New governance of Europe: Parliamentary or presidential?, The

This paper discusses the main issues at stake in the Convention preparing a Constitutional Treaty for Europe. It builds on recent work in political economics to discuss the trade-offs between the parliamentary and the presidential model of democracy for legislative and executive activity in areas of competence of an enlarged EU. It argues in favor of a presidential model in the context of the EU with the president being elected by national parliaments.EU governance; parliamentary system; presidential system; commission president; convention future Europe;

Culture, institutions and democratization.

We construct a model of revolution and transition to democracy under individualistic and collectivist cultures. The main result is that, despite facing potentially more challenging collective action problems, countries with individualistic cultures are more likely to end up adopting democracy earlier than countries with collectivist cultures. Our empirical analysis suggests a strong and robust association between individualistic cultures and average polity scores and durations of democracy, even after controlling for other determinants of democracy emphasized in the literature. We provide evidence that countries with collectivist cultures also are more likely to experience autocratic breakdowns and transitions from autocracy to autocracy

Banking Passivity And Regulatory Failure In Emerging Markets: Theory And Evidence From The Czech Republic.

We present a model of bank passivity and regulatory failure. Banks with low equity positions have more incentives to be passive in liquidating bad loans. We show that they tend to hide distress from regulatory authorities and are ready to offer a higher rate of interest in order to attract deposits compared to banks that are not in distress. Therefore, higher deposit rates may act as an early warning signal of bank failure. We provide empirical evidence that the balance sheet information collected by the Czech National Bank is not a better predictor of bank failure than higher deposit rates. This confirms the importance of asymmetric information between banks and the regulator and suggests the usefulness of looking at deposit rate differentials as early signals of distress in emerging market economies where banks' equity positions are often low.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39808/3/wp424.pd

Law Enforcement and Transition

We present a simple model to analyze law enforcement problems in transition economies. Law enforcement implies coordination problems and multiplicity of equilibria due to a law abidnce and a fiscal externality. We analyze two institutional mechanisms for solving the coordination problem. A first mechanism is what we call "dualism", follows the scenario of Chinese transition where the government keeps direct control over economic resources and where a liberalized non state sector follows market rules. The second mechanism we put forward is accession to the European Union. We show that accession to the European Union, even without external borrowing, provides a mechanism to eliminate the "bad" equilibrium, provided the "accesing" country is small enough relative to the European Union. Interestingly, we show that accession without conditionality is better than with conditionality because conditionality creates a coordination problem of its own that partly annihilates the positive effects of expected accession.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39647/3/wp262.pd

Banking Passivity and Regulatory Failure in Emerging Markets: Theory and Evidence from the Czech republic

We present a model of bank passivity and regulatory failure. Banks with low equity positions have more incentives to be passive in liquidating bad loans. We show that they tend to hide distress from regulatory authorities and are ready to offer a higher rate of interest in order to attract deposits compared to banks that are not in distress. Therefore, higher deposit rates may act as an early warning signal of bank failure. We provide empirical evidence that the balance sheet information collected by the Czech National Bank is not a better predictor of bank failure than higher deposit rates. This confirms the importance of asymmetric information between banks and the regulator and suggests the usefulness of looking at deposit rate differentials as early signals of distress in emerging market economies where banks' equity positions are often low.bank failures, bank supervision, Czech banking crisis, default risk, transitional economies

The Long Run Impact of Bombing Vietnam

We investigate the impact of U.S. bombing on later economic development in Vietnam. The Vietnam War featured the most intense bombing campaign in military history and had massive humanitarian costs. We use a unique U.S. military dataset containing bombing intensity at the district level (N=584). We compare the heavily bombed districts to other districts controlling for baseline demographic characteristics and district geographic factors, and use an instrumental variable approach exploiting distance to the 17th parallel demilitarized zone. U.S. bombing does not have a robust negative impact on poverty rates, consumption levels, infrastructure, literacy or population density through 2002. This finding suggests that local recovery from war damage can be rapid under certain conditions, although further work is needed to establish the generality of the finding in other settings.

Coordinating Changes in M-Form and U-Form Organizations

We model the coordination of specialized tasks inside an organization as "attribute matching." Using this method, we compare organizational forms (U-form and M-form) in coordinating changes. In our framework, organizational forms affect the information structure of an organization and thus the way to coordinate changes. Compared to the U-form, the M-form organization achieves better coordination but suffers from higher costs due to a lack of scale economies or a lack of what we call "attribute compatibility." The distinctive advantage of the M-form is experimentation, which gives the organization more flexibility leading to more innovation and reform. Our theory applies to business firms, transition economies, and the organization of government. For transition economies, our theory relates the initial conditions of organizational differences with reform strategies, especially the "big-bang" approach in Eastern Europe and the "experimental" approach in China.

Banking Passivity and Regulatory Failure in Emerging Markets: Theory and Evidence from the Czech Republic

We present a model of bank passivity and regulatory failure. Banks with low equity positions have more incentives to be passive in liquidating bad loans. We show that they tend to hide distress from regulatory authorities and are ready to offer a higher rate of interest in order to attract deposits compared to banks that are not in distress. Therefore, higher deposit rates may act as an early warning signal of bank failure. We provide empirical evidence that the balance sheet information collected by the Czech National Bank is not a better predictor of bank failure than higher deposit rates. This confirms the importance of asymmetric information between banks and the regulator and suggests the usefulness of looking at deposit rate differentials as early signals of distress in emerging market economies where banks' equity positions are often low.bank failures; bank supervision; Czech banking crisis; default risk; transitional economies

Banking Passivity And Regulatory Failure In Emerging Markets: Theory And Evidence From The Czech Republic.

We present a model of bank passivity and regulatory failure. Banks with low equity positions have more incentives to be passive in liquidating bad loans. We show that they tend to hide distress from regulatory authorities and are ready to offer a higher rate of interest in order to attract deposits compared to banks that are not in distress. Therefore, higher deposit rates may act as an early warning signal of bank failure. We provide empirical evidence that the balance sheet information collected by the Czech National Bank is not a better predictor of bank failure than higher deposit rates. This confirms the importance of asymmetric information between banks and the regulator and suggests the usefulness of looking at deposit rate differentials as early signals of distress in emerging market economies where banks' equity positions are often low.bank failures, bank supervision, Czech banking crisis, default risk, transitional economies

Law Enforcement and Transition

We present a simple model to analyze law enforcement problems in transition economies. Law enforcement implies coordination problems and multiplicity of equilibria due to a law abidnce and a fiscal externality. We analyze two institutional mechanisms for solving the coordination problem. A first mechanism is what we call "dualism", follows the scenario of Chinese transition where the government keeps direct control over economic resources and where a liberalized non state sector follows market rules. The second mechanism we put forward is accession to the European Union. We show that accession to the European Union, even without external borrowing, provides a mechanism to eliminate the "bad" equilibrium, provided the "accesing" country is small enough relative to the European Union. Interestingly, we show that accession without conditionality is better than with conditionality because conditionality creates a coordination problem of its own that partly annihilates the positive effects of expected accession.law enforcement, government collapse, mafia, EU accession, dual track liberalization