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Economic sanctions: Coalitions increase the cost for the target and reduce own burden

What is the role of coalitions in enforcing sanctions? In a newly released study, researchers at IfW Kiel and DIW Berlin analyse the economic impact of jointly implementing punitive measures in the context of the 2012 Iran and 2014 Russia sanctions. They find that coalitions serve two crucial purposes -- they not only magnify the economic cost imposed on the target but also reduce domestic costs for ...

Floating population: consumption and location choices of rural migrants in China

What is the Right Geographic Market Definition?

What is the “right” geographic definition of relevant markets? We study how unexpected and exogenous increases in excise duties in petroleum products were passed-through to retail prices in the Athens region and examine how the degree of the pass-through varies across different geographic relevant markets. Using various definitions of the relevant geographic market, we find that the most...

On the relation between trade and democratization

Whether trade can achieve societal change is a contested topic and difficult to investigate. This round-up aims at summarizing recent empirical research on this topic while focusing on democracy and democratization as an important part of societal change. No robust results for change arising from trade can be found, but there exists an inverse causality, i.e., democratization leading to more trade...

Competition and VAT Pass-Through

We examine how competition affects VAT pass-through in isolated oligopolistic markets as defined by the Greek islands. Using daily gasoline prices and a difference-in-differences methodology, we study how changes in VAT rates are passed through to consumers in islands with different number of retailers. We show that pass-through increases with competition, going from 50% in monopoly to around 80%...

Brothers in Arms: The Value of Coalitions in Sanctions Regimes

This paper provides novel empirical results on the welfare impact of sanctions when countries coordinate their sanctions packages. To do so, weconduct simulations with the Caliendo and Parro (2015) CGE model of the world economy that provides changes in welfare under different hypothetical setups of sanctions coalitions. Focusing on the 2012 wave of sanctions against Iran and the 2014 sanctions...

Local Energy Markets

In current power markets, the bulk of electricity is sold wholesale and transported to consumers via long-distance transmission lines. Recently, decentralized local energy markets have evolved, often as isolated networks based on solar generation. We analyze strategic pricing, investment, and welfare in local energy markets. We show that local energy markets yield competitive equilibrium prices and ...

A Behavioral Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian Model

We develop a New Keynesian model with household heterogeneity and bounded rationality in the form of cognitive discounting. The interaction of household heterogeneity and bounded rationality generates amplification of monetary and fiscal policy through indirect general equilibrium effects while simultaneously ruling out the forward guidance puzzle and remaining stable at the effective lower bound. ...

House Price Expectations

This study examines short-, medium-, and long-run price expectations in housing markets. We derive and test six hypothesis about the incidence, formation, and relevance of price expectations. To do so, we use data from a tailored household survey, past sale and rental offerings, satellites, and from an information RCT. As novel findings, we show that price expectations exhibit mean reversion in the ...

One Hundred Years of Rent Control in Argentina: Much Ado about Nothing

Following World War I, rent control became a standard policy response to the housing shortage and the resulting rent increases. Typically, economists blame it for creating inefficiencies in the housing market and beyond. We investigate whether rental market regulations (including rent control, protection of tenants from eviction, and housing rationing) had any effects in a middle-income Latin American ...