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1. Scrutinizing countries’ climate commitments: Insights from recovery spending

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2023.08.022  

   Egli, Florian ; Schmid, Nicolas ; Fransen, Taryn ; Stünzi, Anna ; Isah, Abdulrasheed ; Pineda, Adrianna ; Beaton, Christopher ; Schmidt, Tobias S. ( September 2023 , One Earth)

   The Global Stocktake of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change assesses countries’ collective progress toward holding warming to well below 2 C, or 1.5 C. In this commentary, we argue that governments’ fiscal responses to global economic shocks provide an important opportunity to investigate the credibility of climate pledges and progress. 

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2. The Effect of Macroeconomic Uncertainty on Household Spending

   https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20221167  

   Coibion, Olivier ; Georgarakos, Dimitris ; Gorodnichenko, Yuriy ; Kenny, Geoff ; Weber, Michael ( March 2024 , American Economic Review)

   We use randomized treatments that provide different types of information about the first and/or second moments of future economic growth to generate exogenous changes in the perceived macroeconomic uncertainty of treated households. The effects on their spending decisions relative to an untreated control group are measured in follow-up surveys. Our results indicate that, after taking into account first moments, higher macroeconomic uncertainty induces households to significantly and persistently reduce their total monthly spending in subsequent months. Changes in spending are broad based across spending categories and apply to larger durable good purchases as well. (JEL D12, D81, D84, E21, E23, G51)

    

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3. Do Government Spending Multipliers Depend on the Sign of the Shock?

   https://doi.org/10.1257/pandp.20231071  

   Ben Zeev, Nadav ; Ramey, Valerie A. ; Zubairy, Sarah ( May 2023 , AEA Papers and Proceedings)

   We analyze whether government spending multipliers differ by the sign of the shock. Using aggregate historical US data, we apply Ben Zeev's (2020) nonlinear diagnostic tests and find evidence of nonlinearities in the impulse response functions of both government spending and GDP. We then extend Ramey and Zubairy's (2018) framework to allow for asymmetric effects as a type of state dependence to estimate multipliers. While we find differences in the impulse response functions, the resulting multipliers do not differ by sign of the shock. Thus, declines in government spending do not have different effects on economic activity than rises in spending. 

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4. Policing the California Outercity: Drivers of Police Spending in a Changing Metropolis

   https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spad050  

   Ross, Ángel Mendiola ( October 2023 , Social Problems)

   This paper explores the intersection of two major trends in the United States over the last forty years: a substantial investment in local law enforcement and the diversification of suburbia. While previous research on police spending has focused almost exclusively on large central cities, this study broadens this perspective to assess how these dynamics play out in outer-ring suburbs. I construct a unique panel dataset of over 200 California municipalities and find that the drivers of police spending vary across the metropolis in significant ways. Fixed-effects models that control for unobserved heterogeneity across place suggest that suburbs with growing shares of renters spend more on police. Elaborating on the concept of renter threat, I show how increases in renter households are associated with increases in police expenditures across a range of model specifications in suburbia. I point to suburban homeowner concerns about crime and property values as well as the history of racial exclusion in suburbia that is often couched in economic terms as potential explanations for these findings. Results point to the enduring role of police as a contemporary mechanism of both social control and inequality in California suburbs.

    

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5. Terrorism Risk Assessment, Recollection Bias, and Public Support for Counterterrorism Policy and Spending

   https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13203  

   Liu, Xinsheng ; Portney, Kent E. ; Mumpower, Jeryl L. ; Vedlitz, Arnold ( October 2018 , Risk Analysis)

   Recollection bias (RB) refers to the phenomenon whereby after an adverse event people report that their risk assessment about a similar future event is presently no higher than their recollection of their pre‐event risk assessment. While previous research has outlined this theoretical construct and generated important empirical findings, there were some limitations. We design and employ a new national representative survey to address these limitations in this study. We examine the existence and persistence of RB among the general public in the context of a number of domestic and international terrorist attacks. We further examine the socioeconomic and political base of RB and the influences of RB on a wide range of citizens’ counterterrorism policy preferences. Our data analyses reveal strong evidence showing the occurrence of RB and its persistence across various forms of terrorism risk. With regard to the socioeconomic and political base, we find that females, older people, political conservatives, and Republicans are less likely to be subject to RB. For the effects of RB on public counterterrorism policy preferences, our analyses demonstrate that this bias significantly dampens public support for a wide range of preventive policy measures and government anti‐terrorism spending. Overall, our study, based on a national representative sample and an extended survey design, provides robust evidence of RB in terrorism risk assessment, and adds further evidence to support the idea that RB is likely a generalizable phenomenon. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed in the conclusion.

    

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