Girls Next Door

Nowadays we are surrounded by peer networks. There are those virtual social ones, where you work hard at adding peers (“friends”) as if they were scores in a game, most of which you barely remember and will never meet again. Then there are those professional networks where your peers are called “connections” and where past job experiences tend to wax lyrical. But the peer network that counts, according to a recent CESifo study, is the one you had outside school when you were a high school student. Provided, that is, that that peer network contained a significant number of females.

Working from Home, Shopping Close to Home

The covid pandemic lent respectability to working from home, which means that the proportion of people wearing slippers to the “office” and working with a cat on their lap may stay higher than before the lockdown forced them into such sacrifices.

Eat Your Greens

We are all for green, of course. Good for the health—mine, yours, the environment’s, the planet’s and all that. But wait, you don’t mean to put it right next to me, right? And what, I have to pay for it?? That’s the moment when the politician proposing a given green initiative goes into many voters’ won’t-vote-for-that-one list.

Aside from behavioural changes, two things are needed to slow down global warming and environmental degradation: technological solutions and political acceptance. But the more progress is done on the technological front, the stronger the political challenge seems to grow. Small wonder then that some politicians hesitate before introducing green policy measures. What’s worse, they may refrain of proposing such policies altogether. And that could prove disastrous.
 

Tariffs and Politics: Evidence from Trump’s Trade Wars

In a recent CESifo Working Paper, Thiemo Fetzer and Carlo Schwarz studied how countries designing a retaliation response face a trade-off between maximizing political targeting and mitigating domestic economic harm. To quantify the degree of political targeting and to shed more light on underlying trade-offs, the authors developed a novel simulation approach that constructs a host of alternative retaliation baskets that the EU, China, and other countries could have chosen.