BUSCADOR RECOLECTA

This paper disentangles the ethnic drivers of the effect of food-related income shocks on African conflict employing geo-localized information. We consider diversity and political ethnic variables and several conflict definitions. We find that differentiating between organized armed-force and non-organized conflict can be more informative than between factor and output conflict. We show evidence that conflict is driven by the opportunity cost and state capacity mechanisms. Furthermore, ethnic cleavages have a large role in the transmission process of income shocks on organized armed-force conflict; whereas their role in non-organized violence is more limited. The sensitivity to ethnic heterogeneity for producer-price and droughts shocks is much larger than for consumer-price changes., Financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Projects PGC2018-093542-B-I00 and PID2019-111208GB-I00) is gratefully acknowledged.

The goal of this paper is two-fold. First, we reexamine the evidence for the capital-skill complementarity (CSC) and the skill-biased technological change (SBTC) hypotheses at the sectoral level in the US economy for the period 1970–2005. Second, we quantify their effect on the evolution of the wage skill premium. To do so, we estimate a translog model with three production factors (skilled labor, unskilled labor, and capital) for different sets of industry aggregates suggested by the literature. At the aggregated level, we find that both CSC and SBTC explain a substantial part of the observed change in the skill premium. The CSC hypothesis also receives support across sectors, although SBTC often explains a larger part of the premium change. We also find that the relevance of CSC increases with the level of aggregation of the data. Besides, when we disaggregate capital into ICT and non-ICT, our results suggest that often ICT capital is not the primary source of CSC. However, ICT-CSC is the most important driver of the skill premium in specific sectors, such as financial and business services., We would also like to thank the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (under grant PID2019-111208GB-I00) for financial support.

Can oil discovery shocks affect the demand for protectionism? An intertemporal model of Dutch disease indicates that if the tradable sector is politically dominant then an oil discovery can induce protectionism. If the economy is also credit constrained, this effect is intensified upon discovery, but partially reversed when oil revenues start to flow. We test these predictions using 16.2 million, HS-6 level, bilateral tariff rates that cover 5718 products in 155 countries over the period 1988–2012, and data on worldwide discoveries of giant oil and gas fields. Our identification strategy rests on the exogeneity of the timing of discoveries. Our empirical results indicate that an oil discovery increases tariffs during pre-production years and decreases tariffs in the years to follow yet to a lesser extent, most notably in capital scarce economies with a relatively dominant tradable sector. Our baseline estimates indicate that a giant oil field discovery induces a rise of approximately 13% in the average tariff over the course of 10 years; this increase is approximately 2.5 times larger during the pre-production period when the oil discovery represents a pure news shock., Financial support from Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Project PID 2019-111208 GB-I00) is gratefully acknowledged.

This paper assesses the extent to which financial development and informality are related, and how this relation translates into differences in GDP and TFP across countries. To this end, we develop a quantitative life-cycle general equilibrium model of occupational choice with imperfect tax enforcement, in which informal entrepreneurs have no access to credit and face an endogenous probability of being caught for tax evasion. Our quantitative analysis shows that the degree of financial frictions of a country is crucial in shaping the firm’s incentives to evade taxation, a feature that, in the aggregate, results into a non-linear relationship between financial development and both size of informality and GDP per capita. We test these model’s predictions with cross-country data and find supporting evidence in favour of both non-linearities., Luis Franjo and Francesco Turino thank the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad − grant PID2019-111208GB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 − for financial support. Luis Franjo acknowledges financial support from the Cátedra Germán Bernácer.

The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the contribution of land capital to the growth of emissions and income per capita in the long run. We collect new satellite data from the Earth Observatory to obtain estimates of the Enhanced Vegetation Index at the country level for the period 2000–2015. We use these data and the World Bank wealth estimates of natural capital to calibrate and empirically test an extension of the Green Solow model with land degradation and land capital investment. We show that the model is consistent with the cross-country variation in growth rates of carbon emissions per capita and find that there is convergence at the global level, with the contribution of land capital investment to the growth of emissions being negative and significant in all specifications., We gratefully acknowledge partial financial support from the Spanish government and FEDER funds under projects PGC2018-093542-B-I00, PID2019-111208GB-I00, and PID2019-107161GB-C33, from the Generalitat Valenciana under AICO/2019/295, and from the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia under the Project UIDB/04007/2020. Open Access funding provided by the Public University of Navarre.

We explore the economic determinants of individual voting behaviour in five UK electoral cycles during 1992–2014. Using the Understanding Society and the British Household Panel Surveys, we investigate the importance of political sentiments and subjective economic evaluations disentangling persistence of party support and unobserved heterogeneity effects. We estimate joint dynamic tripartite models of party support and egocentric perceptions of current and prospective finances, permitting longitudinal simultaneous determination of perceptions of personal finances and political preferences. The results validate the economic voting hypothesis in cycles adjacent to economic downturns: support for the governing political party is positively related to individual perceptions of own financial well-being. Failing to account for simultaneity and not accounting for dynamics and initial political party support inflate the impact of personal financial evaluations., This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad [ECO2016-77200-P]; the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación [PID2019-111208GB-I00]; and the Generalitat Valenciana [AICO/2019/295].

The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the contribution of land capital to the growth of emissions and income per capita in the long run. We collect new satellite data from the Earth Observatory to obtain estimates of the Enhanced Vegetation Index at the country level for the period 2000-2015. We use these data and the World Bank wealth estimates of natural capital to calibrate and empirically test an extension of the Green Solow model with land degradation and land capital investment. We show that the model is consistent with the cross-country variation in growth rates of carbon emissions per capita and find that there is convergence at the global level, with the contribution of land capital investment to the growth of emissions being negative and significant in all specifications., The authors gratefully acknowledge partial financial support from the Spanish government and FEDER funds
under projects PGC2018-093542-B-I00, PID2019-111208GB-I00, and PID2019-107161GB-C33, from the
Generalitat Valenciana under AICO/2019/295, and from the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia
under the Project UIDB/04007/2020. Open Access funding provided by the Public University of Navarre.