Journal of Comparative Economics最新文献

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.

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.

We explore the determinants and consequences of U.S. corporations limiting their business operations in Russia in the immediate aftermath of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Firms with Russian exposure experience slightly worse stock market returns when the invasion begins on February 24, 2022. Russia-exposed firms with worse stock-price reactions to the war and greater share of operations in Russia are more likely to subsequently remain in Russia, while firms with milder ex ante exposure are more likely to withdraw or suspend their Russian operations. When U.S. firms announce exits from Russia in the aftermath of the invasion, there are no adverse announcement effects on their returns. Instead, exit announcements are preceded by a negative trend in abnormal returns that ends immediately on the day of the announcement. In regression analyses, immediately preceding negative stock returns are the strongest predictor of firms’ decisions to exit Russia, after size and industry. These results are consistent with firms choosing to limit their Russian presence in response to operational impact and reputational pressure, and the damage to stock returns stops immediately after the exit announcements.

Although international sanctions are a widely used instrument of coercion, their economic effects are still not well-understood. This study uses a novel dataset and an event study approach to evaluate the economic consequences of international sanctions, thereby visualizing pre-treatment and treatment dynamics in countries subject to sanctions. Our analysis focuses on the effects of sanctions on GDP growth as well as on various transmission channels through which sanctions suppress economic activity. We document a significant negative effect of sanctions on the growth rate of GDP and its components (consumption and investment) as well as on trade and foreign direct investment. Given that sanctions exert their adverse effect over the first years of a sanction episode and that sanctioned countries fail to recover during or immediately after the episode, we demonstrate the usefulness of sanctions as a political instrument of coercion. Long-lasting sanctions regimes, however, may not provide the political incentives needed to force additional concessions.

This paper studies extortion of firms operating in legal sectors by a profit-maximizing criminal organization. We develop a simple taxation model under asymmetric information to find the Mafia optimal extortion as a function of firms’ observable characteristics, namely size and sector. We test the predictions of the model on a unique dataset on extortion in Sicily, the Italian region where the Sicilian Mafia, one of the most ancient criminal organizations, operates. In line with our theoretical model, our empirical findings show that extortion is strongly concave with respect to firm size and highly regressive. The percentage of profits appropriated by the Mafia ranges from 40% for small firms to 2% for large enterprises. We derive some implications of these findings for market structure and economic development.

How much has Russia’s war in Ukraine damaged the collateral of Ukrainian firms, and how much damage has that caused the Ukrainian financial system? We address this question using unusually rich high-frequency supervisory data of Ukrainian banks combined with a survey of banks on the location and condition of corporate borrowers’ collateral between February and November 2022. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in collateral value resulting from damage to collateral, we find that a 10-percent reduction in the collateral-loan ratio lowers the probability of getting any new loan by nearly eight percentage points; new lending falls by over two percentage points. Our results additionally imply that the same reduction in collateral value raises default rates and banks’ assessment of firms’ probability of default by approximately eight and four percentage points, respectively. The results imply that, in the absence of sufficient aid to repair the damage, Ukraine may experience reduced investment and lower economic growth in the future.