Political regimes and deaths in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic

This article provides a quantitative examination of the link between political institutions and deaths during the first 100 days of the COVID-19 pandemic. We demonstrate that countries with more democratic political institutions experienced deaths on a larger per capita scale than less democratic countries. The result is robust to the inclusion of many relevant controls, a battery of estimation techniques and estimation with instrumental variables for the institutional measures. Additionally, we examine the extent to which COVID-19 deaths were impacted heterogeneously by policy responses across types of political institutions. Policy responses in democracies were less effective in reducing deaths in the early stages of the crisis. The results imply that democratic political institutions may have a disadvantage in responding quickly to pandemics.

The statist neo-institutionalism of Acemoglu and Robinson

In a long review of Acemoglu and Robinson’s 2019 The Narrow Corridor McCloskey praises their scholarship but criticizes their relentless statism—their enthusiasts for a bigger and bigger Stato, so long as it is somehow “caged.” Their case is mechanical, materialist, and structuralist, none of which is a good guide to history or politics. Their theory of social causation mixes up necessary with sufficient conditions, though they are not unusual among political scientists an economists in doing so. They downplay the role of ideas, which after all made the modern world through liberalism. They recognize how dangerous the modern “capable” state can be, what they call The Leviathan, after Hobbes. But their construal of “liBerty” is the provision of goodies to children by a beneficent Leviathan. It is not the adultism that in fact made the modern world of massive enrichment and true liberty. Their vision is deeply illiberal, and mistaken as science.

The impact of publications in core public choice journals: an analysis of institution rankings

This study examines the impact of research published in the two core public choice journals – Public Choice and the Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice – during the five-year period from 2010 through 2014. Scholars representing almost 400 universities contributed impactful research to these journals over this period, allowing us to rank institutions on the basis of citations to this published research. Our work indicates that public choice scholarship emanating from non-US colleges and universities has surged, with the University of Göttingen, University of Linz, Heidelburg University, University of Oxford, University of Konstanz, Aarhus University, University of Groningen, Paderborn University, University of Minho and University of Cambridge occupying ten of the top 15 positions in our worldwide ranking. Even so, US-based institutions still maintain a lofty presence, with Georgetown University, Emory University, the University of Illinois and George Mason University each holding positions among the top five institutions worldwide.

Larger polities are more regulated

Using a variety of novel data sources from the RegData project, we show that population levels and the amount of regulation are highly correlated across countries and time, and that more-populated US states, Australian states and Canadian provinces tend to be more heavily regulated than less-populated states and provinces. A doubling of population size is associated with a 22 to 33 per cent increase in regulation. This provides support for the theory that the fixed costs associated with regulating partly determine where and when regulations occur.

Debundling accountability: prosecutor and public defender elections in Florida

I explore the impact of public defender and prosecutor elections using caseload data from Florida. While most states within the US use popular elections to select and retain prosecutors, public defenders are typically appointed positions. Florida is novel in that for both positions, popular, partisan elections are used to select the office’s leader. I first document important distortions in pre-trial case handling. A public defender re-election is associated with an increase in the proportion of cases resolved via plea bargaining, while prosecutor re-elections are associated with less plea bargaining. At the trial phase, I present evidence that public defender re-elections are associated with a decrease in the proportion of jury trials that result in a conviction, while a prosecutor re-election coincides with an increase in the conviction rate. The results are consistent with voters holding both elected officials accountable for doing their job. Public defenders obtain plea bargains at a higher rate and secure acquittals for their clients when up for re-election. Prosecutors do not plea bargain as much and win at trial when up for re-election.

Is social capital underproduced?

Is social capital likely to be underproduced without state action? Where previous analysts have typically argued that social capital is a public good and, therefore, needs government action to be produced at an optimal level, we argue that social capital is not a public good because though often non-rivalrous, it is almost always excludable. As such, social capital is more appropriately conceived of as a club good. Further, we argue that governments are not likely to be in a position to improve a society’s social capital due to epistemic limits and the complexity of social capital. Finally, we argue that rather than a state solution, solutions to social capital-related problems are best solved through a bottom-up process. As we demonstrate throughout, this has implications for how we understand community resilience in the wake of disasters. The key role that social capital plays in facilitating community rebound after disasters has been widely acknowledged. If social capital is a public good, then policymakers could be justified in focusing on cultivating social capital as a strategy for promoting community resilience. If social capital is a club good and there are limits to top-down strategies for creating social capital, however, then social capital creation is not an available policy lever.

Tax policy and charitable giving: an evaluation of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act 2017 and its impact on charitable contributions

Studies of how the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act 2017 will affect charitable giving narrowly focus on the increase in the standard deduction. Based on these studies, the media and policy analysts warned that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would lead to a sharp decrease in charitable giving. However, these predictions did not fully account for some of the nuances in the tax code and the political economy of changes to tax policy. We explain that a richer analysis includes the political response of interest groups. Tax provisions other than changes to the standard deduction, such as an increase in the adjusted gross income limit, mean that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act may change the composition of giving but that it is unlikely to have a large impact on overall giving. To supplement our analytical narrative, we present statistics on the pattern of charitable giving and estimate a predictive autoregressive model of overall charitable giving. The results show that the change in giving after the implementation of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act cannot be distinguished from zero. We conclude that misleading interpretations about the effect of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on overall charitable giving are due to the omission of political economy from the analysis.

Rightly blamed the ‘bad guy’? Grandparental childcare and COVID-19

This study explores the link between regular grandparental childcare and SARS-CoV-2 infection rates at the level of German counties. In our analysis, we suggest that a region’s infection rates are shaped by region-, household- and individual-specific parameters. We extensively draw on the latter, exploring the intra- and extra-familial mechanisms fuelling individual contact frequency to test the potential role of regular grandparental childcare in explaining overall infection rates. We combine aggregate survey data with local administrative data for German counties and find a positive correlation between the frequency of regular grandparental childcare and local SARS-CoV-2 infection rates. However, the statistical significance of this relationship breaks down as soon as potentially confounding factors, in particular, the local Catholic population share, are controlled for. Our findings do not provide valid support for a significant role of grandparental childcare in driving SARS-CoV-2 infections, but rather suggest that the frequency of extra-familial contacts driven by religious communities might be a more relevant channel in this context. Our results cast doubt on simplistic narratives postulating a link between intergenerational contacts and infection rates.

Intertemporal substitution in labour supply and tax revenue use

This article examines the response of work effort to changes in wage and/or tax rates when (1) no part of the taxes returns back to taxpaying workers, but when a part goes back (2) through the provision of a pure public good or (3) through transfer payments. The work-effort ratio is found to be higher in a Leviathan state, but the comparison between the two other tax-use regimes is uncertain. The response of the effort ratio to a change in the wage ratio follows the same pattern, while this response is weakened by a change in the current tax rate and strengthened by a change in the future tax rate, regardless not only of the use of tax revenue, but also of its change over time. In the case of change, the comparison of effort ratios is clear only when the change prompts them to move in the same direction. Corollaries related to tax evasion point to the irrelevance of tax benefits for labour supply decisions.

Adam Smith and the problem of unintended consequences

Over the years, libraries have accumulated an enormous number of books concerning the work of Adam Smith. Yet, research covering the methodology adopted by the great Scot occupies very little space. This is probably due to the fact that, while Smith was an all-round scholar, specialisation in research activity has progressively reduced the scope of knowledge of each of us. It is therefore rare to find one researcher covering Smith’s entire opus. If, however, we manage to overcome the barriers of specialisation, it is possible to perceive a common denominator that holds the various phases of Smith’s activity together. This denominator is methodological in nature. From his History of astronomy, Smith set himself the problem of the unintended consequences of intentional human actions. He understood that looking at everything that happens as a direct outcome of human will or divine will prevents us from seeing that there is a ‘third person’ that we must take into account: social interaction – that is to say, the process of co-adaptation of individual plans from which, without any design on our part, our rules and institutions are born. Attention to unintended consequences is present in every one of Smith’s works, and it touches on topics ranging from the origin of moral rules to the formation of the self, and from social cooperation to the delimitation of the sphere of intervention of public power.