This paper evaluates the effects of the More Productive Brazil Program (BMP) which provided subsidized on-site management consultancies about lean manufacturing techniques to 3000 establishments between 2016 and 2018. The BMP was restricted to four manufacturing sectors but included large, medium, and small-sized establishments. We apply two-way fixed effects regressions and event study specifications

This paper provides new evidence on a long-standing question asked by Shiller (1997): why do we dislike inflation? I conducted two surveys on representative samples of the US population to elicit people's perceptions about the impacts of inflation and their reactions to it. The predominant reason for people's aversion to inflation is the widespread belief that it diminishes their buying power, as neither

We estimate that the combination of changes in behavior to slow the spread of COVID-19 and the delivery of vaccines to a substantial majority of the American population by mid-2021 saved close to 800,000 American lives relative to what would have occurred had vaccines not been developed. We argue that the duration and magnitude of this behavioral response—and thus its overall success in delaying infections—came

Reducing high public debt is key for countries seeking to restore fiscal capacity and resilience in the wake of recent crises. But large debt reductions are rare. Jamaica stands out for reducing its debt from 144 percent of GDP to 72 percent over the last decade, a record achieved by running large, persistent primary budget surpluses. Well-designed fiscal rules combined with social partnership agreements

We introduce a simple long-run aggregate demand and supply framework for evaluating long-run inflation. The framework illustrates how exogenous economic and political economy factors generate pressures that, in the presence of central bank discretion, can have an impact on long-run inflation as well as transitions between steady states. We use the analysis to provide a fresh perspective on the forces

Using newly digitized unemployment insurance claims data, we construct historical monthly unemployment series for US states going back to January 1947. We validate our series, showing that they are highly correlated with the Bureau of Labor Statistics' state-level unemployment data, which are only available since January 1976, and capture consistent business cycle dynamics. We use our claims-based

As revealed by the failures of three regional banks in the spring of 2023, bank runs are not a thing of the past. To inform the ongoing discussion of the appropriate regulatory response, we examine trends in the banking industry over the last twenty-five years. On the liability side of bank balance sheets, deposits—and especially uninsured deposits—have grown rapidly. On the asset side, there has been

We explore the extent to which aspirations – such as those forged in the course of social interactions – explain ‘puzzling’ behavioral patterns in investment decisions. We motivate an aspirational utility, reminiscent of Friedman and Savage (1948), where social considerations (e.g., status concerns) provide an economic foundation for aspirations. We show this utility can explain a range of observed

Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

Large cities are a key driver of technological innovation and economic growth. This paper investigates the developments of Italian metropolitan areas, building on insights from economic geography and innovation studies. The key questions to be investigated are the following: (i) Which trajectories of population and economic change can be identified for Italian metropolitan areas? Are we facing a process

This work investigates the technical and financial performance of deeply decarbonised wholesale electricity markets with uncertain variable renewable generation (VRG), uncertain demand and different types of flexibility. It first finds that different combinations of power reserves (i.e. power generation capacity) and energy reserves (i.e. energy storage capacity), can achieve adequate system reliability

In this paper, we analyze the economic impacts of the West-East Electricity Transmission Project (WEETP) project using the multi-period difference-in-difference (DID) method based on county-level data from 2000 to 2020. Our findings indicate that the WEETP project inhibits firm entry in electricity-exporting regions while encouraging firm entry in electricity-importing regions, thus hindering regional

We estimate the returns to IRS audits of taxpayers across the income distribution. We find an additional ${\$}$1 spent auditing taxpayers above the 90th income percentile yields more than ${\$}$12 in revenue, while audits of below-median income taxpayers yield ${\$}$5. We construct our estimates by drawing from comprehensive internal accounting information and audit-level enforcement logs. We begin

Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

We investigate whether green (brown) portfolios constructed from clean energy ETFs (fossil fuel ETFs) yield positive (negative) returns conditional on climate-related risks. While the green portfolios do not unconditionally outperform the brown ones, the outperformance of green portfolios is statistically significant under the conditional setting using non-parametric estimates with imposing inequality

This paper examines the suspension of the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM) that occurred in June 2022. Our study aims to (i) identify the key factors leading to the market suspension, (ii) investigate the behaviour of market participants and price outcomes during this period, and (iii) provide important recommendations for policy and decision-makers related to avoiding or managing crises

Distributive justice is an important but often overlooked factor in policy evaluation. We thus examine how people's attitudes towards distributive justice affect their preferences for programmes aimed at reducing ambient air pollution resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels for residential heating. To do so, we carried out two multifactorial survey experiments that allowed us to incorporate justice

Income inequality and energy poverty are critical obstacles to the worldwide low-carbon transformation and deeply affect human behavior. Applying a dynamic panel data model, this study investigates the effect of income inequality and energy poverty on global carbon emissions. We determine the effect of the interaction between income inequality and energy poverty on the global low-carbon transformation

This study investigates the relationship between novel and old news sentiment and commodity futures returns. Using TRNA data from Thomson Reuters, we measure daily sentiment of both novel and old news to estimate their impact on commodity futures returns. Our findings reveal that both novel and old news sentiment significantly correlate with returns, with old sentiment having a stronger effect. Notably

We develop a novel recovery theorem based on no-arbitrage principles. To implement our Arbitrage-Based Recovery Theorem empirically, one needs to observe the Arrow–Debreu prices only for one single maturity. We perform several different density tests and mean prediction tests using more than 26 years of S&P 500 options data, and we find evidence that our method can correctly recover the probability

In recent years, the worsening global geopolitical conditions have led investors and policy makers to become increasingly concerned about systemic risk in the global energy market. However, the existing literature has little empirical evidence on this problem from a geopolitical perspective. Based on an Elastic-Net-VAR model for depicting high-dimensional left-tail interdependence, this paper measures

Using administrative data on credit profiles matched with unemployment insurance (UI) for individuals in the U.S., we show that laid-off workers with access to Uber rely less on household debt, experience fewer delinquencies, and are less likely to apply for UI benefits. Our empirical strategy exploits both the staggered market entry of Uber across cities and the differential benefit of its entry across

We study information sharing between strategic investors who are informed about asset fundamentals. We demonstrate that a coarsely informed investor optimally chooses to share information if his counterparty investor is well informed. By doing so, the coarsely informed investor invites the other investor to trade against his information, thereby reducing his price impact. Paradoxically, the well informed

Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

This paper develops a capped-call option model to evaluate sustainable insurance for achieving common prosperity. It integrates policyholder protection (Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG 3)) and the cap-and-trade mechanism (SDG 7) in modeling the Gini coefficient, thereby connecting SDGs 3 and 7 with common prosperity. The main findings are as follows. Life insurance policies that prioritize saving

The slow adoption of residential energy-efficiency retrofits continues to hamper the energy transition. We study incentives for adoption by proposing a model of optimal investment under uncertainty where the wealth-maximising agent has the option to delay. Stochastic portfolio returns and energy prices are taken into account. An extension of the model where the energy carrier is switched, e.g. from

We use Swedish administrative data to study the role of unemployment risk in salaried employees’ decisions to become entrepreneurs. Using the 2001 relaxation of Sweden’s last-in-first-out (LIFO) dismissal rule as an exogenous shock to unemployment risk, we find that employees facing increased unemployment risk are more likely to become entrepreneurs. The effect is more pronounced for employees with

This study presents the first analysis of the nexus between the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), a measure of climate risk, and segmented clean energy indices (such as solar, renewable, and bioenergy). Our research findings indicate that (i) the Granger quantile causality significance of SOI on segmented clean energy indices is asymmetric across different conditional quantiles. Significant predictability

The aim of this paper is to analyse the key effects contributing to changes in energy imports in the European Union (EU-27) in the period 2000–2020. Using the Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI), the analysis examines the effect of changes in six factors—energy structure, energy dependence, energy transformation efficiency, energy yield after transformation, energy efficiency and activity—on imports

Time variation and persistence are crucial properties of volatility that are often studied separately in energy volatility forecasting models. Here, we propose a novel approach that allows shocks with heterogeneous persistence to vary smoothly over time, and thus model the two together. We argue that this is important because such dynamics arise naturally from the dynamic nature of shocks in energy

This research examines the energy efficiency of city districts through the Malmquist–DEA model and investigates the spatial effects of the service trade and the digital economy on energy efficiency in urban green development. The study also delves into the specific context of the AI service trade to gain insights into and align with the emerging digital intelligence industry. The interplay of the service

The accurate forecasting of carbon returns is paramount for enabling informed investment decisions, promoting emissions reduction, and effectively shaping policies to combat climate change. In this paper, we propose a novel method to improve carbon returns predictability in a data-rich environment. The innovations of the model are manifested in two key dimensions: (i) a feature selection strategy based

We characterize investors’ moral preferences in a parsimonious experimental setting, where we auction stocks with various ethical features. We find strong evidence that investors seek to align their investments with their social values (“value alignment”), and find no evidence of behavior driven by the social impact of investment decisions (“impact-seeking preferences”). First, the willingness to pay

Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

This study explores the degree to which per capita aggregate renewable energy production is converging across U.S. states. Specifically, we examine both relative (club) convergence and weak σ-convergence. The results reject overall convergence in per capita aggregate renewable energy production for the panel of U.S. states, but identifies two convergence clubs. The results also suggest that there is

From 1944 to 1952, largely agrarian Finland had to export, on average, 4% of its yearly GDP in industrial products to the Soviet Union as war reparations. To meet the reparation demands, the Finnish state needed to provide extensive but temporary support to Soviet-assigned industries with insufficient production capacity. This paper documents the long-term impacts of this extensive and temporary industrial

This research aims to evaluate the accuracy of the long-term relationship between renewable and sustainable energy sectors and emerging technologies, including quantum computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and big data. Using a novel methodology that integrates the Time-Varying Parameter Vector Autoregressive (TVP-VAR) frequency connectedness approach with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks

Renewable energy innovations are essential for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and addressing climate change, guaranteeing a more pristine and healthful environment. Moreover, these advancements stimulate economic expansion by establishing novel sectors and employment prospects while improving energy reliability and ecological viability. For the first time, the current study explores how supply

Highlighting the unprecedented rise in CO2 emissions from the global energy sector, the paper discusses the significant shift towards renewable energy, which has reshaped financial markets and investment landscapes. Despite the transition, conventional fossil fuel energy remains pivotal to the global economy, influencing renewable energy markets, especially during financial crises. Using advanced methodologies

This paper investigates the influence of peer financial choices on the capital structure decisions of European and North American listed companies in the oil and gas sector. It also examines how commodity prices, particularly oil and natural gas prices, and their corporate hedging affect capital structure policies. The findings underscore the existence of peer effects in the oil and gas industry, indicating

Carbon allowance price is an important tool to reduce carbon emissions and achieve carbon neutrality. It is necessary to establish a predictive model to provide accurate and reliable information to managers and participants in the carbon trading market. Therefore, a novel probability density prediction model, called TS2Vec-based distribution Transformer (TDT), is proposed. TDT consists of two stages:

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused economic crises and increased inter-regional economic disparities. However, the catalyst effect that the pandemic has had on digitalization may change the traditional pattern of internal migration, in favour of rural areas. Using time-sensitive register data we explain changes in net migration rates of German districts from an economic geography perspective. We show

The domain of energy poverty is increasingly recognised as a multifaceted global challenge stemming from limited income, high energy costs, and inefficient housing. The issue affects different social groups and regions unevenly, even within Europe. This paper investigates energy poverty across 32 economies, including EU member states and several non-EU European countries, over the period from 2004

This paper develops a difference-in-differences estimator that uses annual changes in the conforming loan limit and the 80% loan-to-value (LTV) threshold to isolate the impact of easier access to credit on house prices. Houses that become eligible for financing with an 80% LTV conforming loan increase in value by about $1.17 per square foot, controlling for a rich set of characteristics. Our estimates

Errors in survey expectations display waves of pessimism and optimism. This paper develops a novel theoretical framework of time-varying beliefs capturing this fact. In our model, dynamic beliefs arise endogenously due to agents’ attitude towards alternative models. Decision-maker’s distorted beliefs generate countercyclical risk aversion, procyclical portfolio weights, and countercyclical equilibrium

Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

The complementarity between renewable generation profiles has been widely explored in the literature. Notwithstanding, complex interactions between regulatory and economic frameworks add interesting challenges and opportunities for hybrid power plant investors, regulators, and planners. Focusing on the Brazilian power market, we study the alignment of incentives between the economically-optimized strategy

Interest in nuclear energy has increased recently due to its low-carbon footprint, energy security concerns, and technological advances. Despite the recent surge in uranium stocks, there is a lack of research on uranium sector volatility. We fill this gap by analyzing the volatility of the Global X Uranium ETF (URA) from 2010 to 2024 using high-frequency data. Our analysis reveals that HAR models effectively

We assess the impact of discrimination on Black individuals’ job networks across the U.S. using a two-stage field experiment with 400+ fictitious LinkedIn profiles. In the first stage, we vary race via AI-generated images only and find that Black profiles’ connection requests are 13 percent less likely to be accepted. Based on users’ CVs, we find widespread discrimination across social groups. In the

Journal of Political Economy, Ahead of Print.

We show that the likelihood of a liquidity crunch in wholesale US dollar funding markets depends on levels of reserve balances at the financial institutions that are the most active intermediaries of these markets. Heightened risk of an imminent liquidity crunch is signaled by significant delays in intra-day payments to these large financial institutions over the prior two weeks. Our study contributes