Journal of Comparative Economics最新文献

The evidence for whether China become more competitive following its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) is mixed. Using recent methods for estimating markups and profit shares, this paper documents that Chinese manufacturing firms on average collected more rents after the accession because the rate of net entry of firms lagged the rapid growth of the domestic market. While the selection on large productive firms drove the rise in the aggregate markups in the United States (De Loecker et al., 2020), these competitive forces played a secondary role in China.

What are the origins of national identity? We investigate the success of propaganda as one the first nation-building policies conducted in the German lands around 1815. To elicit identity changes at the level of individuals we use data on first names across German cities and villages. To validate the approach of using first names, we show that soldiers with national names had a higher likelihood to be honored for bravery during the German-French War. Exploiting unanticipated border changes together with variation within the same families over time, i.e., family fixed effects, we find that parents in treated cities responded by choosing national (rather than ruler) first names for their children. We do not find a corresponding increase in villages suggesting that national identity was more prevalent among the urban population, in particular the elite, during this period.

Can transparency interventions reduce corrupt behavior when corrupt actors are politically influential and the victims of corrupt acts confront large obstacles to collective action? These conditions describe the pervasive phenomenon of grand corruption and potentially render corrupt actors less vulnerable to transparency interventions. We present the first evidence that, despite these theoretical obstacles, a transparency intervention in the Colombian School Meals Program significantly changed the behavior of powerful operators. The intervention consisted of informal audits and text messages to parents. It affected behavior through two channels. A survey of parents reveals greater bottom-up mobilization to oversee operators in treated schools; the pattern of operator responses to the informal audits over time and across departments indicates that operators were concerned that systematic evidence of corrupt behavior would trigger top-down enforcement actions by high-level enforcement agencies.

Survival cannibalism persisted across human societies until recently. What drove the decline in cannibalism and other forms of violence? Using data from the 1470–1910 period, this paper documents that in historical China, the Confucian clan—an institutionalized kinship network—acted as an informal internal market to facilitate intra-clan resource pooling and risk-sharing, thus reducing the need for cannibalism during times of drought-related famine. The risk mitigation role of the clan remains robust after controlling for economic development and other factors and ruling out alternative channels. Thus, kinship networks and their associated culture contributed to human civilizational development before the advent of formal markets.

Symbiotic corruption occurs when senior officials employ the symbiotic relationship with junior officials in corrupt activities, to induce them to participate in the political contest for power and political rents. This paper develops a formal theoretical model to analyze the mechanics and consequences of symbiotic corruption prevailing in weakly institutionalized societies. We find that in the presence of symbiotic corruption, political contests tend to arise when the initial distribution of political rents between rival factions is disproportional to their de facto political power. Anti-corruption by increasing the effective penalty or enhancing monitoring of corruption works differently, but both are surprisingly ineffective in a society plagued by symbiotic corruption. In an unbalanced political system, where the initial distribution of political rents is relatively disproportional, an increase in the effective penalty induces rival factions to reach a tacit collusion to maintain peace and leads to universal symbiotic corruption; a rise in monitoring efficiency decreases total corruption but inevitably increases symbiotic corruption. In a balanced political system, universal corruption always emerges, and anti-corruption only affects the transformation between symbiotic and individual corruptions. This study not only sheds light on the (in)effectiveness of conventional anticorruption measures in the presence of symbiotic corruption, but also provides a new perspective on the link between bureaucratic hierarchies, national-level power dynamics, and corruption.

The use of the Internet to access news has an impact on African citizens’ perceptions of democracy. Using repeated cross-sectional data from the Afrobarometer survey across 35 African countries over the period 2011–2018, along with an instrumental variable approach, allows addressing potential endogeneity bias between Internet use and citizens’ perceptions. The results indicate that using the Internet to obtain information has a significant negative effect on both the preference for and the perception of the extent of democracy. This negative effect is due to several factors. First, Internet use erodes trust in government institutions, mainly in the parliament and the ruling party. It increases the perception that parliament members are involved in corruption. In addition, the erosion of trust is correlated with more political mobilization, in the form of greater participation in demonstrations and voting. These results echo the existing literature and, in particular, hint at the risks of reversal of nascent democratization processes. Finally, the Internet seems to act as a misinformation channel. On the one hand, Internet users’ perception of the extent of democracy and perception of the corruption of legislators diverge from experts’ assessments. On the other hand, Internet use increases the likelihood of inconsistency in respondents’ stances on their preference for democracy. The Internet is not a neutral information channel: it tends to undermine citizens’ preference for democracy while also altering perceptions about political institutions.

In this paper we examine to what extent civic engagement might emerge from a deep and organic link, which exists between religion and culture. We rely on a novel approach which approximates the deep embodiment of religious institutions in culture by the presence of religious symbols in the public sphere. Drawing on data for rural Poland, we show that municipalities in which we observe a growing number of street names associated with the Catholic Church display a higher level of civic engagement (measured by the number of NGOs) than municipalities in which, over the last years, such streets were not created.

This paper examines the effect of absolute-relative framing on contributions to a public good. Group members have high and low endowments and the number of high-income members in each group varies between treatments. They make contributions without and with a minimum contribution level. We express the contribution metric either in absolute amount or as a relative proportion of a member's initial endowment. We propose that these institutional designs affect contribution behavior through shifting reference points in decisions. First, as the number of high-type members increases, the average contribution increases, especially among the low-type members in absolute framing. Second, relative framing makes the contribution proportions between high and low types move closer than in absolute framing. Third, the difference in contributions between absolute and relative conditions mostly disappears when the minimum contribution level is introduced. We show that the effects of group members’ endowments, relative framing, and the MCL policy represent the internal, external and the institutional reference point respectively with increasing strength.

Elites’ resentment and populist sentiments have been growing in recent years. This research argues that one reason for this is growing income inequality and limited intergenerational mobility, particularly associated with persistent inequality in social status. The presented model uses mechanisms of accordance of social status to generate inequality persistence which, in turn, generates divergence in preferred policies between poor masses and rich elites. This induces the poor majority to mistrust the informed policy making by the elites and to make own, less well informed policy choices. The model generates insights that are consistent with documented empirical regularities. Additionally, our framework enables exploring mechanisms that can potentially empower the poor thereby alleviating resentment against the elites.

This study focuses on the impact of municipal government officials’ vacancies on the economic development of their cities. Using manually collected data on unfilled senior governmental positions measured by the absence of municipal party secretaries in China from 2003 to 2019, we find that these absences limit city economic development. We identify two possible channels through which this happens: government efficiency and economic policy uncertainty. Finally, we show that the impact of these vacancies on city economic development is stronger in cities in which there is greater pressure to promote government officials and in less developed cities. Thus, this study offers new evidence that vacancies in city government undermine that city's economic development, particularly in a country undergoing an economic transition.