In the Brexit referendum on 23 June 2016, the British electorate voted to leave the EU. The vote is widely seen as a watershed moment in British history and European integration. This column asks why some areas vote to leave the EU, and others voted to remain.

In recent years, the use of randomised controlled trials has spread from labour market and welfare programme evaluation to other areas of economics, and to other social sciences, perhaps most prominently in development and health economics. This column argues that some of the popularity of such trials rests on misunderstandings about what they are capable of accomplishing, and cautions against simple extrapolations from trials to other contexts.

The October 2016 expert survey of the Centre for Macroeconomics (CFM) and CEPR invited views from a panel of macroeconomists based across Europe on Germany’s trade surplus, its impact on the Eurozone economy, and the appropriate response of German fiscal policy. More than two-thirds of the respondents agree with the proposition that German current account surpluses are a threat to the Eurozone economy. A slightly smaller majority believe that the German government ought to increase public investment in response to the surpluses. 

Growth in higher education has been driven by the view that human capital is essential for economic and social progress. This column uses a comprehensive international dataset covering 78 countries to show that on average, a 10% increase in the number of universities (roughly adding one more university to the average region in the data) increases a region’s income by 0.4%, with additional effects spilling over to other regions within the same country. In the UK context, the benefits of university expansion are likely to far outweigh the costs.

The booms and busts of real estate prices echo those of the real business cycle. This column looks at the relationship between house price valuations and economic growth in an international context. Taking account of heterogeneity in housing policies across countries, large house price depreciations are found to be positively associated with economic growth. This positive relationship is more pronounced in countries with civil law legal systems.

While standard microeconomic theory suggests that firms have no power over setting wages when markets are perfectly competitive, this view obviously clashes with the perceptions of the casual observer. This column uses data from Sweden to investigate the extent to which differences in firms’ pay are related to differences in physical productivity. It finds that firms that benefit from positive productivity shocks increase the wages of incumbent workers, and in particular firms among which there is substantial labour mobility. The evolution of productivity among such firms appears to be a crucial determinant of workers’ wages.

The migration debate is often harsh and polarised, oscillating from calls for more open borders to promises to build new fences, and contrasting the views of those who emphasise the advantages and benefits from migration flows with those who consider migrants to impose an unnecessary strain on hosting societies. This column introduces a new eBook that offers a brief summary of what economists have learnt about migration in several crucial areas of policymaking, and identifies most of the important questions that still remain to be answered.

The economic consequences of individuals being persistently mistaken in their trust beliefs can be as large as those from not going to college. This column sheds light on how trust assessments are made. It documents a large role for moral considerations, which may ultimately contribute to the persistence of mistakes in trusting behaviour.

The IMF invests significant resources in developing models to estimate equilibrium exchange rates. This column assesses the predictive power of one vintage of IMF exchange rate models during 2006–2011. The models performed exceptionally well at predicting exchange rate movements over the medium run, which is particularly remarkable given that the period covered the unanticipated Global Crisis and the assessments were not shared publicly at the time.

Recently a number of both small and large economies have experienced negative nominal interest rates. This column uses exchange rate data from 2010 to 2016 to demonstrate that negative interest rates seem to have little effect on observable exchange rate behaviour in these economies. While the long-run consequences for the financial sector of negative interest rates are unknown, the short-run effects on exchange rates in the sample are negligible.

The Chinese Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index dropped by a third in mid-2015, wiping out billions in share value. One of the responses of the Chinese government was to directly participate in the stock market. This column assesses the costs and benefits of this intervention, finding that the resulting gains amounted to about 5% of Chinese GDP. The value was created not just from increased equity and investor confidence, but also from increased liquidity and reduced probability of default for listed firms.

It is questionable whether the lessons from the relatively new field of household finance have been reflected to any great extent in the way that the banking and financial services industry works. This column introduces the Think Forward Initiative, which seeks to build a bridge between research and action. A better understanding of how and why people spend, save, invest and hold assets can act as a springboard for action to help consumers.

Oliver Hart has been jointly awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with Bengt Holmström “for their contributions to contract theory”. This column outlines his contributions to our understanding of the nature of the firm.

Multinational production has become one of the most important means by which firms serve foreign markets. This column examines the role of multinational firms in aggregate business cycle transmission. The results suggest that the combined impact of all foreign multinationals is small but significant, accounting for about 10% of the productivity shocks in a typical country and leading to a somewhat more synchronised international business cycle.

Excessively high credit ratings are thought to have contributed to the Global Crisis. A key concern is the conflict of interest that arises due to rating agencies being mainly paid by the companies whose securities they rate. This column uses Indian data to explore how the commercial ties between issuers and raters affect ratings. The results indicate a fee-driven conflict of interest, with an upward bias in the ratings of issuers whose fees are important to an agency. This highlights the potential benefits for the financial system of circumscribing rating agency consulting.

Banks' payout decisions at the beginning of the financial crisis of 2007-2009 were particularly controversial as the crisis eroded the capital of many banks. Concerns were raised that banks may have engaged in wealth transfer to shareholders, or that they may have been reluctant to reduce dividends to avoid negative signalling. This column examines these arguments using a large dataset on US bank holding companies. Cross-sectional tests do not provide clear-cut evidence of active wealth transfer. Similarly, the evidence on signalling is mixed.

Alphabetical order is in many ways a good arrangement, but if your name begins with a letter that is early in the alphabet, it gives you significant and unwarranted advantages. This column – whose authors both have surnames starting with R, one of whom was once recommended a “wonderful paper” on which he was a co-author – argues that a voluntary mechanism to order co-authors using a coin toss would be fairer and more efficient.

The European Commission is currently evaluating compliance with the Stability and Growth Pact across the Eurozone. However, differences in the econometric methods used by member states and by the Commission can lead to estimates that are at odds. This column argues that the Commission’s method of estimating the non-accelerating wage rate of unemployment for Eurozone members, which relies on an accelerationist Phillips curve, is inferior to specifications with a traditional Phillips curve. The findings highlight how technical aspects of an estimation procedure can have serious effects on policy outcomes.

In September 2016, the ECB held its first Annual Research Conference. This column surveys the contributions to the conference, which brought together policymakers and academics from around the world to promote discussion of topics at the forefront of monetary and financial economic research. Nobel laureate Eric Maskin gave the keynote lecture, addressing whether fiscal policy should be set by politicians, and the conference included eight further presentations and a panel discussion on monetary policy and financial stability.

Over the past two years, a significant disinflationary impulse has dampened nominal activity around the world. As this disinflationary impulse fades, however, both nominal and real growth should normalise. Indeed, as this column highlights, the latest signs show inflation and inflation expectations rising, profits stabilising, and capital expenditure inching up.

Economists normally study wealth formation and inequality among the adult population, but some people already possess economic resources in early childhood. This column uses data from Denmark to examine childhood wealth and the role of wealth transfers early in life. A main result is that wealth inequality starts as early as childhood. Although overall wealth levels in childhood are low, they are better predictors of wealth in adulthood than parental wealth.

There is much dispute over whether immigration is beneficial or detrimental to the host country, and any conclusions are often event-driven rather than evidence-based. This column explores evidence on how immigration affected economic development between 1960 and 2013 through its effect on the cultural and ethnic composition of the destination country. Cultural heterogeneity appears to have had a positive impact on economic development, and the positive effect of diversity seems to have been stronger in developing countries.

A substantial body of literature finds significant effects of unemployment rates on crime rates. However, relatively little is known about the direct impact of individual unemployment on individual crime. This column examines the effect of job displacement on crime using 15 years of Danish administrative data. Being subject to a sudden and unexpected mass-layoff is found to increase the probability that an individual commits a crime. However, the findings stress the importance of policies targeting education and income inequality in mitigating crime.

After the 2008 Global Crisis, there has been progress towards a system-wide regulatory architecture that includes a national macroprudential authority. This column describes a ‘capacity indicator’ that measures the state of macroprudential policies worldwide, including the features policymakers believe constitute a successful macroprudential policy regime. Eventually this index may be used to establish whether these macroprudential policy innovations have been successful.