In economic research, the Hodrick-Prescott filter is a widely used tool for removing cyclical components from time-series data. This column argues that, despite its popularity, the HP filter has serious drawbacks that should severely restrict its application. It involves several levels of differencing, so that for random walk series, subsequently observed patterns are likely to be artefacts of having applied the filter, rather than due to the underlying data-generating process. The column goes on to suggest an alternative to the HP filter that avoids these pitfalls. 

Recent studies have analysed trends in global income inequality, but for most people in the world, labour earnings represent the vast majority of their income. This column uses a new global database on occupational earnings since 1970 to examine trends in earnings inequality between countries’ high- and low- earners, between countries, and between occupational groups. Global earnings inequality has fallen over the past half-century, and so has inequality within occupations, with main equalisation in the late 1990s and 2000s.

Beliefs about origins, life after death, and rituals that activate supernatural processes to help people navigate life, despite being almost certainly incorrect, are common in developing countries. This column examines the role of ‘magical’ beliefs in warfare in the context of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Belief in a spell that offers protection from bullets helped villagers liberate their village, and others in the area, from militias, providing an example of how the ‘right’ amount of ‘wrong’ beliefs can achieve a socially efficient outcome.

China has become the world’s largest exporter, with a rapid rise in its world trade share just after it joined the WTO in 2001. This column finds that China’s WTO entry reduced the US manufacturing price index by 7.6% between 2000 and 2006, with most of this effect arising from China reducing its own import tariffs. US consumers gained because they paid less for manufactured goods and because they had access to more varieties of goods.

Trade union membership has been declining since the 1980s. Recently, however, there has been renewed interest in the potential of collective bargaining to address rising wealth inequality and poor wage growth. This column presents an OECD report on collective bargaining institutions and practices across member countries and selected emerging economies. Despite substantial variation across member countries, the overall pattern is one of a broad decline in the use of collective bargaining to set the terms of employment.

Trade liberalisation has been a significant driver of globalisation over the past half century, but global trade has slowed in recent years. This column argues that globalisation can also be driven by higher commodity prices, as commodities constitute a large fraction of global trade. This is reflected in trade volumes and commodity prices, which increased until around 2014 but have fallen since. Commodity price-driven globalisation implies lower living standards in advanced countries, as the higher commodity prices diminish the purchasing power of workers. 

Cybersecurity is becoming a vital concern for the functioning of a modern economy. This column argues that the threat of cyber attacks should be tackled economy-wide, with economic policies aimed at overcoming the externalities and information asymmetries that lead to suboptimal protection choices on the part of private agents. There is an urgent need for an improved understanding of microeconomic mechanisms in the cybersecurity market, and for reliable data upon which policy design can be based.

Substantial headway has been made in the transition to clean technology, but recent political developments threaten this progress. This column examines the transition process using a microeconomic model of competition in production and innovation between clean and dirty technologies. The results suggest that production taxes can deal with dirty emission externalities, while research subsidies are sufficient to redirect innovation towards clean technologies. However, delaying intervention will drastically slow down the overall transition.

VoxEU is pleased to announce the launch of its new sister site – VoxDev.org. VoxDEV will focus on development issues, posting research-based analysis and commentary by leading economists. The Editor-in-Chief is Tavneet Suri, Professor of Economics at MIT.

Several recent empirical papers have challenged the ‘spanning hypothesis’, which holds that the level, slope, and curvature of bond yield curves are sufficient to forecast returns and estimate bond risk premia This column argues that these studies suffer from a previously unrecognised standard error bias. Controlling for this bias, false positives are found to be between six and twelve times more likely, suggesting that the evidence against the spanning hypothesis is substantially less convincing than would appear from the studies.

Political economy discourses in areas such as the nature of market failure, the case for government intervention on grounds of efficiency and equity, and the interplay between economic and political forces have run for generations. This column provides an overview of the life of Nobel Prize-winning economist W Arthur Lewis, who was a critic of laissez-faire economic policies, but who also acted as a check on extreme statist interventions, arguing against heavy state subsidy to industry on purely economic grounds.

Most analysis of long-run economic performance abstracts from short-run fluctuations and seeks to explain improved performance through an increase in the rate of growth. Using data on annual rates of change of per capita income reaching back to the 13th century for some countries, this column show that improved long-run performance has actually occurred primarily through a decline in the rate and frequency of shrinking. Structural change, technological change, demographic change and the changing incidence of warfare offer at best a partial explanation; a full understanding requires a consideration of institutional change.

Despite the policy importance of understanding the relationships between them, very little evidence exists on the causal effects siblings have on one another. This column investigates outcomes for families in which the third-born child has a disability, and shows that the oldest children have better educational outcomes than the middle children, who due to birth order are more likely to be more affected by a common sibling spillover. We may be able to measure greater returns to investments that relieve the effects of negative shocks to children if we consider the effects on siblings too.

Vox is ten years old this month. Since the launch, over 6,000 of the world’s top economists have published on the site, including 17 Nobel Prize winners. Readership has grown to the point where we get between 400,000 and 500,000 page views per month from over 150,000 readers. This column recaps the thinking behind the creation of the site, and describes how Vox’s ‘voice’ grew in importance during the Subprime Crisis, the Global Crisis and the Eurozone Crisis.

The recent resolutions of the Spanish Banco Popular and of two smaller Italian banks – Veneto Vanca and Banca Popolare di Vicenza – can be seen as a first important test for the banking union. This column assesses the progress made over the past three years. It argues that a ‘never bailout’ rule is inefficient, especially if referring to legacy problems; that a crisis should be resolved before a new regulatory framework is put in place; that to avoid national solutions, we need to go to a complete banking union; and finally, that the process will take some time, and new institutions and regulations are only a small step.

Recent research suggests that foreign direct investment makes it more likely that host countries upgrade production. Using the example of Turkey, this column shows that while the presence of foreign affiliates does not seem to affect the propensity of firms to innovate, it is positively correlated with the complexity level of products newly introduced by local supplier firms. Foreign direct investment inflows appear to act as a catalyst to develop sophisticated manufacturing, and should be promoted as part of a domestic industrial policy.

After another six months of discussions, Greek debt negotiations succeeded in once again kicking the can down the road. This column analyses how sophisticated and experienced negotiators like the IMF, the Eurozone leadership, and by now even the Greeks, could have let negotiations drag out for so many years, and goes on to propose a plan which might be just radical enough to meet the needs of all parties.

The economies of Europe and the United States are inextricably linked and in an ideal world, a number of factors motivate a trade deal such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. This column, taken from a recent VoxEU eBook, argues, however, that given the Brexit referendum in the UK and the election of Donald Trump as US president, as well as a number of other pre-existing complications, achieving such agreements will be highly contentious. 

There is a growing awareness that non-performing loans generate risks of financial instability and constrain lending growth, and that coordinated action to solve the problem in Europe is both necessary and achievable. This column discusses proposals for state-supported vehicles, such as asset management companies, put forward by the main international organisations and prominent scholars to deal with the large backlog of non-performing loans. Part of this backlog will be resolved through market-based solutions, but due to market failures and capital shortages of critical banks, state-supported schemes are also deemed necessary.

There is growing interest in measuring the scientific aspects of industrial innovation and performance to understand the economic impact of publicly funded R&D. This column presents new indicators for science-industry linkages in Japan based on a novel dataset combining academic research paper data, patent data, and economic census data. It finds that the academic sector is getting more involved in patenting activities, and that scientific knowledge generated in the sector is being utilised not only in science-based industries, but also in many others.

A large literature has argued that natural resources have a negative effect on economic development. The Brazilian data used in this column fail to confirm these findings. Economic activity, as measured using night-time light data, increases more during periods of rising oil prices in localities with better access to oil.  Oil revenue windfalls accruing to oil-rich locations and spillovers to adjacent locations drive this effect. 

Since 2011, EU macroeconomic surveillance has aimed at preventing or correcting the type of imbalances that were responsible for the Global Crisis. Surveillance under the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure implies regular reports and policy recommendations monitored by the Commission, and the possible activation of economic sanctions. This column shows that, despite the procedure not having been used to its full extent so far and the sanctions stage not having been reached yet, the surveillance and recommendations have had an impact on policies in the first years of implementation. 

The nature of military and social conflict has changed in the last three decades, particularly in the way it impacts civilians locally. This column presents new research that models localised conflict based on the spatial configuration of groups, using evidence from conflict in Northern Ireland. The model can help target policies at the origin of attacks and with attempts to change the interaction between local groups, reducing conflict in the short-to-medium term.

Post-war Hong Kong delivered one of the most dramatic improvements in living standards in history, a transformation regarded by Milton Friedman as an experiment in the potential impact of economic freedom on economic growth. This column assesses the contribution of one key official – finance minister Sir John Cowperthwaite – whose laissez-faire approach of ‘positive non-interventionism’, much admired by Friedman, underpinned that success. It also explores, 20 years on from the handover to China, whether a second stage of the Hong Kong economic experiment might be in progress, perhaps leading to faltering freedom and faltering growth.