Economics & Politics最新文献

This paper develops a dynamic population game in which agents play a simple anonymous-exchange game of cooperating or defecting. Agents switch to the strategy with a higher expected payoff. Reformers can affect the payoff structure of the stage game to maximize the number of cooperators in the population by either enacting legal reform (institutional quality of contract law) or focusing on the macro outlook of the economy. Based on the theoretical model, the paper predicts which types the reformer should enact first and under which conditions reform will not be successful.

This study investigates individual auditors' attitudes toward various corrupt behaviors in Palestine, an underexplored context. We examine the perception and determinants of auditors toward corruption and introduce the link between gender, job position, exposure to other cultures, age, and level of education as factors affecting attitudes toward corruption perception. Our findings reveal that auditors' perception of corruption differs across corrupt behaviors. In most surveyed behaviors, age is negatively associated with acceptance of corruption, and female auditors exhibit a higher attitude toward accepting corruption across various forms. Additionally, the auditor's position and outside education significantly impact their attitude toward accepting corruption. Our work fills an existing literature gap and provides valuable information for targeted regulators and professional bodies aiming to reduce corruption.

This paper examines the impact of the 2016 election on substance use. One of Donald Trump's major campaign initiatives was to build a wall at the American/Mexican border, and he frequently made negative comments about various underrepresented groups. I hypothesize that this unorthodox rhetoric, coupled with Donald Trump's proposed policies during his campaign, created an exogenous shock of discrimination for women, and ethnic and racial minority groups when he was elected. The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System dataset, which has a variety of health measures and demographic information compiled at the individual level, is utilized to empirically examine the hypothesis. I examine the average treatment effects of the election using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy. The results indicate that there has been an increase in cigarette use for Hispanic individuals. These results highlight the impact that discriminatory rhetoric by political leaders and public figures has on marginalized groups within society. Policy implications include new ways to target substance use by targeting discrimination.

We appraise the effects of institutional quality on public spending for a set of 27 European countries and 18 Euro-area economies over the 1996–2017 period. While institutions play a weak role in affecting spending once the fixed-effects model is employed, the application of the quantile regression indicates that improved institutional quality mitigates public spending, although the effects crucially depend on the distribution of public expenditure and the sample examined. For both the Euro-area sample and the full sample, we show that better quality of institutions reduces public spending, although the effects become less significant the higher the levels of public spending. Further, for the Euro-area sample, institutions appear to have a stronger role in mitigating public spending. Several robustness tests confirm our findings.

This study investigates the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on asymmetric inventory investment (i.e., inventory stickiness or sticky inventory management). Using a sample of 74,912 US firm-year observations over the 1984–2021 period, we observe a significantly negative relationship between EPU and asymmetric inventory investment. Our cross-sectional analyses reveal that managers' pessimistic expectations regarding future demand and higher cost of funding and maintaining capacity are the channels through which EPU affects asymmetric inventory behavior. Moreover, this negative impact is more pronounced for firms that face longer-duration uncertainty, rely heavily on government purchases, and have higher firm-specific political risk. Lastly, we find that reducing inventory stickiness leads to improved firm performance during periods of increasing policy uncertainty.

This paper seeks to explain the difference across countries of the impact of national growth on the growth of the income of the poor. Traditionally, studies attempting to explain such differences investigate only the impact of some additional variables on the income level of the poor. Here, we introduce interaction terms to explain the change in the elasticity of income of the poor to national income. We focus on the role of formal and informal institutions and religions; variables which have rarely been considered in this context. The results show that only formal institutions (i.e., Resistance to corruption) and, to some extent, informal institutions (i.e., Trust all) explain the differences. Religion has no impact. The findings also show that improvements in the Resistance to corruption benefits the extremely poor more than the poor.