Search Results
Working Paper
The Politics of Debt in the Era of Rising Rates
We examine how the post-pandemic trajectory of risk-free rates—from historically low levels in 2020 to a steep rise in 2022—affects sovereign debt management and default risk in emerging markets (EMs). Using a dynamic political economy model, we show that weak institutional environments with political incentives to engage in corruption spending lead to over-borrowing and increased default risk, especially during low-rate periods. As rates rise, EMs face high risks of default or the need for austerity programs, depending on the severity of productivity shocks. While International Financial ...
Journal Article
Corruption and innovation
In this article, the author illustrates how corruption can affect an industry's rate of innovation. An interesting result of analysis is that, under certain parameter ranges, small increases in the penalties to corruption or the effectiveness of detection can result in large increases in product innovation.
Working Paper
Corruption and trade protection: evidence from panel data
This paper provides new estimates of the effects of corruption and poor institutions on trade protection. It exploits data on several measures of trade protection including import duty, international trade taxes, and the trade-GDP ratio. The paper complements the literature on the relationship between corruption and trade reform. It deviates from the previous literature in several ways. First, unobserved heterogeneity among countries have been controlled with properly specified fixed effects exploiting the time dimension present in the dataset. Secondly, instead of using tariff and non-tariff ...
Discussion Paper
Bad politicians
We present a simple theory of the quality of elected officials. Quality has (at least) two dimensions: competence and honesty. Voters prefer competent and honest policymakers, so high-quality citizens have a greater chance of being elected to office. But low-quality citizens have a comparative advantage in pursuing elective office, because their market wages are lower than the market wages of high-quality citizens (competence), and/or because they reap higher returns from holding office (honesty). In the political equilibrium, the average quality of the elected body depends on the structure ...
Journal Article
Political economy determinants of non-agricultural trade policy
The authors investigate several existing political economy hypotheses on trade policy using cross-country trade-protection data for non-agricultural goods. The authors find that a left-leaning political regime leads to pro-labor trade policies only for a subset of trade policy measures. In addition, they find that income inequality and country-level corruption appear to be important determinants of trade policy. For various measures of trade protection, it appears that corruption tends to hurt labor interests by increasing trade protection in labor-abundant countries and reducing trade ...