False pretences of knowledge about complicated economic situations have become all too common in public policy debates. This column argues that policymakers should take into account what they don’t know in their decision making. It describes a tractable approach for acknowledging, characterising, and responding to different forms of uncertainty, by using theories and statistical methods available at any particular moment.
Mothers in the US breastfeed their infants at higher rates today than at any point in documented history, but low-income mothers have become less likely to do so. A leading reason for mothers to stop breastfeeding is the need to return to work. This column uses data on over 270,000 mother-child pairs in California, which implemented paid family leave in 2004, to examine the relationship between paid family leave and breastfeeding. It finds that paid family leave significantly increases overall breastfeeding duration, suggesting that paid family leave may lead to longer-term health improvements for children and mothers, particularly among disadvantaged families.
The payment landscape is changing. This column goes back to late 19th century France to explore the implications of this more decentralised and less banked landscape for the design of central banks’ interventions when fighting financial crises. The Banque de France operated a very wide discount window and used a variety of risk management techniques to effectively subdue risk-taking behaviours and to protect its balance sheet from taking any loss. This helped it to stabilise the economy and to overcome the consequences of negative income shocks.
In the early days of his administration, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro announced plans to privatise several of the country's largest state-owned enterprises and airports. Fearing such a move would lower both wages and employment, labour unions organised in opposition to Bolsonaro’s plans. This column looks anew at evidence testing whether privatisation offers more than merely an immediate infusion of revenue, and finds that while increases in efficiency might contribute to Brazil’s overall economic growth, privatisation could also expose the country’s most vulnerable workers to significant risk of decreased wages.
Is the rise of ‘atypical’ work arrangements – such as self-employment, freelancing, gig work and zero-hour contracts – a result of workers wanting such jobs or because they have no other choice? This column reports evidence from the UK and the US that while atypical workers may like flexibility, they would prefer a steady job. Indeed, workers would agree to earn less in order to increase their employment security.
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17 - 18 August 2019 / Peking University, Beijing / Chinese University of Hong Kong – Tsinghua University Joint Research Center for Chinese Economy, the Institute for Emerging Market Studies at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University, the Stanford Center on Global Poverty and Development at Stanford University, the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University, BREAD, NBER and CEPR
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