January 2020

Agnieszka Rusinowska*, Akylai Taalaibekova

Social networks play a central role in most of our everyday activities, communicating and exchanging information, sharing knowledge, research and development, advertisement, among many others. A process that can be modeled by social networks is opinion formation. The opinions result from interactions with other individuals that hold views on given issues. A related question being particularly important, e.g., in lobbying, political campaigning, marketing, or counter-terrorism, is how to identify optimal targets to achieve social impact...

Short link to this article: https://bit.ly/2Tv5ExG

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Do Central banks need a status update to preserve their independance?

Patrick Bolton, Stephen Cecchetti, Jean-Pierre Danthine*, Xavier Vives

The Great Financial Crisis and its aftermath have constituted an eye-opener for the general public on the role of Central bankers and the power of their toolkit. The rediscovery of their core mission in the pursuit financial stability and the current persistence and likely future prevalence of the Zero Lower Bound generate the prospects that their action will remain much more visible and politically sensitive than it has been in the past where regular interest rate decisions were the only occasions for them to be in the news...

Short link to this article: https://bit.ly/2Twz9yW

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Collective Quality: pulling off the incentive benefits of collective reputation

Pierre Fleckinger*, Wanda Mimra, Angelo Zago

France is world-renowned for its Champagne, Bordeaux and Camembert. These names evocative of quality do not identify a particular company or producer, but apply collectively to thousands of them. For instance, the more than 300 million bottles of Champagne per year are produced by more than 16,000 smaller vine-growing producers and 300 Champagne houses. Of course, wines are not the only economic domain in which collective names, and therefore a collective reputation, play a very important role...

Short link to this article: https://bit.ly/2R1VXoO

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What impact does trade openness have on informal and irregular jobs in Egypt?

Mélika Ben Salem*, Chahir Zaki

Developing countries suffer not only from labor market participation problems but also from low quality jobs not backed by contracts, social insurance schemes, legal protection, or administrative rules covering commercial licensing, mostly informal and irregular employment. Informal jobs are conventionally defined as any job that neither complies with labor market legislation nor provides worker social benefits. They primarily concern small firms, which form the bedrock of the informal sector...

Short link to this article: https://bit.ly/36ZWZHl

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What impacts do urbanization and nature disconnection have on environmental quality?

Emeline Bezin*, Ingmar Schumacher

The increasing urbanization across the world has led to rising incomes which in turn tends to lead to larger investments in environmental quality. At the same time, this unprecedented transition into cities has led to a progressive reduction in human-nature interactions. Beyond the economic field, some social scientists note that this ’extinction of experience’ will lead to ’a cycle of disaffection that can have disastrous consequences’. They argue that this lack of exposure to nature when young leads to a lower preference towards the environment...

Short link to this article: https://bit.ly/2NwC8Ui

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* PSE Members