European Journal of Political Economy最新文献

Considering self-inflicted critical events (suicides, attempted suicides, self-harm acts, hunger strikes) in Italian prisons as indicators of the respect of inmates' human rights, this study examines their relationship with the characteristics of the Italian prison system between 2016 and 2021, using a unique prison-level dataset covering the 188 national prisons. Both individual panel regressions and seemingly unrelated regressions show that reducing prison overcrowding reduces critical events. The same result is achieved by increasing mandatory treatments (restraint acts) performed discretionally by prison staff. Because the former policy is politically sensitive and difficult/costly to implement, policymakers may prefer to rely on the latter as a “death-avoidance strategy”, despite the greater likelihood of violating inmates’ human rights. These findings may help explain the increasing use of acts of restraint in Italian prisons in recent times.

We study the consequences of politically induced asset-market uncertainty. Our data are from Poland, where the imposition of a new resource tax was vaguely announced in a single sentence by the prime minister in November 2011. The tax concerned a single company, one of the world's leading copper and silver producers. We show how the announcement, besides imposing losses as expected on shareholders, introduced uncertainty into asset-market valuation.

Using the measures proposed by Mink et al. (2012), we reexamine the coherence of business cycles in the euro area using a long sample period. We also analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on business cycle coherence and examine whether our measures for business cycle coherence indicate a core versus periphery within EMU. Our results suggest that business cycle coherence did not increase monotonically. The COVID-19 pandemic made that the signs of the output gaps of euro area countries became more similar, but we find large differences in the amplitude of the output gaps across countries.

We conducted two fundraising experiments to study the effects (1) of compassion towards the beneficiary, and (2) of giving participants an opportunity to attribute small donations to luck. We find that exposing the participants to a plea to help the beneficiary increases the average donation. Giving participants an opportunity to attribute small donations to luck decreases the average donation. We find that in our setting, the latter effect dominates.

Over the past 20 years, per-student spending on compulsory education in Switzerland has risen by 52 percent in real terms. However, per-pupil expenditures vary significantly across cantons. The question quickly arises whether “more is always better”. Switzerland lends itself to this analysis because spending authority lies with the cantons and thus provides a good setting for a within-country analysis. We use a new comprehensive dataset to measure educational quality and mobility at the individual level. Our analysis shows that higher cantonal spending does not increase educational quality or mobility. The allocation of education spending seems to be more important than its mere amount. For example, our study suggests a better linguistic integration of foreign-speaking students.

In cross-country data, income and key education variables are strongly correlated. This is mainly due to the long-run transition from traditional to modern society. The paper looks at a flow and a stock variable. The flow is the E-share of GDP for the annual public budget for education. When it is adjusted for the number of school-age children, it becomes the EC-share. The stock is School, which is the number of years the average person has been in school. Both variables are due to demand and supply. People and firms demand human capital needed by production. Governments supply education to increase production. The demand factor works better to explain the strong correlation. Countries with too much or too little education are identified by the deviations from the transition curves for education. Neither deviation has a clear impact on the growth rate. The explanation proposed uses the equilibrium properties of the transition path, where too much education is of no use, while too little is compensated by the private sector.

This paper analyzes the political reaction of residents to refugee housing in their neighborhood. The city of Hamburg, Germany, experienced between 2014 and 2017 large refugee inflows that required many new accommodations. Openings of refugee houses led to an increase of 0.9 percentage points in the vote share of right-wing anti-immigrant parties in a neighborhood. The negative reaction applies to reception centers and follow-up accommodations with different inhabitant compositions. It persisted longer for large houses and was stronger for multiple openings and in areas with worse economic conditions and many foreigners and migrants. The right-wing gains came with losses for the governing party. A matching estimation that accounts for an unbalanced distribution of houses across neighborhoods confirms the negative reaction. Voting gains around accommodations explain only a small part of the electoral success of right-wing parties, but the findings suggest giving more attention to the distribution and housing of refugees.

This is the first study of bread regulation in a post-World War II democratic country. Under Israel's Labor Socialist regime, bread was mostly privately supplied. In setting prices, policymakers faced tradeoffs between producer profits/viability of small-scale producers and consumer welfare, and between producer profits and minimizing inflation and real appreciation. Subsidization entailed a tradeoff between producer profits and consumer welfare on one hand, and fiscal responsibility and exchange rate unification on the other hand. We study the regulatory changes that took place as the industry structure evolved, and document the changes that occurred in the revealed weights of producer profits, consumer welfare, fiscal responsibility and exchange rate unification. Over 1952–1977, regulatory reforms accelerated the process of technologically-based rationalization, and policy was strongly pro-consumer. This process did not unfold smoothly: Regulatory changes occurred in four phases, with (sometimes) sharp fluctuations in consumer welfare, producer profits, fiscal policy and exchange rate policy.

We study contests for promotion of local government leaders orchestrated by the central government in China. The contests rewarded regional economic success. The probability of promotion increased with regional infrastructure investment but we find negative returns from infrastructure. We find feedback between corruption and investment in infrastructure. There was moral hazard – successful local government leaders who were promoted to higher level positions in the government and Party hierarchical structure left behind regional local governments mired in debt or bankruptcy because of debt financing of infrastructure investment that was used to win the center-orchestrated contests. Our study makes a contribution to contest theory by providing an empirical study for rent-seeking contests.

While research in constitutional economics has made important progress in recent decades, the factors determining whether a constitution is complied with have only received scant attention. We contribute to that narrow literature by studying how personal traits of political leaders are associated with constitutional compliance. Compliance levels of 943 political leaders between 1950 and 2010 can be explained by their education, entry into office, political experience, military background, and whether they are members of extreme left-wing parties. Specifically, under former military officers and Communist leaders, constitutional compliance is significantly lower. The combined effect of these two traits corresponds to the difference between democracy and nondemocracy. This implies a difficult normative question, which we discuss in our conclusion: Should constitutions set entry barriers for high political offices that are based on leader characteristics?