Economic PolicyPub Date : 2024-01-22DOI: 10.1093/epolic/eiad043
Ricardo Hausmann, Ulrich Schetter, Muhammed A Yıldırım
{"title":"On the design of effective sanctions: the case of bans on exports to russia*","authors":"Ricardo Hausmann, Ulrich Schetter, Muhammed A Yıldırım","doi":"10.1093/epolic/eiad043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/epolic/eiad043","url":null,"abstract":"We build on Baqaee and Farhi (2019, 2021) and derive a theoretically-grounded criterion that allows targeting bans on exports to a sanctioned country at the level of ∼5000 6-digit HS products. The criterion implies that the costs to the sanctioned country are highly convex in the market share of the sanctioning parties. Hence, there are large benefits from coordinating export bans among a broad coalition of countries. Applying our results to Russia reveals that sanctions imposed by the EU and the US in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are not systematically related to our arguments once we condition on Russia’s total imports of a product from participating countries. We discuss drivers of these differences, and then provide a quantitative evaluation of the export bans to show that (i) they are very effective with the welfare loss typically ∼100 times larger for Russia than for the sanctioners; (ii) improved coordination of the sanctions and targeting sanctions based on our criterion allows to increase the costs to Russia by about 80% with little to no extra cost to the sanctioners; and (iii) there is scope for increasing the cost to Russia further by expanding the set of sanctioned products.","PeriodicalId":47772,"journal":{"name":"Economic Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2024-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139586991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economic PolicyPub Date : 2024-01-11DOI: 10.1093/epolic/eiae001
Oscar Arce, Miguel García-Posada, Sergio Mayordomo, Banco de España, Steven Ongena
{"title":"Bank lending policies and monetary policy: Some lessons from the negative interest era","authors":"Oscar Arce, Miguel García-Posada, Sergio Mayordomo, Banco de España, Steven Ongena","doi":"10.1093/epolic/eiae001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/epolic/eiae001","url":null,"abstract":"What is the long-term impact of negative interest rates on bank lending? To answer this question, we construct a unique summary measure of negative rate exposure by individual banks based on exclusive survey data and banks’ balance sheets and couple it with the credit register of Spain and firms’ balance sheets to identify this impact on the supply of credit to firms. We find that only when deposit rates reached the zero lower bound (ZLB) did affected banks (relative to non-affected banks) decrease their supply, especially when undercapitalized and lending to risky firms. The adverse effects of the negative rates on banks’ intermediation capacity only took place after a protracted period of time.","PeriodicalId":47772,"journal":{"name":"Economic Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2024-01-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139464560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economic PolicyPub Date : 2023-12-12DOI: 10.1093/epolic/eiad034
Barry Eichengreen, Massimo Ferrari Minesso, Arnaud Mehl, Isabel Vansteenkiste, Roger Vicquéry
{"title":"Sanctions and the Exchange Rate in Time","authors":"Barry Eichengreen, Massimo Ferrari Minesso, Arnaud Mehl, Isabel Vansteenkiste, Roger Vicquéry","doi":"10.1093/epolic/eiad034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/epolic/eiad034","url":null,"abstract":"We test the predictions of recent theoretical studies of the impact of sanctions on the exchange rate. We build a database of exchange rates and sanctions spanning 1914-1945—an era when both large and small economies were targeted by multilateral sanction packages, facilitating comparisons with today’s Russian war episode. We estimate the dynamic response of the exchange rate in a panel of sanction episodes at weekly frequency using local projections, conditioning on the type of sanctions taken. We tease out mechanisms through which sanctions affect the exchange rate by estimating their effects on macroeconomic variables plausibly acting as transmission channels. Our estimates suggest that import restrictions, export restrictions, asset freezes and trade embargoes lead to exchange rate effects consistent with theory, though the precision of the measured effects varies across sanction type. These findings suggest that recent models of the effects of sanctions on the exchange rate do not just match developments in today’s specific Russia episode but have broader applicability. It follows that the direction of exchange rate movements is not an adequate metric of the success or failure of sanctions but a reflection of the type and scale of the measures taken.","PeriodicalId":47772,"journal":{"name":"Economic Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138579894","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economic PolicyPub Date : 2023-12-09DOI: 10.1093/epolic/eiad041
Oliver Hart, David Thesmar, Luigi Zingales
{"title":"Private Sanctions","authors":"Oliver Hart, David Thesmar, Luigi Zingales","doi":"10.1093/epolic/eiad041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/epolic/eiad041","url":null,"abstract":"We survey a representative sample of the U.S. population to understand stakeholders’ desire to see their firms leave Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. Only 37% of the respondents think that leaving Russia is a pure business decision, and only 30% think that sanctions are a pure matter for the government. If a firm does not conform to the desire to leave Russia, 66% of the respondents are willing to boycott it (exit). We randomize a (hypothetical) cost of exiting the firm. This cost has a strong effect on the stated propensity to exit. This sensitivity allows us to provide a natural $equivalent of moral motivations for exiting. We try to distinguish deontological and impact-related motives to exit, by randomizing beliefs about the impact on the firm. We find a clear effect of impact for shareholders, but not for consumers and employees. Our results continue to hold on the subsample of participants who actually donate part of their survey compensation to Ukraine. In our survey, consumers emerge as the most powerful force to control the morality of firms. We discuss the geopolitical and economic implications of a world where private corporations can discontinue profitable business relationships for moral or political reasons.","PeriodicalId":47772,"journal":{"name":"Economic Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138563155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economic PolicyPub Date : 2023-11-25DOI: 10.1093/epolic/eiad032
Francesco D’Amuri, Marta De Philippis, Elisa Guglielminetti, Salvatore Lo Bello
{"title":"Natural Unemployment and Activity Rates in Italy: Flow-based Determinants and Implications for Price Dynamics","authors":"Francesco D’Amuri, Marta De Philippis, Elisa Guglielminetti, Salvatore Lo Bello","doi":"10.1093/epolic/eiad032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/epolic/eiad032","url":null,"abstract":"Despite the magnitude and cyclicality of transitions into and out of the labor force, the literature generally considers unemployment as a sufficient statistic of labor market slack. We question this view by jointly estimating natural unemployment and participation rates through a Phillips curve informed by structural labor market flows. Focusing on Italy, a country where flows into and out of the labor force are particularly large, we find that the participation margin accounts for a significant share of total slack and explains one third of the missing inflation that followed the 2011 Sovereign Debt Crisis. Exploiting a reform that sharply and unexpectedly increased the statutory retirement age and expanded labor supply without directly affecting unemployment, we confirm that neglecting the participation gap biases inflation forecasts.","PeriodicalId":47772,"journal":{"name":"Economic Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-11-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138541317","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economic PolicyPub Date : 2023-11-21DOI: 10.1093/epolic/eiad028
Leonardo Gambacorta, Tommaso Oliviero, Hyun Song Shin
{"title":"Low price-to-book ratios and bank dividend payouts: economic policy implications","authors":"Leonardo Gambacorta, Tommaso Oliviero, Hyun Song Shin","doi":"10.1093/epolic/eiad028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/epolic/eiad028","url":null,"abstract":"Banks with a low price-to-book ratio have a greater propensity to pay out dividends. This propensity is especially marked for banks with a price-to-book ratio below a threshold of 0.7, a situation that characterises many banks in recent years, especially in the euro area. We demonstrate these features using data for 271 advanced economy banks in 29 jurisdictions. Dividend payouts as a proportion of profits rise in a non-linear way as the price-to-book ratio falls below 0.7. In a hypothetical exercise with fixed balance sheet ratios, we find that a suspension of bank dividends in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic would have added, under different stress scenarios and parametrisations, an additional US$0.2–1.1 trillion of bank lending capacity in our sample, equivalent to 0.3–1.6% of total GDP.","PeriodicalId":47772,"journal":{"name":"Economic Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138541366","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economic PolicyPub Date : 2023-11-15DOI: 10.1093/epolic/eiad030
Massimo Morelli, Laura Ogliari, Long Hong
{"title":"Power Mismatch and Civil Conflict: An Empirical Investigation","authors":"Massimo Morelli, Laura Ogliari, Long Hong","doi":"10.1093/epolic/eiad030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/epolic/eiad030","url":null,"abstract":"This paper empirically shows that the imbalance between an ethnic group’s political and military power is crucial to understanding the likelihood that such a group engages in a conflict. We develop a novel measure of a group’s military power by combining machine learning techniques with rich data on ethnic group characteristics and outcomes of civil conflicts in Africa and the Middle East. We couple this measure with available indicators of an ethnic group’s political power as well as with a novel proxy based on information about the ethnicity of cabinet members. We find that groups characterized by a higher mismatch between military and political power are between 30% and 50% more likely to engage in a conflict against their government depending on the specification used. We also find that the effects of power mismatch are nonlinear, which is in agreement with the predictions of a simple model that accounts for the cost of conflict. Moreover, our results suggest that high-mismatched groups are typically involved in larger and centrist conflicts. The policy implication is that power-sharing recommendations and institutional design policies for peace should consider primarily the reduction of power mismatches between relevant groups, rather than focusing exclusively on equalizing political power in isolation.","PeriodicalId":47772,"journal":{"name":"Economic Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138541363","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economic PolicyPub Date : 2023-11-14DOI: 10.1093/epolic/eiad029
Ricardo Reis
{"title":"What can keep euro area inflation high?","authors":"Ricardo Reis","doi":"10.1093/epolic/eiad029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/epolic/eiad029","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract A central bank that faces inflation above target may fail to bring it down. This article discusses six ways in which this happens because the central bank is dominated by: misjudgment, expectations, fiscal policy, financial markets, recession fears, or external forces. It applies this approach to the challenge facing the ECB in 2023-24. The hope is that the factors identified can serve as warning signs for what to avoid.","PeriodicalId":47772,"journal":{"name":"Economic Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134957051","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economic PolicyPub Date : 2023-11-09DOI: 10.1093/epolic/eiad027
Jean Imbs, Laurent Pauwels
{"title":"An Empirical Approximation of the Effects of Trade Sanctions with an Application to Russia","authors":"Jean Imbs, Laurent Pauwels","doi":"10.1093/epolic/eiad027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/epolic/eiad027","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract We propose a data-based approximation of the effects of trade sanctions that can readily be computed on the basis of international input-output data. Approximated effects are very close to the exact responses obtained from a canonical multi-country multi-sector model, without having to make difficult calibration choices. We illustrate the approximation with trade sanctions against Russia and obtain estimates well within the existing range. Russia is much more affected by trade sanctions than the EU, even though the importance of EU markets for Russia has been falling, especially since 2014 with China picking up the slack. Within the EU the consequences are largest in ex-“satellite” countries of the Soviet Union: These countries do not typically have access to substitute markets and in fact have historically been highly dependent on Russia. This extreme and persistent dependence is at least partly explained by the existence of specific energy transporting infrastructure (pipelines) that appears to constrain tightly the production of electricity. Our proposed approximation is practical and can be implemented in a variety of contexts: We have developed a web-based dashboard, accessible at exposure.trade that can be used to approximate the costs of trade sanctions for any combinations of sanctioning and sanctioned countries or sectors.","PeriodicalId":47772,"journal":{"name":"Economic Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135291796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economic PolicyPub Date : 2023-09-07DOI: 10.1093/epolic/eiad016
Katharina Werner, Ludger Woessmann
{"title":"The legacy of Covid-19 in education","authors":"Katharina Werner, Ludger Woessmann","doi":"10.1093/epolic/eiad016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/epolic/eiad016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract If school closures and social-distancing experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic impeded children’s skill development, they may leave a lasting legacy in human capital. Our parental survey during the second German school lockdown provides new measures of socio-emotional development and panel evidence on how students’ time use and educational inputs adapted over time. Children’s learning time decreased severely during the first school closures, particularly for low-achieving students, and increased only slightly 1 year later. In a value-added model, learning time increases with daily online class instruction, but not with other school activities. Parental assessments of children’s socio-emotional development are mixed. Discussing our findings in light of the emerging literature on substantial achievement losses, we conclude that unless remediated, the school closures will persistently increase inequality and reduce skill development, lifetime income and economic growth.","PeriodicalId":47772,"journal":{"name":"Economic Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136364057","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}