Innovative performance effects of institutional quality: an empirical investigation from the Triad

ABSTRACT

Using data for a set of 823 R&D-intense manufacturing firms within the Triad and the Quality of Government (QoG) dataset over the 2002–2010 period, this article investigates the effects of institutional quality upon firms’ inefficiency, through the application of a Stochastic Frontier Approach (SFA). Empirical evidence, which is robust to alternative specifications of the technology employed and different lag structures in R&D activities, reveals that improvements in the quality of institutions significantly reduce firms’ inefficiency and suggests that, among the set of relevant institutional factors considered, a pre-eminent role is found for the rule of law.     

Contribution Ceilings and the Incidence of Payroll Taxes

Social security contributions (SSCs) are typically formally split between employers and employees as payroll taxes, levied on earnings at a constant tax rate that applies only up to a ceiling, above which the marginal tax rate falls to a reduced rate, often 0. Such contribution ceilings create a concave kink point in the budget set of workers and hence should generate a dip in the distribution of earnings around the ceiling through labour supply responses (the reverse of bunching expected at convex kink points) but such a dip is not observed empirically. This paper sets out a new approach to infer the incidence of SSCs that exploits the absence of this dip and the fact that (mechanically) the distributions of labour cost (earnings inclusive of all payroll taxes), gross earnings (net of employer payroll taxes) and net earnings (net of both employer and employee payroll taxes) cannot all be smooth around a kink. The other papers in this special issue apply the method to data for Germany, France, the Netherlands and the UK and all find that distribution of gross earnings is smooth around kinks (implying that the distributions of labour costs and net-of-tax earnings are not) even though the concept of gross earnings is irrelevant in the standard static model of labour supply and demand that dominates the public economics literature. This suggests that other features of the labour market, such as wage bargaining based on the gross earnings concept, are relevant for determining the incidence of SSCs.     

Institutional quality and public spending in Europe: A quantile regression approach

We appraise the effects of institutional quality on public spending for a set of 27 European countries and 18 Euro-area economies over the 1996–2017 period. While institutions play a weak role in affecting spending once the fixed-effects model is employed, the application of the quantile regression indicates that improved institutional quality mitigates public spending, although the effects crucially depend on the distribution of public expenditure and the sample examined. For both the Euro-area sample and the full sample, we show that better quality of institutions reduces public spending, although the effects become less significant the higher the levels of public spending. Further, for the Euro-area sample, institutions appear to have a stronger role in mitigating public spending. Several robustness tests confirm our findings.