Recently the topic of the future of Ukrainian economy has been attracting great attention among economists and politicians. The way how it should develop is widely discussed on the international arena. Economists and politicians cannot reach an agreement to which direction it is better to move for Ukraine. Nowadays a lot of special institutions has been created on both sides: in Ukraine and in Europe. The main goal of those is to control all the processes of transformation to be transparent on all levels; as well as prevent unlikely events. Of course, there are proponents and opponents of the moving to the free trade with the EU as for every global process. Among the young generation it is very clear, that possibilities, which gives us European Union are much more valuable and gainful. Even now, majority of students, researchers seek to apply their knowledge or gain some knowledge in European countries. I try to determine potential impact on Economy of Ukraine assuming integration to European Union. It is very important to consider both threats and benefits of such processes as they are taking place on very high level. Therefor in this work I will consider both contours of development for Economy of Ukraine. To explore it I have applied the synthetic control method, which gives us opportunity to...

People respond to incentives—people make decisions by comparing the costs and benefits of a particular action. When either the costs or benefits change, behavior also changes. My dissertation focuses on estimating the impact of two different behaviour-altering taxes on household consumption. In the first section, I conduct an empirical examination of a hypothetical "fat tax" on household food consumption in Canada. The simulation results suggest that when fat tax revenues are recycled as lump-sum transfers to households, this policy would be the most efficient and progressive scenario from both economic and health perspectives. In the second section, I examine the impact of British Columbia's (BC) recently implemented carbon tax on household energy use from an aggregate perspective. I find no significant impact of the BC carbon tax on residential natural gas consumption. The third section is a further investigation of the BC carbon tax on household natural gas consumption varied by their environmental ideology. The results suggest that the impact of the carbon tax is more effective for non-environmentally conscious households than for other households.

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Submitted by Fabio Sobreira Campos da Costa (fabio.sobreira@ufpe.br) on 2016-09-16T15:21:14Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Dissertação_Poliana.pdf: 864570 bytes, checksum: 74d0fe98907e91cfd6d989e6f6735ace (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-09-16T15:21:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Dissertação_Poliana.pdf: 864570 bytes, checksum: 74d0fe98907e91cfd6d989e6f6735ace (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-03-31 / CAPES / PROPESQ- UFPE / Os acidentes de trânsito tem se apresentado como um sério problema de saúde no mundo, ocasionando prejuízos físicos, emocionais e econômicos. Esses tipos de acidentes são diretamente influenciados por ações individuais dos motoristas e de outros usuários. Leis ou medidas que afetem os incentivos individuais na forma de se comportarem no trânsito podem levar a mudanças nas taxas de mortalidade, entre elas as que restringem a associação, consumo de bebidas alcoólicas e direção, como a Lei Seca implantada no Brasil no ano de 2008. Desta forma, o objetivo desta dissertação é avaliar o impacto da Lei Seca sobre a mortalidade por acidente de trânsito automotivo na Região Metropolitana de Recife, Pernambuco. Para tanto, a partir do método do Controle Sintético de dados de mortalidade obtidos no DATASUS estimou-se um efeito positivo da referida lei na RMR, resultando em uma redução da taxa de mortalidade por acidentes de trânsito automotivo em média de um ponto, equivalente a 45%, entre os anos de 2008 a 2013. Ou seja, a Lei Seca apresentou como uma medida eficiente na prevenção de mortes no trânsito decorrentes de acidentes automobilísticos na região em estudo. / Traffic accidents must be presented as a serious health problem in the world, causing damages to physical, emotional and economic. These types of accidents are directly influenced by individual actions of drivers and of other users. Laws or measures that affect individual incentives in the form of behave in transit may lead to changes in mortality rates, among them the that restrict the association, consumption of alcoholic beverages and direction, as the Dry Law implanted in Brazil in the year 2008. In this way, the objective of this dissertation is to assess the impact of the Dry Law on mortality by automotive traffic accident in the Metropolitan Region of Recife, Pernambuco. For both, from the method of synthetic control of mortality data obtained in DATASUS we estimated a positive effect of this law in the metropolitan Recife, resulting in a reduction in the rate of mortality from traffic accidents automotive on average a point, equivalent to 45%, between the years of 2008 to 2013. Thus the Dry Law presented as an efficient in the prevention of traffic related deaths resulting from car accidents in the region under study.

[pt] Existe um grande debate entre acadêmicos e formuladores de política a respeito do efeito potencial da legalização das drogas no crime. Proponentes da legalização das drogas argumentam que a legalização levaria a mais consumo e crime. Já os defensores da legalização (e.g Friedman, 1991) argumentam que a proibição por si só causa mais crimes ao desviar recursos policiais do combate a outros tipos de crime e incentivar a violência por parte de participantes do mercado negro como forma de disputar mercado e cumprir contratos. Nesse artigo, examinamos uma droga específica que responde por uma grande fração do mercado: maconha. Para isso, analisamos a experiência pioneira da Califórnia com a legalização da maconha medicinal, iniciada em 1996. A experiência californiana é particularmente interessante por se aproximar de uma legalização de facto da droga, mesmo para fins recreativos. Nós usamos uma abordagem de controle sintético para estimar um contrafactual qual teria sido a taxa de criminalidade violenta na Califórnia na ausência de legalização da maconha medicinal. Este contrafactual é construído como uma média ponderada de outros estados americanos, cujos pesos são escolhidos de forma ótima para aproximar tal média a Califórnia, antes da mudança de política. Ao comparar a Califórnia com sua contrafactual (principalmente composto por Florida, Illinois e Texas), mostramos que, no ano de 2006, a taxa de crimes violentos da Califórnia foi 13 por cento menor do que o que teria sido na ausência da legalização da maconha medicinal. / [en] There is a large debate among both scholars and policy makers about the potential effects of drug legalization on crime. On the one hand, proponents of drug criminalization claim that legalization would lead to greater consumption and crime. On the other hand, advocates of drug legalization (e.g. Friedman, 1991) argue that prohibition itself can cause more crime by diverting police resources away from deterring non-drug crimes and incentivizing market participants to resort in violence to dispute market share and enforce agreements. In this paper, we examine one specific drug that corresponds to a large share of the drug market: marijuana. For that, we analyze California s pioneer experience with medical marijuana legalization, which started in 1996. California s experience is particularly interesting because it was close to a de facto total legalization of the drug, even for recreational purposes. We use a synthetic control approach to estimate a counterfactual of what would have been the violent crime rate in California in the absence of medical marijuana legalization. This counterfactual is a weighted average of other American states whose weights are optimally chosen to best resemble California before this policy change. By comparing California with its counterfactual (mostly composed by Florida, Illinois and Texas), we show that, by the year 2006, California s violent crime rate was 13 per cent lower than what it would have been in the absence of medical marijuana legalization.

The aim of this study is to examine whether the 2018 U.S. steel tariffs have negatively impacted Swedish steel exports to the U.S, given that the U.S. is Swedish steel industry’s second most important foreign market and the majority of Swedish steel exports to the U.S. are subject to the tariffs. The theoretical foundation for this study is the standard trade model, which predicts a decline in quantity traded due to tariffs. With monthly export value data for January 2015 to January 2020, the synthetic control method (SCM) is used to create a counterfactual to the steel products subject to tariffs. The study encountered several data limitations which complicated the use of the SCM, but the overall results suggest that in the absence of tariffs, Swedish monthly export value for steel to the U.S. would have higher than it has been with the tariffs.

This paper empirically estimates the effect of tax exemptions from the carbon tax and energy taxon emissions in Sweden. After the tax exemptions in 1992, carbon dioxide emissions from theSwedish industrial sector increased by, on average, over 34 percent, compared to a synthetic control unit constructed from a comparable group of OECD countries. The main finding is robust to various placebo tests, robustness tests and a dose-response test, suggesting that the tax exemptions are the driver of the result.

This paper aims to investigate how the domestic unemployment rate of a nation is affected by joining the European currency union and converting to the euro. This is done through the use of a synthetic control method, as well as an augmented version of the model, where I define the Euro Area countries as the treatment group, and conversion to euro as treatment. In line with the predictions of previous related theoretical frameworks such as the optimum currency area theory, the gravity theory and Matusz’s equilibrium model, the findings in this paper suggests that conversion to the euro leads to a short-term decrease in domestic unemployment. The effect is likely due to the short-term increase in trade, specifically within-union trade, that arises from joining the EMU.

In 2007, the Swedish payroll tax was reduced for youths in an attempt to suppress the perceived high unemployment among Swedish youths. The reform was rolled back later in 2016. For this period there is a rich supply of publicly available aggregated (macro) data. This thesis aims to examine: first, if the aggregated data is suitable for policy evaluation of the reform, and second, the effects of the reform introduction and repeal. This has been done by using both a conventional fixed effects model and a more unorthodox synthetic control method. Neither of the two methods could show any unbiased and consistent significant result of the treatment effects of the reform. Instead, the results of this thesis suggest that the publicly available aggregated data doesn’t contain enough information to evaluate such reforms.

To establish the economic impact of petroleum in the UK, this paper uses the synthetic control method. By constructing an artificial UK economy without oil, from the donor pool of OECD economies, it establishes the counterfactual time path of capital stock the UK would have had if it lacked the petroleum endowment. Comparing the observed time path of capital stock with its counterfactual, one can witness that the petroleum extraction has reduced the UK’s capital stock with an average of 17 % since 1970, despite the UK having arguably the best quality of institutions. Dose-response tests suggest that it is possible to attribute the impact to the petroleum production. Performed robustness and sensitivity tests together with several falsification tests show that the result is robust to alternations in the donor pool, the predictor variables and alternative explanations. The finding raises a question regarding the quality of institutions, advanced by Mehlum, Moene and Torvik and claimed that the resource curse only occurs in economies with low quality of institutions.