Open Access Published by De Gruyter Open Access

Volume 15 Issue 1

January 2021

Issue of Economics

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Contents
Journal Overview

Editorial

Open Access April 30, 2021

Editorial

Katharine Rockett

Page range: 1-2

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Regular Articles

Open Access June 7, 2021

Houses as Collateral and Household Debt Deleveraging in Korea

Joonhyuk Song, Doojin Ryu

Page range: 3-27

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Abstract

As Korea’s household debt has increased rapidly since the mid-2000s, concerns that its economy’s hard-wired leveraging may negatively impact economic activity have grown. Calls are being made for policy actions to return the economy to its long-run trend. Housing preferences and monetary shocks can both trigger deleveraging, as most household debt is profoundly connected to the housing market, and debt growth increases sensitivity to interest rates. Constructing a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous households and the housing production sector, we simulate and analyze the macroeconomic effects of deleveraging. Because a lower loan-to-value (LTV) ceiling limits the size of household debt, the deleveraging effect caused by borrowers’ re-optimization is alleviated as the LTV ceiling decreases. When the housing price is included as an additional operating target in an otherwise standard monetary policy (MP) rule, economy-wide welfare increases when the MP is proactive to demand shocks and inactive to supply shocks. These findings suggest that deleveraging risk can be attenuated by adopting a lower LTV ceiling and maneuvering MP asymmetrically depending on the source of a shock.

Open Access June 9, 2021

Methods Used in Economic Research: An Empirical Study of Trends and Levels

Martin Paldam

Page range: 28-42

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Abstract

The methods used in economic research are analyzed on a sample of all 3,415 regular research papers published in 10 general interest journals every 5th year from 1997 to 2017. The papers are classified into three main groups by method: theory, experiments, and empirics. The theory and empirics groups are almost equally large. Most empiric papers use the classical method, which derives an operational model from theory and runs regressions. The number of papers published increases by 3.3% p.a. Two trends are highly significant: The fraction of theoretical papers has fallen by 26 pp (percentage points), while the fraction of papers using the classical method has increased by 15 pp. Economic theory predicts that such papers exaggerate, and the papers that have been analyzed by meta-analysis confirm the prediction. It is discussed if other methods have smaller problems.

Open Access August 31, 2021

Money for the Issuer: Liability or Equity?

Biagio Bossone, Massimo Costa

Page range: 43-59

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Abstract

This study analyzes the nature of money through the lens of the international principles of accounting and lays the foundations of what it calls the accounting view of money (AVM). Using international accounting principles, the AVM argues that the fiat monies issued by the state (typically, cash, banknotes, and central bank money) are not debt and that in fractional reserve regimes, only a share of commercial bank money can be regarded as debt. The AVM argues, instead, that state monies and the nondebt share of commercial bank money are net wealth of their holders and net worth (equity) of their issuers and determines how the seigniorage associated with money issuance should be accounted for correctly in the financial statements of the issuing institutions. The AVM points to the correct way to account for the various forms of money in the financial statements of the issuing institutions, clarifies what the different accounting treatments imply for a correct understanding of the concept of money, and evaluates the related economic and economic policy implications.

Open Access September 13, 2021

Corruption Accusations and Bureaucratic Performance: Evidence from Pakistan

Ummad Mazhar, Komal Iftikhar

Page range: 60-71

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Abstract

This study assesses the effectiveness of anti-corruption policies of Pakistan by relating the corruption of government officials to the actual and perceived bureaucratic hurdles faced by formal businesses. It offers a unique perspective by focusing on cases in which the accused officers voluntarily disclosed the misuse of public money (or gains acquired through corruption) in order to avail the option of plea-bargaining. The empirical analysis estimates the effect of these policies on the responses of the managers of business firms in Enterprise Surveys. The number of accusations seems to reduce the incidence of bureaucratic corruption. While the amount that is being offered in bargaining has a negative effect overall, it switches sign overtime suggesting the possibility that it may increase corruption in the long run. The core results are robust across various measures of firm-level corruption. The instrumental variable estimates produce similar results.

Open Access December 30, 2021

Subsidising Formal Childcare Versus Grandmothers' Time: Which Policy is More Effective?

Victoria Osuna

Page range: 85-111

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Abstract

This article quantifies the relative effectiveness of childcare subsidies and subsidies on grandmothers’ time on married mothers’ employment and fertility rates, paying special attention to heterogeneous effects. A heterogeneous agent model, populated by married households who make decisions related to labour supply and fertility, and the Spanish economy are used as a benchmark for calibration. The results indicate that childcare subsidies conditional on employment are more effective than subsidies on grandmothers’ time to foster the participation of married mothers in the labour force. However, they induce women to work fewer hours, unless after-school hours are also subsidised. This overtime subsidy is also necessary for the fertility rate to increase, but it implies a significant adjustment in tax rates to maintain the same fiscal balance. If the aim is simply to raise the employment rate of mothers of children aged 2 years or younger, then subsidising childcare costs only is more effective because the fiscal effort is lower. Regarding the heterogeneous effects, in all the policies studied, the growth in female employment is mainly accounted for by the behaviour of women without tertiary education while that of fertility is accounted for by women with tertiary education. Considerations related to inequality and distributional effects of these policies would also seem to favour childcare subsidies versus subsidies on grandmothers’ time.

Open Access December 31, 2021

The Impact of Foreign Direct Investments on Poverty Reduction in the Western Balkans

Margerita Topalli, Meri Papavangjeli, Silvester Ivanaj, Blerta Ferra

Page range: 129-149

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Abstract

This article empirically examines the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows on poverty in six Western Balkan countries and also considers other country characteristics, such as the human development index (HDI), corruption, investment freedom, economic freedom, trade openness, and fertility. The work presents estimations based on a generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator for panel data models with fixed effects during the period from 2002 to 2021. Our results show that FDI has significantly contributed to poverty reduction in the Western Balkan countries. However, attention should be paid to where and how FDI takes place as these investments should be directed at the productive sectors of the economy, thus leading to a higher impact on poverty and inequality. The study also finds that policies and institutions that support a country’s economic freedom and openness are imperative for poverty reduction. In addition, poverty reduction in the Western Balkan region can be achieved through measures that contribute to the improvement of HDI and strengthen institutions to combat corruption. Nevertheless, the empirical results of the paper are subject to a number of drawbacks, such as the limited number of observations and the considerable amount of missing data, some of which is probably questionable, a phenomenon that is quite common for developing countries.

New Issues in International Economics

Open Access December 31, 2021

Structural Breaks and Explosive Behavior in the Long-Run: The Case of Australian Real House Prices, 1870–2020

Vicente Esteve, Maria A. Prats

Page range: 72-84

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Abstract

In this article, we use tests of explosive behavior in real house prices with annual data for the case of Australia for the period 1870–2020. The main contribution of this paper is the use of very long time series. It is important to use longer span data because it offers more powerful econometric results. To detect episodes of potential explosive behavior in house prices over this long period, we use the recursive unit root tests for explosiveness proposed by Phillips et al. (2011), (2015a,b). According to the results, there is a clear speculative bubble behavior in real house prices between 1997 and 2020, speculative process that has not yet been adjusted.

Open Access December 30, 2021

Measuring the Cost of Covid-19 in Terms of the Rise in the Unemployment Rate: The Case of Spain

Juan Carlos Cuestas, Javier Ordóñez, Mercedes Monfort

Page range: 112-114

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Abstract

In this article, we aim to estimate what the cost of Covid-19 has been in terms of unemployment for Spain. We use a simple autoregressive model to simulate what the unemployment rate would have been without the pandemic and we compare this with the actual values. We also forecast the unemployment rate for 2021 and 2022 to analyse the persistence of the pandemic shock to unemployment.

Open Access December 31, 2021

Digital Gender Divide and Convergence in the European Union Countries

María López-Martínez, Olga García-Luque, Myriam Rodríguez-Pasquín

Page range: 115-128

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Abstract

The aim of this study is to examine the digital gender divide in the European Union (EU) countries by applying two widely used indicators: percentage of the population who has used the Internet in the last 3 months (ICT-USE indicator) and percentage of the population who has made an online purchase in the last 3 months (ICT-PURCHASE indicator). With these indicators, the digital gender gaps are shown in absolute and relative terms. In addition, the European convergence beta and sigma, between the years 2007 and 2019, is also analyzed. The results among European countries show that the ICT-USE indicator has a lower dispersion than the ICT-PURCHASE indicator; hence, in general, the digital gender divide or gap is usually lower when ICT-USE is used in comparison with ICT-PURCHASE. The highest values of the digital gender gap in the EU, regardless of the indicator used, are found in Croatia and Italy, reflecting an unfavorable position for women. Ireland is also in this group, but in its case, the results show an unfavorable position for men. Additionally, Cyprus does not register gender differences in either of the two indicators analyzed. Finally, the convergence between European countries is corroborated, both in the indicators analyzed and in the different gender digital gaps built.

Open Access December 31, 2021

Disentangling Permanent and Transitory Monetary Shocks with a Nonlinear Taylor Rule

Juan Ángel Lafuente, Mercedes Monfort, Rafaela Pérez, Jesús Ruiz

Page range: 150-162

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Abstract

This article provides an estimation method to decompose monetary policy innovations into persistent and transitory components using the nonlinear Taylor rule proposed in Andolfatto, Hendry, and Moran (2008) [Are inflation expectations rational? Journal of Monetary Economics , 55 , 406–422]. To use the Kalman filter as the optimal signal extraction technique, we use a convenient reformulation for the state equation by allowing expectations to play a significant role in explaining the future time evolution of monetary shocks. This alternative formulation allows us to perform the maximum likelihood estimation for all the parameters involved in the monetary policy as well as to recover conditional probabilities of regime change. Empirical evidence on the US monetary policy making is provided for the period covering 1986-Q1 to 2021-Q2. We compare our empirical estimates with those obtained based on the particle filter. While both procedures lead to similar quantitative and qualitative findings, our approach has much less computational cost.

Open Access December 31, 2021

The Export Strategy and SMEs Employment Resilience During Slump Periods

Daniel Aparicio-Pérez, Carolina Calatayud, María E. Rochina-Barrachina

Page range: 163-186

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Abstract

The Spanish economy was the most hit by the Great Recession. It suffered a greater decrease in the gross domestic product (GDP) (affecting especially internal demand). However, it suffered a greater increase in exports (the so-called Spanish “miracle”). Particularly, Spanish SMEs incorporation into exports has been spectacular since 2008. Further, this has coincided with a huge increase in unemployment. Therefore, our main objective is to investigate the moderating role of exports in job destruction associated with recessive contexts of domestic demand using Spanish manufacturing SMEs as a case study. We obtain for SMEs that export participation helps compensate for the decrease in the number of workers generated by a (domestic) downturn, also increasing their survival. Otherwise, SMEs’ survival is negatively affected by financial constraints, production costs, and a recessive demand. This compensatory effect of exports on employment works in favor of permanent workers, meaning that the ratio of permanent to temporary workers may increase for SMEs during recessive periods. Finally, we provide evidence that supports that participation of SMEs in exports is also due to a reaction to the fall in the domestic demand (the so-called “venting out” hypothesis) and, mainly, that this occurs for firms with high utilization of its productive capacity.

Open Access December 31, 2021

Corruption and International Trade: A Re-assessment with Intra-National Flows

Silviano Esteve-Pérez, Salvador Gil-Pareja, Rafael Llorca-Vivero, Jordi Paniagua

Page range: 187-198

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Abstract

This study re-examines the impact of corruption on international trade accounting for both inter- and intra-national flows in line with the latest advances in the gravity equation literature. Using a wide sample of countries for the period 1995–2017, our results show that the non-inclusion of internal trade flows drastically biases the estimations. Additionally, we find that the negative impact of corruption on trade is reduced, ceteris paribus, in poorer countries. We also find non-linearities, more corrupt countries present a more harmful impact of corruption on trade. Moreover, we perform a general equilibrium analysis to investigate the impact of a given reduction in perceived corruption on a selected group of countries’ economic growth and prices. We find that these effects are far from being negligible, especially when there is a “synchronized” reduction in corruption in most corrupt countries.

Open Access December 31, 2021

Fiscal Rules in Economic Crisis: The Trade-off Between Consolidation and Recovery, from a European Perspective

Carmen Díaz-Roldán, Fernando Ferrari Filho, Julimar da Silva Bichara

Page range: 199-216

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Abstract

In this study, we will perform a simulation exercise to investigate whether the use of explicit fiscal rules improves the macroeconomic performance in the economic framework of the European Union (EU), where the fall in income levels occurred very asymmetrically, and this has accentuated the social inequality that existed before the recent crises. To evaluate the performance of fiscal rules, we will allow for a fiscal rule keeping the growth of the public expenditure below the growth of the inflation. This special design of the fiscal rule is a novelty in the European context, although the inflation constraint has been successfully implemented in other countries as, for example, Brazil. As the results, we expect to find that before the financial crisis of 2008, the EU public finances keep relatively stable. However, after the crisis, the budget of the member states suffered a significant deterioration. In addition, therefore, we will discuss to which extent the use of proper fiscal rules could help to rationalize fiscal consolidation efforts.

About this journal

Economics aims to cover all the main areas of economics. Inevitably, articles in different areas of economics are addressed at different audiences. Many of the articles submitted to the journal are standard technical pieces, addressed to a purely academic audience. Others concern economic policy and thus are addressed both to economists and policy makers with some economic background. Yet others are surveys and overviews, often interdisciplinary, addressed to a nontechnical audience.

Economics is a new type of academic journal in economics. By involving a large research community in an innovative open peer review process, the journal aims to provide fast access to top-quality papers. Publishing is seen as a cooperative enterprise between authors, editors, referees, and readers. Economics takes the form of an e-journal, i.e., submission, evaluation, and publication are electronic.

Economics embodies the following principles:

Open Access: Following the principle that knowledge is a public good, all articles are free to read, download, and copy for all users.

Open Assessment: The traditional peer review process is substantially supplemented by a public peer review process in which the community of active researchers from all over the world has a hand in the evaluation process. Due to interactive peer review and public discussion, Economics provides fast and efficient quality assurance.

Speed: Submitted papers that have been identified as sufficiently promising for a referee process are made immediately available on the journal’s homepage as discussion papers. Thus, the time for new ideas to find their way into the scientific community is substantially reduced.