pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning by exporting with a dose-response function
Authors: Francesca Micocci, Armando Rungi, Giovanni Cerulli
Date: 2025-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual

This paper investigates the causal effect of export intensity on productivity and other firm-level outcomes with a dose-response function. After positing that export intensity acts as a continuous treatment, we investigate counterfactual productivity levels in a quasi-experimental setting. For our purpose, we exploit a control group of non-temporary exporters that have already sustained the fixed costs of reaching foreign markets, thus controlling for self-selection into exporting. Our findings reveal a non-linear relationship between export intensity and productivity, with small albeit statistically significant benefits ranging from 0.1% to 0.6% per year only after exports reach 60% of total revenues. After we look at sales, variable costs, capital intensity, and the propensity to filing patents, we show that, before the 60% threshold, economies of scale and capital adjustment offset each other and induce, on average, a minimal albeit statistically significant loss in productivity of about 0.01% per year. Crucially, we find that heterogeneous export intensity is associated with the firm's position on the technological frontier, as the propensity to file a patent increases when export intensity ranges in 8%-60% with a peak at 40%. The latest finding further highlights that learning-by-exporting is linked to the building of absorptive capacity.
Strategic Effort and Bandwagon Effects in Finite Multi-Stage Games with Non-Linear Externalities: Evidence from Triathlon
Authors: Felix Reichel
Date: 2025-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

This paper examines strategic effort and positioning choices resulting in bandwagon effects under externalities in finite multi-stage games using causal evidence from triathlon (Reichel, 2025). Focusing on open-water swim drafting where athletes reduce drag most effectively by swimming directly behind peerswe estimate its performance effects through a structural contest framework with endogenous, deterministic effort and drafting position. Leveraging exogenous variation from COVID-19 drafting bans in Austrian triathlons, we apply a panel leave-one-out (LOO/LOTO) peer ability instrumental variables (IV) strategy to isolate the causal non-linear effect of drafting. Results from restricted sample analysis and pooled estimated bandwagon IV effects show substantial and nonlinear gains: in small (group size below 10) drafting swim groups/clusters, each deeper position improves finishing rank on average by over 30%, with rapidly diminishing returns in larger groups. Leading however is consistently more costly than optimal positioning, aligning with theoretical predictions of energy expenditure (metabolic costs).
Ethnic Conflicts, Civil War and Economic Growth: Region-Level Evidence from former Yugoslavia
Authors: Aleksandar Keseljevic, Stefan Nikolic, Rok Spruk
Date: 2025-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual

We investigate the long-term impact of civil war on subnational economic growth across 78 regions in five former Yugoslav republics from 1950 to 2015. Leveraging the outbreak of ethnic tensions and the onset of conflict, we construct counterfactual growth trajectories using a robust region-level donor pool from 28 conflict-free countries. Applying a hybrid synthetic control and difference-in-differences approach, we find that the war in former Yugoslavia inflicted unprecedented regional per capita GDP losses estimated at 38 percent, with substantial regional heterogeneity. The most war-affected regions suffered prolonged and permanent economic declines, while capital cities experienced more transitory effects. Our results are robust to extensive variety of specification tests, placebo analyses, and falsification exercises. Notably, ethnic tensions between Serbs and Croats explain up to 40 percent of the observed variation in economic losses, underscoring the deep and lasting influence of ethnic divisions on economic impacts of the armed conflicts.
Revolutions as Structural Breaks: The Long-Term Economic and Institutional Consequences of the 1979 Iranian Revolution
Authors: Nuno Garoupa, Rok Spruk
Date: 2025-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual

This paper examines whether major political institutional disruptions produce temporary shocks or structural breaks in long-term development. Using the 1979 Iranian Revolution as a natural experiment, we apply the synthetic control method to estimate its causal effect on economic growth and institutional quality. Drawing on a panel of 66 countries from 1950 to 2015, we construct counterfactual trajectories for Iran in the absence of revolutionary change. Our results show a persistent and statistically significant divergence in per capita GDP, institutional quality, and legal constraints on executive power. We perform in-space and in-time placebo tests to rule out confounding events, such as the Iran-Iraq War and international sanctions, and propose confidence interval estimation to address uncertainty in treatment effects. The findings identify the Iranian Revolution as a structural institutional rupture, with implications for the classification of institutional change more broadly. We contribute a generalizable empirical framework for distinguishing between temporary and structural institutional shocks in long-run development.
Heterogeneous Trader Responses to Macroeconomic Surprises: Simulating Order Flow Dynamics
Authors: Haochuan Wang
Date: 2025-05-04 00:00:00

Understanding how market participants react to shocks like scheduled macroeconomic news is crucial for both traders and policymakers. We develop a calibrated data generation process DGP that embeds four stylized trader archetypes retail, pension, institutional, and hedge funds into an extended CAPM augmented by CPI surprises. Each agents order size choice is driven by a softmax discrete choice rule over small, medium, and large trades, where utility depends on risk aversion, surprise magnitude, and liquidity. We aim to analyze each agent's reaction to shocks and Monte Carlo experiments show that higher information, lower aversion agents take systematically larger positions and achieve higher average wealth. Retail investors under react on average, exhibiting smaller allocations and more dispersed outcomes. And ambient liquidity amplifies the sensitivity of order flow to surprise shocks. Our framework offers a transparent benchmark for analyzing order flow dynamics around macro releases and suggests how real time flow data could inform news impact inference.
The quest for explosive bubbles in the Indonesian Rupiah/US exchange rate: Does the uncertainty trinity matter?
Authors: Abdul Khaliq, Syafruddin Karimi, Werry Darta Taifur, Endrizal Ridwan
Date: 2025-05-04 00:00:00

The Generalized Supremum Augmented Dickey-Fuller (GSADF) technique is performed to resolve whether the Indonesian Rupiah/US exchange rate has experienced multiple explosive bubbles. The GSADF uncovers that the Indonesian Rupiah/US exchange rate deviates from the fundamental values by six times from January 1985 to September 2023, periodically indicating the presence of numerous explosive behaviors. Once the full-sample period separates into the managed-floating regime and the free-floating regime, the GSADF still detects multiple bubbles. Of particular curiosity on uncertainty trinity, this study underlines that global geopolitical risk negatively drives explosive actions in the ratio of exchange rates for non-traded and traded goods. The global economic policy uncertainty negatively affects speculative bubbles in the exchange rate and the ratio of exchange rates for non-traded. The country's geopolitical risks negatively strike only speculative bubbles in the exchange rate. Further, we find heterogeneity in our results by examining different exchange rate systems. The robustness checks further firmly ascertain across baseline empirical findings.
Integrating earth observation data into the tri-environmental evaluation of the economic cost of natural disasters: a case study of 2025 LA wildfire
Authors: Zongrong Li, Haiyang Li, Yifan Yang, Siqin Wang, Yingxin Zhu
Date: 2025-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Earth Observation, Management

Wildfires in urbanized regions, particularly within the wildland-urban interface, have significantly intensified in frequency and severity, driven by rapid urban expansion and climate change. This study aims to provide a comprehensive, fine-grained evaluation of the recent 2025 Los Angeles wildfire's impacts, through a multi-source, tri-environmental framework in the social, built and natural environmental dimensions. This study employed a spatiotemporal wildfire impact assessment method based on daily satellite fire detections from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), infrastructure data from OpenStreetMap, and high-resolution dasymetric population modeling to capture the dynamic progression of wildfire events in two distinct Los Angeles County regions, Eaton and Palisades, which occurred in January 2025. The modelling result estimated that the total direct economic losses reached approximately 4.86 billion USD with the highest single-day losses recorded on January 8 in both districts. Population exposure reached a daily maximum of 4,342 residents in Eaton and 3,926 residents in Palisades. Our modelling results highlight early, severe ecological and infrastructural damage in Palisades, as well as delayed, intense social and economic disruptions in Eaton. This tri-environmental framework underscores the necessity for tailored, equitable wildfire management strategies, enabling more effective emergency responses, targeted urban planning, and community resilience enhancement. Our study contributes a highly replicable tri-environmental framework for evaluating the natural, built and social environmental costs of natural disasters, which can be applied to future risk profiling, hazard mitigation, and environmental management in the era of climate change.
Consumption and capital growth
Authors: Gordon Getty, Nikita Tkachenko
Date: 2025-05-02 00:00:00

Capital growth, at large scales only, arrives with no help from net saving, and consequently with no help from consumption constraint. Net saving, at large scales, is sacrifice of consumption with nothing in return.
Testing Piketty's Hypothesis on the Drivers of Income Inequality: Evidence from Panel VARs with Heterogeneous Dynamics
Authors: Carlos Góes
Date: 2025-05-02 00:00:00

Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century puts forth a logically consistent explanation for changes in income and wealth inequality patterns. However, while rich in data, the book provides no formal empirical testing for its theorized causal chain. This paper tests the hypothesis that the $r-g$ gap drives income inequality and the increasing capital share of national income. Using panel VAR models with data from 18 advanced economies over 30 years, I find no empirical support for Piketty's predictions. The results suggest that dynamics such as savings-rate adjustments and diminishing returns to capital play critical roles in offsetting the hypothesized effects. These findings challenge the theoretical underpinnings of the growth in inequality and call for alternative explanations.
Simulating Tertiary Educational Decision Dynamics: An Agent-Based Model for the Netherlands
Authors: Jean-Paul Daemen, Silvia Leoni
Date: 2025-05-02 00:00:00

This paper employs agent-based modelling to explore the factors driving the high rate of tertiary education completion in the Netherlands. We examine the interplay of economic motivations, such as expected wages and financial constraints, alongside sociological and psychological influences, including peer effects, student disposition, personality, and geographic accessibility. Through simulations, we analyse the sustainability of these trends and evaluate the impact of educational policies, such as student grants and loans, on enrollment and borrowing behaviour among students from different socioeconomic backgrounds, further considering implications for the Dutch labour market.
Examining gender and cultural influences on customer emotions
Authors: Vinh Truong
Date: 2025-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Marketing

Understanding consumer emotional experiences on e-commerce platforms is essential for businesses striving to enhance customer engagement and personalisation. Recent research has demonstrated that these experiences are more intricate and diverse than previously examined, encompassing a wider range of discrete emotions and spanning multiple-dimensional scales. This study examines how gender and cultural differences shape these complex emotional responses, revealing significant variations between male and female consumers across all sentiment, valence, arousal, and dominance scores. Additionally, clear cultural distinctions emerge, with Western and Eastern consumers displaying markedly different emotional behaviours across the larger spectrum of emotions, including admiration, amusement, approval, caring, curiosity, desire, disappointment, optimism, and pride. Furthermore, the study uncovers a critical interaction between gender and culture in shaping consumer emotions. Notably, gender-based emotional disparities are more pronounced in Western cultures than in Eastern ones, an aspect that has been largely overlooked in previous research. From a theoretical perspective, this study advances the understanding of gender and cultural variations in online consumer behaviour by integrating insights from neuroscience theories and Hofstede cultural dimension model. Practically, it offers valuable guidance for businesses, equipping them with the tools to more accurately interpret customer feedback, refine sentiment and emotional analysis models, and develop personalised marketing strategies.
Mapping the Intersection of Research and Policy in Centers for Medicare National Coverage Decision Memos
Authors: Sean A. Klein
Date: 2025-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

Evidence is a crucial component of federal policy, but the interactions between the various stakeholders involved in funding, producing, and using the results of scientific research, an important class of evidence, for federal policy are poorly understood. The national coverage determination process used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to make significant policies on healthcare coverage is an ideal candidate for studying the interactions between stakeholders producing and utilizing scientific research for policy. Memos produced during the national coverage determination process contain information that identifies the organizations funding and producing research articles cited by CMS policy staff. I use these data to map scientific articles and their funding sources to discrete federal policies with substantial economic and health impacts. My analysis highlights that information derived from policy documents can facilitate transparency among the stakeholders involved in funding, producing, and using evidence for federal policy.
Nonparametric Estimation of Matching Efficiency and Elasticity in a Marriage Agency Platform: 2014--2025
Authors: Suguru Otani
Date: 2025-05-01 00:00:00

This paper examines monthly matching efficiency in the Japanese marriage market using novel data from IBJ, the country's largest structured matching platform. Unlike administrative or dating app data, IBJ provides full search, dating, and matching logs based on verified profiles and confirmed engagements. Users are highly selected into serious marriage search via costly screening. Covering 3.3% of national marriages annually, the data offer rare behavioral granularity. Using a nonparametric approach, I estimate time-varying matching functions and elasticities. Efficiency rises threefold over time, illustrating how digital intermediation transforms partner search in modern marriage markets.
Multigenerational Effects of Smallpox Vaccination
Authors: Volha Lazuka, Peter Sandholt Jensen
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00

Can the effects of childhood vaccination extend across three generations? Using Swedish data spanning 250 years, we estimate the impact of smallpox vaccination on longevity, disability, and occupational achievements. Employing mother fixed-effects, difference-in-differences, and shift-share instrumental-variables designs, we find that vaccination improves health and economic outcomes for at least two subsequent generations. Causal mediation analysis reveals that these benefits arise from improved health behaviors and epigenetic factors. Even in milder disease environments as seen today, vaccination delivers lasting advantages, demonstrating its long-term benefits beyond epidemic contexts. These findings highlight the benefits of early-life health interventions lasting for subsequent generations.
Lights Out, Stress In: Assessing Stress Amidst Power and Energy Challenges in Bangladesh
Authors: Faisal Quaiyyum, Khondaker Golam Moazzem
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00

This study examines the psychological impact of energy crises on households, utilising the Perceived Stress Scale-10 (PSS-10) to measure the stress induced by disruptions in electricity, gas, and fuel supply and pricing. Through a multivariate analysis incorporating Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression, Simultaneous-Quantile Regressions (SQR), Random Forest (RF) and Ordered Probit models, the research identifies the key socio-demographic and environmental factors influencing household stress. Our findings reveal that urban residency, low-income households, older individuals, and those with low environmental awareness are particularly vulnerable to stress during energy crises. Regional disparities and attitudes towards nuclear and renewable energy also significantly shape stress responses. The study emphasises the need for psychologically-informed energy policy, advocating for the inclusion of stress metrics in energy planning to enhance resilience and address the multi-dimensional nature of energy insecurity. This research contributes a novel, human-centric perspective to energy policy, urging policymakers to integrate psychosocial resilience alongside traditional technical and economic considerations in the design of energy interventions.
GDP-GFCF Dynamics Across Global Economies: A Comparative Study of Panel Regressions and Random Forest
Authors: Alina Landowska, Robert A. Kłopotek, Dariusz Filip, Konrad Raczkowski
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Econometrics

This study examines the relationship between GDP growth and Gross Fixed Capital Formation (GFCF) across developed economies (G7, EU-15, OECD) and emerging markets (BRICS). We integrate Random Forest machine learning (non-linear regression) with traditional econometric models (linear regression) to better capture non-linear interactions in investment analysis. Our findings reveal that while GDP growth positively influences corporate investment, its impact varies significantly by region. Developed economies show stronger GDP-GFCF linkages due to stable financial systems, while emerging markets demonstrate weaker connections due to economic heterogeneity and structural constraints. Random Forest models indicate that GDP growth's importance is lower than suggested by traditional econometrics, with lagged GFCF emerging as the dominant predictor-confirming investment follows path-dependent patterns rather than short-term GDP fluctuations. Regional variations in investment drivers are substantial: taxation significantly influences developed economies but minimally affects BRICS, while unemployment strongly drives investment in BRICS but less so elsewhere. We introduce a parallelized p-value importance algorithm for Random Forest that enhances computational efficiency while maintaining statistical rigor through sequential testing methods (SPRT and SAPT). The research demonstrates that hybrid methodologies combining machine learning with econometric techniques provide more nuanced understanding of investment dynamics, supporting region-specific policy design and improving forecasting accuracy.
A Hamiltonian Higher-Order Elasticity Framework for Dynamic Diagnostics(2HOED)
Authors: Ngueuleweu Tiwang Gildas
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Causal Inference, Epidemiology

Machine learning detects patterns, block chain guarantees trust and immutability, and modern causal inference identifies directional linkages, yet none alone exposes the full energetic anatomy of complex systems; the Hamiltonian Higher Order Elasticity Dynamics(2HOED) framework bridges these gaps. Grounded in classical mechanics but extended to Economics order elasticity terms, 2HOED represents economic, social, and physical systems as energy-based Hamiltonians whose position, velocity, acceleration, and jerk of elasticity jointly determine systemic power, Inertia, policy sensitivity, and marginal responses. Because the formalism is scaling free and coordinate agnostic, it transfers seamlessly from financial markets to climate science, from supply chain logistics to epidemiology, thus any discipline in which adaptation and shocks coexist. By embedding standard econometric variables inside a Hamiltonian, 2HOED enriches conventional economic analysis with rigorous diagnostics of resilience, tipping points, and feedback loops, revealing failure modes invisible to linear models. Wavelet spectra, phase space attractors, and topological persistence diagrams derived from 2HOED expose multistage policy leverage that machine learning detects only empirically and block chain secures only after the fact. For economists, physicians and other scientists, the method opens a new causal energetic channel linking biological or mechanical elasticity to macro level outcomes. Portable, interpretable, and computationally light, 2HOED turns data streams into dynamical energy maps, empowering decision makers to anticipate crises, design adaptive policies, and engineer robust systems delivering the predictive punch of AI with the explanatory clarity of physics.
Estimating the housing production function with unobserved land heterogeneity
Authors: Yusuke Adachi
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00

This paper develops a novel method for estimating the housing production function that addresses transmission bias caused by unobserved heterogeneity in land productivity. The approach builds on the nonparametric identification strategy of Gandhi et al. (2020) and exploits the zero-profit condition to allow consistent estimation even when either capital input or housing value is unobserved, under the assumption that land productivity follows a Markov process. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that the estimator performs well across a variety of production technologies.
Monitoring North African regional tourism by web data
Authors: Ilyes Boumahdi, Nouzha Zaoujal
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00

The purpose of this article is to explore the opportunity of recent and detailed unconventional data from the tourism sector collected from {\guillemotleft} Booking.com {\guillemotright} to make a finer and more up-to-date analysis than that established by conventional data, particularly, at the territorial level of North Africa. We extracted and geolocalised about 40 variables of different types covering 1852 accommodations on Booking.com to analyze the characteristics of territorial tourist offer of the six North African countries (10 of 12 Moroccan regions, 3 of 13 Mauritanian Wilayas, 26 of 48 Algerian Wilayas, 13 of 24 Tunisian Governorates, 1 region of Libya, 15 of 27 Egyptian Mohafazats). Then, we used a random sample of 10% of the most recent appreciations of nearly 606000 tourists of the three most dynamic destinations (Marrakech-Safi, Tunis, Cairo) by analyzing the feelings of their comments with a differentiation according origin of tourists. We concluded that the accommodation offer of the territories of North Africa is very diversified and unclassified offers are slightly better appreciated compared to those classified. The coastal regions have higher prices compared to the interior of the countries and quality-price appreciation of North African regions is below their overall ratings.