Suchergebnisse

I examine the contribution of institutional breakdowns to long-run development, drawing on Argentina's unique departure from a rich country on the eve of World War I to an underdeveloped one today. The empirical strategy is based on building a counterfactual scenario to examine the path of Argentina's long-run development in the absence of breakdowns, assuming it would follow the institutional trends in countries at parallel stages of development. Drawing on Argentina's large historical bibliography, I have identified the institutional breakdowns and coded for the period 1850-2012. The synthetic control and difference-in-differences estimates here suggest that, in the absence of institutional breakdowns, Argentina would largely have avoided the decline and joined the ranks of rich countries with an income level similar to that of New Zealand.

AbstractThis study identifies the impact of Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) on foreign direct investments (FDI) by taking advantage of the random timing of 44 unilateral BIT terminations in India between 2013 and 2019. Using quarterly bilateral data of 138 foreign investors' home countries (FIHCs), our difference-in-differences (DD) estimates uncover a significant reduction in FDI inflows to India in response to BIT terminations by more than 30 percent compared to countries without terminations. We identify the sudden break with investor protection for new investments as the major transmission channel. Further investigations suggest that investors do not necessarily abandon India in response to BIT terminations but apparently reroute FDI via FIHCs with BITs. Evidence from firm-level data reveals that investors revoke or reroute mainly deals (e.g. mergers and acquisitions) rather than own new projects. Moreover, similarity of some legal institutions with India offsets the negative effect of BIT terminations.

We examine the diversification of administrative and procedural costs on patent stockusing a large dataset from the European Patent Office with 15,000firms for the periodbetween 1995 and 2015. The results reveal that administrative and procedural costs aresignificant forfirm-level patenting activity. However, not all administrative and proceduralcosts have equal effects. Higher administrative costs often encourage patent applicationand validation by solving the adverse selection problem and short-run opportunism, aswell as other sources of asymmetric information. The effective administration of intel-lectual property law and low-cost enforcement are found to considerably foster patentingactivity. The effects are robust for various mis-specification checks and do not disappearonce country-level research and development infrastructure proxies are controlled for. Theextreme bounds of administrative and procedural costs are computed across more than 5billion regressions, and the sizeable impact of administration on patent application andvalidation outcomes is confirmed.