A new GLO Discussion Paperdevelops a dynamic version of the competitive search model with adverse selection. Numerical results show that firm learning does not increase labor market efficiency.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: I develop a dynamic version of the competitive search model with adverse selection in Guerrieri, Shimer and Wright (2010). My model allows for an analysis of the effects of firm learning on labor market efficiency in the presence of search frictions. I find that firm learning increases relative expected earnings in high-ability jobs and, thereby, enhances imitation incentives of low-ability workers. The net effect on the aggregate expected match surplus and unemployment is indeterminate a priori. Numerical results show that firm learning does not increase labor market efficiency.
Featured image: Photo-by-Alex-Kotliarskyi-on-Unsplash
A new GLO Discussion Paperfinds on experimental basis with students from middle- and high-school classes in the city of Rome that obtaining information about migrants shape open attitudes more effectively than meeting one, but neither treatment affects feelings associated to immigrants.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: We analyze whether (correct) information provision on immigration is more effective than contact in shaping attitudes towards immigration. We collect data from a randomized experiment in 18 middle- and high-school classes in the city of Rome. Half of the classes meet a refugee from Mauritania, whereas the rest of them attend a lecture on figures and numbers on immigration in Italy and the world. On average, students develop better attitudes towards immigration (especially in the case of policy preferences and the perceived number of immigrants in their country) after the information treatment more than they do after the contact treatment, whereas neither treatment affects feelings associated to immigrants. Also, students having received the information treatment strongly adjust their knowledge on immigration. However, students’ individual characteristics and school type (i.e. middle vs. high school) affect treatments’ effectiveness.
A new GLO Discussion Paperfinds that removing the criminal ties makes it challenging for the firm to maintain profitability and efficiency.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: In this paper, I assess the causal effects of judicial administration on a sample of Italian criminal firms in the period 2004-2016, to shed light on the dynamic path of the firm’s performance from pre-seizure to the post-entry judicial administration phase. By using exogenous enforcement law decisions imposed by authorities for each case, I estimate their impact, highlighting the economic consequences of having new legal governance aiming to establish legality and the perpetuation of activities. The results show that there are adverse effects on profitability and efficiency with an increase in the leverage level. The empirical evidence shows how organised crime firms are intrinsically managed by their dark criminal side; removing the criminal ties makes it challenging to maintain profitability and efficiency. Overall, the negative results are due to difficulty in establishing a new economic framework for (ex-criminal) firms in which they are able to operate efficiently and according to market rules.
Posted inNews, Research|Comments Off on What Happens in Criminal Firms after Godfather Management Removal? Judicial Administration and Firms Performance.
A new GLO Discussion Paper suggests that Donald Trump would likely have won re-election if COVID-19 cases in the United States had been 5 percent lower.
While some people may argue that “A German – Turkish vaccine conspiracy has cost the US President the re-election!”, this is probably fake news. However, this GLO Discussion Paper No. 710 is based on fresh serious academic research and contributes to our proper understanding of voting behavior in the US.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: What is the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the 2020 U.S. presidential election? Guided by a pre-analysis plan, we estimate the effect of COVID- 19 cases and deaths on the change in county-level voting for Donald Trump between 2016 and 2020. To account for potential confounders, we include a large number of COVID-19-related controls as well as demographic and socioeconomic variables. Moreover, we instrument the numbers of cases and deaths with the share of workers employed in meat-processing factories to sharpen our identification strategy. We find that COVID-19 cases negatively affected Trump’s vote share. The estimated effect appears strongest in urban counties, in swing states, and in states that Trump won in 2016. A simple counterfactual analysis suggests that Trump would likely have won re-election if COVID-19 cases had been 5 percent lower. Our paper contributes to the literature of retrospective voting and demonstrates that voters hold leaders accountable for their (mis-)handling of negative shocks.
A new GLO Discussion Paperdocuments that poorer households bear disproportionate costs of water quality violations in the United States.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: Up to 45 million Americans in a given year are potentially exposed to contaminated drinking water, increasing their risk of adverse health outcomes. Existing literature has demonstrated that individuals respond to drinking water quality violations by increasing their purchases of bottled water and filtration avoidance, thereby avoiding exposure to contaminants. This paper demonstrates that poorer households, for whom the costs of avoidance comprise a greater share of disposable income, bear disproportionate costs of water quality violations in the United States. Following a health-based water quality violation, poor households’ expenditure on nutritious grocery products in a nationally representative panel differentially decreases by approximately $7 per month. This is associated with a decrease of about 1,500 calories per household member per day, placing these individuals at a higher risk of food insecurity. This finding suggests that the indirect costs of drinking water contamination through economic channels exacerbate health disparities associated with poverty.
Volume 34, issue 1, 2021 of the Journal of Population Economics is published online. See below the list of articles and access links to read or download the contributions.
PARTICIPATE in the November 19, 2020 (Thursday); (2-5 pm CET) Journal of Population Economics Online Workshop (Webinar). Hosted by UNU-MERIT. Maastricht . Open to the general public. Mark your calendar. The detailed agenda is below presenting highlights on “Covid-19” and “societal conflict” from the new issue.
A LINK TO THE EVENT will be provided in time through special reminders, and the GLO & POP @ UNU-MERIT websites. For instance,HERE.
Journal of Population Economics: Report Klaus F. Zimmermann (Editor-in-Chief; UNU-MERIT & Maastricht University)
2.15 – 2.45 pm CET Maastricht
Lead paper Issue 1/2021:Session Chair Terra McKinnish (Editor; University of Colorado Boulder)
“Names and behavior in a war” presented by Štěpán Jurajda (CERGE-EI, Prague) Co-author: Dejan Kovač (Princeton University and Zagreb)
Discussion
2.45 – 3.15 pm CET Maastricht
Kuznets Prize 2021: “Impacts of social and economic factors on the transmission of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in China”, published in the Journal of Population Economics (2020), 33(4), pp. 1127–1172.
Klaus F. Zimmermann (Editor-in-Chief; UNU-MERIT & Maastricht University) Bartel Van de Walle (Director, UNU-MERIT)
Panel with the authors: Yun Qiu (Jinan University), Xi Chen (Yale University), and Wei Shi (Jinan University)
3.15 – 4.00 pm CET Maastricht
Panel: Publishing in Population Economics Alessandro Cigno (Editor; University of Florence), Shuaizhang Feng (Editor; Jinan University), Oded Galor (Editor; Brown University), Pierre Pestieau (Editor; Université de Liège), Erdal Tekin (Editor; American University), Katharina Wetzel-Vandai (Springer Nature), Junsen Zhang (Editor; Chinese University of Hong Kong), Klaus F. Zimmermann (Editor-in-Chief; UNU-MERIT & Maastricht University)
4.00 – 5.00 pm CET Maastricht
Covid-19 in Issue 1/2021: Session Chair Madeline Zavodny (Managing Editor; University of North Florida)
Fabio Milani (University of California, Irvine): “COVID-19 outbreak, social response, and early economic effects: a global VAR analysis of cross-country interdependencies”
Discussion
Domenico Depalo (Bank of Italy): “True COVID-19 mortality rates from administrative data”
Discussion
Fabrizio Patriarca (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia): “Identifying policy challenges of COVID-19 in hardly reliable data and judging the success of lockdown measures” Co-authors: Luca Bonacini (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia); Giovanni Gallo (National Institute for Public Policies Analysis)
Discussion
Sergio Scicchitano (National Institute for Public Policies Analysis): “Working from home and income inequality: risks of a ‘new normal’ with COVID-19” Co-authors: Luca Bonacini (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia); Giovanni Gallo (National Institute for Public Policies Analysis)
Posted inEvents, News|Comments Off on Journal of Population Economics Webinar on November 19, 2020: Kuznets Prize 2021 & Presentation of the newly published Issue 1, 2021.
A new GLO Discussion Paper makes the case that the COVID-19 pandemic may cause a permanent reduction in innovation and entrepreneurship and may even bring the 4th industrial revolution to a premature end.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: Industrialization is vital for inclusive and sustainable global development. The two engines of industrialization – innovation and trade – are in danger of being compromised by the COVID-19 pandemic, under conditions increasingly reminiscent of the medieval world. It comes at a time when innovation had already been stagnating under guild-like corporate concentration and dominance, and the multilateral trade system had been buckling under pressure from a return to mercantilist ideas. The COVID-19 pandemic may cause a permanent reduction in innovation and entrepreneurship and may even bring the 4th industrial revolution (4IR) to a premature end. Hence the post-COVID-19 world may be left with trade as the only engine for industrialization for the foreseeable future. If the global community fails to fix the multilateral trade system, the world may start to resemble the Middle Ages in other, even worse, aspects.
A new GLO Discussion Paperdocuments that in Africa both the intensive and extensive margins of contemporary conflict are higher close to historical ethnic borders.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: We explore the effect of historical ethnic borders on contemporary conflict in Africa. We document that both the intensive and extensive margins of contemporary conflict are higher close to historical ethnic borders. Exploiting variations across artificial regions within an ethnicity’s historical homeland and a theory-based instrumental variable approach, we find that regions crossed by historical ethnic borders have 27 percentage points higher probability of conflict and 7.9 percentage points higher probability of being the initial location of a conflict. We uncover several key underlying mechanisms: competition for agricultural land, population pressure, cultural similarity and weak property rights.
Featured image: Sergey Pesterev on Unsplash; Amboseli National Park Kenya
A new GLO Discussion Paperdemonstrates that massive online social networks can advance the study of human culture by providing quantitative, scalable, and high-resolution measurement of behaviorally revealed cultural values and preferences.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: Culture has played a pivotal role in human evolution. Yet, the ability of social scientists to study culture is limited by the currently available measurement instruments. Scholars of culture must regularly choose between scalable but sparse survey-based methods or restricted but rich ethnographic methods. Here, we demonstrate that massive online social networks can advance the study of human culture by providing quantitative, scalable, and high-resolution measurement of behaviorally revealed cultural values and preferences. We employ publicly available data across nearly 60,000 topic dimensions drawn from two billion Facebook users across 225 countries and territories. We first validate that cultural distances calculated from this measurement instrument correspond to traditional survey-based and objective measures of cross-national cultural differences. We then demonstrate that this expanded measure enables rich insight into the cultural landscape globally at previously impossible resolution. We analyze the importance of national borders in shaping culture, explore unique cultural markers that identify subnational population groups, and compare subnational divisiveness to gender divisiveness across countries. The global collection of massive data on human behavior provides a high-dimensional complement to traditional cultural metrics. Further, the granularity of the measure presents enormous promise to advance scholars’ understanding of additional fundamental questions in the social sciences. The measure enables detailed investigation into the geopolitical stability of countries, social cleavages within both small and large-scale human groups, the integration of migrant populations, and the disaffection of certain population groups from the political process, among myriad other potential future applications.
A new GLO Discussion Paperfinds for European countries that school friendship networks arise according to homophily along many characteristics (gender, school achievement and ethnic and cultural backgrounds).
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: This paper investigates the determinants of school friendship networks among adolescents, proposing a model of network formation and estimating it using a sample (CILS4EU) of about 10,000 secondary school students in four countries: England, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. We test the idea that networks arise according to homophily along many characteristics (gender, school achievement and ethnic and cultural backgrounds), and assess the relative importance of each factor. In addition to gender, we find that country of origin, generational status and religion predict friendship for foreign-born students. For country-born individuals, ties depend on a broader set of factors, including socioeconomic status and school achievement. In sum, homophilic preferences go considerably beyond ethnicity. Multiculturalism, which gives prominence to ethnic backgrounds, risks emphasising the differences in that dimension at the expense of affinity in others.
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here:
Cookie Policy
