Review of periodical literature for 2023: (vi) 1945 to present

In 2023, the periodical literature on the period 1945 to present centred on key themes relating to business cycles, labour markets, and policy responses to economic crises. The lasting impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic was evident, with several papers directly addressing the pandemic, and a renewed emphasis on job quality, resilience, and well-being throughout the literature and especially in articles relating to employment, health, education, and social policy. These themes intersect with ongoing interest in the field in inequality and disparities in economic outcomes. Methodologically, the literature remains diverse, demonstrating a rich array of approaches to understanding economies of the past and present. Many papers use mixed methods, linking theory and empirical work in economics-focused papers, and integrating qualitative and econometric evidence in more historical work. Throughout the literature, evaluating historical and contemporary policy responses to national and global challenges emerges as a central aim of recent research. As the global COVID-19 pandemic recedes into the past, the increased availability of data on the pandemic and clarity gained with time has led to many articles on the topic. What is most striking is the way the pandemic touched all areas of the economy. Crossley et al. use panel data to measure the initial labour market impacts of the pandemic in the United Kingdom. They find fewer differences in labour market outcomes by gender than expected and that, even though minority and young workers were especially disadvantaged, these effects were temporary. Some negative labour market consequences may have been mitigated by the furlough program, which Görtz et al. show made workers 95 per cent less likely to fall behind on bills than if they had become unemployed. On fiscal responses, Albuquerque and Green estimate that UK households that were most concerned about their ability to pay bills during the pandemic had a higher marginal propensity to consume a one-time positive cash transfer, suggesting that fiscal stimulus might be most effective if it targeted these households. Ayaz et al. explore how the increased fiscal pressure in the future from the COVID-19 pandemic support should best be addressed through the tax system. Using data at the local level for England, Giulietti et al. find that exposure to more COVID-19 mortality meaningfully increased vaccine take-up, especially for ethnic minorities, which suggests potential informational responses to future pandemics. In cross-national comparisons, Antràs et al. show how pandemics can impact trade through business travel, Hsu et al. show how trade supports welfare and income during pandemics, Jordà and Nechio show how increased transfers during the pandemic led to increased inflation, Bergant and Forbes show that countries’ policy responses to the pandemic were shaped by their pre-existing policy space, and Davis and Zlate show that global financial markets were responsive to health metrics. Relatedly, many papers focused on health outcomes and health policies. Gruber et al. evaluate a 2000 policy in England incentivizing emergency departments to see patients within 4 hours. This policy reduced wait times by 21 minutes, increased admissions, and led to a 14 per cent reduction in mortality. Bokhari et al. explore whether policies banning volume discounts can improve health by evaluating a policy banning multiple-unit discounts on alcohol sales in Scotland in 2011. They find that this policy actually led to increased alcohol sales, suggesting banning volume discounts might not be an effective way to support public health. Fry and Farrell find that road accidents increase with both positive and negative unexpected shifts in daily stock market returns from 2008 to 2019. Focusing on 1945–50, prior to when scientific links between smoking and health were well known, Singleton documents how the Attlee government balanced the need to raise revenue from tobacco duties with the need to keep tobacco at a reasonable price for consumers. Arnold-Forster uses letters submitted by the public to the Royal Commission on the National Health Service (NHS) in 1976 to investigate sentiments surrounding the NHS and other popular anxieties of the time. Finally, on health and labour markets, among other results, Blundell et al. find that health has a larger impact on employment in the United States than in the United Kingdom. Adams-Prassl et al. show that, in 2020, workers in high-contact jobs and those in less economically secure jobs are less likely to have access to sick pay through their employers. A theme of growing interest is historical business cycles. In the Economic History Review, Broadberry et al. provide a comprehensive chronology of UK business cycles back to 1700, with quarterly data available back to 1920. This project, guided by the UK Business Cycle Dating Committee, provides a reliable dating of all UK business cycles including measures of uncertainty, descriptions of causes of the fluctuations, and various metrics of each cycle. Relevant for future research on the period 1945 to the present are the dates decided on for the mid-1970s, early 1980s, early 1990s, and ‘great’ recessions: 1973 quarter (q) 3–1975q3, 1979q3–1981q1, 1990q3–1992q2, and 2008q2–2009q2. Overall, the authors find that business cycle downturns have become less frequent but are persistent in their severity. Paker provides further details on the shape of one of those recessions, finding that the early 1980s recession had a jobless recovery, meaning output recovered prior to employment, owing to the reallocation of labour across industries rather than to job polarization. Looking across all of these cycles, Matusche and Wacks show that monetary policy transmission was stronger during periods of higher income inequality such as the 1970s. Focusing on the recovery from the Great Recession, Jacob and Mion find that the poor productivity performance in the United Kingdom was because of both a decline in quantity total factor productivity (TFP) and demand, meaning that both slow technological change and uncertainty may have played a role. Coyle and Mei show that this aggregate labour productivity slowdown was driven by within-sector productivity growth lagging behind in the manufacturing and the information and communication technology sectors. Relatedly, Goodridge and Haskel find the greatest slowing of labour productivity in intangible, knowledge-intensive industries such as finance and high-tech manufacturing. Paul shows us why these trends matter, using data from 1870 to 2013 for 16 countries to show that periods of slowly rising income inequality and low productivity growth make recessions more likely to occur and more severe when they do occur. In another cross-country analysis, Duernecker and Sanchez-Martinez link slowing productivity to the reallocation of labour towards the service industries, yet forecast that the United Kingdom's productivity slowdown in the future owing to this channel will be relatively moderate. Gutierrez-Posada et al. find that, for 20 British cities, each job in the cultural and creative sector generates 1.9 jobs in the nontraded sector, mainly on the intensive margin, which accounts for over 16 per cent of job growth from 1998 to 2017. Tomlinson calls into question the dominance of GDP in our discussions of growth and progress, tracing the development and increasing relevance of the metric and showing how, for the 1950s and 1960s, it misses out on other aspects that are important to economic welfare. Galvão and Mitchell helpfully remind us that GDP is itself an estimate with uncertainty, and they show that, despite this uncertainty being measured well by the Bank of England for 20 years, in common discussion this uncertainty is often not reported. Several papers focused on Bretton Woods-era policymaking. In the Economic History Review, De Bromhead et al. investigate why countries in the Sterling Area stopped holding sterling in their reserves from 1965 to 1979. Using a survival model, they find that these decisions were shaped by international transactional forces, political considerations, and national income. Naef and Weber use Bank of England archives to measure how secret sterilization interventions impacted the exchange rate during the Bretton Woods era, finding that they accomplished their objective. Zoega uses a principal components analysis to analyse current account balances from 1950, identifying a divergence between surplus and deficit groups by 1980. Hayo and Mierzwa find that legislated tax reductions from 1974 onward generally led to reductions in exports and imports in imports in the United Kingdom, though of a small magnitude. On more recent shifts, Dhingra et al. build a structural model to identify the general equilibrium impacts of deep trade agreements (DTA). Then, they apply the model to Brexit, ‘the largest DTA reversal in recent history,’ finding that, even with the most generous deep trade agreements with other nations, the United Kingdom experiences welfare losses of 1 per cent of real consumption per capita, and in other scenarios up to 4 per cent. Also of note is a special issue of the European Economic Review seeking to construct a history of macroeconomics in Europe. This includes an article by Goutsmedt and Truc using topic modelling to distinguish a distinct European school of macroeconomics in the late 1970s to mid-1980s. Also in the special issue, Plassard and Renault argue that general equilibrium models with rationing were a ‘European specialty’, and Backhouse et al. give a valuable history of the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU). In finance, Meeks and Whittington track the survival of stocks on the UK stock exchange from 1948 to 2018, finding that half of all companies disappeared within a decade. Bertilorenzi explores the self-regulation of futures markets in the United Kingdom relative to the United States in the 1970s. Borch and Min discuss the development of autonomous trading and evaluate how recent improvements in machine learning have changed its nature. Taxes were also approached from interdisciplinary perspectives. Fletcher explores the history of estate duty, showing that the share valuation method led to large tax bills for businesses. The increase in rates in the 1940s and 1950s thus led businesses to restructure to avoid paying the high duty. On present-day proposals for wealth and inheritance taxes, Stanley et al. present sociological evidence from UK focus groups that these are seen as unfair ‘double-taxing’ of family income. Yet, these groups were supportive of policies to stop tax evasion. Tørsløv et al. measure shifted profits to tax havens across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), finding that 14 per cent of profits in the United Kingdom are shifted to tax havens. Ogle reminds us this is not a new problem, discussing a covert international working group including the United Kingdom operating in the 1970s and 1980s aiming to stop this loss of revenue from tax havens through information sharing. In the Review of Economics and Statistics, Advani et al. explore the consequences of a UK program of random individual tax audits, finding that the program increased tax liabilities (through reduced misreporting) for 5–8 years after a random audit. From a more behavioural perspective, Besley et al. validate a model of social norms and tax evasion using data from the Thatcher government's poll tax, finding that the normalization of widespread tax evasion led to higher tax evasion even after the end of the program in 1993. De Graeve and Mazzolini construct a new database of daily government debt for 20 countries, including the United Kingdom, back to 1995. An increasing area of focus appears to be job quality and the connection between work arrangements and well-being. Over the course of 3 years, Smith and McBride conducted interviews with workers on zero-hour contracts in the north-east of England, many of whom have multiple precarious jobs at once. Their qualitative analysis shows that these zero-hour arrangements are far from mutually advantageous, with workers forced to accept uncertain pay and to be highly productive during working hours while balancing multiple jobs and caring responsibilities. Maestripieri finds in a cross-national comparison that involuntary part-time work among women decreases household economic security. For those in regular employment, Minardi et al. remind us that computer use is routine-biased, complementary only to non-routine workers, yet abstracting from the task-composition of jobs, computer use is associated with lower job satisfaction in the United Kingdom. Haile shows that increases in the quality of organizational leadership lead to meaningful increases in worker job satisfaction. Gueguen and Senik find mixed results on the impact of working from home on well-being using COVID-19 as a way to control for self-selection into working from home. While it seems that all workers eventually can adapt to working from home, its effects are most positive when workers choose to work from home. Employment stability is a key dimension of job quality. St-Denis and Hollister show an increase in the share of workers holding short-time jobs in the United Kingdom since 1984, after controlling for demographics, with men especially shifting into short-term jobs and women actually increasing their job tenure over this period. Postel-Vinay and Sepahsalari provide estimates of transitions between work, unemployment, and inactivity back to 1992 using a new linking of the British Household Panel Survey and the UK Household Longitudinal Study. For aggregate job-to-job transitions in the United Kingdom, they find an increase through 2001, a large decrease through 2010, and then an increase in recent years, following established patterns of dynamism in the United States. On the role of unions, Bell and Hart show that paid overtime declined from 5.4 to 2.0 per cent of all hours of paid work in the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2020, driven mainly by a decline among male workers owing to reduced collective bargaining power. Yet, Veliziotis and Vernon use panel aspects of the Workplace Employment Relations Survey 2004–2011 to show that increased unionization is actually positively associated with productivity, potentially through the mechanism of improved job quality. There were also many papers published on gender gaps in wages and labour market outcomes. Jones and Kaya show that the gender pay gap is greater for larger firms, controlling for most worker characteristics, but that this is driven by differences across firms rather than within firms. Similarly, Hennig and Stadler find evidence that firm-specific factors meaningfully impact gender pay gaps, with the changes over time in the gender pay gap in the United Kingdom being shaped by changes within firms and between firms. et al. explore the decline in wages for women not in the United Kingdom, finding that this decline was driven not by job but rather a higher of up in et al. explore how income and family shape the of home in a cross-country with impacts on labour and Finally, et al. analyse all letters submitted to a UK in the job finding that women are more likely to be in of work rather than On gaps, et al. use data for from and to find that gaps in wages for workers are driven by in are reduced by a when is a a job evidence on of the historical patterns of this how working in the 1970s including of to the of working Focusing more on and show that the of the National in led workers impacted by the policy change to less for and led to an increased and show that in more recent years the in the United Kingdom has not been and they find that increasing the increases employment, especially in areas with high of In a cross-country and show that firms with local are less likely to increase wages in the of productivity increasing factor that impacts inequality is the paid to over their which is greater in the United Kingdom than in other European countries and increases with to the by et al. 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