Kyklos最新文献

While extensive research has shown how power corrupts those who wield it, less is known about its effects on the powerless. Victims of power abuse may either become dissatisfied with such norm violations by those in power or normalize such behavior, corrupting their own normative standards. In a laboratory experiment, we create communities where a single individual holds the power to punish others. We find that there is general agreement that it is socially inappropriate for those in power both to undercontribute and to enforce higher contributions from others. Yet we find that the powerless who are randomly exposed to this behavior believe it to be less socially inappropriate than those who are spared from it. These findings shed light on how power abuse can perpetuate itself and contribute to the persistence of corrupt institutions.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the school-to-work transitions and early employment trajectories of young workers with disabilities. Using a survey following a cohort of French young workers exiting education in 2013 on their first 3 years on the labour market, I estimate the effect of disability on the probability of finding a (stable) job using duration models. I use several disability indicators to explore how the different definitions affect the results. Overall, I find that disability increases the duration of the transition to (stable) employment at the beginning of the career. This effect is higher when the disability is administratively recognised than when self-reported. I also show that the gap between disabled and nondisabled workers is somewhat lower among the most educated, while I evidence no significant difference between women and men. Besides, mental disabilities appear to be more detrimental on the school-to-work transitions than other types of disabilities, and having multiple disabilities increases the difficulties in the access to employment.

As a country highly dependent on imports, Switzerland has many free trade agreements (FTAs) that liberalise trade barriers. We assess how these agreements affect Swiss agricultural imports at different margins of trade adjustment. We estimate reduced-form gravity models using agricultural trade data for 202 partner countries from 2004 to 2022. We find that Swiss FTAs increase agricultural import values by 8.75%, decrease import prices by 3%, increase the probability of imports by 2% and reduce market exit rates by 1%. These effects are heterogeneous across products, sectors and agreements. Regarding import values and quantities, the positive effects of FTAs are mainly observed for raw products (including vegetables, fruits and nuts, coffee, tea and spices). However, the estimated effects are negative for processed products. Regarding import prices, the effects are positive whenever they are statistically significant. We also find that the number of competing agreements to which a Swiss trade partner is exposed only marginally affects Swiss imports. We extend our analysis to agricultural exports and find that FTAs increase Swiss export values by 47%, quantities by 53% and prices by 3% but do not affect export probabilities or export market exit rates. Thus, although Swiss FTAs generally boost trade on average, policymaking should consider the heterogeneities of the estimated FTA effects regarding products, agreements and time when using FTA estimates for counterfactual analysis and negotiations.

There appears to be a widely held belief that individual-based performance pay has a stronger influence on firm performance than collective performance pay. This also applies to an index of best management practices that has been used by Bloom and Van Reenen in a series of influential publications (e.g., Bloom and Van Reenen 2007, Bloom et al. 2019). The index assigns the highest weight to individual-based performance pay, a medium weight to group-based performance pay and a low weight to profit sharing. This weighting is obviously driven by the implicit assumption that collective payment schemes suffer from a free-rider problem, so they have a less strong influence on productivity than individual-based schemes. We show that this assumption is questionable from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view. Using the German Management and Organizational Practices Survey, one of the datasets initiated by Bloom and Van Reenen, we show that individual-based performance pay does not outperform group-based performance pay or profit sharing. The finding also holds when accounting for possible interactions among the payment schemes and considering the moderating roles of firm size, employee representation, and innovativeness. Our results suggest that researchers should be careful with respect to the assumptions and subjective priors guiding their empirical analyses.

Governments in most of the developed world fund arts and culture. Theoretically, the arguments for doing so are based on the arts and culture being public goods or providing positive externalities. The size of the externalities for a variety of cultural goods has been empirically investigated in numerous stated preference studies. However, the existence of externalities has not previously been tested as a causal relation. In this paper we are testing the existence of externalities of cultural consumption (cultural capital externalities) for Danish theatres. We are doing this based on a theoretical model, where a private consumption jointly produces private and public goods. We exploit variation generated by a national ticket purchasing scheme to estimate the causal effects of theatre consumption on public returns. We find that there are significant cultural capital externalities for users, but we find no effects for non-users, pointing towards peer-effects rather than externalities. Even though there are some limitations to our study, it shows that it is possible to test the existence of externalities of cultural consumption in an empirically convincing causal set-up.

This study investigates the influence of individualistic culture on property rights protection using a dataset of 86 countries. Employing the instrumental variable estimation method, the study uncovers the causal relationship between culture and institutional dynamics, considering variations in historical pathogen prevalence, linguistic pronoun usage, and genetic distance between countries. The findings reveal that individualism has a positive and statistically significant impact on property rights. The results are robust even after controlling for variables associated with both individualism and property rights and when considering alternative dependent and independent variables. This paper effectively links two significant societal elements, namely, the cultural aspect highlighted by Geert Hofstede and the establishment of economic institutions emphasized by Douglass North.