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The feminization U, which describes the tendency of female labor force participation (FLFP) to first decline and then rise as per capita income grows, is a well-known “stylized fact” of economic development. Empirical studies have documented this pattern using cross-country, time series, subnational, and, most recently, panel data. Overall, the evidence confirms the existence of a U-shaped relationship between per capita GDP and female labor supply, at least for an important subset of countries. The theoretical literature has also described several mechanisms from which a U-shaped relationship may arise. In particular, the U-curve has been linked to structural change, fertility dynamics, and to variation in the gender gap in education levels along the process of economic development. Some recent contributions have highlighted important heterogeneities in the income path of FLFP: whether each of these three mechanisms is operative depends on initial conditions – specifically, the gender-role cultural norms that prevail as an economy embarks on the process of economic development. Accordingly, the income path of FLFP has been shown to be more or less U-shaped depending on initial conditions.

The Feminisation U describes the tendency of female labour force participation (FLFP) to first decline and then rise in the process of economic development. While the Feminisation U is often presented as a ‘stylised fact’ of development, empirical support for it is mixed. Here, we show that cultural norms inherited from ancestral plough use exert a moderating influence on the shape of the Feminisation U. Specifically, we find a significantly U-shaped path of FLFP only in countries whose ancestors employed a plough-based agricultural technology. The shape of the U-curve becomes progressively more muted as the share of a country's ancestors that practiced plough agriculture decreases. In countries with little or no legacy of historical plough use, the time path of FLFP is effectively flat. This pattern of results is robust to correcting for dynamic panel bias, instrumenting for per-capita income, and controlling for other potential effect modifiers. Our findings are compatible with a nuanced reading of the main theoretical models proposed in the literature to explain the Feminisation U.

In the run-up to elections, self-interested politicians use privatization opportunistically to buy votes and increase their probability of re-election. When state-owned firms are privatized, politicians use (implicit) subsidies to persuade managers to choose inefficient but politically beneficial strategies such as excess employment. Under plausible assumptions, politicians have a strict preference for privatization over state ownership in the run-up to elections. We test these predictions using a unique dataset covering the full population of former socially owned enterprises in post-Milošević Serbia (2002–2019). We report robust conditional correlations consistent with our theory. Privatization sales and revenues increase significantly in pre-election periods. The firms privatized before elections are sold at a lower price, and exhibit higher total costs after privatization, than otherwise similar privatized firms. They also have a higher probability of bankruptcy and, conditional on surviving, achieve lower profitability than otherwise similar privatized firms. These findings highlight the link between privatization, elections and corruption, and point to the need for monitoring, or even suspending, privatization sales during election periods.

The parameters of logit models are typically difficult to interpret, and the applied literature is replete with interpretive and computational mistakes. In this article, I review a menu of options to interpret the results of logistic regressions correctly and effectively using Stata. I consider marginal effects, partial effects, (contrasts of) predictive margins, elasticities, and odds and risk ratios. I also show that interaction terms are typically easier to interpret in practice than implied by the recent literature on this topic.

We use a newly assembled indicator of corruption from Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) to examine the effects of corruption on economic growth. The V-Dem indicator is coded for almost all contemporary and historical polities since the year 1900 and, for some countries, since the French Revolution. This global dataset allows us to exploit long-run, slow-moving variation within countries for identification, circumventing many of the difficulties faced by previous studies based on cross-section data or short panels. We present robust evidence of a negative effect of corruption on steady-state growth. Yet, we find that corruption interacts with political regime type, giving rise to heterogeneous effects. In particular, corruption is found to be significantly more deleterious for growth in democracies than in autocracies. Since corruption tends to be decentralised in democracies and centralised in autocracies, these findings are in line with theories of the ‘industrial organisation’ of corruption. We find little to no evidence that institutional weaknesses along other dimensions (state capacity, regulatory quality, property rights protection) make corruption any less harmful for growth, casting doubt on the thesis that corruption may ‘grease the wheels’ of dysfunctional institutions. Our findings provide a rationale to target anti-corruption efforts to young democracies.

Economists and social scientists have long debated the relative importance of institutions and human capital as fundamental determinants of long-run development. After discussing some of the limitations of the existing literature, we use panel data covering the period 1955-2010 and a novel indicator of property rights protection from Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) to reinvestigate these relationships. We find that both property rights institutions and human capital are positively related to economic growth, although human capital is relatively more robust when we account for country fixed effects. We also investigate whether the growth effects of property rights institutions are heterogeneous across different levels of development. In contrast to the cross-country evidence, our panel data results suggest that broad-based property rights protection clearly and strongly enhances growth only in advanced economies.

Since the late 1990s, aid spending for elections has witnessed a dramatic increase. Yet, we lack a comprehensive evaluation of aid effectiveness in this particular programme area. Here, we investigate the impact of aid on electoral integrity using panel data on purpose-disaggregated aid disbursements and a multi-dimensional index of electoral quality from the Varieties of Democracy project. Based on 502 elections in 126 aid-receiving countries during 2002–2015, we estimate a statistically significant effect of election-support ODA on the integrity of elections. The estimated effect is, however, economically small and not very persistent. In the long run, a permanent increase in aid spending by one million US$ leads to an improvement in electoral quality of 1.4 per cent of a standard deviation on the integrity index. We also find that different dimensions of electoral integrity are variably responsive to donor interventions. Additionally, aid spending for elections is subject to diminishing marginal returns, and is less effective at higher levels of development. These findings underline the difficulty of promoting democratic change in countries with adverse structural conditions. Still, donors may improve the cost-effectiveness of electoral assistance programmes by targeting specific countries and prioritising certain types of intervention.

Using data from a novel representative survey, we examine how corruption affects the performance of industrial-sector firms in Albania and Kosovo, two low-middle-income post-socialist economies in the Western Balkan region. Bribes are costs that firms incur to "grease the wheels" of the bureaucracy and/or to seek rents. Rents, however, may improve firm performance. Thus, to estimate the total effect of corruption, we develop and collect a set of perception-based indicators of both corruption and rents. In addition, we allow both bribery and rents to affect output growth through multiple channels-by influencing the firm's investment and hiring decisions, by affecting total-factor productivity and by modifying the marginal product of factor additions. We find that, in Albania and Kosovo, bribes and rents have both positive and negative effects on firm performance. The net effect of corruption, however, is negative and large and is not fully offset by the beneficial effects of rents.

Using data from 64 countries in Eastern Europe and MENA, I study the long-run effects of Ottoman and socialist rule on the incidence of corruption. To proxy Ottoman legacies, I estimate the length of Ottoman rule across all Ottoman successor states. Conditioning on income per capita, I find a robust adverse effect of both socialist and Ottoman legacies on present day corruption a finding which reconciles two rival accounts of post-socialist corruption from the transition literature. The results are robust to controlling for potential confounders and instrumenting for both per capita income and the length of Ottoman rule. However, the explanatory power of long-run historical determinants of corruption is lower than the contribution of short-run factors. While present day income explains about half of the total variation in corruption across post-socialist countries, Ottoman and socialist legacies jointly account for about one third. Although history does matter, these findings suggest that most of the corruption observed in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Balkans today may not be inherently 'eastern' or socialist. Rather, the data are consistent with an interpretation of corruption predominantly as a manifestation of persistent economic under-development.

We analyze the effects of opportunistic and partisan politics on the licensing of construction activities, which in turn determines the level of housing supply. In line with Political Business Cycle theory, we hypothesize that the municipal incumbent may manipulate the supply of construction permits before (general and local) elections in order to boost economic activity and voter satisfaction, or to accommodate special-interest groups. Our findings, based on time-series data from post-socialist Tirana (Albania), are consistent with opportunistic and partisan incentives’ creating cycle effects in the licensing of construction permits. However, we find that the direction of opportunistic election cycles depends critically on the interaction between the municipal incumbent and the central-level government. Our paper raises important questions about the effects of transition politics on spatial development in post-socialist cities.