{"title":"Freedom from unit roots? The time series properties of democracy and economic freedom","authors":"Colin O'Reilly , Ryan H. Murphy","doi":"10.1016/j.jce.2025.02.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jce.2025.02.003","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper revisits Sobel and Coyne (2011), which finds a cointegrating relationship between democracy and economic freedom. We extend their sample with data published since that time, make use of the second generation of panel unit root and panel cointegration tests, and apply the more comprehensive measure of democracy from <em>Varieties of Democracy</em>. With these methodological improvements in place, we do not find that either economic freedom or democracy has a unit root in the full set of countries studied, and they therefore cannot have a cointegrating relationship. We then apply the methodology developed by Chortareas and Kapetanios (2009) in order to isolate a subset of countries whose institutions may in fact have a cointegrating relationship.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48183,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Economics","volume":"53 2","pages":"Pages 472-489"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144138894","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Diplomatic relations and agricultural trade","authors":"Zhongda Li , Lu Liu","doi":"10.1016/j.jce.2025.02.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jce.2025.02.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Political conflicts often cause disruptions in agricultural trade, yet previous studies have not paid much attention to the food market. Focusing on China, this paper examines the impact of diplomatic relations on agricultural trade. We match a panel dataset on agricultural exports to China from 168 trading partners with our constructed ranking index of diplomatic relations. Using different strategies to address the endogeneity issue, our analysis finds robust evidence for a strong and positive effect of diplomatic affinity on bilateral agricultural export flows. Exploring the potential mechanisms, we uncover that the increased agricultural exports work primarily through enhancing bilateral communication. Based on a quantitative trade model with Stone-Geary preferences, we then quantify the welfare effects from changes in diplomatic relations. We show that an increase in the ranking of diplomatic relations with trading partners leads to welfare gains of 0.5-1.8% through agricultural trade.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48183,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Economics","volume":"53 2","pages":"Pages 433-460"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144138580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conflict and social capital: Evidence from the Russian War against Ukraine","authors":"Georg Hoch , Andreas Pondorfer , Viktoriia Shkola","doi":"10.1016/j.jce.2025.02.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jce.2025.02.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study investigates the relationship between the Russian invasion of Ukraine and social capital. Using survey data of the Ukrainian population, we apply two measures of conflict exposure: geocoded conflict data and self-reported war experience. We find that objective war events are associated with lower levels of prosocial behavior and institutional trust, while subjective war experiences show a positive correlation with prosociality and a negative correlation with institutional trust. These findings highlight the complex interplay between objective and subjective war measures and underscores the importance of considering both quantitative and qualitative aspects of war experiences in understanding their impact on human behavior.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48183,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Economics","volume":"53 2","pages":"Pages 461-471"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144138893","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"National identity, public goods, and modern economic development","authors":"Stergios Skaperdas , Patrick A. Testa","doi":"10.1016/j.jce.2025.01.006","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jce.2025.01.006","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Since the Industrial Revolution, large-scale economic development has coincided with the rise of the modern nation-state. We argue that this is not a coincidence. We show how the advent of <em>national identity</em> helped modern states overcome internal conflicts over the distribution of economic benefits to provide public goods and grow. Using a model with elites and commoners, characterized initially by distinct group identities (e.g., ethnicity, class), we show that elites have an incentive to induce commoners to identify with the nation. The more widespread is national identification, the less is conflict between elites and commoners, and the more revenues can be collected and public goods broadly provided. This effect is self-reinforcing: the greater is public goods provision, the greater is the economic status of the nation and thus the psychological return on national identification. Elites’ incentives to induce national identification, however, depend on the presence of political restraints on the elite. We reexamine the historical cases of England (1600–1920) and the United States (1865–present), identifying support for our framework therein.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48183,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Economics","volume":"53 2","pages":"Pages 412-432"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144138579","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Land reform and illegal adoption of children","authors":"Yanjun Li , Yu Bai , Masaki Nakabayashi","doi":"10.1016/j.jce.2025.01.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jce.2025.01.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The paper examines how China’s land reform between 1978 and 1984 altered economic incentives, leading to observable household responses, with involvement in illegal adoption as a key example. The reform transferred land rights from collectives to individual households, granting them control over land-based income and thereby increasing the demand for children as labor and heirs. Leveraging a unique dataset that tracks the inflow of trafficked children and the staggered rollout of the reform, we use triple differences and other identification strategies to demonstrate that land decollectivization significantly increased the illegal adoption of abandoned or abducted children in rural areas. This land usage rights shock was moderated by clan influence, which traditionally valued bloodlines, highlighting the importance of the interaction between culture and institutions.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48183,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Economics","volume":"53 1","pages":"Pages 182-208"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143444921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Bernard Clery Nomo Beyala, Jean Pierre Fouda Owoundi
{"title":"The effects of fiscal rules on budget deficit: Does democracy matter?","authors":"Bernard Clery Nomo Beyala, Jean Pierre Fouda Owoundi","doi":"10.1016/j.jce.2025.01.005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jce.2025.01.005","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper aims to analyse the extent to which democracy shapes the relationship between fiscal rules and budget deficits. To attain this objective, we estimated different fiscal reaction functions for a sample of 97 countries over the period 1985–2021. Our results show that fiscal rules reduce primary budget deficits. Furthermore, the paper establishes that this effect diminishes with democracy as a marginal increase in fiscal rules strength reduces the primary budget only in weak democracies while in strong democracies they do not, indicating that fiscal rules and democracy are substitutes to attain fiscal discipline. Our results are robust to the exclusion of EU countries members, alternative methods dealing with endogeneity or time-invariant variables and the inclusion of other determinants of primary budget deficit as explanatory variables. This suggests that fiscal rules and democracy are substitutes. However, when dealing with the fiscal framework, we find that fiscal rules and democracy are substitutes only in new democracies and under high indebtedness.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48183,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Economics","volume":"53 1","pages":"Pages 290-315"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143444976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The making of the Greek fiscal state, 1833-1939","authors":"Franciscos Koutentakis","doi":"10.1016/j.jce.2025.01.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jce.2025.01.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The paper studies the historical process of fiscal state-building in 19<sup>th</sup> and early 20<sup>th</sup> century Greece. A new public finance dataset, compiled from primary sources, is combined with international databases in a graphical network analysis revealing dynamic interactions between economic (tax revenue, debt payments and GDP per capita) and institutional variables (army and representation). The emphasis is on two particular results closely related to the fiscal capacity literature: The first is that war preparation, captured by the size of the army, had a positive effect on tax revenue. The second is that representation, measured by legislative constraints to executive, was detrimental for tax revenue.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48183,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Economics","volume":"53 1","pages":"Pages 243-271"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143444924","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Economics of majoritarian identity politics","authors":"Rohit Ticku , Raghul S. Venkatesh","doi":"10.1016/j.jce.2025.01.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jce.2025.01.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Majoritarian identity politics has become salient in representative democracies. Why do parties engage in identity politics, and what are its consequences? We present a model of electoral competition in which parties capture voter groups based on their identity, and compete over an economic policy platform for the support of non-partisan voters. In addition, the party that caters to majoritarian interests makes a costly investment in polarizing identity. The investment provides subsequent payoffs to voters who have a preference for identity. When voter preferences over policy platforms are idiosyncratic in nature, greater investment in polarizing identity <em>(i)</em> increases <em>both</em> parties’ rents from office; and <em>(ii)</em> marginalizes minority voter interests. Further, the majoritarian party substitutes away from economic policy platforms. This enhances its overall payoffs in equilibrium and decreases that of the opposition party. We discuss the implications in the context of episodes of majoritarian identity politics in India, Turkey, Brazil, and the United States.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48183,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Economics","volume":"53 1","pages":"Pages 56-78"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143444980","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Arthur Blouin , Sayantan Ghosal , Sharun W. Mukand
{"title":"Globalization of capital flows and the (in)disciplining of nations","authors":"Arthur Blouin , Sayantan Ghosal , Sharun W. Mukand","doi":"10.1016/j.jce.2024.12.005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jce.2024.12.005","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We analyze whether the threat of capital flight “disciplines” governments and improves governance. Our findings show that the globalization of capital flows influences governance through two competing channels. When a government effectively manages domestic governance, it seeks to minimize exposure to sudden capital flight driven by external factors. In contrast, when a government fails to manage domestic governance, the threat of capital flight can impose discipline, improving governance and welfare by placing the country in a “golden straitjacket”—the disciplining effect. However, capital flight may also negatively affect governance quality. As a result, this paper proposes a novel and qualified role for modest capital controls. Finally, we present evidence consistent with the predictions of our theoretical framework.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48183,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Economics","volume":"53 1","pages":"Pages 209-226"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143444922","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Liberalizing reforms do not cause suicide: Causal estimation using matching, 1980–2019","authors":"Tibor Rutar , Minea Rutar","doi":"10.1016/j.jce.2025.01.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jce.2025.01.003","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The impact of market liberalization on the subjective well-being (SWB) of societies has been thoroughly investigated over the past two decades using indexes of economic freedom. However, one crucial related aspect of well-being at the societal level remains unexplored with aggregate measures of liberalization: rates of suicide. The critical literature on liberalization suggests market reforms are expected to boost suicide. To our knowledge, we are the first to explore the issue using the Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) measure in a quasi-experimental framework. We do so by identifying 43 countries experiencing large, sustained jumps in economic freedom. We then use matching methods to obtain the average treatment effect in the 10 years following the jump. Our main finding, which is robust to a variety of alternative specifications, including a different estimator (synthetic difference-in-differences), is that we detect virtually no statistically significant positive effect of aggregate liberalization on suicide at the conventional level. Thus, we are unable to corroborate the critics’ prediction about reforms worsening this aspect of psychological well-being. We find evidence that individual reform packages, such as sound money, instead even work protectively.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48183,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Comparative Economics","volume":"53 1","pages":"Pages 272-289"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143444925","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}