{"title":"Capital-skill complementarity in manufacturing: Lessons from the US shale boom","authors":"Victor Hernandez Martinez","doi":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105072","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105072","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper tests the existence of capital-skill complementarity in the manufacturing sector using quasi-experimental increases in the relative price of low-skill labor induced by the US shale boom. I find that in response to the shale boom, local manufacturing firms decreased their relative usage of low-skill labor while increasing their capital expenditures. These endogenous changes in the input mix allowed manufacturers to maintain the value added despite the increase in the price of low-skill labor, avoiding the potential short-term crowding-out effects of the natural resource boom. These findings perfectly match the predictions from a nested CES manufacturing production function where capital and low-skill labor are nested together, and their elasticity of substitution exceeds that between capital and high-skill labor. Alternative production functions yield predictions that are inconsistent with the data or hard to reconcile with the previous literature.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48389,"journal":{"name":"European Economic Review","volume":"178 ","pages":"Article 105072"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144517388","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Optimal housing taxation with land scarcity and maintenance: A Mirrleesian perspective","authors":"Spencer Bastani , Sören Blomquist , Firouz Gahvari , Luca Micheletto , Khayyam Tayibov","doi":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105078","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105078","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study optimal housing taxation in a Mirrleesian framework where individuals differ in both labor productivity and land ownership. Housing services are produced by combining scarce land with structures that require maintenance, which can be performed either in-house or through market purchases. We first characterize optimal allocations under information and resource constraints. We then restrict the government to the use of proportional housing taxes. Numerical simulations show that uniform taxation of land and structures is desirable only when political constraints prevent the imposition of very high land taxes. Otherwise, the optimal policy is to tax land at a much higher rate than structures, while still imposing a positive tax on structures to mitigate distortions from income taxation. A positive marginal tax on labor income incentivizes in-house over market-purchased maintenance. To prevent an inefficiently large reliance on in-house maintenance, optimal policy should generally subsidize market-purchased maintenance services.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48389,"journal":{"name":"European Economic Review","volume":"178 ","pages":"Article 105078"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144517387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dark versus light personality types and moral choice","authors":"David L. Dickinson","doi":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105092","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105092","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this preregistered study, participants were administered validated short-form instruments assessing dark and light personality traits, and they also completed simple building-block tasks relevant to business ethics (e.g., organizational citizenship and counterproductive workplace behaviors). Specifically, participants were administered consequential prosociality and dishonesty decision tasks, as well as the hypothetical moral (Trolley) dilemma task. Overall, the results support the hypotheses that dark, compared to light, personality traits are associated with lower levels of prosociality, higher likelihood of dishonesty, and an increased willingness to make immoral choices. Follow-up data suggest the likely mechanisms connecting personality to (un)ethical choices are at least two-fold: darker personality types are less sensitive to behavioral deviations from a common norm; darker types also have different perceptions of what is others’ ethical norm.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48389,"journal":{"name":"European Economic Review","volume":"178 ","pages":"Article 105092"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144490945","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Macroeconomic regime change and the size of supply chain disruption and energy supply shocks","authors":"Roberto A. De Santis , Tommaso Tornese","doi":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105077","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105077","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have complicated macroeconomic forecasting and policymaking due to unprecedented disruptions in supply chains and energy markets, suggesting a new macroeconomic regime. However, we are unable to reject the null hypothesis of no structural break in March 2020. We then examine whether these shocks have increased post-COVID-19. Their sizes were initially elevated, but then have been gradually returning to pre-pandemic levels. The linear and nonlinear models reveal that supply chain disruptions cause persistent increases in expected inflation and headline goods prices, while energy supply shocks have a transitory inflation effect. The nonlinear model shows that real GDP is adversely affected by supply shocks in low growth periods.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48389,"journal":{"name":"European Economic Review","volume":"178 ","pages":"Article 105077"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144501756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Anchored inflation expectations and the slope of the Phillips curve","authors":"Peter Lihn Jørgensen , Kevin J. Lansing","doi":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105073","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105073","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>It is conventional wisdom that the reduced form Phillips curve has become flatter in recent decades. Accordingly, we show that the statistical relationship between <em>changes</em> in U.S. inflation and economic activity, commonly known as the accelerationist Phillips curve, has become flatter. But in contrast, the statistical relationship between the <em>level</em> of inflation and economic activity, which we refer to as the “original” Phillips curve, has become <em>steeper</em>. By allowing for changes in the degree of anchoring of agents’ inflation forecasts, we recover a stable structural slope parameter in an estimated version of the New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) from 1960 to 2019. Using a New Keynesian model with imperfect information, we show that imperfectly anchored inflation expectations, coupled with an inflation-targeting central bank, induce an upward bias in the slope of the accelerationist Phillips curve but a downward bias in the slope of the original Phillips curve relative to the true structural slope of the NKPC. Improved anchoring shrinks both biases, accounting for the observed changes in the slopes of the reduced form Phillips curve relationships.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48389,"journal":{"name":"European Economic Review","volume":"178 ","pages":"Article 105073"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144739535","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Monetary policy and the functional income distribution: Two million firms’ production dynamics","authors":"Lea Steininger , Jan P. Fritsche","doi":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105082","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105082","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study the role of firm heterogeneity and cost structure in determining the distributional impact of euro area monetary policy at the firm level. Using local projections and high dimensional fixed effects, we first show that a one standard deviation contractionary monetary policy shock decreases firms’ labor share by 0.4 percentage points, on average. Next, we employ firms’ ideosyncratic leverage ratio as an exposure measure to mediate the euro-area-wide shocks to the firm level, and show that responses vary along two key dimensions: the labor share is most informative in distinguishing firms based on their response in payroll expenses, while firms’ leverage is most indicative in differentiating their response in value added. Our results inform the policy debate on transmission and redistribution effects of monetary policy, and suggest that the effectiveness of monetary policy may depend on the functional income distribution.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48389,"journal":{"name":"European Economic Review","volume":"178 ","pages":"Article 105082"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144501761","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Density forecasts of inflation: A quantile regression forest approach","authors":"Michele Lenza , Inès Moutachaker , Joan Paredes","doi":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105079","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105079","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Inflation density forecasts are a fundamental input for a medium-term-oriented central bank, such as the European Central Bank (ECB). We demonstrate that a quantile regression forest, which captures general non-linear relationships between euro area inflation (both headline and core) and a broad set of determinants, performs competitively against state-of-the-art linear and non-linear benchmarks and judgmental forecasts. The median forecasts generated by the quantile regression forest exhibit a high degree of collinearity with the Eurosystem inflation point forecasts, displaying similar deviations from “linearity”. Given that the Eurosystem’s modeling toolbox predominantly relies on linear frameworks, this finding suggests that the expert judgment embedded in the projections may incorporate mild non-linear elements. Finally, we provide a real-time application illustrating how the model is employed to assess risks surrounding the Eurosystem inflation projections in the context of the recent euro area disinflation path.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48389,"journal":{"name":"European Economic Review","volume":"178 ","pages":"Article 105079"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144298828","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Intelligence and strategy choice in indefinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma games: A replication of Proto, Rustichini & Sofianos (2022)","authors":"Michalis Drouvelis , Graeme Pearce","doi":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105075","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105075","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We provide a close replication of the original study of Proto et al. (2022) which examines the link between intelligence, strategy choice and errors in strategy implementation in indefinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma games. Our experiments, powered at 99% to detect the effect sizes obtained in the original study, replicate all the findings of the original study: (1) cooperation rates in the first period of an indefinitely repeated game are not found to be correlated with intelligence; (2) subjects with a higher level of intelligence are more likely to be conditionally cooperative; (3) more intelligent subjects make fewer errors when implementing their strategy. Our experiments validate the results of the original study, and lend credence to its findings.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48389,"journal":{"name":"European Economic Review","volume":"178 ","pages":"Article 105075"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144298827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hans Gersbach , Akaki Mamageishvili , Oriol Tejada
{"title":"Do we need a (large) committee?","authors":"Hans Gersbach , Akaki Mamageishvili , Oriol Tejada","doi":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105074","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105074","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper studies committee design when a homogeneous population is uncertain about which alternative is correct, individuals can acquire costly information about the state of the world, and the decision must be taken via voting with the majority rule. We assume verifiability of costs and cost sharing, which are realistic assumptions in many applications, e.g. if the time spent in learning is recorded, or if reports have to be produced. We show that the optimal committee size depends on the properties of the cost function and on the size of the population. If either the marginal cost function satisfies a standard single-crossing condition or the population is sufficiently large, it is optimal to delegate voting to a small committee and often to a single individual, in which case no committee is needed at all. If information acquisition costs increase slowly for small values of information, but the magnitude of such costs is large, the optimal committee might comprise many members. Our results add a rationale for the widespread use of small committees for decision-making.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48389,"journal":{"name":"European Economic Review","volume":"178 ","pages":"Article 105074"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144722553","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Claudio Deiana , Andrea Geraci , Giovanni Mastrobuoni , Simon Weidenholzer
{"title":"Running the risk: Immunity and mobility in response to a pandemic","authors":"Claudio Deiana , Andrea Geraci , Giovanni Mastrobuoni , Simon Weidenholzer","doi":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105057","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105057","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The relative effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as lockdowns and work-from-home mandates, depends on whether individuals adjust their social behavior in response to infection risk when policy restrictions are absent. Exploiting geographic variation in COVID-19 exposure during the first wave, three key results emerge. First, we find evidence that areas with relatively high excess death rates during the first wave of the pandemic had relatively low excess death rates during the second wave. Second, using granular mobility data from GPS devices, we show that the same areas saw relatively high mobility during the second wave, which may suggest that the first finding is driven by an immunity effect. Finally, the heterogeneity analysis reveals that scarring, behavioral responses, and immunization may operate with varying intensity across municipalities with different age compositions, yielding observable differences in both second-wave mobility and mortality patterns.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48389,"journal":{"name":"European Economic Review","volume":"177 ","pages":"Article 105057"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144147208","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}