Kyklos最新文献

We investigate to what extent personal proximity and similarity in professional and political attributes, besides scientific factors, help explaining citations between economists. We do so by using a unique dataset of all academic economists based in the United Kingdom, created specifically for this study by merging RePEc data on works published in the past four decades with information collected by manually processing their curriculum vitae (CVs). We investigate directed citations within each pair of authors active in a same year, finding that social factors play an important role as predictors of citations. An author is systematically more likely to cite another economist not only if they work on similar topics, but most relevantly if they have been co-authors, faculty colleagues, alumni of the same Alma Mater, and even if they express similar political views. The implication is that citations do not signal the intrinsic quality of research outputs only, but they also capture social and professional connections. When citation counts are used to reward academics, economists have an incentive to join many and large professional communities as doing so would increase their predicted citations.

The institution of liability serves to mitigate the lack of care in almost all areas, whether private or business. However, we have not yet found such an institution in political decision-making. Surprisingly, the literature has not discussed a specific institution that subjects political actors who fail to exercise due diligence in their decision-making regarding personal liability. Hence, this paper aims to fill this gap and derive the necessity of internalizing the negative effects resulting from the imperfections of the market for political services in general and the democratic process, particularly by a liability rule. To design the new institution, we draw on the findings of corporate governance, combining economic thinking in incentives and legal knowledge expressed in the law of the corporation. In this respect, this paper is the first to make a concrete proposal for political liability accompanied by a political judgment rule. However, it is important to emphasize that the aim is not to punish a wrong decision but to provide strong incentives to prevent it ex ante. Political liability must be understood as a process-oriented institution that considers uncertainty and decision-making complexities. By proposing and analyzing this new institution, this work contributes to a broader discussion of incentive structures in the political process of modern democracies and shows how the political sphere can learn from the corporate world.

This study relies on a novel research approach to analyze how national income, income inequality, institutional quality, and culture combine to generate different recipes for eliciting subjective well-being (SWB). Specifically, we use fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, which facilitates the study of the combinations of conditions (paths) that act synergistically to achieve a certain outcome. The study uses data from over 70 countries and finds several combinations of conditions for different periods which lead equally to high SWB, as well as several configurations equally leading to low SWB. Additionally, we find that high national income, income equality, high-quality institutions, and each of the cultural dimensions are not necessary conditions for high SWB. However, high-power distance and low individualism are necessary conditions to achieve low SWB. The results for a few individual conditions are in line with previous studies, but we also determine that the effect of the remainder depends on the other conditions present in each combination. Overall, the results deliver an original and contrasting view of the factors leading to a nation's high or low SWB.

This paper investigates the effect on academic performance of an exogenous educational reform that reduced the school calendar of non-fee-paying schools in the Madrid region (Spain) by approximately two weeks, leaving the basic curriculum unchanged. To identify the consequences of such a measure, we exploit the fact that it did not affect private schools (control group) and the existence of an external cognitive test that measures academic performance before and after its application in the region. We find that the reform worsened students' educational outcomes by around 0.13 of a standard deviation. This effect was especially strong in the subjects of Spanish and Mathematics. We further explored quantile effects across the distribution of exam scores, finding that the disruption had a more negative effect on students in the upper quartile than those in the lower quartile. Overall, the analysis shows a reduction in the gap across non-fee-paying schools and an increase in the gap between non-fee- and fee-paying schools.

Using firm-level survey data for 29,962 manufacturing firms in 141 developing and emerging countries, the impact of exports (as a percentage of sales) on the share of female workers at the firm is estimated. The impact is positive, large, and statistically significant. For the baseline specification, moving from a firm that does not export to one that does all its sales abroad is associated with a 6.6 percentage point increase in the share of female workers. This positive relationship is much stronger when competition in the domestic markets is low, social attitudes and mobility laws are more favorable to women's work outside the home, and the law-and-order situation is better. We argue that these heterogeneities serve as important checks against endogeneity concerns. We also provide results using the average share of exports in a country–industry cell as an instrument. The policy implications of our findings are discussed in detail.

We utilise data from a self-designed survey that includes information experiments to elicit the German public's attitude towards the right of asylum. The survey was carried out in 2018. We randomly assign 2048 interviewees to different groups and ‘treat’ each group with different information about the asylum seekers that came to Germany in 2015 and 2016. Treatments involve information about (i) the total number of asylum seekers, (ii) the fiscal costs and (iii) potential long-term benefits associated with accepting refugees, (iv) the share of Muslim asylum seekers and (v) the share of war refugees. Providing information about the fiscal costs associated with accepting refugees, and, to a lesser extent, about the share of Muslim refugees, significantly increases the likelihood of opposing the right of asylum. These effects are more pronounced for middle-income earners, respondents with a low level of education and female respondents. Deviations of people's beliefs from the actual numbers can affect their attitudes: Respondents who underestimated the share of Muslim refugees are more likely to call for abolishing the right of asylum.

We study how exposure to (Soviet) communism (EC), a political-economic regime based on collectivist state planning, affected the preferences for family support, which we refer to as informal family insurance. Against the backdrop that ‘communism gave rise to the abolition of the family’, we document that it actually strengthened the preference (the demand) for informal family insurance without depressing individuals' preferences for social insurance. We exploit cross-country and cohort variation in EC on more than 314,000 individuals living in 33 Central and Eastern European countries, among which 14 had been subject to communist regimes. We estimate that EC gave rise to 9.6 percentage point (pp) increase in the preference for family care for older parent and 4.3 pp increase in the support (both financial and nonfinancial) for children. These effects are explained by the strengthening of social and family networks that resulted from the erosion of generalized, interpersonal and institutional trust, rather than by ‘indoctrination effects’ during Soviet communism times.

Starting from the assumption that citizenship is property that would be more valuable if it were transferable, the paper explores the idea of commodification of citizenship. The paper provides arguments in favor of commodification and recommendations to how the market for citizenships should be designed. A market for citizenships could result in an improved matching between employer and employee when citizens swap citizenship with each other. Successful States could issue new citizenships and thus make it possible for a greater share of the world population to live and work within the countries with the best institutions. The combined effect would be a higher global productivity. Additionally, market prices on citizenships would provide information on institutional quality and thus provide politicians with information on voters' preferences as well as voters with information on the quality of the work of the government. The market value of a tradable citizenship is also found to be a candidate as tax base for a redistributive tax on a global level that could address some of the inherent inequality with birthright citizenships. Those potential benefits aside, several problems with a market for citizenship are also found and discussed, among those the age-dependent value of citizenships.

In a developing market, where the ownership is highly concentrated and the central governance issue is the conflict between majority and minority shareholders, how do managers with previous military experience (military managers) affect the quality of financial reporting? We use a sample of Chinese listed firms over period 2006–2016, with a total of 16,010 firm-year observations. Our results suggest that firms with military managers are associated with higher levels of earnings management, through both accrual-based and real-activities manipulations. Those firms are more susceptible to financial restatements, qualified audit opinions, and penalties for violation. To alleviate endogeneity problems, we use both the instrumental variable regression and propensity score matching, and our results are robust. In addition, the effect of military managers is more pronounced in state-owned firms and firms with weak internal control systems. These findings improve our understanding of the link between managerial traits and financial reporting decisions, in an environment where the major governance issue is the conflict between majority and minority shareholders.

This paper analyses the causal effects of different levels of mother's and father's education on child general and mental health, by applying a fixed effects instrumental variable panel data estimator with selection to nationally represented longitudinal data of over 13,000 observations in the United Kingdom from 2008 to 2019. The results reveal a negative association between mother's education and boys' mental health, potentially driven by relative rather than absolute levels of education between parents. Differences in educational attainment between parents signal unequal power and different values, which inhibits conflict resolution and commitment, leading to higher likelihood of breaking up, which in turn may negatively affect child mental health. On the contrary, no evidence is found of causal links between different levels of mother's and father's education on child health, indicating the relevance of potential environmental factors in the intergenerational transmission mechanism. This calls for more co-ordination of educational interventions with other economic policies, also taking economic cycle into account.