Kyklos最新文献

This paper explores the impact of political elections on public policies during the Covid pandemic, distinguishing between economic (supportive) and noneconomic (restrictive) policies in a panel of countries that held political elections during 3 years of pandemic, 2020–2022. An event study, controlling for the evolution of the pandemic in terms of Covid cases and deaths, as well as country and time fixed effects, reveals significant adjustments in the Covid-related restrictive, lockdown-type, policies but not in the Covid-related economic support policies before political elections during the first half of the pandemic. The pre-election policy adjustments included a gradual easing of the restrictions before elections and were driven by the changes in the restrictions that were more likely to directly affect the electorate, such as the restrictions on workplace closing, gatherings, and public events. The presence of the pre-election restrictions adjustment is conditional on the economic and political characteristics of the country, such as the state of democracy, the degree of political competition, the overall restrictions stringency, and the income level.

Using a panel of all 38 OECD countries for the time period 1980–2020, we estimate elasticities between aggregate unemployment and households' average food consumption. For food consumption measured in calorie intake, we find a small but statistically and economically significant negative elasticity of about 0.02 with unemployment. This elasticity is about 0.03 for food spending measured in protein intake which suggests that unemployment most likely leads to decreases in the quality of food primarily, on average. These findings are robust to a wide variety of consumption definitions, functional forms, types of wealth and income fluctuations, countries considered, and institutions considered. Our results suggest that unemployment insurance benefits and households' savings both matter for the size of the elasticity, thereby operating as automatic stabilizers.

Although many contributions examine how individuals and various entities (e.g., organizations and countries) manage to obtain a (competitive) advantage, there is a knowledge gap on how to make the best of disadvantages. Using notably the theories of self-enhancement and psychological reactance, the existing literature has explained the mechanisms that can motivate and support an entity to get out from a disadvantageous position. We go further by addressing the “how” issues. We conceptualize disadvantages and adopt a provocative stance by showing how they can be transformed into valuable opportunities. Specifically, we document how being disadvantaged may be a driver of compensatory behaviors, effectual thinking, and innovation and serves as an emotional bond and in-group marker. We also draw managerial and policy implications that offer a refreshing view on how to take advantage of disadvantages, such as changing the non-market context and promoting the disadvantage as a market differentiation factor. As a caveat, adopting this stance should not be interpreted as a catch-all solution that exonerates stakeholders from doing their part in providing support to disadvantaged entities.

We study whether present-day women's political participation in sub-Saharan Africa is associated to the temporary gender ratio imbalances caused by the transatlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades, taking into account pre-existing gender norms influenced by kinship structures. To study the interrelatedness between historical exposure to the slave trades, patrilineality and their association to contemporary women's political participation, we use individual-level data for 35,595 women from 28 sub-Saharan African countries from three rounds of Afrobarometer surveys, georeferenced to historical ethnic region kinship and slave trade data. Our findings suggest that a woman's ethnic region historical exposure to the transatlantic slave trade is associated with an increase in her likelihood to vote today, however, only in non-patrilineal ethnic regions. This effect is mitigated in patrilineal ethnic regions, where women have less decision-making power. This paper contributes to the literature on the contemporary sub-national effects of the slave trades and the historical causes of gender gaps in political participation.

We argue that a deficient provision of public goods may influence citizen satisfaction with the status quo, thereby encouraging demands for institutional changes. We formalize and test this relationship using prior data related to the recent constitutional process carried out in Chile to replace its dictatorship-era constitution. Individual-level data from the Chile 2016/17 AmericasBarometer survey are used to estimate ordered and multinomial probit models to study the determinants of citizen preferences for constitutional change, distinguishing between amendment and replacement. The main findings reveal that preferences for reforming the Chilean constitution can be driven by greater discontent with public goods provision. These results remain robust when estimating pseudo-panel models using cohort-level data and examining coefficient stability. Moreover, higher levels of corruption are associated with a stronger demand for constitutional replacement, suggesting a potential rupture in the shared social contract due to poor governance and lower political equality.

Recent evidence shows that social media use has negative effects on well-being of children and youths. However, the underlying reasons are unclear, as social media are means that can also serve beneficial purposes. We propose the hypothesis that social media induce users to harmful addiction of a new variety because such use is not toxic per se but becomes toxic by crowding out beneficial activities. We identify, in particular, the key mechanism in the change of time preference: While social media induce users to present-biassed activities, thus encouraged by how platforms are designed, they crowd out activities that develop skills and are forward-looking, such as education, volunteering and democratic participation. This triggers a vicious circle leading to a long run deterioration of well-being and skills that would have acted as an antidote to addiction. As implication, policies should address adequate information and education in general, as well as increased competition in the digital platform market. While the available evidence supports our hypothesis in many respects, more empirical research is needed.

The fact that environmental factors have a broader effect on financial decision-making has been lengthily explored, but there is a gap in understanding how personality traits might mediate the effects of temperature on individual decision-making. Using plausibly exogenous variation of individuals' exposure to changes in national temperature between 2004 and 2018 across NUTS 1 regions in 29 European countries, we estimate the causal effect of a marginal change in temperature on financial investments and its interaction with the trait of optimism/pessimism using Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) data. A 10% increase in temperature is associated with a 0.03 percentage point (pp) rise in the probability that an optimist invests in bonds and a 0.024 pp decline in the probability for investment in stocks. However, among pessimists, we find null effects. The results are comparable on the intensive margin. In sum, our results highlight the potentially heterogeneous ways that environmental factors shape individual decision-making.

Exclusion of some groups caused by the misuse of government power remains a major problem across the world. We propose that market-oriented institutions and policies have the capacity to reduce such exclusion. To test this, we use an overall measure derived from the V-Dem dataset, capturing government discrimination based on political group, social group, socio-economic group, and gender, which we combine with the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World index. The sample consists of 153 countries for 1970–2020, which we organize in a panel consisting of consecutive, non-overlapping 5-year periods, rendering up to about 1,200 observations. Our estimates show a clear negative association between the rule of law and government discrimination in electoral democracies and electoral autocracies but not in single-party autocracies. There are, however, reasons for not considering the finding for electoral autocracies causal. Two further areas of economic freedom seem to matter: free trade is negatively related to government exclusion in electoral democracies, while regulatory freedom is so in both types of autocracies. Thus, it seems as if a market-economic system may be able to constrain public officials in the direction of non-discrimination.

While pro-market economic institutions are a strong and causal predictor of economic development, such institutions are not expected to have the same impact across countries. Furthermore, there are actually a few instances where countries that enacted market-friendly reforms had negative economic growth soon after. Examining 49 cases of large and sustained increases in economic freedom over a five year window, we find 10 cases that were followed by low/negative economic growth thereafter. We consider various potential determinants of failed reforms by comparing different measures between the successful and failed reforming countries. Our strongest evidence points to the following as plausible reasons for failed reforms: culture (high levels of power distance, low levels of individualism, and low levels of generalized trust), areas of economic freedom that countries reformed (less focus on sound monetary policy, more focus on limiting the size of government, and more variance between the five areas), and autocratic political institutions.

This study examines whether the use of Internet-based communication technologies during election campaigns helps candidates to be elected to parliament and improves their perception of being able to win national elections. Using data from the 2013 Italian Candidate Survey, estimation results show that the use of a personal website and Twitter during the electoral race significantly improves candidates' perceptions of winning nationwide election and their likelihood of being elected to parliamentary office.