The Unassuming Economist

Source: NBER Working Paper (2022)

Abstract– “Need fluctuates over the business cycle. We conduct a survey revealing a desire for nonprofit activities to countercyclically expand during downturns. We then demonstrate, using comprehensive US nonprofit data drawn from millions of tax returns, that the public’s hopes are disappointed. Nonprofit expenditure, revenue, and balance sheets fluctuate procyclically: contracting during national and local downturns. This finding is evident even for a narrow group of nonprofits the public most wishes would expand during downturns, e.g., those providing critical needs like food or housing. Our new facts contribute to the charitable giving, nonprofit, and business cycle literatures (sic).”

Source: VoxDev

Authors of this article (2022), Baafra Abeberese, A. et al describe their study and its results as follows:

“We study how democratisation affects firm productivity — a critical micro-driver of economic growth. We do so in the context of Indonesia, which had been under the dictatorial rule of Soeharto for three decades, until the unexpected collapse of his regime in 1998. Using the exogenous timing of when each district in the country transitioned to a democracy, we estimate the causal effect of democratisation on firm productivity. We combine data on the timing of democratisation with an annual census of manufacturing firms over two decades to analyse the impact of democratisation on firms using an event study design. Our findings suggest that democratic leaders are less likely to impose socially inefficient regulations or engage in rent-seeking and, hence, enhance firm productivity.”

Related Reading

Revisiting the causal effect of democracy on long-run development

In a latest blog for the Conversable Economist, author Timothy Taylor studies data from the OECD publication, Health at a Glance (2021) to understand why meaningful healthcare reform in the USA may be harder to achieve.

It glances over evidence that demonstrates USA’s not-so-commendable performance on health and wellbeing indicators (like mortality, growth in life expectancy, etc.) despite a large share of expenditure on healthcare. Subsequently, parameters of Americans’ satisfaction from their healthcare industry are discussed, which are found to be upbeat and high-ranking in contrast.

Click here to read the full blog.

In a recent column for VoxEU CEPR, Elwyn Davies, Mary Hallward-Driemeier and Gaurav Nayyar of the World Bank write about prospects of services-led development and the role of small firms in driving it.

“This column argues that the services sector deserves more credit for helping drive economic transformation than it generally receives. Using firm-level data from 20 developing economies, the authors find that while services establishments are smaller than manufacturing establishments, this matters less for their productivity. Services firms can scale up without sizing up through investments in human and other more intangible forms of capital can leverage the diffusion of digital technologies. “

This theme is elaborated upon further in their book, At Your Service?: The Promise of Services-Led Development (2021), which “assesses the scope of a services-driven development model and policy directions that maximize its potential”.

Related Reading:

Services Development and Comparative Advantage in Manufacturing

Global services value chains: A new path to development

Source: Journal of Political Economy

“Do elites capture foreign aid? This paper documents that aid disbursements to highly aid-dependent countries coincide with sharp increases in bank deposits in offshore financial centers known for bank secrecy and private wealth management but not in other financial centers. The estimates are not confounded by contemporaneous shocks—such as civil conflicts, natural disasters, and financial crises—and are robust to instrumenting using predetermined aid commitments. The implied leakage rate is around 7.5% at the sample mean and tends to increase with the ratio of aid to GDP. The findings are consistent with aid capture in the most aid-dependent countries.”

Click here to read the full paper and here to join the discussion on it.