Despite around a third of PhDs in economics in the US having been earned by women over the last few decades, under 15% of full professors in the US were women in 2017. This column uses data scraped from research institute websites to investigate whether a similar ‘leaky pipeline’ exists in Europe. It finds that in comparison to the US, European countries have a higher share of women full professors in their research institutions, but the attrition rate between junior and senior ranks is comparable on both sides of the Atlantic. There are important differences throughout Europe, however, with the Nordic countries and France scoring much higher on gender equality than, for instance, Germany and the Netherlands.
Consumers expect to bear the costs of trade wars through higher prices and reductions in variety. This column examines a different hardship of the US-China trade war: the retaliatory tariffs that affect income and production opportunities for directly impacted farmers and workers. Unlike price effects, which are spread across the population, this ‘labour income channel’ is concentrated and differs across US counties. Those who lost their position of comparative advantage for the Chinese market due to tariffs bear this burden of the trade war alone.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal highlighted the sophisticated ways social media platforms can allow companies to infer information about users and non-users from shared data. This column shows how correlations between platform users’ and non-users’ characteristics mean companies can obtain data at below equilibrium prices, implying welfare inefficiencies for individuals. The authors make some suggestions of regulations that could improve on these data-sharing inefficiencies for users and non-users of the platforms.
Institutions are an important ingredient for economic growth. Using data from European regions for the period 1999-2013, this column shows that government quality matters for regional growth, and that relative improvements in the quality of government are a powerful driver of development. One-size-fits-all policies for lagging regions are not the solution. Government quality improvements are essential for low-growth regions, and in low-income regions, basic endowment shortages are still the main barrier to development.
It is often suspected that politicians time announcements of controversial policies strategically to avoid public scrutiny. This column reports evidence from a systematic analysis of the timing of executive orders issued by US presidents to show that this suspicion is correct, at least in this case. Presidents tend to issue executive orders, especially those that are more likely to generate negative publicity, in coincidence with other important events that distract the media and the public.
Other Recent Columns:
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- The real effects of money supply shocks
- Economic warfare: Insights from Mançur Olson
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- 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
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20 - 22 November 2019 / Florence, Italy / Florence School of Banking and Finance, European University Institute
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28 - 29 November 2019 / University Jaume I, Castellon, Spain / University Jaume I. INTECO Joint Research Group.
