Bulletin of Economic Research最新文献

This study examines the effect of the digital divide on women's political participation across 48 African nations. Using the system's generalized method of moments, we arrive at the main result that the digital divide is a brake on women's political empowerment in Africa. Our result remains stable to additional control variables. Similar evidence is found using the women's political participation sub-index and alternative digital divide variables separately. We also find large differences in the relationship between the digital divide and women's political empowerment, depending on the country's political regime. We conclude by suggesting improving the quality of institutions, as well as improving financial systems, in order to reduce the digital divide and boost women's political participation.

This article examines the strategic decision of a domestic firm to certify its Environmental Corporate Social Responsibility (ECSR) efforts, with certification provided either by a social planner or a non-governmental organization (NGO), in the context of competition with an uncertified foreign firm. We analyze whether the NGO and the social planner align or diverge in their pollution standardization. Our findings indicate that the NGO consistently selects a non-optimal ECSR standard, whereas the optimality of the social planner's standard depends on the severity of the environmental damage. Notably, both certifying entities tend to converge on non-optimal ECSR standards when the environmental damage severity is high, aligning with the domestic firm's ECSR investment capacity. However, divergence in the standards and their optimality occurs when the environmental damage severity is low. In this context, shifting from NGO to social planner certification reduces supply and price but increases profit for the domestic firm, as well as overall gas emissions. Despite the negative impact on consumers, this shift is socially beneficial due to the significant reduction in the ECSR investment cost. The results suggest that under lower damage severity, firms favor the social planner over the NGO as the certifier. The study underscores the importance of aligning ECSR standards with environmental conditions and firm incentives, highlighting the need to incentivize ECSR investment, balance standards, and, where necessary, transition to social planner certification for optimal and sustainable outcomes.

This study analyzes the wage costs of labor market segmentation (LMS) in the private sector in eight West African countries. The article aims to first analyze the private sector's labor market by identifying its segments and their effects on wage formation and second, to compare the labor market structures of the studied countries. Using finite mixture models (FMMs), the study determined the number of segments in each country in 2018 and 2021. Our findings indicate that the LMS hypothesis in the private sector holds for all countries that share similarities in segment functioning. We also noticed that the dominant segments, except for a few countries, do not value high education.

Countries of origin have long considered remittances as an important source of development. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze whether and how remittances react to political shocks in these countries. We focus on the case of Tunisia by investigating the reaction of Tunisian migrants through their remittances to the Arab Spring. Using event-study methodology adapted to the examination of remittance patterns, our results reveal that the response is significant 3 months after the Arab Spring and tends to dissipate 5 months from the occurrence of the event. Overall, migrant remittances may act as immediate and direct aid to households harmfully affected by economic crises resulting from civil unrest and political upheaval.

Education is an important factor in promoting social mobility and improving the quality of human capital. The literature on educational efficiency mainly focuses on the performance of a single country or year, with little measurement of efficiency over a long period of time or on a single level of education. This research suggests that to measure a country's educational efficiency performance and to be objective, it is necessary to simultaneously measure three parts: junior high school, high school, and higher education. It extracts Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) indicators from 2012, 2015, and 2018 and establishes a three-stage network slacks-based measure (SBM) model and strategic matrix to explore efficiency and overall efficiency performance of education stages in 24 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Findings show that education spending in every country is on the rise, but the PISA composite indicator of international student performance is gradually declining. Estonia has the best efficiency, with an average total efficiency of 1, followed by Latvia (0.9368) and Türkiye (0.9189).

We examine the extent to which ideological differences between acquiring and target firms influence the likelihood of deal completion and the magnitude of announcement returns. Our empirical analysis shows that deals are 26% more likely to be completed when the political ideologies of the acquirer and target are closely aligned. This result holds even after controlling for widely accepted deal characteristics influencing both deal completion and market response to deal announcements. Furthermore, acquirers ideologically closer to their targets achieve announcement returns that are 1 to 2 percentage points higher than their more distant counterparts. This effect persists even after controlling for geographic proximity and other established determinants of announcement returns. These findings indicate that corporate political ideology plays a significant role in determining the success of mergers and acquisitions.

This article studies and quantifies the impact of COVID-related shock on segmented labor market by using Periodic Labour Force Survey of India. We employ transition matrices, cumulative distribution functions, and machine learning techniques. We find that labor market outcomes, both in terms of employment status and income, became even more divergent between the formal and informal sectors during the first wave of pandemic and remained divergent in the recovery phase. The classification analysis highlights that the sector in which the worker was employed (formal or informal sector) was an important predictor of income loss during the first wave. Additionally, the decline in income was influenced by individual and household-level characteristics, whereas the recovery is explained by aggregate characteristics, like state of residence, industry and occupation classification, and employment status.