EconPol Forum

This article shows how Facebook interests can be used to construct subnational measures of patience (“the relative valuation of present versus future payoffs”). Differences in patience are closely related to regional student performance in Italy and the United States. The results provide new perspectives on long-standing differences between the countries.

Populism is on the rise. It goes hand in hand with far-left or far-right party slogans and/or strong, personalized political leadership and polarized rhetoric: The presidency of Donald Trump in the US and the campaigns for the Brexit referendum are two prominent examples in recent years. Several EU member states, namely France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Greece, Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany, have experienced how quickly populists win voters in national elections. With the presidential election in the US and European elections in 2024, many people fear a further rise in political polarization and populism in the Western world.

With ongoing demographic and economic changes, documenting the distribution of economic resources within a society is a recurring task for applied economic research that can never be considered complete. In Germany, several studies have investigated trends in earnings and income inequality in the past few years. However, a recent and comprehensive account of inequality in Germany that also considers dimensions other than earnings and income inequality is currently not available. This article documents the development of inequalities in Germany over the years from 1983 to 2020.

The outbreak of an unprecedented global health crisis about four years ago put the very foundations of our communities, economies and politics to the test. Policymakers had to learn and react fast to limit human and economic costs at the same time. This article highlights the importance of existing markets, technological features such as payments systems and economic decisions at the transactional level in combating the spread of a contagious disease while stabilizing aggregate economic activity.

How far away is the world from ensuring that every child obtains at least basic skills? And what would it mean for world development to reach the goal of global universal basic skills? This article addresses these two intertwined questions in a new study. The authors draw on the individual-level test data from available international and regional student assessments to develop world estimates of the share of children not achieving basic skills in each country and then show the economic costs of these deficits.