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The same capitalism vital to day-to-day wealth creation is even more important at grand scales in a modern technological society. A superior posture from which to boost infrastructure would entail separation of state and economics and a sidelining of the government-centric approach. A course correction is in order.

We study the magnitude and nature of racial disparities in the U.S. small business credit market. Exploiting a unique dataset containing rich loan contract information, including firm and lender characteristics, we document sizable racial differentials in small business lending, measured by loan denial rates and interest rates between black-owned businesses and otherwise observationally identical white-owned businesses. Such racial disparities are most pronounced in areas associated with severe racial bias against blacks. Critically, we show that an exogenous increase in bank competition due to bank deregulation has a quantitatively large effect in reducing racial disparities in small business lending, and such a reduction is primarily driven by entrant banks, as the Becker (1957) theory of racial prejudice predicts.

Most politicians and international organisations advocate for increased regulation and government control of industry in order to handle climate change and reduce overall CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions. However, it remains an open question how economic freedom is associated with environmental damage and whether deregulation is harmful to the environment or incentivises the use of green technology. On one hand, more government control and regulation may force firms and individuals to reduce their emissions. On the other hand, more economic freedom is likely to enable innovation and the adoption of green technological development. In this paper, I therefore combine data on growth in CO2 emissions and GDP per capita with the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World indices in order to test if economic freedom affects emissions. I do so in the context of estimating a standard Environmental Kuznets Curve in which economic freedom can both reduce overall levels as well as shift the shape of the curve. The results suggest that economic freedom reduces overall CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions but also shifts the top point of the Kuznets Curve to the left. Part of this effect may be due to the effect of economic freedom on the adoption of renewable energy.

We develop a two-sector growth model of vertical structure in which the upstream sector features Cournot competition and produces intermediate goods that are used in the downstream sector for the production of final goods. In such a vertical structure, we show that deregulation and increased market competition in the upstream sector does not only increase its own productivity, but also has a substantial spill-over effect on the productivity of the downstream sector through affecting factor prices. We calibrate the model to the Chinese economy and use the calibrated model to quantitatively evaluate the extent to which deregulation in the upstream market in China from 1998 to 2007 accounts for the rapid economic growth over the same period. Our quantitative experiments suggest that deregulation in the upstream market in China from 1998 to 2007 can account for a significant fraction of China’s economic growth during this period partly due to the significant spillover effect it has on the downstream sector. In addition, our model can also match several relevant observations in China during the same period including high and rising returns to capital, declining markups.

While there is growing evidence of persistent or even permanent output losses from financial crises, the causes remain unclear. One candidate is intangible capital – a rising driver of economic growth that, being non-pledgeable as collateral, is vulnerable to financial frictions. By sheltering intangible investment from financial shocks, counter-cyclical macroeconomic policy could strengthen longer-term growth, particularly so where strong product market competition prevents firms from self-financing their investments through rents. Using a rich cross-country firm-level dataset and exploiting heterogeneity in firm-level exposure to the sharp and unforeseen tightening of credit conditions around September 2008, we find strong support for these theoretical predictions. The quantitative implications are large, highlighting a powerful stabilizing role for macroeconomic policy through the intangible investment channel, and its complementarity with pro-competition product market deregulation.

This paper studies whether foreign investment deregulation promotes firm innovation. A theoretical framework, in which the spillover and competition effects from more foreign firms induced by foreign investment deregulation, is built to guide the empirical evaluation. Exploiting the data on Chinese firm-level patents in a difference-in-differences setting, this paper finds a significantly positive impact of foreign investment deregulation on firm innovation. Moreover, this paper finds a robust heterogeneity that the impact is prominent in the firms with high productivity while being not significant in the firms with low productivity.

We empirically investigate the role of credit supply in fertility decisions. Using the U.S. banking deregulation in the 1980s and the 2007–2009 Great Recession as two different laboratories for credit supply shocks, we find that an increase in credit supply consistently implies higher fertility rates, as well as higher probability of giving birth. This relation, which is economically and statistically significant, differs across individuals: it is more pronounced for young women and for families with unemployed husbands. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that increased credit access leads to more optimistic expectations about personal prospects, and in turn, higher fertility rates.

The term neoliberal has been a source of some controversy in recent years, with critics denying its usefulness. In response to those criticisms this paper analyzes neoliberalism--what is here referred to as Neoliberal Financialization--as an economic model, elaborating it and substantially contrasting it with the model that prevailed prior to it, Keynesian Fordism, likewise elaborated here. In doing so this paper contends that Keynesian Fordism stressed a state-managed and sustained output of assembly line-produced consumer durables, substantially through enlarged welfare and warfare states which also kept financialization in check. By contrast Neoliberal Financalization, sees the state retreat from significant areas of economic life (notably the nurturing of industrial development and concessions to social welfare via deregulation, privatization and "austerity"), and unleashes the financial sector Keynesian Fordism kept in check as an engine of growth. Completing the model are "creditism," "globalization" and "digitalization," which have enlarged the resources available for financial activity, broadened and smoothed the field for its operation worldwide, and accelerated and intensified its operations in a distinct, if often problematic, pattern of activity that has produced financialization, and a high stress on speculative activity and global labor cost arbitrage.

In this short Essay, I take the opportunity to highlight one further potential asymmetry that may yet emerge from the Supreme Court’s application of Chevron’s many doctrines. Drawing on then-Judge Kavanaugh’s disdissental from the D.C. Circuit’s decision affirming network neutrality rules, I suggest that there is at least one vote on the Supreme Court—and perhaps more—for an asymmetric approach to the major questions doctrine. Moreover, I demonstrate how asymmetry in this context is deeply irrational. As applied to network neutrality, the asymmetry has at least one of two effects. One, it might simply favor one large industry over another, subjecting one inter-sector wealth transfer to heightened scrutiny, while treating an analogous wealth transfer—in the opposite direction—deferentially. But the judiciary is not typically in the business of favoring one industrial sector over another. Two, it subjects consumer-protection devices to increased regulatory scrutiny, thereby shifting the costs and burdens of overcoming a regulatory default to those entities—consumers—who can likely least afford to bear them. Hence, in more general terms, Justice Kavanaugh’s unbalanced approach to the major questions doctrine tends to undermine many of the values— accountability and expertise, among others—that agency policymaking has long served.

This article examines the downstream sector of the Nigerian oil and gas sector has in recent times, it has being operating at crossroads. With the huge amount of money spent by the Federal Government of Nigeria on subsidizing petroleum products into the country is causing economic dislocation. In remedying this malady, this article examines the policy of the government on total deregulation of the downstream sector from the law and economic perspective. Deregulation is a process of allowing the market forces to be the major determinant of petroleum prices. Law and economics otherwise known as the economic analysis of law is best viewed as a social tool that promotes economic efficiency. This article evaluates the economic efficiency of deregulation in light of existing laws and proposed laws coupled with recent social events. This article reveals arguments for and against deregulation but concludes that the adverse effect of deregulation is not ad infinitum but will bring about self-sufficiency and economic buoyancy.

This paper studies the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on industrial agglomeration.Using the differential effects of FDI deregulation in 2002 in China on different industries, we find that FDI actually affects industrial agglomeration negatively. This result is somewhat counter-intuitive, as the conventional wisdom tends to suggest that FDI attracts domestic firms to cluster for various agglomeration benefits, in particular technology spillovers. To reconcile our empirical findings and the conventional wisdom, we develop a theory of FDI and agglomeration based on two counter-veiling forces. Technology diffusion from FDI attracts domestic firms to cluster, but fiercer competition drives firms away. Which force dominates depends on the scale of the economy. When the economy is sufficiently large, FDI discourages agglomeration. We find various evidence on this competition mechanism.

Exploiting staggered interstate banking deregulation as exogenous shocks to bank geographic expansion, we examine the causal effect of geographic diversification on systemic risk. Using the gravity-deregulation approach, we find that bank geographic diversification leads to higher systemic risk measured by the change in conditional value at risk ($\Delta$CoVaR) and financial integration (Logistic($R^{2}))$. Furthermore, we document that geographic diversification affects systemic risk via its impact on asset similarity. The impact of geographic diversification on systemic risk is stronger in BHCs located in states comoving less with the U.S. aggregate economy.

Do gender pay gaps transform into more covert forms of gender inequity in the labor market? Exploiting divergent industrial responses to U.S. bank deregulation, we document how industrial differences in credit access propel this transformation. This is because in less equitable industries (where we show new entry is limited and incumbents increase R&D investments), credit increases rents, which disproportionately benefit male workers. In response, equitable industries (where we show credit increases competition) shift labor demand towards women. These divergent industrial responses in net reduce the gap, but also exacerbate sorting across industries, accentuate workplace gender bias, and make female wages vulnerable to credit contractions. Gender inequities, thus, transform rather than disappear.

Using an exogenous variation in entry barriers, we develop and test a theory of wage inequality due to higher levels of startup entry. Researchers have argued that startups generate greater inequality in the labor market because new ventures lead to a higher within- and between-firm dispersion of wages. We propose an alternative explanation: a competitive response of incumbent firms to the threat of talent loss. When threatened by startup entry, incumbents will reallocate rewards among their own workers to prevent the loss of valuable employees to newly founded firms, thus generating greater wage inequality. We exploit a natural experiment provided by deregulation in Portugal and its effect on wage inequality between 1995 and 2009. Using a difference-in-differences methodology we find that, following an exogenous rise in the threat of startup entry, wage inequality increased. This threat further resulted in wider disparities in wages between high and low earners, as the former experienced greater increases in their bargaining power than the latter. Finally, increases in wage inequality inside incumbent firms were amplified in industries with higher rates of mobility to startups and greater human-capital intensity.

We examine the effects of geographic deregulation on banks’ cost of equity (COE) using changes in interstate bank branching laws over the post–Riegle-Neal period (1994:Q4–2016:Q4). We find strong evidence that deregulation increases banks’ COE. This is driven primarily by active acquirers, rather than those subject to increased competition from these acquirers. We identify higher risk-taking as an important channel for these findings. The results support our new acquisitions–fragility view, rather than the traditional competition–fragility view. Results are robust to instrumental variables, accounting for secular trends, and alternative explanations.

The role of financial crises in boosting populism has been well documented. Yet the specific mechanisms through which this occurs remain elusive. This paper studies how populist candidacies were fueled by a public financial scandal, triggered by market volatility and financial deregulation. Using an instrumental variable strategy, we exploit the leak of a list of French municipalities which contracted “toxic” loans prior to the crisis as a source of identification. During the subsequent municipal elections, we show that i) populist parties were the main political parties experiencing an increase in vote share, while the incumbent’s political party was electorally punished, ii) both far-right and far-left populist candidacies were more likely in municipalities affected by the scandal, leading to a rise in electoral competition, iii) for the populist far-right, these results were stronger in economically fragile municipalities and in cities with a higher growth of the immigrant population. Importantly, the findings are not driven by the economic aftermath of the scandal and suggest that public finance mismanagement disclosure contributes by itself to the rise of populism during financial crises.

A key issue in the finance-growth nexus literature is endogeneity – economic growth may drive finance as well as finance driving growth. Some research addresses endogeneity using relatively exogenous shocks from U.S. bank geographic deregulation, often documenting favorable economic effects. We connect deregulation shocks for the first time to individual firm growth in a model that differentiates sources of external financing – short-term debt, long-term debt, and equity. Our results suggest that deregulation increases firm growth overall and this growth is fueled by all three external funding sources. However, benefits accrue only to relatively financially unconstrained firms, while relatively constrained firms lose.

We propose a method to estimate the effect of firm policies (e.g., bankruptcy laws or subsidized credit) on allocative efficiency using (quasi-) experimental evidence. Our approach takes general equilibrium effects into account and requires neither a structural estimation nor a precise assumption on how the experiment affects firms. Our aggregation formula relies on treatment effects of the policy on the distribution of output-to-capital ratios, which are easily estimated in (quasi-) experimental data. We show that this method is valid as long as the true data-generating process belongs to a large class of commonly-used models in macro-finance. Finally, we apply this method to the French banking deregulation episode of the mid-1980s and find that this reform led to an increase in aggregate TFP of 2.7%.

Economists recommend to partly redistribute gains to losers from a structural reform, which in many cases may be required for making the reform politically viable. However, taxation is distortionary. Then, it is unclear that compensatory transfers can support a Pareto-improving reform. This paper provides sufficient conditions for this to occur, despite tax distortions. I consider an economy where workers have sector-specific skills and some sectors are regulated by a price floor. Transfers have to be financed by proportional taxation on firms revenues or, equivalently, labor income. Labor supply is elastic to net post-tax real wages, and hence reduced by taxation. In a setting where preferences are isoelastic, deregulation is implementable in a Pareto- improving way through compensatory lump-sum transfers, despite that these are financed by distortionary taxes. In a more general setting, there always exist Pareto-improving reforms but they may involved tightening regulation for some goods. I provide sufficient conditions for deregulation, i.e. a general reduction in price floors, to be Pareto-improving. They imply that demand cross-price elasticities should not be too large and that the reform should not be too unbalanced. Finally, I consider counter-examples where some people earn rents associated with informational or institutional frictions. In such situations, Pareto improvements are unlikely. If losers have veto power, the reform may only be supported by a minority of people. Broadening reform scope is especially useful to raise its political support when its impact is uneven across consumers.

We show that firms with more short-term institutional investors have better long-term performance in dynamic economic environments. Following exogenous increases in competitive pressure due to large cuts of import tariff rates, firms with more short-term investors achieve higher growth rates of sales and employees in comparison to other firms in the industries affected by the tariff cuts. To do so, these firms invest more in fixed assets, R&D, and advertising, and differentiate their products from those of the competitors. Firms with more short-term investors also conduct more diversifying acquisitions and have higher executive turnover in the aftermath of large tariff cuts, suggesting that they put stronger effort in adapting their business to the new competitive environment. These results are not specific to tariff cuts but also robust to increases in competitive pressure due to deregulation shocks. Our findings suggest that firms with more short-horizon investors adapt more promptly to changing economic environments and highlight a potential benefit of short-horizon investors.

2017 year-end positive results, particularly real GDP growth recovery, fixed investment growth, reflected largely the termination of the cyclical downswing phase for the Russian economy. However, structural and external factors in 2018 will not be able to shore up economic growth. To ensure a sustainable economic growth, a new government should be focused more on structural reforms including a fiscal manoeuvre, denationalization of the economy and deregulation of foreign economic activities.

Deregulation of major industries over the past 40 years has produced large efficiency gains. However, distributional effects have been more difficult to assess. In the electricity sector, deregulation has vastly increased information available to market participants through the formation of wholesale markets. We test whether upstream suppliers, specifically railroads that transport coal from mines to power plants, use this information to capture economic rents that would otherwise accrue to electricity generators. We find railroads charge higher markups when rents are larger. This effect is larger for deregulated plants, highlighting an important distributional impact of deregulation. (JEL L11, L51, Q48)

We develop a model of sluggish firm entry to explain short-run labor responses to technology shocks. We show that the labor response to technology and its persistence depend on the degree of returns to labor and the rate of firm entry. Existing empirical results support our theory based on short-run labor responses across US industries. We derive closed-form transition paths that show the result occurs because labor adjusts instantaneously whilst firms are sluggish, and closed-form eigenvalues show that stricter entry regulation results in slower convergence to steady state. Finally we show that our theoretical results hold in a quantitative model with capital accumulation and interest rate dynamics.

Using a dataset on career paths of elite U.S. engineers, including superstar entrepreneurs, we examine the effect of early career choices on long-run entrepreneurial outcomes. Exploiting exogenous variation in entry labor market conditions, driven by local financial sector growth, and comparing classmates in the same school-major-year, we find that talented engineers are more likely to switch from engineering jobs to finance in high finance growth areas. Compared to classmates who remain in engineering, these individuals create fewer startups that are large employers, receive VC funding, are acquired, and issue patents. A quasi-experimental design using state-wise banking deregulation produces similar results.

Financial regulatory policy in the U.S. has been conspicuously pro-cyclical over the last two decades. The 2000s financial boom coincided with a period of financial deregulation and the post-crisis response, a massive scaling up of regulation, was largely implemented during an economic downturn. Many argued that these regulatory waves were excessive. More recently, there are strong signs of a move toward deregulation, at a time of a booming economy and stock market. A closer look at historical financial boom-bust cycles suggests that, in fact, pro-cyclicality in financial regulation is a common and recurring pattern. This paper combines a signaling model of elections with a simple financial regulation model to study how public opinion, financial innovation, and policy-makers incentives shape financial regulation. While changes in voters' perceptions of financial innovation alone can generate a pro-cyclical pattern, we show that this cyclicality can be significantly amplified by politicians' electoral incentives: Both over-regulation and under-regulation can naturally arise in equilibrium, and small changes in public opinion can induce large regulatory shifts.

This paper studies the impact of geographic banking restrictions on monetary policy transmission. Exploiting the staggered deregulation of U.S. banking from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, we find that interstate deregulation signifi cantly increased the responsiveness of bank lending to monetary shocks. This effect occurred primarily for small and illiquid banks, pointing to a strengthening of the bank lending channel. Changes in bank market structure and loan portfolio composition are unlikely to explain the effect of deregulation. This instead reflects a reduced propensity of small banks affiliated with complex holding companies to insulate borrowers from monetary contractions.

European societies are once more in the grip of the kind of identity politics that decades of carefully constructed economic relationships were supposed to obviate. This paper argues that if the EU is ill-equipped to meet this challenge, it is not so much because of its bias in favor of deregulation, as leftist critics contend, but because the only tools at its disposal for doing so are of an economic nature. For this reason, it is unclear whether an alternative, social democratic model of supranationalism would do much resolve the discontents of identity politics. In fact, since such a project would require vesting the EU with even greater power and fiscal capacity, it is likely to have the opposite effect, at least in the near term.

Using the staggered and reciprocal passage of interstate bank deregulation as an exogenous variation in the degree of bank integration, we investigate how and why bank integration influences the market for corporate control for nonfinancial firms. We posit that bank integration affects acquisitions either through reducing the information asymmetry between acquirers and targets or through increasing credit supply. Our evidence is more consistent with the former channel. Specifically, we document that (1) cross-state acquisitions are more likely to occur between reciprocally deregulated states, and (2) firms are more likely taken over by out-of-state acquirers after deregulation; this effect is stronger for a target who borrows from an out-of-state bank, whose local bank is acquired by an out-of-state bank, and who is informationally more opaque. Announcement returns for acquirers of out-of-state (particularly private) targets increase after deregulation, consistent with better identification of higher-valued targets by acquirers after deregulation. This paper was accepted by Tomasz Piskorski, finance.

Graduating high school improves wellbeing. It is important to understand how policy affects high school graduation. This paper studies the impact of bank branching deregulation on high school graduation. The use of National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 geocoded data focuses the results on three deregulations: Ohio in 1979, Connecticut in 1980, and Alabama in 1981. Discontinuities in treatment assignment at borders between deregulated states and regulated states identify the effect of banking deregulation on high school graduation. Results indicate significant increases in the likelihood of high school graduation for treated individuals. Analysis provides evidence of heterogeneous effects of bank branching deregulation based on skill level and income level.

Notwithstanding low capital investment requirements and a market structure that otherwise allows many thousands of competitors in big markets, taxis have long been treated as a regulated industry, with the same legal constraints as once applied to railroads, airlines, telecoms, electric, and other utilities. Now, Uber and other ridesharing services are upsetting that regulatory system, much as the competitive entry of Southwest Airlines or MCI upset the premises of regulation in their markets. This paper discusses the economic reasons that taxi markets were regulated as common carriers, with limited entry, rate regulation, and universal service obligations. And this paper explains how ride-sharing services change the market structure without creating the fear of a persistent new monopoly. Drawing on prior deregulatory practice, the paper then provides a roadmap for managing the transformation of “ride markets”: separate safety from economic regulation; ensure competitive neutrality; make universal service subsidies explicit; manage externalities directly; and reject claims from incumbents that their lost value somehow requires compensation.

This investigation uses a unique data base that combines government effectiveness and regulatory quality indices from the World Development Indicators, to represent deregulation towards more market-driven incentives in renewable energy dissemination and production, and how such efforts are triggered by new regulatory change. We use panel data analysis and control for the dynamics of solar-pv and wind output in a set of 34 developed and developing countries. The panel data analysis reveals a strong and significant effect for both wind and recent solar-pv efforts to increase their presence in most of the countries analyzed, although with some asymmetries. Positive government effectiveness and regulatory quality explain the dynamics. We test for robustness also with data from the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, on market concentration of incumbent utilities.

Credit supply expansion can affect an economy by increasing productive capacity or by boosting household demand. This study develops an empirical test to determine whether the household demand channel of credit supply expansion is present, and it implements the test using both a natural experiment in the United States in the 1980s based on banking deregulation and an international panel of 56 countries over the last several decades. Consistent with the importance of the household demand channel, credit supply expansion boosts non-tradable sector employment and the price of non-tradable goods, with limited effects on tradable sector employment. Such credit expansions amplify the business cycle, leading to more severe recessions.

Regulation magazine celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, which is also roughly the anniversary of the beginning of the deregulation era in federal domestic policy. This article reviews the history of the rise of federal regulation in the United States, the intellectual and political reasons for deregulation, and the subsequent expansion of federal regulation so far in the 21st century. It concludes with a discussion of what antecedents might produce a second wave of deregulation.

This paper utilizes variation in timing of deregulation to investigate the relationship between bank branching deregulation and educational outcomes for individuals in 39 states over the period 1977 - 1999. In order to investigate the labor market channel, this paper focuses on the relationship between deregulation and high school graduation, as opposed to recent studies focusing on the relationship between deregulation and college attendance via the credit market channel. Results indicate increases in the likelihood of graduating high school after deregulation. Results also suggest heterogeneity in effects due to race and age at deregulation. Finally, models testing the relationship between bank deregulation and post-secondary education outcomes generate similar results to findings from previous studies.

This paper studies the impact of changing tuition on students' preferences for college degrees. In particular, it analyzes the selective tuition policy changes for certain degrees in Australia in the 2000s. Using a logit discrete choice model, I find that while tuition increases discouraged students from choosing those degrees, the effect was small as the estimated price elasticity of students' preferences is low. The estimated responses are however heterogeneous across income groups; students in the lower socioeconomic groups are more responsive to tuition changes.

Over the past four decades, across the OECD countries and beyond, we observe a simultaneous increase (a) in the number, the budgets and the staffing of regulatory agencies, as well as the number of regulations, and (b) of economic liberalization, as measured by economic freedom and doing business indices. This is the “freer markets, more rules” or “more capitalism, more regulations” puzzle. This puzzle provides a window into the underlining mechanisms behind the complex regulatory developments in advanced democracies and transition economies, showcasing both some convergence trends and some diversity of the regulatory national patterns. Before the recent post-financial crisis backlash, the neoliberal agenda of privatization and deregulation seems to have happened in a roundabout manner as a side-effect of regulatory capitalism, rather than by implementing the policy and institutional recommendations of authors like Hayek, Friedman, and Buchanan. Three common hypotheses about “neoliberalism” don’t work very well: pro-market ideology as a driver of policy, rent-seeking in favor of deregulation, and markets outpacing attempts at government regulation. Two other hypotheses provide better insight: a heterogeneous regulatory environment allows private firms to engage in regulatory arbitrage, and political entrepreneurs under public finance constraints look for novel ways of obtaining tax revenues. The emerging picture provides a serious challenge to both critics and supporters of neoliberalism.

The study looks at the impact of price of petroleum prices on inflation in the Ghanaian economy in the pre and post deregulation era and associated direction of causality as well as the extent of pass through of high international petroleum products price to the domestic retail market. An ARDL model was applied on time series monthly data of various petroleum fuel prices as well as exchange rate. A pass-through formula use by Baig et al, (2007) was also applied. The results reveal that changes in LPG, Kerosene and premium prices have marginal impact on inflation. The pass through analysis revealed Ghana has not pass through more than 50% of increase price of international or import petroleum product of gasoline, kerosene and LPG to the ordinary consumers in the period of the study and this was lower in the post deregulation than pre deregulation. The study therefore recommends full deregulation to continue since it favours lower pass through of fuel price increase in the world market to ordinary consumers whiles may consider gasoline and premium price increase at the expense of kerosene and liquefied petroleum gas price if inflation is to be shielded from fuel price increase.

Empirical support for the purported benefits of retail electric deregulation is mixed at best. Prior studies that identify states as simply “retail deregulated” overlook complex policy environments in which deregulation is implemented by regulators with a high degree of discretion. Prior studies also rely on Energy Information Administration data that do not account for core regulatory interventions that can take place during the process of implementing deregulation. Using robust time series household final bill survey data from the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, this article provides a quasi-experimental analysis of the price impacts of retail electric restructuring in Ohio. The results suggest that residential electricity prices have increased following retail restructuring in all service territories in Ohio, with significant favourable welfare effects observed only in the Cincinnati area, where key policy implementation stages were not circumvented.

The severity of impact of crude oil price shocks on the macro economy of an oil importing country are thought to be moderated by regulating domestic prices of petroleum products. India has adopted a deregulated regime of pricing of bulk purchases of diesel in January 2013 moving away from a controlled and subsidised pricing system. This paper investigates how this change has affected (A) the influence of crude price changes in determining diesel prices in India using an ARDL framework and (B) the severity of impact of international crude oil price changes on the macro economy of India using a SVAR framework. Based on monthly data between 2004 April and 2017 February, we find that in the post deregulation phase (1) diesel prices are influenced by crude oil prices much more than before; (2) the intensity of impact of crude oil price changes on inflation has increased; (3) the response of monetary policy to crude oil price changes have become statistically insignificant. We also find that the impact of crude price changes on output has always been insignificant.

This paper investigates the competitive conditions and revenues drivers of commercial banks in MENA region in the context of Panzar-Rosse model. It is the first study of its kind that examines a large sample of MENA banks for an extensive period (1999-2012) during an era of political and economic unrest and transformation that includes the 2007 global crisis, providing the ability to draw reliable conclusions. We find that MENA banks operate under monopolistic competition. Our findings indicate that policies that favoured relaxing capital adequacy requirements, decreasing state role and mergers are not empirically justified for MENA banks during this period.

How did the deregulation of U.S. bank activities affect the patterns of cross-border lending to emerging economies? Unlike bank lending from Europe or Japan, U.S. bank lending to emerging economies exhibited increasing volatility over time. Using U.S. cross-border bank exposure data, this study identifies a temporal association between important deregulation initiatives and the volatility of U.S. bank emerging market lending. This association is explained by the linkages between an important outcome of bank deregulation－earnings volatility from diversified bank activities－and the rising volatility. Together, it argues that U.S. banking deregulation had unanticipated effects of exacerbating the volatility of bank lending to emerging economies.

Electricity price forecasting has become a crucial element for both private and public decision-making. This importance has been growing since the wave of deregulation and liberalization of energy sector worldwide late 1990s. Given these facts, this paper tries to come up with a precise and flexible forecasting model for the wholesale electricity price at the Italian market on an hourly basis. We utilize artificial intelligence models such as neural networks and bagged regression trees that are rarely used to forecast electricity prices. After model calibration, our final model is bagged regression trees with exogenous variables. The selected model outperformed neural network and bagged regression with single price used in this paper, it also outperformed other statistical and non-statistical models used in other studies. As a policy implication, this model might be used by energy traders, transmission system operators and energy regulators for an enhanced decision-making process.

As poverty is a multidimensional phenomenon and is not easy to be confined within any definitive parameters. If we really tend to send the word poverty back to dictionary it will take more than creating employment opportunities for poor people. Poverty eradication needs both short and long term strategic interventions; policies regarding employment opportunities should also be planned in such way. As an economic strategy, deregulation targets to eliminate the regulating authorities of labour market and decrease the interference of legal aspects within the relationship between companies and individual personnel to a minimum level with a massive decline in the instances of collective bargaining. Labour market deregulation creates ample employment opportunities for poor people especially women. This paper looks for an effective and efficient way to alleviate poverty between decent job creation and the development of micro-enterprises with a sketch of possibilities and vulnerabilities of both approaches and a comparative approach to find the best possible way within these two to remove poverty’s shadow from humankind.

Analysis of recent updates to the Russian privatization legislation in 2015 allows saying that the 2015 amendments as a whole aim to boost the process of privatization. The suggested enhancements for the information system of privatization of government-owned and municipal property and for the mechanism of selling such property are intended to render the entire privatization process more transparent while counteracting occurrences of corruption and criminality. It has not gone unnoticed that the practice of narrowing the scope of the privatization legislation continues. Since the legislation came into force late in 2001, the number of property categories whose disposal goes beyond the scope of the provisions thereof has nearly doubled (to 20 from 11), some of which have been given a broader interpretation. The next few years will show what kind of effect the potential of the foregoing amendments has on the effectiveness of this process, bearing in mind the contribution to meeting the federal budget deficit and generating budget revenues at other levels of public authority.

This paper provides a quantitative evaluation of the macroeconomic, distributional, and fiscal effects of three reform proposals for Germany: i) a reduction in the social security tax in the low-wage sector, ii) a publicly financed expansion of full-day child care and full-day schooling, and iii) the further deregulation of the professional services sector. The analysis is based on a macroeconomic model with physical capital, human capital, job search, and household heterogeneity. All three reforms have positive short-run and long-run effects on employment, wages, and output. The quantitative effects of the deregulation reform are relatively small due to the smal size of professional services in Germany. Policy reforms i) and ii) have substantial macroeconomic effects and positive distributional consequences. Ten years after implementation, reforms i) and ii) taken together increase employment by 1.6 percent, potential output by 1.5 percent, real hourly pre-tax wages in the low-wage sector by 3 percent, and real hourly pre-tax wages of women with children by 2.7 percent. The two reforms create fiscal deficits in the short run, but they also generate substantial fiscal surpluses in the long-run. They are fiscally efficient in the sense that the present value of short-term fiscal deficits and long-term surpluses is positive for any interest (discount) rate less than 9 percent.

The urban labor market in Latin America has been assessed through a set of traditional typologies: formal-informal and wage labor-self-employed. In recent decades these approaches seem extensively criticized and overstretched by the successive waves of deregulation, incapable of analyzing the mutation of social practices. In this context, the quality of employment concept (QoE) appears as a multidimensional instrument that can break these representations. In this paper we offer an adapted methodology to construct a QoE index with the MCA method. This indicator shows its relevance by demonstrating that quality is not necessarily where you would expect on the Bogota’s urban labor market in 2013. Indeed, more than 25% and 41% of very low quality jobs are respectively formal and employees, and some social differences appear between workers in the different levels of QoE.

Recent research maintains that the observed variation in productivity within industries reflects resource misallocation and concludes that large GDP gains may be obtained from market-liberalizing polices. Our theoretical analysis examines the impact on productivity dispersion of reallocation frictions in the form of costs of entry, operation, and restructuring, and shows that reforms reducing these frictions may raise dispersion of productivity across firms. The model does not imply a negative relationship between aggregate productivity and productivity dispersion. Our empirical analysis focuses on episodes of liberalizing policy reforms in the U.S. and six East European transition economies. Deregulation of U.S. telecommunications equipment manufacturing is associated with increased, not reduced, productivity dispersion, and every transition economy in our sample shows a sharp rise in dispersion after liberalization. Productivity dispersion under central planning is similar to that in the U.S., and it rises faster in countries adopting faster paces of liberalization. Lagged productivity dispersion predicts higher future productivity growth. The analysis suggests there is no simple relationship between the policy environment and productivity dispersion.

In the last 25 years, there has been a significant, global renovation of telecommunications regulation as countries around the world have opened telecommunications markets to competition. This present regulatory era can be described as “Regulation 3.0.” This is the world after monopoly regulation (Regulation 1.0) and market opening measures including privatization, liberalization and interconnection and unbundling (Regulation 2.0). This paper asks what “Enforcement 3.0” should look like in an Internet world, with less regulation, less market power, and more of a focus on investment and innovation. In an Internet economy, business models, services and technologies are evolving quickly and in unforeseen ways and governing rules may be unclear, new or non-existent. In such an environment, dialogue with the regulator will be an essential feature of the new enforcement paradigm. John Braithwaite is well known for his articulation of a restorative justice “enforcement pyramid.” Variations of the enforcement pyramid have been implemented in practice by sophisticated regulators around the world, including within the context of telecommunications. A key to restorative justice is dialogue between regulators and industry. In this paper we argue that there is a gap in the literature between the development of restorative justice dialogue and the institutional framework which must accompany such dialogue. We attempt to contribute to the shaping of Enforcement 3.0 by drawing a link between restorative justice pyramids and the institutional frameworks and practices that will best permit and promote positive dialogue with regulators.

Regarding the causes of the Sewol ferry accident that claimed 304 lives in April 2014, some scholars have blamed neoliberal reforms such as deregulation and privatization for the safety regulatory failure. Others have highlighted the role of industry influence and corruption. Our analysis shows that regulatory capture was the crucial causal factor; moreover, this capture was institutionalized from the state-corporatist arrangements of the authoritarian period rather than reflecting new arrangements under the democratic era or corruption per se. The delegation of the critical safety regulation enforcement to the shipping industry association was not introduced as a neoliberal reform but in the context of state corporatism of the Park Chung-hee regime. Democratic governments continued to protect the monopoly of the lucrative Incheon–Jeju ferry business, contrary to neoliberal logic. The legacies of state corporatism persist despite post-financial crisis reform.