European Economic Experts Panel

 

 

The pandemic has led to a big shift to working from home among people in occupations where it is possible for the jobs or some part of them to be done remotely. There has been much debate about the extent to which such forms of working (or a hybrid model, with some hours done at home and some on business premises) will continue over the longer term. Key questions include the potential impact on employees’ productivity and their job satisfaction, and whether the career trajectories of women and men may be affected differently by a substantial increase in working from home.

 

 

With the emergence of a new strain of the virus that causes Covid-19 re-opening debates about the economic impact of the pandemic, the success of efforts to achieve global distribution of vaccines and the value of travel bans, we invited our panels to express their views on these issues. In early December, we asked the experts whether they agreed or disagreed with the following statements, and, if so, how strongly and with what degree of confidence:

 

 

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was recently awarded to David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, ‘for his empirical contributions to labour economics’, and to Joshua Angrist of MIT and Guido Imbens of Stanford University ‘for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships’. As has become an annual tradition at the IGM, we invited our panels to express their views on the work of the new laureates. We asked the experts whether they agreed or disagreed with the following statements, and, if so, how strongly and with what degree of confidence:

 

 

This week's European Economic Experts Panel statements:

A) The current combination of US fiscal and monetary policy poses a serious risk of prolonged higher inflation.

B) Current EU and national fiscal policy plans are likely to leave European output below potential a year from now. 

Peter Neary, a member of IGM’s panel of European economic experts, passed away in June 2021 – a sad loss for the whole economic research community. On VoxEU, Patrick Honohan of Trinity College Dublin, a fellow Irishman and member of the European panel, co-authored an appreciation of Peter, whom he and Cormac o’Grada describe as ‘one of the profession’s European leaders, both in terms of the depth and range of his research and his role as a wizard of organizational development’.