Berghs betraktelser

Nytt papper av Christian Bjørnskov och Stefan Voigt i Public Choice om hur regeringar hanterar möjligheten att deklarera undantagstillstånd (state of emergency). Ur abstract:

[...] the more advantages emergency constitutions confer to the executive, the higher the number of people killed as a consequence of a natural disaster, controlling for its severity. As this is an unexpected result, we discuss a number of potential explanations, the most plausible being that governments use natural disasters as a pretext to enhance their power. Furthermore, the easier it is to call a state of emergency, the larger the negative effects on basic human rights

Commerce requires trust, but trust is difficult when one group consistently fears expropriation by another. If men have a comparative advantage at violence and there is little rule-of-law, then unequal bargaining power can lead women to segregate into low-return industries and avoid entrepreneurship altogether. In this paper, we present a model of female entrepreneurship and rule of law that predicts that women will only start businesses when they have both formal legal protection and informal bargaining power. The model's predictions are supported both in cross-national data and with a new census of Zambian manufacturers. In Zambia, female entrepreneurs collaborate less, learn less from fellow entrepreneurs, earn less and segregate into industries with more women, but gender differences are ameliorated when women have access to adjudicating institutions, such as Lusaka's "Market Chiefs" who are empowered to adjudicate small commercial disputes. We experimentally induce variation in local institutional quality in an adapted trust game, and find that this also reduces the gender gap in trust and economic activity.

Intressant artikel:

Generous to all or ‘insiders only’? The relationship between welfare state generosity and immigrant welfare rights

Ur abstract:

Two sharply contrasting accounts exist for the relationships between welfare generosity and immigrant social rights. The dualization hypothesis argues that due to fiscal pressures and welfare chauvinism, generous welfare states are more likely to exclude immigrants from access to welfare benefits. The generosity hypothesis argues that on the contrary, in generous welfare states, an immigrant will be granted greater access to benefits for material, institutional and cultural reasons. Using newly collected data from the Immigration Policies in Comparison (IMPIC) project that covers 18 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) states over 30 years (1980–2010) the two hypotheses are tested using pooled time series analyses.

Resultatet:

[...] generous welfare states are more likely to grant immigrants access to welfare benefits, and less generous welfare states are more likely to exclude immigrants from access.

Kommentar: 'Insiders' i rubriken syftar alltså inte på arbetsmarknaden. Som jag själv beskrivit tycks länder med generösa välfärdssystem också ofta ha konkurrensbegränsande institutioner på arbetsmarknaden.

Källa:

Römer, Friederike. 2017. "Generous to All or ‘Insiders Only’? The Relationship between Welfare State Generosity and Immigrant Welfare Rights." Journal of European Social Policy 27(2): 173–96. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0958928717696441 (April 30, 2019).

Jag har två gånger ägnat min DN-kolumn åt det omdiskuterade sambandet mellan å ena sidan fattigdom, utsatta bostadsområden och segregation och å andra sidan brottslighet (och andra utfall), först här, sedan här.

Nu finns en ny amerikansk studie av Eric Chyn i AER som utnyttjar ett naturligt experiment för att undersöka vad som händer när man får möjlighet att flytta ifrån ett problematiskt bostadsområde. Så här lyder abstract:

I study public housing demolitions in Chicago, which forced low-income households to relocate to less disadvantaged neighborhoods using housing vouchers. Specifically, I compare young adult outcomes of displaced children to their peers who lived in nearby public housing that was not demolished. Displaced children are more likely to be employed and earn more in young adulthood. I also find that displaced children have fewer violent crime arrests. Children displaced at young ages have lower high school dropout rates.

Författaren menar att det var så gott som slumpmässigt vilka hus som rivdes, vilket gör att de kvarboende kan användas som kontrollgrupp gentemot vilken effekten av att få flytta kan utvärderas.

Resultaten i abstract låter upplyftande, men när man läser artikeln framgår att effekterna är inte jättestora, och dessutom att resultaten rörande brottslighet är inte helt rättvisande beskrivna i abstract.

Först, storleken: så här beskrivs det i artikeln:

Relative to their non-displaced peers, girls are 6.6 percentage points (13 percent) more likely to be employed and have $806 (18 percent) higher annual earnings. The corresponding effects for boys are less precisely estimated, although the estimates for all outcomes are positive.

samt

children displaced at young ages (age 7 to 12) are 5.1 percentage points (8 percent) less likely to drop out from high school

När det gäller effekterna på brottlighet står det:

youth who relocated have 14 percent fewer arrests for violent crimes

Men också

displaced children have more arrests for property crimes than their non-displaced peers. Interestingly, Kling, Ludwig, and Katz (2005) also observed an increase in property crime for boys whose household moved to a low-poverty neighborhood through the MTO program.

När det gäller effekten på brottslighet, finns en bias av att de flesta flyttar till betydligt rikare områden, där polisen kanske inte är lika aktiv:

the relocation effects on arrests may be biased upward due to a higher probability of arrest in less disadvantaged neighborhoods

Det faktum att författarna trots denna bias hittar att de som flyttades arresterades oftare för egendomsbrott (jämfört med dem som var kvar), är intressant. Kan det möjligen tyda på att viss brottslighet beror på individen och inte på bostadsområdet? Eller beror brottslighet faktiskt på bostadsområdet i den bemärkelsen att mer stjäls där det finns mer att stjäla? Artikeln erbjuder tyvärr inte mycket diskussion kring hur detta resultat ska tolkas.

Källor:

Chyn, Eric. 2018. "Moved to Opportunity: The Long-Run Effects of Public Housing Demolition on Children."American Economic Review, 108 (10): 3028-56.

Nyligen publicerades en intressant artikel i The Economic Journal. Författaren påpekar att global migration i de flesta fall minskar den globala ojämlikheten, men det gäller inte migrationen till de allra rikaste länderna, eftersom migranter till dessa länder får löner som i ett globalt perspektiv är mycket höga.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries accept massive numbers of migrants from poor countries and pay wages that dramatically improve over outside options but are meagre by the standards of natives. As such they do dramatically more per capita to reduce global inequality than do the ‘fortress welfare states’ of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. If OECD countries were to imitate the GCC it would reduce global inequality by more than full equalisation within the OECD would. Such examples suggest a philosophically disturbing trade‐off between openness to global inequality‐reducing migration and internal equality.

Källa: Glen Weyl, E. 2018. “The Openness-Equality Trade-off in Global Redistribution." The Economic Journal 128(612): F1–36. http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/ecoj.12469 (October 16, 2018).