China’s ascension to the WTO followed years of negotiations with the incumbent members and was hailed at the time as a victory for the liberal paradigm – part of the ‘end of history’. But today frictions remain. This first in a series of three columns presents the build-up to China joining the multilateral trade agreement, arguing that expectations for its subsequent behaviour were misguided from the off.
Appropriation artists incorporate borrowed images from different sources to produce new compositions. These artists not only risk infringing copyright, but also leave intermediaries such as auction houses at risk of litigation. This column considers changes to the secondary market for appropriation art in the aftermath of a 2013 decision by the US Court of Appeals. Providing quantitative evidence of how the ‘fair use’ defence has affected the secondary arts market, the column questions whether the existing framework promotes or hampers innovation in the art world.
Machine learning algorithms are increasingly being used in decision making. Web companies, car-sharing services, and courts rely on algorithms to supply content, set prices, and estimate recidivism rates. This column introduces a method for predicting counterfactual performance of new algorithms using data from older algorithms as a natural experiment. When applied to a fashion e-commerce service, the method increases the click through rate and improved the recommendations algorithm.
Many antitrust investigations, particularly for intermediate goods, involve markets where the buyer negotiates with competing sellers and gets an individualised price. This column explores the conceptual differences between individualised pricing and standard uniform pricing, and reports some recent evidence that provides empirical support for the view that these differences can have a major impact on market power and merger effects, which should be accounted for in competition policy.
The social cost of carbon is a monetary metric for the damage caused by the emission of an additional tonne of CO2. Previous literature has shown that accounting for inequality between countries significantly influences the social cost of carbon, but mostly omits heterogeneity below the national level. Using a model that features heterogeneity both between and within countries, this column demonstrates that climate and distributional policy can generally not be separated. In particular, it shows that a higher social cost of carbon may be called for globally under realistic expectations of existing inequality.
Other Recent Columns:
- Addressing impediments to digital trade: A new eBook
- Lockdowns widen the gender gap in mental health
- Migration and the post-pandemic reboot of global trade
- French firms through the COVID storm
- Africa’s latent assets
- Commodity prices and banking crises
- The voice of monetary policy
- Working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic: Updated estimates
- The growing concentration of wealth in Italy
- Taxing wealth in a context of extreme inequality legacy: The case of South Africa
- Reshaping European economic integration in the post-Covid world
- Unequal jury representation and its consequences
- COVID-19 fatalities show a Black female bias
- Globalisation and global crises
- EU economic policy and architecture after Covid: Rebooting the debate on the EU reform roadmap
- Ditch the EU’s fiscal rules; develop fiscal standards instead
- Why housing is built in flood-prone coastal areas
- In defence of regional development banks in the Covid-19 era
- When distance drives destination, small towns can stimulate development
- Accounting for the Great Divergence: Recent findings from historical national accounting
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