Suchergebnisse

An important question for international investors concerns the relationship between political institutions and property rights. Yet a debate remains over whether authoritarian institutions promote favorable investment climates. Using data on oil nationalization in a sample of autocracies, this study finds that legislatures are correlated with lower expropriation risk in non-personalist dictatorships, but a higher risk of nationalization in personalist regimes. The results show a consistent pattern between authoritarian institutions and property protections, for which context matters.

It is often argued that capital should flow from aging industrialized economies to countries with fast-growing populations. However, institutional failures and the risk of expropriation substantially reduce developing economies' attractiveness for foreign investors. We analyze the influence of a country's demographic structure on international investment, using a political-economy model in which population growth potentially affects the risk of expropriation. We first explore how redistributive expropriation affects the welfare of different age groups and derive the government's incentive to expropriate. We then analyze how the relative size of different generations influences the feasible volume of foreign investment.

We build a Real Options model to assess the importance of private provisionand the impact of expropriation risk on investment timing, investmentvolumes, governmental costs and social welfare. We consider two types ofbusinesses (essential and non essential businesses) and two stages (operatingand investment opportunities), and answer questions regarding three maintopics: the firm's reaction to expropriation risk, the government drivers toexpropriate, and the costs this generates in terms of welfare. We find thatthe firm makes suboptimal investment decisions. When we endogenize thereputational costs of expropriation, results show that the decision of the governmentregarding the level of political risk will largely depend on the typeof business. However, in terms of welfare it is never optimal to expropriate

How can agents in the military, who control the means of coercion, commit not to expropriate from producers? In this paper we propose competition within the military as one of the mechanisms that can deter predation and consequently create commitment. In our model, even if agents within the military could expropriate all output costlessly, it is attractive to protect producers from predating military units. This is because there is a marginal defensive advantage and consequently defense is an effective way to potentially eliminate other military units, reducing competition and leading to higher future payoffs. Our model predicts that greater internal competition within the military lowers the risk of expropriation and that this effect is strongest for countries with low institutional and economic development. Testing this prediction empirically, we find a robust negative relationship between competition within the military and expropriation risk. In line with our model this effect is strongest for countries at lower stages of institutional and economic development, and it weakens as the latter improve. These results indicate that there may be a short-run component to property rights institutions that varies with the degree of competition among agents who control the means of coercion.

Abstract
Factor price differences create economic incentives for migration to industrialized countries and for capital flows to developing countries. However, immigration restrictions and capital expropriation risks impede factor flows. Using a political-economy approach that takes into account different generations' conflicting attitudes toward immigration and expropriation, we explore how these restrictions interact. Then, we run two separate country fixed regressions to explore the interdependence of policies empirically. The results from our theoretical model are borne out by the data: We find a positive relationship between emigration and foreign investors' perceived security of property rights in developing countries and a negative relationship between the US foreign direct investment (FDI) outflows to developing countries and the share of US green cards granted to natives from the respective countries. Based on our analyses, we conclude that the key to lowering mobility barriers is not simply a quid pro quo.