European Journal of Political Economy最新文献

There is a consensus over Europe’s transformation into a highly competitive economy through a series of ambitious pro-competition reforms. However, both the European Commission and national actors have legislative authority over competition policies. Thus, who are the critical actors behind this legislative and economic transformation in this multi-level system? Focusing on the liberalization of state-owned industries and using a staggered difference-in-differences approach, the paper shows that the effectiveness of European directives in decreasing firm-level market power increased with the extent of preceding domestic pro-competition reforms. For every unit increase of the early domestic reform index, EU directives decrease market power in liberalized industries by an additional 7.8%. However, this effect is not significant in countries that did not reform their industries ex-ante. This finding contradicts the established view in the literature identifying the Commission as the dominant force driving this transformation, which implemented ambitious reforms by often overcoming the resistance of reluctant national governments. Instead, it is shown that the effectiveness of the Commission’s reforms depends on the support of domestic actors and compatible national institutions.

Using data from two representative population surveys with more than 3000 participants, we examine the effect of randomized priming interventions on attitudes toward immigrants and preferences for immigration policy. We document robust null effects of these interventions in two experimental settings, across two surveys, and for a range of specifications. Our results suggest that (economic) attitudes toward immigrants may be less sensitive to priming than previous research suggests when priming intensity is moderate. We thus (i) provide evidence for settings in which intentional priming interventions are ineffective, and (ii) suggest a reference point for unintentional priming effects. We conclude that researchers should not be overly concerned about confounding priming effects when designing surveys to elicit attitudes toward immigration.

We assess the impact of geopolitical risk and world uncertainty on the sovereign debt risk of 26 European Economies during the period 1984–2022, through the implementation of OLS-Fixed Effects regressions and the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). We find that geopolitical tensions and global uncertainty in border countries contribute to the rise of European country's sovereign risk as measured by 5- and 10-year Credit Default Swaps (CDS) and bond returns. Moreover, this interconnection is more pronounced during turbulent times such as the subprime crisis. Lastly, we found that geopolitical tensions in other country’ groups such as South America and Asia have a significant impact on the government risks of European countries.

Social trust is a deeply-rooted feature of society, whose positive impact on economic performance has been widely documented in many contexts. However, its impact on the non-economic aspects of social progress that characterize advanced societies, such as personal rights, freedom, tolerance and inclusion and access to advanced education is still understudied, especially at the subnational level. As shown by the European Social Progress Index (EU-SPI) 2020, elaborated by the European Commission, the European regions present remarkable disparities in those non-economic aspects. Using the EU-SPI framework, this paper provides fresh evidence on a positive impact of social trust on several features defining advanced social progress. Social trust effects are mainly seen in improved quality of government, education and people’s pro-social behaviors. These insights can be useful for the design of future policies that pursue a more equal Europe beyond purely economic indicators, given that regional social trust can condition their success.

I study how economic growth in Chinese cities responds to the recent anti-corruption campaign, focusing on a novel mechanism of network-based political competition, whereby the removal of investigated officials creates job vacancies and triggers promotion competition within the social network of the investigated officials for the vacancies. Such a network-based competition hinges on the premise that (1) some positions are persistently occupied by certain networks, and (2) high-ranked officials help low-ranked ones to achieve promotion within the network, two facts that are well supported by the evidence. Using a difference-in-differences and an instrumental variable approach, I find that cities’ GDP growth rate registers a 2.5-percentage-point increase following the investigation of the city leader’s connected officials. City leaders create a healthier business environment, attract investments, and increase government spending, while some long-term issues, including innovation, education, and environmental protection, are compromised, indicating the dichotomous nature of political competition.

Presidential Elections are critical moments for polyarchical systems, particularly in contexts of high social tension. In this regard, the 2018 presidential election in Brazil, which used a two-round system, is a significant case study. Intriguingly, the most divisive candidates went to the second round. Was this an institutional accident? Pairwise and positional voting procedures embody different generalizations of a majoritarian credo that underpins such elections. The paper mobilizes both perspectives and, using representative survey data, reconstructs the top four preferences of the Brazilian electorate a week before the election. The analysis reveals that the electoral winner, Jair Messias Bolsonaro – despite being a divisive candidate – was a Condorcet Winner and a Borda Winner. Conversely, the second-round loser, Fernando Haddad, was a Condorcet Loser. Thus, Bolsonaro’s victory in 2018 was not an institutional accident. The paper also explores possible alternative scenarios under different feasible sets of candidates through simulations, contributing to a deeper understanding of the role of decision procedures in critical junctures.

Supply-side policies take centre stage in the EU's post-pandemic recovery plans. This paper employs a benchmarking approach to quantify the potential impact of structural reforms in the EU Member States. Based on a comprehensive collection of structural indicators and a rich endogenous growth model, we evaluate reforms in five policy areas: (i) market competition and regulation; (ii) taxation; (iii) skills and education; (iv) labour markets; and (v) research and development. For each indicator and Member State, we simulate the closing of half of the gap with the EU's best performers, implying ambitious reforms for countries with significant distance to the frontier. For these stylised reforms, we find significant potential gains in employment and output, raising EU GDP by around 2% and 8% after five and twenty years, respectively. In the long run, the policies can increase EU GDP by over 20%. The policies also reduce economic disparities between countries, given different scope for reform. For countries with a sizable distance to the best performers, increases in potential GDP could exceed 40% when halving the gap across all indicators. Among the reforms considered here, human capital investment emerges as central for enhancing growth potential. In addition, we find synergies across reforms and countries and assess the sensitivity to alternative assumptions on technology dynamics in our model.

We investigate whether joining the European Monetary Union and losing the ability to set monetary policy affected the economic growth of Eurozone countries. We use the synthetic control approach to create a counterfactual scenario for how each Eurozone country would have evolved without adopting the euro. We let this matching algorithm determine which combination of other developed economies best resembles the pre-euro path of twelve Eurozone economies. Our estimates suggest that most countries’ economic growth was not significantly affected. There were some mild losers (France, Germany, Italy, and Portugal) and a clear winner (Ireland). The drivers of these economic gains and losses are heterogeneous. First, we find that Ireland’s economic gains are more modest when excluding profits and income earned by foreigners. Second, our results show that adopting the euro spurred government consumption and trade and deterred private consumption and investment, on average.

Judicial independence is a fundamental pillar of a liberal democracy. In one of its most basic functions, judicial independence impedes the ability to engage in executive overreach. Judicial manipulation, particularly the infamous practice of court-packing, threatens this pillar. Court-packing and other forms of judicial manipulation can exacerbate executive corruption and worsen government accountability and the rule of law. Using synthetic control analyses, we examine three countries (Hungary, Poland, and Turkey) that recently implemented waves of judicial manipulation that included outright court-packing. Our results provide evidence that in every case, executive corruption worsens and scores on accountability and rule of law decrease relative to the counterfactual. Furthermore, the gap between the de jure constitutional provisions and the actual de facto practice of those provisions (constitutional compliance) widens. In each case, these results are large in magnitude and almost always statistically significant.

We provide first evidence for the long-run causal impact that Chinese imports to European regions had on voting outcomes and revisit earlier estimates of the short-run impact for a methodological reason. The fringes of the political spectrum gained ground many years after the China shock plateaued and, unlike an earlier study by Colantone and Stanig (2018b), we do not find any robust evidence for a short-run effect on far-right votes. Instead, far-left and populist parties gained in the short run. We identify persistent long-run effects of import shocks on voting. These effects are biased towards populism and, to a lesser extent, to the far-right.