infonet-economy

How long shall a country take to learn the world technological frontier? What would happen if that country found the same difficulties in learning the true model of its economy? After all, countries catching up often experience life-changing transformations during the catch-up to a balanced growth path. We show that an open economy, learning rational expectations alongside foreign…

We exploit variation in consumer price inflation across seventy-one Russian regions to examine the relationship between the perceived stability of the domestic currency and financial dollarization. Our results show that regions with higher inflation experience an increase in the dollarization of household deposits and a decrease in the dollarization of loans. The impact of inflation…

Since house prices govern the consumption decisions of renters and owners alike, changing house prices can have far-reaching macroeconomic consequences. We analyze how the disposable income and consumption decisions of households are affected by exogenous house price changes in Switzerland. We look at consumption of both housing and nondurable goods to establish a comprehensive…

Nighttime lights are increasingly used by social scientists as a proxy for economic activity and economic development in subnational spatial units. However, so far, our understanding of what nighttime lights capture is limited. We construct local indicators of household wealth, education and health from geo-coded Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for 29 African countries. We show…

We systematically investigate the effect heterogeneity of job search programmes for unemployed workers. To investigate possibly heterogeneous employment effects, we combine non-experimental causal empirical models with Lasso-type estimators. The empirical analyses are based on rich administrative data from Swiss social security records. We find considerable heterogeneities only…