American Journal of Economics and Sociology最新文献

Who was responsible for the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi, the president of Libya? The official story says it was Libyan rebels who were seeking justice against a political dictator. But there is more than meets the eye regarding this assassination, which was an orchestrated event. Yet, the mainstream media have ignored the evidence that counters the official narrative. Emails between former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her aide Sidney Blumenthal describe how French currency imperialism in Africa led to the death of Gaddafi. John Perkins, a former economic “hitman,” draws the same conclusion. In this article, we reveal why the French government had strong motives to silence Gaddafi and to put an end to his efforts to replace the CFA franc with a truly African currency not controlled by an imperial power.

The CFA franc persists because French elites have mostly followed “territorialist logic” and African elites “capitalist logic” for the last six decades. French governments have conceded to capitalist logic, most dramatically in 1994 with the devaluation of the CFA franc and subsequent introduction of the “Balladur Doctrine.” Similarly, West and Central African governments tried to reorient the CFA franc in a more territorialist (developmentalist) direction in the 1970s. Pressure from the IMF, the World Bank, and the French treasury following the sovereign debt crisis of the 1980s pushed most African leaders to accept neoliberal reform—a reassertion of capitalist logic. Advocates of reforming the West African Economic and Monetary Union are currently trying to push the region's monetary policy in a more territorialist direction. The Franco-African neocolonial alliance has, so far, successfully suppressed efforts toward greater political and economic autonomy in Africa. The CFA's peg to the euro will therefore persist as long as this alliance does; until France decides to abandon its sphere of influence in Africa or African leaders seek greater autonomy and/or new allies.

In this article, we summarize the geopolitics that keeps Françafrique in place—including residual Cold War antagonisms, extreme economic underdevelopment, the globalized counterterrorism agenda, expanding U.S. military influence in Africa, and last, but perhaps the most important of all, pervasive anti-Black racism. We then propose a series of grassroots engagements that, if taken by concerned global citizens, could succeed in overcoming this recalcitrant power alignment.

This paper applies a variation on differences-in-differences to the effects of economic freedom in matched bordering metropolitan statistical areas using the Metropolitan Economic Freedom Index. While a great deal of research has explored the relationship between economic freedom and economic performance, less has been done at the local level. We find that economic freedom has a positive effect on several measures of economic performance, but no effect on population.

The importance of economic conditions on election outcomes is well established. This paper supplements the standard approach to economic voting by assessing government support from a highly debated perspective of European spaces: Core countries and Periphery countries (Central Eastern European and Southern countries). The paper reveals that the economic conditions perceived by voters in the future are expected to differently affect incumbent government support depending on the macroeconomic position of the country. This paper finds that, contrary to Core countries' electors, voters in periphery countries are keener to support the incumbent governments if the economic outputs are positive. It concludes that positive economic expectations are strongly and positively associated with incumbent government support, regardless of previous vote choice, while negative economic expectations are strongly and negatively associated with government support.

Special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) originated in the 1980s. A SPAC is a shell company formed by a sponsor to raise capital through a SPAC IPO to acquire or merge with an existing (target) private company. In a SPAC IPO, the units issued, consisting of (1) shares of common stock and (2) warrants, are typically priced at a nominal $10. Until 2022, SPAC IPOs were an increasingly popular alternative to traditional IPOs. We provide an overview of SPACs and an assessment of two measures of returns to SPACs, one is market-adjusted buy and holds abnormal returns, and the other is risk-adjusted abnormal returns by estimating a three-factor regression model. The return calculations are based on 299 SPAC completed mergers between January 2013 and December 2021. Our results indicate that the main driver in a series of regressions, including various explanatory variables in explaining deSPAC returns, is the extent of warrants issued in a SPAC IPO, and robustness checks confirm these results.

This paper attempts to employ a microeconomic model (industrial-organization approach to banking) to formalize the concept that banks in an economy may also unilaterally create money, at least initially, rather than passively multiplying the base money exogenously issued by the Central Bank in the money creation process. It shows that in equilibrium, banks may indeed create money (bank deposits) when making loans without relying on the newly issued base money from the Central Bank. Instead, the endogenously created money by banks would cause the Central Bank to endogenously adjust base money to hit the target policy interest rate.

Greater availability of firm-level surveys in developing countries has enabled researchers to consider the effects of corruption at the firm level. One often overlooked issue with these surveys is nonresponse by firms. We examine the impact of corruption on firm investment and demonstrate that failing to account for nonresponse leads to an overestimation of the impact of corruption.