Economics of Transition and Institutional Change最新文献

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.

The paper studies the effects of abolishing fees in the public childcare facilities on the maternal labor supply and provides evidence from a post-Soviet developing country, Armenia, characterized with low female labor force participation and high unemployment. The reform unexpectedly introduced only in the capital city created a natural experiment which we investigate using difference-in-differences methodology. The statistically significant increase of the childcare service utilization is shown to be affecting only marginally the maternal labor supply as measured by intention-to-treat effects. The positive results are more robust when only women actually utilizing the services are considered, but all the effects obtained fade out already in the second year after the reform. The robustness of our findings is tested by a series of placebo regressions.

We show that the heavy use of legal services relative to output in the US is not a peculiarity of the country but applies to common law countries in general. It can likely be attributed largely to better ability to contract and adapt to changes in the environment. Yet common law also opens significantly more room for rent seeking by lawyers than civil law. Thereby the costs could outweigh the benefits. In supporting this last thesis, we control for other factors besides common law favouring legal services, including real output per capita, openness, and ease of entry into the legal profession.

Parental gender preferences may affect partnership decisions and as a result lead to early life disadvantages. We study these preferences in five post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, a region with strong traditional gender norms and persisting inequalities between women and men in labour market outcomes. Using subsamples of census from Belarus, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Russia around 2000 and 2010, we follow Dahl and Moretti (2008), The demand for sons, to examine the effect of the gender of the first-born child(ren) on fertility decisions and relationship stability of their parents. We only find strong evidence of ‘boy preferences’ in fertility decisions in the cases of Romania and Russia. However, unlike Dahl and Moretti (2008), The demand for sons, for the US, we cannot confirm a relationship between the children's gender and parental partnership decisions. This is the case for all examined Central and Eastern European countries, as well as for a number of countries from Western Europe. The cases of Romania and Russia raise questions about other potential consequences of the documented gender preferences. We argue that our approach can be applied more broadly to identify other countries characterised by parental gender preferences, and to motivate further examination of different forms of gender driven early life disadvantages.

This study examines the impact of income mobility on internal migration across prefectures in China. We use income intergenerational persistence to evaluate income mobility and find that migrants prefer cities with higher income mobility. We further use the instrumental variable estimation and a set of robustness tests to verify the reliability of our findings. The influence is larger among women, the elderly, and the less-educated, while the economic prosperity of destinations could relatively offset the negative effect of lower income mobility on migration. Additionally, higher mobility not only attracts but also retains migrants, hence benefiting the local economy. Through further exploration, we find that the real migration influencing factor underlying the higher income mobility is the higher job mobility, indicating that the real pursuit of Chinese migrants is the increased access to suitable job opportunities.