Journal of Government and Economics最新文献

The objective of this work is to analyze the impact of fiscal decentralization on the behavior of Brazilian municipal policymakers. This work uses the first three cutoffs of the transfer rules of the Municipal Participation Fund (FPM) and applies a regression discontinuity designs (RDD) to capture the effects that have impacted municipal budget rates from 2013 to 2016. The comportment hypothesis is that transfer gains can generate (a) perverse incentives, if the gains are earmarked for personnel and administrative expenses or if they decrease revenue, or (b) beneficial incentives, if the main gains are spent on education or health. The results found for the estimates of the data panel model suggest that an increase in exogenous revenue generates a significant increase only in spending on administrative and sports and leisure functions and that the possible channel for this increase in expenses should be aimed at increasing the number of employees with commissioned position. These results indicate that the transfers generate only perverse incentives. This article explores how local managers allocate their resources according to their additional budget. Unlike the other works, we look for the mayor's behavior in relation to spending on the employment of commissioned civil servants, which can lead to perverse incentives.

I measure the effect of contract changes on selected fishery resources in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM). I apply the difference-in-difference approach to commercial fishery panel data. My cross-sectional units use the red snapper and grouper-tilefish fisheries in the GoM as treatment groups and the fisheries from same group of species in the U.S. South Atlantic (SA) as the control group. The results show that the grouper-tilefish individual fishing quota has improved commercial fishing safety in the GoM. The modest effect from the red snapper individual fishing quota program seems to be due to interrelatedness and economies of scope stemming from the multispecies nature of the reef fish fishery in the GoM.

The U.S.-China conflict is threatening continued global economic prosperity and this has inspired a variety of predictions and prescriptions on the future global order. This paper proposes a light model of global governance not only to form international agreements across countries but also to smooth U.S.-China relations. There are two elements of the light model: 1) A transparency-enhancing process for domestic policy making and 2) A meta-regime for global order that only requires a minimal set of initial agreement among states for managing economic conflict while encouraging cooperation. There are two main reasons behind my proposal. First, in the economic domain there fewer global public goods than is widely believed. Second, international cooperation should be restricted to true beggar-thy-neighbor policies, rather than other kinds of cross-border spillovers.

We investigate the causal effect of government spending on real output conditional on economic freedom. Using data for 161 countries from 2000 to 2019 results show, first, that the size of the fiscal multiplier is inversely related to the level of freedom and, second, countries with the mean level of economic freedom of the sample (6.9) had a multiplier of around 1. Developed countries are characterized by high levels of freedom and a fiscal multiplier lower than 1 while developing countries exhibit a fiscal multiplier higher than 1 and low levels of freedom. The differences between countries with low and high economic freedom in their fiscal multipliers are asymmetric, in fiscal contractions are higher. We conclude that countries should strengthen institutions to promote economic freedom and development.

This paper studies the effect of settlement and mortality on the growth of African financial markets using the mediation of institutions over the period 1996–2017. A comparative result is based on two types of data bases. Firstly, the Acemoglu et al.’s (2001) database and the Albouy's (2006) database. Two samples including 29 for the settler mortality rate and 33 for the settler rate have been chosen. Applying ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, we find that institutions exert a negative and significant influence on financial market growth in African countries where settler mortality rates were high while in countries where settlers settled, the interaction effect of settler sedentarization rate and institutions is positive and significant. These results remain robust to several tests conducted. As a key recommendation, we suggest that African governments put in place new institutional governance policies that take into account the current economic context to further improve the growth of their financial markets.

China's recent economic growth, along with rising corruption, challenges the widespread sanding wheels view of corruption. The lack of a general theory linking corruption and development prevents us from disentangling China's paradox. This paper aims to fill in this gap by providing the changing wheels hypothesis, which conceptualizes the relationship between corruption and growth from an institutional perspective. This theory reconciles previous conflicting findings on corruption and explains the changing role of corruption in the process of China's recent development.

The studies on monetary policy highlight that a contractionary policy reduces a firm's access to external funds. However, it is unknown whether it affects men and women equally. In this scenario, the aim of this paper is twofold. First, to investigate the differential effect of monetary policy on female- and male-run firms. We find that a contractionary monetary policy widens credit market discrimination, i.e., female-owned and -managed firms receive less funds during a tight monetary policy period. This effect reverses during the expansionary period, i.e., female-run firms are more likely to receive funds than male-run firms. This result implies that during a tight policy period, financial institutions resort to credit rationing and women are the victims of this practice, whereas during an expansionary period, banks are flushed with money and they channelize these excess funds to female-owned firms. Our results also indicate that the adverse effects of the policy fall heavily on small and medium enterprises. Second, to study the impact of gender equality on monetary policy-led credit market discrimination. We find that credit market discrimination during the contractionary period is relatively lower (higher) in a country where gender equality (gap) is higher. This is another evidence that women receive less external funds not based on their lack of repayment ability but rather on society's predetermined notions about their incapability.

The implications of a binding minimum wage law on employment have been the subject of a lively and ongoing debate. Estimation of employment effects may be hindered by the non-random manner in which minimum wage laws are created. To overcome this, we explore the employment implications of the minimum wage in the US restaurant industry through an approach that exploits variation in compliance, as opposed to legislation. In the five US states without state minimum wages, violations of the US federal minimum wage are shown to be associated with decreased employment in the restaurant industry in the time period around the federal minimum wage increases of 2007 through 2009. The most robust specification shows an elasticity of employment with respect to unpaid wages of -0.233. Robustness checks use earlier time periods to show results do not reflect seasonal trends, vary the group of industries used as controls, and only use 2007 to show estimates are not confounded by a unique effect of the Great Recession on the restaurant industry.