Projekty badawcze

The impact of incomplete decentralisation on the quality of local public expenditure in Poland.

UMO-2014/13/B/HS4/03204 - OPUS

During the recent decades, in many countries a growing number of public task have been transferred to local governments (the process slowed down with the crisis of 2008). A full decentralization is a rare phenomenon though.

Incentive compatibility of contingent valuation studies based on stated preferences.

UMO-2016/20/T/HS4/00013 - ETIUDA

The subject of the applicant's doctoral dissertation concerns the methodology of preference modeling consumers and the valuation of non-market goods based on preference-driven research
declared. Preference modeling underpins modern microeconomics and is difficult to do overestimated. It is crucial for planning socially optimal quantities and types delivered public goods, is used in the design of private goods, as well it serves to predict consumer behavior. Economics has developed several methods to allow model preferences, the most flexible of which, currently the most widely used, is valuation contingent valuation method (CV) using choice questions discrete choice experiment (DCE).
The applicant's doctoral dissertation addresses fundamental methodological problems related to the observation and modeling consumer preferences, i.e. the issue of the motivational correctness of the instruments questionnaires used in research using the DCE method. Motivational correctness allows you to get a real picture of the preferences in society as it ensures that giving
honest answer is the optimal strategy for the respondent. Research is a response to recently theoretically proposed conditions necessary to maintain the motivational correctness in the method
DCE which suggest that it is imperative that (1) respondents perceive the survey as binding, i.e. convinced that their answers would influence the final decisions, and (2) according to Gibbard Satterthwaite's theorem, the information space was not larger than binary, which means one choice situation per respondent consisting of exactly two alternatives.
The main goal of the research is empirical verification of the significance of the suggested ones in theoretical literature, the conditions of motivational correctness for preferences obtained by the method DCE. This verification is based on the results of field tests performed in the standard conditions for applying the CV method. In particular, the work addresses the following research questions:
(1) whether it is actually necessary to maintain the above-mentioned conditions of motivational correctness, and at the same time sufficient to obtain real preferences, (2) which of the conditions (binding nature, number of choice situations, number of alternatives) play the most significant role and (3) what it is the scale of burdens caused by failure to meet individual conditions of motivational correctness in a typical study using the DCE methodology.
 

Endogenous growth, heterogeneous firms, business cycles, innovation, labour market, welfare analysis.

UMO-2014/13/N/HS4/02690 - PRELUDIUM

The main goal of the research is to build upon and combine recent developments in the dynamic macroeconomics literature into a unified framework in order to analyse the relationship between the short-term business cycle fluctuations and long-term growth.

By integrating the insights of the endogenous growth literature into the business cycle analysis framework of the DSGE literature, the research aims to provide quantitative measures of the influence of short-term fluctuations on the long-term growth, and to aid the welfare analyses of the costs of business cycles. This is a key information for the macro-stabilizing policy. Special attention is given to the workings of the labour market in the monopolistically competing, heterogeneous firm setup.

Thanks to the search-and-matching model of the labour market, the project will be able to provide the quantitative measure of welfare costs of labour market volatility. Since the prediction of the neo-Schumpeterian models of endogenous growth is that small short-term volatility may be beneficial for long-term growth, the research aims to find a “golden rule” of optimal growth and to reassess past industrial and labour policy recommendations.

The applied part of the project aims to calibrate the model according to the Polish economy and to estimate the welfare improvement resulting from switching the current labour market policy to the flexicurity type model.

The research hypotheses are as follows:

H1. A small degree of the business cycle volatility improves the long-term growth rate due to the positive cleansing effect while the influence of other negative effects is smaller.

H2. The above result is dependent on the specifics of the institutional setting of the economy, especially on the existence and height of enry barriers for new enterprises.

H3. Even small business cycle fluctuations lead to an increase in labour market volatility, which is welfare deteriorating.

H4. There is a welfare optimum between the gains from faster growth and losses from labour market volatility, that can be realized through the flexicurity type labour market policy.

Autonomy or external regulation? An economic analysis of the professional groups problem.

UMO-2013/09/D/HS4/01046 - SONATA

We define ‘professions’ as skilled occupations that provide ‘expert’ services, i.e. their work is characterized by a high level of information asymmetry. Classic examples are lawyers, doctors, architects or scientists. Historically, the markets for such services have often been subject to self regulation. Although self-regulation has several advantages (low information- and monitoring costs, high adaptability to technological and business innovations), it carries the risk of abuse by creating monopolies benefiting professionals to the detriment of the society. The objective of the project is to assess the justification for and the economic consequences of the professional self-regulation and to investigate – from the theoretical viewpoint – the options for the society to organize professions.

Our focus will be the selfregulatory organization of professionals (SRO), which is a key actor in self-regulatory arrangements, yet it has been modeled only in a highly simplified way in previous studies. Specific project objectives include: 1. Model incentive structure that affects self-regulatory organizations’ behavior in designing and implementing rules governing the professional practices. 2. Model how self-regulatory organizations use their informational advantages to interact with the government in affecting policies. 3. Assess the options for the government to extract the professional rent by adopting appropriate policies towards the SRO.

True but not (always) universal. On the nature of economic laws.

UMO-2013/11/B/HS4/01074 - OPUS

The goal of the project is to analyze the nature of economic laws. I am to show that they are true but not (always) universal. Also, it will be demonstrated that economic laws are not natural laws in the sense of deductive-nomological model of explanation.Moreover, one of the tasks ofthe research will be to give some arguments for the claim that economists explain by isolating(U. Mäki’s thesis) and referring to natures of explaining items (N. Cartwright’s idea). An important part of the project will be also the reconstruction of the ways economists –from Smith, Ricardo, and Mill till Samuelson and Friedman, understood economic laws. Last but not least, I am to focus on analyzing the very idea of the ‘truth’ of economic laws.

This project is situated within the framework of philosophy and methodology of economics. The central thesis of the project, i.e., that economic laws are true but not (necessarily) universal, is to be investigated using the research apparatus taken from the philosophy of science, e.g., I am to refer to the studies analyzing the logic of explanation if natural laws are excluded from the deductive-nomological model as well as to the works focusing on the role of powers and capacities in forming various types of explanations, the Popperian notions of corroboration, corroborability, and verisimilitude, are alsoto be used. I hope to add some insights to the already growing philosophical literature on the nature of economic laws (see, e.g., contributions by Maki, Cartwright, Reiss, Friggi Alexandrova). The philosophical perspective of the project is to be supplemented by the methodological one, i.e., particular ways of conceptualizing economic laws by economists as such are to be analyzed.This is due to a general shift in the philosophyof science (including economics) from formulating the suggestions of what form the science should be to just focusing on the ways the researchers do science (here: economics).

Monetary policy and capital markets - central bank reaction to asset prices.

UMO-2014/15/B/HS4/02078 - OPUS

The aim of the research project is to investigate the impact of stock market fluctuations on monetary policy. Numerous theoretical studies of the inflation targeting framework for the monetary policy argue that central banks should not react to asset market developments that are not associated directly with changes in inflation.

Preference uncertainty and stability in stated preference studies.

UMO-2012/07/E/HS4/04037 - SONATA BIS

SC are currently very popular methods in transportation, health economics, marketing research and environmental valuation. Mostof the applications of SC focus on estimating implicit prices. Accounting for uncertainty in willingness to pay (WTP) estimatescan be very important from the policy perspective. For example, policy implications of cost benefit analysis can be very differentonce lower bounds (taking into account uncertainty in preferences) of WTP are used. The second highly relevant aspect of theproject is testing preference stability across different elicitation methods. We think that the proposal has a chance to show that thecurrent practice of using the best-worst elicitation method, very popular in health economics but also in other fields, is notappropriate. We hypothesise that asking for the best alternative within choice set is behaviourally very different than asking forthe worst one. Finally we propose a novel approach which classifies different convergence problems and links them with thedecision rules respondents use. We believe that our research can show that individual-level modelling can provide valuableinsights into the respondents’ preference structure that is usually concealed if pooled models are used i.e. can be used to identifyindividuals who ignore choice attribute/attributes and identify the correct distribution of random parameters in Multinomial Mixed (MMNL) applications.We think that our research has chance to significantly contribute to the current state-of-the-art on non-market valuation anddiscrete choice models

Economic inequality, political inequality and economic outcomes: an attempt to look from the perspective of the regional Poland during system transformation period.

UMO-2013/09/D/HS4/01038 - SONATA

The main goal of the project is to investigate interactions between economic inequality, political inequality and economic outcomes. Drawing inspiration from the recent theories in political economy, we focus firstly on the potential impact that economic inequalities may have on distribution of political influences and secondly, on the effects that political inequalities may have on economic outcomes.

The first hypothesis that is proposed to be verified in the analysis assumes that an unequal distribution of wealth is positively correlated with an unequal distribution of political influences. The second hypothesis in turn, states that political inequality is negatively associated with economic performance. We illustrate this by referring to processes that could have been observed at the local level in Poland during the transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy. The analysis uses the data at both the village and the municipality level and covers the period 1988-2005. Thus, it aims at capturing important dynamics that characterized the formation of equilibriums related to the distribution of both the economic resources and the political influence over this period.

Preventing aging of the population using the instruments of fiscal policy and migration policy

UMO-2012/07/B/HS4/03254 - OPUS

Celem projektu jest wskazanie skutecznej polityki demograficznej mającej na celu opóźnienie procesu starzenia się populacji europejskich. Ocenie poddane zostaną, po pierwsze, bodźce fiskalne nakierowane na zwiększenie dzietności oraz, po drugie,rozwiązania polegające na stymulacji napływu cudzoziemskiego zwiększającego zasób młodej siły roboczej.

Analiza pierwszego rodzaju polityki ludnościowej składać się będzie z porównania hipotetycznych zmian systemu finansów publicznych obniżających koszt utrzymania dzieci. Teoretyczne rozważania zostaną uzupełnione empirycznymi analizami dla wybranych krajów europejskich, które pozwolą na oszacowanie kosztów wynikającej z modelu polityki oraz na porównanie ich z kosztami obecnie stosowanych pronatalistycznych rozwiązań fiskalnych w analizowanych krajach. Analiza drugiego rodzaju polityki ludnościowej dotyczyć będzie oszacowania efektywności kosztowej alternatywnej polityki, polegającej na zachęcaniu do imigracji kompensacyjnej i wzrostu dzietności u imigrantów.Obserwowany spadek dzietności w rodzinach europejskich jest jedną z przyczyn napięć w finansach publicznych wielu krajów. Zmniejszanie się liczby ludności w wieku produkcyjnym względem liczby ludności w wieku poprodukcyjnym wywołuje trudności z finansowaniem świadczeń emerytalnych. Problem ten może być rozwiązany na dwa sposoby: przez ograniczenie wydatków na emerytury, co w badaniu pomijamy, bądź przez przeciwdziałanie spadkowi relacji liczby osób pracujących i otrzymujących świadczenia z systemu ubezpieczeń społecznych. Zapobiec mu można m.in. oddziałując na wzrost dzietności populacji miejscowej albo przez intensyfikację imigracji osób młodych. Stawiamy tezę, iż istnieje możliwość opracowania polityki fiskalnej, sprzyjającej znacznemu wzrostowi dzietności o kosztach nie większych od kosztów obecnie stosowanych form wsparcia rodzin w postaci ulg podatkowych (w tym wspólnego opodatkowania małżonków) i transferów. Oczekujemy, że polityka taka (jak proponowana) będzie w krótkim okresie bardziej kosztowna niż wspieranie imigracji osiadłej, lecz w długim okresie okaże się demograficznie skuteczniejsza w przeciwdziałaniu procesowi starzenia się populacji

Dynamic CGE model for analysis of energy policy.

UMO-2013/11/B/HS4/01701 - OPUS

In the coming decades energy sector in Poland will undergo substantial transition towards low carbon usage which will have a preponderant impact on the economy. Several modernisation scenarios for energypolicy are currently being discussed and not yet concluded. The main objective of this project is to provide anew insight into economics of this modernisation agenda by creating tailored modelling tool for energypolicy impact assessment. More specifically, the project aims at:

(i) Providing identification and assessment of direct and indirect effects resulting from implementation of three main alternative scenarios of modernization of energy sector on the polish economy withintwo coming decades (until 2035). Those scenarios assume, in different proportions, increasing use ofnuclear energy, renewable sources and natural gas in exchange for reduction of carbon.

(ii) Developing a specific analytical tool –dynamic Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model –dedicated for country-wide analysis of energy policy. The model will simulate the economic effectsof sector regulations and new policy targets within each scenario, by accounting for complex set oflinkages between energy sector and other parts of economy.

For each scenario, the model will provide number of performance measurements such as social welfare and other efficiency indicators like investment to GDP or investment to employment ratio. Realization of thisproject will not only enrich the understanding of modernization challenges but also will allow to formallytest quantifiable hypotheses related to the economic efficiency of different scenarios which now aresupported mainly by speculative reasoning of their proponents.

In the proposed project we will adopt dynamic CGE approach. Mathematical form of CGE models rely on multiple self-solving equations that show: circular flow of commodities in economy, represent optimizingbehaviour of households that own production factors and are final consumers, firms that produce and rentproduction factors. They also describe government that pursues policies like taxes, subsidies, lump-sumtransfers, but also buys products and services. From the economic point of view CGE models are based on anumber of neoclassical assumptions, e.g.: utility maximizingbehaviour of households, cost-minimizingbehaviour of producers and average-cost pricing. They also have Keynesian macro model properties, e.g.:simultaneously solved, macro balancing equations (closures). On more operational level the model willsimulatethe effects of scenarios by perturbing the equilibrium with set of dynamically distributed shockssuch as changes in taxation, emission quotas, investment in particular production capacities and liberalization activities within and outside energy sector.