La industria de defensa en el mundo: hechos estilizados y tendencias

As in other areas, technological transformations, along with their high speed, have been incorporated into weapons systems throughout the global defense industry. However, it is not possible to know to what extent the new technological leaderships are undermining the foundations of those that existed until now. Along with this, changes in the geo-political and geo-economics spheres are generating a reality in which aspects such as the international arms trade, the emergence of SMEs in the sector or, as far as the EU is concerned, the promotion of defense policy, transform the morphology and relationships between the agents that intervene in this market. What can be the future trends considering the main stylized facts that are observed today?

Disruptions in global value chains due to COVID-19: stylized facts and policy lessons

This paper provides an early assessment of global value chains (GVCs) amid the disruptive effects of COVID-19 on world trade. Using the Asian Development Bank’s updated Multiregional Input-Output Table, key indicators were estimated to identify important stylized facts about the contraction of GVC activities in 2020. Econometric models were also estimated to analyze the disruptive effect of COVID-19 outbreaks and stringent containment measures on GVC trade. The input-output analysis confirms that all major economic sectors suffered large losses, especially services. However, the bulk of the decline in overall GVC trade can still be traced to lower backward transactions in manufacturing. On the aggregate level, stronger backward GVC participation was associated with relatively milder contraction while the opposite was observed for forward participation. The regressions showed that positive growth of GVC trade was less likely in sectors with relatively larger exposure to foreign downstream shocks. Further, the combined effects of stringent containment measures and severe COVID-19 outbreaks also reduced the probability of growth in both backward and forward GVC transactions. These findings indicate that on top of foreign suppliers’ internal disruptions (foreign supply shock), weak global consumption (foreign demand shock) and local producers’ domestic sourcing problems (local supply shock) contributed to the steep contraction of GVCs in 2020. Against this background, the major challenges to robust recovery were also identified. These include the downside risks of a prolonged pandemic, the resurgence of protectionist tendencies, the strength of global demand, the reconfiguration of broken supply chains, and the ability of countries to coordinate their actions especially with respect to vaccination.

"Controlling for what?" Folk economics, legal consciousness and the gender wage gap in the United States

Studies of the political power of economic knowledge have tended to foreground the role of causal claims in the form of grand theories or more narrow findings produced by experimental methods. In contrast, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the role of economic experts' descriptions. This article highlights one category of influential, quantitative descriptive claim: stylized facts. Stylized facts are simple empirical regularities in need of explanation. Focusing on the example of the gender wage gap in the United States, this article showcases how stylized facts travel into political debates, and how the choices made in characterizing an aspect of economic life (such as controlling for full-time work, but little else) interact with social movement activism, and folk understandings of economic life shaped by legal consciousness. The gender wage gap was first calculated in the 1950s, but did not take on special importance until the 1960s-1970s when feminists rallied around the statistic as a useful aggregate measure of women's economic disempowerment. Academics soon followed, and sociologists and economists began to publish studies documenting trends in the gap and trying to account for its sources. The comparable worth movement of the 1980s explicitly argued that the wage gap resulted from occupational segregation and the devaluation of women's work. As that movement faltered in the late 1980s, the gender wage gap became increasingly understood through the lens of women's choices and tradeoffs between work and family, and occupational segregation dropped out of the narrative, even as academics documented the persistent importance of segregation in explaining the remaining gap. Throughout this period, the gap was frequently misunderstood or misrepresented as reflecting the narrow sort of same-job, different-pay discrimination made illegal by the 1963 Equal Pay Act, adding confusion to the public debate over women's economic position. These dynamics showcase how technical choices made in the identification of stylized facts, such as statistical controls, are simultaneously deeply political choices.

HOUSING CHOICES AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR CONSUMPTION HETEROGENEITY

This paper proposes a model to jointly explain two stylized facts observed in the recent empirical literature—the existence of a significant size of wealthy hand-to-mouth consumers and negative marginal propensities to consume associated with housing upgrades. The key ingredients of the model are a realistic set of housing choices, sizable down payment requirements, transaction costs, and endogenous borrowing constraints. Moreover, in the presence of unanticipated income shocks, this richness in marginal propensities to consume has significant implications for aggregate consumption and helps explain the puzzling increase in savings by low net worth households observed during the Great Recession as well as the consumption responses to recent tax rebates.

Financial Innovation and Technology after COVID-19: a few Directions for Policy Makers and Regulators in the View of Old and New Disruptors

Innovation and technology have led to the redefinition of business models and development of new ones in many bricks and mortar sectors. Similarly, blockchain and fintech have impacted the finance and banking industries and are expected to further affect them in the future, leading some media to coin the expression “Uberization of banking”. The authors extrapolate from sharing economy models to conclude that while blockchain and fintech are poised to advance finance and banking, there are no disruptive features that corroborate the term. By analogy and successive approximations, this article identifies the limitations of the arguments for disruption in finance and banking. Besides, hinging upon stylized facts, the article establishes similarities with sharing economy models to identify potential threats stemming from financial innovations such as Tokenomics, tagged as “no-ABSs”. Eventually, the authors identify entry points and ways forward arising from the COVID-19 pandemic for policy makers and regulators to regain their pivotal role in policing the market and ensuring transparency while driving innovation.

Perceived competition in agricultural lending: stylized facts and an agenda for future research

PurposeThis study examines agricultural lending by commercial banks and the competition they face from the Farm Credit System (FCS) and non-traditional lenders, including merchants, dealers and other input suppliers.Design/methodology/approachWe construct a measure of commercial banks' perceived competition with FCS or non-traditional lenders using the individual responses to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago's Land Values and Credit Conditions Survey between 1999 and 2019. Through regression analysis of an unbalanced panel of survey responses, we present a number of stylized facts on the relationship between perceived competition and farm loan rate spreads, collateral requirements, loan delinquencies and expected lending volumes.FindingsOur analysis shows that the two sources of competition have very different effects on commercial bank lending terms, loan portfolio riskiness and expected loan volumes. With these results in mind, we offer a number of suggestions for future research.Originality/valueWe leverage the unique characteristics of the Land Values and Credit Conditions Survey to examine the competition with non-traditional lenders that cannot be observed using administrative data.

The Immigration Puzzle in Italy: A Survey of Evidence and Facts

Recently in Italy immigration has been at the centre of public debates. Nonetheless, the still growing literature has focused mainly on the experience of old settlement countries and has looked at single aspects of the phenomenon. In order to guide effective local policy intervention, we offer an exhaustive view of immigration in Italy. We combine the presentation of stylized facts from available data, based on descriptive analyses, with a review of existing studies. Our conclusions tell that evidence available for Italy does not match the policy relevance of the issue and also identify areas where solid evidence is needed.