Examinando por Autor "Dimakou, Ourania"

Mostrando 1 - 8 de 8

Beyond GDP: Is Okun's Law still t?
(2024-12-27) Miquel Burgos, Ana Belén; Dimakou, Ourania; Eleftheriou, Maria
This paper challenges the role of GDP, as a measure of economic activity, in the regu- larity and universality of Okun's Law. Numerous empirical studies verify the stability and robustness of Okukn's law, despite quantitative and methodological discrepancies. At the same time, a large body of the literature is exposing the limitations of GDP as a measure of economic welfare or di erent aspects of economic activity. Our paper ques- tions whether and to what extent Okuns law empirical regularity is `GDP-contingent'. Is the \Law" as stable when a di erent measure is used? Our work draws on adjusted disposable income to answer that. We demonstrate that, over a three decade span and for more than 20 OECD countries, the stylised fact described by Okun law is less ro- bust and stable when GDP is substituted by adjusted disposable income: for a subset of countries in our sample, the relationship turns insigni cant or even positive. This apparently broken, for being GDP contingent, relationship opens a broad discussion with diverse implications regarding economic policies and their socioeconomic impact.
Bureaucratic corruption and the dynamic interaction between monetary and fiscal policy
(Elsevier, 2015-07-31) Dimakou, Ourania
This paper analyses the dynamic interaction between monetary and fiscal policies in the presence of bureaucratic corruption. Corruption constrains the fiscal capacity to tax and increases the reliance on inflation (seigniorage). Given the restrictions that corruption imposes, a monetary reform strengthening central bank independence induces strategic debt accumulation; the government has the incentive to use debt and indirectly ‘force’ the central bank to pursue expansionary monetary policy. This result is augmented by the size of bureaucratic corruption, posing difficulties on the achievement of both a balanced debt process and price stability. The adverse implication of corruption on debt accumulation, given central bank independence, is supported in a large cross-sectional event study for developed and developing countries. Complementing the analysis with a measure for the level of independence each central bank reform enacted, the impact of corruption is greater, the higher the degree of independence granted. The results are also confirmed when accounting for countries that did not forego meaningful reforms and our findings are robust to different sub-samples, control variables and unobserved heterogeneity.
How consumption carbon emission intensity varies across Spanish households
(Springer, 2023) Basso , Henrique S.; Dimakou, Ourania; Pidkuyko, Myroslav
The prominence of emissions mitigating policies call for an understanding of their potential distributional impact. To assess this heterogeneity, we quantify and analyse the consumption emission intensity, defined as carbon emissions per unit of consumption, across households in Spain. With the exception of the poorest households, emission intensity decreases with income and peaks for households whose head is middle-aged (40 years old). Moreover, households whose main earner is less educated and male, and who live in smaller cities and rent their main residence, also emit more per unit of expenditure and thus, may be disproportionably impacted by emissions mitigating policies.
How Inflation Varies Across Spanish Households
(Subdirección General de Estudios y Prospección Comercial. Ministerio de Economía, Comercio y Empresa, 2022-12-30) Basso , Henrique S.; Dimakou, Ourania; Pidkuyko, Myroslav
Inflation has distributional effects. Leveraging data on consumption expenditure of goods across households provided in the Spanish Household Budget Survey we estimate household-specific inflation from 2006 to 2021 in Spain and analyse how it varies according to households’ known characteristics. We show that households with lower income, more members and whose head is less educated, older, and male experience higher inflation. Finally, we also depict the effects of the most recent price increases across households. Cómo varía la inflación entre los hogares españoles. La inflación tiene efectos distributivos. Aprovechando los datos sobre el gasto de consumo de bienes en los hogares proporcionados por la Encuesta de Presupuestos Familiares de España, estimamos la inflación específica de los hogares de 2006 a 2021 en España y analizamos cómo varía según las características conocidas de los hogares. Mostramos que los hogares con menores ingresos, más miembros y cuya cabeza de familia tiene menos estudios, es mayor y varón, experimentan una mayor inflación. Finalmente, también describimos los efectos de los aumentos de precios más recientes en los hogares.
Macroeconomics. A critical companion
(Pluto Press, 2016) Fine, Ben; Dimakou, Ourania
Macroeconomics is fundamental to our understanding of how the world functions today. But too often our understanding is based on orthodox, canonized analysis. In this rule-breaking book, Ben Fine and Ourania Dimakou provides an engaging, heterodox primer for those interested in an alternative to mainstream macroeconomic theory and history. From classical theory to the Keynesian revolution and more modern forms including the Monetarist counterrevolution, New Classical Fundamentalism, and New Consensus Macroeconomics, Fine and Dimakou rigorously and comprehensively lay out the theories of mainstream economists, warts and all.
Monetary and Fiscal Institutional Designs
(Elsevier, 2013-02-20) Dimakou, Ourania
Two investment decisions in economic institutions are feasible; investments in monetary institutions in the form of delegation of monetary policy to a more conservative or independent central bank, and investments in fiscal capacity, in the form of combating bureaucratic corruption and its consequent fiscal revenue leakages. Within this framework, we investigate the interactions among those two institutional decisions and the obtained institutional structure. The findings provide support of strategic complementarities; investments in monetary and fiscal institutions reinforce each other. In addition, we identify a set of determinants that impact on the government’s decisions to improve economic institutions, particularly, the structure and intensity of the initial corruption level, the amount of distortions caused by taxation and the policymaker’s goals and preferences across its objectives.
Political considerations and fiscal regulation in a spatial duopoly: Effects on product differentiation
(University of Rijeka, 2024-11-30) Hamoudi Amar-Khodja, Hamid; Miquel Burgos, Ana Belen; Dimakou, Ourania
We examine the impact of political orientation on fiscal regulation and product differentiation within a spatial duopoly. Using a modelling approach a la Hotelling, we explore how the regulator’s political stance -whether pro-consumer or pro-business- affects market outcomes through distinct optimal designs of fiscal intervention. We identify three regulatory profiles: (i) pro-consumer regulation with high tax rates leading to minimal product differentiation and lower prices; (ii) pro-business regulation with no taxation resulting in maximum product differentiation and higher prices, and (iii) moderate regulation, balancing the interests of firms and consumers, in which taxes can be moderate but the firms are not induced to follow the regulator’s designated levels of differentiation. Our findings highlight the significant role of political orientation in shaping market dynamics and regulatory effectiveness, emphasising the need to consider political factors and the balancing of various actors in policy design within spatial competition models.
Waiting time distribution in public health care: empirics and theory
(Springer, 2015-08-25) Dimakou , Sofia; Dimakou, Ourania; Henrique , Basso
Excessive waiting times for elective surgery have been a long-standing concern in many national healthcare systems in the OECD. How do the hospital admission patterns that generate waiting lists affect different patients? What are the hospitals characteristics that determine waiting times? By developing a model of healthcare provision and analysing empirically the entire waiting time distribution we attempt to shed some light on those issues. We first build a theoretical model that describes the optimal waiting time distribution for capacity constraint hospitals. Secondly, employing duration analysis, we obtain empirical representations of that distribution across hospitals in the UK from 1997–2005. We observe important differences on the ‘scale’ and on the ‘shape’ of admission rates. Scale refers to how quickly patients are treated and shape represents trade-offs across duration-treatment profiles. By fitting the theoretical to the empirical distributions we estimate the main structural parameters of the model and are able to closely identify the main drivers of these empirical differences. We find that the level of resources allocated to elective surgery (budget and physical capacity), which determines how constrained the hospital is, explains differences in scale. Changes in benefits and costs structures of healthcare provision, which relate, respectively, to the desire to prioritise patients by duration and the reduction in costs due to delayed treatment, determine the shape, affecting short and long duration patients differently.