Economics of Transition and Institutional Change最新文献

This article documents the existence of an anchoring bias in the pricing and acceptance of takeover bids in a blockholder regime where the mandatory bid rule applies. Our analysis, performed on the Romanian market for corporate control, shows that the 52-week high price of the target and the pricing of direct privatisations conducted by the government are strong predictors of both bid premium and outcome. The tender decision depends also on the scope of expropriation perceived by minority shareholders. Our results suggest that stronger capital market discipline is also important for insuring an effective protection of minority shareholders.

This study examines the impact of Internet use on healthy food consumption, captured by the share of healthy food expenditure in total household food expenditure. The inverse probability weighted regression adjustment and Tobit models combined with the Lewbel approach help address the selection bias issues and estimate data of 334,229 households collected by the National Economics Survey in Indonesia. The results show that Internet use significantly reduces household healthy food consumption, and the effect on rural households is larger than that on urban households. Internet use diversity, measured by the number of Internet activities and services people access, also significantly reduces healthy food consumption. The disaggregated analyses reveal that with incomes increasing from low (quartile 1) to high (quartile 4), the impacts of Internet use on healthy food consumption for urban households become positive at quartile 2 and the effects increase monotonously. In comparison, the impacts of Internet use on healthy food consumption for rural households are negative at the different income quartiles.

Institutions are regularly blamed for poor economic performance, and Latin America is often used as the prime example of the potentially damaging effects of inadequate institutions on economic development. In this paper, annual data is constructed over the past two centuries for seven Latin American countries and for few advanced settler economies to (1) test for the influence of institutions on innovations, education and fixed investment using instruments for institutions; and (2) simulate the growth path of the Latin American countries using the institutional path of today's most successful settler economies. Findings show that institutions have been statistically highly significant determinants of economic development; however, they can only explain a small fraction of the widening income gap between the Latin American countries and the most successful settler economies over the past two centuries, suggesting that complementary explanations for economic development are called for.

We examine the relationship between mining activity and participation and positioning in the global value chain in 74 developing countries from 1995–2018. Mining activity can impact countries' participation and especially their positioning in this chain through the changes it induces in the industrial and institutional structure of countries. We use the event study method, taking the activation of mines as the event to be studied, with a study time horizon of 5 years. Our relatively robust results show that mining activity harms positioning in the global value chain through specialisation towards start-of-the-chain industries. The type of mineral extracted, and the mode of extraction plays an essential role in this relationship. Institutional quality, level of openness, and geographical position of countries condition our results.

In this paper, I examine whether exposure to authoritarian rule, which often focuses on preventing the emergence of pro-environmental groups that might threaten regime stability, persists after regime collapse and the onset of democratisation. Empirically, I exploit the post-World War II division of Germany into two states, one of which became a liberal democracy and the other a Soviet-style autocracy, in a geographic regression discontinuity design. I show that districts from the former East have lower climate policy equilibrium levels, which means that more climate-ambitious political parties are less likely to receive strong electoral support. Crucially, these effects are independent of East Germans' preferences over other political conflicts, suggesting that authoritarian rule had a direct and persistent effect on environmental attitudes. Moreover, I show that the authoritarian legacy also manifests itself in increased polarisation over climate change policies, which, combined with lower demand for such measures, makes the former East Germany a breeding ground for climate-sceptical political parties.

We model and investigate differences in factor demand by private and state-owned enterprises in Vietnam, an economy in transition, to market-driven growth. We postulate that state firms, who have privileged access to financial capital and face lower borrowing costs, choose technologies that are capital intensive and demand more skilled labour, a complementary input, while private firms rely on low-technology methods and less-skilled labour. Propositions generated by the model are supported by analysis using data from Vietnam's enterprise census. Because the private sector is by far the larger employer, a more level capital market playing field would likely raise aggregate demand for skills, thereby strengthening incentives to invest in higher education.