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No. wp2020-5   (Download at EconPapers)
Nataliia Ostapenko
Macroeconomic expectations: news sentiment analysis
I investigate the role that news sentiment plays in the macroeconomy. Using an approach that combines Doc2Vec embedding and Latent Dirichlet Allocation with lexical-based models I show that the news the media choose to report and the tone of these reports contain impor- tant information for household unemployment, interest rates, and in ation expectations. Topic time series derived from the news and the sentiments they express are employed to estimate how the news a ects the macroeconomy.
JEL-Codes: E52, E31, E00
Keywords: expectations, sentiment, news, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Doc2Vec
No. wp2020-4   (Download at EconPapers)
Karsten Staehr
Export performance and capacity pressures in Central and Eastern Europe
This paper investigates whether various measures of capacity pressure or available production capacity may help predict the dynamics of exports from the EU countries in Central and Eastern Europe. The analysis uses annual panel data for the 11 countries from 2001 to 2019. Reduced form estimations reveal that cost competitiveness measures have little or no predictive power. The measures of capacity pressure comprise capacity utilisation in industry, the unemployment rate and the output gap, and the measures are all robust predictors of future export dynamics. The results are robust to various changes in the time and country sample, control variables and specification, and also hold in panel vector autoregressive models
JEL-Codes: F14, F17, E32
Keywords: export, competitiveness, capacity utilisation, output gap, unemployment, Central and Eastern Europe
No. wp2020-3   (Download at EconPapers)
Orsolya Soosaar, Allan Puur and Lauri Leppik
Does raising the pension age prolong working life? Evidence from pension age reform in Estonia
We estimate how raising the statutory retirement age affects employment by considering the pension age reform in Estonia, that gradually raised the normal retirement age (NRA) for women from 58 to 61.5 and the early retirement age (ERA) from 56 to 59.5 during the period of 2001 to 2011. The analysis employs a difference-in-differences estimation strategy on register data covering women born between 1943 and 1952. The reform did have an impact on the employment rate of affected women, with an estimated increase of 4.1 percentage points associated with the rise in the NRA, and 3.4 percentage points with the rise in the ERA. These estimates are at the lower end of those found in previous studies for other countries, pointing to the role of contextual features such as lower replace-ment rates and fewer disincentives to work while drawing pensions.
JEL-Codes: H31, H55, J14, J26
Keywords: retirement age, older workers, employment
No. wp2020-2   (Download at EconPapers)
Natalia Levenko
Elevated survey uncertainty after the Great Recession: a non-linear approach
The European Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) is a dataset that is widely used to derive measures of forecast uncertainty. Participants in the SPF provide not only point estimates but also density forecasts for key macroeconomic variables. The mean individual variance, defined as the average of the variances of individual forecasts, shifted up during the Great Recession and has remained elevated since the crisis. This shift is not typical since proxies for uncertainty are usually counter-cyclical. The paper seeks to explain this puzzling lack of countercyclicality by applying a smooth transition analysis on data from the European SPF. The analysis indicates that the mean individual variance has a non-linear relationship with the share of non-rounded responses in the survey and consequently the upward shift in individual variance is likely to be associated with changes in the modelling preferences of forecasters. The results remain robust after potential endogeneity has been accounted for
JEL-Codes: C25, C32, C83, D81, E32, E37
Keywords: survey uncertainty; forecast disagreement; density forecasts; surveys of professional forecasters; Great Recession; smooth transition; instrumental variables
No. wp2020-1   (Download at EconPapers)
Merike Kukk and W. Fred van Raaij
Joint and individual savings within families: evidence from bank accounts
In this paper, we investigate the ownership of financial assets within families and how pooling affects the individual savings of the partners. We use anonymised monthly transactional data from ING Bank to observe the financial data of Dutch couples for 2014–2016. We find that savings are quite equally allocated in almost half of households but in one-fifth of households there is only one partner who owns an individual account. The estimations show that joint savings contribute to a more equal division of savings since they are held equally. However, we find larger differences in individual savings among partners who pool, suggesting that the use of joint savings does not lead to individual savings being more evenly distributed, but rather to the opposite. The pattern is more apparent for households in their 20s and for saving accounts. The results of the study highlight the need to understand how families make decisions about applying the sharing rule to joint and individual savings
JEL-Codes: G51, D13, D14, D31
Keywords: household, savings, financial assets, financial management, allocation of resources in households, sharing rule, pooling, joint and separate/ individual assets, bank and savings accounts
No. wp2019-9   (Download at EconPapers)
Remi Generoso, CĂ©cile Couharde and Olivier Damette
The effects on growth of El Nino and La Nina:local weather conditions matter
This paper contributes to the climate-economy literature by analysing the role of weather patterns in in uencing the transmission of global climate cycles to economic growth. More speci cally, we focus on El Ni~no Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events and their interactions with local weather conditions, taking into account the heterogeneous and cumulative e ects of weather patterns on economic growth and the asymmetry and nonlinearity in the global in uence of ENSO on economic activity. Using data on 75 countries over the period 1975{2014, we provide evidence for the negative growth e ects of ENSO events and show that there are substantial di erences between its warm (El Ni~no) and cold (La Ni~na) phases and between climate zones. These di erences are due to the heterogeneity in weather responses to ENSO events, known as teleconnections, which has so far not been taken into account by economists, and which will become more im-portant in the climate-economy relationship given that climate change may substantially strengthen long-distance relationships between weather patterns around the world. We also show that the negative growth e ects associated with these teleconnections are robust to the de nition of ENSO events and more important over shorter meteorological onsets
JEL-Codes: C33, O40, Q54
Keywords: economic growth, ENSO events, weather shocks, climate change
No. wp2019-8   (Download at EconPapers)
Dmitry Kulikov and Nicolas Reigl
Inflation expectations in Phillips Curves models for the euro area
This paper takes a fresh look at the use of the Phillips curve and various in ation expectation proxies for tracking euro area in ation dynamics in the aftermath of the global nancial crisis of 2008. Because in ation expectations can be measured in a multitude of alternative ways and the Phillips curve model itself is subject to many potential speci cation choices, we employ a novel thick modelling perspective that is data and model-agnostic and estimate a large number of di erent Phillips curve models using di erent data series for di erent components of our models. We nd that Phillips curve models without any forward-looking expectational terms are uniformly the worst predictors of euro area in ation rates after 2013, when measured for the RMSE criterion across all models and speci cations. This result underlines the importance of in ation expectations in tracking the recent dynamics of euro area in ation and shows that in ation persistence alone or in combination with di erent slack and cost push terms cannot satisfactorily explain the euro area in ation story during the period of missing in ation after 2012. We also illustrate the usefulness of the thick modelling approach for practical modelling and forecasting of the euro area in ation series.
JEL-Codes: E31, E37, E58, C13, C15, C52
Keywords: data-rich models, thick modelling, data and model uncertainty, Phillips curve, in ation expectations, in ation dynamics, euro area