has job stability decreased population data from a small open economy we use a population based employer employee dataset to analyze changes in job stability in norway we first present descriptive analyses of tenure and separation rates followed by regression adjusted measures controlling for changes in demographics and the business cycle we see only weak evidence of changes in the tenure rates in particular for the public sector we find a slight increase in short tenures and a decrease in tenures above eight years however we do not find that this tendency towards less stable jobs leads to an increase in the flow to unemployment or out of the labor force

inflation targeting what can the ecb learn from the recent experience of the bank of england establishment of the european central bank presents a rare opportunity to define the operations of a central bank without a prior track record this paper asks what might be learnt from the recent experience of inflation targeting at the bank of england before the ecb specifies an as yet undefined operational target we consider whether there should be single or multiple targets and which inflation measure should be used if at all if inflation is targeted then a forecast of its value becomes the intermediate variable this raises an issue of transparency and the compensating supply of information necessary to fill the gap but too much openness can also be problematic the ecb must be accountable and the contracting approach may be useful although being seen to say and do the same thing is ultimately most important opportunity presents itself to define the provisions for the structure and operation of a central bank without a prior historical track record some of these are already written into the statutes of the maastricht treaty which for example defines the ecb s primary statutory duty to be that of the pursuit of price stability and it has been the remit of the european monetary institute emi to make recommendations on other aspects critically however the terms of reference for the ecb in relation to an operational target for its monetary policy are yet to be resolved and although a statement from the ecb is expected to clarify the issue by september after this paper was finalised this need not be the end of the matter circumstances could well call for a subsequent recommendation the emi 1997 provisionally narrowed the choice to one between monetary targets and inflation targets since inflation targeting is the latest game in town it seems important to take stock of the experience of those newly independent central banks which have adopted it it is rather too soon to reach a definitive conclusion on the performance of inflation targeting central banks so what we consider are the lessons to be learnt from the mechanisms and structures that have been adopted by various inflation targeting central banks focusing in particular on the policies of the

compensation and rewards for environmental services cres and efficient design of contracts in developing countries behavioral insights from a natural field experiment the use of economic incentives for biodiversity mostly compensation and reward for environmental services including payment for es has been widely supported in the past decades and became the main innovative policy tools for biodiversity conservation worldwide these policy tools are often based on the insight that rational actors perfectly weigh the costs and benefits of adopting certain behaviors and well crafted economic incentives and disincentives will lead to socially desirable development scenarios this rationalist mode of thought has provided interesting insights and results but it also misestimates the context by which real individuals come to decisions and the multitude of factors influencing development sequences in this study our goal is to examine how these policies can take advantage of some unintended behavioral reactions that might in return impact either positively or negatively general policy performances we test the effect of income s origin low effort based money vs high effort based money on spending decisions necessity vs superior goods and subsequent pro social preferences future pro environmental behavior within madagascar rural areas using a natural field experiment our results show that money obtained under low effort leads to different consumption patterns than money obtained under high efforts superior goods are more salient in the case of low effort money in parallel money obtained under low effort leads to subsequent higher pro social behavior compensation and rewards policies for ecosystem services may mobilize knowledge on behavioral biases to improve their design and foster positive spillovers on their development goals

why should central banks avoid the use of the underlying inflation indicator abstract this paper assesses the usefulness of the commonly used underlying inflation indicator in light of the criteria proposed in marques et al evaluating core inflation indicators mimeo 2001 empirical evidence for a group of six countries strongly suggests that the use of underlying inflation as an indicator of trend inflation should be avoided

revisiting the employment impact of offshoring abstract the productivity gains due to offshoring may in part accrue to workers this paper estimates the magnitude of these gains and compares it to the magnitude of employment loss due to worker displacement a model based on the production task framework from grossman and rossi hansberg 2008 is used to demonstrate that the effect of offshoring depends on the intensity of use of these tasks and ultimately impacts domestic employment through three channels a direct displacement effect which negatively impacts employment an output effect generated by the productivity gains from offshoring which reorganizes and increases aggregate production in the economy and impacts domestic employment positively and a substitution effect among factors and tasks which has an ambiguous effect using the model s structure as a roadmap and applying it to detailed u s manufacturing sector data over 2001 2007 results from gmm 3sls regressions provide overall support for the structure and predictions of the tasks model of offshoring in particular the economic magnitude of the productivity gains is found to have been important

licensing effect in consumer choice abstract most choices in the real world follow other choices or judgments the authors show that a prior choice which activates and boosts a positive self concept subsequently licenses the choice of a more self indulgent option the authors propose that licensing can operate by committing to a virtuous act in a preceding choice which reduces negative self attributions associated with the purchase of relative luxuries five studies demonstrate the proposed licensing effect of a prior commitment to a virtuous act on subsequent choice consistent with the authors theory the preference for an indulgent option diminishes if the licensing task is attributed to an external motivation the authors also report a mediation analysis in support of their theoretical explanation that the licensing effect operates by providing a temporary boost in the relevant self concept

vicarious goal fulfillment when the mere presence of a healthy option leads to an ironically indulgent decision this research examines how consumers food choices differ when healthy items are included in a choice set compared with when they are not available results demonstrate that individuals are ironically more likely to make indulgent food choices when a healthy item is available compared to when it is not available the influence of the healthy item on indulgent choice is stronger for those with higher levels of self control support is found for a goal activation based explanation for these findings whereby the mere presence of the healthy food option vicariously fulfills nutrition related goals and provides consumers with a license to indulge

do core inflation measures help forecast inflation abstract we conduct cointegration and granger causality tests for traditional and new measures of core inflation we find that both measures are consistent with desired properties of measures of underlying inflation but neither is very useful for forecasting purposes

the forecasting power of real interest rate gaps an assessment for the euro area the real interest rate gap irg the gap between the short term real interest rate and its natural level is a theoretical concept that has attracted much attention in central banks in recent years this article aims at clarifying its practical relevance for monetary policy in real time for this purpose it provides an empirical assessment of the usefulness of a semi structural versus purely statistical estimates of the real irg for predicting policy relevant macroeconomic variables in the euro area however mixed the results confirm that semi structural estimates of the real irg deserve being added to the central banks toolbox

data improvement and labor economics the expansion of available data for research has transformed empirical labor economics over the past generation this paper briefly highlights some of the changes and describes a few examples of papers that illustrate the advances it also documents the changing ways data have been used in the journal of labor economics over the past 30 years including a trend toward a higher fraction of papers using any data and among those papers using any data a higher fraction using nonpublic data a higher fraction using international data and more frequent use of multiple data sources finally this paper describes work that came out of the recent princeton data improvement initiative a program that considers and furthers improved data collection

job polarization and task biased technological change evidence from sweden 1975 2005 this paper shows that between 1975 and 2005 sweden exhibited a pattern of job polarization with expansions of the highest and lowest paid jobs compared to middle wage jobs the most popular explan

behavioral spillover effects from a social information campaign abstract we investigate whether a social information campaign aimed at reducing water use causes a spillover effect on the use of electricity on average water use decreased by 6 percent for the treatment group we identify a positive spillover effect on electricity use among households that had efficient use of water before the campaign the effect is sizeable almost a 9 percent reduction we argue that these results are consistent with a model of cognitive dissonance where the efficient households infer information about electricity use from the water use information

spillover effects of nudges abstract we consider a theoretical model where an individual pays limited attention to decision relevant factors nudges increase attention to a factor but can have at the same time attentional spillover effects to other factors as a consequence nudges can have detrimental effects on desired behavior and consumption utility further measuring behavioral changes in the nudged domain sometimes does not yield the right conclusions about the effects of the nudge on utility even with an additive separable utility function

measures of technology and the business cycle empirical evidence on the relationship between technology shocks and e g hours worked hinges crucially on the identification of the unobservable technological progress in this paper we study different measures of technology in order to find out i to what extent they capture the same underlying phenomenon and ii whether the implications for macroeconomic theory are robust across the approaches several versions of the productions function approach and structural var models are investigated our main finding is that the different technology measures are highly correlated however the exact formulation of the identifying restrictions seems to matter for the results while we replicate the standard finding of a strongly procyclical solow residual all other measures of technology are either acyclical or countercyclical

permanent and transitory movements in labor income an explanation for excess smoothness in consumption many have argued that if labor income is difference stationary the permanent income hypothesis predicts that consumption should be relatively volatile in u s aggregate data labor income is well characterized as having a unit root however consumption turns out to be relatively smooth this anomaly is known as deaton s paradox i resolve deaton s paradox by providing decompositions of labor income into permanent and transitory components these preserve the univariate dynamic properties of labor income however when agents distinguish permanent and transitory movements in their labor income as the rational expectations hypothesis asserts they should the permanent income hypothesis correctly predicts the observed smoothness in consumption

a combined measure of uk core inflation estimates this article estimates uk core inflation in a structural vector autoregression var framework while building on the work of quah and vahey 1995 we extend their two variable var model to allow for different dynamics depending on the nature of the shocks that potentially influence the process of core inflation we also construct a combined measure of core inflation estimates on the basis of their reliabilities empirical evidence shows that the new measures demonstrate marked improvement in their eligibility to serve as core inflation estimators furthermore the combined measure is shown to perform best it appears that the conventional core measures such as the retail prices excluding mortgage interest payments rpix and the harmonized index of consumer prices hicp inflation series are not successful in capturing the underlying trend of inflation casting some doubt on their current use in the making of monetary policy decisions

descomposicion historica de la inflacion en peru distinguiendo entre choques de demanda y choques de oferta this paper analyzes and distinguishes the role and importance of the shocks related to the aggregate demand and aggregate supply on the behavior of the peruvian inflation during the period 1997 1 2009 2 we use the methodology based on structural vector autoregressive svar models using a long run identification based on blanchard and quah 1989 which allows to obtain the historical decomposition of the annual inflation unlike salas 2009 this paper uses a more simple model of aggregate demand and aggregate supply and a larger sample the results show that the behavior of inflation was largely explained for shocks related to the aggregate demand side in comparison with aggregate supply shocks furthermore the results of the variance decomposition of the prediction error show that in the short and long term the shocks of the demand side explain around 70 and 60 of the movements of the inflation the results are robust to the inclusion of different variables in the set of information

offshoring of tasks taylorism versus toyotism this paper contributes to the recent debate on trade in tasks drawing on insights from the theory of the firm as well as recent developments in trade theory recent empirical literature suggests that between 20 and 30 per cent of all jobs in key oecd countries could be digitised and offshored this study offers a cluster analysis which documents that offshorable and non offshorable tasks tend to be performed together across occupations therefore when assessing the offshorability of a job one needs to take into account all tasks being performed by the worker and the gains from fragmenting jobs versus the benefits of multi tasked workers taylorism versus toyotism furthermore one needs to distinguish between fragmentation of production and fragmentation of jobs

inflation measurement and the ecb s pursuit of price stability a first assessment as part of its monetary policy strategy announced in 1998 the ecb provided a quantitative definition of its price stability objective as an annual rate of increase in the harmonized index of consumer prices hicp of below 2 0 percent this paper takes a measurement perspective in evaluating the ecb s quest for price stability during the first years of monetary we consider the following questions first what is the hicp designed to measure and how accurate is it in terms of its stated objective second how accurate are the traditional exclusion type measures of core inflation derived from the hicp and more importantly is there evidence that less traditional measures of core inflation might be useful to the ecb and third is there any sense in which the ecb s definition of price stability in terms of a 2 0 percent limit on hicp inflation can be said to be too low from a measurement perspective we conclude that the conceptual underpinnings of the hicp remain sufficiently vague that it is difficult to compare with other indexes or come to any hard conclusions about its accuracy it is possible that the hicp is as susceptible to the biases that are known to affect other measures of inflation at the consumer or household level and if forced to quantify potential bias a point estimate of 1 0 percent strikes us as reasonable potential bias of this magnitude in conjunction with the inherent noisiness of the headline number and the well known aversion of central bankers to deflation argues for a modest upward redefinition of the rate of hicp inflation consistent with price stability finally we show that the ecb would be well served by increasing their use of nontraditional core inflation measures

does environmental concern change the tragedy of the commons factors affecting energy saving behaviors and electricity usage electricity consumption produces private goods such as heat for homes but fossil fuel consumption impacts the public goods of clean air and water while self interests can increase usage social interests such as global climate change can impact an individual s attitude toward energy consumption this paper examines the tragedy of the commons using household data and compares the impact of self and social interests in predicting electricity consumption using both stated and observed behavioral data the results show that self interests have a greater impact on energy saving behaviors and electricity use we extend the analysis to control for an individual s environmental concern and perceived behavioral impact finding similar results and supporting the notion that the tragedy of the commons occurs regardless of a person s perception or environmental concern these findings may explain why pro environmental attitudes do not necessarily lead to pro environmental behaviors and it contributes to our understanding of the motivating factors for energy savings and electricity use by examining both stated and observed behaviors policies aimed at electricity reduction may have a greater impact if they focus on private interests such as pricing rebates subsidies and taxes rather than social interests alone

offshoring and outsourcing potentials evidence from german micro level data this paper provides two indicators that measure i offshoring potentials cross country geographical relocation and ii outsourcing potentials organisational relocation separately at the level of jobs occupations tasks and industries we use four waves of the bibb baua labour force survey in germany and apply principal component analysis based on a large set of potential determinants of offshoring and outsourcing derived from the literature our results show significant variation across these levels in the determinants of both dimensions we provide a comprehensive empirical classification of the determinants of how easily jobs can be offshored and outsourced this can serve as a basis for further research to investigate the economic effects of job offshoreability

the dynamic effects of aggregate demand and supply disturbances we interpret fluctuations in gnp and unemployment as due to two types of disturbances disturbances that have a permanent effect on output and disturbances that do not we interpret the first as supply disturbances the second as demand disturbances demand disturbances have a hump shaped mirror image effect on output and unemployment the effect of supply disturbances on output increases steadily over time peaking after two years and reaching a plateau after five years

moral self licencing and social dilemmas an experimental analysis from a taking game in madagascar this article explores whether previous good deeds may license antisocial behaviour such as appropriating a social surplus for private benefits in a developing country context namely madagascar we design a two step framed experiment with one control treatment a neutral task and three test treatments tasks enabling subjects to earn moral credits in three different ways followed by a taking game in which subjects are given the opportunity to take an amount from a fund allocated to their university on average we find that participants in the three licencing conditions appropriate more than those in the control group and that further differences emerge according to the way the moral credits have been earned

behavioral economics and energy conservation a systematic review of non price interventions and their causal effects abstract research from economics and psychology suggests that behavioral interventions can be a powerful climate policy instrument this paper provides a systematic review of the existing empirical evidence on non price interventions targeting energy conservation behavior of private households specifically we analyze four nudge like interventions referred to as social comparison commitment devices goal setting and labeling in 44 international studies comprising 105 treatments this paper differs from previous systematic reviews by solely focusing on studies that permit the identification of causal effects we find that all four interventions have the potential to significantly reduce energy consumption of private households yet effect sizes vary immensely we conclude by emphasizing the importance of impact evaluations before rolling out behavioral policy interventions at scale

permanent transitory decompositions and traditional measures of core inflation abstract the aim of this paper is twofold first after defining core inflation in line with the recent literature as the long run component of the rate of change of the consumer price index cpi we address the general problem of establishing a set of conditions under which given the assumption of inflation as an i 1 process it is possible to identify an indicator of trend inflation we show that some criteria recently proposed in the literature economics letters 75 2002 17 are unnecessarily restrictive second an empirical investigation for the period 1983 2001 reveals that these conditions are met in the us economy both for the traditional measure of core inflation which is obtained by subtracting food and energy components from cpi and for the weighted median of cpi proposed by monetary policy university of chicago press for nber 1994 261 these conclusions hold for a measure of core inflation based on the year on year rate of change of the core index and thus we provide some motivation for this choice

for better or for worse empirical evidence of moral licensing in a behavioral energy conservation campaign isolated environmental campaigns focusing on defined target behaviors are rolled out to millions of households every year yet it is still unclear whether these programs trigger cross domain adoption of additional environment friendly behaviors positive spillover or reduced engagement elsewhere a thorough evaluation of the real net performance of these programs is lacking this paper investigates whether positive or perverse side effects dominate by exemplifying the impact of a water conservation campaign on electricity consumption the study draws on daily water 10 780 data points and weekly electricity 1386 data points consumption data of 154 apartments in a controlled field experiment at a multifamily residence the results show that residents who received weekly feedback on their water consumption lowered their water use 6 0 on average but at the same time increased their electricity consumption by 5 6 compared with control subjects income effects can be excluded while follow up research is needed on the precise mechanism of the psychological process at work the findings are consistent with the concept of moral licensing which can more than offset the benefits of focused energy efficiency campaigns at least in the short term we advocate the adoption of a more comprehensive view in environmental program design evaluation in order to quantify and mitigate these unintended effects

occupations at risk job tasks job security and wages germany similar to other developed countries witnessed a sharp decline in jobs that used to constitute the middle class in the 1970s and 1980s this decline has been associated with the level to which jobs are codifiable there is evidence that codifiable tasks are more prone to technological substitution and outsourcing compared with tacit tasks this article empirically investigates two crucial aspects of the decline in codified jobs first it studies what happened to workers in codified occupations in terms of unemployment occupational change and wages second it revisits the hypothesis that code based technologies are the major driver of this labor market shift we find that job codification is associated with both higher unemployment and higher occupational change it is also associated with wage losses for workers who left routinized jobs we find however little evidence that code based technologies were the driving factor behind these dynamics

how to predict future pro environmental intention the spillover effect of electricity saving behavior under environmental and monetary framing abstract the spillover effect in the environmental realm has attracted attention from many researchers the present study took electricity saving as an example to explore the mechanism of the spillover effect under environmental framing ef or monetary framing mf and examine the effect of labeling on the spillover effect to add value to existing environmental research three studies showed that both environmental and monetary framing could promote environmental intention study 1 tested the effectiveness of the intervention materials and found that both ef and mf increased the intention to save electricity study 2 and 3 revealed that the spillover effect was influenced by framing specifically the spillover of ef was positive whereas that of mf was negative at the same time environmental self identity mediated both positive and negative spillover moreover enhancing individuals environmental self identity by labeling them as environmentalists could prevent negative spillover and increase positive spillover the results of the present study also provided practical guidance regarding pro environmental education and campaigns by emphasizing environmental benefits rather than monetary benefits and by strengthening environmental self identity through labeling

wage shocks and the technological substitution of low wage jobs we extend the task based empirical framework used in the job polarization literature to analyze the susceptibility of low wage employment to technological substitution we nd that increases in the cost of low wage labor via minimum wage hikes lead to relative employment declines at cognitively routine occupations but not manuallyroutine or non routine low wage occupations this suggests that low wage routine cognitive tasks are susceptible to technological substitution while the short run em

how many jobs can be done at home evaluating the economic impact of social distancing measures taken to arrest the spread of covid 19 raises a fundamental question about the modern economy how many jobs can be performed at home we classify the feasibility of working at home for all occupations and merge this classification with occupational employment counts we find that 37 of jobs in the united states can be performed entirely at home with significant variation across cities and industries these jobs typically pay more than jobs that cannot be done at home and account for 46 of all us wages applying our occupational classification to 85 other countries reveals that lower income economies have a lower share of jobs that can be done at home

a simple adaptive measure of core inflation this paper proposes a new measure of core inflation and compares it with several existing measures the new measure is adaptive and is designed to track sudden and persistent movements in inflation such as those arising from changes in monetary policy regimes the adaptive measure filters out transients more effectively than existing measures and it is a superior predictor of locally mean reverting components of inflation

a note on modelling core inflation for the uk using a new dynamic factor estimation method and a large disaggregated price index dataset abstract the term core inflation is widely used by academics and central bankers though there is no widely accepted definition or agreed method of measuring it in this paper we propose a new measure of core inflation which is atheoretical but assumes factor structure for the disaggregated price indices which underlie most constructed measures of inflation we show that the measure of core inflation obtained has added predictive ability for inflation in the uk over a relatively long evaluation period

retirement savings a tale of decisions and defaults we examine the behavior of members of an industry wide pension fund to assess both the prevalence of defaults and their impact on retirement savings our empirical investigations show that preferences demographic characteristics and labor mobility matter greatly when it comes to the extent of active plan choice or high defaulting and overall level of pension benefits using a structural dynamic life cycle model we then evaluate the ability of these empirically motivated factors to explain retirement savings patterns in our model individuals decide how much to save in a setting that combines irreversible automatic enrolment with an active decision regime after automatic enrolment there is an initial choice between two pension plans defined benefit vs defined contribution and then members decide possibly by default their voluntary contributions and type of investment allocation we estimate the model using the simulated method of moments on administrative data from a large australian pension fund our results show that default settings strongly influence wealth accumulation such settings are also highly persistent both over time and across decisions overall our findings suggest that if defaults particularly the irreversible ones are not carefully designed retirement savings can be severely affected this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

look at me saving the planet the imitation of visible green behavior and its impact on the climate value action gap abstract examining the regional distribution of 15 different greenhouse gas mitigation practices mps across australia we study the tendency for consumers to imitate visible pro environmental behavior in their local region while there is a great deal of variation in the specific type of mps adopted by consumers located in the same region anova results suggest that they tend to adopt a similar number of mps as their neighbours using discrete choice modelling our results suggest that this is due to the peer adoption of certain visible mps such as using public transport or car pooling encouraging agents to adopt other types of visible mps however the character of this spillover is limited in that visible pro environmental behavior does not appear to influence the adoption of non visible mps we also find that social imitation patterns help individuals overcome the observed gap between their stated concern about climate change and their propensity to act on this concern known as the climate value action gap policy implications for designing effective green nudges are discussed

do underlying measures of inflation outperform headline rates evidence from australian data many central banks often focus on underlying measures of inflation when assessing inflation trends this paper compares the accuracy of underlying measures of inflation relative to the headline rates by using australia data it is found that the underlying measures did have smaller errors in predicting the long term trend in inflation than the quarterly headline rate due to the volatility in the headline rate as compared to the year ended headline rate the statistical test results however support only the measure of market prices excluding volatile items not the others there is some weak evidence of the weighted median measure outperforming the headline rate in the sub period after 1993 with respect to directional accuracy the test statistics cannot reject the null hypothesis of an equal probability correctly predicting the moving direction of the inflation trend though the headline rates have a higher probability

this job is getting old measuring changes in job opportunities using occupational age structure high and low wage occupations are expanding rapidly relative to middle wage occupations in both the u s and the e u we study the reallocation of workers from middle skill occupations towards the tails of the occupational skill distribution by analyzing changes in age structure within and across occupations because occupations typically expand by hiring young workers and contract by curtailing such hiring we posit that growing occupations will get younger while shrinking occupations will get old after verifying this proposition we apply this observation to local labor markets in the u s to test whether markets that were specialized in middle skilled occupations in 1980 saw a differential movement of both older and younger workers into occupations at the tails of the skill distribution over the subsequent 25 years consistent with aggregate trends employment in initially middle skill intensive labor markets hollowed out between 1980 and 2005 employment losses among non college workers in the middle of the occupational skill distribution were almost entirely countered by employment growth in lower tail occupations for college workers employment losses at the middle were offset in roughly equal measures by gains in the upper and lower tails of the occupational skill distribution but gains at the upper tail were almost entirely limited to young college workers consequently older college workers are increasingly found in lower skill lower paying occupations this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

service offshoring and firm employment abstract major technological advances have recently spurred a new wave of offshoring in services which used to be non tradable should service workers in developed countries worry about their jobs trade theory has given a nuanced answer to this question suggesting that efficiency gains from offshoring may counteract direct job losses which leaves the predicted net effect ambiguous this paper investigates the employment effects of service offshoring in a newly combined and exceptionally detailed panel dataset covering almost the entire universe of german firms service imports over the years 2001 2013 it exploits firm specific export supply shocks by partner countries and service types as an instrumental variable to find that service offshoring has increased firm employment in line with the canonical trade in tasks model the employment gains are greater in firms with higher initial levels of service offshoring

do core inflation measures help forecast inflation out of sample evidence from french data abstract this paper compares the ability of four indicators of underlying or core inflation to forecast inflation in the french case though most indicators granger cause inflation results from out of sample tests of forecast accuracy are less compelling the results nevertheless seem to give some empirical support to trimmed mean indicators

self control for the righteous toward a theory of precommitment to indulgence prior research has examined consumers use of self control to avoid hedonic myopic temptations such as overspending and smoking in this research we investigate the opposite form of self control whereby consumers force themselves to indulge and avoid default forms of spending on utilitarian necessities and or savings in particular consumers who have difficulty choosing items that are perceived as indulgences or luxuries e g a cruise over necessities e g saving for college education and cash in everyday decisions may use precommitments to indulgence especially when the psychological cost of such commitments is less concrete these propositions were tested in a series of studies involving real and hypothetical choices as well as process measures the results indicate that a substantial segment of consumers choose hedonic luxury rewards over cash of equal or greater value consumers typically explain such choices based on the need to precommit to indulgence to make sure that the award does no

a core inflation indicator for the euro area this paper proposes a new core inflation indicator for the euro area obtained by cleaning monthly price changes from short run volatility idiosyncratic and measurement errors we use a factor model to project monthly inflation on a large panel of time series exploiting multivariate information we obtain a satisfactory degree of smoothing without using backward looking moving averages which induce a time delay in the signal the indicator forecasts inflation and is a useful tool for policy makers it outperforms other commonly used predictors at 6 months and longer horizons it tracks past policy interventions of the ecb

conservation from voluntary restraint to a voluntary price premium this paper investigates how concern for the environment translates into predictable patterns of consumer behavior two types of behavior are considered first individuals who care about environmental quality may voluntarily restrain their consumption of goods and services that generate a negative externality second individuals may choose to pay a price premium for goods and services that are more environmentally benign a theoretical model identifies a symmetry between such voluntary restraint and a voluntary price premium that mirrors the symmetry between environmental policies based on either quantities quotas or prices taxes we test predictions of the model in an empirical study of household electricity consumption with introduction of a price premium green electricity program we find evidence of voluntary restraint and its relation to a voluntary price premium the empirical results are consistent with the theoretical model of voluntary conservation

outsourcing and the us labour market there is worldwide concern about the vulnerability of the current labour force to displacement by future imported services in the usa some have suggested that as much as one third of the workforce might be vulnerable to such outsourcing however the labour market impacts of this displacement are difficult to assess using purely analytical or statistical approaches in this paper simulation methods are used to understand how sensitive the us economy and labour market are to increases in services imports specifically the scenario examined assumes that the share of imported services in total employment increases from 0 8 per cent to 7 25 per cent over a time horizon in which workers are unable to change occupations in response it is found that all industries increase their use of imported services and their use of the composite input that is comprised of imported services and tradable labour with the exception of legal workers all workers in tradable occupations experience declines in their real wages demand for non tradable occupations labour rises in the industries that expand the most while demand falls in shrinking industries the non tradable occupations that are used intensively in the shrinking industries experience declines in real wages while the real wages rise for workers in non tradable occupations used intensively in the expanding industries

the geography of trade and technology shocks in the united states abstract this paper explores the geographic overlap of trade and technology shocks across local labor markets in the united states regional exposure to technological change as measured by specialization in routine task intensive production and clerical occupations is largely uncorrelated with regional exposure to trade competition from china while the impacts of technology are dispersed throughout the united states the impacts of trade tend to be more geographically concentrated owing in part to the spatial agglomeration of labor intensive manufacturing our findings highlight the feasibility of separately identifying the impacts of recent changes in trade and technology on us regional economies

what drives labor market polarization in advanced countries the role of china and technology this article explores the effects of offshoring technology and chinese import competition on labor market polarization in european countries we find that polarization occurs mostly as a result of polarization within individual industries while the reallocation of employment away from less polarized industries toward more highly polarized industries contributed only about one third of the total change we find that both technological change and chinese net import competition contributed to labor market polarization but that they did so in distinct ways in european manufacturing industries ict adoption explains a third of within industry polarization while chinese net import competition contributed to a much smaller extent the process of between industry polarization is driven by widespread deindustrialization and servitization in developed countries we find that chinese net import competition explains about a fifth of the employment decline in lowly polarized manufacturing industries and was thus an important driver of the reallocation of labor within economies away from lowly polarized manufacturing industries we present tentative evidence that employment grew faster in initially highly polarized service industries moreover these industries appear unaffected by their indirect input output exposure to chinese net import competition while this was not the case for initially lowly polarized service industries while polarization patterns in different european labor markets show considerable heterogeneity labor market institutions seem to be insufficient to explain these cross country differences

on backstops and boomerangs environmental r d under technological uncertainty abstract in areas such as climate change the recent economic literature has been emphasizing and addressing the pervasive presence of uncertainty this paper considers a new and salient form of uncertainty namely uncertainty regarding the environmental characteristics of green innovations here rd ii a decreasing probability of finding a backstop leads to the toleration of higher pollution levels slower rd iii learning about the probability of a backstop is driven by failures only and leads to decreasing research incentives and iv small to moderate delays in the resolution of technological uncertainty do not affect the optimal policy

what is missing in research on non monetary incentives in the household energy sector abstract based on current research the impact of non monetary incentives on energy consumption and green energy uptake in the household sector remains unclear studies often only provide tests for combinations of measures and consider short time intervals we provide a systematic review of the literature point to several shortcomings in existing published studies and make recommendations for future research aiming to inform policy and other decision makers

trade in goods and trade in tasks an integrating framework abstract we introduce a simple but flexible analytical framework in which both trade in goods and trade in tasks arise we use this framework to provide versions of the gains from trade and the famous four ho theorems heckscher ohlin factor price equalisation stolper samuelson and rybczynski that apply to this environment we extend our framework to accommodate monopolistic competition and two way offshoring and to integrate theoretical results of the early offshoring literature

a simple inflation indicator for the euro zone this article proposes and estimates an inflation indicator for the european monetary union emu this indicator is set up so that it is contemporarily not affected by the changes in price differentials among emu countries the results show that the monetary union index of consumer prices muicp which is the inflation measure that the european central bank ecb takes as a reference for monetary policy purposes could be understating the value of the inflation in the euro zone it is also concluded that regional peculiarities are fundamental in the evolution of prices in the different emu countries

do concerns about labor market competition shape attitudes toward immigration new evidence abstract are concerns about labor market competition a powerful source of anti immigrant sentiment several prominent studies have examined survey data on voters and concluded that fears about the negative effects of immigration on wages and employment play a major role generating anti immigrant attitudes we examine new data from a targeted survey of u s employees in 12 different industries in contrast with previous studies the findings indicate that fears about labor market competition do not appear to have substantial effects on attitudes toward immigration and preferences with regard to immigration policy among this large and diverse set of voters

measuring core inflation in this paper we argue that measured rpi inflation is conceptually mismatched with core inflation the difference is more than just measurement error we propose a technique for measuring core inflation based on an explicit long run economic hypothesis core inflation is defined as that component of measured inflation that has no medium to long run impact on real output a notion that is consistent with the vertical long run phillips curve interpretation of the co movement in inflation and output we construct a measure of core inflation by placing dynamic restrictions on a vector autoregression var system

how technological efficiency improvements change consumer preferences towards a psychological theory of rebound effects abstract the use of technologies can influence consumer preferences and demand and hence impact on environmental sustainability this article contributes to research on rebound effects which focus on how energy efficiency improvements eei increase energy service demand most of 35 years of rebound research has been analyzed from micro and macro economic perspectives yet micro economic rebound research has so far investigated human behavior only on grounds of simple rational choice models and static assumptions about consumer preferences this article exposes the existing rebound discourse to psychological theories building on considerations of how eei can interfere with processes of decision making it develops a model of how eei via psychological processes may lead to motivational rebound effects as well as to beneficial effects which countervail rebounds the article then advances a typology of such rebound and beneficial effects that not only integrates the typology currently used in the micro economic rebound literature but goes beyond it model and typology explain how economic rebound research could benefit from psychological theory provide the basis for empirically investigating rebound effects on more solid theoretical grounds and empower a comprehensive discussion about policies and measures that aim at a sustainable use of technologies

a sorted tale of globalization white collar jobs and the rise of service offshoring abstract we study how the rise of unaffiliated trade in services with china and india has impacted u s labour markets the topic has two understudied aspects it deals with service trade most studies deal with manufacturing trade and it examines the historical first of u s workers competing with educated but low wage foreign workers our empirical agenda is made complicated by the endogeneity of service imports and the endogenous sorting of workers across occupations to develop an estimation framework that deals with these we imbed a partial equilibrium model of trade in tasks within a general equilibrium model of occupational choice the model highlights the need to estimate labour market outcomes using changes in the outcomes of individual workers and in particular to distinguish workers who switch up from those who switch down switching down means switching to an occupation that pays less on average than the current occupation we apply these insights to matched cps data for 1996 2007 the cumulative 10 year impact of rising service imports from china and india has been as follows 1 downward occupational switching increased by 7 percentage points from 21 to 28 and upward occupational switching increased by 6 percentage points from 17 to 23 2 transitions to unemployment were imprecisely measured to have increased by half a percentage point potentially raising the white collar unemployment rate from 3 0 to 3 5 3 the earnings average across all white collar workers fell by a small 1 however for the sub population of workers who switched down or became unemployed earnings fell by 15 and 47 respectively 4 service exports had partially offsetting effects on switching and unemployment

does pricing nature reduce monetary support for conservation evidence from donation behavior in an online experiment abstract ecosystem services valuation attempts to determine the monetary value of the benefits provided by the natural world prior research has shown that making monetary value salient fosters self interested behavior in experimental settings vohs mead and goode 2006 reduces the intrinsic value ascribed to pro social activities such as volunteering pfeffer and devoe 2009 and reduces the efficacy of environmentally relevant interventions steinhorst klockner and matthies 2015 these findings raise concern that ecosystem service valuation information might adversely impact individual s pro environmental behaviors this study uses an experimental framework to determine whether ordinary citizens exposure to valuation information such as one might encounter in a news article or fundraising materials might influence an individual s contribution to a natural resource conservation fund the study is implemented with 250 participants from across the united states we find that participants who receive a natural resource description plus valuation treatment donate a statistically significant lower dollar amount of their experimental earnings on average than those who read the narrative alone based upon this evidence we assert that ecosystem service valuation information has the potential to negatively impact financial support for the exact resources the information is designed to promote

does complexity explain the structure of trade this paper analyzes whether complexity measured by the number of skilled tasks that are performed simultaneously in production explains countries commodity trade structure we modify romalis 2004 model to incorporate differences in complexity across commodities together with differences in average skills across countries and monopolistic competition our model predicts that the share of developed countries in world trade increases with products complexity the empirical tests confirm this prediction moreover in most cases complexity seems to provide a better explanation of countries commodity trade structure than the one offered only by skill intensity

us versus them mass attitudes toward offshore outsourcing economists have argued that outsourcing is another form of international trade however based on a representative national survey of americans conducted in 2007 and 2009 the distribution of preferences on these two issues appears to be quite different this article examines the origins of attitudes toward outsourcing focusing on the extent to which it reflects 1 the economic vulnerabilities of individuals 2 the information they receive about outsourcing including their subjective understanding of what constitutes outsourcing and 3 noneconomic attitudes toward foreign people and foreign countries the findings emphasize the importance of variations in understandings of the term as well as the highly symbolic nature of attitudes toward this issue individuals who believe the us should distance itself from international affairs more generally who are nationalistic or who feel that members of other ethnic and racial groups within the us are less praiseworthy than their own group tend to have particularly hostile reactions to outsourcing the informational cues people receive are also important influences on their understanding of and attitudes toward outsourcing experimental results further emphasize the symbolic nature of attitudes toward outsourcing taken together the results strongly suggest that attitudes are shaped less by the economic consequences of outsourcing than by a sense of us versus them

how many us jobs might be offshorable using detailed information on the nature of work done in over 800 us bureau of labor statistics occupational codes this paper ranks those occupations according to how easy hard it is to offshore the work either physically or electronically using this ranking it is estimated that somewhere between 22 and 29 of all us jobs are or will be potentially offshorable within a decade or two no estimate is made of how many jobs will actually be offshored since the rankings are subjective two alternatives are presented one is entirely objective the other is an independent subjective ranking in general they corroborate the rankings albeit not perfectly it is found that there is little or no correlation between an occupation s offshorability and the skill level of its workers as measured either by educational attainment or wages however it appears that controlling for education the most highly offshorable occupations were already paying significantly lower wages in 2004

some causes are more equal than others the effect of similarity on substitution in charitable giving donation matching and other directed interventions to encourage prosocial contributions may affect contributions through other channels in an experimental dictator game where subjects may donate to two different real world charities we simulate activity specific interventions by varying the relative productivity of those charities and introduce several treatments to test whether i subjects substitute across charities and ii whether substitution occurs even across possibly very dissimilar alternatives we find that significant substitution occurs in all cases but that the effect is weaker the more dissimilar the charity alternatives in our most dissimilar treatment substitution is only half as large as when alternatives are very similar

weighted median inflation is this core inflation this paper investigates core inflation defined as the best predictor of inflation i compare forecasts obtained using the mean weighted median trimmed mean and less food and energy inflation rates for the consumer price index and the personal consumption expenditure deflator for the current u s monetary policy regime another issue addressed is that of the systematic bias that exists due to the differences in means of these measures i test whether correcting for this bias can lead to better inflation forecasts this paper finds that adjusting for bias improves forecasting and that the weighted median is a better forecaster than the alternative measures and thus is a good measure of core inflation

intellectual property rights product complexity and the organization of multinational firms this paper studies how the intellectual property right ipr regime in destination countries influences the way multinationals structure the international organization of their production in particular we explore how multinationals divide tasks of dierent complexities across countries with dierent levels of ipr protection the analysis studies the decision of firms between procurement from related parties and outsourcing to independents suppliers at the product level it also breaks down outsourcing into two types by distinguishing whether or not they involve technology sharing between the two parties we combine data from a french firm level survey on the mode choice for each transaction with a newly developed complexity measure at the product level our results confirm that firms are generally reluctant to source highly complex goods from outside firm boundaries by studying the interaction between product complexity and the ipr protection we obtain that i for technology sharing outsourcing iprs promote outsourcing of more complex goods to a destination country by guaranteeing the protection of their technology ii for non technology related outsourcing iprs attract the outsourcing of less complex products that are more prone to reverse engineering and simpler to decodify and imitate

inflation and monetary dynamics in the us a quantity theory approach in this article we investigate the long run link between inflation and money growth in the united states since 1960 a measure of the long run inflation trend is constructed which bears the interpreation of monetary inflation rate and is directly related to the excess nominal money growth process money growth less output growth as postulated by the quantity theory consistent with the memory characteristics of the series their fractional integration and cointegration properties are taken into account in empirical modelling the proposed measure is then compared with several existing measures of core inflation aimed at capturing long run inflation dynamics but unrelated to money growth the monetary long run inflation rate performs well in out of sample forecasting exercises especially over a 2 3 year horizon yielding valuable information to monetary policymakers

are prosumer households that much different evidence from stated residential energy consumption in germany abstract this paper discusses the effect of residential energy prosuming on households energy consumption behavior with the objective of finding evidence of a prosumer rebound effect on energy consumption prosuming is the partial self consumption of distributed energy production we hypothesize that prosumer households are systematically different from consumer households with regard to housing situation and socio economic characteristics we ensure an appropriate quasi randomized comparison by using propensity score matching as our identification strategy we employ data from a nationwide online survey among homeowners in germany while the data show a correlation between lower energy consumption and prosumer households we find no significant difference in energy consumption behavior between prosumers and non prosumers in a comparable sample with regard to socio economic and housing characteristics instead the lower energy consumption of prosumer households is attributed to more energy efficient technical equipment and thus to purchasing behavior our results do not show evidence of either negative or positive externalities of prosuming on residential energy consumption behavior and therefore we conclude that there is no need for additional governmental measures e g in the form of taxation or subsidies to address behavioral changes in energy prosuming