Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni reassured US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy during a meeting in Rome last week that while a final decision hasn’t been taken, her government is favoring an exit from its role in China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative, according to people present at the talks. Italy signed onto the infrastructure initiative in 2019 when Giuseppe Conte was premier, becoming the only Group of Seven country to become part of the deal. Participation will automatically renew in 2024 unless Rome actively exits the agreement. China’s Belt and Road Initiative has funded $900 billion in infrastructure projects globally.

We focused on suicides and hospitalisations for self-harm among 17 countries.  Both indicators look worrying for girls. Suicide rates have been falling overall, but girls—who kill themselves less often than other groups—are an exception. Among girls aged 10-19, suicide rates rose from an average of 3.0 per 100,000 people in 2003 to 3.5 per 100,000 in 2020. The rate among boys, although higher at 6.1 per 100,000 population, has barely changed. Girls engage in more non-fatal self-harm, like cutting, than boys do. This measure shows even steeper increases. For teenage girls, rates of hospitalisation for self-harm have climbed since 2010 in all 11 countries with available data, by an average of 143%. Boys’ average rise was 49%.

We measure the impact of a major event in the advancement and dissemination of Generative AI technology, namely, the public release of ChatGPT, on equity returns at the firm level. Our key finding is that the arrival of ChatGPT had a sizable positive effect on the value of firms whose labor forces are more exposed to Generative AI and related Large Language Models (LLMs). Firms with higher exposure to the release of ChatGPT, as measured by the exposure of their labor force to being made more productive by tools like ChatGPT, outperform firms with lower exposures by over 40 basis points in daily excess returns during the two weeks following its release. Notably, these return differences are not only due to differences in labor force exposures across industries. Returns of firms with high labor force exposures also outperform firms with low exposures by about 40 basis points daily in industry-neutral portfolios.

It is banks with the least stick deposits that should have seen the biggest declines in market capitalization. My proxies for deposit stickiness are limited, given the data that I have access to, but I used deposit growth over the last five years (2017-2022) as my  measure of stickiness (with higher deposit growth translating into less stickiness): The results are surprisingly decisive, with the biggest market capitalization losses, in percentage terms, in banks that have seen the most growth in deposits in the last five years. To the extent that this is correlated with bank size (smaller banks should be more likely to see deposit growth), it is by no means conclusive evidence, but it is consistent with the argument that the stickiness of deposits is the key to unlocking this crisis.

Bank credit conditions are tightening, and the negative impact on the economy from the ongoing banking crisis is going to be significant because small banks account for 30% of assets in the banking sector and 40% of lending, and small banks are facing three headwinds from 1) higher funding costs, 2) lower asset prices because of higher interest rates, and 3) more regulatory scrutiny.

Banks’ cross-border claims fell by $1.4 trillion in Q4 2022, slowing the year-on- year (yoy) growth rate to 6%. Both lower bank credit (i.e., loans and holdings of debt securities) and a drop in the market value of banks’ derivatives and other residual instruments contributed to the decline. Global cross-border bank credit (i.e., loans and holdings of debt securities) fell by $749 billion, or $400 billion on a seasonally adjusted basis. Euro-denominated credit declined by $231 billion after expanding earlier in the year. Cross-border bank credit to emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) fell by $179 billion in Q4 2022 due to weaker dollar lending. Credit to the Asia-Pacific region contracted the most. The BIS global liquidity indicators (GLIs) show a large contraction in dollar credit to non-banks in EMDEs in Q4 2022. Dollar credit to EMDEs shrank by 4%, a rate last seen during the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–09.

Barring a last-minute legal challenge, the Trump-era policy known as Title 42 will expire at 11:59 p.m. Eastern on Thursday. It was put in place three years ago under the premise of preventing the spread of Covid-19. Border agents, state and local officials and even President Biden’s top aides in Washington are all bracing for the arrival of tens of thousands of migrants in the coming days. Already, people have begun crossing into U.S. border towns, anticipating the end of Title 42, which since 2020 has allowed the government to swiftly expel citizens of several countries back to Mexico. Three cities in Texas — Brownsville, Laredo and El Paso — have declared a state of emergency. No one is certain what will happen after Thursday. The federal government is expecting as many as 13,000 migrants each day immediately after the measure expires, up from about 6,000 on a typical day.

Republicans stand to make much bigger gains in the census in 2030. That’s the news from the American Redistricting Project’s forecast, based on extrapolations from 2022 Census Bureau estimates. ARP shows California, which gained seats in every census from 1850 to 2000 and lost just one seat in 2020, losing five seats in 2030. It shows New York losing three seats and Illinois two seats. It also shows large-scale flight to low-tax states, with Texas and Florida each projected to gain four House seats in 2030 and Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, and Delaware one each. In 2016, the balance between the consistently Trump and consistently Democratic electoral votes was precisely even, 232-232. The 2020 reapportionment would have changed that just slightly to 235-231, with the switching states dropping from 74 to 72 electoral votes.

The average cost of homeowners coverage has reached $1,900 a year nationwide, but it’s $4,000 a year in New Orleans and about $5,000 a year in Miami, according to Policygenius, an online insurance marketplace. After recent years of paying out claims for about 20 disasters a year with damages of over $1 billion, a sixfold increase from the 1980s, insurers are getting serious about new pricing models that incorporate the costs of a warming climate. Across the United States, premiums jumped 12 percent from 2021 to 2022, according to Policygenius estimates, and they are expected to continue to rise.  Ten insurers have gone belly up in Florida in just the last two years. And in many cases, insurers are pulling back in risky areas, leaving state-backed insurance plans holding the bag.

Job growth is slowing, from a ~325K/month pace to a 225K/month pace. Here is something truly amazing, the employment-population ratio for prime age workers is 0.3pp above where it was prior to COVID. This reflects a combination of the unemployment rate and the labor force participation rate. We're now well into the era of the mystery of the extra workers. Both payroll & household employment are well above CBO's pre-pandemic forecast, which is especially amazing given that the population is smaller than they expected due to premature deaths and missing immigrants. [This] employment situation not consistent with inflation falling from its 4.5% pace to a <3%. Overall Fed has a bit less reason to worry about rate hikes, I'll bet more coming.

PacWest Bancorp led a rebound across US regional banking stocks after a bruising week of losses, amid signals that some of the selling has been overdone. PacWest’s shares gained as much as 40% in US trading on Friday, while Western Alliance Bancorp rose 30%. Charles Schwab Corp., whose massive banking unit has been a source of investor concern, added 4.7% after an update showed outflows slowed for a third month.  The pessimism became so indiscriminate that Pacific West Bancorp, a small lender based outside Portland, Oregon, felt impelled to issue a statement to remind everyone that it’s “a separate entity with no affiliation” to the similarly named PacWest.

Here is a data point that is hard for Russia to fake: pollution emitted by its factories and detectable by satellites in outer space. Rather than showing an economy that suffered an initial shock and has since stabilized, this data reveals an industrial sector that, for the most part, has declined even further as the war has continued. This unusual bird’s-eye view of Russia’s economy comes courtesy of the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5P satellite, launched in 2017. To monitor the release of pollutants into the atmosphere, the satellite has a cutting-edge Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument, known as Tropomi, which can detect gases such as nitrogen dioxide, ozone, formaldehyde, methane and others. Over the past six months, urban pollution in Moscow and St. Petersburg has begun to increase (partially a reflection of traffic) but pollution in industrial regions has continued to drop, off 1.2% over the six months ended in April and down 6.2% over the past year—more than during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic. By contrast, Russia’s official measure showed industrial production rose 1.2% in March from a year earlier.

Remember the rise of the right? First Brexit, then Trump, then a wave of rightwing populism broke over Europe. There were dozens of news articles on the “rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment.”  Except it turns out that in the west, 2016 was a high water mark for such views. This is true of almost all western countries, but the most dramatic shifts have come in the US, Canada and, in particular, Britain, where the share of people saying there should be strict limits — if not an outright ban — on immigration has more than halved from 66 per cent on the eve of the EU referendum to 31 per cent last year. We see similar shifts in the general public’s attitude towards members of other ethnic groups and faiths. Just 3 per cent of Americans and 2 per cent of Britons say they would not want someone of a different race as a neighbour, with only Sweden scoring lower across the developed world. Discomfort with people from other faiths falls to just 3 and 1 per cent in the US and the UK respectively.

Assembly theory started when Lee Cronin of the University of Glasgow in Scotland asked why, given the astronomical number of ways to combine different atoms, nature makes some molecules and not others. It’s one thing to say that an object is possible according to the laws of physics; it’s another to say there’s an actual pathway for making it from its component parts. “Assembly theory was developed to capture my intuition that complex molecules can’t just emerge into existence because the combinatorial space is too vast,” Cronin said. Sara Walker of Arizona State University, meanwhile, had been wrestling with the question of life’s origin — an issue closely related to making complex molecules, because those in living organisms are far too complex to have been assembled by chance. Something, Walker mused, must have guided that process even before Darwinian selection took over. Called assembly theory, the idea underpinning the pair’s strategy has even grander aims. As laid out in a recent series of publications, it attempts to explain why apparently unlikely things, such as you and me, even exist at all. And it seeks that explanation not, in the usual manner of physics, in timeless physical laws, but in a process that imbues objects with histories and memories of what came before them.

We find that billionaires responded strongly to geographical differences in estate taxes by increasingly moving to states without estate taxes, especially as they grew older. Our estimated elasticity implies that $80.7 billion of 2001 Forbes 400 wealth escaped estate taxation in the subsequent years due to billionaires moving away from estate tax states. Yet despite the high elasticity of geographical location with respect to the estate tax, we find that for most states the benefit of additional revenue from the estate tax exceeds the cost of forgone income tax revenue by a significant margin. Adoption of an estate tax implies a one-time tax revenue gain for the state when a resident billionaire dies, but it also reduces its billionaire population and thus their flow of income tax revenue over remaining lifetimes. For the average state the benefit of additional revenue from the estate tax exceeds the cost of forgone income tax revenue by 31 percent. While the cost-benefit ratio varies substantially across states, most states that currently do not have estate taxes would experience revenue gains if they adopted estate taxes. California, which has the highest personal income top tax rate, is the main exception In California, the cost-benefit ratio is 1.45, indicating that if California adopted the estate tax on billionaires, the state would lose revenues by a significant margin. (Currently, California does not have an estate tax.) An earlier version of this research was cited in my chapter The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies in Oxford University Press's United States Income, Wealth, Consumption, and Inequality

The quarterly investment flows are pretty lumpy, so to measure market share I’ll use trailing-12-month data. Over the 12 months ending in March, 29.9% of US venture investment flowed to Greater Silicon Valley — down from more than 40% in 2018 and 2019. The combined share of the next three VC destinations held more or less steady, while the share for the rest of the US rose from 29.9% at the end of 2019 to 38.6% as of March. It looks a bit like the “rise of the rest” egged on by venture capitalist and AOL co-founder Steve Case, only it’s happening amid an overall collapse in VC investment that’s probably not exactly what he had in mind.

It was big news a few years ago when, for the first time in more than a century, California’s population shrank. The small but still startling decline in 2020 was driven by Covid-19 deaths and falling immigration and birth rates, and it was something of a turning point for a huge state founded on rapid growth and long accustomed to it.  The state’s population dipped yet again in 2022, for the third year in a row. The number of people living in California fell by 138,443 last year, to 38.94 million, according to state data released this week. The primary driver of the state’s population loss has been Californians moving to other states, like Texas, Nevada, Idaho or Oregon, according to Hans Johnson, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. Between July 2021 and July 2022, the net movement out of California was a record 407,000 people, he said. “In the past, California had continued to gain college graduates and people who had higher incomes, even as we were losing a very large number of less educated adults,” he said. “And then in the most recent couple years we’ve seen an outflow for every group.”

PacWest Bancorp said core deposits have increased since March and confirmed it’s in talks with several potential investors, seeking to calm markets after a 60% stock rout that made it the new focal point of concern over the health of US regional lenders. Western Alliance Bancorp also said Wednesday that it had seen no unusual deposit outflows and reaffirmed its guidance deposits would rise quarter-over-quarter. Yet the stock slumped 18% in premarket trading, set to add to a 20% drop this week. Comerica Inc. and Zions Bancorp were also poised to extend steep weekly losses.

Small and medium-sized businesses have been underperforming in the stock market since the SVB collapse, suggesting investors are worried about the negative impact of the ongoing credit crunch on middle market companies, see chart below.

Sun Xin, now an assistant professor in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, will take up a new appointment at the Beijing International Centre for Mathematical Research at his alma mater, Peking University, although the university did not specify Sun’s new role. At least 1,400 US-based ethnic Chinese scientists switched their affiliation in 2021 from American to Chinese institutions, according to a joint report by academics from Harvard and Princeton universities and MIT. Life scientist Yan Ning, for example, made headlines in China when she gave up a permanent post at Princeton. After five years in the US, the structural biologist returned to China last year to establish and serve as dean of the Shenzhen Medical Academy of Research and Translation.