In the US, both taxes and social security benefits depend on one’s marital status and tend to discourage the labour supply of the secondary earner. Using information on US cohorts born in 1945 and 1955, this column shows that eliminating marriage-related provisions drastically increases the participation of married women over their entire life cycle and reduces the participation of married men after age 60. If the resulting government surplus were used to lower income taxation, there would be large welfare gains for the vast majority of the population.
International humanitarian aid plays an important role in the response to natural disasters. This column argues that political motives play a role in the allocation of aid. Focusing on the allocation of US humanitarian assistance, it shows that disasters that affect the birth regions of leaders of recipient countries receive substantially more funding than other comparable disasters. This suggests that there is a ‘home bias’ in humanitarian aid.
Over the past ten years there has been a substantial rise in income per capita differences between Germany and France.However, it is not a given that the German economy will continue to outperform the French one, and indeed the picture has changed during 2019. This column argues that structural divergences between member states in the euro area contributed to nominal and real divergences, and suggests what can be done to foster convergence between the two countries.
Global trade in services increased six-fold between 1990-2017, representing a threat for workers but a growth opportunity for firms that source these services at lowest cost. This column examines the changes in employment composition and performance of Finnish service importers. Firms that increased imports of service inputs reduced employment of low-skill service workers but increased employment of managers. They also improved their sales, assets, and service exports, and were more likely to survive.
The economic debate on immigration has focused on migration’s short-term labour market and fiscal effects. Less attention has been given to the long-run economic opportunities linked to migration. This column uses the case of refugees returning to the former Yugoslavia from Germany after the end of the Yugoslav wars to explore the role that returning migrants play in shaping the industrial development of their home country. The findings support the idea that migrants are drivers of knowhow and technology transfers between countries.
Other Recent Columns:
- Recovery and reconstruction: Europe after WWII
- Interpreting rotating global current account surpluses
- WTO dispute settlement and the Appellate Body crisis
- Trade effects of WTO
- Women in European economics
- The US-China trade war is harming communities in the US
- Can we have too much data?
- Institutional change and development in lagging regions in Europe
- The politics of distraction
- The two-margin problem in insurance markets
- Exposure to frequent price changes shapes inflation expectations
- The real effects of money supply shocks
- Economic warfare: Insights from Mançur Olson
- Quantifying the unemployment effects of Trump’s protectionist policies
- Supplier networks as a key to wartime production in Japan
- On the decline of R&D efficiency
- The political colour of fiscal responsibility
- Resolving the missing deflation and inflation puzzles
- World War II in America: Spending, deficits, multipliers, and sacrifice
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27 - 29 November 2019 / Florence, Italy / Florence School of Banking and Finance, European University Institute
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28 - 29 November 2019 / Santiago, Chile / Millennium Institute in Market Imperfections and Public Policy (MIPP) and Center for Applied Economics, University of Chile
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28 - 29 November 2019 / University Jaume I, Castellon, Spain / University Jaume I. INTECO Joint Research Group.
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12 - 14 December 2019 / National University of Singapore (NUS) / National University of Singapore (NUS)
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16 - 17 December 2019 / Frankfurt am Main / European Central Bank
