We revisit the determinants of house prices in Chinaís megacities. Previous work on similar topics fails to account for the widespread cross-sectional heterogeneity and interdependencies, despite the importance of them. Using a PVAR estimated by the Bayesian method allowing for these features,...

A measure of the degree of debt monetisation is constructed for its impact on the business cycle to be studied in a standard VAR model. Debt monetisation is hardly expansionary, as it raises public demand that crowds out almost as much demand from the private sector. However, it generates...

We fit the logistic function, the reduced form of epidemic behaviour, to the data for deaths from Covid-19, for a wide variety of countries, with a view to estimating a causal model of the covid virus' progression. We then set out a structural model of the Covid virus behaviour based on...

We assess the impact of reminder frequency on the probability of paying overdue property taxes in a randomized controlled trial in China. One reminder a week (sent as a text message) considerably increases the probability of tax compliance and results in tangible fiscal gains compared to a...

This paper sheds light on an important causality which is of primary interest for policy makers, both at country level as well as broad institutional level, though it is largely ignored in the literature. Using panel data from a diversified group of countries and after controlling for various...

The COVID pandemic reveals the fragility of the global financial market during rare disasters. Conventional safe-haven assets like gold can be used to hedge against ordinary risks, but tail dependence can substantially reduce the hedging effectiveness. In contrast, green bonds focus on...

Little is known about the impact of policy interventions other than taxes and bans aimed at reducing the demand for single-use plastic bags. We report results from a natural field experiment conducted in a large supermarket chain to test interventions based on nudges (information provision),...

We develop a data-rich measure of expected macroeconomic skewness in the US economy. Expected macroeconomic skewness is strongly procyclical, mainly reflects the cyclicality in the skewness of real variables, is highly correlated with the cross-sectional skewness of firm-level employment growth,...

A general version of the ZMW model of international tax competition is presented that confirms and extends the results of the existing literature about the choice of tax policy instruments in the symmetric case when the tax externality is positive for both countries. In the asymmetric case when...

We study the impact of broadband penetration on social capital in the UK. Our empirical strategy exploits a technological feature of the telecommunication infrastructure that generated substantial variation in the quality of Internet access across households. The speed of a domestic connection...