Kyklos最新文献

This paper investigates the impact of citizens' perceptions of economic and political conditions on nonviolent uprisings. For a global sample of high-income (Europe) and developing economies (Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East and North Africa), on average, negative perceptions of political conditions have a significant positive effect on the number of anti-government protests and general strikes while negative perceptions of economic conditions do not, even after accounting for actual economic conditions and the quality of governance. This holds for European and high-income countries but not for developing economies where both economic and political perceptions matter. The international contagion of protests attenuates this regional heterogeneity, possibly implying that in Europe, the incidence of uprisings in nearby countries tends to generate protests at home through its effect on political perceptions. This invites the possibility of countries perennially facing vicious cycles of protests. Overall, the effects of political perceptions and protest contagion are robust to the inclusion of numerous control variables, seemingly valid instrumental variables, alternative count-data estimators, and sample composition.

This study contributes to the literature on corruption by exploring the impact of corruption controls in one region on corruption in other regions within a country, known as the spatial spillover effect. Specifically, using spatial econometric models and a panel dataset from all 63 provinces in Vietnam during the 2011–2023 period, the study finds that the spatial spillover effect of corruption controls on corruption can function through three main channels: (1) Corruption controls directly impact corruption within a province, subsequently affecting corruption in neighbouring provinces through the spatial spillover effect of corruption; (2) corruption control practices directly affect corruption in neighbouring provinces; and (3) corruption control practices in the given province affect corruption control practices in neighbouring provinces, changing corruption there. However, this effect is primarily generated by the adjacent provinces and dramatically diminishes corresponding to the increase in distance between provinces. The results also suggest that the effect of current corruption control efforts is more potent than the past efforts. These findings offer valuable information to policymakers enacting anticorruption initiatives.

This paper provides evidence that government debt is associated with increases in the income share of the top 1% in Italy between 1974 and 2019. The main argument of this study is that public debt ownership is highly concentrated at the top and interest payments on sovereign bonds are received by the wealthy bondholders. As the tax burden of financing interest payments falls on the entire population, public debt often entails a redistribution of income within a country. On top of that, modern bondholders rarely keep government bonds until maturity; rather they regularly trade in secondary markets to receive capital gains. This paper explores both historically and econometrically the two mechanisms and highlights the relevant importance of coupon payments on the Italian sovereign bonds for rising income inequality. Finally, this is the first paper to examine the drivers of the income share of the top 1% in Italy.

Schools present an ideal setting for intervention. We demonstrate that a greater prevalence of group discussion used in schools positively affects students' life satisfaction and noncognitive skills, and has no negative impact on test scores, based on a sample from the 2015 PISA, which includes more than 35 thousand students from approximately 1500 schools in 14 countries. We perform regressions of student life satisfaction on school-level group discussion and lecturing, including a battery of controls and random intercepts by school. For robustness, we use instrumental variables and methods to account for school-selection. The impact of group discussion is meaningful—a one-standard-deviation increase leads to an increase in life satisfaction that is about one-half of the negative-association with grade repetition. In contrast, lecturing does not have any effects. We are the first to show group discussion improves student life satisfaction and noncognitive skills, and thereby likely positively affects later-life outcomes.

The Great British Bake Off is a popular amateur cooking competition show, and its design offers an opportunity for analyzing serial position bias among expert rankings. In this paper, we use the technical challenge portion of the show to assess whether experts—in this case, the judges in the show—are susceptible to primacy or recency effects. We find that expert judges favor the first dish tasted in a blind test and that this pattern holds not only among judges of the British version of the show but also in other English-speaking versions. We do not find evidence of a recency effect. Our results indicate that expert assessments, regularly used in markets, are vulnerable to bias even when there are no financial incentives.