Has the Affordable Care Act increased part-time employment?

We examine the impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on part-time employment. Because the ACA’s employer health insurance mandate applies to individuals who work 30 or more hours per week, employers may try to avoid the mandate by cutting workers’ hours below the 30-hour threshold in order to avoid having to provide them with health insurance. Although the employer mandate only went into effect in 2015, many observers have argued that forward-looking employers began to shift towards a part-time workforce well in advance of the mandate. To test this hypothesis, we examine relative shifts across two categories of part-time workers (25–29 hours and 31–35 hours). We find some evidence of a shift from the 31–35-hour category into the 25–29-hour category after the passage of ACA in March 2010. However, that shift is not more pronounced among low-wage workers or among workers in industries and occupations most likely to be affected by the mandate. Thus, there is little evidence that the ACA has caused the shift across hours categories, or led to an increase in part-time employment. However, the ACA could cause a shift towards part-time work in the future as the mandate takes effect.     

The Mystery of Missing Real Spillovers in Southern Africa: Some Facts and Possible Explanations

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the economies of South Africa and its neighbours (Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe) are tightly integrated with each other. The multiple interconnections suggest that South Africa's GDP growth rate should affect positively its neighbours'. However, our review of the available econometric evidence and our panel growth regressions suggest that there is no strong evidence of real spillovers in the region after 1994, once global shocks are controlled for. More generally, we find no evidence of real spillovers from South Africa to the rest of the continent post‐1994. We investigate the possible reasons for this lack of spillovers. Most importantly, the economies of South Africa and the rest of Sub‐Saharan Africa might have decoupled in the mid‐1990s. That is when international sanctions on South Africa ended and the country re‐integrated with the global economy, while growth in the rest of the continent accelerated due to a combination of domestic and external factors.     

Do common currencies facilitate the net flow of capital among countries?

Earlier studies have hypothesized that membership in a common currency arrangement (either a currency union or a currency board) is associated with larger current account imbalances (either deficits or surpluses) for participating countries. This paper examines a panel of 128 countries over the period 1976–2005, and finds that the current account balances of common currency participants are more highly correlated with fundamental factors (such as net foreign assets, incomes, growth rates, fiscal policy, demographics, resource endowments) than the current accounts of non-participants. Furthermore, this greater sensitivity to fundamentals leads to larger current account imbalances. Participation in a common currency is typically associated with a 1.6 percent increase in a country's current account imbalance. Larger current account imbalances under common currency arrangements could be a sign of increased financial integration. Alternatively, they could reflect the difficulties of current account adjustment under fixed exchange rates.     

Do immigrants delay retirement and social security claiming?

ABSTRACT

We use data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to examine how immigrants’ retirement and Social Security claiming patterns compare to those of natives. We find that immigrants retire and claim Social Security at older ages than natives, an effect that is similar across immigrant ethnic groups and more pronounced among immigrants who arrived in the U.S. after age 40. We discuss and explore possible mechanisms for these differences. Hazard models suggests that these differences arise because immigrants have lower retirement and claiming hazard rates in their early 60s. We do not find evidence of an increase in the rate at which immigrants move abroad or exit the survey, compared to U.S. natives, in their late 50s through 60s, a finding that is consistent with immigrants retiring in the U.S. rather than abroad. These results are important given the rising share of older immigrants living in the U.S., and they have implications for the impact of immigration on government finances as well as the retirement security of an important subgroup of the population.     

Innocent or Not‐so‐innocent Bystanders: Evidence from the Gravity Model of International Trade About the Effects of UN Sanctions on Neighbour Countries

This paper examines two hypotheses about the effects of UN sanctions on trade flows between land neighbours of the target country and the rest of the world. First, there have been claims that sanctions hurt neighbour countries by cutting off trading routes, increasing transportation costs and disrupting established trading ties. We would expect that a neighbour's trade with the rest of the world would fall, as a result. Second, there is extensive evidence that neighbours have been involved in smuggling. Consequently, neighbours should trade more with the rest of the world during UN trade embargoes, because now they also trade on behalf of the target. I employ the gravity model of international trade to show that, overall, a neighbour's trade with the rest of the world tends to fall during UN sanctions episodes. This confirms the first hypothesis above: on a net basis, land neighbours have been ‘innocent bystanders’ hit by UN sanctions.     

Does Monetary Integration Reduce Exchange Rate Pass‐Through?

There are several theoretical arguments for why the adoption of a common currency (either a currency union or a currency board) may reduce the exchange rate pass‐through (ERPT) to domestic consumer prices. This paper examines a broad panel of 101 countries over the period 1976–2006, using two‐stage instrumental‐variable estimation techniques in order to resolve the potential endogeneity problem. The main result is that ERPT indeed tends to decline in countries participating in a common currency arrangement. In particular, there has been a strong reduction in pass‐through in the member countries of the European Monetary Union (EMU) since the launch of the euro. Currency boards do not appear to be different from currency unions – both reduce the pass‐through from depreciation to inflation. Furthermore, the negative impact of common currencies on ERPT is at work in both high‐income and low‐income countries. Finally, most of the reduction in pass‐through to consumer prices under common currency arrangements happens somewhere along the pricing chain between the border and the supermarket shelf.