Browsing by Subject "Empirische Analyse"

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Business cycles and institutions : empirical analysis
(2017) Kufenko, Vadim; Hagemann, Harald
The cumulative dissertation covers diverse aspects of empirical analysis of business cycles and institutions. There are three research questions in focus. To address the interplay between business cycles and institutions, the first research question is formulated: could the Malthusian cycles be present in a frontier economy with abundance of land and which institutions could be responsible for the Malthusian regime and the transition from it? In order to consider the far-reaching implications of economic cycles for the development of economic thought, the second question is stated: can economic fluctuations quantitatively influence research output? To address the methodology of business cycle analysis, the third question is brought up: how may spurious periodicities emerge and how could one test for them? The main findings in the cumulative dissertation can be summarized as follows: i) it is shown that institutional arrangements may form economic constraints or build-up on the existing ones, responsible for the regimes in which cyclical fluctuations take place; ii) the interaction between the economic cycles and fluctuations in bibliometric variables representing research output in Economics as a science is analysed, and empirical evidence suggests the downswings of cycles stimulate more publications on the topic of crises and business cycles; iii) spurious periodicities emerge close to filtering bounds for real and simulated data after detrending, and it is demonstrated that simultaneous significance testing of spectral density peaks against the noise spectrum across different types of signals may help to reveal spurious periodicities.
Trade integration, global capital flows and the link to institutional quality from a North-South perspective
(2020) Schneider, Sophie Therese; Jung, Benjamin
This doctoral thesis is a cumulative dissertation containing three essays. In the first essay, I create a panel data set of North-South preferential trade agreements (PTAs) building on the comprehensive database on the design of trade agreements (DESTA). I analyze the effects of the depth and number of PTAs signed on the quality of institutions in developing countries, the global South, measured as the political risk component investment profile of the ICRG database. I show that the system GMM is the appropriate estimator to apply for my empirical analysis to account for various sources of endogeneity. I show that signing deep North-South PTAs positively affects institutions in the South. The results differ with respect to the type of agreement and region. The second essay deals with the determinants of PTAs focusing on institutional distance as a driving factor and regarding PTAs as an instrument to compensate for missing institutions. I argue that the effect of institutional distance is specifically important (1) in a North-South trade relationship where institutional distance is particularly large and (2) if countries trade a large share of contract-intensive goods. For this analysis I create a panel data set including a large number of developing countries and a variable to measure the difference of the share of bilateral contract-intensive exports and show that a linear probability model for discrete choice panel data is a suitable estimator to be used. I address endogeneity using an instrument variable (IV) approach. I show that institutional distance promotes the formation of PTAs. Comparing this effect for North-North, North-South, and South-South country pairs reveals that the positive effect of institutional distance on the probability of PTA formation is specifically high for the formation of North-South PTAs. Furthermore, I find that the effect is nonlinear and that trading contract-intensive goods reinforces the positive effect of institutional distance for the formation of North-South PTAs and may offset negative effects. Robustness checks with regard to the underlying sample reveal that the effect of institutional distance is driven by North-South relationships involving the EU. Essay 3 is dedicated to global investment flows and aims at deriving a global model to determine the factors of foreign direct investment (FDI) by considering investment flows between and within North and South. We empirically estimate and assess global FDI models, namely the gravity and knowledge capital (KK) model, based on the new CDIS data set by the IMF, which includes a large number of developing and transition countries. This allows us to detect potential vertical motives for FDI and to address the global trend of increasing FDI from and to the global South. We find the gravity model to achieve the best theory-consistent out-of-sample prediction, particularly when parameter heterogeneity of South and North FDI is allowed for. Controlling for surrounding market potential is important to recover the horizontal effect of the gravity model. Including institutional, cultural, or financial factors does not improve the model performance distinctly although results for those variables are mostly in line with theory.