News Archive

To mitigate the economic impact of the corona crisis many governments have heavily engaged in counter-cyclical policies contributing to record high deficit and debt levels. Therefore, the more efficient use of public resources will be given special attention by financial markets’ participants.

This research provides evidence that replacing minimum unemployment benefits with a guaranteed basic income of equal size has minor employment effects in an advanced country. The study examined 2,000 benefit recipients in Finland who were randomized to receive a monthly basic income between 2017 and 2018.

Corruption has a negative effect on the economy - specifically on the level and growth of GDP - and large governments register less benefit from reducing corruption than small governments. This working paper from António Afonso and Eduardo de Sá Fortes Leitão Rodrigues finds that developing economies, regardless of government size, benefit less from reducing corruption and government size is not sufficient to explain the influence of corruption on economic activity - although the level of effectiveness of public services is crucial.

Delays in the availability of vaccines are very costly for society but existing fixed price contracts provide no incentives for producers to speed up delivery: a dose delivered tomorrow receives the same price as a dose delivered in the next quarter. The benefits for early delivery are huge for society, but non-existent for suppliers. A better contract would have the price fully  variable over time. In this policy brief, the authors show that it is straightforward to design an optimal contract, which aligns the time paths of the price with that of the social value of a vaccination.

The budget dispute between Italy and the European Commission in 2018 gave new impetus for the debate about the reliability of output gap estimation methods and their use for calculating structural budget balances. In this paper, Marcell Göttert and Timo Wollmershäuser review the main properties of the mainstream approaches. They show that the structural budget balances resulting from the production function approach and the time series approach are imprecise, subject to large revisions and often biased.