Economics of Transition and Institutional Change最新文献

The judicial institutions of a country impact corporate litigation. From 2003 to 2010, China allowed the appointed secretaries of the Committee of Political and Legislative Affairs to hold concurrent administrative roles (CAR) as directors of the Police Departments in their respective provinces. Such a policy provides a natural experiment on the change of the judicial environment. In this paper, we employ a Staggered Difference-in-Differences method to study the effect of changes in judicial institution on corporate litigation using data on publicly traded corporations from 1998 to 2010. We find corporations engage in fewer corporate litigations during the time period of China's CAR policy (i.e., when judicial justice was likely weaker). Further analysis shows that the probability of winning lawsuits increases for non-state-owned enterprises. Mechanism analysis shows that the CAR policy heightens the uncertainty of economic policies by changing companies' perceptions of the status of political and legal institutions in the judicial system, thereby reducing corporate judicial participation.

The paper studies the effect of household poverty on child labour (CL) and explores how CL affects working children's health using an instrumental variable strategy. After correcting for endogeneity, we find that household poverty significantly contributes to the incidence of CL whilst increasing the working hour of children increases the likelihood that working children would sustain wounds/cuts, get skin diseases, or get burned by fire, signifying the adverse effect of CL on child health in Ghana. These findings are robust to different approaches to addressing endogeneity. The study recommends that while it is imperative to implement policies to reduce children's engagement in all hazardous forms of child work and to protect the health of working children, government policies that address poverty might also be necessary.

The impact of a firm's origins on its strategic decision-making has attracted scholarly attention in recent years. Focusing on firms' origins, this paper explores the relationship between the privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and family business internationalization. Based on data from listed family businesses in China from 2003 to 2022, we find that compared to entrepreneurial family businesses, restructured family businesses have a lower internationalization degree. Moreover, high trade policy uncertainty strengthens the negative relationship between the privatization of SOEs and family business internationalization, while high family involvement plays a weakening role. Several robustness tests later, the findings remain valid. This study introduces the firm's origin as a vital determinant, which may contribute to the prior studies on family business internationalization. Besides, this paper complements research on the economic consequences of the privatization of SOEs in China. Finally, this paper may help Chinese family businesses actively participate in the international cycle to achieve competitive advantage and high-quality development.

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the social contract (SC) in MENA based on a simple model synthesizing three main characteristics of a SC linking governments and citizens: Participation, Protection, and Provision. Using this 3-P framework, we focus on the role of provision and protection in determining citizen participation, a question that drew much attention following the recent economic and social developments in MENA. We compare our characterization of the SC in MENA and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and find robust empirical evidence that, in MENA, the benefits provided to citizens through improved delivery of basic services have come at the cost of impaired participation. We also find that digital transformation, a potential channel through which the SC may improve, has an inversely U-shaped effect suggesting that institutional changes are called for in MENA countries before their SC is comparable to that of OECD countries.

A wealth of evidence has shown the positive effects of better management practices on firms. More recent evidence has highlighted that ownership matters for several developing and advanced economies. However, this relationship has not been studied extensively for economies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), a region where the presence of the government in the productive sphere looms large. This study addresses a gap in the literature by exploring how partial government ownership can influence management practices of medium and large formal firms in the MENA. Using two waves of Enterprise Surveys undertaken in 2013 and 2019/2020, the evidence points at a negative relationship between partial government ownership and management practices in the developing MENA region. The findings pass several robustness checks.

In this paper, we analyse the effect of fiscal policy volatility on capital flight. Based on a sample of 27 African countries over the period 1970–2018 and using System generalised method (GMM) of moments, we show that fiscal policy volatility increases capital flight. Specif-ically, our baseline results indicate that an increase in fiscal policy volatility by 1% increases capital flight by 1.4%. In other words, an increase in fiscal policy volatility by 100% increases capital flight by 140% or by 40% above the increase in the cause, that is, fiscal policy volatility. These results are robust to additional control variables, alternative methods, samples, and specifications, and may vary with the initial level of capital flight.

This study involved a meta-analysis of 506 estimates extracted from 75 studies to estimate the effect size of rural household registration (hukou) on wage levels. Our meta-synthesis results indicated that the negative effect of rural hukou on wages is statistically significant; however, the effect size remains small in terms of the partial correlation coefficient. The results of the meta-regression analysis and test for publication selection bias indicated that the differences in the wage effect of hukou among genders, corporate ownership sectors, and periods are insignificant. We also found that publication selection bias is unlikely, and genuine evidence exists in the literature.

This study investigates the sources of economic growth for Latin American economies. With two centuries of data and extended growth accounting methods, the study shows that poor total factor productivity (TFP) growth is the key to understanding Latin America's low economic growth relative to other economies. Using a functional form of TFP growth, based on second-generation growth models, furthers analyses to show some empirical evidence for growth induced by R&D, knowledge spillovers, educational attainment and the distance to the frontier. However, the magnitude effect is very small and when compared to the OECD countries, the gap between the TFP growth generating factors is very substantial. An intricate policy structure should be implemented for Latin America to foster an environment that is conducive to aid permanent TFP and economic growth.

Small area estimation (SAE), which combines a population census and a sample survey, is widely used to estimate poverty and welfare indicators in small areas. A common situation in practice is that a population census is conducted using both short- and long-form questionnaires. The short form is used to collect basic demographic information for the whole population, while the long form is used to collect additional information, such as employment, from a random sample. This study shows that combining both short- and long-form data can improve estimation efficiency. This method is applied to poverty maps for the 2014–2019 period in Vietnam.

We use Bayesian model averaging techniques to assess the role of different types of structural and institutional variables and their interaction with specific characteristics of the economy, as determinants of employment dynamics for 30 economies in Europe and Central Asia. We find that, once short-run dynamics are controlled for, common structural determinants for the employment rate emerge, including tax rates, human capital, availability of technology, labour market regulation and trade openness. The results show that the effect of labour market regulation on employment outcomes is affected by other characteristics, such as trade openness. Focusing on the trade–labour link, we find that labour market reforms toward a more flexible labour market have a positive impact on employment ratios, and this effect is stronger for economies characterised by relatively low level of trade barriers. In addition, the positive employment effects from labour market regulation reforms are stronger; the less flexible is the initial labour market regulatory framework. These findings bring important policy insights related to the employment potential of further structural reforms and trade integration for the countries in the region.