Economics of Transition and Institutional Change最新文献

We estimate the effect of spending on festivities on various economic outcomes in an IV framework. The estimates show that ceremonial spending causes reduction in food expenditure. Households with higher spending on festivities are more likely to borrow money. Moreover, children are more likely to miss school in such households. One possible explanation for ceremonial expenditure despite its high economic cost is reliance on informal networks. Using the control function approach, we show that ceremonial spending is the means to maintain these networks. Moreover, ceremonial spending reduces the household's income variation. This suggests that these networks may serve the role of informal insurance. We also distinguish between events that are intertemporarily flexible (such as weddings) and intertemporarily inflexible (such as funerals). Intertemporarily inflexible ceremonial spending is less income elastic and thus may present the biggest financial stress to households.

By adapting a well-known model in the literature, the current paper sharpens the theoretical predictions on how competition intensity and institutional ownership interact to influence corporate innovation decisions, and adopts data from Chinese listed firms to empirically test the validity of two potential mechanisms. The split-share reform of 2004–2005, whose timing and speed were largely beyond the firms' control, is used as a quasi-natural experiment to address the potential endogeneity of institutional share. Similar to the existing results, we find support for the career concern mechanism rather than the lazy manager mechanism. But in addition to the complementary effects between institutional share and competition intensity on corporate innovation documented in their work, our findings also imply that competition discourages innovation when the share of institutional investors is low but encourages innovation when the institutional share is high. The opposite effects of competition on innovation with or without institutional shares is accounted for by the negative correlation between competition and innovation success, which is an assumption in our theoretical model that departs from the existing literature, but fits the reality of China's economic transition. Additional evidence relating listed firms' managerial turnover to their institutional shares is also in support of the career concern mechanism. Combined with the substantial increase in innovation after the split-share reform, these findings demonstrate the strong positive role of institutional investors in encouraging innovation, but also offer more insight into the complex process that determines corporate innovation, especially where ownership structure is still in flux.

‘What exactly’ can countries do to initiate an episode of growth surge? I identify 132 episodes of growth surges occurring between 1980 and 2010 in 117 countries. I find that disproportionate improvements in macroeconomic stability and external factors and endowments favour a higher probability of growth surge. They are followed by structural reforms, investments, labour and productivity, trade diversification and quality and, lastly, by institutions. Countries can maximize the likelihood of igniting growth surges if they jointly achieve significant improvements in macroeconomic stability and external conditions and endowments. Also, macroeconomic stability and to some extent, external factors and endowments may be considered as dominant strategies to ignite a growth surge, as no improvements in these determinants, generally constraint the other determinants to have a smaller effect on growth surges. There is a notable difference between decades, regions and levels of development, which calls for careful tailoring of policies aiming at igniting growth surges to local conditions.

Over the past millennium, Confucian culture has prevailed in China as a typical informal institution, especially its emphasis on human feelings and interpersonal connections (guanxi) that coincides with the incentives for corruption. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that Confucian culture can generate positive effects on the formation of bureaucratic corruption in China. Using the variation in the number of jinshi across Chinese cities as a proxy for the degree of Confucian culture, and using the number of bribery recipients to measure corruption, we find that regions with more jinshi are associated with more bribe recipients. To address the endogeneity, we employ the Confucian sages in a given city as our instrumental variable. The instrumented results are consistent with our baseline claim. The findings remain robust after using a variety of tests, including using the percentage of bribe recipients instead of the number of bribe recipients, using the number of Confucius temples, Confucian academies and chaste women as alternative Confucian cultural measures, and controlling the impact of the North–South differences. In addition, we find the shock of foreign culture can mitigate the positive effect of Confucian culture on corruption. Finally, mechanism shows that the effect of Confucian culture on corruption can be attributed to the attitudes towards income unfairness, the excessive pursuit of vanity and the emphasis on interpersonal connections.

We develop an open-city model in which the incentive for a local government to shut down zombie firms depends on the capacity of the most efficient firms in the city to re-employ the displaced workers in competition with the efficient firms in other cities. The model predicts that the local government has a greater incentive to shut down zombie firms when the city has better access to technology that enables the efficient firms to expand and re-employ displaced workers. Data from Chinese cities validate the prediction. Our developed model adds to the understandings of governments' roles in China's zombie firm problems and provides a more feasible solution for reducing zombie firms.

The aim of this paper is to examine the relationships between financial development (FD), economic complexity and country stability. To achieve this objective, this paper applies a finite mixture model to a sample of 92 developing countries over the period 1995–2018. The study posits that the effect of FD on economic complexity differs across groups of countries with similar but unobserved characteristics. The study finds that the effect of FD on economic complexity varies across four classes of countries, which differ according to their level of economic, political and financial stability. Furthermore, the study argues that stable countries are more likely to be in class 1, including more performing countries – that is, the group of countries where FD spurs economic complexity. This finding remains consistent even when alternative measures of FD and economic complexity are considered. Hence, efforts by developing countries to undertake sound reforms to reduce economic, political and financial risks could help leverage the benefits of FD in fostering the development of sophisticated and complex economies.

This paper uses labour force survey data to analyse the dynamics of job tenure in seven transition economies of Europe and a comparator country (Türkiye) for an average 13 years per country during the period 1994–2020. The country-specific age-period-cohort decomposition demonstrates that the job tenure of the cohort of workers entering the labour market in the 2000s is 4–9 years shorter than that of workers who started working in the 1970s. This difference is at least twice as large as the difference in job tenure observed among workers from the same cohorts in European Union countries. These trends in tenure persist after accounting for changes in cohort composition, but they are significantly attenuated by controlling for differences in individual worker characteristics. These results suggest that the evolution of tenure in the transition economies of Europe may still be driven by the transition-induced structural change processes in the labour market.

A large body of literature argues that macroeconomic stability is a prerequisite for the sustainable development of economies. Moreover, it is also recognized that the most dynamic economies do not necessarily grow faster than others in good times, but they do manage to be more resilient and limit the extent of a downturn in bad times. Therefore, this study draws on this theoretical framework to examine the effect of macroeconomic instability on access to electricity in developing countries. We find that macroeconomic instability reduces access to electricity for the total urban and rural populations. In addition, macroeconomic instability increases the access gap between urban and rural populations in terms of electricity access. However, the adverse effect of macroeconomic instability on access to electricity is more pronounced in oil exporting countries. However, democracy mitigates this deleterious effect of macroeconomic instability on access to electricity. Based on these results, several policy recommendations are discussed in this paper.

The paper constructs a theoretical framework suggesting a moderating impact of product market competition in determining the relationship between family ownership/control and innovation. We argue that the elimination of ‘career concerns’ of CEOs in firms with greater family share may explain the mechanism followed to encourage R&D investments. Empirical testing of the hypotheses is performed using data from the Indian manufacturing industry for the period 2001–2018. The findings suggest that the domestic product market competition complements the relationship between family ownership/control and R&D investments. This indicates that family firms tend to invest more in R&D as domestic product competition increases. The data suggest that the effect of family involvement on innovation is due to the reduction of managerial career concerns, as we find that managerial turnover (conditional on poor performance) is lower if family involvement is higher. This effect is significantly stronger under higher degrees of competition.

In 2014, the Austrian bank Hypo Group Alpe Adria was purchased by the American banking group Advent International, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and re-branded as Addiko bank. In this paper, I explore how this purchase of Addiko Bank by an international multilateral development bank (MDB) affected exporting firms in Croatia. Using a difference-in-differences specification to investigate whether there was a meaningful effect of this turnover on firm performance, I find that the turnover of Addiko bank led to a $160,000 decrease in loans taken out by firms. However, this effect seems to occur immediately after the turnover, and vanishes over time. This effect is seen among domestically-owned firms and non-manufacturing firms, but not multinational affiliates and manufacturing firms. Additionally, I find no effect of this turnover on firm revenues. These results indicate that after an initial period of turmoil, the intervention by EBRD and Advent International had no lasting negative effects on firms in Croatia. The intervention by a MDB can help reform a financial sector and will not necessarily lead to detrimental effects at the micro-level.