European Journal of Political Economy最新文献

This paper establishes the links between politician criminality and higher education provision by studying the causal impact of electing leaders with accusations of serious crimes on the opening of new publicly funded colleges in India. Using a regression discontinuity design with close elections between candidates accused of serious crimes and candidates not accused of serious crimes, I show that constituencies represented by state legislature members accused of serious crimes are less likely to witness openings of new state government funded colleges. Further, this effect is not compensated by openings of new private colleges. This negative impact is higher for constituencies with representatives aligned with the party governing at the state level, confirming the notion that access to power is essential for the ability to influence provision of higher education institutes. Finally, this study provides suggestive evidence that such lower provision of state government colleges is most likely to impact the lowest income groups in society.

We test the fiscal illusion hypothesis, which concerns whether an awareness of the government’s costs and benefits is linked to preferences for redistribution and social policy. We conduct an $N=2016$ survey experiment in Russia—a country where many taxpayers are not aware of social security contributions that are paid by employers on their behalf. The treatment consists of a video with a calculation of the total amount of taxes and social security contributions that typically arise from an individual’s salary. We show that for individuals who initially overestimated these payments, information provision increases preferences for redistribution, while overall, the awareness of these payments reduces preferences for state spending, possibly due to reduced trust in the government and lower satisfaction with state-provided services. This is consistent with the explanation that new information about taxes and social security contributions signals a low state quality. These results persist in a follow-up survey given six weeks later.

The past decade has witnessed an increase in populist movements across the world. Some of those movements have gained strong political support and formed populist governments promising new sets of economic and fiscal policies. This raises the pertinent policy question: how do such populist governments influence fiscal policy outcomes? We approach this question by looking at the case of Poland which according to several recent studies has experienced the highest level of populist rhetoric in recent years. We performed two types of analyses. First, standard time series estimations of fiscal sustainability parameters that are typical for literature on fiscal sustainability, for both full sample and rolling-windows. Second, a counter-factual analysis using the synthetic control method (SCM) which is a useful complementary framework for our analysis of populists’ economic performance. Overall, our estimates suggest that in the period of 2016–2019 fiscal sustainability parameters were the lowest since Poland joined the EU in 2004. The SCM analysis, in turn, showed that populist PiS fiscal policies might have been viable compared to the counter-factual data. At the same time, we also noted sensitivity of SCM across several dimensions and conclude that such sensitivity analysis might be useful or even necessary in future studies on populism.

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.