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Essays in Political Economy and Economic Policy
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| 자료유형 | 학위논문 |
|---|---|
| 서명/저자사항 | Essays in Political Economy and Economic Policy. |
| 개인저자 | Espinosa, Francisco Jose. |
| 단체저자명 | New York University. Economics. |
| 발행사항 | [S.l.]: New York University., 2019. |
| 발행사항 | Ann Arbor: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2019. |
| 형태사항 | 336 p. |
| 기본자료 저록 | Dissertations Abstracts International 81-03A. Dissertation Abstract International |
| ISBN | 9781085676359 |
| 학위논문주기 | Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2019. |
| 일반주기 |
Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 81-03, Section: A.
Advisor: Ray, Debraj. |
| 이용제한사항 | This item must not be sold to any third party vendors. |
| 요약 | The focus of this dissertation is on the political economy of good governance and good policy-making. Specifically, it seeks to understand the way in which governments function and should function (along some particular dimensions, to be sure), and the consequences of the behavior of politicians with private interests and private information. In the theories I develop in Chapters 1 and 2, the main conceptual tool is the principal-agent model, but amended to emphasize the distinctive characteristics of a situation in which the public is the principal, exerting its power through retention or replacement, and the agent is the politician. In Chapter 3 I analyze a direct policy question: what is the correct way to compute antidumping duties? Even though this problem might at first glance seem very narrow in its scope, it is of great importance to the development of trade and international relations, since antidumping is the primary form of discretionary protection for most countries, as argued by the literature. The question is also closely related to the first two Chapters, inasmuch as antidumping policy cannot be accurately understood through the lens of standard economic theory with social-welfare maximizing governments, but through the lens of the political economy of protectionism.This dissertation combines both theoretical and empirical analyses. I believe deeply in the power of good economic theory to generate positive predictions that inform the empirical analysis, that help me to understand what to look for, and that allows me to interpret the results in a meaningful way. At the same time, I also believe that only detailed empirical analysis enables us to fully understand the problem at hand, by clarifying the mechanisms that are really relevant in the situations we investigate. I believe in these methodological approaches both as an academic and a practitioner, the latter as Commissioner for two years in the Foreign Trade Commission of the Government of Argentina.In the first chapter, "Corruption and Political Turnover over the Business Cycle: Theory and Evidence," I study how GDP shocks affect corruption and political turnover, both from a theoretical and an empirical perspective. The theoretical setting presumes politicians are heterogeneous and privately informed about their degree of corruptibility. They face exogenous shocks to GDP, which affect appropriable government revenues. The political incentives to appropriate these rents systematically vary with such shocks, which affects the endogenous re-election/replacement decisions of voters. I predict that transitory output shocks that lie above trend represent a good opportunity to grab rents today - current gains increase relative to expected continuation values. Therefore, corruption is predicted to be pro-cyclical, as is subsequent political turnover. This has the further implication that booms in current mandates decrease corruption in future mandates, because voters eliminate the more corrupt incumbents. I test these three predictions using an annual panel of countries over 1985-2011. I find evidence in support of the theory. Moreover, these cyclical properties are stronger for more democratic countries, suggesting electoral accountability is indeed the bridge that links corruption to business cycles.The second chapter, "Noisy Agents," coauthored with Debraj Ray, analyzes a principal-agent interaction that resembles the interaction between political candidates and the voters during electoral campaigns. In the model we set up, the principal seeks to retain good agents. Agent type is signaled with some ambient noise. Agents can add or remove noise at a cost. We show that monotone retention strategies, in which the principal keeps the agent above some signal threshold, are generically never equilibria. The main result identifies an equilibrium in which the principal retains the agent if the signal is "moderate" and replaces him otherwise. We consider various extensions: non-normal signal structures, non-binary types, interacting agents, costly mean-shifting, dynamics with term limits, and principal commitment. We discuss applications to risky portfolio management, fundraising, and political risk-taking.The third chapter, "Computation of Antidumping Duties for Differentiated Goods," advances a new methodology for computing antidumping duties. Current methodologies implicitly assume that the domestically produced and the imported products are perfect substitutes, and this can often lead to over-protection of the domestic industry. This Chapter relaxes this assumption by means of a partial equilibrium Armington model with monopolistically competitive domestic firms. The theory indicates that antidumping duties should not depend on quality differentials but on elasticities of substitution between then the domestic and the imported products under consideration. I empirically evaluate the proposed methodology by applying it in two real-world antidumping cases. With the first case I show how to calibrate the parameters of the theoretical model in order to compute the proposed antidumping duties, and I illustrate how big the difference between current and proposed duties can be in practice: antidumping duties decrease from 97% to 37%. The second example is considered to show that antidumping duties might be insufficient to eliminate the injury to the domestic industry, even if they are infinitely large. |
| 일반주제명 | Economics. Economic theory. Political science. |
| 언어 | 영어 |
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