The Switch Project

Although the global expansion has plateaued, easy monetary policies continue to support growth. But we shouldn’t rest too easily. Chapter 1 of the latest Global Financial Stability Report finds that short-term risks to the financial system have increased somewhat over the past six months. Trade tensions have escalated, policy uncertainties have increased in a number of countries, and some emerging market economies are facing financial market pressures

Increasing interest rates appear to pose little risk to financial stability at present. The basic reason is simple: Monetary policy normalisation, which comes as a reaction to the ‘normalisation’ of the economy, should not lead to a deterioration of the creditworthiness of most debtors.

Ramsey famously pronounced that discounting "future enjoyments" would be ethically indefensible. Suppes enunciated an equity criterion implying that all individuals' welfare should be treated equally. By contrast, Arrow accepted, perhaps rather reluctantly, the logical force of Koopmans' argument that no satisfactory preference ordering on a sufficiently unrestricted domain of infinite utility streams satisfies equal treatment. In this paper, we first derive an equitable utilitarian objective based on a version of the Vickrey-Harsanyi original position, extended to allow a variable and uncertain population with no finite bound. Following the work of Chichilnisky and others on sustainability, slightly weakening the conditions of Koopmans and co-authors allows intergenerational equity to be satis ed. In fact, assuming that the expected total number of individuals who ever live is nite, and that each individual's utility is bounded both above and below, there is a coherent equitable objective based on expected total utility. Moreover, it implies the \extinction discounting rule" advocated by, inter alia, the Stern Review on climate change.

We estimate the causal effect of permanent and premature exits from the labor force on mortality. To overcome the problem of negative health selection into early retirement, we exploit a policy change in unemployment insurance rules in Austria that allowed workers in eligible regions to exit the labor force 3 years earlier compared to workers in non-eligible regions. Using administrative data with precise information on mortality and retirement, we find that the policy change induced eligible workers to exit the labor force significantly earlier. Instrumental variable estimation results show that for men retiring one year earlier causes a 6.8% increase in the risk of premature death and 0.2 years reduction in the age at death, but has no significant effect for women

Globalisation, in the form of trade, migration, and financial flows, typically increases income inequality. However, this column argues that the welfare state spreads the gains from trade to almost all income groups, thereby reducing inequality. In this way, the welfare state, financed by labour and capital taxes, is able to survive international tax competition brought about by financial globalisation. Immigration is one of the ways to finance the welfare state, particularly in ageing societies.

Public sector balance sheets bring together the entirety of what the state owns and owes, offering a broader fiscal picture beyond debt and deficits. Once governments understand the size and nature of public assets, they can start managing them more effectively, raising considerable additional revenue. Also, public sector balance sheet analysis allows for better risk management and policymaking. The Fiscal Monitor provides governments the tools to analyze the resilience of public finances. By identifying risks within the balance sheet, governments can act to manage or mitigate those risks early, rather than dealing with the consequences after problems occur. Balance sheet analysis raises the tenor of the policy debate, asking how public wealth can be better used to meet society’s economic and social goals.

Chapter 2 takes stock of global regulatory reform 10 years after the global financial crisis. It reviews the main precrisis failings in financial sector oversight and assesses the progress in implementation of the reform agenda designed to address them. It also looks at whether shifts in market structure and risks in the global financial system since the crisis have been in the direction the new regulatory agenda intended, that is, toward greater safety. It finds that the broad agenda set by the international community has given rise to new standards that have contributed to a more resilient financial system—less leveraged, more liquid, and better and more intensively supervised, especially at large banks.

This paper uses a detailed panel of individual spending, income, account balances, and credit limits from a personal finance management software provider to investigate how expenditures, liquid savings, and consumer debt change around retirement. The longitudinal nature of our data allows us to estimate individual fixed-effects regressions and thereby control for all selection on time-invariant (un)observables. We provide new evidence on the retirement-consumption puzzle and on whether individuals save adequately for retirement. We find that, upon retirement, individuals reduce their spending in both work-related and leisure categories.

Previous studies have shown that saving rates are influenced by, among other things, demographics and income, but much of the difference in saving rates across societies remains unexplained. This column uses data covering three generations of immigrants in the UK to demonstrate that culture is an important explanation for cross-country differences in saving behaviour. When designing incentives to save, culture should therefore be taken into account.

This study systematically compares HTA recommendations on a number of disease–modifying therapies for patients with Relapsing-Remitting Multiple Sclerosis. We analysed publicly available HTA reports for nine medicine-indication pairs across seven OECD countries using a methodological framework enabling systematic analysis of HTA recommendations. The analysis was conducted based on a number of value dimensions, including clinical and economic variables, as well as several other dimensions of value beyond cost-effectiveness. The material was qualitatively and quantitatively coded following the different stages of HTA decision-making process. Fifty-seven medicine-indication pairs were assessed across the study countries. Of those, eight medicine indication-pairs reported diverging HTA recommendations

Health care expenditure per person, after accounting for changes in overall price levels, began to slow in many OECD countries in the early-to-mid 2000s, well before the economic and fiscal crisis. Using available estimates from the OECD’s System of Health Accounts (SHA) database, we explore common trends in health care expenditure since 1996 in a set of 22 OECD countries. We assess the extent to which the trends observed are the results of cyclical economic influences, and the respective contributions of changes in relative prices, health care volumes and coverage to the slowdown in health care expenditure growth. Our analysis suggests that cyclical factors may account for a little less than one half of the estimated slowdown in health care spending since the crisis, suggesting that structural changes have contributed to the trends.

A “patent box” is a term for the application of a lower corporate tax rate to the income derived from the ownership of patents. This tax subsidy instrument has been introduced in a number of countries since 2000. Using comprehensive data on patent filings at the European Patent Office, including information on ownership transfers pre‐ and post‐grant, we investigate the impact of the introduction of a patent box on international patent transfers, on the choice of ownership location, and on invention in the relevant country. We find that the impact on transfers is small but present, especially when the tax instrument contains a development condition and for high value patents (those most likely to have generated income), but that invention itself is not affected. This calls into question whether the patent box is an effective instrument for encouraging innovation in a country, rather than simply facilitating the shifting of corporate income to low tax jurisdictions.

We use 2009-14 data from patients hospital discharges to assess the effects of fiscal federalism on the quality of care provided to regional and extraregional patients in Lombardy. Empirical results suggest that even after controlling for hospital fixed effects, patients demographic and health characteristics, extraregional patients wait less compared to regional ones, stay longer in hospital and are associated with higher reimbursement costs. However, private and public hospitals with higher proportion of extraregional patients show a lower mortality and lower reimbursement costs. This result suggest that competition works because of the spillovers effects that the market for extraregional patients produces

This study presents an empirical analysis of the resilience of European countries to the financial and economic crisis that started in 2007.   The analysis addresses the following questions: Which countries showed a resilient behaviour during and after the crisis? Is resilience related only to the economic dimension? Has any of the EU countries been able to use the crisis as an opportunity and 'bounce forward'? Is it possible to identify any particular country characteristics linked to resilience? The analysis is based on the JRC conceptual framework for resilience (Manca et al., 2017) which places at its core the wellbeing of individuals, thus going beyond the merely economic growth perspective.

We analyze patent protection when innovative technologies are "complex" in that they involve sequential and complementary innovations. We argue that complexity affects the classic Nordhaus trade-off between innovation and static monopoly distortions. We parametrize the degree of sequentiality and that of complementarity and show that the optimal level of patent protection increases with both. We also address the issue of the optimal division of profit among different innovators.

This Policy Contribution looks at the evolution of public debt in Belgium and Italy since 1990 and uses the debt dynamics equation to explain the contrasting evolution in the two countries in the run-up to the introduction of the euro, during the early years of the euro and since the beginning of the crisis, arguing that the euro could have been used also by Italy to undertake sufficiently large fiscal adjustment.

The expansion may now have peaked. Global growth is projected to settle at 3.7% in 2018 and 2019, marginally below pre-crisis norms, with downside risks intensifying. Growth has become less broad-based, with prospects diverging across the major economies, especially among the emerging-market economies. Policy support and strong job growth continue to underpin domestic demand, but some emerging-market economies are facing significant headwinds from rising financial market pressures. Wage and price inflation are still surprisingly low, but should continue to rise gradually.