HOME /

Academic Research

Endowment Structure, property rights and reforms of large state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China: Past, present and future
Liu, X., Shen, J.H. & Deng, K., 2022. Endowment Structure, property rights and reforms of large state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China: Past, present and future. Structural Change and Economic Dynamics. Publisher's VersionAbstract
endowment_structure_large_chinas_soes.pdf
Based on the criteria of the factor endowment structure of state-owned enterprise (SOE) sectors in China between 1980 and 2018, this paper rationalizes the classified reforming of China's state sectors by constructing a Nash bargaining model to capture the dynamics of ownership restructuring, and the reduction process of policy burden on SOEs. We reveal that the interplay between policy burden bared by SOEs and the ownership restructuring process largely depends upon their factor intensities since the reform period in the 1980s. Our model identifies two Ownership Reform Irrelevance Points (ORIP), which serve as the benchmark for the dynamics of the ownership restructuring process of China's large SOEs, which saw them move from ‘mixed-ownership’ to ‘privatization’. ORIPs demonstrate the need for a reduction in social policy burdens with regards to the state sector's comparative advantage of factor endowment structure through SOE ownership restructuring. This study theoretically analyzes existing literatures on the classified reforms of China's state sectors from 1978 to 2018. This study is the first to base such an analysis on the criteria of factor endowment structure focusing on the connection between the policy burdens bared by SOEs and their ownership restructuring process.
2022 May 23

Research Seminar: Closing Regional Economic Divides

10:15am to 11:30am

Location: 

Belfer Weil Town Hall / Zoom (registration information below)

The Growth Lab Research Seminar series is a weekly seminar that brings together researchers from across the academic spectrum who share an interest in growth and development.

Speaker: Gordon Hanson, Peter Wertheim Professor in Urban Policy, HKS

Abstract: How to help lagging regions create better jobs for disadvantaged workers? Traditional industrial regions have fallen behind economically across high-income countries due to globalization, new technology, and now the energy transition. We need new...

Read more about Research Seminar: Closing Regional Economic Divides
2022 May 09

Research Seminar: Migration and Cultural Change

10:15am to 11:30am

Location: 

Weil Town Hall - Belfer/Zoom (registration info below)

The Growth Lab Research Seminar series is a weekly seminar that brings together researchers from across the academic spectrum who share an interest in growth and development.

Speaker: Hillel Rapoport, Professor of Economics (and Director of International Relations) at the Paris School of Economics

...

Read more about Research Seminar: Migration and Cultural Change
2022 Apr 25

Research Seminar: Mechanisms of Hardware and Soft Technology Evolution and the Implications for Low-Carbon Energy Costs

10:15pm to 11:30pm

Location: 

Zoom (registration information below)

The Growth Lab Research Seminar series is a weekly seminar that brings together researchers from across the academic spectrum who share an interest in growth and development.

Speaker: Magdalena Klemun, Assistant Professor, Division of Public Policy, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s Interdisciplinary Program Office; Research Affiliate, Institute for...

Read more about Research Seminar: Mechanisms of Hardware and Soft Technology Evolution and the Implications for Low-Carbon Energy Costs
Hausmann, R., et al., 2022. Cutting Putin’s Energy Rent: ‘Smart Sanctioning’ Russian Oil and Gas.Abstract
2022-04-cid-wp-412-cutting-putins-energy-rent.pdf
science_letter.abq4436.pdf

Following the Russian aggression against Ukraine, major sanctions have been imposed by Western countries, most notably with the aim of limiting Russia’s access to hard international currency. However, Russia remains the world’s first exporter of oil and gas, and at current energy prices this provides large hard currency revenues. As the war continues, European governments are under increased pressure to scale-up their energy sanctions, following measures taken by the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. This piece argues that given the inelasticity of Russia’s oil and gas supply, for Europe the most efficient way to sanction Russian energy would not be an embargo, but the introduction of an import tariff that can be used flexibly to control the degree of economic pressure on Russia.

E-Letter in Science: How to weaken Russian oil and gas strength

Neffke, F., Hartog, M. & Li, Y., 2022. The Economic Geography of the War in Ukraine. Complexity Science Hub Vienna.Abstract

The war in Ukraine has been waging for a month now, not only causing human suffering on a massive scale, but also sending economic tremors that are felt far beyond the country’s borders. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s economy has been pulled between its strong historical ties with the Russian economy and the opportunities in forging new ties with the European Union (EU). With the help of Metroverse, an online tool for analyzing the local economies of over a thousand cities worldwide, and of the data that power this tool, we analyze the evolving economic relations between Ukraine, Russia and the West and weigh the consequences of their disruption.

Explore: The Economic Geography of the War in Ukraine 

Related reading:
Media Release
Bloomberg Opinion: Markets Need to Lose the ‘Peace in Our Time’ Reflex

2022 Mar 28

Research Seminar: Organizational Frictions to Automation, and Its Effects on Firms, Workers, and Labor Markets

10:15am to 11:30am

Location: 

Zoom (registration information below)

Speaker: Daniel P. Gross, Assistant Professor, Duke's Fuqua School of Business

Abstract: AT&T was the largest U.S. firm for most of the 20th century. Telephone operators once comprised over 50% of its workforce, but in the late 1910s it initiated a decades-long process of automating telephone operation with mechanical call switching---a technology first invented in the 1880s. This talk will cover results from two papers. In one, we study what drove AT&T to do so, and why it took one firm nearly a century to automate this one...

Read more about Research Seminar: Organizational Frictions to Automation, and Its Effects on Firms, Workers, and Labor Markets
Bahar, D., et al., 2022. Migration and Knowledge Diffusion: The Effect of Returning Refugees on Export Performance in the Former Yugoslavia. The Review of Economics and Statistics. Publisher's VersionAbstract
During the early 1990s Germany offered temporary protection to 700,000 Yugoslavian refugees fleeing war. By 2000, many had been repatriated. We exploit this natural experiment to investigate the role of returning migrants in boosting export performance upon their return. Using confidential German administrative data we find that industries with 10% more returning refugees exhibit larger exports between the pre- and post-war periods by 1 to 1.6%. We use exogenous allocation rules for asylum seekers within Germany as an instrument to deal with endogeneity concerns. We show evidence pointing to productivity shifts as the main mechanism behind our results. Consistently, we find our results are driven by refugees in occupations more apt to transfer knowledge, technologies and best-practices.
Horrible trade-offs in a pandemic: Poverty, fiscal space, policy, and welfare
Hausmann, R. & Schetter, U., 2022. Horrible trade-offs in a pandemic: Poverty, fiscal space, policy, and welfare. World Development , 153. Publisher's VersionAbstract
We analyze how poverty and a country’s fiscal space impact policy and welfare in times of a pandemic. We introduce a subsistence level of consumption into a tractable heterogeneous agent framework, and use this framework to characterize optimal joint policies of a lockdown and transfer payments. In our model, a more stringent lockdown helps fighting the pandemic, but it also deepens the recession, which implies that poorer parts of society find it harder to subsist. This reduces their compliance with the lockdown, and may cause deprivation of the very poor, giving rise to an excruciating trade-off between saving lives from the pandemic and from deprivation. Transfer payments help mitigate this trade-off. We show that, ceteris paribus, the optimal lockdown is stricter in richer countries and the aggregate death burden and welfare losses smaller. We then consider a government borrowing constraint and show that limited fiscal space lowers the optimal lockdown and welfare, and increases the aggregate death burden during the pandemic. This is particularly true in societies where a larger fraction of the population is in poverty. We discuss evidence from the literature and provide reduced-form regressions that support the relevance of our main mechanisms. We finally discuss distributional consequences and the political economy of fighting a pandemic.
2022 Feb 14

Research Seminar: How Immigration Grease is Affected by Economic, Institutional, and Policy Contexts: Evidence from EU Labor Markets

10:15am to 11:30am

Location: 

Zoom (registration information below)

Speaker: Martin Kahanec, Professor and Head of the Department of Public Policy at the Central European University (CEU) in Vienna.

Abstract: (Paper)
Theoretical arguments and previous country-level evidence indicate that immigrants are more fluid than...

Read more about Research Seminar: How Immigration Grease is Affected by Economic, Institutional, and Policy Contexts: Evidence from EU Labor Markets
2022 Feb 07

Research Seminar: Colombia’s Structural Challenges for the Creation of New, Better and More Inclusive Jobs

10:15am to 11:30am

Location: 

Zoom (registration information below)

Please register in advance and contact Chuck McKenney with any questions. 

Speakers: Laura Pabón, Eliana Carranza, and Andreas Eberhard-Ruiz

Abstract:
In mid-2020, the Government of Colombia launched a labor reform consultation process (Misión de Empleo) in response to a deterioration in pre-Covid19...

Read more about Research Seminar: Colombia’s Structural Challenges for the Creation of New, Better and More Inclusive Jobs

Pages