The role of the government in financial sector development

This study examines the impact of two dimensions of the government, namely, size and quality, on two dimensions of the financial sector, size and efficiency, in a cross section of 71 economies. The study finds that increased quality of the government as measured by governance and legal origin positively influences both financial sector size and efficiency. The size of the government proxied by government expenditure and the government ownership of banks has a negative effect on financial sector efficiency, and a positive impact on financial sector size, particularly in the low income economies.     

Do National Numerical Fiscal Rules really shape fiscal behaviours in developing countries? A treatment effect evaluation

This paper analyses the effect of National Numerical Fiscal Rules (FRs) upon fiscal discipline in 74 developing countries over the period 1990–2007. It is the first study that assesses the impact of FRs on budgetary outcomes while controlling for the self-selection problem. It finds that the effect of FRs on structural fiscal balance is significantly positive, robust to a variety of alternative specifications, and varies with the type of FRs. It also finds that the treatment effect differs according to countries' characteristics: number of FRs, time length since FRs adoption, presence of supranational FRs, government fractionalisation and government stability.     

Optimal Climate Change Policies When Governments Cannot Commit

We analyse the optimal design of climate change policies when a government wants to encourage the private sector to undertake significant immediate investment in developing cleaner technologies, but the relevant carbon taxes (or other environmental policies) that would incentivise such investment by firms will be set in the future. We assume that the current government cannot commit to long-term carbon taxes, and so both it and the private sector face the possibility that the government in power in the future may give different (relative) weight to environmental damage costs. We show that this lack of commitment has a significant asymmetric effect: it increases the social benefits of the current government to have the investment undertaken, but reduces the private benefit to the private sector to invest. Consequently the current government may need to use additional policy instruments—such as R&D subsidies—to stimulate the required investment.     

Proto-coalition bargaining and the core

In the proto-coalition model of government formation, formateur F appoints a proto-coalition and asks its members whether to start negotiating a coalition contract. If all accept, then the proto-coalition forms and starts negotiating; otherwise, a caretaker government assumes office. I extend this model by allowing F to revise the chosen proto-coalition after rejections, that he states pre-conditions for the subsequent negotiations, and that F??s opponents may publicly pre-commit to accept/reject certain proposals. The set of equilibrium outcomes is identified as the core if F??s opponents can pre-commit and as the convex hull of the core if they cannot pre-commit credibly. This extended model eliminates two flaws of the standard model: it explains why F cannot always install his favored coalition (whatever the status quo) and why ??important?? coalition members may have more bargaining power in the subsequent negotiations than others.     

Bond financed fiscal policy and the problem of instrument instability

Previous analyses of bond financed government expenditure policies have indicated stability problems but have considered only a once-for-all and sustained increase in government spending. In this paper we examine the bond financing of temporary government expenditure changes, which form part of an ongoing policy designed to “balance the budget over the business cycle.” We find that an endogenous fiscal policy can keep national output near its target value but that the effects on the national debt and the size of the public sector are likely not to be transitory. There is a strong tendency toward instrument instability, in that control of the economy forces the level of government spending to forever diverge from its equilibrium value.     

The effects of federal regulations on corruption in U.S. States

Using the newly constructed Federal Regulation and State Enterprise Index (FRASE Index) to measure the federal regulations and the existing Corruption Convictions Index (CCI), we investigate the effects of federal regulations on corruption in U.S. states. Controlling for several demographic and economic variables including the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom Index (EFI), which measures the size and scope of government in U.S. states, we find a positive and statistically significant relationship between federal regulations and corruption. Our findings have important policy implications. A 1 standard deviation increase in FRASE Index causes CCI to increase by approximately 0.5 standard deviations. Standardized coefficient of EFI is also approximately equal to 0.5. In other words, it is possible to mitigate the effects of regulations at the federal level by reducing the size and the scope of the government at the state level.     

Taylor rules: Consequences for wealth and income inequality

This paper compares the consequences of “active” vs. “passive” Taylor rules for wealth and income inequality. Since the distinction is operative only along transitional paths, we compare the implications for two forms of government expenditure that generate such transitions. Our results confirm that the contrasting effects obtained previously for the aggregate economy have significant distributional consequences. For an active Taylor rule, whether the government increases its expenditure on consumption, or productively, wealth inequality will increase. Expenditure on the two public goods yields divergent paths for income inequality. Government consumption expenditure raises income inequality; productive government expenditure reduces it. If the Taylor rule is passive, an increase in either form of government expenditure reduces wealth inequality initially and over time. Income inequality initially increases, but declines over time, although remaining above its previous steady-state level.     

The macroeconomics of unbalanced growth and the expanding public sector: Some simple tests of a model of government growth

A now classic model of public sector growth is Baumol's (1967) ‘Macroeconomics of Unbalanced Growth’. That model implies that one cause of public sector expenditure growth is a low or zero rate of productivity growth in the public sector relative to the private sector. Previous studies have tested, and partially confirmed, the Baumol hypothesis by computing productivity indices for various public sector activities. In this paper I attempt to test that model in a more direct manner. The unbalanced growth model is used to predict growth rates of per capita government expenditures, government's share of GNP and the pattern of government expenditure growth. These predictions are compared with observed growth rates of aggregate government expenditures. The model predicts the growth rate aggregate government expenditures, the growth rate of government's share of GNP, and the pattern of government expenditure growth reasonably well, and the data tend to support the Baumol model.     

Debt and deficit fluctuations and the structure of bond markets

We analyse the implications of optimal taxation for the stochastic behaviour of debt. We show that when a government pursues an optimal fiscal policy under complete markets, the value of debt has the same or less persistence than other variables in the economy and it declines in response to shocks that cause the deficit to increase. By contrast, under incomplete markets debt shows more persistence than other variables and it increases in response to shocks that cause a higher deficit. Data for US government debt reveals diametrically opposite results from those of complete markets and is much more supportive of bond market incompleteness.     

The effects of taxation,price control and government contracts in oligopoly and monopolistic competition

Many government contracts with or policies towards oligopolistic sectors essentially involve private firms selling a given proportion (ϑ), or quantity, of output to the government at a fixed price (P_R) with the remainder being sold on the open-market. Often this is combined with consumer rationing. Examples include cement and sugar in India, and health, housing and defence in many countries. The paper investigates the effects of these schemes (including sales and excise taxation) on prices, output and household welfare under oligopoly and monopolistic competition. Less government control (reduced ϑ) may raise prices and tax shifting can be above or below 100 percent.     

The progressivity of equalization payments in federations

We investigate the conditions under which an inequality averse and additively separable welfarist central government would choose to set up a progressive equalization payments scheme in a federation with local public goods. A progressive equalization payments scheme is a list of per capita net (possibly negative) subsidies – one such net subsidy for every jurisdiction – that are decreasing with respect to jurisdictions per capita wealth. We examine this question in a setting where the case for progressivity is a priori the strongest, namely: all citizens have the same utility function, inhabitants of a given jurisdiction have the same wealth and are not able to move across jurisdictions and there is no cross-jurisdiction competition in the setting of tax rates. We show that the central government favors a progressive equalization payments scheme for all distributions of wealth and population sizes if and only if its objective function is additively separable between each jurisdiction's per capita wealth and number of inhabitants. When interpreted for a mean of order r social welfare function, and assuming the absence of congestion in the local public good, this condition is shown to be equivalent to the requirement that the individual indirect utility function be additively separable between wealth public good price and be raised at the power 1/r before its agregation by means of the mean-of-order r social welfare function. Some implications of this restriction to the case where the individual's direct utility function is additively separable are also derived.     

Public spending and growth: The role of government accountability

This paper examines the role of institutions in the nexus between public spending and economic growth. Empirical results based on a newly assembled dataset of 80 countries over the 1970–2010 period suggest that particularly when institutions prompt governments to be accountable to the general citizen does public capital spending promote growth. Taking account of the type of financing for this spending, we show that the growth-promoting effect under an accountable government appears to prevail for various financing sources, including a reallocation from current spending, an increase in revenue, and a rise in the budget deficit. However, government accountability does not seem to play a key role in the growth effects of current spending.     

Environmental protection mechanisms and technological dynamics

The paper proposes a new financial mechanism that could be implemented to protect the environment of a tourist region. For this purpose, we investigate the potential consequences of two financial activities, issued by the local government (G) of a region R, which work like contracts between G and, respectively, visitors of R and firms operating in R. According to these contracts, agents who decide to visit R (firms that decide to adopt an environmental friendly technology) have to buy an option that entitle them to get a partial or total reimbursement if environmental quality in R turns out to be sufficiently low (high), namely, below (above) a given predetermined threshold level.     

Public debt in a basic endogenous growth model

We work out the mechanism that makes public debt affect the allocation of resources in the long-run. To do so we analyze an AK growth model with elastic labor supply and a government sector. The government levies a distortionary income tax and issues bonds to finance lump-sum transfers and non-distortionary public spending. We show that the long-run growth rate is the smaller the higher the debt ratio if the government adjusts public spending to fulfill its inter-temporal budget constraint. If the government adjusts lump-sum transfers the public debt ratio does not affect the balanced growth rate.     

Non-random selection into entrepreneurship in the realm of government decentralization and corruption

For the past few decades, the extant literature on corruption has primarily relied on firm-level survey measures – for example, those from the World Bank – to explore the relevant empirical determinants of this illegal practice. However, these studies have potentially overlooked an underlying econometric problem – namely, non-random selection into entrepreneurship – that may bias all the estimated determinants to date if ignored in the analysis. Here, I assess this possibility by applying the traditional Heckman (1979) correction procedure in a novel way: using two different samples. I use my proposed solution in the context of government decentralization and firm-level corruption as a plausible application. Specifically, I revisit the question of the causal impact of government decentralization on firm-level corruption when the underlying sample selection issue is addressed. Results are worth noting. I find reasonable evidence of selection bias. On controlling for this, fiscal decentralization substantially decreases firm-level bribery, in general. This finding is in contradiction to the results reported by naive estimation strategies where the sample selection issue is completely ignored.     

Tax competition,tax exporting and higher-government choice of tax instruments for local governments

This paper presents a theoretical model with tax exporting due to external ownership of a fraction θ of the land in each local jurisdiction. There are n local jurisdictions in a metropolitan area (n≥1) and many metropolitan areas in a world economy. The paper examines the usage of business property taxes and source-based wage taxes by local jurisdictions, first in the presence of and then in the absence of residence-based lump-sum taxes, and how this depends on θ and n. The paper then examines the choice of a world, national or state government as to whether to allow local (metropolitan or sub-metropolitan) governments to use business property taxes, wage taxes or both, assuming that the local governments choose the actual tax rates.     

“Alcohol Bans”: Can they reveal the effect of Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign?

China is perceived to be one of the most politically corrupt countries in the world. Chinese government officials establish firm ties with trusted people through lavish banquets with flowing alcohol, providing privileged access to scarce resources like licenses, land, bank loans, subsidies, and government contracts. In China, Baijiu, the most popular grain liquor at these parties, works as the currency of bribery and is the lubricant for political connections for corruption. Xi Jinping's anti-corruption policy, known as the “Alcohol Bans,” has targeted Baijiu in an attempt to stop the boozy banquets, and, consequently, to bring an end to this channel of political networking. This paper employs the event study approach and connects cumulative abnormal stock returns of high-end Baijiu companies with the impact of the Alcohol Bans. It applies the difference-in-difference method to rule out unobserved reasons for stock market changes. The result is unchanged in both the efficient market hypothesis test and the abnormal return test. We consider if Baijiu may be substituted for other luxuries, and find little evidence for such “substitution effects.” Our work concludes that the Alcohol Bans has partially contributed to Xi's anti-corruption campaign.     

Social constraints and women's education: Evidence from Afghanistan under radical religious rule

We analyze how growing up under Taliban rule affects Afghan women's educational attainments and subsequent labor market and fertility outcomes. While in power from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban ruled a large portion of the Afghan territory and introduced a ban on girls’ education. Using data from the National Risk and Vulnerability Assessment survey, we rely on the fact that, depending on their year of birth and province of residence, individuals differed in the number of years they were exposed to the Taliban government while of school age. Our difference-in-differences estimates show that an additional year of exposure to the Taliban occupation while of school age reduces a woman's probability of completing basic education by about two percentage points. The effects on educational outcomes are larger in Pashtun districts and rural areas. These findings are not due to the 1992 introduction of the provisional Islamist government that preceded the Taliban, cultural differences related to ethnicity, or varying emigration rates across provinces. The estimates are robust to differences across provinces in the number of violent events before, during, and after the Taliban occupation. Women exposed to the Taliban’s radical religious rule while they were of school age are also less likely to be employed outside of the household and more likely to have an agricultural job within the household. For fertility choices, exposure to the Taliban occupation increases total number of children and lowers age at first marriage. We discuss our empirical findings against theoretical economic literature on radical religious groups (e.g., Iannaccone, 1992; Berman, 2000).     

Optimal compensation for potential fatality

Cordes and Weisbrod have recently demonstrated that the requirement that the government actually compensate individuals adversely affected by public projects is likely to have serious resource allocation implications. We examine a rudimentary model of government discretionary behaviour subject to a compensation requirement in the presence of physical risks. Risk assessments are endogenous and asymmetrically held — features enabling analysis of the trade- offs between compensation and protection or information available to the government, and of the structure of compensation which motivates it to do what is objectively best for the individual. We show that, paradoxically, greater government discretion seems more likely to ensure the latter.     

WTO membership and corruption

Despite widespread belief that accession process and formal membership to the World Trade Organization (WTO) improve the quality of governance within a country, there is no convincing empirical evidence to substantiate this thought. Here, I investigate whether the WTO status of a country has a causal effect on firm-level reports of political corruption using a nonparametric partial identification approach to bound the average treatment effects (ATEs). I also analyze conditional ATEs to explore various sources of potential heterogeneity. Contrary to popular belief, I find that WTO membership is likely to have no causal effect on domestic corruption overall. And if anything, it is likely to increase corrupt practices, particularly among firms that are established post WTO membership and those that are government owned.