Month: May 2025

To promote the research and analysis of Latvia’s and euro area’s macroeconomic issues by involving the most talented young economists in this work, Latvijas Banka has announced the annual Competition of Student Scientific Research Papers.

Most awarded papers are usually students’ bachelor’s and master’s theses covering topics concerning the Baltic or the euro area economies. See the bottom of this page for the full list of topics.

The competition papers shall be submitted to Latvijas Banka from 15 May to 30 May 2025. The authors of the winning paper are awarded EUR 2500 and the total prize pot exceeds EUR 9000. 

Latvijas Banka organises the competition already for the 23rd time. Participation is open to citizens and non-citizens of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia as well as foreigners who at the time of the competition are registered as students of higher education institutions accredited in the Baltic States, enrolled in Bachelor’s or Master’s degree programmes, as well as to the students of the Baltic States studying abroad.

Visit this page for more information.

On 11 June 2025 at 10:30, you a welcome to join a seminar on the topic „Optimal Fiscal Policy under Endogenous Disaster Risk: How to Avoid Wars?”, which will be presented by Vytautas Valaitis (University of Surrey).

The seminar should take around 1 hour and 30 minutes including questions and discussions. There is also the option to dial in via MS Teams.

Abstract: We examine the role of government investment in defense capital as a deterrence tool. Using an optimal fiscal policy framework with endogenous disaster risk, we allow for an endogenous determination of geopolitical risk and defense capacity, which we discipline using the Geopolitical Risk Index. We show both analytically and quantitatively that financing defense primarily through debt, rather than taxation, is optimal. Debt issuance mitigates present tax distortions but exacerbates them in the future, especially in wartime. However, since additional defense capital deters future wars, the expected tax distortions decline as well, making debt financing a welfare-improving strategy. Quantitatively, the optimal defense financing in the presence of heightened risk involves a twice higher share of debt and backloading of tax distortions compared to other types of government spending.

Full paper can be found here.

On 9 June 2025 at 14:00, you a welcome to join a seminar on the topic „Migration Restrictions, Selection and Labor Market Returns: Estonian Emigrants, 1989–2021”, which will be presented by JAAN MASSO (Tartu Ülikool).

More information and the Zoom link can be found here.

Prof. Mihkel Tombak (Professor of Strategic Management, University of Toronto Mississauga) will read a short course “Industrial Organization Economics“, to be held at the premises of the University if Tartu.

Dates:
MAY, 14TH & 21TH 2025 @12:00-14:00 ROOM 1024
MAY, 16TH & 23TH 2025 @14:00-16:00 ROOM 1040

Please use this link to apply.

You are welcome to attend a lecture series on Bayesian modelling by prof. Andrés Ramírez Hassan, to be held 12-16 May 2025 daily 17:00-20:00 on KTU premises in Kaunas.

On 13 May 2025 at 15:00, you a welcome to join a seminar on the topic „EASI Drugs in the Streets of Colombia: Modeling Heterogeneous and Endogenous Drug Preferences”, which will be presented by prof. Andrés Ramírez Hassan from the School of Finance, Economics, and Government at Universidad EAFIT (Medellín, Colombia).

The seminar will take place at the KTU School of Economics and Business, 304 auditorium, Gedimino str. 50, Kaunas, Lithuania.

You are welcome to submit your paper and attend The Shadow 2025 Conference to be held on 25-28 September 2025 in Warsaw.

The 9th International Conference ¨The Shadow Economy, Tax Behaviour and Insights from Big Data¨ aims at bringing together researchers studying:

• shadow economy,
• tax compliance,
• taxpayer privacy,
• psychological aspects of tax behaviour,
• money laundering,
• corruption,
• formal and informal institutions,
• trust in institutions.

The conference will provide a great opportunity for scholars across disciplines to explore and discuss recent research on the shadow economy, tax behaviour, and related fields. One focus area is the opportunities that the development of big data collection and AI-powered analytics creates for both academic understanding of tax evasion and related policymaking, but also the resulting challenges.

The deadline for submissions of papers is 15 June 2025.

For more information, see the conference webpage: https://shadow2025.sgh.waw.pl/

On 13 May 2025 at 14:00, you a welcome to join a seminar on the topic „On the recent inflation surge in the euro area: Monetary policy when the Phillips curves … are curves”, which will be presented by Alex Grimaud (Oesterreichische Nationalbank, TU Wien)  and is a joint work with his co-authors Alexandre Carrier (European Central Bank), Emanuel Gasteiger (TU Wien, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa) and Gauthier Vermandel (École Polytechnique, Universités PSL & Paris-Dauphine, Banque de France).

The seminar should take around 1 hour and 30 minutes including questions and discussions. There is also the option to dial in via MS Teams.

Abstract: We investigate monetary policy where the wages and prices Phillips curves exhibit true curvature, moving beyond the quasi-linear structure of the standard nonlinear New Keynesian Phillips curves (NKPC). To address this limitation, we propose a New Keynesian (NK) model featuring endogenous adjustment frequencies for price and wage setting. Using Eurozone data spanning 1999 to 2023Q4, we estimate and simulate the nonlinear model. We then study the recent inflation surge and the implication of state-dependent prices and wages for monetary policy in the estimated non-linear model. Unlike conventional models, our framework does not rely mostly on exogenous supply shocks to explain inflation dynamics. Instead, the effects of shocks on inflation dynamics vary by time, magnitude, and state of the business cycle. The inflation-output stabilization trade-off faced by monetary policy varies with business cycle conditions. For example, monetary policy demonstrates greater efficacy in controlling inflation, and supply shocks have larger effects during periods of elevated inflation.