Negative relationship

About: Negative relationship is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4727 publications have been published within this topic receiving 123732 citations.

Financialisation and capital accumulation in the non-financial corporate sector:A theoretical and empirical investigation on the US economy: 1973–2003

Abstract: Recent research has explored the growing ‘financialization’ process in the U.S. and other advanced economies. The term is a catch-all phrase used to denote important changes in the structure of non-financial corporations’ balance sheets, including the growth of income from financial subsidiaries and investment as well as growth in the transfer of earnings to financial markets in the forms of interest payments, dividend payments and stock buybacks. This paper seeks to empirically explore the relationship between financialization in the U.S economy and real investment at the firm level. Using data from a sample of non-financial corporations from 1973 to 2003, I find a negative relationship between real investment and financialization. First, increased financial investment and increased financial profit opportunities may have crowded out real investment by changing the incentives of firm managers and directing funds away from real investment. Second, increased payments to the financial markets may have impeded real investment by decreasing available internal funds, shortening the planning horizons of the firm management, and increasing uncertainty. These two channels can help explain the negative relationship I find between investment and financialization.

Conflict and Trade

Abstract: This article applies microeconomic theory to illustrate the plausibility of a relationship between international trade and conflict. It is argued that the mutual dependence established between two trading partners (dyads) is sufficient to raise the costs of conflict, there-by diminishing levels of dyadic dispute. This hypothesis of a negative relationship between conflict and trade is tested using a ten-year thirty-country cross section merged from four separate data sources. It is found that ceteris paribus countries with the greatest levels of economic trade engage in the least amounts of hostility. In fact, a doubling of trade on average leads to a 20% diminution of belligerence. This relationship appears robust, holding even more strongly when statistical adjustments are made for causality.

Do Natural Resources Fuel Authoritarianism? A Reappraisal of the Resource Curse

Abstract: A large body of scholarship finds a negative relationship between natural resources and democracy. Extant cross-country regressions, however, assume random effects and are run on panel datasets with relatively short time dimensions. Because natural resource reliance is not an exogenous variable, this is not an effective strategy for uncovering causal relationships. Numerous sources of bias may be driving the results, the most serious of which is omitted variable bias induced by unobserved country-specific and time-invariant heterogeneity. To address these problems, we develop unique historical datasets, employ time-series centric techniques, and operationalize explicitly specified counterfactuals. We test to see if there is a long-run relationship between resource reliance and regime type within countries over time, both on a country-by-country basis and across several different panels. We find that increases in resource reliance are not associated with authoritarianism. In fact, in many specifications we generate results that suggest a resource blessing.