Journal of Comparative Economics最新文献

Preferences play a key role in economic models as drivers of behaviour. Recent contributions have started to model preferences as endogenously determined. This creates two fundamental issues for empirical research. The first concerns the determinants of preferences. The second concerns the effect of preferences on economic outcomes, which become difficult to quantify once preferences are endogenous. We explore the extent to which the prevalence of risk tolerance across countries is endogenously determined by the legal and institutional environment of a country, and whether this behavioural trait in turn contributes to shaping the aggregate entrepreneurship rate. To do so, we rely on structural equation modelling, where the direction of causality arises from the underlying model assumed to construct the equations. Data fit to the model serve to determine whether the underlying causal model presents a plausible representation of the empirical facts. We find that legal origins exert a strong effect on risk tolerance. We further document an indirect effect of legal origins on entrepreneurship rates passing through risk preferences. These findings illustrate the pervasiveness of the effect of legal origins on economic behaviour.

This study examines the impact of superstition on corporate decision-making in Vietnam, a highly irreligious country. We focus on the folk belief that the ages of 49–53 are considered calamitous and use a regression discontinuity design to show that companies significantly decrease their investment in fixed assets during these ages of their directors. The effect is more pronounced in smaller firms and is not accompanied by a decrease in employment growth. We introduce a novel two-stage difference method to identify the role of superstition in causing the ‘calamitous ages’ effect.

We generate and analyze data pertinent to examining whether developments in caselaw were consequential for England's economic performance during the Industrial Revolution. Applying topic modeling to a corpus of 67,455 reports on English court cases, we construct annual time series of caselaw developments between 1765 and 1865. We then add a real per-capita GDP series to our caselaw series and estimate a structural VAR featuring a linear time trend. Our evidence shows that caselaw developments were an important determinant of economic fluctuations. Caselaw shocks jointly account for more of the variability in per-capita GDP around its long-term trend than do shocks directly to per-capita GDP. The response of per-capita GDP to caselaw innovations critically depends on the legal domain. Developments in caselaw on intellectual property, organizations, debt and finance, and inheritance boosted economic performance while developments in property and ecclesiastical caselaw had negative effects on per-capita GDP. Our analysis uncovers a 'bleak-law era' when the legal system misallocated attention between output-promoting and output-hindering areas of law.

Do politically administered mass layoffs undermine trust and political interest? During the German reunification, formerly state-owned socialist firms in East Germany were privatized by the Treuhand, which came at the cost of massive job losses and public protest. We demonstrate that these activities had a detrimental effect on attitudes and political behavior of the affected individuals. Using survey data from the German Socio-economic Panel and election results, we find that East Germans who lost their jobs exhibit significantly lower trust levels, lower political interest and a lower identification with mainstream democratic parties, even up to 30 years after reunification. We corroborate the causality of the results using fixed-effects estimations and a placebo analysis, which fails to explain political disenchantment by reasons other than the Treuhand experience. We interpret the findings as the persistent, negative effect of perceived political mismanagement during a crucial phase of economic transition on long-run political identification.

The Covid 19 pandemic has caused both a decrease in tax revenues and an increase in public spending, forcing governments to increase fiscal deficits to unprecedented levels. Given these circumstances, it is foreseeable that fiscal rules will play a predominant role in the design of many countries’ recovery policies. We develop a general equilibrium, overlapping generations model for a small, open economy in order to study the impact of several fiscal rules upon welfare, public expenditures and growth. We calibrate the model to the Peruvian economy. In this economy, fiscal rules have been widely used and, unlike in other Latin American countries, they have been relatively successful. We find that fiscal rules will generate better results in terms of output if, in addition to maintaining control over the fiscal result, they also preserve public investment. We also find that the performance of economies that implement structural rules tends to be better than the performance of economies that implement rules based on realized budget balance.

Although formal education is often considered an indicator of political leaders’ quality, the evidence on the effectiveness of educated leaders is mixed. Besides, minimum education qualifications are increasingly being used as requirements for contesting elections, making it critical to understand the role of politicians’ education in their performance. This study investigates the impact of electing an educated politician on economic development in the politician’s constituency in India. The analysis uses constituency-level panel data on the intensity of night-time lights to measure economic activity. The identification strategy is based on a regression discontinuity design that exploits quasi-random outcomes of close elections between educated and less-educated politicians. The results show that narrowly electing a graduate leader, as compared to a non-graduate leader, in the state assembly constituency increases the growth rate of night-time lights by about 3 percentage points in the constituency. As pathways, graduate leaders are found to improve the provision of roads, electricity, and power; however, they do not significantly impact the overall provision of public goods. In comparison with findings from other studies in the literature, these results suggest that the impact of formal education of the leader is weaker than the leader’s other characteristics, such as gender or criminality.

We use the time series variation in the World Bank’s “distance to frontier” estimates of the ease of doing business to assess the effects of changes in this variable on real GDP per capita. The use of Vector Autoregression techniques allows us to identify shocks to the Doing Business scores that are initially uncorrelated with GDP, thus addressing an important endogeneity problem that affects the cross-sectional literature on this topic. We report a robust finding that improvements in Doing Business scores have at least a temporary negative impact on GDP and find little evidence for a positive effect in the years following these improvements.

We study how the tax morale of individuals is influenced by societal diversity in their place of residence. Using data from the World Value Survey, we compare the effects that diversity has on self-reported measures of tax morale at the national, sub-national and individual level. We show first that, both across countries and within countries across sub-national regions, greater diversity is associated with lower average levels of tax morale. We then document that within countries and regions tax morale is lower among individuals who are less similar to others and this effect operates more strongly in places characterized by higher levels of diversity. This pattern applies to diversity in terms of different social cleavages, including income, ethnicity, language or religion, but is particularly pronounced when it comes to diversity in terms of cultural values. This suggests that social identification is important for how people perceive their responsibility of paying taxes.

This paper employs data from the World Values Survey (1995–2020) and the European Values Study (1999–2020) to test three hypotheses on attitudinal differences between Catholics, Protestants and Muslims: (1) the work ethic hypothesis, which covers attitudes towards work and some fundamental characteristics of the market economy; (2) the social ethic hypothesis, which concerns interpersonal trust, ethical standards and attitudes towards gender equality; (3) the political ethic hypothesis, which involves attitudes towards democracy and political violence, institutional trust and preferences for government-organized redistribution. The empirical analysis provides very little support for the work ethic hypothesis but solid support for the social and political ethic hypothesis. Although the results should be ultimately interpreted as partial correlations, they support the following argument. Market forces and the rise of post-materialist values may have dissolved the original role of a work ethic rooted in religion (especially in the Catholic and Protestant world). Yet, the socio-political ethic associated with Catholicism, Protestantism and Islam continues to manifest itself in attitudinal differences concerning interpersonal trust, ethical standards and gender equality, and in political preferences. A complementary analysis of regions with a historically strong influence of Catholicism, Protestantism and Islam supports this argument and suggests that the current attitudinal differences between the three religions are more related to their cultural and historical legacy than to current personal commitment to their specific doctrines.

Using a panel of more than 156 000 firms surveyed in 140 countries over the 2003–2019 period, this paper addresses the issue of the financial resource curse through a new channel that thus far has not been accounted for in the literature, namely, firms’ access to finance. To do this, our econometric analysis is based on an original approach combining microeconomic level data on firms’ access to finance and macroeconomic level data on countries’ level of natural resource rents, with a focus on energy rents (oil, gas and coal). By doing so, we are able to investigate in a more precise and disaggregated way the mechanisms explaining why resource-based countries are associated with less developed financial systems. Using panel regressions, we find significant and robust evidence that firms operating in countries characterized by a high level of natural resource rents suffer from less access to external financing. Moreover, depending on two important transmission channels, namely, the quality of institutions and the extent of supply constraints, we find heterogeneities in the relationship between firms’ access to finance and countries’ level of natural resource rents. In addition, we show that the countries’ level of natural resource rents has a significant and negative correlation with firms’ access to finance only for firms that do not operate in the natural resource sector. This provides new evidence of the Dutch disease phenomenon, since the lack of firms’ financing can also be an explanation for the atrophy of sectors unrelated to the natural resource sector.