Economics

Using a survey on wage expectations among students at two Swiss institutions of higher education, we examine the wage expectations of our respondents along two main lines. First, we investigate the rationality of wage expectations by comparing average expected wages from our sample with those of similar graduates; we further examine how our respondents revise their expectations when provided information about actual wages. Second, using causal mediation analysis, we test whether the consideration of a rich set of personal and professional controls, namely concerning family formation and children in addition to professional preferences, accounts for the difference in wage expectations across genders. We find that males and females overestimate their wages compared to actual ones, and that males respond in an overconfident manner to information about outside wages. Despite the attenuation of the gender difference in wage expectations brought about by the comprehensive set of controls, gender generally retains a significant direct, unexplained effect on wage expectations.

The aim of this paper is twofold:1)contribute to a better understanding of the place of women in Economics and Management disciplines by characterizing the difference in levels of scientific collaboration between men and women at the specialties level;2) Investigate the relationship between gender diversity and citation impact in Economics and Management. Our data, extracted from the Web of Science database, cover global production as indexed in 302 journals in Economics and 370 journals in Management, with respectively 153 667 and 163 567 articles published between 2008 and 2018. Results show that collaborative practices between men and women are quite different in Economics and Management. We also find that there is a positive and significant effect of gender diversity on the academic impact of publications. Mixed-gender publications (co-authored by men and women) receive more citations than non-mixed papers (written by same-gender author teams) or single-author publications. The effect is slightly stronger in Management. The regression analysis also indicates that there is, for both disciplines, a small negative effect on citations received if the corresponding author is a woman.

How has the science system reacted to the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic? Here we compare the (growing) international network for coronavirus research with the broader international health science network. Our findings show that, before the outbreak, coronavirus research realized a relatively small and rather peculiar niche within the global health sciences. As a response to the pandemic, the international network for coronavirus research expanded rapidly along the hierarchical structure laid out by the global health science network. Thus, in face of the crisis, the global health science system proved to be structurally stable yet versatile in research. The observed versatility supports optimistic views on the role of science in meeting future challenges. However, the stability of the global core-periphery structure may be worrying, because it reduces learning opportunities and social capital of scientifically peripheral countries -- not only during this pandemic but also in its "normal" mode of operation.

Progress to-date towards the UN Agenda 2030 has fallen short of expectations. We undertake a model-based global integrated assessment to project future progress by 2030, 2050, and 2100 and to characterise the transformations needed to deliver the global Sustainable Development Goals and an increasingly ambitious 21st century sustainability agenda. Our results quantify the scale and pace of transformations required through eight key entry points: increasing education access, powering sustainable economic development, controlling global population growth, lowering energy intensity across sectors, decarbonising energy systems, promoting healthy food diets, limiting agricultural land expansion, and reducing global emissions intensity. Our findings indicate many actions that appear to make a limited contribution to initial progress are in fact vital for accelerating change towards sustainable development later in the century.

During the past few decades, globalization and protectionism have ebbed and flowed from time to time among economies. The movements demand formal analytics that can help countries make better trade policies. They also imply that the best trade policies could be time-varying and country-specific. Economies and their imports and exports constitute a counterbalanced network where conflict and cooperation are two sides of the same coin. A country could improve its relative strength in the network by embracing globalization, protectionism, or trade wars. This paper provides necessary conditions for globalization and trade wars, evaluates their side effects, identifies the right targets for conflict or collaboration, and recommends fair resolutions for trade wars. Data and events from the past twenty years support these conditions.

We introduce a prototype agent-based model of the macroeconomy, with budgetary constraints at its core. The model is related to a class of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs), which has been thoroughly investigated in computer science. The CSP paradigm allows us to propose an alternative price-setting mechanism: given agents' preferences and budgets, what set of prices satisfies the maximum number of agents? Such an approach permits the coupling of production and output within the economy to the allowed level of debt in a simplified framework. Within our model, we identify three different regimes upon varying the amount of debt that each agent can accumulate before defaulting. In presence of a very loose constraint on debt, endogenous crises leading to waves of synchronized bankruptcies are present. In the opposite regime of very tight debt constraining, the bankruptcy rate is extremely high and the economy remains structure-less. In an intermediate regime, the economy is stable with very low bankruptcy rate and no aggregate-level crises. This third regime displays a rich phenomenology:the system spontaneously and dynamically self-organizes in a set of cheap and expensive goods (i.e. some kind of "speciation"), with switches triggered by random fluctuations and feedback loops. Our analysis confirms the central role that debt levels play in the stability of the economy. More generally, our model shows that constraints at the individual scale can generate highly complex patterns at the aggregate level.

This study examines the influence of grandchildren's gender on grandparents' voting behavior using independently collected individual-level data. The survey was conducted immediately after the House of Councilors election in Japan. I observed that individuals with a granddaughter were more likely to vote for female candidates by around 10 % than those without. However, having a daughter did not affect the parents' voting behavior. Furthermore, having a son or a grandson did not influence grandparents' voting behavior. This implies that grandparents voted for their granddaughter's future benefit because granddaughters may be too young vote in a male-dominated and aging society.

Green parties have enjoyed tremendous electoral success over the last decades. Yet, little is known about what they do when leading governments. We examine how Green governments influence macroeconomic, education, and environmental outcomes. Our empirical strategy exploits that the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan gave rise to an unanticipated change in government in the German state Baden-Wuerttemberg in 2011. The incumbent rightwing government was replaced by a leftwing government led by the Green party. We use the synthetic control method to select control states against which Baden-Wuerttemberg's outcomes can be compared. The results do not suggest that the Green government influenced macroeconomic outcomes. The Green government implemented education policies that caused comprehensive schools to become larger. We find no evidence that the Green government influenced CO2 emissions or increased energy usage from renewable energies overall. An intriguing result is that the share of wind power usage decreased relative to the estimated counterfactual. Intra-ecological conflicts are likely to have prevented the Green government from implementing drastic changes in environmental policies.

Understanding the microeconomic details of technological catch-up processes offers great potential for informing both innovation economics and development policy. We study the economic transition of the PR China from an agrarian country to a high-tech economy as one example for such a case. It is clear from past literature that rapidly rising productivity levels played a crucial role. However, the distribution of labor productivity in Chinese firms has not been comprehensively investigated and it remains an open question if this can be used to guide economic development. We analyze labor productivity and the dynamic change of labor productivity in firm-level data for the years 1998-2013 from the Chinese Industrial Enterprise Database. We demonstrate that both variables are conveniently modeled as Lévy alpha-stable distributions, provide parameter estimates and analyze dynamic changes to this distribution. We find that the productivity gains were not due to super-star firms, but due to a systematic shift of the entire distribution with otherwise mostly unchanged characteristics. We also found an emerging right-skew in the distribution of labor productivity change. While there are significant differences between the 31 provinces and autonomous regions of the P.R. China, we also show that there are systematic relations between micro-level and province-level variables. We conclude with some implications of these findings for development policy.

Using a semi-structural approach, the paper identifies how heterogeneity and financial frictions affect the transmission of aggregate shocks. Approximating a heterogeneous agent model around the representative agent allocation can successfully trace the aggregate and distributional dynamics and can be consistent with alternative mechanisms. Employing Spanish macroeconomic data as well as firm and household survey data, the paper finds that frictions on both consumption and investment have rich interactions with aggregate shocks. The response of heterogeneity amplifies or dampens these effects depending on the type of the shock. Both dispersion in consumption shares and the marginal revenue product of firms, as well as the proportion of investment constrained firms are key determinants of the fiscal multiplier.