Economics & Politics最新文献

The 1975 Voting Rights Act (VRA) extended voting rights protections to language minority groups. Employing a triple difference design, we find that language minority voter turnout remained stable in VRA-shielded counties while it eroded elsewhere. This led to a reallocation of state educational funds away from unshielded counties. As a result, shielded counties experienced preferable changes in their high school graduation rates, white-collar job attainment, and income. We find most of these differences were driven by the VRA's preclearance provision.

This study explores the role of digital inclusive finance in company digital transformation within China, particularly examining the variances among companies with differing levels of technological intensity and financialization. Using A-share Chinese data from 2011 to 2022, we find that regions with superior digital inclusive finance exhibit enhanced corporate digital transformation, regardless of the provincial or municipal level. Subindexes, including the coverage breadth, use depth, and degree of digital inclusive finance, confirm that they are all significantly positively related to digital transformation. These effects are more pronounced in companies with lower technological intensity, and corporate financialization serves as a mediating factor.

The integration of algorithmic decision-making into daily life gives rise to a need to understand public attitudes toward this phenomenon. This study uses online experiments to explore how decision scenarios and roles influence public preferences for algorithms. In-depth interviews were conducted to examine interpretations of algorithmic fairness. The findings indicate a preference for algorithms, yet a stronger preference for human decision-making in ethically complex scenarios. Decision-makers demonstrate greater acceptance of algorithms. Participants perceive algorithmic fairness from social and technical perspectives, emphasizing autonomy and transparency. Despite a general preference for algorithms, concerns persist, revealing a nuanced view of algorithmic fairness as a form of societal power.

We examine the political conditions mediating the effect of vertical fiscal imbalance (VFI) on local government fiscal discipline in Ghana. Based on a panel dataset of 216 local governments in Ghana over the period 1994–2018, we adopt both a static and dynamic approach, in addition to a regression discontinuity design. From the results, while alignment may give “free pass,” local governments could leverage same for effective tax efforts. Further, the benefits of lower political competition may reduce where local governments place reliance on central government grants. There is consistent evidence of a negative effect of VFI on fiscal discipline.

U.S. presidential approval is a topic that has long attracted the interest of political pundits, journalists, candidates, and academics. This study focuses on quarterly U.S. presidential approval and measures of the U.S. macroeconomy. This research will expand, update and reinvestigate this relationship using new data, additional variables and the IVX predictive regression model of Kostakis, et al. (2015), specifically developed for time series data with mixed orders of integration such as we have here. We found that (as measured by Gallup data) U.S. presidential approval is a stationary mean-reverting variable with a long-term mean of approximately 50%. Our results also suggest that presidential party and the business cycle have no impact on the mean of quarterly presidential approval as standalone variables. However, using a comprehensive set of macroeconomic variables in a single study, we found that macroeconomic variables make a difference in applying predictive regression models to indicate significance. Specifically, before and after controlling for other macroeconomic variables, political party and the business cycle, more immediate “pocketbook issues” like gasoline prices and inflation expectations are important issues to American voters' presidential approval rating. Simply put, our regression results suggest rising prices and the expectation of rising prices consistently lower presidential approval in our sample data. This is a result that will likely interest political practitioners and academics alike.

The study analyzes the relationship between the political regime and income (re)distribution. The unbalanced panel has 126 countries from 1988 to 2021, which is subdivided by Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) membership. In non-OECD countries, the study finds that more democratic regimes and movements toward democracy on the political regime spectrum are associated with (1) increases in the market Gini coefficient, (2) increases in the net Gini coefficient, and (3) less absolute income redistribution. This suggests that democratic transitions may lead to greater income inequality, and these transitions do not necessarily correspond with more aggressive redistributive policies. In OECD countries, the political regime has an insignificant relationship with Gini coefficients and absolute income redistribution. The findings are robust to two political regime measures, namely, Polity5 and International Country Risk Guide, and multiple econometric models (e.g., Ordinary Least Squares, Fixed Effects, Generalized Least Squares, and Generalized Method of Moments). The study also explores the role of regime longevity, government stability, and institutional strength on income (re)distribution. Although the results are mixed, many models find that government stability and institutional strength are often associated with a decrease in Gini coefficients.

This paper investigates the phenomenon of premature deindustrialization in developing countries, with a focus on Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, and examines why this trend primarily occurs in these regions rather than in East Asia. Through a comparative analysis of industrialization experiences across different economies since the 1960s, the paper argues that premature deindustrialization results from a combination of liberalization shocks, development strategies that defy comparative advantage, and inadequate infrastructure supply due to the lack of active state involvement in its provision driven by prevailing neoliberal ideas. This study empirically validates this hypothesis using country-sector-level data from 40 economies.

This study explores polarized economic stagnation from the perspective of a capitalist corporate economy. It introduces two institutional policy paradigms: economic differentiation (ED) and economic egalitarianism (EE). ED-friendly “market democracy” promotes shared growth, whereas EE-friendly “egalitarian democracy” leads to polarized stagnation. The corporate economy is portrayed as the epitome of the ED institution leading shared growth, whereas the redistributive welfare state based on EE institutions could bring polarized stagnation. Empirical analysis tests these hypotheses and discovers that the world's polarized stagnation may be linked to “welfare policy under egalitarian democracy” rather than “corporate growth under market democracy” as commonly thought.

Does a politician's sex influence political budget cycles (PBCs)? We answer this question using a sample of Spanish municipalities from the Madrid region for the period 2010–2019. The Madrid region has a homogenous set of budget rules that allow consistent categorization of budget expenditure items as either “mandatory” or “non-mandatory” public services. After differentiating between smaller and larger municipalities, gender influence is studied along two dimensions: the mayor's sex and the share of women in government. Our findings include, in regard to mandatory spending in smaller municipalities, that gender-balanced governments induce PBCs. In larger municipalities, when the share of women in government is above 60%, electoral spending is increased by up to 10% of an average municipal budget for mandatory spending, and up to 2.2% for non-mandatory. These findings are generally supported in a mixed-gender close election analysis.

This article evaluates the effects of non-trade non-rent barriers to intra-Africa trade. Specifically, the effects of improved productivity, improved capital inflows, share of employment in non-agricultural sectors, and ratio of rural population. We seek to investigate the impact of institutional strength measured by property rights, rule of law and control of corruption, different exchange rate regimes on the impact of the non-trade non-rent variables on intra-Africa trade. We use an extensive dataset of 25 countries, by picking the most diverse and high-income economies in each region, for the period 2000–2020 using annual data. The empirical analysis involves a linear panel analysis with a fixed effects estimator. The study provides evidence that level of labor productivity is a key factor in the growth of intra-Africa imports and exports, the share of employment in the wholesale and services sector also has a significantly positive impact, exchange rate regimes play a magnifying role, and strong institutions (regulatory quality, rule of law and low corruption) will enhance the benefits to be drawn for increased income flows.