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The gender gap at the top: The role of networks

The gender pay gap is well-documented, yet its source remains debated. This column uses data from Portuguese firms to analyse the role of professional networks in explaining the gender pay gap among top executives. The component of the pay gap which is unexplained by age, tenure, or education has remained persistently large over the period 1986 to 2017, reflecting a gender bias which can be partly explained by networks. Both female and male managers benefit most from connections to managers of their own gender.

Policymaking, trust, and the demand for public services

There is growing concern that citizens around the world have declining trust in institutions such as public health agencies, private corporations, scientists, or vaccine manufacturers. This column focuses on a family planning campaign in Peru to examine how government actions in the implementation of public programmes can shape trust in institutions and thus affect demand for public services and welfare outcomes.

Communication costs, science, and innovation

It seems obvious that lowering the cost of communication among innovators would facilitate scientific and technological progress. Yet, few studies examine this relationship. This column explores the introduction of the first modern postal system in Britain in 1840 and its effect on the number of citations between pairs of scientists and on patenting. The gradient with which citations declined with distance-based postage costs fell and patenting increased in locations that experienced more significant improvements in letter market access due to the reform.

Covid-19’s impact on innovation

The Covid crisis inspired extraordinary innovation. Carsten Fink and Reinhilde Veugelers are two of the editors of a new ebook from CEPR called Resilience and Ingenuity that examines how countries, organisations and industries were able to innovate. Tim Phillips asks them what worked, what didn’t, and whether we can keep up the pace of new ideas. 

Trade, volatility, and the role of specialisation and diversification

The relationship between trade and volatility depends on a complex interaction between sectoral shocks, sectoral specialisation, and geographic diversification. This column uses a multi-country, multi-sector framework to study the main sources of risk for open economies and how trade determines the exposure to those risks through specialisation and diversification of sales. It shows that diversification reduces volatility, particularly in countries with higher output volatility.

Post-disaster policies expose more people to disaster risks

The federal government provided $296 billion in disaster relief for catastrophic events in the US between 2001 and 2019. However, excessive bailouts may encourage economic activity to remain in exposed areas. This column shows that increased post-disaster efforts due to political motives result in more people living in hazard-prone coastal regions. A dynamic spatial general equilibrium model predicts that current post-disaster policies improve aggregate welfare at the expense of overall GDP and productivity losses, and encourage sorting into exposed areas.

Climate change risks to sovereign debt

Evidence suggests that sovereign debt markets are taking climate effects into account in pricing, creating the potential for a climate-debt doom loop. However, climate risks to fiscal stability do not attract the same attention as climate risks to financial stability. This column discusses how integrated assessment models can be linked with stochastic debt sustainability analysis to inform our understanding of climate risks to sovereign debt.

Causes and costs of populism

Recorded live at CEPR Paris Symposium 2022: Across Europe and beyond, populist movements have recently flourished. What does history teach us about the economic impact of populism – and is our taste for populists a bug or a feature of democracy? Tim Phillips talks to Moritz Schularick and Massimo Morelli.

The innovation response to the covid crisis: A new eBook

How has the global innovation system fared in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis? A new eBook untangles how the COVID-19 shock affected innovation ecosystems in different parts of the world and how scientists, entrepreneurs, and creative professionals responded to the shock. Innovation not only proved crucial in finding solutions to the crisis, overall the innovation system proved more resilient to the pandemic’s fallout compared to previous crises.  

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