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Numerical Simulation of Reaching a Steady State: Effects of Using Progressive Income Tax and Public Assistance
No full textIn a heterogeneous population, a steady state cannot necessarily be guaranteed unless a government appropriately intervenes. I numerically simulate whether a steady state can be reached by means of progressive income taxes and public assistance in the case that households are heterogeneous in probabilities of obtaining persistent rent incomes. Simulation results indicate that, in many cases, a steady state can be reached, but at the same time a high level of economic inequality is generated. This occurs because progressive income taxes can “confiscate” persistent rent incomes, but they cannot compensate for the extracted economic resources resulting from rent incomes. Simulation results also indicate that large-scale public assistance is needed to reduce inequality, but it will be difficult to actually implement due to difficulties in distinguishing between persistent rent incomes and other types of income. As a result, a high level of economic inequality will remain even with progressive income taxes
Cluster analysis of the furniture industry and agribusiness in Bulgaria: Innovation potential, challenges, and development opportunities
No full textThe report analyses the innovation potential of Bulgaria's furniture industry and agribusiness through a cluster approach, emphasizing regional disparities and challenges. The results indicate that the furniture industry suffers from low investment in innovation and limited digitization, while agribusiness faces low productivity and regional imbalances despite its steady growth. Leading regions (Ruse, Gabrovo, Dobrich, Yambol) demonstrate high economic activity and innovation development. National policies in the sector should focus on increasing investments in new technologies, promoting balanced regional development, and enhancing cluster coordination to improve competitiveness and sustainability in both sectors
Teletrabajo y desplazamientos: Modelización teórica y evidencia empírica para Estados Unidos
No full textThis paper examines the household decision to work from home (WFH) using the collective labor supply framework, which accounts for intrahousehold bargaining in time allocation across market work, domestic tasks, and telework. The model incorporates the joint budget constraint, domestic production, and relative bargaining power, allowing decisions to be understood as interdependent between spouses. Based on this framework, a system of simultaneous equations is derived and estimated through different econometric strategies (OLS, fixed effects, SUR, and SUR-IV). Results reveal a negative income effect on labor supply, significant cross-spousal interactions, and clear gender asymmetries: women’s domestic time substantially reduces their labor supply, while men’s impact remains marginal. The findings suggest that telework may enhance work–life balance but also risks reinforcing inequalities if not accompanied by redistributive and responsibility-sharing policies
Extracting O*NET Features from the NLx Corpus to Build Public Use Aggregate Labor Market Data
No full textData from online job postings are difficult to access and are not built in a standard or transparent manner. Data included in the standard taxonomy and occupational information database (O*NET) are updated infrequently and based on small survey samples. We adopt O*NET as a framework for building natural language processing tools that extract structured information from job postings. We publish the Job Ad Analysis Toolkit (JAAT), a collection of open-source tools built for this purpose, and demonstrate its reliability and accuracy in out-of-sample and LLM-as-judge testing. We extract more than 10 billion data points from more than 155 million online job ads provided by the National Labor Exchange (NLx) Research Hub, including O*NET tasks, occupation codes, tools, and technologies, as well as wages, skills, industry, and more features. We describe the construction of a dataset of occupation, state, and industry level features aggregated by monthly active jobs from 2015 – 2025. We illustrate the potential for research and future uses in education and workforce development
Inequality, financialization, and political disintegration
No full textDrawing on Peter Turchin’s structural-demographic theory, this paper provides a preliminary examination of how rising inequality and financial liberalization contribute to political instability through the interplay of mass immiseration and elite overproduction. We capture these dynamics through a simplified agent-based macroeconomic model, introducing two structural shocks - growing inequality and financial liberalization - that reflect the transformations reshaping advanced economies in recent decades, a process intertwined with political disintegration. A wealth tax on the richest households can reduce political fragmentation and improve economic performance, but lasting resilience will require embedding such measures within a broader rethinking of the policy paradigm that has prevailed since the 1980s
The Post-2015 German Lending Surge: What Role for QE?
No full textThis paper uses German microdata to test whether the ECB’s quantitative easing (QE) spurred bank lending to non-financial firms. Bank-firm loan data
allow me to control for loan demand at firm level. The share of bonds in banks’ total assets before QE serves as treatment proxy. While the effects are positive and statistically significant, they are small: Increasing the bond/asset share in a firm’s lender bank by one standard deviation increases the de-trended outstanding bilateral loan volume by 3-5% of its within-sample mean. At firm level, no unambiguous effect can be observed
Impact of Geography on Institutions in Agricultural and Nomadic Societies
No full textHow geography affects the choice of institutions is studied in a theoretical model. In this model, nations are located around a circle. Rulers compete through choosing tax rates, the level of military spending, and the degree of formality of institutions. Geographic condition is captured by population density. It is shown that societies with higher population densities choose lower tax rates, establish more formal institutions, and give government officials lower levels of autonomies than those with lower population densities do. A higher level of external threats induces a ruler to choose a higher level of autonomy for officials. The model is illustrated by comparing institutions of agricultural and nomadic regimes in ancient China
Energy transition and economic growth in Colombia: A dynamic cge Model with Renewable Energies
No full textClimate change has gained significant relevance in recent years, encouraging many countries to implement decarbonization policies aimed at reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. While much attention has been paid to the design of these policies, there is a growing interest in analyzing their macroeconomic implications. This study evaluates the impact of the energy transition on economic growth in Colombia using a recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. The model is calibrated for the year 2022 and simulates the Colombian energy economy over a ten-year horizon. Results indicate that an ambitious and sustained policy promoting non-conventional renewable energy could increase GDP growth by up to 0.5 percentage points compared to a business-as-usual (BAU) scenario. Additionally, climate shocks such as El Ni˜no may negatively affect economic performance; however, early investment in renewable energy technologies can partially offset these adverse effects
Ethnicity Matters: Correcting Cultural Bias in Social Models
No full textEthnicity Matters: Correcting Cultural Bias in Social ModelsThis study examines the determinants of domestic violence (DV—physical or sexual) against women in Pakistan using nationally representative data from the 2017–18 Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (PDHS). We estimate survey-adjusted logistic regression models, reporting logit coefficients, odds ratios, and marginal effects, to assess the influence of intergenerational, marital, demographic, and socioeconomic factors, and test whether excluding ethnicity biases results.
Findings show that intergenerational transmission is a powerful driver: women whose fathers beat their mothers face more than double the odds of experiencing DV (OR = 2.39, marginal effect +12 pp, p<0.01). Marital dynamics are equally critical. Husband’s alcohol consumption (OR = 3.96, +19 pp) and women’s fear of their husbands (OR = 5.11, +23 pp) emerge as the strongest correlates of DV. Polygamy increases the odds substantially (OR ≈ 3.50), although estimates are less precise. Household structure also matters—each additional child increases DV risk (OR = 1.16, +2 pp).
Socioeconomic variables show weaker and less consistent effects. Wife’s and husband’s education, as well as consanguinity, are not robust predictors. However, household wealth displays a protective gradient: women in the richest quintile face significantly lower odds of DV (OR = 0.60, marginal effect –7 pp, p<0.1).
Model comparison confirms that ethnicity is jointly significant (Wald test, p<0.01) and improves model fit. Relative to Urdu-speaking women, Sindhi (OR = 0.41, –12 pp), Pashto (OR = 0.46, –11 pp), Brahui (OR = 0.24, –18 pp), Hindko (OR = 0.28, –16 pp), and Marwari (OR = 0.19, –19 pp) women report substantially lower odds of DV, underscoring the role of cultural norms and community structures.
Overall, the results highlight that excluding ethnicity biases estimated effects and conceals heterogeneity across groups. Policy interventions must therefore combine universal protections with culturally tailored strategies that recognize ethnic variation in women’s vulnerability and reporting of domestic violence
Comparing rhetorics of crisis. Italy and the United Kingdom at the turn of the 1970s
No full textThis paper aims at challenging a consolidated reading of the 1970s as an age of crisis par excellence, from the perspective of Britain and Italy. It focuses on both real economic facts and their interpretation by economists, “second hand dealers in economic ideas” and policy makers. We reflect on the actors who “proclaimed” the crisis in the 1970s and the recipes they suggested to overcome it. We argue that the rise of neoliberalism and the paradigm change in economic policies were also the product of a narrative construction, influenced by political and ideological reasons, which contrasted an extremely negative picture of the 1970s to a very positive, nearly caricatural, representation of the 1980s