Revistas
Revista:
DEFENCE AND PEACE ECONOMICS
ISSN:
1024-2694
Año:
2022
Vol.:
33
N°:
8
Págs.:
912 - 937
A vast economic literature examines the welfare gains and distributional consequences of economic reforms, while much less is generally known on the relationship of inequality and forced regime changes. Some studies analyze how economic inequality impacts the likelihood of coups, but the distributional outcomes of such events have been largely ignored to date. Employing novel data, we find that successful coups have a significant positive impact on the consumption shares of the lowest quintile and a strong negative impact on the highest quintile, as compared to the inexistent redistribution that results from failed coups. In addition, the redistributive effect is stronger for military coups, as compared to civilian coups, and effects seem to be substantially driven by coups against democratic regimes. Despite their negative impact on overall growth and per capita income, our results show that forced regime changes, as compared to non-successful attempts, reduce inequality at a short notice. This may partially explain their continued popularity in highly unequal developing countries.
Revista:
JOURNAL OF INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMICS
ISSN:
1744-1374
Año:
2022
Vol.:
18
N°:
4
Págs.:
569 - 586
Claims that colonial political institutions fundamentally affected the probability for democratic governance in the post-colonial period are probably among some of the most contested in institutional analysis. The current paper revisits this literature using a previously unused source of empirical information - the Statesman's Yearbook - on a large number of non-sovereign countries in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Our analysis shows that neither the size of the European population nor the existence of institutions of higher education appear to be important for the subsequent democratisation of countries decolonised during the latter half of the 20th century, while the existence of representative political bodies during the late colonial period clearly predicts the existence and stability of democracy in recent decades. Successful transplants of democracy to former colonies thus seem to crucially depend on whether recipients had time available to experiment around and adjust the imported institutions to local practices.
Revista:
ECONOMICS & POLITICS
ISSN:
0954-1985
Año:
2022
Vol.:
34
N°:
2
Págs.:
275 - 29
Consequences of social trust are comparatively well studied, while its societal determinants are often subject to debate. This paper studies both in the context of Catalan attempts to secede from Spain: First, we test whether Catalonia enjoys higher levels of social capital that it is prevented from capitalizing on. Second, the paper examines whether secessionist movements create animosity and political divisions within society that undermine trust. Employing the nine available waves of the European Social Survey for Spain, we only find weak indications that social trust levels are higher in Catalonia than in the rest of the country. Interestingly, we further find testimony of a purely transient "exuberance effect" after secession became a real option, indicating that the long-run evolution of social trust may best be thought of as a stable punctuated equilibrium.
Revista:
PUBLIC CHOICE
ISSN:
0048-5829
Año:
2022
Vol.:
190
N°:
1-2
Págs.:
175 - 204
The sport of surfing is best enjoyed with one rider on one wave, but crowding makes that optimal assignment increasingly hard to attain. This study examines the phenomenon of surf localism, whereby competitors are excluded from waves by intimidation and the threat of violence. An alternative way to accommodate crowds is contained in the surfer's code, which sets informal rules and self-enforced regulations to avoid conflict in the water. Both regimes establish property rights over common pool resources with no state intervention, creating a setting wherein users face the question of cooperation or conflict. The disposition to cooperate and follow norms has been shown to vary substantially across different cultures, though. Employing data from over seven hundred surf spots on the European Atlantic coast, this study reports evidence that certain informal cultural norms significantly reduce the probability of violent exclusion, while formal state institutions mostly are irrelevant. The results also indicate that informal norms become more important with greater resource quality and, possibly, with increasing scarcity.
Revista:
SERIES
ISSN:
1869-4187
Año:
2021
Vol.:
12
Págs.:
423 - 451
Ever since the spectacular boom and bust cycle of the Spanish real estate industry, endemic corruption at the local level has become a widely recognized problem in the national public discourse. In an effort to expose an under-explored political determinant, this paper investigates the effect of local and regional alignment in fomenting corruption at the Spanish municipal level. To do so, we construct an ample panel dataset on the prevalence of corrupt practices by local politicians, which is employed to test the possible impact of partisan alignment in three consecutive joint municipal and regional elections. Findings show aligned municipalities to be more corrupt than non-aligned ones, an effect that is further associated with absolute majorities at both levels of government and higher capital transfers. By contrast, we also show that ¿throwing the rascals out¿ could be an effective strategy for curbing the corrupt practices of aligned municipalities. This indicates that the democratic political process may be effective in corruption control if agreements can be reached to remove corrupt politicians or parties from power.
Revista:
SOCIAL INDICATORS RESEARCH
ISSN:
0303-8300
Año:
2021
N°:
158
Págs.:
485 - 506
Debates about the appropriate role of markets and governments are often shaped by sharply contrasting opinions. Based on individual data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study for up to 190,000 respondents in a sample of 68 democratic countries, we find that social trust is associated with tempered attitudes regarding government intervention and redistribution. Results corroborate ideas from socio-psychological research that trusting people have personality attributes which work towards a moderation on politically divisive topics. Complementary to the literature on political polarization, this opens the possibility that trusting societies may be superior at adapting polices to novel challenges because social trust reduces the probability of extreme attitude formation.
Revista:
JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR AND ORGANIZATION
ISSN:
0167-2681
Año:
2021
Vol.:
189
Págs.:
51 - 83
Following financial research on the importance of public policy for asset prices, we hypothesize that the success of populist movements impacts risk assessments in financial markets. Building a novel dataset, findings show for a sample of Western democracies that the success of populist parties has a direct impact on volatility in major domestic market indexes, measured from option prices spanning national elections. Despite its anti-capitalist rhetoric, the political insecurity generated by populist movements on the far left only partially translates into financial insecurity in the context of institutionalized democracies. In turn, we find the electoral success of right-wing populists to reduce risk assessments, which could be driven by its frequent association with rent-seeking and big business. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ )
Autores:
Bjornskov, C. (Autor de correspondencia); Rode, Martin
Revista:
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS
ISSN:
1559-7431
Año:
2020
Vol.:
15
N°:
2
Págs.:
531 - 551
Social scientists have created a variety of datasets in recent years that quantify political regimes, but these often provide little data on phases of regime transitions. Our aim is to contribute to filling this gap, by providing an update and expansion of the Democracy-Dictatorship data by Cheibub et al. (Public Choice, 143, 67-101, 2010), originally introduced by Alvarez et al. (Studies in Comparative International Development, 31(2), 3-36, 1996), where we add the following three features: First, we expand coverage to a total of 192 sovereign countries and 16 currently self-governing territories between 1950 and 2018, including periods under colonial rule for more than ninety entities. Second, we provide more institutional details that are deemed of importance in the relevant literature. Third, we include a new, self-created indicator of successful and failed coups d'etat, which is currently the most complete of its kind. We further illustrate the usefulness of the new dataset by documenting the importance of political institutions under colonial rule for democratic development after independence, making use of our much more detailed data on colonial institutions. Findings indicate that more participatory colonial institutions have a positive and lasting effect for democratic development after transition to independence.
Autores:
Bjornskov, C. (Autor de correspondencia); Rode, Martin
Revista:
POLITICAL STUDIES
ISSN:
0032-3217
Año:
2019
Vol.:
67
N°:
4
Págs.:
815 - 833
Proper government reaction to economic crisis has long been a central element of public policy debate and is experiencing a revival after the Great Recession of 2008. Previous studies argue on theoretical and empirical grounds that crises may lead to more interventionist policies, but also cause deregulation and liberalization. This Artículo claims that policy responses will partly depend on the core economic ideology of government, causing ideologically heterogeneous post-crisis strategies. Employing a panel of 69 countries for which salient ideology measures can be constructed, we find that growth crises between 1975 and 2015 caused larger increases in government size and regulatory policy when countries have left-wing governments. We also find some evidence of policy ratchets, meaning that certain crisis policies present a tendency to become permanent, regardless of the ideology of successive governments in power. Rolling back the public sector in size and scope seems to be possible, but our results show that, on average, it does not clearly occur as an ideologically driven reaction to anti-crisis policies.
Revista:
PUBLIUS
ISSN:
0048-5950
Año:
2018
Vol.:
48
N°:
2
Págs.:
161 - 190
Popular and scientific contributions often call for increased regional decision-making power to manage secessionist conflict, assuming that fiscally federalized countries are less prone to disintegrate politically. From a theoretical standpoint this is not clear though, as federalism creates an institutional paradox where autonomous legislative and bureaucratic structures can potentially be used to make secessionism a viable strategy in the first place. In particular, the role of asymmetric territorial arrangements in this association is crucially underexplored at present. Using electoral data on separatist political movements from a large variety of European regions since the mid-1990s, our findings indicate that regions with comparatively higher fiscal and institutional autonomy are more prone to vote for secessionist parties. Accounting for possible endogeneity, asymmetric territorial self-governance seems to cause much stronger incentives to vote for secessionist platforms, while the association with fiscally more symmetric arrangements is surprisingly small.
Revista:
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
ISSN:
0176-2680
Año:
2018
Vol.:
54
Págs.:
42 - 55
Using survey data from the World Values Survey and the Comparative Manifesto Project, we empirically study attitudes towards the proposal that government compensation should be provided for individuals adversely affected by globalization. We include roles for personal experience with globalization and ideology of individuals and political parties, noting also the general problem of expressiveness in survey data, where responders who favored compensation did not actually have to pay to help. Findings indicate that attitudes to actual compensation depend on exposure to globalization but are substantially qualified by ideology.
Revista:
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
ISSN:
0176-2680
Año:
2017
Vol.:
48
Págs.:
3 - 15
Policy advice by the OECD has long been at the heart of academic debates on welfare state reform, with frequent claims questioning the ideological orientation of recommendations. This paper constructs an indicator of perceived reform need for 24 countries, quantifying the policy advice contained in the OECD Economic Surveys around 1985, 1995, and 2005. These recommendations describe a policy consensus that is based on competition, work incentives, monetary reform, fiscal discipline, and labor market reform. Empirically, perceived need for reform is well explained by preceding levels of economic freedom. In particular, countries with more government intervention, lower property rights protection, and more regulation are perceived to have a bigger reform need. In turn, perceived reform need has no explanatory power for subsequent changes in social expenditure and welfare state entitlements. Only in countries with right wing governments, perceived reform need might be followed by marginal reductions in welfare state entitlements, but definitely not in social expenditure.
Revista:
JOURNAL OF INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMICS
ISSN:
1744-1374
Año:
2017
Vol.:
13
N°:
3
Págs.:
575 - 598
A popular explanation for economic development is that individualistic values' provide a mind-set that is favorable to the creation of growth-promoting institutions. The present paper investigates the relationship between individualistic values and personal attitudes toward government intervention. We consider two key components of an individualistic culture to be particularly relevant for attitude formation: self-direction ('social' individualism) and self-determination ('economic' individualism). Results indicate that both are negatively associated with interventionist attitudes. Effects of self-direction are much weaker though, than self-determination. Moreover, the effects of self-direction are mitigated through higher trust in the state and lower confidence in companies, while that is not the case for self-determination values. We conclude that especially economic individualism supports attitudes conducive to the formation of formal market-friendly institutions.
Revista:
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF WELLBEING
ISSN:
1179-8602
Año:
2016
Vol.:
6
N°:
1
Págs.:
81 - 100
Revista:
ECONOMICS OF GOVERNANCE
ISSN:
1435-6104
Año:
2015
Vol.:
16
N°:
1
Págs.:
73 - 96
Revista:
APPLIED ECONOMICS LETTERS
ISSN:
1350-4851
Año:
2013
Vol.:
20
N°:
9
Págs.:
916 - 920
Revista:
JOURNAL OF HAPPINESS STUDIES
ISSN:
1389-4978
Año:
2013
Vol.:
14
N°:
5
Págs.:
1479 - 1505
Revista:
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
ISSN:
0176-2680
Año:
2012
Vol.:
28
N°:
4
Págs.:
607 - 619
Revista:
CONSTITUTIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY
ISSN:
1043-4062
Año:
2012
Vol.:
23
N°:
2
Págs.:
95 - 133
Empirical studies provide evidence that economic freedom, as measured by the Economic Freedom of the World Index, is related to economic growth. None the less, identifying which aspects of economic freedom are more conducive to growth has proven difficult, due to multicollinearity among the index areas. A possible explanation is that certain countries score high in all areas, whereas others tend do bad in all of them, simply because the former are more freedom-friendly than the latter. However, it is also true that each country presents a combination of freedoms, and restrictions to freedom, at the level of the individual indicators that make up each area. If some regularity exists with respect to these combinations, empirical detection of the most popular policy combinations would alleviate the collinearity problem, when assessing growth effects. Our article explores this possibility by means of cluster analysis, which we conduct at the individual indicator level. We show that multicollinearity can indeed be reduced in this way and identify policy packages that seem to be more conducive to economic growth than others. Results further indicate that certain policy packages may have only a short-term effect on growth, whereas others seem to have an enduring one.
Nacionales y Regionales
Título:
Ayuda social, incentivos y comportamiento de los hogares
Código de expediente:
PID2020-120589RA-I00
Investigador principal:
Raúl Bajo Buenestado
Financiador:
AGENCIA ESTATAL DE INVESTIGACION
Convocatoria:
2020 AEI PROYECTOS I+D+i (incluye Generación del conocimiento y Retos investigación)
Fecha de inicio:
01/09/2021
Fecha fin:
31/08/2024
Importe concedido:
29.403,00€
Otros fondos:
-
Título:
Los factores que afectan a la asunción de riesgos en el sistema financiero
Código de expediente:
PID2019-105227RB-I00
Investigador principal:
Javier Ignacio Arellano Gil, Germán López Espinosa
Financiador:
MINISTERIO DE CIENCIA E INNOVACIÓN
Convocatoria:
2019 AEI PROYECTOS I+D+i (incluye Generación del conocimiento y Retos investigación)
Fecha de inicio:
01/06/2020
Fecha fin:
31/05/2023
Importe concedido:
29.161,00€
Otros fondos:
Fondos FEDER
