Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p>This article surveys studies on the impact of central bank negative interest rate policies (NIRP). It reviews recent research on the effects of NIRP on financial markets, banks, households, firms, and the macroeconomy. Overall, policy rate cuts when interest rates are negative propagated along the yield curve, with the first policy cut below zero contributing significantly to the fall in longer-term yields. Lending and deposit rates also decreased following the adoption of NIRP. Based on the experience so far, bank lending volumes rose, and bank profits did not significantly deteriorate, although there was considerable heterogeneity in the effects. The impact of NIRP on inflation and output appears to have been comparable to that of conventional interest rate cuts.</jats:p>

<jats:p>With average temperature ranging from −20°C at the North Pole to 30°C at the Equator and with global warming expected to reach 1.4°C to 4.5°C by the year 2100, it is clear that climate change will have vastly different effects across the globe. Given the abundance of land in northern latitudes, if population and economic activity could freely move across space, the economic cost of global warming would be greatly reduced. However, spatial frictions are real: migrants face barriers, trade and transportation are costly, physical infrastructure is not footloose, and knowledge embedded in clusters of economic activity diffuses only imperfectly. Thus, the economic cost of climate change is intimately connected to these spatial frictions. Building on earlier integrated assessment models (IAMs) that largely ignored space, in the past decade there has been significant progress in developing dynamic spatial integrated assessment models (S-IAMs) aimed at providing a more realistic evaluation of the economic cost of climate change, both locally and globally. This review discusses this progress and provides a guide for future work in this area.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This article surveys the economics of industrial policy as it relates to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Motivated by concern that the modern use of industrial policy is emerging in ways that threaten cooperation in the international trading system, the article begins with the basic historical economic framework for tying industrial policy to underlying market failures. It then introduces the dominant economic understanding of the role played by the WTO, examining the WTO's rules on subsidies (and thus industrial policy), the unease with the evolution of the trading system's subsidy rules, gaps in knowledge, and important data and measurement shortcomings. The main part of the article examines four areas in which modern industrial policy operates differently and has become especially important for the trading system: China, supply chain resilience, supply chain responsiveness, and climate change. The article identifies the evidence to date, open questions, and potential paths forward for economic research to help inform policymakers’ efforts to restore international economic cooperation in trade and industrial policy.</jats:p>

<jats:p>We discuss the considerable literature that has developed in recent years providing rigorous evidence on how industrial policies work. This literature is a significant improvement over the earlier generation of empirical work, which was largely correlational and marred by interpretational problems. On the whole, the recent crop of papers offers a more positive take on industrial policy. We review the standard rationales and critiques of industrial policy and provide a broad overview of new empirical approaches to measurement. We discuss how the recent literature, paying close attention to measurement, causal inference, and economic structure, is offering a nuanced and contextual understanding of the effects of industrial policy. We re-evaluate the East Asian experience with industrial policy in light of recent results. Finally, we conclude by reviewing how industrial policy is being reshaped by a new understanding of governance, a richer set of policy instruments beyond subsidies, and the reality of deindustrialization.</jats:p>

<jats:p>For decades, households’ subjective expectations elicited via surveys have been considered meaningless because they often differ substantially from the forecasts of professionals and ex-post realizations. In sharp contrast, the literature we review shows that household characteristics and the ways in which households collect and process economic information help us understand previously considered puzzling facts about their subjective expectations. In turn, subjective expectations contribute to explain heterogeneous consumption, saving, investment, and debt choices as well as different reactions by similar households to the same monetary and fiscal policy measures. Matching microdata on households’ characteristics with the price signals the same households observe, their subjective expectations, and their real-world economic decisions is crucial to establishing these facts. Our growing understanding of households’ subjective expectations inspires several theoretical and empirical research directions and begets the design of innovative and more effective policy instruments.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Happiness data—survey respondents’ self-reported well-being (SWB)—have become increasingly common in economics research, with recent calls to use them in policymaking. Researchers have used SWB data in novel ways—for example, to learn about welfare or preferences when choice data are unavailable or difficult to interpret. Focusing on leading examples of this pioneering research, the first part of this review uses a simple theoretical framework to reverse-engineer some of the crucial assumptions that underlie existing applications. The second part discusses evidence bearing on these assumptions and provides practical advice to the agencies and institutions that generate SWB data, the researchers who use them, and the policymakers who may use the resulting research. While we advocate creative uses of SWB data in economics, we caution that their use in policy will likely require both additional data collection and further research to better understand the data.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Fiscal federalism concerns the division of policy responsibilities among different levels of government. Many current economic and policy developments, such as globalization, environmental crises, and rising inequality, may not appear to be favorable to fiscal federalism, yet countries are further decentralizing their fiscal systems. We summarize the efficiency and equity aspects of fiscal decentralization, fiscal competition, fiscal externalities, and intergovernmental grants. The review introduces readers to theoretical reasons for/against a federalist structure. We discuss how federalism relates to classic problems in economics: externalities, inequality, spillovers, information, and aspects of political economy. Our review integrates both theory and empirics, while also focusing on the variety of federal systems in different countries, both developing and developed. We conclude by discussing how fiscal federalism is being shaped by economic, technological, and environmental changes, while discussing the effects of globalization, polarization, and global crises on the future of federal systems.</jats:p>