Displaying from 51 to 60 of 277 available piece of news
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Effectiveness and counter-cyclicality of fiscal consolidation under compliance regulation: The case of the Stability and Growth Pact
We examine the effect of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) on fiscal adjustments. Three alternative measures of budget cuts are considered: i) narratively identified fiscal adjustments whose main objective is to reduce the budget deficit, ii) the primary budget balance and iii) the structural budget balance. The database includes information from the period 1980-2014 for 17 economies, of which 10 fall under the SGPs' regulations. The SGP is analyzed with respect to its effectiveness, its cyclicality and the type of fiscal adjustments (tax increases versus spending cuts).
The results of the study indicate that the SGP has effectively promoted the budgetary consolidation measures identified through the narrative approach, while it had no overall impact on the primary balance and a smaller overall impact on the structural budget balance. However, the effectiveness of the SGP has varied considerably over time. All measures indicate that the SGP was particularly effective in the period after the introduction of the euro, except for the 2 years after the 2008 financial crisis. We find no evidence that fiscal policy has become more procyclical under the SGP.
Finally, the fiscal consolidation under the SGP favors spending cuts, whereas the application of tax hikes shows no sizeable differences as compared with the reference group
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Incentivizing Environmental Investments: The Contest-based Subsidy Allocation Mechanism
The contest-based subsidy-tax mechanisms may help policymakers achieving sustainable environmental investments, promoting cost-efficient ecological policy designs, properly pricing environmental emissions, making green budgets more effective, decoupling economic growth from the harmful emissions, and generating trade-offs between stabilizing inflation and improving the mix of sustainable environmental policies.
Two researchers from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili at the Dept. Economics/Eco-SOS have proposed two novel contest-based subsidy mechanisms and evaluates their effectiveness in terms of firms' environmental investments, profits, consumer and producer surplus, environmental damage and social welfare.
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A New Measure of Wage Risk: Occupation‑Specific Evidence for Germany
This study proposes a new measure of wage risk based on estimated probabilities to earn an hourly wage that is below some specific lower quantile of the wage distribution. Using the German SOEP as an information rich data base, we determine wage risks overall and for nine job categories during the period from 1992 until 2015. Our empirical results show that, firstly, the low-wage workers in Germany are clearly worse off after the Hartz reforms. Workers in Western Germany have experienced both a decline in low-wages and a rise of wage risk, while workers in Eastern Germany suffered from trends in wage risk only. Secondly, both in Western and Eastern Germany, the overall evidence hides important heterogeneity showing up at occupational levels. In Western Germany, the described utility losses have been particularly strong for Unskilled workers, Service & sales workers, Craftsmen and Operatives. In Eastern Germany, this holds for male and female Unskilled workers and Craftsmen and female Operatives, Clerks and Technicians.
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The link between cryptocurrencies and Google Trends attention
This paper revisits the linkage between cryptocurrencies and public disclosed preferences, proxied by online searches. We show that cryptocurrencies are not related to a general uncertainty index as measured by the Google Trends data by Castelnuovo and Tran (2017). Instead, cryptocurrencies are linked to a Google Trends attention measure specific for this market.
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The application for funding may be diverting researchers from doing research: The perverse effects of competitive research calls.
A researcher from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili at the Dept. Economics/Eco-SOS and a researcher from the Max Planck Society in Germany have analysed different ways of reducing inefficiency and the waste of resources associated with the application to research funding calls.
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Detection of Geographical Clustering: Cultural and Creative Industries in Barcelona
Creative clusters are increasingly being recognized as vital tools in the promotion of the competitiveness, innovation, urban development, and growth of cities in developed countries. This paper studies the geography of Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) in Barcelona (Spain) for the years 2009 and 2017. We investigate the spatial distribution of firms using the Scan methodology, which identifies the localization of clusters and assigns them statistical significance. Our findings indicate that CCIs are not located haphazardly- they tend to cluster in and around Barcelona's prime districts. The evolution of the clusters over these nine years reveals distinct patterns of clustering among the twelve CCI sub-sectors. The mature clusters in Barcelona's core tend to have greater growth and enhanced transformation capabilities. Our results can guide CCI cluster policy, taking into account the specificity of each sub-sector. In addition, they can direct place-based development strategies, creative urban and rural planning, and restructuring in a polycentric context.
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Policies for Supporting the Regional Circular Economy and Sustainability
The Circular Economy and Sustainability are among the greatest challenges faced by policy makers, producers, and consumers. Circular Economy processes demand less from the environment since they can minimize waste generation, and, hence, can be powerful tools to combat the negative effects of climate change.
Additionally, following subsidiarity principles, public policies supporting the Circular Economy should be designed at the lowest levels of public administrations-this provides huge opportunities for regional governments to design, implement and monitor these policies. This paper explores and discusses implications for those policies before introducing the five papers published in the special issue dedicated to policies for regional economy and sustainability.
While some of the papers attempt to conceptualize sustainable development through a microeconomic perspective, others have a clear macroeconomic empirical focus. In consequence, this special issue provides a rich body of work for further Circularity and Sustainability nexus studies.
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The city of start-ups: Location determinants of start-ups in emergent industries in Barcelona
Several authors suggest that cities promote technology, innovation, and the growth of disruptive technologies (Bosma and Sternberg, 2014; Balland et al., 2020). In recent years, cities have become nursery start-ups and high-risk investments have shifted from the outskirts to the city center (Florida and Mellander, 2016). This is a common trend, observed not only in the United States, but in many major cities around the world (Florida, 2013; Florida and Mellander, 2016).
Among these, Barcelona occupies a prominent place internationally, just behind European cities such as London, Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam. Its growing popularity as a business center is due at least in part to the efforts made by the Generalitat in recent years to develop a rich and diverse ecosystem.
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U.S. banks’ lending, financial stability, and text-based sentiment analysis
We examine the impact of investor sentiment on bank credit and financial stability. We also investigate how loan growth may affect bank stability. We use a large panel data set of U.S. commercial banks over the period 1999Q1-2015Q4, using bank-level data. Investor sentiment is proxied by two novel but alternative measures based on textual analysis
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Using contests to design emission tax mechanisms
An optimal tax mechanism has less impact on economic growth, incentivizes firms' green R&D investments, and achieves carbon neutrality fast.
Two researchers from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili at the Dept. Economics/Eco-SOS have proposed three novel market-based emissions tax mechanisms. The objective of their approach is to minimize economic losses, incentivizing green R&D investments and reducing environmental emissions in a sustainable manner.
