Showing papers in "Journal of Comparative Economics in 2011"

TL;DR: The authors used a unique World Bank survey of 1088 private manufacturing firms from 18 Chinese cities over the period 2000-2002 to empirically examine the roles of managerial incentives and CEO characteristics in a firm's innovation activities.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that institutionalized ruling parties allow autocrats to make credible commitments to investors, and they derive conditions under which autocrats want to create such parties, and predict that private investment and governance will be stronger in their presence.

TL;DR: This paper showed that political instability impedes financial development, with its variation a primary determinant of differences in financial development around the world, even when controlling for factors prominent in the last decade's cross-country studies of financial development.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that a minimum level of financial development is a necessary precondition for achieving reduction in income inequality through financial development and that financial depth only occurs if the country has reached a threshold level of finance development.

TL;DR: Feng et al. as discussed by the authors used the exogenous variation in pension wealth to estimate the impact of pension wealth on household savings, and obtained evidence of a significant offset effect of pensions wealth on households' savings.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used a historical experiment to study the persistence of financial development in South Eastern Europe by the Ottoman Empire and found that former Ottoman rule is associated with lower contemporaneous formal financial development, both across and within countries.

TL;DR: The authors analyzes the impact of public investment on private investment in 116 developing countries between 1980 and 2006 and finds a strong crowding-out effect that seems to be the norm rather than the exception, both across regions and over time.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used data from 46 studies and more than 500 estimates to identify the main factors that help explain the variation in the estimated long-run effects of structural reform on economic growth.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors provide evidence suggesting an important yet largely unexplored motive for the diversified structure of emerging economy business groups is to facilitate expropriation of minority shareholders by controlling insiders through tunneling.

TL;DR: This paper found that income inequality has a negative (positive) effect on household consumption net of education expenditures (savings) even after controlling for household income, and that the negative effect of income inequality on consumption is stronger for poorer and younger people.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors empirically test the role that religious and political institutions play in the accumulation of human capital and find that Muslim literacy is negatively correlated with the proportion of Muslims in the district, although they find no similar result for Hindu literacy.

TL;DR: In this paper, it is hypothesized that the degree of delegation to international organizations can improve the credibility of nation-state governments and this hypothesis is tested by introducing three new indicators for international delegation.

TL;DR: The authors empirically identified an inverted U-shaped relationship between nationalism and government effectiveness and showed that the level of nationalism in the population is higher than optimal in most countries, and further showed that nationalism may mitigate the negative effects of ethnic heterogeneity in former colonies.

TL;DR: In this article, a general equilibrium endogenous growth model is used to explain underperformance in the small and medium enterprise sector as an effect of corruption and non-competitive banking, and the persistence of noncompetitive banking as a result of governments' regulatory choice.

TL;DR: The authors analyzes the effects of policy reform on the structure of India's trade in manufactures, from 1990 to 2006, and computes comparative advantage indicators on the basis of disaggregated trade flow data.

TL;DR: This article used survey data on Macedonian firms that participated in USAID programs providing technical and financial assistance for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and on firms that did not, to estimate the effectiveness of such assistance in increasing the growth of employment in the assisted firms.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyzed the dynamics of the unemployment rate in the eight countries from Central and Eastern Europe which joined the EU in 2004 and found that shocks are highly persistent, implying a slow rate of convergence to the natural rate of unemployment.

TL;DR: In this article, a method based on a small area estimation method of Elbers et al. (2003) was used to project a map of disaggregated poverty measures in the future.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used a large data set of Russian manufacturing firms to describe the ownership structure in the Russian industry at the end of the mass privatization program in 1994 and its subsequent evolution.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated whether a proactive exchange rate policy in accordance with price incentives can foster manufactured exports and growth in 52 developing countries, and found that during the period 1991-2005 a number of countries have used undervaluation to foster the price competitiveness of manufactured exports.

TL;DR: The authors posit a rational choice model of dictatorship to explain the tendency of dictators to repress innocent citizens, showing that, when the quality of information about regime enemies is low, a rational dictator will knowingly kill and imprison citizens who are not real enemies.

TL;DR: In this paper, the determinants of post-divestment private ownership concentration and its possible link to corporate efficiency were analyzed for Spanish firms, and it was shown that ownership concentrated in the hands of private investors has a positive and significant effect on post-privatisation efficiency.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors use factor analysis to summarize information from various macroeconomic indicators, effectively producing coincident indicators for the Chinese economy and compare the dynamics of the estimated factors with GDP, and compare their factors with other published indicators.

TL;DR: The authors empirically investigated the effects of political and economic liberalization on growth volatility using a difference-in-difference method for a sample of 158 countries over the 1970-2005 period.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors used time-varying regression to model the relationship between returns in the Shanghai and New York stock markets, with possible inclusion of lagged returns, revealing that the effect of current stock return of New York on Shanghai steadily increases after the 1997 Asian financial crisis and turns significantly and persistently positive after 2002 when China entered WTO.

TL;DR: The authors decomposes consumption risk sharing among provinces in China over the 1980-2007 period and finds that 9.4% of the shocks to gross provincial product are smoothed by the interprovincial fiscal transfer system.

TL;DR: Vranken et al. as discussed by the authors analyzed how imperfections of property rights affect households' allocation of assets using micro-survey data from Bulgaria and found that land in co-ownership is more likely to be used by less efficient farm organizations or to be left abandoned, and that it is related to significant welfare losses.

TL;DR: Li et al. as discussed by the authors developed a rational model to explain villagers' participation in village elections and highlighted the pivotal role of township governments in China's rural politics and reveal the inner dilemma of democratization in China.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors provide new evidence on the nature and extent of accounting fraud, the scale and optimal size of conspiratorial networks, the authorities willingness to penalize it and the political and social factors that secured leniency.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors provided a novel perspective on the expectation forming process of financial markets using forecasts for the short-term interest rate, the inflation rate, and output growth for 10 emerging markets in Latin-America, central and eastern Europe, and estimate expected (ex-ante) Taylor-type rules.