Economic Systems最新文献

I construct a novel dataset to measure the geographic complexity of cross-border African banks and relate it to their default and earnings risk. The results suggest that having a higher degree of geographic complexity decreases risk. Further results show that the negative relationship between geographic complexity and risk is significantly channeled through changes in banks’ loan quality. Following the recent exit from Africa by major international banks, indigenous African banks could be encouraged to expand further across the continent to take advantage of available opportunities, in addition to diversifying their risk. The success of such expansions, however, may largely depend on effective credit management.

To what extent are the locational decisions for US FDI outflows affected by the nature of the political regimes along with the quality of institutions in the host countries? Using property rights protection as an indicator of institutional quality, this study analyses how sensitive US FDI outflows are to institutional factors and to the nature of the hosting countries’ political regimes. In other words, whether a democratic or an autocratic regime makes any difference in terms of attracting US FDI. A joint effect between democracy and the protection of property rights on US FDI flows is examined using a panel data fixed effect technique for forty-one countries during the period 1984–2021. The instrumental variable method is used to check the endogeneity concerns. The results predict that the protection of property rights can have a positive impact in attracting US FDI, provided the countries in question become more democratic in nature. The findings suggest that partial reform to enhance the institutional quality or unconsolidated democratization are insufficient to attract US FDI rather than complementing each other in bringing FDI. The implication of the findings reveals that a democratic country such as India can be a good location for US investment if its protection of property rights becomes stronger. Moreover, some highly democratic countries with strong institutions should be more market oriented and improve their quality of infrastructure to receive the maximum benefit. Our results are robust to alternate measures of institutional quality/democracy and endogeneity concerns.

The goal of this study is to examine the persistence of human capital development in 21 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for the period 1870–2019. Gross enrollment rates for secondary and tertiary education are both used as proxies for human capital development. Employing linear and nonlinear fractional integration approaches, our results suggest high degrees of persistence in the series under examination. However, lower orders of integration are observed in the data for tertiary education than for secondary education. Thus, no evidence of reversion to the mean is found in secondary education, and Australia and New Zealand have the highest coefficients for the time trends and the highest dependence. However, mean reversion in tertiary education is found in France, the US, and, in particular, Austria. Finally, evidence of nonlinearity is observed in about eight countries, though without altering the persistence in the series. The implications of the empirical results are also presented.