the impact of bank competition and concentration on industrial growth this paper studies whether bank competition affects growth of non banking industries we find that non cooperative bank competition and stability promote industrial growth robustly bank concentration may also affect growth positively the latter effect increases for higher levels of competition

social networks in the boardroom this paper provides empirical evidence consistent with the facts that 1 social networks may strongly affect board composition and 2 social networks may be detrimental to corporate governance our empirical investigation relies on a unique dataset on executives and outside directors of corporations listed on the paris stock exchange over the 1992 2003 period this data source is a matched employer employee dataset providing both detailed information on directors ceos and information on the firm employing them we first find a very strong and robust correlation between the ceo s network and that of his directors networks of former high ranking civil servants are the most active in shaping board composition our identification strategy takes into account 1 differences in unobserved directors abilities and 2 the unobserved propensity of firms to hire directors from particular networks irrespective of the ceo s identity we then show that the governance of firms run by former civil servants is relatively worse on many dimensions former civil servants are less likely to leave their ceo job when their firm performs badly secondly ceos who are former bureaucrats are more likely to accumulate directorships and the more they do the less profitable is the firm they run thirdly the value created by acquisitions made by former bureaucrats is lower all in all these firms are less profitable on average

banking deregulation and industry structure evidence from the french banking reforms of 1985 we investigate how the deregulation of the french banking industry in the 1980s affected the real behavior of firms and the structure and dynamics of product markets following deregulation banks are less willing to bail out poorly performing firms and firms in the more bank dependent sectors are more likely to undertake restructuring activities at the industry level we observe an increase in asset and job reallocation an improvement in allocative efficiency across firms and a decline in concentration overall these findings support the view that a more efficient banking sector helps foster a schumpeterian process of creative destruction many economies around the world are characterized by heavily regulated bank

how does credit supply expansion affect the real economy the productive capacity and household demand channels credit supply expansion can affect an economy by increasing productive capacity or by boosting household demand in this study we develop a test to determine if the household demand channel is present and we implement the test using both a natural experiment in the united states in the 1980s and an international panel of 56 countries over the last several decades consistent with the importance of the household demand channel we find that credit supply expansion boosts nontradable sector employment and the price of nontradable goods with limited effects on tradable sector employment such credit expansions amplify the business cycle and lead to more severe recessions

credibility and policy convergence in a two party system with rational voters the traditional approach to modeling political parties behavior based upon the contribution of anthony downs 1957 assumes that the parties unique objective is to win elections thus they maximize their popularity the crucial implication of this assumption for a two party system is that if the two parties have the same information about voters preferences full convergence of policies results from electoral competition this is the crucial implication of the median voter theorem more generally it may be argued that different parties are motivated differently because they represent different constituencies parties may not care only about winning elections per se but also about the quality of the policies resulting from an election in this case the candidates of the two parties view winning an election not only as a goal per se but also as a means of implementing a better policy for their respective constituencies this paper shows that electoral competitions imply dynamic inconsistency if the voters are modeled as rational and forwardlooking agents and parties do not care exclusively about being elected but also about which policy to implement once elected the dynamic inconsistency arises as follows the parties have an incentive to announce convergent platforms to increase their chances of election however if the elected party is not committed to its electoral platform it has an incentive to follow its most preferred policy rather than the policy announced in its platform if voters are rational they account for this incentive thus in general in a one shot electoral game the only timeconsistent equilibrium is one in which no convergence is possible the two parties follow their most preferred policies and the voters rationally expect this outcome full convergence of parties platforms results only as a limiting case when the parties are completely indifferent with respect to the quality of the policies resulting from the election thus these results differ from the existing literature on ideologically motivated politicians for instance donald wittman 1977 1983 randall calvert 1985 which implicitly assumes the possibility of binding commitments to electoral platforms complete or partial policy convergence can be the outcome of political competition if the interaction between the parties and the voters is modeled as an infinitely repeated game in fact if the candidates have concave objective functions the welfare maximizing policy rule implies a complete convergence of parties policies however this cooperative and agreed upon policy may or may not be sustainable as a subgame perfect equilibrium depending on parameter values in particular it depends on the discount rates of the two parties the degree of polarization of their preferences and the relative popu graduate school of industrial administration carnegie mellon university pittsburgh pa 15213 and national bureau of economic research cambridge ma 02138 this paper is based upon a chapter of my unpublished doctoral dissertation at harvard university i am greatly indebted to jeffrey sachs for directing my attention toward these issues and for many conversations i also wish to thank andrew abel dilip abreu olivier blanchard ramon caminal andrew caplin alex cukierman morris fiorina benjamin friedman herschel grossman howard rosenthal and the referees for very useful comments the responsibilitv af anv n mtnkieis af calrirp nfnlv mine the result of policy convergence in a two party system is more general than the median voter theorem for discussions of convergence results not at the median see john ledyard 1984 peter coughlin 1984 coughlin and shmuel nitzan 1981 melvin hinich 1977 for earlier work on spatial competition see richard mckelvey 1975 hinich ledyard and peter ordeshook 1972 1973 and the references quoted therein the present paper focuses on the result of convergence rather than on the median voter theorem per se

managerial incentive problems a dynamic perspective the paper studies how a person s concern for a future career may influence his or her incentives to put in effort or make decisions on the job in the model the person s productive abilities are revealed over time through observations of performance there are no explicit output contingent contracts but since the wage in each period is based on expected output and expected output depends on assessed ability an implicit contract links today s performance to future wages an incentive problem arises from the person s ability and desire to influence the learning process and therefore the wage process by taking unobserved actions that affect today s performance the fundamental incongruity in preferences is between the individual s concern for human capital returns and the firm s concern for financial returns the two need be only weakly related it is shown that career motives can be beneficial as well as detrimental depending on how well the two kinds of capital returns are aligned it is well understood by now that informational externalities may place special demands on the organization of economic exchange simple price mediated markets will frequently fail in the presence of asymmetric information in that case more elaborate contractual arrangements have to be used as substitutes for the price system lately considerable effort has been devoted to the analysis of contracting under incomplete information with the objective to understand the range of economic institutions that emerge in response to the failure of the price system the analysis of moral hazard has played a prominent role in this development moral hazard problems arise when for some reason or another transacting parties cannot contract contingent on the delivery of the good for instance in buying labour services it may be that the amount of labour supplied is not directly observable precluding a simple exchange of wage for labour as a partial remedy to this problem an imperfect mutually observed signal about the supply of labour can be used as a proxy in the contract frequently output is taken as such a proxy the drawback is that output is often influenced by other factors than labour input which induce undesirable risk into the contract one is therefore faced with a tradeoff between allocating risk associated with incomplete observability and providing incentives for a proper supply of labour gaining insight into this tradeoff is important not only for understanding contracting in the small e g managerial incentive schemes but also because it is closely related to the fundamental tension between equity and efficiency in the society as a whole while our understanding of moral hazard has advanced a lot in past years it is clear that much work remains an important question that has received little attention until

balanced budget redistribution as the outcome of political competition this paper models balanced budget redistribution between socio economic groups as the outcome of electoral competition between two political parties equilibrium is unique in the present model and a sufficient condition for existence is given requiring that there be enough stochastic heterogeneity with respect to party preferences in the electorate the validity of hotelling s principle of minimum differentiation and of director s law are examined under alternative hypotheses concerning administrative costs of redistributions and voter s possibilities both of abstaining from voting and of becoming campaign activists for one of the parties the policy strategy of expected plurality maximization is contrasted with the strategy of maximizing the probability of gaining a plurality incomes are fixed and known so lump sum taxation is feasible however constraints on tax transfer differentiation between individuals are permitted in the analysis

dealing with time inconsistency inflation targeting versus exchange rate targeting adopting a single instead of multiple targets can be an effective way to overcome the classic time inconsistency problem the choice of a single mandate depends on the trade openness and the credibility reduced form empirical results show as central banks become less credible they are more likely to adopt a pegged exchange rate and the tendency to peg depends on trade openness in a model with loose commitment as credibility falls either an inflation target or a pegged exchange rate is more likely to be adopted arelatively closed highly open economywould adopt an inflation target exchange rate peg

using differences in knowledge across neighborhoods to uncover the impacts of the eitc on earnings we develop a new method of estimating the impacts of tax policies that uses areas with little knowledge about the policy s marginal incentives as counterfactuals for behavior in the absence of the policy we apply this method to characterize the impacts of the earned income tax credit eitc on earnings using administrative tax records covering all eitc eligible lers from 19962009 we begin by developing a proxy for local knowledge about the eitc schedule the degree of sharp bunching at the exact income level that maximizes eitc refunds by individuals who report self employment income the degree of self employed sharp bunching varies signi cantly

exposing corrupt politicians the effects of brazil s publicly released audits on electoral outcomes author s finan frederico ferraz claudio abstract this paper examines the extent to which access to information enhances political accountability based upon the results of brazil s recent anti corruption program that randomly audits municipal expenditures of federally transferred funds it estimates the effect of the disclosure of local government corruption practices upon the re election success of incumbent mayors in municipal elections comparing municipalities which were randomly audited before the elections with those audited after the analysis shows that the disclosure of audit results had a significant impact on the re election rates of mayors found to be corrupt for a one standard deviation increase in reported corruption the audit policy reduced the incumbent s likelihood of re election by 25 percent this effect is more pronounced in municipalities where radio stations are present and higher levels of corruption are identified these findings highlight the value of information and the role of the media in reducing informational asymmetries in the political process thus enabling voters to not only hold corrupt politicians accountable but also to reward non corrupt politicians

law finance and firm growth we investigate how differences in legal and financial systems affect firms use of external financing to fund growth we show that in countries whose legal systems score high on an efficiency index a greater proportion of firms use long term external financing an active though not necessarily large stock market and a large banking sector are also associated with externally financed firm growth the increased reliance on external financing occurs in part because established firms in countries with well functioning institutions have lower profit rates government subsidies to industry do not increase the proportion of firms relying on external financing the corporate finance literature suggests that market imperfections caused by conflicts of interest and informational asymmetries between corporate insiders and investors constrain firms in their ability to fund investment projects the magnitude of these imperfections depends in part on the effectiveness of the legal and financial systems because these systems differ across countries the literature implies that there should exist systematic cross country differences in firms ability to obtain external capital to finance investment in this paper we examine whether the underdevelopment of legal and financial systems does prevent firms in some countries from investing in potentially profitable growth opportunities in particular we focus on the use of long term debt or external equity to fund growth see our earlier work demirgut kunt and maksimovic 1996a which compares firms financial structures in developed and developing countries and finds the greatest difference to be in the provision of long term credit we estimate a financial planning model to obtain the maximum growth rate that each firm in our thirty country sample could attain without access to long term financing we then compare these predicted growth rates to growth rates realized by firms in countries with differing degrees of development in their legal and financial systems our approach enables us to identify specific characteristics of the legal and financial systems that are associated with long term financing of firm growth thus we provide a micro level test of the hypoth

economic consequences of deregulation evidence from the removal of voting cap in indian banks abstract we examine the effect of the 2005 banking regulation amendment bill and the 2011 banking laws amendment bill proposals for removal of the 10 percent voting rights cap in indian banks the 2011 banking laws bill was first introduced in 2005 but lapsed with the dissolution of the 14th lok sabha the bill was passed in december 2012 and raised the voting cap in private sector banks from 10 to 26 percent we present evidence that the removal of the voting cap enhances the value of votes of bank stocks by reducing the wedge between cash flow and control rights thus increasing monitoring and the probability of takeover post deregulation analysis reveals that the passage of the bill was followed by increasing blockholders number and percentage of shares held in larger and government banks furthermore a stronger negative relationship between banks profitability and size as well as share of non performing loans is observed this study makes an important contribution to the growing literature on the valuation impact and efficiency gains of liberalization of ownership restrictions in emerging markets as well as the rich literature on corporate governance and control relating to the value of voting privilege in companies with disparate voting rights

the economics of maps for centuries maps have codified the extent of human geographic knowledge and shaped discovery and economic decision making economists across many fields including urban economics public finance political economy and economic geography have long employed maps yet have largely abstracted away from exploring the economic determinants and consequences of maps as a subject of independent study in this essay we first review and unify recent literature in a variety of different fields that highlights the economic and social consequences of maps along with an overview of the modern geospatial industry we then outline our economic framework in which a given map is the result of economic choices around map data and designs resulting in variations in private and social returns to mapmaking we highlight five important economic and institutional factors shaping mapmakers data and design choices our essay ends by proposing that economists pay more attention to the endogeneity of mapmaking and the resulting consequences for economic and social welfare

unwilling or unable to cheat evidence from a tax audit experiment in denmark this paper analyzes a tax enforcement field experiment in denmark in the base year a stratified and representative sample of over 40 000 individual income tax filers was selected for the experiment half of the tax filers were randomly selected to be thoroughly audited while the rest were deliberately not audited the following year threat of audit letters were randomly assigned and sent to tax filers in both groups we present three main empirical findings first using baseline audit data we find that the tax evasion rate is close to zero for income subject to third party reporting but substantial for self reported income since most income is subject to third party reporting the overall evasion rate is modest second using quasi experimental variation created by large kinks in the income tax schedule we find that marginal tax rates have a positive impact on tax evasion for self reported income but that this effect is small in comparison to legal avoidance and behavioral responses third using the randomization of enforcement we find that prior audits and threat of audit letters have significant effects on self reported income but no effect on third party reported income all these empirical results can be explained by extending the standard model of rational tax evasion to allow for the key distinction between self reported and third party reported income

the impact of firm entry regulation on long living entrants what is the impact of firm entry regulation on sustained entry into self employment how does firm entry regulation influence the performance of long living entrants in this paper i address these questions exploiting a natural experiment in firm entry regulation after german reunification east and west germany faced different economic conditions but fell under the same law that imposes a substantial mandatory standard on entrepreneurs who want to start a legally independent firm in one of the regulated occupations the empirical results suggest that the entry regulation suppresses long living entrants not only entrants in general or transient short lived entrants this effect on the number of long living entrants is not accompanied by a counteracting effect on the performance of long living entrants as measured by firm size several years after entry

political jurisdictions in heterogeneous communities we investigate whether political jurisdictions form in response to the trade off between economies of scale and the costs of a heterogeneous population we consider heterogeneity in income race ethnicity and religion and we test the model using american school districts school attendance areas municipalities and special districts we find strong evidence of a trade off between economies of scale and racial heterogeneity we also find evidence of a trade off between economies of scale and income heterogeneity conversely we find little evidence that ethnic or religious heterogeneity shapes jurisdictions to clarify the direction of causality between heterogeneity and jurisdictions we exploit shocks to racial heterogeneity generated by the two world wars

dominance and competition we propose and test two possible explanations of envy and its opposite gloating one explanation views them as a learning process just as regret and rejoice are in the private domain envy is the social correspondent of regret the other explanation traces envy back to the natural tendency of individuals to seek higher positions in the social ranking that is a dominant position a tendency with very strong evolutionary motives we show experimentally that these two functional reasons for envy coexist competition is the product of the desire for dominance rather than the artificial output of social arrangements jel d12 d87

credit quantity and credit quality bank competition and capital accumulation in this paper we show that bank competition has an intrinsically ambiguous impact on capital accumulation we further show that it is also responsible for the emergence of development traps in economies that otherwise would be characterized by unique equilibria these results explain the conflicting evidence emerging from the recent empirical studies of the effects of bank competition on economic growth we obtain them developing a dynamic general equilibrium model of capital accumulation where banks operate in a cournot oligopoly more banks lead to a higher quantity of credit available to entrepreneurs but also to diminished incentives to offer relationship services that improve the likelihood of success of investment projects we also show that conditioning on one key parameter resolves the theoretical ambiguity in economies where intrinsic market uncertainty is high low less more competition leads to higher capital accumulation

committees with supermajority voting yield commitment with flexibility abstract a fundamental problem for government is how to combine commitment to certain policies with the flexibility required to adjust them when needed rogoff 1985 rogoff k 1985 the optimal degree of commitment to an intermediate monetary target q j econ 100 4 1169 1189 showed that a way to strike the right balance is to appoint an optimally conservative policy maker in real life however policy makers also have power over decisions where optimal plans are time consistent so delegating to a conservative person could be undesirable a flexible delegation device can be found in a large committee of randomly appointed members voting over policy after observing a shock when facing dynamic inconsistency under a single crossing property there exists a supermajority rule that implements the population median s optimally conservative policy maker with certainty another single crossing property guarantees that if simple majority voting is used to select the voting rule that will govern policy choice the supermajority preferred by the median is chosen for problems where dynamic inconsistency vanishes the committee will choose to make decisions by simple majority implementing median outcomes an application to monetary policy is developed we show that the optimal supermajority is higher when dynamic inconsistency is more severe when preferences are more homogeneous and when the economy is less volatile

contrasting rational and psychological analyses of political choice we contrast the rational theory of choice in the form of expected utility theory with descriptive psychological analysis in the form of prospect theory using problems involving the choice between political candidates and public referendum issues the results showed that the assumptions underlying the classical theory of risky choice are systematically violated in the manner predicted by prospect theory in particular our respondents exhibited risk aversion in the domain of gains risk seeking in the domain of losses and a greater sensitivity to losses than to gains this is consistent with the advantage of the incumbent under normal conditions and the potential advantage of the challenger in bad times the results further show how a shift in the reference point could lead to reversals of preferences in the evaluation of political and economic options contrary to the assumption of invariance finally we contrast the normative and descriptive analyses of uncertainty in choice and address the rationality of voting

lending by example direct and indirect effects of foreign banks in emerging markets using a novel dataset that allows us to trace the bank relationships of a sample of mostly unlisted firms we explore which borrowers are able to benefit from foreign bank presence in emerging markets our results suggest that the limits to financial integration are less tight than the static picture of firm bank relationships implies even though foreign banks are more likely to engage large and foreign owned firms after an acquisition a bank is 20 less likely to terminate a relationship with a firm if the acquirer is foreign rather than domestic most importantly within a credit market firms appear to have the same access to financial loans and ability to invest whether they borrow from a foreign bank or not while foreign banks benefit all firms by indirectly enhancing credit access

the effects of fiscal stimulus evidence from the 2009 cash for clunkers program we evaluate the impact of the 2009 cash for clunkers program on short and medium run auto purchases our empirical strategy exploits variation across u s cities in ex ante exposure to the program as measured by the number of clunkers in the city as of summer 2008 we find that the program induced the purchase of an additional 370 000 cars in july and august 2009 however we find strong evidence of reversal high clunker counties bought fewer autos in the 10 months after the program expired which offset most of the initial purchases we find no evidence of an effect on employment house prices or household default rates in cities with higher exposure to the program jel codes h20 e62 copyright 2012 oxford university press

long term evidence of retrospective voting a natural experiment from the german democratic republic abstract the paper investigates long lasting electoral punishment decades of communist socialization and the repressive rule of a single party have left their left wing fingerprint on east germany in this paper we show that voters act rationally given negative life circumstances experienced under the rule of the communist party they display retrospective voting even decades later our insight is based on the analysis of 19 years of revealed and stated party preferences we argue that life at the border region to west germany was particularly hard and find that east german voters who lived close to the inner german border before the reunification of the two states are 5 9 percentage points less likely to lean toward the successor party to east germany s communists given that over the years roughly every fifth person has revealed preferences for the communists in the east this translates to over thirty percent reduction we confirm the preferences with administrative data the electoral punishment estimated at the district level amounts to a reduction of 1 3 percentage points of votes for the party

signalling commitment with monetary and inflation targets abstract this article studies a two period game between the public and a central bank about whose ability to commit to an announced target the public is uncertain the central bank chooses between announcing a target for an intermediate variable money growth and its goal variable inflation prior to setting its instrument the central bank receives private noisy information about the link between money growth and inflation monetary targeting facilitates communication of the central bank s type in that the probability of separation is always higher than under inflation targeting this advantage of monetary targets from a dependable central bank s perspective is outweighed for most parameter values by the advantage of inflation targeting in terms of inflation control if the regime choice is treated as a strategic decision over a large range of parameter values both central banks choose the regime that a dependable central bank would prefer

shaming tax delinquents abstract many federal and local governments rely on shaming penalties to achieve policy goals but little is known about how shaming works such penalties may be ineffective or even backfire by crowding out intrinsic motivation in this paper we study shaming in the context of the collection of tax delinquencies we sent letters to 34 334 tax delinquents who owed a total of half a billion dollars in three u s states we randomized some of the information contained in the letter to vary the salience of financial penalties shaming penalties and peer comparisons we then measured the effects of this information on subsequent payment rates we found that increasing the visibility of delinquency status increased compliance by individuals who have debts below 2500 but had no significant effect on individuals with larger debt amounts financial reminders had a positive effect on payment rates independent of the size of the debt while information about the delinquency of neighbors had no effect on payment rates

an economic model of representative democracy this paper develops an approach to the study of democratic policy making where politicians are selected by the people from those citizens who present themselves as candidates for public office the approach has a number of attractive features first it is a conceptualization of a pure form of representative democracy in which government is by as well as of the people second the model is analytically tractable being able to handle multidimensional issue and policy spaces very naturally third it provides a vehicle for answering normative questions about the performance of representative democracy

the effect of fiscal performance on local government election results in israel 1989 1998 abstract we discuss the circumstances under which voters in local elections will reward fiscal responsibility and suggest that such circumstances evolved in israel in the mid 1990s we present empirical evidence that indeed fiscal performance of mayors substantially affected their reelection probability in the 1998 campaign but not in the 1989 and 1993 campaigns changes in the political environment enforcement of audit and financial reporting requirements tougher imposition of hard budget constraints and the development of local media are proposed as explanations the hypotheses that the fiscal variables reflect the income level at the locality or the mayor s success in extracting resources from the central government are tested and rejected

time consistent collection of optimal seigniorage a unifying framework this paper reviews the existing literature on the time consistency problem of seigniorage collection when monetary policy is determined by optimal taxation considerations it develops a unifying accounting framework and suggests a general measure for seigniorage which encompasses the standard measures employed in the literature in addition the ex ante optimal solution to the optimal taxation problem is derived and interpreted in relation to the ramsey principle we show that the different recommendations of the public finance literature i e the friedman rule of optimal deflation moderately positive inflation and seigniorage maximizing inflation are specific solutions to the optimal taxation problem the paper continues with a formal illustration of the time consistency problem of the ex ante optimal policy and the characterization of the time consistent solution under discretion as possible solutions to the time consistency problem we consider reputational forces institutional reforms that establish central bank independence and specific ways of asset and debt management in particular it is formally shown that a modified version of the asset and debt management scheme suggested by persson persson and svensson is not only necessary but also sufficient for optimality although this did not hold in their model

do political connections buffer firms from or bind firms to the government a study of corporate charitable donations of chinese firms do political connections buffer firms from or bind firms to the government to examine this theoretical puzzle we distinguish two types of managerial political connections ascribed and achieved

entrepreneurial finance credit cards and race this paper examines the impact of financial deregulation on entrepreneurship we assess the impact of credit card deregulation on transitions into self employment using state level removal of credit card interest rate ceilings following the us supreme court s 1978 marquette decision as a quasi natural experiment we find that credit card deregulation increases the probability of entrepreneurial entry with a particularly strong effect for black entrepreneurs we demonstrate that these effects are magnified in states with a history of racial discrimination and link the results to discriminationbased barriers to entry 2012 elsevier b v all rights reserved

pro market institutions and global strategy the pendulum of pro market reforms and reversals we review the literature analyzing the impact of pro market institutions on firms global strategy we propose that the ideological tension between whether the government or the market should drive economic development results in a pendulum of pro market reforms and reversals that drive changes in firm strategy and performance much progress has been made in the analyses of pro market reforms and their impact on firms international strategies and performance however there is a need to further learn about four areas 1 the concept of pro market institutions in particular the variety of institutional dimensions the measures and the influence of informal institutions on firm strategies 2 the drivers of changes in pro market institutions especially firms influences and the co evolution of firm strategies and institutional changes 3 the implications of changes in pro market reforms for the interactions among integration diversification and internationalization strategies the causality chains connecting institutions and strategies and the reconfiguration of activities globally and 4 the non traditional moderators that alter the impact of pro market institutional dynamics on firms strategies such as country level political systems industry level competitor reactions and individual level managerial capabilities and perceptions

the competitive effects of credit constraints in the global economy as credit constraints exclude some firms from external finance and thus from market entry they affect prices and markups by altering the degree of competition lower credit constraints allow less productive firms to enter with the following consequences on the one hand more competition tends to reduce average prices but on the other hand less productive firms charge above average prices the overall effect is thus ambiguous we therefore formulate and structurally estimate a quantitative multi country version of the model to gauge the direction and magnitude of the effects of credit constraints in a model with variable firm specific markups over marginal costs in a sample of 11 european countries manufacturing sectors between 2000 and 2005 we find that an abolishment of credit constraints reduces markups by about 6 1 on average while average prices are predicted to increase by 1 6 the latter indicates that the effect of credit constraints on productivity dominates the one on competition

gender interactions within hierarchies evidence from the political arena this paper studies gender interactions within hierarchical organizations using a large data set on the duration of italian municipal governments elected between 1993 and 2003 a municipal government can be viewed as a hierarchy whose stability over time depends on the degree of cooperation between and within ranks we find that in municipalities headed by female mayors the probability of early termination of the legislature is higher this result persists and becomes stronger when we control for municipality fixed effects as well as for non random sorting of women into municipalities using regression discontinuity in gender mixed electoral races decided by a narrow margin the likelihood that a female mayor survives until the end of her term is lowest when the council is entirely male and in regions with less favourable attitudes towards working women this evidence is suggestive that group dynamics are an important factor in driving the gender difference other interpretations receive less support in the data our results may provide an alternative explanation for the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions

voting retrospectively critical junctures and party identification abstract this paper provides evidence for retrospective voting in the very long term by exploiting a unique quasi natural experiment of history we trace the origins of party identification to a critical juncture in the local history of sasun a mountainous region of the ottoman empire located in eastern turkey sasun received vital support from the armenian revolutionary federation arf both during the great massacres against armenians at the end of the 19th century and during the armenian genocide 1915 1917 with the help of the arf some of the survivors from sasun were resettled in various villages in modern day armenia although the party was not active in armenia during seven decades of soviet rule we find that villages with sasun ancestry display substantially higher electoral support for the arf than other villages evidence from first names of current residents and our field work suggest that this differential support can at least in part be explained by historical gratitude and sympathy for the party we offer suggestive evidence to explain why this sympathy might have endured over generations

optimal retention in agency problems this paper studies the interaction between a single long lived principal and a series of short lived agents in the presence of both moral hazard and adverse selection we assume that the principal can influence the agents behavior only through her choice of a retention rule this rule is further required to be sequentially rational i e no precommitment is allowed we provide general conditions under which equilibria exist where a the principal adopts a cut off rule under which agents are retained only when the reward they generate exceeds a critical bound and b agents separate according to type with better agents taking superior actions we show that in equilibrium a retained agent s productivity is necessarily declining over time but that retained agents are also more productive on average than untried agents due to selection effects finally we show that for each given type agents of that type are more productive in the presence of adverse selection than when there is pure moral hazard i e when that type is the sole type of agent in the model nonetheless adding uncertainty about agent types cannot benefit the principal except in uninteresting cases

the advantage of tying one s hands ems discipline and central bank credibility abstract it is often argued that the ems is an effective disciplinary device for inflation prone countries in europe since it forces the respective policy makers to pursue more restrictive monetary policies than they would otherwise it is not clear however why these countries should submit themselves to such discipline this paper argues that to answer this question appropriately one must consider that ems membership brings potentially large credibility gains policy makers in inflation prone countries the reason is that not only it attaches an extra penalty to inflation in terms of real appreciation but makes the public aware that the policy maker is faced with such penalty and thus helps to overcome the inefficiency stemming from the public s mistrust of the authorities

reason for reserve reserve requirements and credit this paper considers the impact of a regulatory policy action on bank credit and traces its incidence across banks i make use of a reserve requirement increase in lebanon that was considerably greater on foreign currency deposits than on domestic currency deposits all banks cut lending as they scrambled to adjust portfolios but the policy shock disproportionately affected banks with a greater reliance on dollar funding and with low buffers of dollar liquid assets exposed domestic owned banks also adjusted more slowly than similar foreign owned banks that obtained outside funding descriptive firm bank matching evidence reveals a disproportionate impact on small firms

financial consumption and the cost of finance measuring financial efficiency in europe 1950 2007 this paper proposes to assess financial intermediation efficiency in germany france the uk and europe more broadly over the past 60 years i rely on philippon s 2012 methodology which calculates the unit cost of financial intermediation through the ratio of financial consumption measured by financial income to financial output approximated by the sum of outstanding assets intermediated the contribution of this paper is threefold first because financial industry va ignores banks capital income capital gains dividends and interest on securities it is an imperfect measure of the consumption of financial intermediation so long as capital income generates wages and profits to financial intermediaries it is akin to an implicit consumption of financial services using banking income instead of banking va to measure the consumption of banking services i show that the gdp share of finance has increased continuously in germany france the uk and europe as a whole second the unit cost of financial intermediation increased over the past 40 years except in france where overall it stagnated in addition the european unit cost matches the us unit cost calculated by philippon 2012 finally because financial intermediaries deal with nominal stocks and ows and because the unit cost increases during periods of monetary troubles i focus here on nominal rates of interest to explain the evolution of unit cost i show that a rise in nominal rates of interest increases the spread of bank interest so that 1970s and 1980s high unit costs are statistically explained by increases in short term interest rates on the other hand post 1990s high unit cost seems to coincide with the development of new market based activities

changes in job security and their causes an empirical analysis for france 1982 2002 abstract in this paper we analyze the changes in the risks of involuntary job loss in france between 1982 and 2002 we find that these risks are higher in the 1990s than they were in the 1980s we develop an econometric analysis to separate the effects of institutional changes from the effects of new technologies our estimates show that the rise in job loss rates is significantly more pronounced in industries that have the largest share of r d workers and the largest rate of new technologies users these findings suggest that technological changes contribute to decreasing the incentive to keep workers for long period of time and to increasing job insecurity

has job stability decreased population data from a small open economy we use a population based employer employee dataset to analyze changes in job stability in norway we first present descriptive analyses of tenure and separation rates followed by regression adjusted measures controlling for changes in demographics and the business cycle we see only weak evidence of changes in the tenure rates in particular for the public sector we find a slight increase in short tenures and a decrease in tenures above eight years however we do not find that this tendency towards less stable jobs leads to an increase in the flow to unemployment or out of the labor force

finance and competition we investigate the role of financial constraints for product market competition in a general equilibrium model where firms may differ in terms of own wealth and or efficiency we find that in general the amelioration of financial constraints increases competition it lowers the lerner index of markups in financially dependent sectors even when other standard concentration indexes indicate otherwise our analysis implies that disruptions in financial markets such as the recent financial crisis may have adverse effects on competition in product markets a cost that has not been identified before does the existence of financial constraints hinder product market competition in financially dependent sectors do such constraints matter for the number and size of firms as well as for concentration indexes and markups in these markets there is a strong presumption based on the notion that financial constraints act as a barrier to entry expansion in financially dependent activities that a more developed financial system is conducive to greater product market competition surprisingly though there is no theory linking asset market development to competition and things are not better on the empirical front the empirical literature is quite meagre rajan and zingales 2003 and haber 2000 studied the effects of financial development and cetorelli and strahan 2006 and bertrand et al 2007 studied the effects of changes in the degree of competition in the banking sector on various measures of market structure and performance rajan and zingales find that financial development increases the number of firms while it has an ambiguous effect on average firm size in financially dependent industries haber compares the cotton industries in brazil and mexico during 1880 1930 a period of financial liberalisation and argues that concentration indexes decreased in particular in brazil the country that underwent the most effective financial market reform cetorelli and strahan study how market structure in non financial sectors was affected by the increase in competition lower bank concentration and looser statelevel restrictions following deregulation in state banking in the us they find that the number of firms increased average size number of employees per establishment and concentration decreased and the share of establishments in the smallest size group also increased similarly bertrand et al examine the effects of lower state intervention deregulation in the french banking industry on performance and competition in financially dependent sectors they find an increase in firm entry and exit rates and also a reduction in the level of product market concentration the theoretical literature on finance and product market competition is quite extensive but at the same time quite narrow in scope it has two key features first it is

no taxation without information deterrence and self enforcement in the value added tax abstract claims that the vat facilitates tax enforcement by generating paper trails on transactions between firms contributed to widespread vat adoption worldwide but there is surprisingly little evidence this paper analyzes the role of third party information for vat enforcement through two randomized experiments among over 400 000 chilean firms announcing additional monitoring has less impact on transactions that are subject to a paper trail indicating the paper trail s preventive deterrence effect this leads to strong enforcement spillovers up the vat chain these findings confirm that when taking evasion into account significant differences emerge between otherwise equivalent forms of taxation jel d83 h25 h26 k34 o17

ghost citizens using notches to identify manipulation of population based grants this paper analyzes how local governments misreport population figures to obtain higher per capita grant allocations in 1998 the allocation of a formula based grant in spain switched from using the centrally administered census to local population registers administered by municipalities the value of this per capita grant changes at fixed population thresholds for the entire local population we exploit these notches to analyze the size distribution of municipalities to detect deliberate manipulation of the grant assignment variable this allows us to causally identify the effect of grant generosity on population over reporting we document an excess mass of municipalities to the right of the notch threshold and a density hole to the left of it local registers included a proportion of ghost citizens that is people who presented no trace of actually residing in the municipalities which benefit the most from inflating population figures to pass the relevant threshold we document that manipulation rather than real population responses is the mechanism at work the main channel behind manipulation is the incorrect treatment of foreign residents to inflate total local population

repossession and the democratization of credit we exploit a 2004 credit reform in brazil that simplified the sale of repossessed cars used as collateral for auto loans we show that the reform expanded credit to riskier self employed borrowers who purchased newer more expensive cars the legal change has led to larger loans with lower spreads and longer maturities although the credit reform improved riskier borrowers access to credit it also led to increased incidences of delinquency and default our results shed light on the consequences of a credit reform and highlight the crucial role that collateral and repossession play in the liberalization and democratization of credit

do voters demand responsive governments evidence from indian disaster relief abstract using rainfall public relief and election data from india we examine how governments respond to adverse shocks and how voters react to these responses the data show that voters punish the incumbent party for weather events beyond its control however fewer voters punish the ruling party when its government responds vigorously to the crisis indicating that voters reward the government for responding to disasters we also find evidence suggesting that voters only respond to rainfall and government relief efforts during the year immediately preceding the election in accordance with these electoral incentives governments appear to be more generous with disaster relief in election years these results describe how failures in electoral accountability can lead to suboptimal policy outcomes

importing credibility through exchange rate pegging this paper employs an optimal taxation framework in order to study the credibility of monetary policy making in an open economy since inflation is in part uncontrollable due to stochastic disturbances the authority s actions cannot be monitored perfectly when the exchange rate floats thus implying that reputational forces may become ineffective in contrast pegging the nominal exchange rate to a low inflation currency allows perfect monitoring because the exchange rate is in principle controllable for this reason exchange rate pegging may import credibility and result in the best reputational equilibrium even though the authority retains the discretion to devalue unexpectedly

taxpayer response to an increased probability of audit evidence from a controlled experiment in minnesota abstract in 1995 a group of 1724 randomly selected minnesota taxpayers was informed by letter that the returns they were about to file would be closely examined compared to a control group that did not receive this letter low and middle income taxpayers in the treatment group on average increased tax payments compared to the previous year which we interpret as indicating the presence of noncompliance the effect was much stronger for those with more opportunity to evade in fact the difference in differences is not statistically significant for those who do not have self employment or farm income and do not pay estimated tax surprisingly however the reported tax liability of the high income treatment group fell sharply relative to the control group

institutional and legal context in natural experiments the case of state antitakeover laws we argue and demonstrate empirically that a firm s institutional and legal context has first order effects in tests that use state antitakeover laws for identification a priori the size and direction of a law s effect on a firm s takeover protection depends on i other state antitakeover laws ii preexisting firm level takeover defenses and iii the legal regime as reflected by important court decisions in addition iv state antitakeover laws are not exogenous for many easily identifiable firms we show that the inferences from nine prior studies related to nine different outcome variables change substantially when we include controls for these considerations

do government owned banks trade market power for slack the quiet life hypothesis qlh posits that banks with market power have less incentives to maximize revenues and minimize cost especially government owned banks with a public mandate precluding profit maximization might succumb to a quiet life we use a unified approach that simultaneously measures market power and efficiency to test the quiet life hypothesis of german savings banks we find that average local market power declined between 1996 and 2006 cost and profit efficiency remained constant nonparametric correlations are consistent with a quiet life regarding cost efficiency but not regarding profit efficiency the quiet life on the cost side is negatively correlated with bank size quality of loan portfolio and local per capita income the last result indicates that the quiet cost life is therefore potentially due to benevolent excess consumption of local input factors by public savings banks

enjoying the quiet life under deregulation evidence from adjusted lerner indices for u s banks abstract the quiet life hypothesis posits that firms with market power incur inefficiencies rather than reap monopolistic rents we propose a simple adjustment to lerner indices to account for the possibility of forgone rents to test this hypothesis for a large sample of u s commercial banks we find that adjusted lerner indices are significantly larger than conventional lerner indices and trending upward over time instrumental variable regressions reject the quiet life hypothesis for cost inefficiencies however lerner indices adjusted for profit inefficiencies reveal a quiet life among u s banks

incumbent performance and electoral control in the pure theory of electoral competition citizens compare the platforms of the candidates and vote for the one whose platform is preferred candidate strategies are identified with promises about future performance in office models of this sort have been developed in both static mckelvey 1975 and dynamic kramer 1977 i settings and all appear to have the property that if the set of alternatives is large enough in some sense equilibrium platforms rarely exist but these models have another feature that is quite as disturbing as their instability in the static setting discussed by mckelvey little attention is paid to the possibility that once in office the politician s preferences may diverge from those of his constituents and that he may therefore choose policies at variance from his platform instead it is simply assumed that promises will be kept whether or not such behavior is congruent with the interest of the officeholder it is sometimes argued that an enforcement mechanism may exist to discipline politicians for failing to keep promises but without a specification of the mechanism it is not obvious that it would be in the interests of the

the objective function of government controlled banks in a financial crisis abstract we present evidence that government controlled banks gcbs significantly increased their lending to small and medium sized enterprises smes whose main bank was a large bank in the 2008 09 financial crisis further analyses show that the weak relationship between large banks and smes is a major cause for this phenomenon the mixed cournot oligopoly model with relationship banking where profit maximizing private banks and a welfare maximizing gcb coexist shows that this finding is consistent with the welfare maximization by a gcb rather than its own profit maximization

ghost house busters the electoral response to a large anti tax evasion program the incentives of political agents to enforce tax collection are key determinants of the levels of compliance we study the electoral response to the ghost buildings program a nationwide anti tax evasion policy in italy that used innovative monitoring technologies to target buildings hidden from tax authorities two million buildings were registered as a result of the program our difference in differences identification strategy exploits both variation across towns in the ex ante program scope to increase enforcement as well as administrative data on actual building registrations local incumbents experience an increase in their reelection likelihood as a consequence of the policy in addition these political returns are higher in areas with lower tax evasion tolerance and with higher speed of public good provision implying complementarity among enforcement policies the underlying tax culture and government efficiency

transparency reputation and credibility under floating and pegged exchange rates this paper shows that if the cost of importing foreign inflation and real exchange rate shocks are not too high then the equilibrium nominal exchange rate regime for a country with a credibility problem is a peg under which credibility is higher and inflation is lower than under a float this holds true although devaluations of the pegged rate are assumed to be costless the reason is that as realized inflation is not perfectly controllable planned inflation under a float is private information in contrast since the exchange rate can be perfectly controlled pegging resolves the private information problem is more transparent and makes reputation more effective

cheating ourselves the economics of tax evasion no government can announce a tax system and then rely on taxpayers sense of duty to remit what is owed some dutiful people will undoubtedly pay what they owe but many others will not over time the ranks of the dutiful will shrink as they see how they are being taken advantage of by the others thus paying taxes must be made a legal responsibility of citizens with penalties attendant on noncompliance but even in the face of those penalties substantial tax evasion exists and always has the history of taxation is replete with episodes of evasion often notable for their inventiveness during the third century many wealthy romans buried their jewelry or stocks of gold coin to evade the luxury tax and homeowners in eighteenth century england temporarily bricked up their fireplaces to escape notice of the hearth tax collector webber and wildavsky 1986 p 141 this essay reviews what is known about the magnitude nature and determinants of tax evasion with an emphasis on the u s income tax alm 1999 andreoni erard and feinstein 1998 and slemrod and yitzhaki 2002 offer more comprehensive recent reviews of the literature it then places this information into a conceptual and policy context

on the credibility of alternative exchange rate regimes abstract most anti inflation plans have used a nominal exchange rate anchor even though many other variables can serve this role the conventional wisdom is that an exchange rate anchor imposes more macroeconomic discipline than other anchors though theory does not yet provide any clear reason why this is so we explain the link between an exchange rate anchor and discipline with a model that assumes that the public can monitor the nominal exchange rate more easily that it can the other variables in our model a barro gordon game of incomplete information with imperfect monitoring we show that serious stabilizers prefer more visible anchors such as the nominal exchange rate we also show that in some circumstances serious stabilizers will choose to fix the exchange rate even when fixed exchange rates have some costs such as diminished capabilities to respond to external shocks

causes and consequences of hysteresis aggregate demand productivity and employment in this work we develop an agent based model where hysteresis in major macroeconomic variables e g gross domestic product productivity unemployment emerges out of the decentralized interactions of heterogeneous firms and workers building upon the schumpeter meeting keynes family of models cf in particular dosi et al 2016b 2017c we specify an endogenous process of accumulation of workers skills and a state dependent process of firms entry indeed hysteresis is ubiquitous however this is not due to market imperfections but rather to the very functioning of decentralized economies characterized by coordination externalities and dynamic increasing returns so contrary to the insider outsider hypothesis blanchard and summers 1986 the model does not support the findings that rigid industrial relations may foster hysteretic behavior in aggregate unemployment on the contrary this contribution provides evidence that during severe downturns and thus declining aggregate demand phenomena like decreasing investment and innovation rates skills deterioration and declining entry dynamics are better candidates to explain long run unemployment spells and reduced output growth in that more rigid labor markets may well dampen hysteretic dynamics by sustaining aggregate demand thus making the economy more resilient

fiscal policies and the choice of exchange rate regime a common argument against either a monetary union or a regime or a fixed exchange rates is that they preclude flexible use of the inflation tax the authors address this point of view by comparing three alternative exchange rate regimes a pure float an ems regime in which the exchange rate is fixed but can be realigned and a monetary union the authors model the three regimes as alternative commitments on future seigniorage policies this approac h suggests that it is not possible to pareto rank the three regimes o n the other hand the authors provide intuitive conditions under which each of the systems is superior to the others copyright 1993 by royal economic society

regulations market structure institutions and the cost of financial intermediation this paper examines the impact of bank regulations market structure and national institutions on bank net interest margins and overhead costs using data on over 1400 banks across 72 countries while controlling for bankspecific characteristics the data indicate that tighter regulations on bank entry and bank activities boost the cost of financial intermediation inflation also exerts a robust positive impact on bank margins and overhead costs while concentration is positively associated with net interest margins this relationship breaksdownwhencontrolling for regulatory impediments to competition and inflation furthermore bank regulations become insignificant when controlling for national indicators of economic freedom or property rights protection while these institutional indicators robustly explain cross bank net interest margins and overhead expenditures thus bank regulations cannot be viewed in isolation they reflect broad national approaches to private property and competition

on the number and size of nations this paper studies the equilibrium determination of the number of countries in different political regimes and in different economic environments with more or less economic integration we focus on the trade off between the benefits of large jurisdictions and the costs of heterogeneity of large and diverse populations our model implies that i democratization leads to secessions ii in equilibrium one generally observes an inefficiently large number of countries iii the equilibrium number of countries is increasing in the amount of economic integration

to what extent did the economic stimulus package influence bank lending and corporate investment decisions evidence from china abstract using a panel of chinese firms over the period 2003 2013 we show that from the supply side perspective as a result of the implementation of the economic stimulus package in china state owned enterprises soes received more bank loans and invested more than non soes we further find that after the implementation of the economic stimulus package bank lending became less responsive to firm profitability and firm investments became less responsive to investment opportunities for soes non soes from favoured industries and regions and non soes with political connections overall our findings support the view that the stimulus package and the associated increase in bank loan supply in china resulted in more resources being allocated to soes

lending competition and credit availability for new firms empirical study with the price cost margin in regional loan markets abstract in this paper i present statistical evidence of the impact of lending competition on credit availability for new firms a discrete time duration analysis with respect to the years from the start up to the first loan approval by a commercial bank or a cooperative bank which is collected from survey data in japan shows that the higher price cost margin pcm of banks which reflects the existence of a quasi rent for a bank improves the credit availability for younger firms additional analysis to detect the regional determinants of the pcm of banks shows that the share of larger banks in each local credit market has a negative and significant impact on the pcm in light of the existing empirical finding that smaller banks are more likely to provide relationship banking these findings provide indirect evidence for the hypothesis that the intensity of relationship banking in each local credit market increases the pcm and this encourages banks to extend a loan to new firms so that they can pre empt the opportunity to establish lending relationships that are expected to yield such quasi rents

the collateral channel how real estate shocks affect corporate investment abstract what is the impact of real estate prices on corporate investment in the presence of financing frictions firms use pledgeable assets as collateral to finance new projects through this collateral channel shocks to the value of real estate can have a large impact on aggregate investment to compute the sensitivity of investment to collateral value we use local variations in real estate prices as shocks to the collateral value of firms that own real estate over the 1993 2007 period the representative us corporation invests 0 06 out of each 1 of collateral jel d22 g31 r30

the political economics of redistribution inequality and tax avoidance a central result in the political economy of taxation is that the degree of redistribution is positively linked to income inequality however empirical evidence supporting such a relationship turns out to be mixed this paper shows how the different empirical reactions can be rationalized within a simple model of tax avoidance and costly tax enforcement by focusing on structure induced equilibrium in which taxpayers vote over the size of the income tax and the level of tax enforcement we show that more inequality may well reduce the extent of redistribution depending on two opposing effects the standard political effect and a negative tax base effect working through increases in the average level of tax avoidance and the share of enforcement expenditures in total tax revenue

the finance growth nexus evidence from bank branch deregulation this paper provides evidence that financial markets can directly affect economic growth by studying the relaxation of bank branch restrictions in the united states we find that the rates of real per capita growth in income and output increase significantly following intrastate branch reform we also argue that the observed changes in growth are the result of changes in the banking system improvements in the quality of bank lending not increased volume of bank lending appear to be responsible for faster growth

how do budget deficits and economic growth affect reelection prospects evidence from a large panel of countries conventional wisdom is that good economic conditions and expansionary fiscal policy help incumbents get reelected but this has not been tested in a large cross section of countries we test these arguments in a sample of 74 countries over the period 1960 2003 we find no evidence that deficits help reelection in any group of countries developed and less developed new and old democracies countries with different government or electoral systems and countries with different levels of democracy in developed countries and in old democracies election year deficits actually reduce the probability that a leader is reelected with similar although smaller negative electoral effects of deficits in the earlier years of an incumbent s term in office higher growth rates of real gdp per capita raise the probability of reelection only in the less developed countries and in new democracies but voters are affected by growth over the leader s term in office rather than in the election year itself and apparently only by growth not attributed to global growth low inflation is rewarded by voters only in the developed countries the effects we find are not only statistically significant but also quite substantial quantitatively we also suggest how the absence of a positive electoral effect of deficits can be consistent with the political deficit cycle found in new democracies

can unemployment insurance spur entrepreneurial activity evidence from france we evaluate the effect of downside insurance on self employment we exploit a large scale reform of french unemployment benefits that insured unemployed workers starting businesses the reform significantly increased firm creation without decreasing the quality of new entrants firms started postreform were initially smaller but their employment growth productivity and survival rates are similar to those prereform new entrepreneurs characteristics and expectations are also similar finally jobs created by new entrants crowd out employment in incumbent firms almost one for one but have a higher productivity than incumbents these results highlight the benefits of encouraging experimentation by lowering barriers to entry

rent seeking in elite networks we employ a unique dataset on members of an elite service club in germany to investigate how social connections in elite networks affect the allocation of resources specifically we investigate credit allocation decisions of banks to firms inside the network using a quasi experimental research design we document misallocation of bank credit inside the network with bankers with weakly aligned incentives engaging most actively in crony lending our findings thus resonate with existing theories of elite networks as rent extractive coalitions that stifle economic prosperity

personal bankruptcy and credit market competition we document a link between u s credit supply and rising personal bankruptcy rates we exploit the exogenous variation in market contestability brought on by banking deregulation the relaxation of entry restrictions in the 1980s and 1990s at the state level we find deregulation explains at least 10 of the rise in bankruptcy rates we also find that deregulation leads to increased lending lower loss rates on loans and higher lending productivity our findings indicate that increased competition prompted banks to adopt sophisticated credit rating technology allowing for new credit extension to existing and previously excluded households the last quarter century saw a dramatic increase in the share of u s con sumers filing for personal bankruptcy thereby seeking a discharge of their unsecured debt in 2005 this increase led to the most comprehensive change to u s bankruptcy law since 1978 while several causes for the rise in bankruptcies have been advanced and it is the subject of ongoing research two potentially significant changes occurred during this period banking deregulation the relaxation of bank entry restrictions in the 1980s and 1990s and technological change in consumer lending banking deregulation by removing barriers to entry increases credit market competition and there fore affects the supply of credit new screening technologies change the way loans are made allowing for interest rates to better reflect underlying risk and thus facilitating lending to riskier borrowers in this paper we examine whether banking deregulation and technological change played a role in the increase in consumer bankruptcy the empirical literature has mostly focused on cross sectional differences in personal bankruptcy in particular it has revolved around legal institutions as a way to answer whether consumers file due to adverse events as part of a rational financial calculation or as a consequence of unfair or deceptive lending practices usually researchers have exploited the different asset exemptions across u s states i e the amount of personal assets protected from creditors

bank credit and trade credit evidence from natural experiments abstract prior studies find mixed evidence about the substitution relation between bank credit and trade credit in this paper using two bank interest rate deregulations in china we revisit the substitution hypothesis by examining how exogenous increases in the availability of bank credit affect trade credit we find that firms with higher credit risk increased their use of bank credit and reduced their use of trade credit after the 2004 bank interest rate ceiling deregulation whereas firms with lower credit risk increased their use of bank credit and reduced their use of trade credit after the 2013 bank interest rate floor deregulation our results provide supportive evidence for the substitution hypothesis that firms reduce their use of trade credit after the relaxation of bank credit and suggest that bank credit is more favorable short term financing than trade credit

financial integration and consumption smoothing we test if financial integration improves household consumption smoothing using microeconomic data we find that the process of financial market integration and liberalisation brought about by the introduction of the euro has not affected the sensitivity of consumption with respect to income shocks in italy this article also makes a significant contribution from a methodological point of view because our procedure does not require that consumption and income are available in the same panel data set it can therefore be applied in all countries in which repeated cross sectional consumption data can be combined with panel data on income

a survey of recent developments in the literature of finance and growth this paper provides a survey of the recent progress in the literature of financial development and economic growth the survey highlights that most empirical studies focus on either testing the role of financial development in stimulating economic growth or examining the direction of causality between these two variables although the positive role of finance on growth has become a stylized fact there are some methodological reservations about the results from these empirical studies several key issues unresolved in the literature are highlighted the paper also points to several directions for future research

the historical slave trade and firm access to finance in africa access to finance helps explain the link between the historical african slave trade and current gross domestic product we first present mistrust weakened institutions and ethnic fractionalization as plausible historical channels linking the slave trade to modern finance and development we then show i the slave trade is consistently linked to reduced access to the formal and trade credit needed by modern firms ii this shortage particularly reduces capital investment in smaller firms not in business groups and iii the slave trade cannot explain most other business obstacles suggesting that long term societal shocks are exceptionally important for finance received december 16 2014 editorial decision june 29 2017 by editor philip strahan

benefits from mutual restraint in a multilateral monetary union summary we show that monetary union can enhance price stability for its member countries even if none of them has a long history of stable prices and independent monetary policy as is the case in a number of monetary union initiatives among developing countries the positive effect obtains because the opportunistic objectives of one country s policy makers are kept in check at the union level by other members with disparate objectives we calibrate the model to evaluate the proposed monetary union in the east african community the empirical results show that the mutual restraint on monetary policy is an important determinant of the expected benefit from an eac monetary union

page limits on economics articles evidence from two journals abstract over the past four decades the median length of the papers published in the top five economic journals has grown by nearly 300 percent we study the effects of a page limit policy introd

financial deregulation in france in the past few years an extraordinary amount of financial deregulation has taken place in france only as recently as 1983 the country was under tight capital controls faced a wide range of administered and cartelised interest rates possessed a relative sparsity of financial instruments and had its banks strapped in a credit corset or credit ceiling arrangement known as the encadrement du credit today there is only a vestige of the capital controls the only administered interest rates that remain concern bank deposits a host of new financial instruments has emerged and there is no encadrement banking is no longer the secure business that it used to be quite significantly the first bank failure since world war ii occurred in 1987 a few other have followed since commission bancaire 1989 a couple of french bankers put the matter nicely in a recent assessment henceforth the french banking apparatus will need to show that it can manage risks instead of regulations levy lang and henrot 1987 this paper will provide a quick guide to the deregulation why it happened and what took place in addition some of the basic questions posed by the deregulation will be raised for lack of space a fundamental knowledge of general french conditions prior to the deregulation will be taken for granted the reform took sail under the socialists in 1984 85 after a period of socialist advance into opposite waters toward bank nationalisation and further regulation although the liberahsation was presented as necessary to assure the survival of paris as a financial center in view of deregulation abroad the move looks much more like a deliberate choice we see this best by comparing france and germany the german domestic financial environment is a fairly regulated one but as a country with free capital movements and the leader of monetary policy in the european monetary system ems germany has seen little cause to deregulate its financial markets what pressure to liberalise it has felt has come from the european commission following the white paper on european financial integration in june 1985 on the other hand france as a country which required capital controls to steer an independent course in macroeconomic policy in the ems turned toward financial deregulation before the white paper appeared when economic historians look back at this important juncture in european

the politician and his banker how to efficiently grant state aid abstract politicians should spend money as efficiently as possible but what is the best method of granting state aid to firms we use a theoretical model with firms that differ in their success probabilities and compare different types of direct subsidies with indirect subsidies through bank loans we find that for a large range of parameters subsidies through banks entail higher social welfare than direct subsidies avoiding windfall gains to entrepreneurs and economizing on screening costs for selfish politicians subsidizing a bank has the additional advantage that part of the screening costs are born by private banks consequently from a welfare perspective politicians use subsidized banks inefficiently often

do better paid politicians perform better disentangling incentives from selection the wage paid to politicians affects both the choice of citizens to run for office and the performance of those who are appointed first if skilled individuals shy away from politics because of higher opportunities in the private sector an increase in politicians pay may change their mind second if the re election prospects of incumbents depend on their in office deeds a higher wage may foster performance we use data on all italian municipal governments from 1993 to 2001 and test these hypotheses in a quasi experimental setup in italy the wage of mayors depends on population size and sharply rises at different thresholds we apply a regression discontinuity design to the only threshold that uniquely identifies a wage increase 5 000 inhabitants exploiting the existence of a two term limit we further disentangle the composition from the incentive component of the effect of the wage on performance our results show that a higher wage attracts more educated candidates and that better paid politicians size down the government machinery by improving efficiency importantly most of this effect is driven by the selection of competent politicians rather than by the incentive to be re elected

integrity for hire an analysis of a widespread customs reform abstract can governments improve bureaucratic performance by hiring integrity from the private sector in the past 2 decades a number of developing countries have hired private firms to conduct preshipment inspections of imports generating independent data on the value and tariff classification of incoming shipments i find that countries implementing such inspection programs subsequently experience large increases in import duty collections by contrast the growth rate of other tax revenues does not change appreciably additional evidence suggests that declines in falsification of import documentation are behind the import duty improvements the programs also lead to declines in undervaluation and misreporting of goods classifications historically this hired integrity appears to have been cost effective with improvements in import duty collections in the first 5 years of a typical inspection program amounting to 2 6 times the program s costs

property tax and property values evidence from the 2012 italian tax reform abstract this paper assesses the extent to which property taxes are capitalized into property values exploiting the 2012 italian tax reform municipal level variation in the level of the property tax rates is instrumented using the exogenous staggered timing of local elections we show that the incumbent local governments with upcoming elections in 2013 shifted the composition of fiscal revenues towards lower property tax our 2sls estimate shows that a one standard deviation increase in municipal level property tax intensity leads to a 2 7 reduction of municipal property values in the year of the reform we elicit information on the characteristics of the compliers and show that these municipalities feature inefficient public spending and low social capital