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Highly Educated Women No Longer Have Fewer Kids

Posted on March 17, 2016 | Policy Brief

This policy brief summarizes evidence that the cross-sectional relationship between fertility and women’s education in the U.S. has recently become U-shaped. The number of hours women work has concurrently increased with their education. The theory that the authors advance is that raising children and home-making require parents’ time, which could be substituted by services such as childcare and housekeeping. By substituting their own time for market services to raise children and run their households, highly educated women are able to have more children and work longer hours. The authors find that the change in the relative cost of childcare accounts for the emergence of this new pattern.

In 2012, the European Commission published a special report on “women in decision making positions”, suggesting legislation to achieve balanced representation of women and men on company boards. Some countries such as Norway, France, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands have already taken legal measures in that direction. Trends in women’s education give hope that such goals may be achieved as women are increasingly occupying more prestigious and demanding careers. Indeed, in today’s world, women have surpassed men in higher education in most developed countries (Goldin et al 2006; Hazan and Zoabi 2015a).

What are the consequences of this important development for fertility? Historically, highly educated women have had fewer kids than less educated women (see, for example, Jones and Tertilt 2008). This relationship is deep rooted in the economic and sociological literature to the extent that many theories have already been proposed to explain this relationship. Leading explanations rely on the difficulty to combine children and career (Mincer, 1963; Galor and Weil, 1996) and the quantity-quality tradeoff (Becker and Lewis, 1973; Galor and Weil, 2000; Hazan and Zoabi 2006). The shift in women’s education coupled with more demanding careers for women means that if the cross-sectional relationship between women’s education and fertility is stable over time, then future fertility rates will continue to decline from their already historically low levels.

In Hazan and Zoabi (2015b) we find, however, that the cross-sectional relationship between women’s education and fertility has changed from monotonically declining until the 1990s to a U-shaped pattern during the 2000s. This change is due to a substantial increase in fertility among women with advanced degrees who increased their fertility by 0.7 children, or by more than 50%. This is illustrated in Figure 1, which plots the cross-sectional relationship between fertility and women’s education in 1980 and during the period 2001-2011.

Figure 1: Fertility Rates by Women’s Education, 1980 and the 2000s.

What can explain the rise of fertility among highly educated women during the period that saw the largest increase in the labor supply of highly educated women? We argue that the rise in college premium increased the demand for child-care and housekeeping services by highly educated women and a rise in the supply for such services by low educated women. This ‘marketization’ weakened the tradeoff between career and family life and enabled highly educated women to pursue demanding career without giving up on their desired family size.

To establish the relationship between the rise in the college premium and fertility of highly educated women, we use data from the March CPS for the period 1983-2012. We estimate the average hourly wage in the “child day-care services” industry and allow it to vary by state and year. In addition, we compute the hourly wage of all women in the 25-50 year-old age group who reported a positive salary income. Figure 2 presents the fitted values of the average of this variable for each of our five educational groups. The figure shows that childcare has become relatively more expensive for women with less than a college degree but relatively cheaper for women with a college or an advanced degree.

Figure 2: Linear Prediction of the Log of the Ratio of Average Wage in the Childcare Industry to Average Wage in the Five Educational Groups 1983–2012

To utilize the micro data we estimate regression models where the dependent variable is a binary variable that takes the value of one if a woman, living in a specific state in a specific year gave birth during that year and zero otherwise. Our main explanatory variable is the labor cost in the child daycare industry divided by the own wage of that woman. We show that there is a highly statistically significant and economically large negative correlation between this measure of childcare cost and the probability of giving a birth. In our empirical analysis we find that this change in the relative cost can account for about one-third of the increase in the fertility of highly educated women. We use a battery of tests to show that this correlation is not driven by selection of women into the labor market, by the endogeneity of wages, or by specific years over the last three decades.

Figure 3: 2000s Actual and Hypothetical Fertility under the 1980s prices of Childcare

Figure 3 uses the estimates from the regression models described above and shows a hypothetical fertility for 2001-2011 under the 1983-1985 relative childcare cost. The figure shows that the hypothetical fertility curve is obtained by a clockwise rotation of the actual fertility curve around the group of women that has some college education.

Direct evidence on paid childcare services is consistent with this view. Figure 4 shows the average weekly paid childcare hours by all women aged 25-50 in 1990 and 2008. The figure has two salient features. First, in each of these years, paid childcare is increasing with women’s education. Secondly, between 1990 and 2008, paid childcare hours have stagnated for women with up to some college education but have sharply increased for highly educated women.

Figure 4: Paid Childcare Weekly Hours for Women aged 25-50.

We then rule out potentially other explanations. What if the increase in labor supply stems from women who did not give birth during that year? To address this concern we shows that the cross-sectional relationship between education and usual hours worked for the sub-sample of women age 15-50 who gave birth during the reference period exhibit the same positive correlation. Another concern might be that it is in fact the spouses who respond to a birth by lowering their labor supply enabling their wives to work more. Find that men who are married to highly educated women work more than men who are married to women with lower levels of education. Interestingly, fathers to newborns work more than husbands who do not have a newborn at home, regardless of the education of their wives. More importantly, usual hours worked by fathers to newborns monotonically increased with their wives’ education. Thus, the spouses of highly educated women are not the ones substituting in childcare for their working wives.

Another concern our model may raise is that marriage rates differ across different educational groups. If married women have higher fertility rates and if more educated women have higher marriage rates, more educated women’s higher fertility rates may not be caused by the availability of relatively cheaper childcare and housekeeping services, but rather simply by their higher marriage rates. We find that the fraction of women with advanced degrees who are currently married is somewhat lower than that of women with college degree.

Figure 5: Number of birth per 1,000 White Women in the US in Age Groups 35-39, 40-44 and 45-49: Women with Advanced Degrees (2001-2011) and Historical Rates.

A final potential explanation might be related to recent advancements in Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) that enable women to combine long years in school without scarifying parenthood. We address this possibility in three ways. First, we show that historical levels of fertility rates among women above age 35 were higher than the levels during the 2000s (see Figure 5). This stands in contrast to the argument that highly educated women were not able to have higher fertility rates in the past due to medical reasons. Secondly, we note that ART accounts for less than 1% of births occurred during the 2000s. Finally, fifteen U.S. states have infertility insurance laws that provide coverage to infertile individuals. We compare fertility patterns by women’s education in these states to the rest of the country and find no difference in fertility rates during the 2000s between the two groups of states.

The results of this study have several implications. For public policy, it highlights potential benefits from pro-immigration policies. Unskilled immigrants can potentially have positive effect on fertility via an increase in the supply of cheap home production substitutes. For many developed countries that are facing aging and shrinking population this may be something to consider. It also has consequences for economic growth. Given the strong correlation between parents’ education and kids’ education, an increase in the relative representation of kids coming from highly educated families means that the next generation is going to be relatively more educated. These are good news for economic growth.

References

Gary S. Becker and Gregg H. Lewis. On the interaction between the quantity and quality of children. Journal of Political Economy, 81:S279–S288, 1973.
Oded Galor and David N. Weil. The gender gap, fertility, and growth. American Economic Review 86(3): 374–387, 1996.
Oded Galor and David N. Weil. Population, technology, and growth: From Malthusian stagnation to the demographic transition and beyond. American Economic Review 90(4): 806–828, 2000.
Claudia Goldin, Lawrence Katz, and Ilyana Kuziemko. The homecoming of American college women: A reversal of the college gender gap. Journal of Economic Perspectives 20(4): 133–156, 2006.
Moshe Hazan and Hosny Zoabi. Does longevity cause growth? A theoretical critique. Journal of Economic Growth, 11 (4), 363-376, 2006.
Moshe Hazan and Hosny Zoabi. Sons or Daughters? Endogenous Sex Preferences and the Reversal of the Gender Educational Gap. Journal of Demographic Economic, Vol 81, pp: 179-201, 2015a.
Moshe Hazan and Hosny Zoabi. Do highly educated women choose smaller families? Economic Journal, 125(587):1191–1226, 2015b.
Larry E. Jones and Michele Tertilt. An economic history of fertility in the u.s.: 1826-1960. In Peter Rupert, editor, Frontiers of Family Economics, pages 165 – 230. Emerald, 2008.
Jacob Mincer. Market prices, opportunity costs, and income effects. In Carl F. Christ, editor, Measurement in economics: Studies in mathematical economics and econometrics in memory of Yehuda Grunfeld. Stanford University Press, pages 67-82, 1963.

Strategic Aid Financing

Posted on March 14, 2016 | Policy Brief

Donor countries often face a Samaritan’s dilemma when trying to implement political conditionality in bilateral aid. Giving through multinational organizations can mitigate this problem: Recipient nations are de-facto competing for funds, which restores their incentives to comply even with non-enforceable conditions. Donor nations might therefore find it useful to set up multinational aid funds, rather than to disseminate aid bilaterally, even if they have to give up control over where the money is spent.

In the last decade, global challenges like climate change or the fight against epidemics have become the focus of aid projects. In order to make progress on these large-scale issues, donor nations increasingly recognize that simply giving money to a developing region does not ensure success. Instead, the impact of aid spending depends crucially on efforts undertaken in the partner countries. Reforms of the local economic and judicial system, fighting corruption and general good governance are just a few of the demands on donor countries’ wish lists.

However, many of the conditions set by donating governments are hard to enforce, especially since they nowadays often fall in the category of “political conditionality,” aiming at broader political improvements rather than simple, measurable economic indicators (see for example Molenaers et.al., 2015). The crucial question for aid giving countries therefore remains how to strategically structure aid, so that recipient governments can be incentivized to cooperate also on intangible or non-enforceable conditions.

The Samaritan’s Dilemma

Indeed, the theoretical literature on aid conditionality finds that optimal contracts should be self-enforcing, i.e. the threat of aid sanctions should be large enough to ensure that the recipient government has an interest in fulfilling the conditions (see for example Scholl, 2009). That, however, might be easier said than done: Svensson (2000) argues that the threat of cutting aid in case conditions are violated is hard to credibly sustain, at least for individual donor countries. They often face political constraints to spend a certain amount of money on aid. This opens the possibility for a classic hold-up problem: If the donor country cannot commit to giving aid only conditional on reform efforts, the recipient country, knowing it will receive assistance in any case, has no incentive to implement costly reforms. From the donor’s perspective, this is also known as the Samaritan’s dilemma.

Multinational Funds Can Help

Svensson goes on to argue that transferring the responsibility of allocating aid to a multilateral organization might solve the Samaritan’s dilemma outlined above. He notes that if donors are lacking a commitment technology (that helps them to actually implement aid sanctions in case a recipient government shirks on the agreed aid conditions), “delegation of part of the aid budget to an (international) agency with less aversion to poverty will improve welfare of the poor.” Such organizations will have less of a commitment problem and should therefore better be able to enforce aid conditionality.

Competition Restores Incentives

There is, however, no a priori reason to think that multilateral organizations have a different objective than individual donor countries in terms of eliminating poverty and achieving growth and prosperity for developing countries. After all, these organizations’ founding principles are set by the donor countries that fund them. An international organization’s objective, as represented by how it actually allocates funds across causes and recipient countries, should reflect an aggregation of the individual preferences of donor nations.

In a new study, Simon and Valasek (2016) argue that precisely this stage of preference aggregation enables multilateral organizations to better implement aid conditionality. How non-earmarked funds given to multilateral organizations are allocated is determined in a bargaining process between representatives of the different donating nations. Individual preferences might differ; the bargaining outcome thus has to reflect a compromise between them. The bargaining position of each donor will in part depend on intrinsic values, but importantly also on the reform efforts and willingness to cooperate of the potential recipient nations. Intuitively, the better the government of an aid receiving country behaves, the better the bargaining position of donor countries lobbying on its behalf.

This constitutes a new strategic reason for pooling resources in large aid funds rather than implementing aid bilaterally: When resources are pooled, recipient nations have to compete for their share of aid. It is precisely the heterogeneity of donor country preferences that induces (or enhances) such competition. Bilateral aid relations thus cannot replicate the effect to the same extend. This competition restores incentives to invest in costly reforms and circumvents the hold-up problem.

Conclusion

Donor nations should consider pooling their resources in multinational funds when they fear that their partner governments are reluctant to implement political reforms. This is especially relevant for aid aimed at common global issues like climate change or disease control.

Simon and Valasek show that the payoff from joining an aid fund is especially high when donor nations represented in the fund have relatively homogenous goals for their foreign aid programs, but differ in terms of where in the world they would like to send their aid money. Then the disadvantage from losing the direct say over which recipient nations get the most funds is far outweighed by the gain from inducing investment and reform incentives in the aid receiving nations.

References

Molenaers et al. (2015): “Political Conditionality and Foreign Aid,” World Development Vol. 75.
Scholl (2009), “Aid Effectiveness and Limited Enforceable Conditionality,” Review of Economic Dynamics 12(2).
Simon & J.M. Valasek (2016), “The Political Economy of International Aid Funds,” Working Paper.
Svensson (2000): “When is Foreign Aid Policy Credible? Aid Dependence and Conditionality,”, Journal of Development Economics Vol. 61.

Non-Tariff Barriers and Trade Integration in the EAEU

Posted on February 29, 2016 | Policy Brief

It is a commonly held view that the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) is a political enterprise (Popescu, 2014) that has little economic meaning other than redistribution of oil rents (Knobel, 2015). With a new reality of low oil prices and reduced rents, a legitimate question is how stable this Union is, or whether there is any hope for mutual economic benefits that can provide incentives to all the participants to maintain their membership in the Union? Our answer is yes, there is hope, but only if countries, especially Russia, make progress on deep integration such as services liberalization, trade facilitation, free movement of labor and especially in the reduction of the substantial non-tariff barriers (NTBs). NTBs are hampering trade both within the Union (World Bank, 2012; Vinokurov, 2015), as well as against third country imports. Our research shows (see Knobel et al., 2016) that all the EAEU members will reap benefits from a reduction of NTBs against each other, but they will obtain considerably more substantial gains from a reduction in NTBs against imports from the EU and China.

Since the early stages of creation of the Customs Union (CU) between Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia back in 2010, the economic benefits of the CU have been questionable. The main reason for this in Kazakhstan was the increase in its import tariffs in order to implement the common external tariff of the CU, which initially was Russia’s external tariff (Tarr, 2015). Kazakhstan almost doubled its average tariff from 5.3% to 9.5% (Shepoltylo, 2011; Jondosov and Sabyrova, 2011) in the first year of its CU accession. Belarus did not increase its average tariff, but the structure of its tariffs shifted toward a protection of Russian industry.

In 2015, the CU was transformed into the EAEU, and Armenia and Kyrgyz Republic have joined the EAEU. These two countries are WTO members; Kyrgyzstan entered the WTO in 1998, and Armenia in 2001. In 2014, the simple average most-favored nation (MFN) applied tariff rate in Armenia was 3.7%, and 4.6% in the Kyrgyz Republic. Due to differences between Armenia and Kyrgyzstan’s WTO commitments and the EAEU tariff schedule, the new members of the EAEU are not implementing the full EAEU tariff schedule. That is, they have numerous exemptions. However, they have started a WTO commitments modification procedure.

Despite adverse impacts from the higher import prices from implementing the common external tariff of the EAEU in Armenia and the Kyrgyz Republic, there are potentially offsetting gains. Given the importance of remittances to the Kyrgyz Republic, the benefits coming from the right of workers to freely move and legally work inside EAEU likely dominate the tariff issues. Armenia also benefits from the free movement of labor, receives Russian gas free of export duties, and wants to preserve the military guarantee granted by Russia through the six-country Collective Security Treaty Organization.

In the case of Belarus, it receives Russian oil and natural gas free of export-duties, which, when oil prices were high, tended to dominate their calculus. Kazakhstan hopes for more FDI as a platform for selling to the EAEU market; but President Nazarbaev has expressed concerns that the EAEU is not providing net benefits to his country.

To date, the members have judged participation to be in their interest, but with the plunge in the price of oil and gas, the calculus could swing against participation in the EAEU. That is why it is so important to achieve progress with deep integration in the EAEU. One of the most important areas of deep integration for the EAEU is the substantial reduction of non-tariff barriers in goods trade, both between the EAEU members and against third countries. Estimates by the Eurasian Development Bank (Vinokurov et al., 2015) reveal that NTBs account are 15% of the value of intra-union trade flows.

In our paper, Knobel et al (2016), we estimate substantial gains to all the EAEU members from a reduction of NTBs. We employ a global computable general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition in the Helpman-Krugman style based on Balisteri, Yonezawa, Tarr (2014). Estimates of the ad-valorem equivalents of NTBs were based on Vinokurov et al (2015) for the EAEU member countries and Kee, Nicita, Olarreaga (2009) for non-members.

We find that the effects of deep integration are positive for all countries of the EAEU. Armenia’s accession to the EAEU will have a strong positive effect only if coupled with a decrease of non-tariff barriers. Armenian accession is associated with an increase in external tariffs, which causes a negative economic impact and decrease in output.

The effect of deep integration in the EAEU will be even greater if any spillovers effect reducing NTBs for EAEU’s major trading partners are present. Knobel et al. (2016) simulate a 50% decrease in “technical” NTBs inside the EAEU and a 20% spillover effect of reduction NTBs toward either the EU and USA or China. Reduction of NTBs in trade with the EU and the USA dominates the comparable reduction of NTBs with China for all countries of the EAEU in terms of the welfare gain. Armenia’s welfare gain with a spillover effect towards the EU is 1.1% of real consumption compared to 1.02% with a spillover effect towards China. Growth in welfare in Belarus will be 2.7% with a EU spillover versus 2.5% with a spillover effect towards China. Kazakhstan’s gain in real consumption is also greater in the first (EU+USA) case: 0.86% versus 0.66% (with spillover towards China). Russia’s gain in real consumption in the case of a spillover effect with the EU is 2.01% versus 0.63% in the case of China.

Summing up, our findings suggest an answer to the recent concern about stability of the EAEU. We think that eliminating NTB, hampering mutual trade, and decreasing NTBs in either European or Chinese direction could provide mutual economic benefits that could tie countries of the EAEU together, thereby giving a much needed solid economic ground for the Union.

References

Balistreri, Edward J., Tarr, David G. and Hidemichi Yonezawa (2014). Reducing trade costs in east Africa : deep regional integration and multilateral action (No. 7049).
EEC (2015) Eurasian economic integration: facts and figures, (in Russian).
Kee, Hiau Looi, Nicita, Alessandro, and Marcelo Olarreag (2009) Estimating Trade Restrictiveness Indices, Economic Journal, 119, 172–199.
Knobel, Alexander (2015) Eurasian Economic Union: Prospects and Challenges for Development, Voprosy Ekonomiki, 2015, No. 3, pp. 87—108. (in Russian).
Knobel, Alexander, Andrey Lipin, Andrey Malokostov, David G. Tarr, and Natalia Turdyeva (2016) Non-tariff barriers and trade integration in the EAEU, mimeo
Plekhanov, Alexander and Asel Isakova (2012) Customs Union and Kazakhstan’s Imports (July 1, 2012). CASE Network Studies and Analyses No. 422.
Popescu, Nicu (2014), “Eurasian Union: the real, the imaginary and the likely,” Chaillot Paper – No. 132, European Union Institute for Security Studies, September 9.
Shepotylo, Oleksandr (2011), “Calculation of the tariff rates of Kazakhstan before and after the imposition of the customs union common external tariff in 2010.” Available as part of World Bank (2012), Assessment of Costs and Benefits of the Customs Union for Kazakhstan, Report Number 65977-KZ, Washington DC, January 3, 2012.
Tarr, David G. (2015) The Eurasian Economic Union among Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Armenia: Can it succeed where its predecessor failed? Paper prepared for the BOFIT conference of the TIGER project, Helsinki, Finland, September 16, 17, 2015
Vinokurov, Evgeny, Mikhail Demidenko, Igor Pelipas, Irina Tochitskaya, Gleb Shymanovich, Andrey Lipin (2015) Measuring the Impact of Non-Tariff Barriers in the Eurasian Economic Union: Results of Enterprise Survey. EDB Centre for Integration Studies Report no. 30, EDB: Saint-Petersburg.
World Bank (2012), Assessment of Costs and Benefits of the Customs Union for Kazakhstan, Report Number 65977-KZ, Washington DC, January 3, 2012

The Inevitable Social Security Reforms in Belarus

Posted on February 8, 2016 | Policy Brief

In 2016, Belarus will face the need to reform its social protection policy. The three main directions of reforms will be to departure from subsidized tariffs, to reform the pension system, and to increase unemployment benefits. Needless to say, some of these reforms will be highly unpopular. The government needs not only to cut expenditures, but also to think about new ways of providing targeted social support.

Faced with an anemic growth over the last 5 years and a GDP decline of 3.9 percent in 2015, Belarus has to rethink its economic policy. While the government is so far reluctant to undertake serious structural reforms, the decrease in budget revenues and lack of access to international financing leaves the authorities with few other options than to reform the social security system. This push might actually be a good thing, as social security in Belarus needs to depart from its current non-sustainable model of subsidies for everyone, to a model of focused means-tested social support.

Subsidized Tariffs

A lot of government-set tariffs in Belarus are currently subsidized. Utility service tariffs and transport fees are lower than the costs of providing these services. This is especially true for the heating tariffs, which currently cover 10-20 percent of total costs.

The subsidization policies are inefficient, as they benefit the rich (who consume more) rather than the poor in need of government support. Moreover, in the case of energy tariffs, cross-subsidization leads to higher energy costs for the firms, making them less competitive. Both prospective creditors, the IMF and the Eurasian Fund for Stabilization and Development, demand that the subsidies are gradually removed.

Zhang and Hankinson (2015) estimate the effects of an increase of the heating tariff on welfare. They find that the burden of higher tariffs will mostly fall on low-income groups. In particular, if the heating tariffs increase to 100 percent of the costs, households from the lowest income quintile will spend over 16 percent of their income on energy. Therefore, the authors conclude that the government should introduce a targeted social assistance together with the tariff increase.

While tariff increases were already introduced in the beginning of 2016, a targeted social assistance is still only a project.

Unemployment Benefits

Despite calling itself a social economy, Belarus has inexplicably low unemployment benefits (currently below 10EUR per month in Minsk). These low unemployment benefits contribute to a very low registered unemployment rate – 1 percent in November 2015. The more adequate measure of unemployment, based on labor force surveys, is classified in Belarus. However, large-scale job cuts in the biggest state-owned enterprises suggest that unemployment is a real threat.

Akulava (2015) argues, that given the current situation on the labor market, unemployment benefits should be increased to at least the minimal subsistence level. However, unemployment benefits per se will not solve all the problems in the labor market, and Belarus needs more active labor market policies facilitating the retraining and reallocation of workers.

The IMF has also emphasized the need to introduce proper unemployment insurance. The government has already pre-announced an introduction of increased unemployment benefits, but the details and dates are still unclear. There is a risk that, as many other policies in Belarus, the unemployment support will favor the state-controlled part of the economy and only offer increased support for those laid off from state-owned enterprises.

Pension Reform

The Belarusian pension system has not change much since the Soviet times: it is still a pay-as-you-go redistributive system, with a pension age among the lowest in Europe (55 for women and 60 for men). The Pension Fund first registered a deficit in 2013, and given the ageing population, deficits will only deepen in the future.

Due to relatively low fertility rates (1.6 per woman) and increasing life expectancy, the Belarusian population is quickly ageing: In 2015, there are 4 persons of retirement age per 10 persons of working age, but in 2035, this ratio will be 6 per 10.

Lisenkova and Bornukova (2015) build a demographically accurate overlapping generations model of Belarusian economy to estimate the stability of the pension system. They find that if the current parameters do not change, the deficit of the Pension Fund will explode up to 9% in 2050 (line 55/60 in Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Pension fund deficits under different scenarios, in % of GDP

Source: Lisenkova and Bornukova, 2015

The authors also estimate different reform scenarios. An increase in the contribution rate and a decrease in the replacement rate (ratio of average pension to the average wage) do not seem feasible, as the current contribution rate of 29 percent is already too high, and the replacement rate is near the minimum set by the National Development Strategy 2020. The most obvious reform is then to increase the pension age for women, who retire 5 years earlier than men, despite having 10 years longer life expectancy. However, as can be seen from line 60/60 in Figure 1, equating the pension ages for women and men will not be enough to curb the deficits. Another simulated reform is to gradually increase pension age to 65 years for everyone, after increasing it to 60 for women only. This reform would mean that the deficits would be kept below 1 percent of GDP (and even generate a small proficit by 2035, although in a very long perspective the deficit will increase to 2 percent again (line 65/65)). In the very long run, Belarus needs to build a fully funded pension system.

The need to increase the pension age is already on the public debate agenda, and the authorities recognize the need for reforms. Needless to say, however, this move will be very unpopular.

Conclusion

The current economic crisis gives an opportunity and incentive to make Belarusian social policy more efficient. This policy brief describes the three major fields of reform. Subsidized tariffs are unfair and inefficient, but before removing subsidies the government should create a targeted system of social assistance to those in need. Increasing unemployment (and demands from the creditors) may force the government to change its unemployment benefit policy. The pension system needs reforms, but these would be difficult to implement due to unpopularity.

▪

References

Akulava, M. (2015), ‘Unemployment insurance as a tool of social protection’, BEROC policy paper series, PP no. 32 (in Russian)
Lisenkova, K., and Bornukova K. (2015), ‘Effects of Population Ageing on the Pension System in Belarus’, BEROC working paper series, WP no. 28
Zhang, F., and Hankinson, D. (2015), ‘Belarus Heat Tariff Reform and Social Impact Mitigation,’ World Bank Publications, The World Bank, number 22574

The Issue of Repeat Cartel Offences

Posted on February 1, 2016 | Policy Brief

Leniency policies have become an important antitrust tool but it is not clear whether they have effectively prevented recidivism or whether firms have learned to collude under, and even make strategic use of them. If “recidivism” is really an industry-level phenomenon, the appropriate policy measures are very different from what is necessary if individual firms, having been detected and punished for colluding, engage in the behavior again. Following Levenstein et al. (2015), this brief discusses the recidivism question as one about post-cartel behavior, i.e. the set of policies required to assure that effective competition emerges post-cartel breakup.

Measuring Recidivism

Cartels are one of the main concerns of the European Commission (EC) and the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and so, the US and EU Leniency Programmes (LPs) were designed, in 1978 and 1996 respectively, as a device for the deterrence and dissolution of collusive agreements (see Marvão and Spagnolo (2015a) for an in-depth review on the available evidence of the effects of LPs).

In the analysis of cartel formation, recidivism is an important issue. In the set of 510 cartel members fined by the EC in 1998-2014, Marvão (2015) identifies 89 “multiple offenders” (firms fined for collusion more than once), 10 “repeat offenders” (firms which initiate a cartel after being investigated for another cartel), and 5 recidivists following the definition from Werden et al. (2011): firms which initiate a cartel after being fined for another cartel.

The DOJ dataset compiled by Levenstein and Suslow (2015), spanning 1961-2013, preliminarily finds 113 “multiple offenders” but only 14 “repeat offenders”. Of these 14 firms, 5 that had been previously indicted were caught in the 1990s, but none was indicted again by the DOJ in the 2000s.

Although the number of (discovered) “true recidivists” is not zero, it is less than 1% in these two samples (EU, US). Recidivism seems to arise when there are lapses in enforcement; not surprisingly, some firms take advantage of these lapses to return to old behaviors. Designing policies that are able to prevent recidivism requires understanding whether this is an industry or firm-level phenomenon.

Industry Recidivism

Levenstein et al. (2015) use the above-mentioned EU and US datasets to show that collusion occurs in virtually all sectors of the economy, but with discernable patterns.

In the US, construction and chemicals are frequently cartelized (pre and post leniency). There are a large number of cartels in local markets in some industries, such as retail gasoline stations and dealers and ready-mix concrete. While collusion in these local markets is frequently uncovered, it is not necessarily amongst the same firms.

In the EU, chemicals and transport cartels are also frequent areas of collusive activity (although cartels that are strictly within national boundaries and prosecuted by national competition authorities are not included in the sample).

The authors show that there is a large share of repeat and multiple offenders in chemicals and a surprisingly high proportion of repeat offenders in the manufacture of transport and electrical equipment. The highest proportion of multiple offenders is found in pharmaceuticals and refined petroleum products. The transportation and storage market is a sector with a high incidence of collusion (83 convicted cartel members), but no repeat offenders.

While the determinants of cartel activity are varied and endogenous, some correlations with industry-driven recidivism can be discussed:

Industry concentration. It increases the ease of tacit collusion and it should increase the likelihood of explicit collusion, but there are many cartel examples in unconcentrated industries. In some industries, it has been argued that high fixed costs make competition unstable, so that, absent collusion, firms price below long-run marginal cost and are unable to cover fixed costs (Pirrong, 1992).
Culture and history. Spar (1994) argues that the cooperative culture necessary for survival for diamond miners facilitated collusion as the industry matured. Policy fluctuations can also contribute to this problem, as was the case in the US during the Great Depression.
Inelastic demand. This is empirically challenging to capture if the observed prices have been affected by monopoly power, thus potentially raised to a level at which demand is elastic. In many cases, the direct consumer is a producer, so the downstream cost function and competitive intensity also influence elasticity of demand for the cartelized product. Grout and Sonderegger (2005) estimate the likelihood of collusion in the US and EU and rank industries accordingly. This could be used to target competition authority resources to select industries.

Firm Recidivism

Once a cartel breaks-up, cartel members may decide to compete in the market, merge, tacitly collude, or explicitly collude again. The latter does not mean that the cartel re-forms: a firm may collude in a new industry or product line or with a new set of co-conspirators.

U.S. Steel was involved in 6 different US cartels between 1948 and 1969, with different cartel partners and in different steel products. VSL construction was similarly involved (including as a leader) in multiple US cartels across several decades with distinct, but overlapping partners.

In the EU, Akzo Nobel N.V. has been convicted for 9 cartels, which lasted between 1987 and 2007, and in which its co-conspirators were mostly overlapping – e.g. collusion with Arkema in 6 instances (although the latter changed its name during the period). Many of the other co-conspirators were also multiple offenders. While Akzo only received one fine increase for recidivism, it received 7 leniency reductions, of which 3 were full immunity.

Other EC repeat offenders are ABB and Degussa Evonik – both convicted 4 times and received full immunity twice – as well as Brugg and Sumitomo. The latter was convicted for 7 cartels, of which 5, in the automotive wire harness, were self-reported.

What may influence repeated cartel participation, at the firm level?

Firm’s corporate culture. In such a case, the leadership of the organization expects managers to collude, and collusion occurs in many markets in which the firm operates. Firm norms and expectations of managerial behavior can repeatedly encourage collusion and “disregard” previous fines, as illustrated in the ADM case (Eichenwald, 2000).
Firm structure. Multi-market collusion literature focuses on the ability of firms to target punishments in particular markets. Multi-market firms may also encourage the spread of collusion if they have learned to collude in one market and share their “best practices” in another. This seems to have been the case, for example, in the spread of the vitamin cartel from vitamins A and E to other vitamins (Connor, 2008). Multi-market collusion is encouraged not only by multi-product multinationals, but also multi-market relationships between what appear to be smaller firms in local markets. For example, if gas stations are owned by multi-market firms such as large oil firms or chains of stations, that may facilitate repeated collusion over time and/or across geographic locations.

Policy Tools

In complementarity with LPs, Levenstein et al. (2015) discuss additional (possibly) effective post-cartel policies, aimed at preventing firm-driven recidivism.

Company Fines and Leniency. Theoretical research has emphasized the aptitude of well-designed and well-run LPs to improve cartel detection and deterrence (for a survey, see Spagnolo, 2008). However, Marvão and Spagnolo (2015b) note the generosity of the current EU LP: the average LP reduction is 45% and leniency is granted to 52% of convicted cartel members. In addition, Marvão (2015) shows that repeat offenders appear to receive larger EC leniency reductions, which suggests that firms can learn the “rules of the game”, colluding repeatedly and reporting the cartel to reduce their penalties. As such, fines need to be tougher and recidivism needs to be dealt with differently.
Individual Accountability. Senior management in EU cartels does not seem to suffer from their participation in cartels. For example, Robert Koehler became CEO of SGL Carbon in 2012, after being convicted in 1999 of price-fixing in the graphite electrodes cartel. Imposing tougher sanctions, such as individual prison sentences or disqualification of senior executives from employment in their sector or role, may prevent repeated collusive behaviors (in new firms) and thus, increase deterrence levels.
Follow-On Damages. Private damage suits may increase deterrence. In the US, private litigation plays a major role in the enforcement of antitrust law. Conversely, access to private damages is relatively new in the EU. A recently adopted EU Directive on damages (11/2014) prevents the use of LP statements in subsequent damage actions. However, Buccirossi et al. (2015) show that the effectiveness of damage actions can be improved if the civil liability of the immunity recipient is minimized and claimants receive full access to all evidence collected by the competition authority. Access to previous cartel decisions, for a given firm, will increase the amount of available information and can increase the likelihood and/or amount of successful damage claims.
Consent Decrees. These impose conditions on the behavior of convicted firms (e.g. maximum price, and transparency). If these are violated, the authorities intervene, thus lowering the cost of prosecuting recidivists. In the US, decrees were routinely used by the DOJ in the 1960s and 1970s, but the practice was abandoned due to concerns of effectiveness and large costs. More recently, in September 2007, the Brazilian Administrative Council for Economic Defense enacted a resolution that allows for the use of consent decrees with the aim to settle cartel investigations. Two have already been executed.

If recidivism is industry-driven, its prevention may require a different set of tools, including those below, to complement leniency.

Structural Remedies. Competition authorities have repeatedly permitted mergers among former cartel members, often without review, let alone structural intervention. Davies et al. (2014) examine mergers among former cartel conspirators and conclude that only 29% of the mergers were investigated by the EC. Remedies such as disclosure, divestiture of assets, selling minority shares in competitors, or licensure of intellectual property to competitors may change the nature of competition in the market and make collusion more difficult (see Marx & Zhou, 2015 regarding post-cartel mergers). This is particularly relevant if recidivism is industry-driven.
Monitoring and screening. Some antitrust authorities have implemented monitoring and screening techniques to identify anticompetitive behavior in a given industry. These initiatives involve the analysis or monitoring of the characteristics of products or market structures that are thought to be more prone to collusion (mostly due to repeated offenses). Some examples are watch lists (e.g. Australia, UK, Chile), price observatories (e.g. Belgium, Spain, France), statistical screens (e.g. US FTC, Korea FTC), gasoline retail in Brazil and public procurement in Sweden (see Abrantes-Metz (2013) for further details on screens).

Conclusions

While literal recidivism, i.e. the formation of a cartel after having been convicted of illegal collusion, appears to be rarely detected in the EU and US, there remain policy gaps closing which could improve competition post-cartel.

A variety of post-cartel policies should be explored for their ability to increase the likelihood that workable competition, rather than tacit collusion or single firm dominance, will emerge. These reduce the reliance of competition authorities on leniency-driven self-reports, which will in turn make leniency more effective and less amenable to strategic use by firms determined to collude.

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References

Abrantes-Metz, Rosa (2013). “Proactive vs Reactive Anti-Cartel Policy: The Role of Empirical Screens.” Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2284740.
Buccirossi, Paulo, Catarina Marvão, and Giancarlo Spagnolo (2015). “Leniency and Damages,” CEPR Working Paper DP 10682.
Connor, John M. (2008). Global Price Fixing, 2nd ed. Berlin: Springer.
Eichenwald, Kurt (2000). The Informant. New York: Random House.
Grout, Paul and Silvia Sonderegger (2005) “Predicting Cartels,” Office of Fair Trading, Economic Discussion Paper.
Levenstein, M., Marvão, C., Suslow, V., 2015. Serial Collusion in Context: Repeat Offenses by Firm or by Industry? OECD Global Forum on Competition. DAF/COMP/GF(10/2015)
Levenstein, Margaret C., and Valerie Y. Suslow (2015). “Price Fixing Hits Home: An Empirical Study of U.S. Price-Fixing Conspiracies,” working paper.
Marvão, C., 2015. The EU Leniency Programme and Recidivism. Review of Industrial Organization, 48(1), 1-27
Marvão, Catarina and Giancarlo Spagnolo (2015a). “What do we know about the effectiveness of leniency policies? A survey of the empirical and experimental evidence,” in Beaton-Wells, C and C Tran (eds.), Anti-Cartel Enforcement in a Contemporary Age: The Leniency Religion, Hart Publishing.
Marvão, Catarina and Giancarlo Spagnolo (2015b). “Pros and Cons of Leniency, Damages and Screens”. Competition Law and Policy Debate (forthcoming)
Marx, Leslie M., and Jun Zhou (2015). “The Dynamics of Mergers among (Ex) Co-Conspirators in the Shadow of Cartel Enforcement,” working paper.
Pirrong, Stephen Craig (1992). “An application of core theory to the analysis of ocean shipping markets” Journal of Law and Economics, 35(1): 89-131.
Spar, Debora (1994). The Cooperative Edge: The Internal Politics of International Cartels, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
van Driel, Hugo (2000). “Collusion in Transport: Group Effects in a Historical Perspective.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 41(4): 385–404.
Werden, Gregory, Scott Hammond, and Belinda Barnett (2011). “Recidivism Eliminated: Cartel Enforcement in the United States since 1999,” Georgetown Global Antitrust Enforcement Symposium, Washington DC, Sept. 22, 2011.

Did Russian Migration to Russia Affect the Labor Market?

Posted on January 25, 2016 | Policy Brief

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As a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, five million Russian and Russian-speaking people repatriated to Russia during 1990-2002. I use this natural experiment to study the effect of a large migration wave on the employment and wages of the local population. Taking into account the non-random choice of location by migrants within Russia, I find a negative effect of the inflows of immigrants on the local population’s employment but not on wages. The initial negative effects on employment are particularly large for local men, but they disappear after about ten years from the peak of the migration wave.

The effect of migration on the labor market of the host country is a long-standing question within economic literature and in public debate. In many cases, researchers try to estimate this effect using the data on large and unanticipated migration movements. The most famous study of this kind is probably Card (1990). Another case is the Russian migration to Russia resulting from the collapse of the Soviet Union. According to the 2002 Russian Census, 5.2 million of the people living in Russia in 2002 resided outside the country in 1989. That is, 3.6 percent of the 2002 population immigrated to Russia after 1989. Almost all of them (94.4 percent) immigrated from the former Soviet republics, most notably Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

The existing literature on migration flows in the former Soviet Union (fSU) since its collapse has emphasized the socio-political factors of migration. Locher (2002) finds that ethnic sorting was a major determinant of migration among the fSU countries, with the countries’ stage of transition and wealth level playing a minor role. Yerofeeva (1999) shows that ethnic repatriation was one of the main reasons behind migration from northern and eastern Kazakhstan.

In Lazareva (2015), I study two sides of the labor market effects of the immigration from fSU countries to Russia. The first side is the process of assimilation of migrants in the Russian labor market. The second side is the effect that inflows of immigrants had on the labor market position of the local population in Russia. Data used for estimation span a long period of time, which allows for tracing dynamic long-term effects of the influx of immigrants. This is the first comprehensive study of the labor market effects of one of the largest migration waves in Europe in recent history.

Method

In order to estimate the effects of the inflow of immigrants on the employment and wages of the local population, I exploit variation in the share of immigrants across Russian regions. According to the Census in 2002, migrants were quite dispersed over Russia’s vast territory; their share in population varied from 0.42% in the Tyva region to 8.5% in the Kaliningrad region. A relatively large share of migrants is observed along the border to fSU countries as well as in the oil-rich regions of Western Siberia.

A major problem when using regional variation to estimate labor market effects is that the migrants’ choice of region may be affected by the condition of that region’s labor market. Naturally, migrants tend to choose locations with higher wages and more employment opportunities. If this is the case, the estimates of the labor market effects will be biased.

However, the immigrants’ choice of location was not completely unconstrained due to the costs of migration related to the distance and access to information. Given these constraints, there is a relative crowding of immigrants in the regions of Russia that are closer to the border with fSU countries. Hence, I use the variation in the share of migrants across regions, which depend on the geographical distance from the source countries. In other words, I obtain the estimates from the comparison of regions that are similar in all their characteristics except for the distance to the border with fSU.

Data and Results

I use panel data on households from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey for the period 1995-2009. In the 2009 survey, the respondents were asked since what year they live in the Russian Federation. I define as immigrants, people at the age of 18 and above who moved to Russia after 1989. Note that the RLMS sample, which consists of people residing in the same dwelling units in each round, is unlikely to include illegal migrants or temporary (seasonal) labor migrants. Rather these are mainly people who settled in Russia permanently at some point during the 1990s and 2000s.

In the RLMS sample, 3.6 percent of the respondents moved to Russia after 1989. This is consistent with the national-level statistical data on immigration flows. A majority of the immigrants arrived to Russia in the early and mid-1990s. Immigration peaked in 1994 when almost 1.2 million people moved to Russia. After that, immigration steeply declined; during the 2000s, the registered level of immigration was at about 200,000 people per year.

A majority of the immigrants (71.7%) in the RLMS sample are of Russian ethnicity, and there is a slightly higher share of males. Importantly, migrants are not significantly different from the locals in terms of their education levels. The statistics on marital status show that a higher share of migrants compared to locals have families and children. Apparently, family migration was a large part of this migration wave.

Using the methodology described above, I obtain an insignificant effect of the share of immigrants on the wages of the local population over the period of 1995-2009. The effect of immigrant share on the unemployment of the local population is also insignificant. In contrast, estimates for the labor force participation (LFP) show a significant negative effect of immigration on the LFP of the local population. The size of the effect is non-negligible: a one-percentage point increase in the share of immigrants in a region reduces the probability for a local person to be in the labor force by 0.6 percentage points. Thus, over the whole period of 1995-2009, Russian immigration is estimated to have had some displacement effect, but only in terms of the labor force participation of the local population.

Since the inflow of immigrants was mostly concentrated in the first half of 1990s, I estimate my model for three sub-periods: 1995-2000, 2001-2004, and 2005-2009. The results for the wages remain insignificant in all sub-periods. Immigration is shown to increase the unemployment among locals in the first half of 2000s, but this effect dissipated in the second half of 2000s. The effect of immigration on the labor force participation is negative and highly significant for the late 1990s, still negative and significant but smaller in magnitude in the early 2000s, and disappears in the late 2000s. This analysis suggests that the immigration wave had a quite significant displacement effect for the local population in terms of unemployment and labor force participation, but not in terms of wages. This effect slowly declined and had disappeared by the second half of 2000s. My results also suggest that the negative labor market effects were more significant for men than for women.

Conclusion

The results of this study have implications for the debate on the effect of immigration on local labor markets, in particular on wages and employment opportunities for the native population. The majority of existing studies find only minor negative effects of migration on the labor market position of locals. My results suggest that immigrants who are close substitutes to the local labor force, due to the common language and similar education, have more significant effects on the labor market outcomes of the local population.

The finding that displacement effects in Russia dissipated quite slowly may be related to the very low migration rates of the local population in Russia throughout the transition. In order to reduce negative labor market effects of large influxes of immigrants, policy measures are needed that improve labor mobility across regions. These may include moving or housing subsidies, retraining programs and policies ensuring equal access to jobs and public services for internal migrants across the regions of Russia.

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References

Card, David, 1990, The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 245-257.
Lazareva O. Russian Migrants to Russia: Assimilation and Local Labor Market Effects //IZA Journal of Migration. 2015. No. 4:20
Locher, Lilo, 2002, “Migration in the Soviet Successor States,” Applied Economics Quarterly, 48 (1), 2002, 67-84
Yerofeyeva, Irina, 1999, “Regional aspects of Slavic migration from Kazakhstan on the basis of examples from North Kazakhstan and East Kazakhstan provinces”. In: Vyatkin, Anatoly, Kosmarskaya, Natalya, Panarin, Sergei (Eds.), V Dvizhenii Dobrovoljnom i Vynuzhdennom [In Motion—Voluntary and Forced]. Natalis, Moscow, pp. 154–179

Electoral Competition and Political Selection

Posted on January 18, 2016 | Policy Brief

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Research in political economy has recently rediscovered that individuals, and not only institutions, matter for economic outcomes: not all politicians are of the same quality. Competition in the political market may have another virtue than its traditional disciplining role: it may favor the selection of good politicians. In a recent paper, Marijn Verschelde and I study the (time-varying) relationship between political competition and the quality of French deputies.

Note: this column draws heavily on a paper written with Marijn Verschelde, which is available here. The figures are taken from it.

How to design the political selection mechanism in order to favor the emergence of “good” politicians? The traditional public-choice literature emphasized the role of institutions in shaping the behavior of politicians, but have paid little attention, if any, to the individual decision maker. From this point of view, it is purely illusive to seek for “morally superior agents who will use their powers in some public interest” (Buchanan, 1989): all politicians are purely self-interested agents who have to be incentivized to act in accordance with voters’ preferences.

However, a recent stream of empirical papers provides evidence that individual politicians matter for economic outcomes (Besley et al., 2011; Jones and Olken, 2005). In other words, as suggested by common sense, they are not all cut from the same cloth. This emphasizes the need not only to shape institutions in order to discipline incumbent politicians, but also to select “good” decision makers.

Several determinants have been shown to affect political selection: the wage of politicians (Besley, 2004; Messner and Polborn, 2004), the transparency of politics (Mattozzi and Merlo, 2007), the institutional flexibility (Acemoglu et al., 2010), and reservation quotas (Besley et al., 2005; Besley et al., 2013). In addition to a well-known disciplining effect (for instance Stigler, 1972, and Becker, 1983), electoral competition is also likely to enhance this selection process as well (Galasso and Nannicini, 2011): competition pushes parties to select candidates of good quality in order to seduce neutral voters, who, contrary to partisans, are sensitive to the quality of the candidates. As recruiting experts are difficult, hence costly, parties will allocate them in the most contested districts only.

In a recent paper, Marijn Verschelde and I investigate the relationship between quality and competition in the case of the French National Assembly. Measuring the quality of politicians is not straightforward. A wide theoretical definition of quality is a combination of competence and motivation. Such a broad definition is challenging to operationalize in empirical work. Some papers approximate quality by variables like level of schooling and experience of politicians (Baltrunaite et al., 2014; Besley et al., 2011; Kotakorpi and Poutvaara, 2011), while others use their absenteeism rate or vote attendance (Galasso and Nannicini, 2011; Gagliarducci and Nannicini, 2013). We innovate by proposing a measure of quality based on productivity, i.e., on what deputies actually do. We gathered from the Assemblée Nationale archive all the information that has been systematically collected over the years for each deputy and for each year from 1958 to 2012: (i) propositions of law, (ii) oral questions, (iii) reports, and (iv) debates in which the deputy has been involved in. From these four aspects of parliamentary work, we compute a composite indicator of productivity (bounded between 0 and 1, higher values indicating higher performance). To measure political competition, we use a measure based on a Herfindahl index of the vote shares at the first round (bounded between 0 and 1, larger values indicating stiffer competition).

Figure 1. Estimated Productivity Conditional on Competition

We document a strong effect of competition on deputies’ productivity, in accordance with the theoretical framework. Figure 1 displays the estimated level of productivity as a function of the degree of competition, controlling for personal (age, schooling, etc.) and political (party, committee, and the likes) variables. Everything else equal, a deputy elected in the a priori most contested district is estimated to reach a productivity close to 0.8, while if she is elected in a safe district her productivity is estimated to be at most 0.6. This means that the productivity of deputies can vary by up to 30% depending on the degree of contestability. This relation holds even after minimizing problems of potential reversed causality and controlling for reelection incentives, indicating that we actually observe a selection effect.

Considering the time span of our dataset, it is interesting to observe how the positive relationship between electoral competition and political selection evolved over time. The most noticeable evolution over the second part of the XXth century in France is certainly the ideological convergence after the 80’s, marked with the reconciliation of the Socialist Party with the market and the rise of the Pensée unique (“one track thinking”, Knapp and Wright, 2001). Such an evolution should have decreased ideological voting and produced more competence-based elections, hence increasing the effect of competition on quality.

Figure 2. Effect of Competition over Time

However, we uncover a clear inverse-U shaped evolution. Figure 2 plots the effect of competition conditional on the year: the effect of electoral competition sharply increased till the 1980’s, but it has continuously decreased since then. How to explain this pattern? A possible explanation is the increased voters volatility, i.e., a higher unpredictability in voters’ behavior. If at first sight this phenomenon indicates an increase in the share of neutral voters, this is however not necessarily the case. Instead of moving from partisanship to neutrality, it is possible that supporters of a party A at election t turn into supporters of party B at election t+1. Partisans disappointed by the behavior of their party while in office might provide an unconditional support to the competing party at the next election. This is consistent with the fact that not any party succeeded to win two national elections in a row since the 80’s.

Conclusion

Our analysis point out a clear positive relationship between electoral competition and the quality of the French deputies, measured by a composite indicator of productivity. Overall, deputies elected in contested districts tend to perform better than others. From a public policy perspective, this result suggests that reforms enhancing political competition (for instance by redistricting jurisdiction in a proper way or by ensuring a fair access to media to competing parties) should be supported. However, we observe that the impact of competition increased till the 80’s, but continuously decreases since then. This opens the door for a vast research agenda, as it indicate that drivers of an efficient selection mechanism are not necessarily stable over time.

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References

Acemoglu, D., Egorov, G., Sonin, K., 2010. Political selection and persistence of bad government. Quarterly Journal of Economics 125 (4), 1511-1575.
Becker, G.S., 1983. A theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence. Quarterly Journal of Economics 97, 371-400.
Baltrunaite, A., Bello, P., Casarico, A., Profeta, P., 2014. Gender quotas and the quality of politicians. Journal of Public Economics 118, 62–74.
Besley, T., Montalvo, J., Reynal-Querol, M., 2011. Do educated leaders matter? Economic Journal 121, 205-227.
Besley, T., Pande, R., Rao, V., 2005. Political selection and the quality of government: Evidence from south india. PEPP/8, Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.
Besley, T., Folke, O., Persson, T., Rickne, J., 2013. Gender quotas and the crisis of the mediocre man: Theory and evidence from sweden. IFN Working Paper 985.
Buchanan, J., 1989. Constitutional Economics, Explorations into Constutional Economics. College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press.
Gagliarducci, S., Nannicini, T., 2013. Do better paid politicians perform better? disentangling incentives from selection. Journal of the European Economic Association 11 (2), 369-398.
Galasso, V., Nannicini, T., 2011. Competing on good politicians. American Political Science Review 105 (1), 79-99.
Gavoille, N., Verschelde, M., 2015. Electoral competition and political selection: An analysis of the productivity of French politicians, 1958-2012. Condorcet Center working paper series.
Jones, B., Olken, B., 2005. Do leaders matter? National leadership and growth since World War II. Quarterly Journal of Economics 120 (3), 835-864.
Knapp, A., Wright, V., 2001. The governmentand politics of France. Routledge.
Kotakorpi, K., Poutvaara, P., 2011. Pay for politicians and candidate selection: An empirical analysis. Journal of Public Economics 95, 877–885.
Messner, M., Polborn, M., 2004. Paying politicians. Journal of Public Economics 88, 2423-2445.
Mattozzi, A., Merlo, A., 2007. The transparency of politics and the quality of politicians. American Economic Review 97 (2), 311-315.
Stigler, G., 1972. Economic competition and political competition. Public Choice 13, 91–106.

Changes in Oil Price and Economic Impacts

Posted on December 7, 2015 | Policy Brief

Authors: Chloé Le Coq and Zorica Trkulja, SITE.

Oil has for decades been perceived as a necessary and highly addictive energy commodity, fueling the world economy. It is a crucial input good for most of the net-oil consumer countries, and it is an important source of revenue for the net-oil supplier countries. This means that any changes in the oil price will affect the entire world economy. However, the extent to which the oil-price fluctuations matter for the economy depends on the perspective (e.g. whether it is that of the macro economy, international trade, firm strategies, or the climate economy). In this policy brief, we outline the answers to this question that were provided at the 9th SITE Energy Day, held at the Stockholm School of Economics on November 5, 2015.

Is War Good for a Country’s Political Institutions?

Posted on November 30, 2015 | Policy Brief

Author: Tom Coupe, KSE.

Recent research suggests that experiencing war violence might make people more likely to turn out during elections. Using data from the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, we show, however, that people who were injured or had close friends or relatives killed or injured were less likely to turn out at the 2014 parliamentary elections. We also show that the impact of violence on turn out and political views depends on the type of violence one experienced.

Does Social Media Promote Protests?

Posted on November 23, 2015 | Policy Brief

Author: Ruben Enikolopov, CEFIR.

Despite a lot of speculations about the role of social media in recent political protests throughout the world, there is still no persuasive empirical evidence to support these claims. We fill this gap by providing evidence that social media indeed played an important role in promoting political protests in Russia in 2011-2012. Using data on the dominant Russian online social network, VKontakte, we show that higher penetration of the social network across cities increased the likelihood of protest occurrence and the number of participants in these protests. Additional evidence suggests that reducing the costs of coordination is a mechanism behind social media influence.