Using Iranian province level data from 2001 to 2013, this study finds that the international sanctions of 2012/2013 had a significantly stronger negative impact on the growth rate of the shadow ...economy than they did on the official GDP growth rate. Thus, the international sanctions on Iran have damaged the informal economy even more than the formal economy.
This article reports on trends in organized violence, building on new data by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). The falling trend in fatalities stemming from organized violence in the world, ...observed for five consecutive years, broke upwards in 2020 and deaths in organized violence seem to have settled on a high plateau. UCDP registered more than 80,100 deaths in organized violence in 2020, compared to 76,300 in 2019. The decrease in violence in Afghanistan and Syria was countered by escalating conflicts in, for example, Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), Azerbaijan and Tigray, Ethiopia. Moreover, the call for a global ceasefire following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic failed to produce any results. In fact, the number of active state-based and non-state conflicts, as well as the number of actors carrying out one-sided violence against civilians, increased when compared to 2019. UCDP noted a record-high number of 56 state-based conflicts in 2020, including eight wars. Most of the conflicts occurred in Africa, as the region registered 30 state-based conflicts, including nine new or restarted ones.
lThis study investigates the heterogeneous effects of central vs. local R&D subsidies on firms’ exploratory innovation.lTo reduce the selection bias in the data, we have adopted a multiple-treatment ...matching algorithm based on the Generalized Propensity Scores generated by the Generalized Boosted Models (GBMs).lIn comparison to central subsidies, local subsidies are shown to be more effective in promoting firms’ exploratory innovation.lThe positive effect of subsidies is stronger for the recipients in a highly specialized industrial agglomeration.
Public R&D subsidy is a commonly adopted policy instrument to promote firms’ exploratory innovation that encourages novel knowledge learning. Under the multi-level institutional settings such as China, however, it is unclear in current literature as to whether central and local-level governmental R&D subsidy programs exert heterogeneous influences on recipient firms’ exploratory innovation. By employing an exclusive panel data of manufacturing firms in Jiangsu Province, this study investigates the heterogeneous effects of central and local R&D subsidies on firms’ exploratory innovation. Considering that regional innovation contexts may influence the learning and innovation of subsidy recipients, we further test the interaction effects of specialized industrial agglomeration and R&D subsidies. We find that R&D subsidies in general do promote firms’ exploratory innovation, and the local R&D subsidy exhibits a more salient effect. In addition, the positive effect of subsidies is stronger for the recipients in a highly specialized industrial agglomeration. This study contributes to R&D subsidy literature and extends our knowledge on the different roles of central and local governments in firms’ learning behaviors and technological upgrading.
This paper evaluates the real effects of environmental justice reform on environmental governance at the firm level. Using the establishment of environmental courts in China as a quasi-natural ...experiment, our difference-in-differences estimation shows that: (1) environmental courts significantly enhance environmental investment by firms, and this relationship is robust to different specifications and alternative measures; (2) three possible channels are the improved levels of justice and enforcement of environmental protection, and the mitigation of local government intervention; (3) our findings are particularly pronounced in subsamples with severe local protectionism, state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and non-SOEs with political connections; (4) at the city-level, environmental courts significantly increase air quality and promote cities to cross the inflection point of the environmental Kuznets curve earlier. Overall, this paper reveals the micro-mechanisms behind the real effects of environmental justice on firm environmental investment, thus providing timely implications for regulators concerned with environmental protection.
Statistical models of text have become increasingly popular in statistics and computer science as a method of exploring large document collections. Social scientists often want to move beyond ...exploration, to measurement and experimentation, and make inference about social and political processes that drive discourse and content. In this article, we develop a model of text data that supports this type of substantive research. Our approach is to posit a hierarchical mixed membership model for analyzing topical content of documents, in which mixing weights are parameterized by observed covariates. In this model, topical prevalence and topical content are specified as a simple generalized linear model on an arbitrary number of document-level covariates, such as news source and time of release, enabling researchers to introduce elements of the experimental design that informed document collection into the model, within a generally applicable framework. We demonstrate the proposed methodology by analyzing a collection of news reports about China, where we allow the prevalence of topics to evolve over time and vary across newswire services. Our methods quantify the effect of news wire source on both the frequency and nature of topic coverage. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.
The nexus between corruption and economic growth has been examined for a long time. Many empirical studies measured corruption by the reversed Transparency International's Perception of Corruption ...Index (CPI) and ignored that the CPI was not comparable over time. The CPI is comparable over time since the year 2012. We employ new data for 175 countries over the period 2012–2018 and re-examine the nexus between corruption and economic growth. The cumulative long-run effect of corruption on growth is that real per capita GDP decreased by around 17% when the reversed CPI increased by one standard deviation. The effect of corruption on economic growth is especially pronounced in autocracies and transmits to growth by decreasing FDI and increasing inflation.
US Food Aid and Civil Conflict Nunn, Nathan; Qian, Nancy
The American economic review,
06/2014, Letnik:
104, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We study the effect of US food aid on conflict in recipient countries. Our analysis exploits time variation in food aid shipments due to changes in US wheat production and cross-sectional variation ...in a country's tendency to receive any US food aid. According to our estimates, an increase in US food aid increases the incidence and duration of civil conflicts, but has no robust effect on interstate conflicts or the onset of civil conflicts. We also provide suggestive evidence that the effects are most pronounced in countries with a recent history of civil conflict.
Can War Foster Cooperation? Bauer, Michal; Blattman, Christopher; Chytilová, Julie ...
The Journal of economic perspectives,
07/2016, Letnik:
30, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In the past decade, nearly 20 studies have found a strong, persistent pattern in surveys and behavioral experiments from over 40 countries: individual exposure to war violence tends to increase ...social cooperation at the local level, including community participation and prosocial behavior. Thus while war has many negative legacies for individuals and societies, it appears to leave a positive legacy in terms of local cooperation and civic engagement. We discuss, synthesize, and reanalyze the emerging body of evidence and weigh alternative explanations. There is some indication that war violence enhances in-group or "parochial" norms and preferences especially, a finding that, if true, suggests that the rising social cohesion we document need not promote broader peace.
We perform transaction-level analyses of entrusted loans, one of the largest components of shadow banking in China. Entrusted loans involve firms with privileged access to cheap capital channeling ...funds to less privileged firms, and the increase when credit is tight. Nonaffiliated loans have much higher interest rates than both affiliated loans and official bank loans, and they largely flow into real estate. The pricing of entrusted loans, especially of nonaffiliated loans, incorporates fundamental and informational risks. Stock market reactions suggest that both affiliated and nonaffiliated loans are fairly compensated investments.
Who governs? This is one of the most fundamental questions in political science. Despite its importance, there is currently no global dataset on governing elites over a long period. This article ...presents a novel dataset, WhoGov, which contains yearly data on members of cabinets in 177 countries during the period 1966–2016, making it the largest of its kind. We first present how the dataset was created and validate it by matching this data against existing data. We then demonstrate how the data can be used to gain new insights into diverse fields such as the study of autocracies, gender studies, the study of regime types, and government formation. We expect that this dataset will be an invaluable resource for both comparativists and country experts.
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