News

The 5^th Lietuvos Bankas (LB), Narodowy Bank Polski (NBP) and the Central Bank Research Association’s (CEBRA) conference “Macroeconomic Adjustments after Large Global Shocks” will take place in Vilnius, Lithuania, on 19-20 September 2024.

Topics of the conference include but are not limited to:

• Macroeconomic and international trade effects of large global shocks
• Shock transmission, adjustment channels and heterogeneity of the effects
• Policy responses to large global shocks
• Global shocks challenges for monetary policy

Organising committee:

Julian di Giovanni (Federal Reserve Bank of New York and CEBRA), Paweł Kopiec (NBP), Andrei A. Levchenko (University of Michigan and CEBRA), Krzysztof Makarski (NBP), Aurelija Proškutė (Lietuvos bankas), Robert Rich (Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and CEBRA), Raphael Schoenle (Brandeis University and CEBRA), Swapnil Singh (Lietuvos bankas), Milda Savickaitė (Lietuvos bankas)

Venue: Vilnius County Adomas Mickevicius Public Library, Traku str. 10

Website: Link

Preliminary program: Link

Free registration: Link

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Finnish Economic Association will be held at Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech), Akadeemia tee 3, Tallinn on February 6th and 7th, 2025.

The Finnish Economic Association organizes the event in collaboration with TalTech School of Business and Governance and Department of Economics and Finance. The conference will cover a broad range of topics in economics and finance.

Further information on the conference call and paper submission will follow at the end of October.

During the General Meeting of the Association on 28 June 2024, Oļegs Tkačevs and Karsten Staehr have been voted in and have become new members of the BEA Board. 

Oļegs Tkačevs is a Principal Economist at the Bank of Latvia and a Lecturer at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga. He is an Associate Editor of the Baltic Journal of Economics. His main research activities include fiscal and structural policies, competitiveness and trade. He teaches International Economics to undergraduate students. In the past, Oļegs represented the Bank of Latvia in the ESCB Working Group of Public Finance. During the Great Recession, he closely cooperated with counterparts from the IMF and EC on fiscal consolidation strategy and recommendations for structural reforms. In 2012 and 2013, he was an NCB expert at the Directorate General Economics of the European Central Bank. Oļegs holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Latvia.

Karsten Staehr is Professor in public and international finance at Tallinn University of Technology and a part-time Research Supervisor at the Bank of Estonia. He holds a master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Copenhagen. He carries out research and policy analysis within macroeconomics, international finance, European integration, fiscal policy, and tax evasion. He is an associate editor of the Baltic Journal of Economics, and he is on the editorial boards of Post-Communist Economies and Panoeconomicus.

Productivity-enhancing reallocation during the Covid-19 pandemic

Working Papers of Eesti Pank 5/2024
Tibor Lalinsky, Jaanika Meriküll, Paloma Lopez-Garcia

On 18 September at 11:15-12:15 you are invited to attend the research seminar of the School of Economics and Business Administration of the University of Tartu in which Pei-fen Chen (National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan) will present the research project “Entrepreneurship, Mobile Payment, and Financial Inclusion for Low and Middle Income Asian Economies”.

Despite the burgeoning interest in financial technology , its cor relation to entrepreneurship remains unknown. This research addresses the gap in the literature by examining the determinants of new business entrepreneurship, specific ally focusing on mobile payment , traditional financial inclusion, and regulatory factors across selected low and middle income economies. Employing a baseline panel regression model, we conduct empirical analysis from data collected from multiple sources covering 25 developing economies in Asia spanning 2014 to 2021. The findings reveal a direct and positive effect of mobile payment systems and regulatory quality on entrepreneurship versus a negative effect of traditional financial inclusion. T he study further uncovers the impact channels through which regulatory factors interact with mobile payment systems and significantly contributes to the literature by examining how financial innovations, especially mobile payment systems, stimulate entrepreneurship on a global scale. It expands research by investigating the impact of traditional financial inclusion on new business entrepreneurship sheds light on nuanced pathways through which regulatory factors shape entrepreneurship and highlights the potential interaction effect of regulatory quality with mobile payment systems. The insights generated herein are invaluable for regulators and policymakers to make informed decisions that promote entrepreneurial growth. This is especially pertinent in the post COVID 19 era, where fostering small/new business entrepreneurship drive s sustainable economic development, while also potentially catalyzing the development of financial technology solutions to enhance financial inclusivity and entrepreneurial opportunities.

Zoom meeting
Meeting ID: 998 1085 7956
Passcode: 753583

The photo gallery of BEC 2024 in Tallinn is now available! Thank you for participating in the conference!

Central Bank Stabilisation Policy When Capital Flows Matter: Instruments, Targets, and Trade-offs

Working Papers of Eesti Pank 3/2024
Alfred V. Guender

Wealth disparities between elderly immigrants and natives: a study of Estonia and Latvia

Working Papers of Eesti Pank 4/2024
Liina Rebane, Merike Kukk and Tairi Rõõm

On 23 May at 10.30 am you are kindly invited to attend in Webex the Eesti Pankʼs research seminar in which András Borsos (Magyar Nemzeti Bank) will make the presentation on “Firm-level production networks:  what do we (really) know?”. 

Are standard production network properties similar across all available datasets, and if not, why? We provide benchmark results from two administrative datasets (Ecuador and Hungary), which are exceptional in that there is no reporting threshold. We compare these networks to a leading commercial dataset (FactSet) and published results on national firm-level production networks. Administrative datasets with no reporting thresholds have remarkably similar quantitative properties, while a number of important properties are biased in datasets with missing data.

Co-authors of the paper: Andrea Bacilieri, András Borsos, Pablo Astudillo-Estevez and François Lafond
Full-text of the paper

Meeting information in Webex:

https://eestipank.webex.com/eestipank/j.php?MTID=m96d2570935d3e0896b05eeead66fd202

Meeting number: 2744 731 6268
Password: Jnv5P3gPti5 (56857347, 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, 22 May at 16:00-17:00.

In MS Teams, please join via LINK

“Explaining consumer inertia: Drivers of attention and choice in car insurance market”
Kaido Kepp and Kadri Männasoo (Department of Economics and Finance, TalTech)

We study the vehicle lessees’ Motor Own Damage insurance search frictions and choices. We use a consumer-level annual panel of policy and insurance offers’ data from 2010-2018 from the biggest insurance broker consolidating the Estonian car insurance market offers. We apply the two-stage discrete choice model by Hortaçsu et al 2017 that identifies the sources of consumer inertia by separating the attention and choice decisions given the observed switches to new providers. Our results show strong inertia that stems from consumer inattention and considerable heterogeneity of inattention across consumer groups. Consumers choose from a set of offers and their decisions to switch or stay with the current provider reveal substantial price elasticity and a modest effect of insurance provider’s brand preference.

Keywords: car insurance, consumer behavior, choice frictions, consumer inertia, inattention
JEL classification: D12, D83, G22, G52, L84, M31
Authors: Kaido Kepp (Department of Economics and Finance, TalTech), Kadri Männasoo (Department of Economics and Finance, TalTech)
Funding: This work was supported by the European Economic Area (EEA) Financial Mechanism 2014–2021 Baltic Research Program under project S-BMT-21-8 (LT08-2-LMT-K-01-073), COST Action HiTEc, CA21163 (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) and the European Commission Research and Innovation program grant (agreement 952547).

On 16 May at 10.30 am you are kindly invited to attend in Webex the Eesti Pankʼs research seminar in which Julia Le Blanc (Joint Research Centre at the European Commission) will make the presentation on “Housing Wealth Across Countries: The Role of Expectations, Institutions and Preferences”. 

Homeownership rates and holdings of housing wealth differ immensely across countries. We specify and estimate a life cycle model with risky labor income and house prices in which households face a discrete–continuous choice between renting and owning a house, whose sale is subject to transaction costs. The model allows us to quantify three groups of explanatory factors for long-run, structural differences in the extensive and intensive margins of housing: the homeownership rate and the value of housing wealth of homeowners. First, in line with survey evidence, we allow for differences in expectations of house prices. Second, countries differ in the institutional set-up of the housing market: maximum loan–value ratio and costs of renting, maintaining and selling a house. Third, we allow for differences in household preferences: the dispersion in discount factors, the share of housing expenditure and the bequest motive. We estimate the model using micro data from five large economies and provide a decomposition to interpret what drives the cross-country differences in housing wealth. We find that all three groups of factors matter, although preferences less so. Differences in homeownership rates are strongly affected by (i) house price beliefs and (ii) the rental wedge, the difference between rents and maintenance costs, which reflects the quality of the rental market. Differences in the value of housing wealth are substantially driven by housing maintenance costs.

Meeting information in Webex:

https://eestipank.webex.com/eestipank/j.php?MTID=mcd3e9cf28363b1bd660c184bb6ef9c76

Meeting number: 2743 927 9631
Password: REgwGFpn973 (73494376, from phones and video systems