Journal of Comparative Economics最新文献

This paper evaluates a maternity support conditional cash transfer (CCT) scheme, launched in October 2011, on short and long-run health outcomes of children in India. We estimate intent-to-treat effects of the program by exploiting a natural experiment arising from select geographical implementation and the eligibility of program benefits for first/second born children using the National Family Health Survey-4 data. We find an increase in birth weight, duration of breastfeeding and long term weight-forage, with a larger impact on male children. The effects are positive for height-for-age and negative for infant mortality, albeit insignificant, and significantly negative for neonatal mortality but only over a longer time period. These results are in contrast to the existing two studies in the nascent literature, which in the context of limited availability of healthcare services, find no effect of maternity support CCTs on child health outcomes. Thus, our findings show that institutional factors that ensure access to local health infrastructure for meeting the imposed conditionalities are important for the success of maternal CCT schemes.

In this article, the link between financial wealth and pre-tax household income distribution is scrutinised for three European countries using a conceptually fully consistent macro framework. First, national balance sheets are combined with the related income flows. After this, income flows that are not property income but that are considered part of national income (e.g., wages and salaries) are added, the national income flows are broken down by institutional sector, and the household sector income flows separated. Finally, distributional household microdata are used to break down the aggregate household sector income flows by income decile. The article utilises this framework to analyse the evolution of rates of return and capital and labour shares, as well as the way in which the property income flows created by financial wealth have affected household primary income distribution.

The cross-country relationship between economic freedom and inequality is explored using matching methods. This approach addresses selection bias and endogeneity generally better than extant studies. Meaningful increases in the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) index are related to changes in (i) decile income shares, (ii) decile income levels, and (iii) Gini coefficients. Increased economic freedom is associated with significant gains across the income distribution. It is also associated with modest increases in inequality – associated particularly with gains in the top income decile.

The paper uses a new country-level, panel data set to study the effect of public sector wages on corruption. The results show that wage inequality in the public sector is an important determinant of the effectiveness of anti-corruption policies. Increasing the wages of public officials could help reduce corruption in countries with low public sector wage inequality. In countries where public sector wages are highly unequal, however, raising the wages of government employees could increase corruption. These results are robust to a wide range of empirical model specifications, estimation methods, and distributional assumptions. Combining increases in public sector wages with policies affecting wage distribution could help policy makers design cost-effective programs to reduce corruption in their countries.

The incentives for state-owned banks to boost lending before elections in order to improve the re-election odds of incumbent politicians are well recognized. We hypothesize that political influence on lending behavior in electoral autocracies extends to all banks, irrespective of ownership or political connections. Employing monthly data on individual banks, we consider the lending behavior of Russian banks in the four presidential elections held between 2004 and 2019. We find that both state-owned and private banks increased their lending before these presidential elections. Controlling for economic fluctuations, the pre-election lending surge is followed by a deterioration of loan quality the following year. We show that private banks are rewarded for boosting their lending before an election with government deposits after the election. Our findings support the view that the authorities in electoral autocracies such as Russia have the capacity and means to influence lending of private and state-owned banks in pursuit of favorable election outcomes.

This paper explores the interplay between past exposure to macroeconomic shocks and populist attitudes. We document that individuals who experienced a macroeconomic shock during their impressionable years (between 18 and 25 years of age), are currently more prone to voting for populist parties, and manifest lower trust both in national and European institutions. We use data for EU countries from the European Social Survey (ESS) to construct the differential individual exposure to macroeconomic shocks during impressionable years. Our findings suggest that it is not only current exposure to shocks that matters (see e.g., Guiso et al., 2020) but also past exposure to economic recessions, which has a persistent positive effect on the rise of populism. Interestingly, the interplay between the two, i.e., past and current exposure to economic shocks, has a mitigating effect on the rise of populism. Individuals who were exposed to economic shocks in the past are less likely to manifest populist attitudes when faced with a current crisis, as suggested by the experience-based learning literature.

Voluminous theoretical and empirical research shows that real exchange rate (RER) undervaluation could be conducive to economic development. Why do countries then often avoid the pursuit of policies that facilitate undervaluation or even intentionally pursue RER overvaluation? We address this question by investigating economic, institutional, and policy factors that help explain the within-country variation in RER undervaluation in a baseline panel of 68 developing and 39 developed countries between 1989–2013 using OLS and GMM estimators. Our results indicate that increases in the share of non-tradable sector output, imported input intensity of exports, and capital account openness is systematically associated with less undervalued RERs. We also provide evidence that independent central banks and democratic institutions are linked to RER overvaluation. Our key findings are robust to using alternative specifications, measures, estimation techniques, samples, and additional control variables. A preliminary comparison of Latin America and East Asia suggests interesting support for our key findings.

We study the impact of the Italian Civil War and Nazi occupation of Italy in 1943–45 on postwar political outcomes. The Communist Party, which was more active in the resistance movement, gained votes in areas where the Nazi occupation was both longer and harsher, mainly at the expense of centrist parties. This effect persists until the late 1980s. These results suggest that civil war and widespread political violence reshape political identities in favor of the political groups that emerge as winners. This benefits extremist groups and hurts moderates since the former have a comparative advantage in organizing violent conflict.

We create a novel data set on the European river network and for the ruggedness of trade routes between European countries and integrate these new indicators into recently developed structural gravity models. Moreover, we propose a new approach how to differentiate between contemporaneous and historical trade costs. Applying two-stage structural gravity estimations, we assess the impact of topography on trade by combining worldwide, European, and domestic trade data. While border effect estimates remain largely robust, a main part of the historical and contemporaneous trade costs usually attributed to non-contiguity can be accounted for by topography. Finally, counterfactual simulations suggest that positive effects of rivers on trade are less important than negative effects of mountains.