This paper proposes a new measure of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) for Korea by fine-tuning the keywords and exploiting information drawn from a wide variety of local newspapers. The uniqueness ...of our new EPU index lies mainly in the fact that it uses a set of keywords that correspond much more closely to actual language use and better reflect the economic environment of Korea, which is classified as a small open economy. After shocks to EPU being identified, we employ these shocks to estimate the impulse responses using local projections. Unlike the existing measure, our results show that shocks to EPU lead to a significant decline in macroeconomic aggregates such as output, consumption, investment, and employment. Thus our results suggest a refinement of the EPU index in general for other countries accordingly. We also develop policy-specific uncertainty indices and show that they capture important historical events related to the corresponding policies, such as monetary and fiscal measures.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Abstract
We provide quantitative predictions of first-order supply and demand shocks for the US economy associated with the COVID-19 pandemic at the level of individual occupations and industries. To ...analyse the supply shock, we classify industries as essential or non-essential and construct a Remote Labour Index, which measures the ability of different occupations to work from home. Demand shocks are based on a study of the likely effect of a severe influenza epidemic developed by the US Congressional Budget Office. Compared to the pre-COVID period, these shocks would threaten around 20 per cent of the US economy’s GDP, jeopardize 23 per cent of jobs, and reduce total wage income by 16 per cent. At the industry level, sectors such as transport are likely to be output-constrained by demand shocks, while sectors relating to manufacturing, mining, and services are more likely to be constrained by supply shocks. Entertainment, restaurants, and tourism face large supply and demand shocks. At the occupation level, we show that high-wage occupations are relatively immune from adverse supply- and demand-side shocks, while low-wage occupations are much more vulnerable. We should emphasize that our results are only first-order shocks—we expect them to be substantially amplified by feedback effects in the production network.
This open access book encompasses a collection of in-depth analyses showcasing the challenges and ways forward for macroeconomic modelling of R&D and innovation policies. Based upon the proceedings ...of the EC-DG JRC-IEA workshop held in Brussels in 2017, it presents cutting-edge contributions from a number of leading economists in the field. It provides a comprehensive overview of the current academic and policy challenges surrounding R&D as well as of the state-of-the-art modelling techniques. The book brings to the forefront outstanding issues related to the assessment of the macroeconomic impact of R&D policies and its modelling. It speaks to the rising importance of R&D and innovation policy, and the proliferation of macroeconomic models featuring endogenous technological change. The contents of this book will be of interest to both academic and policy audiences working in the fields of R&D and innovation.
Perspectives on the Labor Share Karabarbounis, Loukas
The Journal of economic perspectives,
04/2024, Volume:
38, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
As of 2022, the share of US income accruing to labor is at its lowest level since the Great Depression. Updating previous studies with more recent observations, I document the continuing decline of ...the labor share for the United States, other countries, and various industries. I discuss how changes in technology and product, labor, and capital markets affect the trend of the labor share. I also examine its relationship with other macroeconomic trends, such as rising markups, higher concentration of economic activity, and globalization. I conclude by offering some perspectives on the economic and policy implications of the labor share decline.
Full text
Available for:
CEKLJ, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
We construct a new monthly index of Economic Policy Uncertainty for China in 2000–2018 based on Chinese newspapers. Different from the existing index, ours uses information from multiple local ...newspapers, and foreshadows declines in equity price, employment and output. Media censorship does not seem to have qualitative impact to our index. Moreover, we develop a daily uncertainty index and several policy-specific uncertainty indices for public use.
•A new monthly index of Economic Policy Uncertainty for China in 2000–2018 is constructed.•Our index uses information from multiple local newspapers.•Our index foreshadows declines in equity price, employment and output.•Media censorship does not seem to have qualitative impact to our index.•Moreover, we develop a daily index and several policy-specific indices.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
16.
Measuring news sentiment Shapiro, Adam Hale; Sudhof, Moritz; Wilson, Daniel J.
Journal of econometrics,
06/2022, Volume:
228, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This paper demonstrates state-of-the-art text sentiment analysis tools while developing a new time-series measure of economic sentiment derived from economic and financial newspaper articles from ...January 1980 to April 2015. We compare the predictive accuracy of a large set of sentiment analysis models using a sample of articles that have been rated by humans on a positivity/negativity scale. The results highlight the gains from combining existing lexicons and from accounting for negation. We also generate our own sentiment-scoring model, which includes a new lexicon built specifically to capture the sentiment in economic news articles. This model is shown to have better predictive accuracy than existing “off-the-shelf” models. Lastly, we provide two applications to the economic research on sentiment. First, we show that daily news sentiment is predictive of movements of survey-based measures of consumer sentiment. Second, motivated by Barsky and Sims (2012), we estimate the impulse responses of macroeconomic variables to sentiment shocks, finding that positive sentiment shocks increase consumption, output, and interest rates and dampen inflation.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
•We investigate factors that have driven Ethiopia’s recent growth acceleration.•Public infrastructure investment was a key driver of growth.•Infrastructure was to a relevant degree financed with ...heterodox macro-policies.•Negative growth effects of these heterodox macro policies were comparably modest.•No other country recently achieved as high growth with a similar policy mix.
Ethiopia has experienced an impressive growth acceleration over the past decade. This was achieved on the back of an economic strategy emphasizing public infrastructure investment supported by heterodox macro-financial policies. This paper identifies the drivers of Ethiopia’s recent growth episode and examines the extent to which they were typical or unique. It combines country-specific information with the results of a cross-country panel regression model. We find that Ethiopia’s growth is explained well by factors correlating with growth in a broad range of countries in recent decades, including public infrastructure investment, restrained government consumption, and a conducive external environment. On the other hand, we argue that the policy mix that supported very high levels of public investment in Ethiopia was, to some extent, unique. Interestingly, macroeconomic imbalances due to this heterodox policy mix only moderately held back growth which helps explain why Ethiopia was able to grow so fast in spite of their presence: their negative effects were quantitatively much less important than the positive growth drivers they helped to achieve. The results suggest that “getting infrastructure right” may outweigh moderate shortcoming in the macro framework at early stages of development. We further relate this country-specific finding to the recent growth literature.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZRSKP
18.
CREDIT-MARKET SENTIMENT AND THE BUSINESS CYCLE López-Salido, David; Stein, Jeremy C.; Zakrajšek, Egon
The Quarterly journal of economics,
08/2017, Volume:
132, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Using U.S. data from 1929 to 2015, we show that elevated credit-market sentiment in year t − 2 is associated with a decline in economic activity in years t and t + 1. Underlying this result is the ...existence of predictable mean reversion in credit-market conditions. When credit risk is aggressively priced, spreads subsequently widen. The timing of this widening is, in turn, closely tied to the onset of a contraction in economic activity. Exploring the mechanism, we find that buoyant credit-market sentiment in year t − 2 also forecasts a change in the composition of external finance: net debt issuance falls in year t, while net equity issuance increases, consistent with the reversal in credit-market conditions leading to an inward shift in credit supply. Unlike much of the current literature on the role of financial frictions in macroeconomics, this article suggests that investor sentiment in credit markets can be an important driver of economic fluctuations.
Full text
Available for:
BFBNIB, INZLJ, IZUM, KILJ, NMLJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK, ZRSKP
Popular DMSP night lights data are flawed by blurring, top-coding, and lack of calibration. Yet newer and better VIIRS data are rarely used in economics. We compare these two data sources for ...predicting GDP, especially at the second subnational level, for Indonesia, China and South Africa. The DMSP data are a poor proxy for GDP outside of cities. The gap in predictive performance between DMSP data and VIIRS data is especially apparent at lower levels of the spatial hierarchy, such as for counties, and for lower density areas. The city lights-GDP relationship is twice as noisy with DMSP data than with VIIRS data. Spatial inequality is considerably understated with DMSP data, especially for the urban sector and in higher density areas. A Pareto adjustment to correct for top-coding in DMSP data has a modest effect but still understates spatial inequality and misses key features of economic activity in big cities.
•DMSP night lights data poorly predict economic activity in low density rural areas.•DMSP night lights data understate spatial inequality, especially in urban areas.•Pareto-adjustment for top-coding has only modest effect, as blurring is a bigger flaw.•VIIRS night lights data more accurate, especially for less aggregated spatial units.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
PDF
