Economic growth and judicial independence,a dozen years on: Cross-country evidence using an updated Set of indicators

Over 10 years ago, Feld and Voigt (2003) introduced an indicator for objectively measuring the actual independence of the judiciary and demonstrated its utility in a large cross-section of countries. The indicator has been widely used, but also criticized. Many new indicators for judicial independence have been developed since. Yet, all of them are based on subjective evaluations by experts or confined to measuring the legally prescribed level of independence. This paper presents more recent objective data on de jure and de facto judicial independence (JI) and strongly confirms previous results that de jure JI is not systematically related to economic growth, whereas de facto JI is highly significantly and robustly correlated with growth. In addition, we show that the effect of de facto JI depends on the institutional environment, but not on a country’s initial per capita income.     

公有制企业的性质

本文概述尚未发生市场化改革的公有制企业的性质。这就是 ,在法权上否认个人拥有生产性资源产权的基础上 ,公有制企业成为非市场合约性的组织。但是为了充分动员在事实上仍然属于个人的人力资本 ,公有制企业用国家租金激励机制来替代市场交易和利润激励体制。本文比较了国家租金体制与市场合约的企业体制的差别 ,认为这是理解公有制企业与非公有制企业效率差别的基础。在方法论上 ,本文认为流行的“委托—代理”框架和“所有权经营权分离”框架都不适合分析公有制企业的经济性质 ,因而尝试运用“法权的和事实的产权不相一致”的框架。     

金融开放测度方法与指标体系述评

作为衡量一国金融开放程度的定量化指标,金融开放度的构建或选取是研究所有金融开放问题的基础性问题。合理、有效的测度指标有助于准确把握一国金融开放的实际情况,更是后续的理论研究和实证分析的基础。本文从金融开放的名义测度和实际测度两个视角出发,追踪溯源,对国内外若干具有较大影响力的金融开放测度方法和指标体系进行了梳理。通过对其各自优缺点和适用性的探讨,本文发现,由于出发点和侧重点的不同,以及受理论、方法或数据等因素的制约,各金融开放测度指标都有其独特的适用性和不足之处,但总体而言,名义开放度指标和实际开放度指标又有其固有的内在机理和特性。针对几种主要的名义开放度指标的优缺点,本文尝试性地提出了一种指标改进方案,以期对后续研究有所启发。     

DEMOCRACY AND DE FACTO EXCHANGE RATE REGIMES

This paper explores the relationship between a country's political regime type and its de facto exchange rate fixity. It argues that more democratic regimes should be associated with less de facto fixity because the median voter is likely to be a domestically oriented producer with a monetary preference for domestic policy autonomy, requiring more a more flexible exchange rate regime. Focusing on a broad sample of country–years in the post‐Bretton Woods era defined by international capital mobility, the statistical results show that not only are more democratic regimes negatively associated with de facto fixity using three different operational measures for this dependent variable, but that this negative relationship gets stronger as the median voter is more likely to be a domestically oriented producer and as societal groups are more able to influence public policy.     

发展中国家汇率制度安排的名与实——对法定汇率制度与事实汇率制度之差异的经验分析

文章分析了发展中国家汇率制度安排名与实不符现象的分布与演变,并对其成因提出了一些假说。文章使用面板数据多元混合Logit模型的计量分析发现,较高的通货膨胀导致恐惧浮动现象,而较高外汇储备或严格的资本管制则导致恐惧固定现象,这在很大程度上支持了我们提出的关于发展中国家汇率制度安排名与实不符现象成因的假说。     

资本账户、法定汇率制度与事实汇率制度

文章对资本账户开放程度以及法定与事实汇率制度之差异的共同决定过程进行了研究。文章以世界各国自布雷顿森林体系崩溃以来的相关数据为基础,利用离散变量联立方程模型进行计量经济学分析。经验分析的结果表明,资本账户的开放程度,对于法定与事实汇率制度的差异有显著影响,但后者对前者的影响并不显著。此外,无论是资本账户的开放程度,还是法定与事实汇率制度的差异,都存在显著的状态依赖性。     

Environmental Management: A Non-Traditional Approach

India's wastelands have been classified as both over utilized and underutilized. Perplexingly, an apparent tragedy of the commons exists alongside extensive official management powers. In this paper, I argue that the complexity of governance structures may be inadvertently worsening the situation. Looking to recent work on contested property and the anticommons concept, I suggest that an anticommons amongst those officially controlling the lands is casting a long and unexpected shadow by encouraging the emergence of open-access de facto resource exploitation and discouraging de facto management. This extension of the anticommons concept implies that the effects of anticommons are not necessarily limited to under exploitation, as most commonly used in the developing anticommons literature. It points to a wider examination of the harmful effects of anticommons situations.     

控制能力、代理成本与独立审计的公司治理效应——中国民营上市公司的经验证据

以近几年中国民营上市公司为样本,实证分析实际控制人控制能力、代理成本、会计师事务所选择及其治理效应,可以发现实际控制人控制能力越强的公司越倾向于选择曾经被监管机构赋予专项复核资格的会计师事务所。通过两阶段回归发现,市场对聘请此类会计师事务所作出了正面评价,而且此类会计师事务所对大股东占用上市公司资金具有监督和抑制作用。     

Institutional transformation and the origins of world income distribution

This paper presents an attempt to quantify institutional changes and examine the respective effects of de jure and de facto political institutions on the path of long-run economic growth and development for a large panel of countries in the period 1810–2000. Using factor analysis, latent indices of de jure and de facto political institutions are constructed by exploiting several existing institutional datasets. The empirical evidence consistently suggests that societies with more extractive political institutions in Latin America, South Asia, Middle East and Eastern Europe have achieved systematically slower long-run economic growth and failed to catch-up with the West. The evidence confirms the primacy of de facto institutional differences over de jure institutions in causing differential growth and development outcomes over time. It also explains why highly concentrated political power and extractive political regimes inhibited the path of economic growth by setting persistent barriers to the engagement in collective action. In the long run, institutional differences account for up to two thirds of within-country development path and up to 83% of between-country development gaps.     

The interaction between capital controls and exchange rate regimes: evidence from developing countries

Abstract

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the interaction between capital controls and exchange rate policies in developing countries in the 1980s and 1990s. We estimate a simultaneous-equations panel mixed logit model for the joint determination of two decisions. We find strong influences from de jure exchange rate regimes on capital account policies but somewhat weaker feedback impacts. With de facto exchange rate regimes the influences in both directions are similar to each other.     

Marx and Resource Scarcity: An Institutionalist Approach

Turkey has recently reshaped its own institutional structure by establishing Independent Regulatory Agencies (IRAs). However, the political authority has not desired to delegate the political property rights to IRAs. Although IRAs is de jure established, the political conflicts occuring during the evolution of the traditional-patrimonial state to the regulatory state de facto impede IRAs to institutionalize. This paper observes recent policy changes during the transition and lessons from the energy regulation in Turkey. So, the paper reveals whether the change in the regulatory institutional structure of Turkey is an effective policy in terms of transition to the institutions of capitalism.     

Endogenous Financial and Trade Openness

The authors study the endogenous determination of financial and trade openness. They construct a theoretical framework leading to two-way feedbacks between financial and trade openness and identify these feedbacks empirically. They find that one standard deviation increase in commercial openness is associated with a 9.5% increase in de facto financial openness (% of GDP). Similarly, an increase in de facto financial openness has powerful effects on future trade openness. De jure restrictions on capital mobility have only a weak impact on de facto financial openness, while de jure restrictions on the current account have a large adverse effect on commercial openness. The authors investigate the relative magnitudes of these directions of causality using Geweke's (1982 ) decomposition methodology. They conclude that in an era of rapidly growing trade integration, countries cannot choose financial openness independently of their degree of openness to trade. Dealing with greater exposure to turbulence by imposing restrictions on financial flows is likely to be ineffectual.     

The intellectual influence of economic journals: quality versus quantity

The evaluation of scientific output has a key role in the allocation of research funds and academic positions. Decisions are often based on quality indicators for academic journals, and over the years, a handful of scoring methods have been proposed for this purpose. Discussing the most prominent methods (de facto standards) we show that they do not distinguish quality from quantity at article level. The systematic bias we find is analytically tractable and implies that the methods are manipulable. We introduce modified methods that correct for this bias, and use them to provide rankings of economic journals. Our methodology is transparent; our results are replicable.     

De jure and de facto determinants of power: evidence from Mississippi

We evaluate the empirical effectiveness of de facto versus de jure determinants of political power in the U.S. South between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Using previously-unexploited racially-disaggregated data on voter registration in Mississippi for the years 1896 and 1899, we show that the observed pattern of black political participation is driven by de facto disfranchisement as captured by the presence of a black political majority, which negatively affects black registration. The de jure provisions introduced with the 1890 state constitution and involving literacy tests and poll taxes exert a non-robust impact. Furthermore, a difference-in-differences approach shows that the decline in aggregate turnout pre-dates the introduction of de jure restrictions and confirms a causal effect of the presence of a black political majority. De jure restrictions intensify the influence of the latter after 1890, which suggests that the main effect of the constitutional reforms may have been an institutionalization of de facto disfranchisement.     

人民币汇率改革评析

本文对近20年来人民币汇率改革的实际成效进行评价，笔者认为改革配套措施的短视化倾向制约了汇率市场化改革目标的实现程度。除了参考IMF事实汇率分类法的外部评价，本文以高度市场化的香港离岸人民币汇率作为参考指标，通过定量分析证明境内人民币即期汇率中间价的市场化程度低于收盘价。本文最后强调，深化汇率改革的关键在于完善汇率形成的市场基础以及淡化中央银行汇率责任。     

NEW ESTIMATION OF CHINA'S EXCHANGE RATE REGIME

Abstract. The present paper updates the question: what precisely is the exchange rate regime that China has put into place since 2005, when it announced a move away from the US dollar peg? Is it a basket anchor with the possibility of cumulatable daily appreciations, as was announced at the time? We apply to this question a new approach of estimating countries’ de facto exchange rate regimes, a synthesis of two techniques. One is a technique that has been used in the past to estimate implicit de facto currency weights when the hypothesis is a basket peg with little flexibility. The second is a technique used to estimate the de facto degree of exchange rate flexibility when the hypothesis is an anchor to the US dollar or some other single major currency. Because the RMB and many other currencies today purportedly follow variants of band‐basket‐crawl, it is important to have available a technique that can cover both dimensions, inferring weights and inferring flexibility. The synthesis adds a variable representing ‘exchange market pressure’ to the currency basket equation, whereby the degree of flexibility is estimated at the same time as the currency weights. This approach reveals that by mid‐2007, the RMB basket had switched a substantial part of the US dollar's weight onto the euro. The implication is that the appreciation of the RMB against the US dollar during this period was due to the appreciation of the euro against the dollar, not to any upward trend in the RMB relative to its basket.     

An analysis of the process generating de facto standards in the PC spreadsheet software market

This paper develops a model to analyze the emergence of de facto or market defined compatibility standards in the market for PC spreadsheet software over the period 1982–1988. The model is capable of integrating diverse fragments of empirical evidence and a number of important theoretical building blocks, in particular the analysis of gateways between different versions of the same package, product preannouncements, and diverse consumer tastes towards intrinsic quality and network externalities. The model also explores the implications of different functional forms for the relationship between installed base and the value of network externalities. The paper finds that at least some enhancements to the basic model of standards have to be incorporated to offer a reasonable approximation to developments in the PC spreadsheet software market. The simplest model of de facto standards is not able to describe developments in this market.     

LINKAGES BETWEEN EXCHANGE RATE POLICY AND MACROECONOMIC PERFORMANCE

Using a sample of 104 countries, we study macroeconomic performance from 1973 to 2007. We examine GDP growth, inflation rate, growth volatility and inflation volatility, and their response to a ‘words versus deeds’ measure of exchange‐rate policy, which is obtained by interacting a country's de jure and its de facto policy. For non‐industrialized countries, the highest growth rates and the lowest inflation volatility are associated with countries that pursue fear of floating policy, whereas countries that pursue a matched float policy (de jure and de facto floating) have the highest inflation rates but the lowest GDP volatility.     

Exchange rate regime verification: An alternative method of testing for regime changes

This work proposes a change in persistence test for identifying de facto exchange rate regime changes. The results from 25 African countries show that this approach is able to identify some regime changes not captured by existing methods.     

Shifting Armington trade preferences: A re-examination of the Mercosur–EU negotiations

This paper examines the ‘small share’ problem inherent within the constant elasticity of substitution Armington specification. As a de facto research tool in the quantitative trade literature, this structural bias plagues the results of numerous multi-region CGE studies. Kuiper and van Tongeren (2006) proposed a fusion of gravity and CGE specifications to remedy said bias, which the current paper further develops. With a pervasiveness of ‘small-share’ examples on Mercosur–European Union trade owing to the latter's restrictive tariff regime, the results reveal that significant additional trade led gains to Mercosur under a potential preferential trade agreement when compared with the standard Armington treatment.