Annual Review of Economics - Volume 15, 2023

The COVID-19 crisis was a stress test for unemployment insurance schemes as it involved a sudden and unexpected shutdown of a very large set of activities. This forced countries to introduce, often from scratch, income support schemes for workers under new forms of employment and for the self-employed. There was also a considerable expansion of short-time work schemes. As we move past this crisis, labor markets are likely to be characterized by substantial labor reallocation, and major innovations in labor market policy will be required to smooth consumption of workers involved in this reallocation. We survey the large body of research on schemes complementary to unemployment insurance to reduce the costs of reallocation. We focus on short-time work, partial unemployment insurance, and wage insurance and compare their properties to those of standard unemployment benefits. Next we present the main empirical results on the effects of wage insurance, partial unemployment insurance, and short-time work. In the final section we discuss directions for further research.

Big data is changing every corner of economics and finance. The largest firms in the US economy are valued chiefly for their data. Yet, these data are largely excluded from macroeconomic and finance research. We review work and relevant tools for measuring economic activity, market power, data markets, and the role of data in financial markets. We also highlight areas where future work is needed.

Growing interest in the role of business entities in addressing social problems highlights the potential of social enterprises—organizations that cover all or most of their costs through revenue-generating business and have an objective to address a societal problem. A social enterprise can be an efficient and effective way to create social value by internalizing externalities, exploiting complementarities with commercial activities, providing better prices or quality to disadvantaged customers, and reducing the need for scarce philanthropic support. The challenges of managing an organization for financial success and social impact may limit their potential. Social enterprises can be for-profit or nonprofit organizations. The legal and institutional structure of for-profit and nonprofit governance and financing makes it challenging for a social entrepreneur to find a business model and organization structure to succeed.

In this article we survey recent advances in the economic theory of cultural transmission. We highlight three main themes on which the literature has made great progress in the last 10 years: the domain of traits subject to cultural transmission; the microfoundations for the technology of transmission; and feedback effects between culture, institutions, and various socioeconomic environments. We conclude by suggesting interesting areas for future research.

This article reviews a framework for studying the aggregation and propagation of microeconomic shocks in general equilibrium. We discuss the determinants of aggregate measures of real economic activity, like real GDP, real domestic absorption, and aggregate productivity in both efficient and inefficient environments. We also discuss how shocks from one set of producers are transmitted to other producers through prices and quantities. The framework we provide is amenable to generalization and can be used to study any collection of producers ranging from one isolated producer to an industry consisting of heterogeneous producers to an entire economy. We conclude with a brief survey of some of the applied questions that can be addressed using the analytical tools presented in this review and avenues for future work.

Identification strategies concern what can be learned about the value of a parameter based on the data and the model assumptions. The literature on partial identification is motivated by the fact that it is not possible to learn the exact value of the parameter for many empirically relevant cases. A typical result in the literature on partial identification is a statement about characterizing the identified set, which summarizes what can be learned about the parameter of interest given the data and model assumptions. For instance, this may mean that the value of the parameter can be learned to be necessarily within some set of values. First, the review surveys the general frameworks that have been developed for conducting a partial identification analysis. Second, the review surveys some of the more recent results on partial identification.

There is widespread dissatisfaction with existing antitrust enforcement. The European Union has enacted comprehensive legislation to address perceived antitrust limitations, and several proposals to amend US antitrust laws have followed its lead. Most of the actual and proposed laws target firms that dominate the digital economy, while others have measures to tighten antitrust enforcement more generally. Market power has increased in the United States and most advanced economies, but it has not been uniformly associated with higher prices or lower productivity. Nonetheless, antitrust reforms can benefit consumers and address concerns about the concentration and exercise of economic power. In the United States, legislation would be desirable to amend rulings that are excessively deferential to antitrust defendants. However, most enacted and proposed reforms include prohibitions or obligations that depart from traditional antitrust principles and create potential risks for consumer welfare.

We attempt to provide a systemic view of the process of regulating collusion, including detection and prosecution as well as bargaining between firms and regulators via consent orders, the production of evidence, and containment measures that may be taken if collusion cannot be addressed with more direct means. In addition, we try to do justice to the peculiarities of the legal system: Modeling the courts as they are, rather than as economists think they should be, is essential for economic analysis to improve the way collusion is regulated.

Surveys are an essential approach for eliciting otherwise invisible factors such as perceptions, knowledge and beliefs, attitudes, and reasoning. These factors are critical determinants of social, economic, and political outcomes. Surveys are not merely a research tool. They are also not only a way of collecting data. Instead, they involve creating the process that will generate the data. This allows the researcher to create their own identifying and controlled variation. Thanks to the rise of mobile technologies and platforms, surveys offer valuable opportunities either to study broadly representative samples or to focus on specific groups. This article offers guidance on the complete survey process, from the design of the questions and experiments to the recruitment of respondents and the collection of data to the analysis of survey responses. It covers issues related to the sampling process, selection and attrition, attention and carelessness, survey question design and measurement, response biases, and survey experiments.

The constant-elasticity-of-substitution (CES) aggregator and its demand system are ubiquitous in business cycles theory, macroeconomic growth and development, international trade and other general equilibrium fields; this is because the CES aggregator has many knife-edge properties that help to keep the analysis tractable in the presence of many goods and factors. However, this also makes it hard to tell which properties of CES are responsible for certain results. Furthermore, it is necessary to relax some of those properties for certain applications. In this article, I review several classes of non-CES aggregators, each of which removes some properties of CES and keeps the rest to introduce some flexibility while retaining the tractability of CES as much as possible. These classes are named after the properties of CES they keep. I explain how these classes are related to each other and discuss their relative strengths and weaknesses to indicate which classes are suited for which applications.

There has been increasing attention to privacy in the media and in regulatory discussions. This is a consequence of the increased usefulness of digital data. The literature has emphasized the benefits and costs of digital data flows to consumers and firms. The benefits arise in the form of data-driven innovation, higher-quality products and services that match consumer needs, and increased profits. The costs relate to the intrinsic and instrumental values of privacy. Under standard economic assumptions, this framing of a cost-benefit trade-off might suggest little role for regulation beyond ensuring consumers are appropriately informed in a robust competitive environment. The empirical literature thus far has focused on this direct cost-benefit assessment, examining how privacy regulations have affected various market outcomes. However, an increasing body of theory work emphasizes externalities related to data flows. These externalities, both positive and negative, suggest benefits to the targeted regulation of digital privacy.

This article surveys the development of nonparametric models and methods for estimation of choice models with nonlinear budget sets. The discussion focuses on the budget set regression, that is, the conditional expectation of a choice variable given the budget set. Utility maximization in a nonparametric model with general heterogeneity reduces the curse of dimensionality in this regression. Empirical results using this regression are different from maximum likelihood and give informative inference. The article also considers the information provided by kink probabilities for nonparametric utility with general heterogeneity. Instrumental variable estimation and the evidence it provides of heterogeneity in preferences are also discussed.

In recent years, experiments have documented a new mechanism that leads to failures of profit maximization: the failure of contingent thinking (FCT). This article summarizes key experimental findings, clarifies what constitutes an FCT, and outlines how FCTs can be tested in other environments. Subsequently, we relate FCTs to recent theoretical work on cognitive limitations in behavioral economics. Finally, we connect FCTs to suboptimal behavior documented in applied environments.

This review discusses the unique features of Austrian economics and some of the recent contributions of this school of thought. We organize these contributions in different research “buckets” in the hope that this will be a useful guide to readers while demonstrating the ongoing relevance of the contemporary Austrian school of economics for advancing scientific discourse. The research buckets discussed include robust political economy, macroeconomics, monetary economics, entrepreneurship and the market process, development economics, behavioral economics, governance, social economy, collective action challenges related to natural disaster recovery and infectious disease, and war and defense.

This article compares early childhood enrichment programs that promote social mobility for disadvantaged children within and across generations. Instead of conducting a standard meta-analysis, we present a harmonized primary data analysis of programs that shape current policy. Our analysis is a template for rigorous syntheses and comparisons across programs. We analyze new long-run life-cycle data collected for iconic programs when participants are middle-aged and their children are in their twenties. The iconic programs are omnibus in nature and offer many services to children and their parents. We compare them with relatively low-cost, more focused home-visiting programs. Participants in programs that enrich home environments grow up with better skills, jobs, earnings, marital stability, and health, as well as reduced participation in crime. The long-run monetized gains are substantially greater than the costs of the iconic programs. A study of focused home-visiting programs that target parents enables us to isolate a crucial component of successful programs: They activate and promote the parenting skills of child caregivers. The home-visiting programs we analyze produce outcomes comparable to those of the iconic omnibus programs. National implementation of the programs with long-run follow-up that we analyze would substantially shrink the overall Black-White earnings gap in the United States.

International trade contributes directly to global greenhouse gas emissions, as the carbon content of high-emission products is priced differently in different countries. This phenomenon is termed carbon leakage. Thus, not putting a price on carbon is theoretically equivalent to an export subsidy, although that would be difficult to challenge in the context of multilateral trade law. Leakage can be alleviated by pricing the carbon embedded in imported products through a border carbon adjustment (BCA), be it a tax, a carbon tariff, or a regulation requiring the purchase of emissions allowances. The design of a BCA is a compromise between environmental effectiveness in preventing leakage, economic effectiveness in preserving competitiveness and ensuring acceptability, technical feasibility of the implementation, and World Trade Organization compatibility. An import-limited BCA is more effective than free emissions allowances in reducing leakage, but it does not preserve the export competitiveness of the country imposing it.

This article reviews economic research on business taxation, with a focus on corporate income taxation. We discuss what this research can contribute to current debates about corporate tax policy and where existing research is incomplete or inconclusive, so that clarification is needed. The issues we discuss include the incidence of the corporate income tax, its effect on investment and economic growth, the problem of international tax avoidance, and the role of corporate taxes in economic crises, including the current debate about taxes on windfall profits.

China's financial system has been integral to its spectacular economic growth over the past 40 years. We review the recent literature on China's financial system and its connections to the Chinese economy based on the categories of Aggregate Financing to the Real Economy (AFRE), a broad measure of the nation's yearly flow of liquidity accounting for unique features of China's financial system. While early work on China's financial system emphasizes the state-owned enterprise reform, the recent literature explores other more market-based financing channels—including shadow banking—that grew rapidly after 2010 and have become important components of AFRE. These new financing channels not only are intertwined with each other, but also, and more importantly, are often ultimately tied back to the dominant banking sector in China. Understanding the mechanisms behind these channels and their intrinsic connections is crucial to alleviate capital allocation distortion and mitigate potential systemic financial risk in China.

This article documents a rapid shift toward services (tertiarization) of the Chinese economy since 2005, as evidenced by the significant increase in both employment and value-added shares of the service sector. Notably, our analysis reveals that a variety of measures of productivity growth have been greater in the service sector than in the manufacturing sector. Firm-level measures of dynamism corroborate this ongoing tertiarization trend, which is not limited to services used as inputs to industrial production but extends also to consumer services. These findings are robust across different growth accounting methodologies, including a recently proposed method by Fan et al. (2023) that addresses challenges associated with the measurement of quality improvements in service industries.

We review theoretical and empirical work on the economic effects of the United States and China trade relations during the past 20 years. We first discuss the origins of the China shock and its measurement and present methods used to study its economic effects on different outcomes. We then focus on the recent US–China trade war. We review methods used to evaluate its effects, describe its economic effects, and analyze whether this increase in trade protectionism reverted the effects of the China shock. The main lessons learned in this review are that (a) the aggregate gains from US–China trade created winners and losers; (b) China's trade expansion seems not to be the main cause of the decline in US manufacturing employment during the same period; and (c) the recent trade war generated welfare losses, had small employment effects, and was ineffective in reversing the distributional effects due to the China shock.