firms may ask credit to many banks, resulting in a complex spatial network. The model reproduces a long list of stylized facts and their dynamic evolution as described by the cross-correlations among model variables. The model allows us to test the effectiveness of rules designed by the current financial regulation, such as the Basel III countercyclical capital buffer. We find that the effectiveness of this rule changes in different business cycle environments and this should be considered by policy makers.

     

Endogenous codetermination

This research introduces endogenous codetermination in a Cournot duopoly. Unlike the received literature (Kraft, 1998), this work assumes that firms bargain with their own union bargaining units under codetermination if and only if they can choose an ad hoc bargaining effort by maximising profits (three-stage non-cooperative game). There are remarkable differences compared with the main findings of the exogenous codetermination literature. Indeed, there may exist asymmetric multiple (Pareto efficient) Nash equilibria in pure strategies. Mandatory codetermination, therefore, is Pareto worsening. Each firm can then use the union bargaining power as a strategic device in a Cournot setting.     

Book Review: Decentralized finance after Bitcoin & Ethereum

Financial Markets and Portfolio Management -     

A spatial theory of urban segregation

We provide a competitive equilibrium theory of urban segregation in a linear city. Households demand consumption and housing along the city and are exposed to neighborhood externalities. We show that equilibria that are robust to small coalitional deviations are segregated. Our results explain urban segregation in a standard neoclassical framework and shed new light on the difficulties faced by authorities to integrate cities.     

Integrating parametric and non-parametric multivariate analysis of urban growth and commuting patterns in a European metropolitan area

Quality & Quantity - Mono-centric regions have experienced a progressive transformation towards polycentric structures. Transition to discontinuous and dispersed spatial configurations was...     

Co‐integration Rank Determination in Partial Systems Using Information Criteria

We investigate the asymptotic and finite sample properties of the most widely used information criteria for co‐integration rank determination in ‘partial’ systems, i.e. in co‐integrated vector autoregressive (VAR) models where a sub‐set of variables of interest is modelled conditional on another sub‐set of variables. The asymptotic properties of the Akaike information criterion (AIC), the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) and the Hannan–Quinn information criterion (HQC) are established, and consistency of BIC and HQC is proved. Notably, the consistency of BIC and HQC is robust to violations of weak exogeneity of the conditioning variables with respect to the co‐integration parameters. More precisely, BIC and HQC recover the true co‐integration rank from the partial system analysis also when the conditional model does not convey all information about the co‐integration parameters. This result opens up interesting possibilities for practitioners who can now determine the co‐integration rank in partial systems without being concerned about the weak exogeneity of the conditioning variables. A Monte Carlo experiment based on a large dimensional data generating process shows that BIC and HQC applied in partial systems perform reasonably well in small samples and comparatively better than ‘traditional’ methods for co‐integration rank determination. We further show the usefulness of our approach and the benefits of the conditional system analysis in two empirical illustrations, both based on the estimation of VAR systems on US quarterly data. Overall, our analysis shows the gains of combining information criteria with partial system analysis.     

When do thick venture capital markets foster innovation? An evolutionary analysis

In this paper, we examine the trade off between different effects of the availability of venture capital on the speed of technological progress in an industry. We consider an evolutionary industry simulation model based on Nelson and Winter (1982), in which R&D efforts of an incumbent firm generate technological know-how embodied in key R&D employees, who might use this know-how to found a spinoff of the incumbent. Venture capital is needed to finance a spinoff, so that the expected profits from founding a spinoff depend on how easily venture capital can be acquired. Accordingly, thick venture capital markets might have two opposing effects. First, incentives of firms to invest in R&D might be reduced and, second, if spinoff formation results in technological spillovers between the parent firm and the spinoffs, the generation of spinoff firms might positively influence the future efficiency of the incumbent’s innovation efforts. We study the manner in which this tradeoff influences the effect of venture capital on innovation expenditures, speed of technological change and evolution of industry concentration in several scenarios with different industry characteristics.