International trade collapsed, and also became much less multilateral, during the 1930s. Previous studies, looking at aggregate trade flows, have argued that trade policies had relatively little to do with either phenomenon. Using a new dataset incorporating highly disaggregated information on the United Kingdom's imports and trade policies, we find that while conventional wisdom is correct regarding the impact of trade policy on the total value of British imports, discriminatory trade policies can explain the majority of Britain's shift toward Imperial imports in the 1930s.

In diesem Beitrag erfolgt ein Überblick über die neuere empirische Literatur zu Beschäftigungswirkungen von Mindestlöhnen. Nach einer einleitenden Diskussion bestehender unterschiedlicher Mindestlohnsysteme und der in der Literatur verwendeten Schätzmethodik zeigt eine Aufstellung der Ergebnisse der neueren Literatur, dass im Gegensatz zu älteren Beiträgen nun grob widersprüchliche Ergebnisse erzielt werden. Neben negativen Beschäftigungswirkungen ist auch Evidenz für keine oder sogar für positive Beschäftigungswirkungen zu finden. (Autorenref.) / Series: Working Papers Series "Growth and Employment in Europe: Sustainability and Competitiveness"

We propose a new evolutionary approach to model technological change based on an extension of replicator dynamics with recombination and mutation. It gives rise to interactive innovation-selection dynamics. The model allows studying the combined effects of selection and variety generation on evolutionary-economic change. The developed framework describes a population of boundedly rational entrepreneurs who decide each period on the allocation of investments in different production technologies. They tend to invest in belowaverage cost technologies, just as under replicator dynamics. In addition, they spend a constant fraction of investments, captured by mutation and recombination rates, on alternative technologies and research on recombinant innovation. As opposed to most previous studies, mutation and recombination are here conceptual variables with a concrete behavioral interpretation, namely describing the decision rules (heuristics) of investors. We compare the dynamics of shares of investments in various technologies for three cases: with constant costs of capital, with costs decreasing steadily and exogenously over time, and with costs depending on the level of cumulative investments. For each model version, we examine under which conditions the coexistence of technological options is feasible and optimal in terms of minimising the average cost of investments.(authors' abstract)

The empirical literature on the relationship between natural disaster risk and investment in education is inconclusive. Model averaging methods in a framework of crosscountry and panel regressions show an extremely robust negative partial correlation between secondary school enrollment and natural disaster risk. This result is driven exclusively by geologic disasters. Exposure to natural disaster risk is a robust determinant of differences in secondary school enrollment between countries but not necessarily within countries Natural disasters, human capital, education, school enrollment, Bayesian model averaging.

This article summarizes a talk, given at the conference From Bretton Woods to Berlaymont: Globalisation, Integration and the Future of Europe, organized by KOF Swiss Economic Institute and ETH Zurich from 22-23 March 2018. It highlights the complexity and multidimensional nature of the question about the future development of the European Union. It argues that there is a need for rebalancing subsidiarity and supranationality, but that the assignment of tasks and the "optimal" degree of centralization has to be judged on a case-by-case basis, differentiated by policy area. Moreover, it emphasizes the need to draw a line between what is desirable from a scientific perspective and can be judged by objective standards and what is desirable from a political perspective, which will vary a lot with political preferences. Finally, it argues that, at least in the short-to medium-run, economic integration should be given priority over political Integration. / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

This paper investigates the drivers of growth and prosperity in a group of eleven European countries -- Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, and Slovakia (the EU11). Since the EU11 began the transformation process, this group of emerging countries has made impressive strides as developing market economies and is anchoring development in European Union institutions. There are reasons to believe that the convergence of EU11 income per capita to Western European levels will continue, but will proceed more slowly. The paper concludes that trade and financial integration have sped along at a spectacular pace in the EU11 in the recent past, although trade in modern services and the integration of government bond and equity markets are somewhat behind. As in the rest of Europe, demographic developments will pose huge challenges for the sustainability of public finance in the EU11 economies. In the next several decades, the EU11 labor force is expected to contract more than labor forces in the rest of the European Union, making it even more urgent that countries in the region reform pension systems, change migration policy, and find incentives to attract talent to the region. Closing the gap with the rest of the European Union in educational attainment levels and improving education quality might significantly soften the constraints imposed by the demographic threats and produce sizable returns in terms of additional income convergence.

La théorie économique conduit à supposer que l’assurance santé accroît les consommations médicales en générant du risque moral ex-post, c'est-à-dire l’achat par les individus de soins dont la valeur est faible au regard de leur coût total. Certains économistes soulignent que tout ou partie de ce surplus de consommation peut résulter également d’une solvabilisation de la demande de soins du fait des remboursements, traduisant ainsi un meilleur accès aux soins. Comprendre lequel de ces effets prédomine représente un enjeu important en termes d’équité et d’efficience du système de santé. Cette thèse vise à mesurer l’ampleur de l’effet de l’assurance complémentaire santé sur les consommations médicales en France et à en comprendre la nature en s’appuyant sur trois articles. Le premier article analyse l’effet du fait d’être couvert par une complémentaire santé sur le recours aux médecins, le second évalue l’impact de la CMU-C sur les consommations médicales de ses bénéficiaires, enfin le troisième étudie l’effet d’une surcomplémentaire santé permettant de compléter les remboursements du contrat de base d’une mutuelle de fonctionnaire. En se focalisant sur l’assurance complémentaire et surcomplémentaire, ces articles permettent d’étudier l’effet d’une variation à la marge du niveau de couverture sur différentes catégories de population. / According to economic theory, health insurance raises medical care consumptions by inducing ex-post moral hazard behavior, it is to say the purchase of health care that individual value below their production cost. Nevertheless, among the economists community, some suggest that these additional consumptions may be the consequence of an increase of financial resources in case of illness due to reimbursements, reflecting a better access to health care. Understanding which of these effects dominates is a crucial issue to assess equity and efficiency of health care system. Based on three articles, this thesis aims to estimate how great the effect of complementary health insurance on health care consumptions is in France, and to understand the nature of this effect. The first article analyzes the effect of being covered by a complementary health insurance on the use of physician care, the second article assess how the CMU-C scheme affected health care consumptions of its beneficiaries, and the third article examines the effect of a supplementary health insurance contract that provides reimbursements in addition of the benefits of a basic complementary health insurance contract that covers civil servants. By focusing on complementary and supplementary health insurance, these articles offer the opportunity to study the effect of health insurance at the margin, on different populations.

This paper considers alternative methods to estimate econometric models based on bilateral data when only aggregate information on the dependent variable is available. Such methods can be used to obtain an indication of the sign and magnitude of bilateral model parameters and, more importantly, to decompose aggregate into bilateral data, which can then be used as proxy variables in further empirical analysis. We perform a Monte Carlo study and carry out a simple real world application using intra-EU trade and capital flows, showing that the methods considered work reasonably well and are worthwhile being considered in the absence of bilateral data. (authors' abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

This paper considers the most important aspects of model uncertainty for spatial regression models, namely the appropriate spatial weight matrix to be employed and the appropriate explanatory vari- ables. We focus on the spatial Durbin model (SDM) specification in this study that nests most models used in the regional growth literature, and develop a simple Bayesian model averaging approach that provides a unified and formal treatment of these aspects of model uncertainty for SDM growth models. The approach expands on the work by LeSage and Fischer (2008) by reducing the computational costs through the use of Bayesian information criterion model weights and a matrix exponential specification of the SDM model. The spatial Durbin matrix exponential model has theoretical and computational advantages over the spatial autoregressive specification due to the ease of inversion, differentiation and integration of the matrix expo- nential. In particular, the matrix exponential has a simple matrix determinant which vanishes for the case of a spatial weight matrix with a trace of zero (LeSage and Pace 2007). This allows for a larger domain of spatial growth regression models to be analysed with this approach, including models based on different classes of spatial weight matrices. The working of the approach is illustrated for the case of 32 potential determinants and three classes of spatial weight matrices (contiguity-based, k-nearest neighbor and distance-based spatial weight matrices), using a dataset of income per capita growth for 273 European regions. (authors' abstract)

Express parcel carriers offer a wide range of guaranteed delivery times in order to separate customers who value quick delivery from those that are less time but more price sensitive. Such segmentation, however, adds a whole new layer of complexity to the task of optimizing the logistics operations. While many sophisticated models have been developed to assist network planners in minimizing costs, few approaches account for the interplay between service pricing, customer decisions and the associated restrictions in the distribution process. This paper attempts to fill this research gap by introducing a heuristic solution approach that simultaneously determines the ideal set of services, the associated pricing and the fulfillment plan in order to maximize profit. By integrating revenue management techniques into vehicle routing and eet planning, we derive a new type of formulation called service selection, pricing and fulfillment problem (SSPFP). It combines a multi-product pricing problem with a cycle-based service network design formulation. In order derive good-quality solutions for realistically-sized instances we use an asynchronous parallel genetic algorithm and follow the intuition that small changes to prices and customer assignments cause minor changes in the distribution process. We thus base every new solution on the most similar already evaluated fulfillment plan. This adapted initial solution is then iteratively improved by a newly-developed route-pattern exchange heuristic. The performance of the developed algorithm is demonstrated on a number of randomly created test instances and is compared to the solutions of a commercial MIP-solver. / Series: Schriftenreihe des Instituts für Transportwirtschaft und Logistik - Supply Chain Management