International Specialization and Labor Unions: Evidence from OECD Countries

The aim of this paper is to explore the role of the institutional determinants of international comparative advantage. Starting from a theoretically well-founded general-equilibrium framework, where specialization depends on relative factor endowments and technological differences, we study the possible additional effect of labor unions. Using country–year panel data, we obtain that they are an important determinant of relative economic performance for a sample of manufacturing sectors. In particular low wages–labor-intensive industries turn out to be relatively disadvantaged, while high wages–capital-intensive sectors are relatively advantaged by stronger labor unions. We also allow for different institutional scenarios, letting unionization patterns interact with different regimes of bargaining coordination and social security systems. Our main conclusions are not substantially altered.     

管制与生产服务业发展的国际经验——以OECD国家为例

文章对管制影响生产服务业的理论机制进行探索性分析,运用23个OECD国家的横截面数据,实证检验了行业管制和国家管制对生产服务业的影响.研究表明:放松行业管制能有效地促进生产服务业的发展,而放松国家对产品市场的管制对生产服务业的影响不确定.中国生产服务业管制存在两个问题:一是政府具有行政审批的管制偏好导致管制的结构性供求失衡,二是政府管制边界模糊导致管制结构不合理.针对于此,文章提出完善中国现有生产服务业管制政策的建议.     

Income Variation and Health Expenditure: Evidence for OECD Countries

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role health investment plays in human capital accumulation, and in so doing to demonstrate that education is not the only factor affecting the performance of the labor force and productivity. Estimates are made for the OECD countries for the period 1960–90. Investment in health contributes in a significant way to explaining variations in output through human capital, even in those countries which presumably have high levels of health.     

Increasing Public Expenditure: Wagner's Law in OECD Countries

Abstract. The paper proposes a panel cointegration analysis of the joint development of government expenditure and economic growth in 23 Organization Economic Cooperation and Development countries. The empirical evidence provides indication of a structural positive correlation between public spending and per‐capita gross domestic product (GDP), which is consistent with the so‐called Wagner's law. A long‐run elasticity larger than 1 suggests a more than proportional increase of government expenditure with respect to economic activity. In addition, according to the spirit of the law, we found that the correlation is usually higher in countries with lower per‐capita GDP, suggesting that the catching‐up period is characterized by a stronger development of government activities with respect to economies in a more advanced state of development.     

Fiscal Transparency,Elections and Public Employment: Evidence from the OECD

There is considerable variation in levels and changes in public employment within and between developed democracies. This article highlights the importance of fiscal transparency in determining changes in public employment. It argues that economic growth increases public employment under low fiscal transparency and that this effect is strongest in years of election. These hypotheses are tested on a panel of 20 OECD countries from 1995 to 2010. The analyses show substantial evidence in favor of the arguments. Fiscal transparency lowers the positive effect of growth on public employment, a relationship, which is most robust in election years.     

Macroeconomic Volatility and the Current Account: Evidence from a Panel of OECD Countries

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the relationship between macroeconomic volatility and the current account. Using quarterly data for a panel of OECD economies, time-varying relative volatility measures are constructed for GDP, net output, and government consumption. The empirical evidence suggests that current account balances are positively affected by all three volatility measures. Moreover, the current account balance is found to be related positively to output growth and negatively to the growth of government consumption. Evidence from saving and investment rates also suggests that the precautionary saving motive is part of (though perhaps not the entire) mechanism that relates output volatility and the current account. Broadly consistent with the predictions of the standard theoretical model, these estimates are sizable, statistically significant, and robust.     

Breaking Trend Functions in Real Exchange Rates: Evidence from Seventeen OECD Countries

This paper tests for unit roots in dollar-based and DM-based real exchange rates using quarterly data (from 1957:i to 1995:iv) for seventeen OECD countries. The results show that the unit root hypothesis cannot be rejected even if allowance is made for the possibility of a one-time change in the mean of the series at an unknown point in time. This is evidence against the hypothesis of absolute long-run purchasing power parity over this period.     

Finance–Growth Nexus and the P‐bias: Evidence from OECD Countries

Recent studies provide new empirical evidence confirming that financial development is linked to economic growth in OECD countries. Using new dynamic panel regression techniques, these appraisals indicate that within the group of high‐income countries stock market size as a measure of financial advancement contributes significantly to overall economic activity. Applying the same advanced techniques, this paper questions this conclusion by showing that the findings of these studies seem to be not only not robust with respect to adding new observations but also likely to be plagued by a severe price bias which belittles the information content of the used financial indicator (stock market capitalization). We provide evidence that anticipative price effects (i.e. expectations of future growth, reflected in current stock prices) may be driving the statistical relationship between stock market activities and economic growth in high‐income countries to a much larger extent than recent analyses of the finance– growth link in OECD countries suggest .     

Fiscal and External Deficits Nexus in GIIPS Countries: Evidence from Parametric and Nonparametric Causality Tests

International Advances in Economic Research - This paper investigates the relationship between fiscal and external deficits in five European Union countries (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and...     

Intertemporal Output and Employment Effects of Public Infrastructure Capital: Evidence from 12 OECD Economies

This paper utilises an intertemporal optimisation framework to study the effects of public infrastructure capital on output supply and input demands in 12 OECD countries. We find that in all 12 countries: (i) public capital has positive long-run effects on both output supply and input demands (ii) its mean short-run rates of return are fairly low, while the corresponding long-run rates are much higher but declining over time. These findings underscore important under-investment gaps in infrastructure during the 1970s and 1980s; these gaps however narrowed down significantly (in a few cases completely) by the early 1990s.     

How Budget Deficits Cause Trade Deficits: The Simple Analytics

A supply and demand framework is used to clarify the links between budget deficits, exchange rates, and the trade deficit.     

International Consumption Patterns among High‐income Countries: Evidence from the OECD Data*

This paper examines the effect of economic integration on the product‐level consumption patterns across the OECD in the past decade. Estimation results find evidence of strong convergence in cross‐country consumption patterns with substantial heterogeneity across products and countries. The results are robust to either the benchmark choice, data selection, or the choice of model specification. In addition to documenting convergence, the paper relates the volume of international trade to cross‐country consumption patterns.     

Women and Budget Deficits*

If women have different economic preferences than men, then female economic and political empowerment is likely to change economic policy, and in turn perhaps macroeconomic outcomes. In this paper, we narrow the focus to fiscal policy, and we investigate whether female enfranchisement affects government budget deficits. In a difference‐in‐differences regression for Swiss cantonal panel data, we find that the inclusion of women in the electorate has reduced deficits by a statistically significant amount.     

Budget Deficits and Redistributive Politics

This paper proposes a new view of the forces in the political process thatcause governments to accumulate debt. The analysis builds on a model of redistributive politics that, contrary to median voter models, does not restrict the set of policies that politicians can propose. I show that deficits occur even in an environment where voters (and periods) are homogeneous. This is an environment where previous political theories of debt would predict budget balance. In the model deficits are a way for candidates to better target promises to voters and are therefore used as tools of redistributive politics. The main contribution of the analysis is to show that the same forces that push candidates to redistribute resources across voters to pursue political advantage are forces that generate budget deficits.     

Budget Deficits and Exchange-Rate Crises

This paper investigates currency crises in an optimizing general equilibrium model with overlapping generations. It is shown that a rise in government budget deficits financed by future taxes generates a decumulation of external assets, leading up to a speculative attack and forcing the monetary authorities to abandon the peg.     

Inflation and the Income Share of the Rich: Evidence for 14 OECD Countries

This paper examines the distributional implications of inflation on top income shares in 14 advanced economies using data over the period 1920–2016. We use local projections to analyze how top income shares respond to an inflation shock, and panel regressions in which all variables are defined as 5-year averages to examine the impact of inflation on the position of the top-one-percent in the long run. Our findings suggest that inflation reduces the share of national income held by the top 1 percent. Furthermore, we find that inflation shocks and long-run inflation have similar effects on top income shares.     

The Constitutional Political Economy of Public Deficits: The Spanish Case 1

This paper makes an argument for the reshaping of the current design of the Spanish budgetary system, pivoting around its legal submission to the balanced-budget rule. Based on a political economy approach to budgeting within the present context of the European Monetary Union, it is argued that such a rule is sorely needed in order to make the traditional Spanish model compatible with the new institutional technology presently developing in the European Community which deals with fiscal policy.     

Resource Price,Macroeconomic Distortions,and Public Outlay: Evidence from Oil-Exporting Countries

This study examines the repercussions of oil price and macroeconomic distortions on government expenditure in 15 oil-exporting countries. Adapting the Pooled Mean Group analytical approach, the long-run findings are indicative of a blend of the Dutch disease and rent-seeking hypothesis of the resource curse theory in oil-exporting countries. These effects crucially impact on the poor growth of the real sector in these countries, needed for diversification of their revenue base. Furthermore, both resource curses account for one of the reasons why fiscal deficits in oil-exporting countries have been on the rise. The country short-run coefficient for the balance of payment, economic growth, and exchange rate also supports the Dutch disease and rent-seeking hypothesis mix found in the long run. Also, the significant negative impact of oil rents in most countries shows that oil-exporting countries have been making attempts at diversifying their income sources; this is because proceeds from oil cannot be relied upon to adequately finance growing government expenditure, due to the volatile nature of oil prices, thus suggesting also that the volatility hypothesis is valid for most oil-exporting countries in the short run.