Economics & Politics最新文献

This paper introduces the peak-end rule to economic voting, finding that voters focus on peak and end economic growth when evaluating incumbents. Cross-national data from 595 elections in 70 countries (1960–2020) shows that the average of the highest GDP growth rate during the term and the growth rate in the election year positively impacts incumbent vote share, with peak growth having a stronger effect. Instrumental variable analysis addresses endogeneity. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that less-educated voters rely more on the peak-end rule. The findings contribute to understanding voters' behavioral patterns and improving democratic accountability.

This paper investigates the drivers of international fiscal spillovers across 62 countries for the period covering 1970–2021. Using the local projections method at the country-pair level, fiscal spillovers are estimated as the cumulative response of the real gross domestic product (GDP) growth in spillover destination countries to a unit shock in the real government spending growth in spillover source countries. Pairwise estimation results (for 3782 country pairs) suggest that there are statistically significant fiscal spillovers for 36% of country pairs, whereas this ratio is 49% for country pairs within the euro area. For the median country pair, a unit shock of real government spending growth in the spillover source country results in about 0.09% of the increase in the real GDP growth of the spillover destination country, whereas this fiscal-spillover estimate goes up to 0.42% when the spillover source is in the euro area, and the spillover destination is an oil producing country. A secondary investigation based on the Heckman selection model is used to identify the drivers of fiscal spillovers across country pairs, where the existence of statistically significant fiscal spillovers is shown to be connected to the proximity between countries. The size of fiscal spillovers is further shown to increase with the initial (as of 1970) country size, trade openness, and government size of the spillover source country, whereas it decreases with the initial country size and trade openness of the spillover destination country. Important policy suggestions follow.

Economic policy uncertainty significantly influences governmental decisions regarding environmental sustainability, particularly in CO₂ emissions reduction efforts. This study examines the impact of economic policy uncertainty on environmental inefficiency across 136 emergent and non-emerging countries from 1990 to 2018, using an unbalanced and heterogeneous sample. Additionally, we explore the moderating effects of institutional quality and political orientation on this relationship. Employing a directional distance function in a parametric context, our analysis reveals that economic policy uncertainty exacerbates environmental inefficiency. However, we find that institutional quality and political orientation act as important moderating factors, fostering greater environmental sustainability. Sensitivity analyses support these empirical findings, providing insights into potential implications for economic policy and guiding regulatory and policymaking efforts toward achieving enhanced environmental sustainability.

High-frequency trading (HFT) and algorithmic trading (AT) have attracted considerable attention from the academic and regulatory communities, often highlighted for their contributions to enhancing market liquidity. However, the distinctive market framework in China may alter the operational dynamics of intraday trading, indicating that traditional HFT/AT paradigms might not fully apply. This study investigates the evolution of market quality in China from an HFT/AT perspective, using publicly available high-frequency data for six futures products traded on the Shanghai Futures Exchange and the Dalian Commodity Exchange. Our findings reveals improvements in contract continuity and liquidity diversification from a daily perspective. Furthermore, the intraday analysis—especially following the increased availability of more granular data to market participants—suggests the emergence of more sophisticated algorithmic traders who enhance liquidity provision and contribute to reduced slippage costs for investors and hedgers.

This study analyses how government popularity was shaped in the UK during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. Using daily data for the Conservative party popularity rate, we find that their popularity was strongly dominated by factors related to the pandemic, more so by the political cases linked to its management and the measures that the government undertook than by the direct health impact of the coronavirus. The government stringency measures became more harmful for government popularity over time, especially when the pandemic metrics calmed down. The economy played a very marginal role in shaping government popularity during that period.

This study investigates factors influencing the reelection prospects of Brazilian mayors. Analyzing a comprehensive data set spanning 5114 municipalities across four elections reveals that increases in investment and current expenditures before elections pay off at the polls. Moreover, higher average investment expenditures throughout the term enhance reelection chances. The results also indicate that when former term-limited mayors run against the incumbent, reelection probability diminishes, particularly with higher average investment by the previous mayor. Finally, the level of literacy shapes voter attitudes towards opportunistic fiscal strategies: voters with limited literacy are inclined to reward increases in current expenditures, whereas more educated populations prefer increasing investment.

In the United States and other countries, large private firms are increasingly more likely to take public political stances on controversial issues. Firms behave as ideological actors when they take sides in large public debates on social and economic issues. These stances may involve public speech, changes in the terms of service, or in internal reorganization and intrafirm actions. Despite the increase in firms' political actions, firms' ideological orientations remain unexamined. To answer this question, we collect corporate social responsibility statements from Fortune 1000 firms. Using semisupervised topic models, we identify topics that reflect stances on environmental and social issues. We then examine if firms are more likely to take stances on political issues due to pragmatic or ideological factors. We find that while pragmatic considerations play a role, firms' political stances are more driven by the ideological orientation of employees and managers. This research contributes a novel measure of firm ideology and sheds new light on the determinants of corporate political activity.

We investigate the political factors involved in the allocation of public investments into Turkish electoral districts. Using a unique data set covering detailed individual characteristics of approximately 2000 Turkish MPs over five legislative periods during 1987–2004, we show that the composition of several legislator characteristics in an electorate, such as the level of education, area of tertiary degree, and former profession, matters in the way pork barrel occurs across electorates. The findings also indicate a strong presence of partisan motivations and targeted support for opposition groups and ideological strongholds in public investment allocations. We also document evidence that a stronger right-wing tendency in the cabinet, a single-party government, fractionalized voter preferences, and higher voter turnout in the electorate are all associated with increased public investments into specific geographic constituencies.

This paper constructs an institutional investor network based on the heavy holdings of the same stock in China and conducts a social network analysis to investigate the influence of this network on stock price volatility from the perspectives of network structure (density) and location (centrality). The study demonstrates that institutional investor network density is negatively related to stock price volatility, while network centrality is positively related to it. Mechanism analyses further reveal that network density reduces stock price volatility by mitigating private information arbitrage behavior among institutional investors, whereas network centrality increases stock price volatility by creating private information arbitrage opportunities within the network. Additionally, the paper finds that information asymmetry enhances the positive effect of network centrality on stock price volatility. These findings are generally consistent across subsample analyses for different market states, reactions to good and bad news, and types of equity ownership, as well as in other robustness tests. The practical implications of these findings are significant for market stability regulation.

Do women in politics contribute to gender parity in education? This study seeks to provide an empirical answer to this question by examining whether women in politics (women parliamentarians) contribute to closing the gender inequality in education using a global sample of 191 countries from 1990 to 2020. We deployed the two-stage least square (IV-TSLS) technique and gender quota as an instrument to isolate the exogenous effect of women in politics on gender parity in primary, secondary and tertiary education. The findings from the IV-TSLS estimators show that an increase in the number of female parliamentarians is associated with a significant increase in gender parity at all levels of education. These results survived several robustness checks, including using different estimators such as the Lewbel two-stage least squares and the Kinky least-squares estimators. Based on the quota type, we documented that women in politics significantly spur gender parity in education in countries with reserved seat quotas and not in countries with candidate quotas. We also found that the results differ across different geographical regions and income groups. The findings call on policy-makers to address societal, legal and structural barriers limiting women's political participation to achieve gender parity at all levels of education.