This paper investigates the migration behavior of rural-urban migrants within Vietnam. It focuses on the length and intensity of migration and its respective determinants. The analysis uses panel data of 2200 rural households and data from a migrant tracking survey of 299 migrants from Vietnam. The findings show that migrants coming from rural households that faced a higher number of idiosyncra...

We analyze the euro area business cycle in a medium scale DSGE model where we assume two stochastic trends: one on total factor productivity and one on the in ation target of the central bank. To justify our choice of integrated trends, we test alternative speci cations for both of them. We do so, estimating trends together with the model's structural parameters, to prevent estimation biases. I...

Recent spikes in oil prices have thrown light on how economic activity in emerging markets may be impacted by oil price shocks. This paper conducts an empirical analysis of the effect of oil price shocks on emerging markets. It tests for the existence of an asymmetrical relationship between oil prices and economic activity using a model developed by James Hamilton. It also assesses the impact o...

The purpose of this paper is to identify the changes in the impact of energy shocks on economic activity at different phases of economic development – with an interest in assessing if the economy’s vulnerability and resilience to shocks improved. Using data on the United Kingdom over the last three hundred years, the paper replicates a method introduced by Kilian (2008) to disentangle supply, d...

The propagation of macroeconomic shocks through input-output and geographic networks can be a powerful driver of macroeconomic fluctuations. We first exposit that in the presence of Cobb-Douglas production functions and consumer preferences, there is a specific pattern of economic transmission whereby demand-side shocks propagate upstream (to input-supplying industries) and supply-side shocks p...

To determine the effect of economic shocks on civil conflict, the empirical approach must be tailored to the shocks’ persistence. I illustrate this point by revisiting Miguel, Satyanath, and Sergenti (2004). MSS argue that lower rainfall levels and negative rainfall shocks increase the probability of civil conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa over the 1979-1999 period. I find MSS’s approach and concl...

This paper shows that productivity shocks to the top 100 U.S. companies (as identified in Gabaix (2011)) contain systematic information. Specifically, shocks to the top 100 firms predict future shocks to geographically close firms. Intra-sector trade links are an important economic channel for the cascade effect. However, these geographic spillovers are not only restricted to firms’ explicit in...

Miguel, Satyanath, and Sergenti (2004) argue that lower rainfall levels and negative rainfall shocks increase conflict risk in Sub-Saharan Africa. This conclusion rests on their finding of a negative correlation between conflict in t and rainfall growth between t-1 and t-2. I argue that this finding is driven by a positive correlation between conflict in t and rainfall levels in t-2. If lower r...

We study dynamics of interactions among environmental pollution, population and output growth showing that shocks are persistent in these systems and that they converge slowly to the steady state. It is demonstrated that the extent of persistence in economic growth is determined by the convergence speed of shocks in both environmental pollution and population. A modified Solow-Swan economy is s...

This paper investigates how economic shocks propagate and amplify through the input-output network connecting industrial sectors in developed economies. We study alternative models of diffusion on networks and we calibrate them using input-output data on real-world inter-sectoral dependencies for several European countries before the Great Depression. We show that the impact of economic shocks ...