Journal of Comparative Economics最新文献

Can decentralization of political powers increase trust in government? We present quasi-experimental evidence from Ukraine where political trust has been among the lowest levels worldwide. The national government devolved powers and resources to newly formed local governments (hromadas) between 2015 and 2020; this includes a substantial share of taxes on local incomes. We exploit local differences in the timing of the decentralization reform. Difference-in-differences estimations show that citizens in decentralized communities report more trust in local authorities and participate more often in local elections. The most likely mechanism is the democratic process of coming together to build new local communities. Local trust however does not spill over to trust in national institutions. The results may explain the strong role of hromadas in Ukraine’s resilience against the detrimental effects of the Russian invasion.

What are the economic consequences of geopolitical fragmentation on trade? We answer this question by using a canonical general equilibrium trade model to quantify the trade and welfare effects stemming from world trade fragmentation along geopolitical borders. To calibrate the size of the increase in trade costs, we use a new aggregate measure of trade restrictions that spans over the last 70 years and includes up to 157 countries and estimate the impact on trade of very broad trade policy restrictions in a theory-consistent structural gravity framework. We estimate that a fragmentation into three different trade blocs (Western, Eastern, Neutral)—defined according to how countries voted on the suspension of the rights of membership of the Russian Federation in the United Nations Human Rights Council because of the invasion of Ukraine— would have important effects on trade between them, reducing trade flows by 22%–57%, in the most extreme scenarios. Welfare losses would be the largest in the Eastern bloc, where the median country would experience a welfare loss of up to 3.4%.

We highlight a new factor behind integration: tolerance in the immigrants’ background culture. We hypothesize that it is easier to partake of economic, civic-political and social life in a new country for a person stemming from a culture that embodies tolerance towards people who are different. We test this by applying the epidemiological method, using a tolerance index based on two indicators from the World Values Survey – the share that thinks it important to teach children tolerance and the share that considers homosexuality justified – as our main independent variable. Our outcomes are indices of individual-level economic, civic-political and cultural integration outcomes for immigrants of the second generation with data from the European Social Survey. The results indicate that tolerance in the background culture is a robust predictor of integration among children of immigrants in European societies.

Using a newly created dataset of detailed and disaggregated military expenditures, this paper studies the impact of military expenditures on GDP changes in nine Central and Eastern European countries in 1999–2021. The cumulative fiscal multipliers of military expenditures estimated using the Local Projections method take values 0.6 on impact, 1.5–1.6 in the second and in the third year after shock and gradually decrease in subsequent years. They are higher during recession periods. Personnel military expenditures have relatively the highest multipliers among disaggregated military expenditures. Other military expenditures have positive, but lower than unity multipliers, while the multipliers of military equipment purchases are insignificant and close to zero. Cumulative multipliers of military expenditures during military build-up after the outbreak of the war in Donbas were lower than cumulative multipliers in the whole sample.

Basic economics teaches that price caps are bad – limiting the price of a good distorts demand and discourages producers from supplying the market. So why did the Biden Administration, led by Janet Yellen, the consummate economist, champion a price cap on oil from Russia after it invaded Ukraine in 2022? The answer is that this price cap, implemented for crude oil in December 2022 and oil products in February 2023, differs significantly from the standard cap discussed in introductory economics classes. This paper explains these differences and describes  the first six months this policy has been in existence. We  provide background on Russian oil trade  and describe the goals, structure,   enforcement and economics of the price cap. We review the main concerns and contrast them with the outcomes observed to date.

We propose a simple and flexible econometric approach to quantify ex-ante the impact of comprehensive trade liberalization or protection with the structural gravity model. Specifically, we argue that the difference between the estimates of border indicator variables for affected and non-affected countries can be used to measure unobservable changes in bilateral trade costs in response to hypothetical policy changes. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods, we focus on the integration between the countries from the Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA) and the European Union (EU); an important policy application that has not been studied before due to a lack of data. We overcome this challenge by utilizing a new dataset on trade and production that covers all EU countries and all CEFTA members (except for Kosovo). The partial equilibrium estimates that we obtain confirm the validity of our methods, while the corresponding general equilibrium effects point to significant and heterogeneous potential gains for the CEFTA countries from joining the EU. The proposed methods are readily applicable to other applications, e.g., Brexit or joining the World Trade Organization (WTO), and can also be extended to ex-post analysis.

This paper introduces near-real time data on Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and uses these data to investigate the short-term impact of occupation and violence on local economic activity. The data project – VIINA (Violent Incident Information from News Articles) – parses news reports from Ukrainian and Russian media, georeferences them, and classifies them into standard event categories (e.g. artillery shelling) through machine learning. As we show, VIINA is more geographically comprehensive and more thoroughly documented than other open-source event databases on Ukraine, and is the only such effort to track territorial control. We illustrate applications for research on political economy, by utilizing remote sensing data on luminosity and vegetation as proxies for urban economic activity and agricultural land use. We find that economic activity declined most in urban areas that neither side fully controlled, and in places most exposed to artillery shelling. Areas under Russian occupation, however, were more insulated from these negative shocks. Although not causal, these findings are in line with the view that war brings not only economic devastation, but also vast geographic inequalities that are almost immediately observable from space.

This paper estimates the effect of the Gaokao reform on children's migration. The reform relaxes the Hukou restrictions in the Gaokao system, allowing eligible migrant children to take the Gaokao in the destination province and be admitted to higher education institutions based on the same criteria as local students. Using the CMDS 2011–2017 dataset and the difference-in-differences approach, we find that the reform significantly increases children's migration probability; the positive effect is weaker in provinces with more stringent requirements. While Gaokao reform does not affect parents’ decisions of cross-province migration or destination of migration, parents’ extend their migration duration.

Do the human costs of Russia’s war in Ukraine undermine the popular support for the Russian government? Although there is little evidence that the poor performance of the Russian military forces in Ukraine erodes domestic support for the government, region-specific war casualties may help fuel anti-war sentiment. The paper hypothesizes that publicly announced military deaths and obituaries published in the local news and social media groups can incite anti-war sentiment because they bring the human cost of the war into peoples’ homes. To evaluate this hypothesis, we use a hand-collected dataset of obituaries, published on the most popular social network in Russia, and analyze statistical connections between the announcements of war casualties and instances of various forms of political protests. The data support the casualties-protest connection, but find that obituaries of military servicemembers with non-Russian-sounding names are uncorrelated with protests even in their home regions, while the opposite is true for similar announcements with Slavic names. We speculate that the observed differences might reflect the intentional government policy of capitalizing on ethno-nationalist sentiment that has been cultivated for the support of Putin’s regime.

China is experiencing a surge in medical malpractice lawsuits. Using administrative hospital panel data, this paper investigates both short- and long-run impacts of medical malpractice lawsuits on patient medical spending and hospital operations. We find that after the occurrence of an additional malpractice lawsuit in a hospital, total medical spending per patient visit increases by 2.8% in the current year and by as much as 8.8% in the long run. This increase is mainly driven by spending on prescription drugs and diagnostic tests. In response, hospitals invest more in medical devices and procure more drugs. We find little evidence of changes in patient outcomes. Our findings show that the surge of medical malpractice lawsuits leads to defensive medicine and fuels the secular growth of medical spending in China.