Kyklos最新文献

Blockchains have enabled innovation in distributed economic institutions, such as money (e.g., cryptocurrencies) and markets (e.g., decentralised exchanges), but also innovations in distributed governance, such as decentralised autonomous organisations. These innovations have generated academic interest in studying web3 governance, but as yet there is no general theory of web3 governance. In this paper, we draw on the contrast between a ‘romantic view’ of governance (characterised by consensus through community voting) and the ‘exchange view’ of governance from public choice theory (characterised by an entrepreneurial process of bargaining and exchange of voters under uncertainty). Our analysis is the first to argue that the latter ‘exchange view’ of governance is best to understand the dynamics of governance innovation in web3, providing the foundations for a new general theory of governance in this frontier field. We apply the ‘exchange view’ of governance to three case studies (Curve, Lido and Metagov), exploring how these projects enable pseudonymous, composable and permissionless governance processes to reveal value. Our approach helps illuminate how this emergent polycentric governance process can generate robustness in decentralised systems.

In a representative democracy, politicians should either implement policies that voters want or policies that politicians believe are in voters long-term interest, even if voters currently oppose them. The exact balance between these goals is debatable and politicians' policy engagement can tempt them to dismiss voters' preferences and resist information counter to their own policy position. In this paper, we discuss Sweden's generous migration policy and how it can serve as an example where politicians' policy engagement led them to a overly optimistic view of the implications of welcoming a large influx of refugees. Using detailed, repeated, survey data on members of parliament, we show that Swedish politicians favored a much more generous policy toward accepting refugees than voters for a long period of time. Neither observable factors nor expert knowledge can explain this difference between voters and politicians. A more likely explanations is wishful thinking and policy engagement from politicians that continued until political competition increased.

We utilize a natural experiment, an education reform increasing compulsory schooling from 5 to 8 years in Turkey, to obtain endogeneity-robust estimates of the effect of male education on the incidence of domestic violence against women. We find that husband's education lowers the probability of physical, emotional, and economic violence. Schooling lowers also the likelihood of having an arranged marriage and makes men less inclined to engage in various socially unacceptable behaviors. We show that these findings are very robust to alternative regression specifications and restricted sample estimation. Finally, we argue that assortative mating implies that the educational outcomes of the two spouses are correlated. Our findings are robust to accounting for the husbands' and wives' education jointly. Moreover, when we separate the two effects, we show that the favorable effect of education can be attributed causally to men's education rather than to the education of their wives.

The self-sacrifice of suicide terrorists is subject to sophisticated models of altruistic sacrifice. Yet, a simpler account is that it reflects common suicidal tendencies. This paper offers new micro and macro evidence supportive of this hypothesis. At the micro level, the paper compares a sample of suicide and non-suicide terrorists in the United States from 1948 to 2017. Results indicate that suicide terrorists are more likely to display various established suicidal risk factors including history of child abuse, absent parent/s, and relationship troubles. Results from Bayesian Model Averaging indicate that suicide risk factors outperform other individual factors (e.g., ideology and lone-actor terrorism) in explaining suicide terrorism. At the macro level, the paper takes advantage of the cross-national variations in suicidal tendencies to explain the incidence of suicide and non-suicide terrorist attacks worldwide from 1991 to 2014. Results reveal that countries with higher share of deaths from suicide display higher incidences of suicide attacks but similar incidences of non-suicide attacks. However, other contextual factors such as the share of Muslims also predict the incidence of suicide terrorism. The decision of some terrorists to sacrifice their life may well have been subject to over-theorization.

In this paper, we study how free labor mobility agreements in Europe, usually thought to favor inward migration, might actually create good incentives for already settled migrants to exit their host country. Using outmigration data between 1990 and 2011, a period of observation where some countries entered the EU and especially a period during which Schengen agreements have been progressively implemented by a large number of European countries, we could test this conjecture. While the evidence for EU is mixed, we find very strong evidence that Schengen did increase migrations outflows by 40 to 53%. The effect appears to be even higher for outmigrants originating from Eastern Europe after their countries' accession to Schengen. Also, and consistent with the hypothesis of preferences for living at home or in a country with a close culture to home, the effect of Schengen on outmigration happens to be smaller when the countries of origin and of residence of the outmigrants are close in terms of their cultural traits. Also, we document that the Schengen effect is significantly higher for outmigration flows than for immigration flows by almost 20 percentage points.

This paper considers an alternate dimension of government institutions associated with the separation of powers between government and its central bank. A more independent central bank is consistent with greater institutional quality and constraints on government. We propose that central bank independence influences the prevalence of the shadow, or underground, economy. Using cross-country panel data for over 100 nations over the period 1991 to 2012, the results from instrumental variables techniques show that central bank independence curbs underground economic activity. Furthermore, considering different dimensions of independence, we find that independence related to central bank CEO, policy formation, and central bank lending are effective at checking the shadow sector. Overall, these findings are robust to a different measure of the underground economy, correcting for the potential influence of outliers, controlling for the impact of additional factors, accounting for heterogeneity related to the level of development, and considering the heterogeneity related to the prevalence of the shadow sector. The main implication of the results is that nations seeking to reduce the prevalence of the underground economy would benefit from policies that promote central bank independence.

Economists have developed a vast empirical literature on how cultural traits like generalized trust affect economic output. Much of this literature finds a positive causal relationship between measures of generalized trust, as gathered by international surveys, and economic output. However, the trust literature commits five deadly empirical and theoretical sins that undermine many of its findings. From the quality of the survey questions and responses to the paucity of theoretical models used to explain how trust affects economic outcomes to the radically different results from experimental evidence and others, the trust literature is riven with poor methods and bad data. Even so, applying common methods used in the trust literature to regional level analysis in the United States during the 1972–2018 period reveals no statistically significant correlation between economic output and trust. Given our lack of findings at the subnational level, we find further evidence to be skeptical of the trust literature.

We utilize data from 5,010 soccer games in the top two Swiss divisions between the 2005/06 and 2018/19 seasons. In these games, a referee can share the same linguistic area with one of the teams. Using referee-per-season fixed effects, we find that referees issue significantly more penalties, in the form of yellow cards, to teams that are not from the referee's linguistic area. We also find some evidence, in the highest level league only, that referees issue more red cards to teams that are not from their linguistic area and that away teams achieve fewer points when home teams share the same linguistic area with the referee. Our analyses suggest that referees' bias is likely to be subconscious and reflexive rather than being a deliberate act of discrimination.

This article hypothesizes and empirically establishes that statehood experience, accumulated over a period of up to six millennia, lies at the deep roots of the spatial distribution of political instability across non-European countries. Using the state history index measured between 3,500 BCE and 2000 CE, I consistently obtain precise estimates that long-standing states outside Europe, relative to their newly established counterparts, are characterized by greater political uncertainty. I postulate that a very long duration of state experience impeded the transplantation of inclusive political institutions by European colonizers, which would eventually become central to shaping countries' ability to establish politically stable regimes outside Europe. The core findings place emphasis on the long-term legacy of early state development for contemporary political instability.

We present the first model of preference evolution in an environment where the fame of an agent affects selection. Specifically, agents who are famous are more likely to be selected for comparison by other agents. Agents compare happiness, and then switch preferences if the other agent is happier. Without the attention economy, only ‘happy’ preferences survive – happy preferences being those which, when followed, give agents maximal subjective well-being. In an attention economy, however, unhappy preferences can persist if there is incomplete information. With incomplete information, agents may make errors when assessing the happiness of others. Furthermore, famous agents may be systematically less happy than others; empirical happiness research suggests that happiness comes from factors like family and religion, not fame. With these two possibilities in play, ordinary agents may be matched frequently with famous people who seem happy but are not. In these matches, ordinary agents will adopt preferences that actually make them less happy, and this allows unhappy preferences to persist in equilibrium. Our model contributes a theoretical explanation for the empirical finding that people who pay more attention to media generally score lower on scales of subjective well-being.