In recent years Chinese foreign acquisitions have increased significantly, with Chinese investors are more likely to acquire larger firms, firms with lower levels of profitability and higher debt. This EconPol working paper from Clemens Fuest (EconPol Europe, ifo Institute, LMU), Felix Hugger (LMU), Samina Sultan (LMU) and Jing Xing (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) shows investors don’t seem to pay more for target firms with given characteristics, questioning the view that they are subsidized to outbid other investors. Policy initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative and Made in China 2025 influence state-owned but not private Chinese investors. After acquisition by a Chinese company, targets exhibit lower growth in capital productivity, but a higher growth of employee compensation.

This paper by Ulrich Hege (Toulouse School of Economics) and Pierre Mella Barral (TBS Business School) examines two prominent approaches to design efficient mechanisms for debt renegotiation with dispersed bondholders: debt exchange offers that promise enhanced liquidation rights to a restricted number of tendering bondholders (favored under U.S. law), and collective action clauses that allow to alter core bond terms after a majority vote (favored under U.K. law). The authors use a dynamic contingent claims model with a debt overhang problem, where both hold-out and hold-in problems are present. They show that the former leads to a more efficient mitigation of the debt overhang problem than the latter. Dispersed debt is desirable, as exchange offers also achieve a larger and more efficient debt reduction relative to debt held by a single creditor.

In this working paper, Andreas Backhaus and Mikkel Barslund (Centre for European Policy Studies) find that women of later working age who become grandmothers are more likely to leave the labour market than women without grandchildren, according to new research from EconPol Europe. Male labour supply, however, does not significantly adjust in response to grandparenthood. The probability of women aged between 55 and 64 continuing to participate in the labour market can fall from an average of 45% to 15% after the arrival of grandchildren, according to the research. The negative effect of grandparenthood is particularly pronounced following the arrival of the first grandchild and for grandmothers who live close to their children.

In this working paper, António Afonso (ISEG – Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Universidade de Lisboa; REM – Research in Economics and Mathematics, UECE) and Frederico Silva Leal (ISEG – Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Universidade de Lisboa; Portuguese Economy Ministry) estimate short- and long-run elasticities of private consumption for fiscal instruments. They find that positive tax revenue elasticities indicate that consumers have a Ricardian behaviour, while social benefits appear to have a non-Keynesian effect on private consumption. Private consumption continues to exhibit a non-Keynesian response to tax increases, and other expenditures have a recessive impact during normal times. After the launch of the EMU, expansionary fiscal consolidations became harder to observe.

Patent boxes have become an increasingly popular tax instrument in the European Union and the US to attract mobile tax bases of multinational enterprises (MNEs) as well as to foster productivity. This paper shows that MNE affliates that can benefit from the preferential regime report 8.5 percent higher profits. The profit change splits up into a profit shifting and a productivity effect in proportions 2/3 and 1/3. Surprisingly, the profit shifting effect includes an unintended, reversed profit shifting out of the affiliate. Contrary to expectation, the overall tax base adjustment might lower tax revenues collected from MNEs.

Is a fiscal stimulus of investment a viable complement to, or substitute for, monetary policy? The authors of this working paper show that, under a balanced-budget stimulus, investment acceleration may come at the expense of decreased total welfare and that where uncertainty is higher about private returns a net efficiency loss is more likely. However, the risk of such negative outcome strongly declines when the government spending is balanced by taxing both private and public returns on investment.

The Euro area is caught in a "maze of peculiar regulations" and referring to current account imbalances (CAI) as a catch-all indicator of financial efficiency may lead to seriously misplaced policies, according to Ronny Mazzocchi (European Parliament) and Roberto Tamborini (University of Trento), the authors of this latest EconPol working paper. The paper examines the controversial points about the causes, meaning and consequences of CAI, and discusses the alternative policy prescriptions that emerge.

The density of voters in polling regions limits the secrecy of voting and can affect the outcome of Italian elections, with the same impact on countries with a similar voting mechanism. In the first study to analyze the link between voter density and election bias, authors Mauro Caselli (University of Trento) and Paolo Falco (University of Copenhagen) examined all municipal elections conducted in Italy from 1989 to 2015. They found that lower voter density significantly increases the probability of re-election for an incumbent in a municipal office, while in areas with a higher number of voters the probability of re-election for an incumbent falls.

This EconPol paper evaluates the relevance of the taxation for public spending efficiency in a sample of OECD economies in the period 2003-2017. It finds that inputs could be theoretically lower by approximately 32-34%; the Malmquist indices show an overall decrease in technology and in TFP. Crucial for policymaking, the authors find that expenditure efficiency is negatively associated with taxation, more specifically direct and indirect taxes negatively affect government efficiency performance. The same is true for social security contributions.

Immigration increases support for far-right political candidates and reduces support for far-left candidates, with areas with low-educated non-European immigrants providing the biggest boost to the far-right. These are the conclusions of a paper released by EconPol Europe. In the paper, forthcoming in the June issue of the European Economic Review, researchers examined to what extent changes in immigration and trade patterns explain voting for far-left and far-right candidates in French presidential elections from 1988 until 2017. They control for the effects of changes in unemployment, education, and demographics.