Volume 14, Number 4, 2022

EN:

In Canada, COVID-19 pandemic triggered exceptional monetary policy interventions by the central bank, which in March 2020 made multiple unscheduled cuts to its target rate. In this paper we assess the extent to which Bank of Canada interventions affected the determinants of the yield curve. In particular, we apply Functional Principal Component Analysis to the term structure of interest rates. We find that, during the pandemic, the long-run dependence of level and slope components of the yield curve is unchanged with respect to previous months, although the shape of the mean yield curve completely changed after target rate cuts. Bank of Canada was effective in lowering the whole yield curve and correcting the inverted hump of previous months, but it was not able to reduce the exposure to already existing long-run risks.

EN:

Despite the relevant role attributed to education on marital outcomes, literature does not show a generalized consensus regarding a positive or negative effect from education on marital decisions with findings differing across countries and linked to differences in several factors such as the labour market conditions, social policies and strictness of divorce legislation. In this paper I investigate the impact of education on marriage dissolution exploiting a change in the length of compulsory education in Mexico in 1993 as an instrument for education. The federal government increased compulsory education from completion of primary school, sixth grade, to completion of secondary school, ninth grade, at a national level. In the first part of the analysis, theprobit models show education is significant and negatively correlated to the probability of marital breakdown. An additional year of education is associated with a decrease between 0.6 and 0.9 percentage points in the probability of marital disruption forthe 2002-2012 period. However, the results using the instrumental variables methodology indicate an additional year of schooling has no effect on the probability of marriage dissolution. This finding demonstrates the relationship between education and divorce is not causal in Mexico, suggesting although higher levels of education are an undeniable trait observed in non-broken marriages, it is not education by itself one of the mechanisms leading to better marriage outcomes in a Latin American country.

EN:

This paper estimates production functions with factor interaction for annual US output from 1949 to 2013 including energy Btu input with capital and labor. Interactions between the three factors are parsimoniously introduced to the error correction estimates. The findings are as follows: Fixed capital assets successfully control for technological change. Interaction between capital and energy reveal them to be very weak substitutes or complements. Factor price elasticities involving the labor force are strong. Labor is overpaid by 39% relative to its declining productivity, while energy is underpaid by 16% relative to its increasing productivity. The own wage effect is nearly elastic implying wage increases are met with nearly opposite percentage decreases in cost minimizing labor input.

EN:

The purpose of this paper is to analyze empirically the contribution of tertiary level education by fields on economic growth for 29 developed and 25 developing countries over the period 1998-2012. Using the two-step System Generalized Method of Moments (GMM), we find that in the developed countries graduates from science faculties make the most contribution to economic growth, but in developing countries graduates from education, humanities and social sciences faculties contributed the most to economic growth. In addition, we focus on the effect of distribution of tertiary level graduates among different fields on economic growth and our results imply that, having human capital from different fields in both developed and developing countries positively affects economic growth.