178 research outputs found
Democracy and Reforms
Empirical evidence on the relationship between democracy and economic reforms is scarce, limited to few reforms and countries and for few years. This paper studies the impact of democracy on the adoption of economic reforms using a new dataset on reforms in the financial, capital, public, and banking sectors, product and labor markets, agriculture, and trade for 150 countries over the period 1960-2004. Democracy has a positive and significant impact on the adoption of economic reforms but there is no evidence that economic reforms foster democracy. Our results are robust to the inclusion of a large variety of controls and estimation strategies.economic liberalization, transition, political economy
Monetary transmission in low income countries
This paper reviews the monetary transmission mechanism in low income countries (LICs). We use monetary transmission in advanced and emerging markets as a benchmark to identify aspects of the transmission mechanism that may operate differently in LICs. In particular, we focus on the effects of financial market structure on monetary transmission. The weak institutional framework prevalent in LICs drastically reduces the role of securities markets and increases the cost of bank lending to private firms. Coupled with imperfect competition in the banking sector, this means that banks with chronically high excess reserves invest in domestic public bonds or (when possible) in foreign bonds. With the financial system not intermediating funds properly, the traditional monetary transmission channels (interest rate, bank lending, and asset price) are impaired. The exchange rate channel, on the other hand, tends to be undermined by central bank intervention in the foreign exchange market. These conclusions are supported by review of the institutional frameworks, statistical analysis, and previous literature.monetary policy, exchange rate, interest rate, banks, credit, institutions
Democracy and Reforms: Evidence from a New Dataset
Empirical evidence on the relationship between democracy and economic reforms is limited to few reforms, countries, and years. This paper studies the impact of democracy on the adoption of economic reforms using a new dataset on reforms in the financial, capital and banking sectors, product markets, agriculture, and trade for 150 countries over the period 1960-2004. Democracy has a positive and significant impact on the adoption of economic reforms but there is no evidence that economic reforms foster democracy. Our results are robust to the inclusion of a large variety of controls and estimation strategies.
Do Interest Groups affect US Immigration Policy?
While anecdotal evidence suggests that interest groups play a key role in shaping immigration policy, there is no systematic empirical analysis of this issue. In this paper, we construct an industry-level dataset for the United States, by combining information on the number of temporary work visas with data on lobbying activity associated with immigration. We find robust evidence that both pro- and anti-immigration interest groups play a statistically significant and economically relevant role in shaping migration across sectors. Barriers to migration are lower in sectors in which business interest groups incur larger lobby expenditures and higher in sectors where labor unions are more important.Immigration, Immigration Policy, Interest Groups, Political Economy
Do Interest Groups Affects US Immigration Policy?
While anecdotal evidence suggests that interest groups play a key role in shaping immigration policy, there is no systematic empirical analysis of this issue. In this paper, we construct an industry-level dataset for the United States, by combining information on the number of temporary work visas with data on lobbying activity associated with immigration. We find robust evidence that both pro- and anti-immigration interest groups play a statistically significant and economically relevant role in shaping migration across sectors. Barriers to migration are lower in sectors in which business interest groups incur larger lobby expenditures and higher in sectors where labor unions are more important.Immigration, Immigration Policy, Interest Groups, Political Economy
The Power of Political Voice: Women's Political Representation and Crime in India
Using state-level variation in the timing of political reforms, we find that an increase in female representation in local government induces a large and significant rise in documented crimes against women in India. Our evidence suggests that this increase is good news, as it is driven primarily by greater reporting rather than greater incidence of such crimes. In contrast, we find no increase in crimes against men or gender-neutral crimes. We also examine the effectiveness of alternative forms of political representation: large scale membership of women in local councils affects crime against them more than their presence in higher level leadership positions.crime; women’s empowerment; minority representation; voice
Three's company: Wall Street, Capitol Hill, and K Street
This paper explores the link between the political influence of the financial industry and financial regulation in the run-up to the global financial crisis. We construct a detailed database documenting the lobbying activities, campaign contributions, and political connections of the
financial industry from 1999 to 2006 in the United States. We find evidence that spending on lobbying by the financial industry and network connections between lobbyists and the legislators were positively linked to the probability of a legislator changing positions in favor of deregulation.
The evidence also suggests that hiring connected lobbyists who had worked for legislators in the past enhanced this link
Dilute stuffing in the pyrochlore iridate
The pyrochlore EuIrO has recently attracted significant attention
as a candidate Weyl semimetal. The previous reports on this compound
unanimously show a thermally induced metal to insulator (MI) transition,
concomitant with antiferromagnetic (AFM) long-range ordering of the Ir-moments
below T120 K. However, there are contradictory reports
concerning the slope ddT of the resistivity plots () in the
"metallic" state above the metal-insulator (MI) transition, and the value of
in the insulating state, both of which show significant sample
dependence. Here, we explore this issue by investigating six different
EuIrO samples with slightly varying Eu:Ir ratio. High-resolution
synchrotron powder diffraction are done to probe minor variations in the cell
parameters of the various EuIrO samples investigated here. Specific
heat (C) and magnetic susceptibility of all the samples showed long-range
antiferromagnetic ordering upon cooling below T120 K. The
transitions are, however, found to be smeared out for the off-stoichiometric
samples. We show that the sign of ddT above the metal-insulator (MI)
transition is highly sensitive to the unit cell length, which, in turn, depends
on the level of Eu-stuffing at the Ir-site. Samples with composition close to
the ideal stoichiometry (Eu : Ir 1) showed a change of sign of ddT
from negative to positive upon cooling below a certain temperature T
T. With increasing Eu-stuffing T decreased until a negative
ddT persisted without any sign change down to T.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure
The Dynamics of Firm Lobbying
We study the determinants of the dynamics of firm lobbying behavior using a panel data set covering 1998-2006. Our data exhibit three striking facts: (i) few firms lobby, (ii) lobbying status is strongly associated with firm size, and (iii) lobbying status is highly persistent over time. Estimating a model of a firm's decision to engage in lobbying, we find significant evidence that up-front costs associated with entering the political process help explain all three facts. We then exploit a natural experiment in the expiration in legislation surrounding the H-1B visa cap for high-skilled immigrant workers to study how these costs affect firms' responses to policy changes. We find that companies primarily adjusted on the intensive margin: the firms that began to lobby for immigration were those who were sensitive to H-1B policy changes and who were already advocating for other issues, rather than firms that became involved in lobbying anew. For a firm already lobbying, the response is determined by the importance of the issue to the firm's business rather than the scale of the firm's prior lobbying efforts. These results support the existence of significant barriers to entry in the lobbying process.
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