Globalization and flattening of Phillips Curve in Turkey between 1987 and 2007

In the last two decades, there have been important changes in inflation dynamics in Turkey. While average inflation rate, inflation volatility and inflation persistence declined, the prices of tradable goods have shown an increase less than prices of non-tradable goods. The aim of this paper is to inquire whether the globalization has an effect on this change and to test whether and how it affected the slope of the Phillips Curve. The findings point out that global activity did have an effect on domestic inflation rate and that Phillips Curve got flatter.     

Lobbying under political uncertainty

This paper considers a model of lobbying described as a common agency game; it departs from the current literature by assuming that the special interest groups are not a priori organized or unorganized and that the type of the politician is not common knowledge. We characterize equilibria when the choice set of the politician consists of two policies; we discuss the conditions leading to efficiency and the characteristics of the groups explaining their relative success in the process of influence. We also offer some results for the general case, including disjoint necessary and sufficient conditions for the equilibria to be efficient.     

Welfare egalitarianism in non-rival environments

We study equity in economies where a set of agents commonly own a technology producing a non-rival good from their private contributions. A social ordering function associates to each economy a complete ranking of the allocations. We build social ordering functions satisfying the properties that individual welfare levels below the stand-alone lower bound (respectively, above the unanimity upper bound) should be increased (respectively, reduced). Combining either property with efficiency and robustness properties with respect to changes in the set of agents, we obtain a kind of welfare egalitarianism based on a constructed numerical representation of individual preferences.     

Revisiting the democracy-private investment nexus: Does inequality matter?

Contrary to the predictions of a large theoretical literature, recent cross-country evidence suggests autocracies can generate statistically indistinguishable levels of private investment compared to democracies. We argue that the previous exclusion of inequality explains part of this puzzle. We model current investment as a function of investors’ beliefs about future tax rates, which are conditioned by the constraints on the Executive in setting tax rates and expropriating tax revenues. In democracies, where tax rates reflect the preferences of the median voter, investment declines with rising inequality. In autocracies, investor beliefs about future tax rates reflect the relative power of Elites compared to the Executive. As inequality rises, the increased resources available to Elites constrains the Executive’s ability to expropriate more tax revenues. The heterogeneous determinants of investor beliefs can explain the observed pattern of investment across regime types. We first test our predictions at the macro-level with cross-country data. We then test the behavioral underpinnings of our model with a novel laboratory experiment showing how inequality affects individual-level investment behavior dependent upon regime type. Results from both types of analyses show that when inequality is taken into account autocracies can generate similar levels of investment to democracies.     

Cyclicality of fiscal policy and the shadow economy

A survey of recent literature on cyclical properties of fiscal policy reveals that fiscal policy is procyclical in many developing countries whereas it is countercyclical in developed ones. However, there is no consensus on what drives the difference in this specific cyclical property of fiscal policy. Using cross-section and panel data sets for 78 countries we document that procyclicality of fiscal policy is more pronounced in countries with a larger size of the shadow economy. We also show that policies reducing the size of the shadow economy lead to a less (more) procyclical (countercyclical) fiscal response to shocks.     

Freedom of choice between unitary and two-tier boards: An empirical analysis

We examine board structure in France, which since 1966 has allowed firms the freedom to choose between unitary and two-tier boards. We analyze how this choice relates to characteristics of the firm and its environment. Firms with severe asymmetric information tend to opt for unitary boards; firms with a potential for private benefits extraction tend to adopt two-tier boards. Chief executive officer turnover is more sensitive to performance at firms with two-tier boards, indicating greater monitoring. Our results are broadly consistent with the Adams and Ferreira (2007) model and suggest that gains result from allowing freedom of contract about board structure.     

Education and earnings in urban West Africa

Using a series of comparable labor force surveys in urban West Africa, we estimate the private returns to education among representative samples of workers in seven economic capitals (Abidjan, Bamako, Cotonou, Dakar, Lome, Niamey and Ouagadougou). The data allow us to provide a unique cross-country comparison using rigorously the same variables and methodology for each country. We tackle the issues of endogenous sector allocation (public, formal private and informal sectors) and endogeneity of the education variable in the earnings functions. We find that the returns to schooling are most often enhanced once an endogenous education variable is accounted for. This effect holds particularly true in the informal sector. In most West African cities of our sample, the public sector gives more value to education, followed by the formal private sector and then the informal sector. We also shed light on convex returns to education in all the cities and sectors, including in informal activity. More generally, a major contribution of this paper is to provide evidence of significant effects of education on individual earnings in the informal sectors of the West African cities, even at high levels of schooling.     

Distributive Politics and Electoral Competition

Within the framework of pure redistribution (dividing one unit of a homo- geneous good among identical individuals), the paper analyses the redistribution that arises from Downsian, two-party, electoral competition. It appears that the strategic behavior of vote-maximizing parties leads them to propose divisions which are not far from the egalitarian one. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, D63, D72.     

The Role of Collateral in the Credit Acquisition Process: Evidence from SME Lending

This study tests the simultaneous impact of observed characteristics and private information on debt term contracts in a multi‐period setting, using a dataset of 12,666 credit approvals by one major Portuguese commercial bank during 2007–2010. The main results show that borrowers with good credit scores that know they have a high probability of success and are unlikely to default are more willing to pledge collateral in return for a lower interest rate premium (IRP). Furthermore, lenders tailor the specific terms of the contract, increasing both collateral requirements and the IRP from observed risk, for borrowers operating in riskier industries and with less credit availability. The results are robust to controls for joint debt terms negotiation and the degree of collateralization offered by the borrower.