Conference Agenda

We identify the territories in Africa affected by subnational border reforms during 1992-2013 with GIS methods. Using this data, we first show that border reforms correlate with several local political and geographic variables (e. g., ethnic heterogeneity, conflicts, distance to capital). Secondly, we study the local effects of subnational border reforms. Difference-in-differences regressions at the grid-level with luminosity as outcome variable suggest insignificant effects for most countries. Political implications, as proxied by the incidence of conflicts, are also small and heterogeneous. In contrast, indicators of pub- lic goods provision (education, electrification, health) suggest significantly positive effects in several countries. Overall, border reforms appear to be more consequential for public goods delivery than for local economic development or political stability.

This research aims to examine the impact of the institutional factors and tax revenue on firm performance in 63 provinces and cities in Vietnam. The authors select data of the period 2015-2021 and run the regression model using GMM with the population and public investment in localities as instrument variables. The results show positive effects of Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI), Provincial Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Index, labor productivity, and tax revenue on firmperformance, while there is a negative impact of firm investment on performance. There exists a negative interaction effect of PCI and labor productivity on firm performance, which might be due to the lack of policies from the local governmental bodies aiming to enhance the knowledge and skills of the labor force. These results suggest both governmental policymakers and business managers have proper strategies to boost the firm performance in the next period.

We compute government spending efficiency scores via data envelopment analysis. Second, relying on panel data and impulse response approaches, we estimate the effect of decentralization on public sector efficiency and how extreme natural disasters mediate this relationship. The sample covers 36 OECD countries between 2006 and 2019. Our results show that tax revenue decentralization decreases public sector efficiency, while spending decentralization and a regional authority index are positively related to public sector efficiency, both for local projections and panel analysis. For instance, efficiency rises by 10 percent following a spending decentralization shock (reaching over 20 percent after 4 years). Nevertheless, in cases of natural disasters, spending decentralization reduces public sector efficiency. Moreover, extreme natural disasters also deteriorate the negative effect of tax revenue decentralization on public sector efficiency. These results suggest that sub-national discretionary spending and tax revenue responses might be less fruitful when such extreme events occur.

To what extent do economic forecasts for a single country affect expectations at the global level? Designing a large-scale survey experiment among economic experts from over 120 countries, I identify the effect of an information shock about the recession probability in the United States of America on expectations of non-US experts. The results show a large positive effect on the reported recession probability in the host countries of the experts. This has relevant policy implications, as I can show that experts who expect a higher recession probability, are more supportive of increasing global trade integration. This effect is driven by the European Experts, whose host countries have strong trade ties with the United States and potentially seek to diversify those to reduce risk from spillovers.