Our staff publish peer-reviewed research in reputable and established economic journals from around the world. Here is a recent selection of such papers.
"Dynamic Synthetic Controls: Accounting for Varying Speeds in Comparative Case Studies"
Political Analysis | November 2024
Synthetic controls are widely used to estimate the causal effect of a treatment. However, they do not account for different speeds at which units respond to change. The authors show that these different reaction speeds can lead to biased estimates of causal effects.
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"Zombie International Currency: The Pound Sterling 1945-1971"
The Journal of Economic History | October 2024
This paper examines the international role of sterling during the Bretton Woods era and argues that it was not a competitor to the US dollars. The author constructs a novel dataset to measure the reserve role of sterling in Europe and sterling area countries. The postwar reserve role of sterling was limited to the sterling area and was artificial as this area was built as a captive market. The author documents how British authorities imposed exchange controls, commerical threats, and economic sanctions on sterling area countries to compel them to keep their foreign exchange reserves in sterling.
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"Better energy cost information changes household property investment decisions: Evidence from a Nationwide experiment"
Energy Economics | September 2024
With buildings accounting for 40% of energy consumption in the US and Europe, energy efficiency upgrades will be central in meeting climate targets. Using a nationwide controlled field experiment, the authors find that the inclusion of property-specific energy cost labels within property advertisements increases energy efficiency premiums. They also show that more energy efficient properties sell faster and, for the first time, that energy cost labels shortened time-to-sell. These results suggest that framing property energy efficiency according to their cost implications, rather than in energy units, increases the demand for energy efficency.
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"Exploring the informativeness and drivers of tone during committee meetings: The case of the Federal Reserve"
Journal of International Money and Finance | August 2024
This paper examines the informativeness and drivers of the tone used by FOMC members to gain insights into the decision-making process of the FOMC. The authors use a bag-of-words approach to measure the tone of transcripts at the speaker-meeting-round level from 1992-2009 and find persistent differences in tone among FOMC members.
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"Automatic for the (tax) people: Information sharing and cross-border investment in tax havens"
Economic Policy | August 2024
This paper examines the impact of international exchange of information (AEOI) treaties on cross-border investments in tax havens. Using a restricted version of the BIS Locational Banking Statistics, the authors find that AEOIs significantly reduced cross-border deposits. A sectoral breakdown assessment reveals that households were the key driving force behind this contraction.
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"Empowering Women in Central Banking"
Journal of European Public Policy | August 2024
When are women appointed to the board of central banks? While progressive societal gender norms may facilitate women's ascension to leadership positions, recent research indicates that women are more likely to assume such positions during crisis periods. The authors hypothesise that appointing women to central bank leadership positions during sovereign financial distress signals a policy change to bolster monetary policy credibility. This study suggests that women's empowerment can be beneficial in restoring monetary policy credibility during sovereign financial distress.
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"Childcare, Labor Supply, and Business Development: Experimental Evidence from Uganda"
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics | July 2024
The authors randomly offered a childcare subsidy, an equivalent cash grant, or both to mothers of three-to-five-year-old children. The childcare subsidy substantially increased labor supply and earnings of single mothers, highlighting the importance of time constraints for them. Among couples, childcare did not affect mothers' labor market outcomes but instead increased fathers' salaried employment. At the household level, childcare led to higher income, consumption and improved child development. Cash grants positively affected mothers' labor supply and income irrespective of the household structure, suggesting the general importance of credit constraints for women's business development.
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"Income Inequality in Ireland, 1987-2019"
Fiscal Studies | June 2024
Ireland has experienced rapid - if volatile - growth over the last three decades. While this performance looks less impressive when considered over a longer horizon and is better seen as belated convergence making up for lost time in the first 50 years of independence, this paper highlights an aspect of the Irish experience that does stand out as quite remarkable: how broad-based and inclusive growth in household disposable income was.
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"What Do Politicians Think of Technocratic Institutions? Attitudes in the European Parliament Towards the European Central Bank"
Journal of Common Market Studies | June 2024
Technocracy has come to be increasingly regarded as a threat to representative democracy. Significant attention has thus been recently devoted to exploring public preferences towards technocratic institutions. Elected policy-makers' attitudes have instead not been investigated as systematically. This article fills the gap by examining the politicians' views on central banks.
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"Housing prices, costs, and policy: The housing supply equation in Ireland since 1970"
Real Estate Economics | May 2024
This article examines how responsive new housing supply in Ireland has been to changes in housing prices and costs. To do this, the authors use data for Ireland and for Dublin from the 1970s to the 2020s, as well as county-level data from the 1990s. They find that - in line with economic theory - housing supply increases when prices go up or when costs go down. The responsiveness to costs is about twice that to prices: a 10% decrease in costs is associated with a 19% increase in supply, while a 10% increase in prices is associated with just a 9% increase in supply. They also examine whether the responsiveness of supply has changed over time but find little evidence of weaker supply responses in the 2010s, suggesting that high costs are holding back supply. Given the shortage of housing in Ireland, and already high sale and rental prices, the findings suggest lower costs is an important avenue for policymakers.
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"Long-Term Effects of Preschool Subsidies and Cash Transfers on Child Development: Evidence from Uganda"
AEA Papers and Proceedings | May 2024
Shortly before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, three-to-five-year-old children in Uganda were randomly offered a subsidy to attend full-day preschool for one year. A second treatment group received cash transfers that were at least as large as the cost of the preschool subsidy provided, while a third group received both. Children who attended preschool prior to the pandemic have better anthropometric outcomes three years later. The authors do not find persistent effects on their learning outcomes.
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"What We Can Learn When Impacts Fail to Replicate: Lessons from an Empowerment Programme for Young Women in Tanzania"
Journal of Development Studies | May 2024
This article evaluates the Empowerment and Livelihood for Adolescents programme that combines life and livelihood skills training with a safe space where young women can network and learn. While the same intervention was effective in raising adolescent girls' economic and social empowerment in Uganda, this randomised evaluation finds no programme impact on any economic, health, or social outcomes in Tanzania.
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"Manufacturing in Africa" in Handbook of African Economic Development
Handbook of African Economic Development | April 2024
Professor Carol Newman has published a chapter, "Manufacturing in Africa", in Handbook of African Economic Development edited by Pádraig Carmody and James T. Murphy, and published by Elgar Publishing.
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"Borrowing Constraints and Demand for Remedial Education: Evidence from Tanzania"
The Economic Journal | April 2024
This article examines a Tanzanian household's willingness to pay for a remedial education programme after using a cash transfer to relax their borrowing constraints. By investigating various household examples, it concludes that borrowing constraints limit access to educational programmes, and may increase inequality of educational attainment.
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"Group Incentives for the Public Good: A Field Experiment on Improving the Urban Environment"
The World Bank Economic Review | March 2024
This paper investigates whether an intervention targeted at Community-Based Organizations can motivate them to make increased contributions to the public good, thereby improving outcomes for the community as a whole. Using a randomized trial conducted in Dakar, Senegal, the analysis tests the effectiveness of a program that provides incentives to community groups to encourage them to keep their neighbourhoods clean, with the ultimate goal of reducing flooding.
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"Telenovelas and attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community in Latin America"
Labour Economics | December 2023
This paper studies how exposure to soap operas with LGBTQ+ characters affects attitudes toward the LGBTQ+ community in Latin America and the Caribbean.
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"Intra-household Time Allocation: Evidence from the Post-socialist Countries"
Comparative Economic Studies | December 2023
This paper examines the division of household work in several post-socialist countries during their democratic transition period and compares them to advanced economies between 1994 and 2012.
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"Repayment Flexibility and Risk Taking: Experimental Evidence from Credit Contracts"
The Review of Economic Studies | November 2023
A widely held view is that small firms in developing countries are prevented from making profitable investments by lack of access to credit and insurance markets. One solution is to provide repayment flexibility in credit contracts. Repayment flexibility eases both the credit constraint, as it allows for increased spending during the start-up phase, and offers insurance, in case of fluctuations in income.
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"The Shock Absorbing Role of Cross-border Investments: Net Positions Versus Currency Composition"
Open Economies Review | September 2023
This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the shock absorption role of external positions using the currency exposures dataset by Bénétrix et al. While the literature has frequently studied how the net international investment position and its currency composition determine the direction and scale of valuation effects, the authors focus on their aplitude.
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"Historical roots of political extremism: The effects of Nazi occupation of Italy"
Journal of Comparative Economics | September 2023
This paper studies the impact of the Italian Civil War and Nazi occupation of Italy in 1943-45 on postwar political outcomes.
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"Competition and Innovation in the Financial Sector: Evidence from the Rise of FinTech Start-ups"
Journal of Financial Services Research | August 2023
This paper provides new evidence on the effects of entry on incumbents' incentives to innovate by examining the rise of FinTech innovations over the period 2000-2016.
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"Revisiting the size-productivity relationship with imperfect measures of production and plot size"
American Journal of Agricultural Economics | July 2023
This paper examines the sensitivity of empirical assessments of the relationship between agricultural productivity and land area to alternative measurement protocols.
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"Growing older and growing apart? Population age structure and trade"
Journal of Economic Studies | February 2023
This paper explores the empirical relationship between population age structure and bilateral trade.
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"Central bank communication and social media: From silence to Twitter"
Journal of Economic Surveys | February 2023
This paper discusses the evolution of central bank communication, focusing on recent efforts by central banks to engage with a wider audience via social media. The authors document the social media presence of major central banks and discuss how analysing Twitter content by and about monetary policy makers can inform the effectiveness of communication in influencing beliefs.
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"Corporate Taxation and International Financial Integration: US evidence from a consolidated perspective"
Oxford Open Economics | February 2023
The authors document a robust relation between corporate tax differentials and US international financial integratioN (IFI). While this is the case for traditional IFI based on cross-border positions, the positive link also emerges for its larger consolidated-by-nationality version. The gap between these IFI measures, the key outcome variable in their analysis, exhibits a strong positive correlation with tax differentials too. This is in part due to consolidated assets of multinational enterprises being more strongly correlated with tax differentials than their cross-border counterpart.
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"Population age structure and secular stagnation: Evidence from long run data"
The Journal of the Economics of Ageing | February 2023
A large literature has reopened the secular stagnation hypothesis, first proposed near the end of the Great Depression as a warning for anemic growth resulting from long run trends in population ageing. In this paper, the author explores the relationship between population age structure and growth in: investment, consumption and output, in a long run panel of advanced economies.
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