infonet-economy

We recently assessed the (possible) effect of plain packaging on the smoking behaviour of young Australian individuals (aged 14–17 years). Our conclusion was that there is no evidence that plain packaging has lowered smoking prevalence among young Australians.

Socio-economic shocks during early childhood are predicted to have detrimental short- and long-run consequences for children's development. We examine this hypothesis using a specific shock: housing damages caused by a super-typhoon. Comparing children, who lived in the same district, but only some experienced housing damages, we can isolate the real-estate shock from any…

In an ever-changing world, the brain must continually formulate, monitor, and adapt patterns of behavior to achieve the best outcome. Often, strategies that we have employed in the past to solve a problem or reach a specific result will work again when we are confronted with a similar situation. When this is the case, we can exploit such strategies for maximal gain. However, if…

Wenn die EU gerettet werden soll, muss im Spitzenpersonal eine «Verschrottung» à la Renzi stattfinden. Nun ist Mut gefragt, und Deutschland muss die Führung übernehmen. Ein Kommentar von Fabrizio Zilibotti.

We show how instrumental variable and matching estimators can be combined in order to identify a broader array of treatment effects. Instrumental variable (IV) estimators are known to estimate effects only for the compliers, representing a subset of the entire population. By combining IV with matching, we can estimate the treatment effects for the always- and never-takers as well.…

Understanding differences in business cycle phenomena between Emerging Market Economies (EMEs) and industrialized countries has been at the center of recent research on macroeconomic fluctuations. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the importance of certain credit market imperfections in different EMEs. To this end, we develop a small open economy Dynamic Stochastic General…