The decomposition of real commodity prices using the BP filtering technique provides evidence of four super-cycles over 1865 to 2009 ranging between 30 to 40 years and with amplitudes of 20 to 40 percent higher or lower than the long-run trend. Non-oil price super-cycles follow those of world GDP, indicating that they are essentially demanddetermined. In contrast, causality runs in the opposite direction for oil prices. In turn, the mean of each super-cycle of non-oil commodities is generally lower than that of the previous cycle suggesting a step-wise deterioration in support of the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis. Tropical agriculture experienced the strongest and steepest long-term downward trend through the twentieth century, followed by non-tropical agriculture and metals. Again, in contrast to these trends, real oil prices have experienced a long-tern upward trend, which was only interrupted temporarily during some four decades of the twentieth century.
We exploit a change in the compulsory schooling law in Turkey to estimate the causal effects of education on the prevalence of domestic violence. By adopting a regression discontinuity design, we find that the reform increased women's schooling by one year to one-anda-half years and improved their labor market outcomes, with particularly strong effects for women raised in rural areas. The increase in education among rural women led to an increase in self-reported psychological violence and financial control behavior, without changes in physical violence, partner characteristics, or women's attitudes towards such violence. (JEL I21, I28, J12, J16, J24, O15, O18)
This paper analyzes the effect of China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 on structural transformation at the local level, exploiting cross-sectional variation in tariff uncertainty faced by county economies pre-2001. Using a new panel of 1,800 Chinese counties from 1996 to 2013, we find that counties more exposed to the reduction in tariff uncertainty post-accession are characterized by increased exports and foreign direct investment, shrinking agricultural sectors, expanding secondary sectors, and higher total and per capita GDP. In addition, when labor substitutes from nonagricultural to agricultural production in counties exposed to positive trade shocks, agricultural output declines.
This paper synthesizes recent advances in the theoretical and empirical literature on capital controls. We start by observing that international capital flows have both benefits and costs, but some of these are not internalized by individual actors and thus constitute externalities. The theoretical literature has identified pecuniary externalities and aggregate demand externalities that respectively contribute to financial instability and recessions. These externalities provide a natural rationale for countercyclical capital controls that lean against boom and bust cycles in international capital flows. The empirical literature has developed several measures of capital controls to capture different aspects of capital account openness. We evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of different measures and provide an overview of the empirical findings on the effectiveness of capital controls in addressing the externalities identified by the theory literature, that is, in reducing financial fragility and enhancing macroeconomic stability. We also discuss strategies to deal with the endogeneity of capital controls in such statistical exercises. We conclude by providing an overview of the historical and current debates on the role of capital controls in macroeconomic management and their relationship to the academic literature. (JEL D62, F32, F33, F38, F44)
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