Assorted links: economic analysis

1. Quantifying structural reforms in OECD countries: a new framework. A look at how various product and labour market policies and regulations affect per capita income growth (LSE Business Review).
2. Annual Economic Report 2018. Policymakers can maintain the current economic upswing beyond the short term by tackling structural reforms, rebuilding monetary and fiscal policy space to react to future threats and encouraging prompt implementation of regulatory reforms (BIS).
3. Visualizing the Longest Bull Markets of the Modern Era (Visual Capitalist).
4. Variation in economic preferences around the world with implications for understanding inequality: Evidence from the Global Preferences Survey. Vast inequalities exist within societies as well as across nations. This column uses a new dataset to show that preferences vary substantially across and within societies, and that these differences are related to differences in economic outcomes at the individual and aggregate levels. The findings suggest that institutional reform should take into account how institutions may interact with preference differences (VOX).
5. European bank mergers: Domestic and cross-border. The European economy is recovering, and banks are thinking once more about mergers. This column demonstrates that, while cross-border mergers have been predicted before, most European bank mergers have consistently been domestic. Regulatory hurdles and relatively low concentration in some of the countries of Europe suggest this may continue (VOX).
6. Gender, informal employment, and trade liberalisation in Mexico. Trade liberalisation has been shown to affect formality rates in labour markets. This column exploits the Mexican trade liberalisation episode in the 1990s, to explore the labour market impact of reductions in import tariffs across gender and sectors. Within disaggregated tradable sectors, the probability of working formally has increased for both men and women in Mexico. Considering regional adjustments,exposure to trade liberalisation has had different effects across genders and tradable versus non-tradable sectors (VOX).