Category: Uncategorized

You are welcome to join the Research Seminar of the Department of Economics and Finance of Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech) on Wednesday, 10 April at 16:00-17:00.

In MS Teams, please join via LINK

“Inclusive Education in Soviet-Inherited Exclusive School System: The Effects of Student Background Factors on School Efficiency”
Simona Ferraro (Department of Economics and Finance, TalTech)

Relying on the school-level data and evaluating inclusive practices in education, we evaluate how the low socioeconomic status of families, the disparity in language spoken at home and at school as well as the special education needs (SENs) students affect schools’ efficiency. We adopt a two-stage double Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and estimate efficiency scores in the first, and the effects of nondiscretionary variables in the second stage. Our findings first show that the efficiency scores improved between the two academic years. Secondly, the reversed share of SEN students and high parental income affect positively school efficiency while language match between home and school has a non-significant impact on efficiency. Our policy implications indicate that the autonomy of schools over student admission and competitive drive for producing better student outcomes for the leaderboard works contrary to the inclusive reform aims – schools are incentivised not to admit SEN students and use decentralised admission interviews for selecting advantaged students.

Keywords: school efficiency, special educational needs, family background, double bootstrap DEA, autonomy of schools
JEL classification: H52, I20, I21
Authors: Simona Ferraro (Department of Economics and Finance, TalTech), Kaire Põder (Estonian Business School), Triin Lauri (Tallinn University)

We are happy to invite you to the research seminar by the Center for Economic Expertise which will take place on Wednesday, March 27st, 14:00-15:00. During the seminar Michail Kokkoris (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) will present the topic „In control but uninspired: Displays of artist self-control undermine perceptions of creativity“.

Venue: Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Vilnius University, Saulėtekio al. 9, Vilnius, TechHub Room 40 (2nd floor) and MS Teams

Abstract. Previous research highlighted the interpersonal benefits of self-control in professional contexts: People prefer high self-control individuals as work or study partners and expect them to perform better than low self-control individuals. We show that these benefits of self-control reverse in the artistic domain. Results of one pilot study and five preregistered experiments (N = 1,644) reveal that artists with high (vs. low) self-control are perceived as less creative. This effect replicates across various artistic domains (visual art, music, poetry, screenwriting), holds for both male and female artists, and can be explained by perceptions of lower experiential processing, which is considered indispensable for creativity. However, art created by high (vs. low) self-control artists is ascribed higher market value due to stronger attributions of productivity. These findings provide novel insights into the social perception of self-control and contribute to the understudied topic of the downsides of self-control as well as to the literature on lay theories of creativity.

MS Teams meeting

Meeting ID: 364 786 008 699
Passcode: xfRiBu

The 12th Nordic Econometric Meeting takes place in June 2024 in Bergen. The deadline for paper submission is the 2nd of April.

For more information see the conference website.

 

Occacional Papers of Eesti Pank 2/2024

The impact of climate change and policies on productivity

The occasional paper is a report by the ESCB Expert Group on productivity, innovation and technological change. The report is also published in the Occasional Paper series of the European Central Bank (No 340).

Occacional Papers of Eesti Pank 3/2024

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and policy support on productivity

The occasional paper is a report by the ESCB Expert Group on productivity, innovation and technological change. The report is also published in the Occasional Paper series of the European Central Bank (No 341).

You are welcome to join the Research Seminar of the Department of Economics and Finance of Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech) on Wednesday, 27 March at 16:00-17:00.

In MS Teams, please join via LINK

“Family background effect on electoral participation and how schools can treat it?”
Kaire Põder (Estonian Business School)

Education serves manifold roles within society. We contribute to research by focusing on the social dimension of education, which relates to political participation, democratic values, and attitudes. The problem’s importance lies in civic outcomes exhibiting higher family background effects compared to other (PISA) disciplines. Our motivation is to find ways in schooling to correct the socioeconomic skew in civic knowledge and future political participation. We hypothesise that school participatory practices, such as good student-teacher relations and classroom openness to discussions, can not only have a positive treatment effect on student’s future electoral participation but also a compensating effect for low socioeconomic status. Utilising data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (2022) derived from eight countries and featuring over 28,000 student-level observations, we employ causal graph (DAG) and weighting regression techniques with continuous treatment variables to avoid self-selection to treatment based on family socioeconomic status and gender. We show that in most countries treatment has socioeconomic and gender bias, especially regarding open classroom climate. Our findings indicate that the school effect is positive, i.e. school practices that improve students’ perceptions of the school participatory environment, and increase expected electoral participation. Also, both treatments capture the compensatory effect, i.e. close the gap between high- and low-SES students’ outcomes in the expected electoral participation.

Keywords: Bayesian vector autoregression, deterministic component, single unit root prior, inflation dynamics
JEL classification: C11, C32, E32
Authors: Kaire Põder (Estonian Business School), Triin Lauri (Tallinn University)

On 27 March at 14:00-15:00 you are invited to attend the research seminar of the School of Economics and Business Administration of the University of Tartu in which Amaresh K Tiwari (Univeristy of Tartu) will present the research project “Estimating Production Function and Productivity Impact of Export Persistence using Revenue Data”.

As has been established, estimating a revenue production function in the presence of market imperfections is unlikely to identify the output elasticities of inputs or recover the ‘true’ total factor productivity (TFP). We present a novel method for estimating output elasticities and the productivity impact of endogenous decisions, such as the decision to export, for revenue and expenditures data. Without specifying a demand system, the method uses a transformation of the first order condition (FOC) for choosing the optimal amount of flexible input to transform the revenue growth function into output growth function. The resultant transformation, which uses growth rates of inputs, and the transformed FOC help estimate the output elasticities and the productivity impact of endogenous decisions in a simple one-step estimation of two equations. Using administrative and customs data from Estonia and Latvia, we find that the productivity impact of an additional year of exporting, reflecting the temporal pattern of the amount— in physical units—​ of the “core” product exported per employee, generally increases with export persistence. However, demand shocks, which affect firms’ exporting behaviour, affect the productivity impact of persistence. Finally, while exporters charge lower markups than the non-exporters, the rate with which exporters increase their markups mirrors the productivity impact of number of years of exporting.

Co-authors: Nicolas Gavoille (SSE Riga), Jaan Masso (University of Tartu)

Zoom meeting

Meeting ID: 929 3534 2083
Passcode: 403298

Jose Garcia-Louzao (Bank of Lithuania, Vilnius University, CESifo) and Ruben Perez-Sanz (University of Bristol) have recently released a new Bank of Lithuania working paper “Women’s Voice at Work and Family-Friendly Firms”.

Uneven family responsibilities lie at the root of gender gaps. Using a new dataset which covers all firm-level agreements signed in Spain between 2010 and 2018, the authors explore whether the presence of female worker representatives can facilitate the negotiation of family-friendly policies with management. They compare firms which operate under the same set of labor regulations but differ in the presence of women among employee representatives. The findings suggest that having female representatives at the bargaining table can help transform workplaces to better meet women’s needs and ultimately close the gender gap.

Žymantas Budrys (Bank of Lithuania, Vilnius University), Mario Porqueddu (European Central Bank) and Andrej Sokol (Bloomberg LP) have recently released a new Bank of Lithuania working paper “Striking a Bargain: Narrative Identification of Wage Bargaining Shocks”.

The authors quantify wage bargaining shocks’ effects on macroeconomic aggregates in Germany using a structural vector auto-regression model. They identify exogenous variation in bargaining power from episodes of minimum wage introduction and industrial disputes. This disciplines the impulse responses of unemployment and output, and sharpens inference on the behaviour of other variables, which is consistent with theoretical predictions from search and matching models. It is found that wage bargaining shocks are an important contributor to aggregate fluctuations in unemployment and inflation, exhibit close to full passthrough to consumer prices, and imply plausible dynamics for the vacancy rate, firms’ profits, and the labor share

On 6 March at 14:00 you are invited to attend the research seminar of the School of Economics and Business Administration of the University of Tartu in which Federica Rossi (Politecnico di Milano) will present the research project “The surge of remote working and coworking spaces. Exploring the case of Italy through mixed methods”.

The rescheduling of working methods due to the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a surge in remote working (RW) and demand for collaborative spaces, like coworking spaces (CSs), adopting hybrid working models. Within this context, the paper analyses the growth and location of Italian CSs in the period before and after the COVID-19 pandemic (2018-2023) by merging new data sources, and explores its determinants. Applying a mixed methods approach (quantitative and qualitative analysis) we show that Italian CSs are located and grow in large urban areas and medium-sized cities. This growth is triggered by the market demand and market potential. Interestingly, the spatial analysis (Moran’s I) and the interviews show a lower demand for CSs in suburban areas around large cities probably because remote workers and hybrid workers prefer to commute to nearby cities to exploit urbanisation economies. Moreover, a higher concentration of innovation and a stronger broadband endowment trigger CS growth.

Co-authors are Marco Biagetti, Ilaria Mariotti and Sergio Scicchitano

Zoom meeting

Meeting ID: 991 8684 9700
Passcode: 211400

On Thursday, 07 March at 10.30 am you are kindly invited to attend in Webex the Eesti Pankʼs research seminar in which bank´s visiting researcher Fabio Canova (BI Norwegian Business School) will make the presentation on “A way forward: practical DSGE models”. 

The presentation discusses the history and the current state of macro modelling in central banks and a way forward to resolve some of the current shortcomings. Professor Fabio Canova is a visiting researcher of Eesti Pank in Fenruary-March 2024.

Meeting information in Webex:

https://eestipank.webex.com/eestipank/j.php?MTID=mf38027dba7f6b8d3846a83096d9944aa

Meeting number: 2744 649 0737
Password: 3E62Er78jWZ (33623778, from phones and video systems)

You are welcome to join the Research Seminar of the Department of Economics and Finance of Tallinn University of TEchnology (TalTech) on Wednesday, 28 February at 16:00-17:00.

In MS Teams, please join via LINK

“What Drives the Recent Surge in Inflation? The Historical Decomposition Roller Coaster”
Fabio Canova (BI Norwegian Business School)

What drives the current inflation surge? To answer, one must decompose observable inflation fluctuations into the contributions due to structural shocks. We document how whimsical an historical shock decomposition can be in standard vector autoregressive models. Neglecting the uncertainty surrounding the deterministic components implies an erratic behavior for shocks over history under general conditions. Our favorite approach to solve the problem, the single-unit-root prior, massively shrinks the uncertainty around the deterministic components. We show that demand shocks are unambiguously the main drivers of the inflation surge in the United States, the euro area and four small open economies.

Keywords: Bayesian vector autoregression, deterministic component, single unit root prior, inflation dynamics
JEL classification: C11, C32, E32
Authors: Drago Bergholt (Norges Bank), Fabio Canova (BI Norwegian Business School), Francesco Furlanetto (Norges Bank), Nicol`O Maffei-Faccioli (Norges Bank), P˚al Ulvedal (Nord University Business School)