This article studies the effect of domestic observers deployed to reduce irregularities in voter registration in a new democracy, and in particular, the response of political parties' agents to these observers. Because political parties operate over large areas and party agents may relocate away from observed registration centers, observers may displace rather than deter irregularities. We design and implement a large-scale two-level randomized field experiment in Ghana in 2008 taking into account these spillovers and find evidence for substantial irregularities: the registration increase is smaller in constituencies with observers; within these constituencies with observers, the increase is about one-sixth smaller on average in electoral areas with observers than in those without; but some of the deterred registrations appear to be displaced to nearby electoral areas. The finding of positive spillovers has implications for the measurement of electoral irregularities or analysis of data collected by observers.
We study the effect of entrepreneurial training on enterprise outcomes, in particular whether business training for (potential) entrepreneurs of small-and medium scale enterprises can lead to an increase in the number of business start-ups or an expansion in the size of existing businesses. We study this question by analyzing the results of business training programs that an NGO held in Central America between 2002 and 2005. To deal with endogenous selection into the training program, we exploit the fact that a fixed number of applicants are taken into the training program based on a pre-training score, which creates a discontinuity around which we can compare accepted and rejected applicants and estimate the effect of training with a regression-discontinuity design. We find that receiving business training significantly increases the probability that an applicant to the workshop starts a business or expands an existing business. Thus, entrepreneurial activity such as starting and expanding businesses can be fostered by training. Exploiting the fact that in the last stage the most successful participants of the program receive substantial monetary prizes (between US$ 6,000 and 15,000) we can also provide some experimental evidence that suggests the presence of financial constraints. Finally, we investigate gender differences, and find that females experience a much larger increase in the probability of starting a business if they win the monetary prize than men, suggesting financial constraints may be significantly larger for female entrepreneurs.
Democracies depend on the support of the general population, but little is known about the determinants of this support. We investigated whether support for democracy increases with the length of time spent under the system and whether preferences are thus affected by the political system. Relying on 380,000 individual-level observations from 104 countries over the years 1994 to 2013, and exploiting individual-level variation within a country and a given year in the length of time spent under democracy, we find evidence that political preferences are endogenous. For new democracies, our findings imply that popular support needs time to develop. For example, the effect of around 8.5 more years of democratic experience corresponds to the difference in support for democracy between primary and secondary education.
Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in Are Immigrants More Mobile Than Natives? Evidence from Germany Matthias Schündeln D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E S ABSTRACTAre Immigrants More Mobile Than Natives? Evidence from Germany * Low rates of internal migration in many European countries contribute to the persistence of significant regional labor market differences. To further our understanding of the underlying reasons I study internal migration in Germany, using the Mikrozensus, a very large sample of households living in Germany. The first contribution of this paper is to quantify the low mobility of the German population by estimating the unobserved cost of migration. I then focus on the differences between immigrants and natives, and start by presenting reducedform econometric evidence for the hypothesis that immigrants, once they are in the country of destination, are more mobile than natives. Observable, individual-level characteristics can only explain part of this finding. To estimate differences in the responsiveness to labor market characteristics that are due to unobserved characteristics, I then estimate conditional logit models of the migration decision across the German federal states. I find significantly higher responsiveness to labor market differentials in the immigrant population than in the native population. Unobserved moving costs for immigrants are estimated to be only about 37% of this same cost for natives. The findings bear on the assessment of the economic impact of immigration, and the paper contributes to the current immigration-related policy debates that feature prominently in many European countries, and that likely will continue to be important in light of the ongoing EU expansion and the expected resulting east-west migration.JEL Classification: J61, R23
We analyze the long-term effects of communism on both policies and preferences in Eastern Europe in four areas in which the communist and capitalist doctrines fundamentally differ: government intervention in markets, political freedom, and inequality in incomes and across genders. Macroeconomic indicators related to these areas show convergence of the East to the West. However, residents in the East express less support for democracy and a stronger desire for redistribution, in line with the communist doctrine. Their preferences for the market economy are on average similar to the ones in the West, and their support of female labor force participation is even lower. To establish an effect of communism on preferences, we recur to cohort differences. In all four areas, older cohorts in the East who have lived under communism for a longer time show preferences more in line with communism than younger cohorts, compared to the same cohort gradient in the West.
In order to increase data quality some household surveys visit the respondent households several times to estimate one measure of consumption. For example, in Ghanaian Living Standards Measurement surveys, households are visited up to 10 times over a period of 1 month. I find strong evidence for conditioning effects as a result of this approach: In the Ghanaian data the estimated level of consumption is a function of the number of prior visits, with consumption being highest in the earlier survey visits. Telescoping (perceiving events as being more recent than they are) or seasonality (first‐of‐the‐month effects) cannot explain the observed pattern. To study whether earlier or later survey visits are of higher quality, I employ a strategy based on Benford's law. Results suggest that the consumption data from earlier survey visits are of higher quality than data from later visits. The findings have implications for the value of additional visits in household surveys, and also shed light on possible measurement problems in high‐frequency panels. They add to a recent literature on measurement errors in consumption surveys (Beegle et al., , Gibson et al., ), and complement findings by Zwane et al. () regarding the effect of surveys on subsequent behaviour.
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