Unbundling democracy: Political rights and civil liberties

Much recent political economy and political science literature views democracy in terms of political rights. This view, often referred to as electoral democracy, is particularly pronounced in the empirical literature. We reincorporate the role of civil liberties, which are at the core of modern democracy, in two ways. We identify four fundamental sources of potential differences in the evolution of political rights and civil liberties. We present systematic, robust and varied empirical evidence on the direct impact of two of these potential sources of differences using cross-national panel data and accounting for the modernization hypothesis. We obtain two noteworthy empirical results: civil liberties exhibit greater persistence than political rights in affecting subsequent outcomes; and, our main result, civil liberties are complementary to political rights when affecting subsequent outcomes, while the reverse is not the case. Consequently, one must incorporate civil liberties as a determinant of electoral democracy. More generally, both dimensions must be considered to understand the setbacks recently experienced by many democracies, despite their holding of free and fair elections.     

Monopolistic competition and income dispersion

We develop a model of monopolistic competition that accounts for consumers’ heterogeneity in both incomes and preferences. This model makes it possible to study the implications of income redistribution on the toughness of competition. We show how the market outcome depends on the joint distribution of consumers’ tastes and incomes and obtain a closed-form solution for a symmetric equilibrium. Competition toughness is measured by the weighted average elasticity of substitution. Income redistribution generically affects the market outcome, even when incomes are redistributed across consumers with different tastes in a way such that the overall income distribution remains the same.     

Does sovereign debt weaken economic growth? A panel VAR analysis

We estimate panel vector autoregressions to analyze the highly disputed relationship between sovereign debt and economic growth. Using data on 20 developed countries, we find no evidence for a robust effect of debt on growth, even for higher levels of debt. We do find a significant negative reverse effect of growth on debt, which explains the negative correlation.     

What drives cross-country differences in export variety? A bilateral panel approach

A worldwide event like the 2020 Coronavirus outbreak can only reinforce the interest in modelling trade diversification as a key factor in countries’ vulnerability to external shocks. This paper adopts a detailed relative framework to study the determinants of product-level export variety in a large bilateral panel of developing and developed economies (16,770 country pairs in the period 1988–2014). We find that country pairs characterized by large differentials in productivity and in the makeup of the labour force differ in export variety patterns. This result holds after controlling for other endowments and for trade costs. Further, productivity plays a significant role in the reduction of export variety dissimilarities between countries belonging to different income groups. Hence, without successful technological convergence the low-income economies will not be able to reduce their exposure to export risk.     

Foreign direct investment and economic growth: Is more financial development better?

We investigate the extent to which an increase in financial development affects the positive effect of foreign direct investment on economic growth. Although the financial sector is beneficial for economic growth, the effect of further financial development on growth is found to become insignificant. Using a dynamic panel threshold model on 62 middle- and high-income countries spanning the period 1987–2016, we re-examine the possible nonlinearity between finance, foreign direct investment, and growth. Consistent with the “vanishing effect” of financial development, we find significant evidence that foreign direct investment fosters growth in general, but the growth effect of foreign direct investment becomes negligible when the ratio of private sector credit to gross domestic product exceeds 95.6%. This finding is robust to different econometric methods, various subsamples and interaction analyses, and distinct financial development indicators.     

Staying dry on Spanish wine: The rejection of the 1905 Spanish-Italian trade agreement

After a long debate on wine import tariffs, the Italian Parliament rejected the Spanish-Italian trade agreement on 17 December 1905. This decision left Spain and Italy without a bilateral trade treaty for an entire decade. In the literature, broader political issues and local interests are alternatively indicated as the main drivers of the rejection. Based on a new database which collects economic and political variables (including MPs personal features) and using a probit model, this paper provides a quantitative analysis of the vote. Results show that constituency interests had a role in determining the result of the vote on the trade treaty. Moreover, constituency interests were also important for the “vote switchers”, i.e. those MPs that supported the overall government policy stance in the first round, but opposed the Spanish-Italian trade agreement in the second.     

A political economy perspective on horizontal FDI in a dynamic Cournot-oligopoly with endogenous entry

Entry in a homogeneous Cournot-oligopoly is excessive if and only if there is business-stealing (Amir et al., 2014). The excessive entry prediction has been derived primarily for closed economies and using a welfarist benchmark. We extend this framework and allow for (1) horizontal FDI in a multi-period setting and (2) interest group-based government behaviour. Opening the market to greenfield investments from abroad tends to aggravate the entry distortion. Moreover, market opening may reduce welfare if a more pronounced entry distortion dominates the gain in consumer surplus. Finally, a government, which places sufficiently little weight on the interests of consumers, will object to market opening, even if welfare rises.     

Euro area sovereign yield spreads as determinants of private sector borrowing costs

We regress long-term private-sector borrowing rates on a money market rate, a term premium and credit risk. As a contribution to the current debate about European safe assets, our interest is in quantifying the impact of euro area sovereign bond spreads on private-sector lending by employing it as a proxy for private-sector credit risk. Panel estimates show significant, albeit rather small long-run effects. Another finding is large cross-country heterogeneity. Using linear country-specific estimates, we find the effect to be significant in only some countries, but the size of the maximum effect in these countries exceeds the average one more than three-fold. Furthermore, for one country, we find an asymmetrical effect with positive spread changes having greater impact on private-sector borrowing costs than negative ones. Substantial heterogeneity of the spillover effect between euro area countries indicates the presence of financial valuation effects based not only on economic fundamentals. This, in turn, implies that spillovers may entail contagion costs. Overall, our results suggest that these costs are considerable in the euro area and will remain so until an effective form of European safe assets is created.     

Multilateral aggregation-theoretic monetary aggregation over heterogeneous countries

We derive fundamental theory for measuring monetary service flows aggregated over countries within a multicountry area. We develop three increasingly restrictive approaches: (1) the heterogeneous agents approach, (2) the multilateral representative agent approach, and (3) the unilateral representative agent approach. These results are being used by the European Central Bank in construction of its Divisia monetary aggregates database, with convergence from the most general to the more restrictive approaches expected as economic convergence within the area proceeds. Our theory permits monitoring the effects of policy over a multicountry area, while also monitoring the distribution effects of policy among the countries.     

Patenting,intellectual property rights and sectoral outputs in Industrial Revolution Britain, 1780–1851

Patenting rose sharply during the British Industrial Revolution. Utilizing time series methods, we investigate the causal relationships between 16 industries and patented inventions. The results show that increased patenting was essentially a consequence of fast growth in the cotton, iron, and mining sectors, which increased the value of protecting intellectual property. Conversely, protecting intellectual property was not a cause of the Industrial Revolution.