Suchergebnisse

Within EUSECON, one research subproject investigates the relationship between economic downturns, terrorism and electoral outcomes. The analysis is carried out using data from Spain. Recent Spanish democratic history has witnessed four complete economic cycles, with deep recessions and pronounced booms. During this period, there has been a nationalistic conflict with terrorist manifestation. This research uses Spanish provincial data from the ten congressional elections since the end of Franco's dictatorship. It has been found that changes in unemployment, inflation and terrorism significantly influence national vote shares.

In this paper we study the response of vote shares to economic fluctuations and conflict. Spain seems to be the ideal niche for a case study like this since it has experienced both phenomena during the last decades. Recent Spanish democratic history has witnessed four complete economic cycles, with deep recessions and pronounced booms. During this period, there has been a nationalistic conflict with terrorist manifestation. We use Spanish provincial data from the ten congressional elections since the end of Franco's dictatorship. Vote shares at provincial level are modeled as fractional responses to unemployment, inflation, terrorism assassinations, turnout and other factors. The statistical model used, a fractional probit, specifies conditional means of district and election unobserved effects as linear functions of the covariates. Estimates of National Partial Effects (NPE), i.e. the effect on national vote shares of changes in unemployment, inflation and terrorism are statistically significant and quantitatively important. In addition, vote shares respond to participation rates and these also depend on economic factors and terrorism, thus creating an endogeneity problem. The expected margin of victory is then used as instrument for turnout.

These notes draw from the Theory of Cointegration in order to test the monetary model of exchange rate determination. Previous evidence shows that the monetary model does not capture the short run dynamics of the exchange rate, specially when assessed in terms of forecasting accuracy. Even though the monetary equations of exchange rate determination may be bad indicators of how exchange rates are determined in the short run, they couldstill describe long run equilibrium relationships between the exchange rate and its fundamentals. Stationary deviations from those long run relationships are allowed in the short run. This book also addresses severalissues on Cointegration. Chapter 6 studies the small sample distribution of the likelihood ratio test statistics (on the dimension and restrictions on the cointegrating space) under deviations from normality. This monograph also focuses on the issue of optimal prediction in partially nonstationary multivariate time series models. In particular, it caries out an exchange rate prediction exercise

The random utility model (RUM) of voting behavior can account for strategic voting by making use of proxy indicators that measure voter incentives to vote strategically. The contribution of this article is to propose a new method to estimate the RUM in the presence of strategic voters, without having to construct proxy measures of strategic voting incentives. Our method can be used to infer the counterfactual sincere vote of those who vote strategically and provides an estimate of the size of strategic voting. We illustrate the procedure using post-electoral survey data from Spain. Our calculations indicate that strategic voting in Spain is about 2.19%.

This article investigates the economic effects of conflict, using the terrorist conflict in the Basque Country as a case study. We find that, after the outbreak of terrorism in the late 1960's, per capita GDP in the Basque Country declined about 10 percentage points relative to a synthetic control region without terrorism. In addition, we use the 1998–1999 truce as a natural experiment. We find that stocks of firms with a significant part of their business in the Basque Country showed a positive relative performance when truce became credible, and a negative relative performance at the end of the cease-fire.

This article develops a spatial model of internal and external forced migration. We propose a model reminiscent of Hotelling's spatial model in economics and Schelling's model of segregation. Conflict is modeled as a shock that hits a country at certain location and generates displacement of people located near the shock's location. Some displaced people cross a border, thus becoming refugees, while others remain as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). The model delivers predictions about how the fractions of a country's population that become refugees and IDPs ought to be related with the intensity of the shock, country size, terrain ruggedness and the degree of geographical proximity of the country with respect to the rest of the world. The predictions of the model are then tested against real data using a panel of 161 countries covering the period 1995-2016. The empirical evidence is mostly in line with the predictions of the model.