Large shifts towards automation, robots, and artificial intelligence have been uprooting the labor market. Computing power has grown exponentially, thus leading to great advances in artificial intelligence, with applications that span diverse tasks, from self-driving cars to cancer detection. While these...
With the current pandemic governments are trying to persuade citizens to take certain actions based on the views of experts, from individuals adopting health precautions, to businesses owners’ keeping their businesses afloat. Major inefficiencies and coordination failures could ensue if...
Affirmative action in employment was introduced in the U.S. in 1965 as a corrective measure to tackle labor market failures stemming from discrimination. Discrimination negatively affects the employment prospects and wages of minority groups, leads to under-investment in human capital, and exacerbates the...
This project aims to understand how religious gatherings and religious networks spread infectious diseases such as Covid-19. Second, we aim to understand how Covid-19 induced restrictions and the inability to attend in-person religious congregations have affected mental health. Our study is based on the...
Agency costs play an important role when societies delegate decision making power to elected politicians. These transaction costs imply that the demands of the electorate to regulate market failures may not be acted upon and, thus, never materialize and that the policies that do materialize will often...
Tax and public spending are central to electoral politics in many countries, and lie at the heart of the classic Downsian model of electoral choice, in which voters seek to maximize their expected utility through a rational evaluation of party programmes.
Since the 1990s, political parties...
Most economists agree that public goods are a key source of market failure. Traditionally, government intervention was thought to be the main solution. However, public goods can be provided voluntarily (Ostrom, 1990). Although very important, voluntary provision of public goods is not well understood in general,...
Our goal is to quantify the macroeconomic consequences of credit misallocation resulting from forbearance incentives in Japan. Forbearance is a practice whereby banks accommodate bad borrowers struggling to meet their obligations. It results in loan relationships being kept alive, which would otherwise be...
This project examines key macro-distributional trends that appear to hold across many OECD economies over the past few decades: earnings inequality has risen due to greater wage differences between firms; the productivity gap between leading firms and laggards has widened; and high- and low-skill employees...
Children of economically successful parents tend to be economically successful themselves. By some estimates, the intergenerational association of economic status in the UK is strongest in the developed world, implying low social mobility (Blanden, 2009; Corak 2013). Given that equality of opportunity is a...