Kyklos最新文献

This paper utilizes data from the Survey of Family Income and Expenditure in Taiwan to discuss habit formation, encompassing internal and external habits, in urban household consumption behaviors. Specifically, we examine high-visibility consumption commodities and narrower spatial reference groups to capture external habits among urban households. Our empirical findings reveal evidence of habit formation in consumption behaviors among urban households in Taiwan. We observe the durability of some expenditure items for internal habits. Additionally, household consumption is influenced by the consumption of reference groups, indicating external habits. This influence is particularly pronounced within highly visible commodities, such as alcoholic beverages, tobacco, beauty, apparel, and recreation and culture. Most of these are more prominent for households facing narrower spatial reference groups, with tobacco being especially notable, highlighting potential public health concerns associated with localized social interactions. Furthermore, the effect of external habits on recreation and culture appears across wider spatial contexts, suggesting a more generalized external influence. These findings carry important implications for public health and the labor market, warranting attention from policymakers.

This paper examines the impact of fiscal rules on fiscal capacity. It is based on the premise that fiscal rules can enhance citizens' tax morale and willingness to pay taxes, thereby improving fiscal capacity. Using a global dataset spanning from 1985 to 2021, we find that stricter fiscal rules have a positive impact on fiscal capacity. This relationship holds when excluding EU countries, differentiating between supranational and national rules and employing alternative measures of fiscal capacity. Robustness checks further reveal that while fiscal capacity tends to rise with the number of rules in place, the combination of rules plays a relevant role. These findings underscore the importance of deliberately selecting and designing fiscal rules to effectively strengthen fiscal capacity.

This paper studies the relationship between language structure and political ideology. Using several language structure data sets and the World Value Survey data, we test the relationship between linguistic characteristics and political ideologies on democracy for over 150,000 people in countries across the world during the past approximately two decades. We explore the impact of pronoun drop, politeness distinction, and irrealis mood on people's political ideology. In addition to considering the links between these language structures and support for democracy, we also examine how language structures influence what aspects of democracy people care about. Additionally, we also test for heterogeneity by income level and degree of democracy across countries. In considering culture, we conduct mediation analysis with the traits of individualism, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance. Overall, these further tests, along with the robustness tests, support the main results by highlighting the connections between language structures and political ideology.

In this article, we extend a benchmark model to allow for a non-welfarist social welfare function (SWF) that treats food as a necessity good rather than a regular good, while preserving the assumption that individuals are rational. We show that the widespread use of food subsidies by governments worldwide for redistributive purposes can be justified by recognizing food as a necessity good in almost all societies. Specifically, (1) If food is treated as a regular good, food consumption should be neither taxed nor subsidized; (2) If food is treated as a necessity good, food consumption should be subsidized; and (3) The higher the “basic need” for food, the more heavily food consumption should be subsidized. We argue that our model provides a general theoretical framework that can also justify subsidies for other necessity goods, including essential utilities such as electricity and gas. Additionally, our model suggests that adopting a non-welfarist SWF would result in the breakdown of the Atkinson–Stiglitz theorem.

We use extreme weather events as quasi-natural experiments to examine their impact on management sentiment. Based on a sample of China's A-share listed companies from 2013 to 2020, we find that managers issue more pessimistic forecasts following climate disasters. Moreover, the impact of climate risk on management forecast pessimism is more pronounced in firms with lower financial flexibility, less-experienced CEOs, and CEOs with less specialist experience. In addition, economic losses and heightened future uncertainty are the primary drivers of management pessimism after extreme weather events. Further analysis reveals that managers issue more ambiguous earnings forecasts and adopt a more negative tone in the wake of climate disasters.

The Catholic Church enacted broad reforms after the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), notably to the liturgies that Catholics must attend every Sunday. However, there has been a revival of pre-Vatican II practices recently, such as the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM). We explore the role played in this resurgence by the entry of a traditionalist Catholic competitor (the Society of Saint Pius X) in the market for religious services. Using data from the continental United States, we show that the presence of SSPX chapels significantly increases the availability of TLMs, particularly on Sundays when attendance at a Mass is required. We also find evidence that the effect is strongest at a local level and that it has intensified over time, possibly due to Pope Benedict XVI's liberalization of TLM celebrations in 2007.