Papers by Per Fredriksson
This paper establishes that the timing and duration of colonization by the Western European power... more This paper establishes that the timing and duration of colonization by the Western European powers were strongly influenced by regional agro-ecological factors. In particular, a recently constructed measure of the potential average crop yield is shown to have a robust effect on both the timing and duration of colonization. Areas with more fertile soils tended to be colonized earlier and subject to colonization for a longer time period. The results are consistent with historical evidence which indicates that the quest for new territories was driven by a strong incentive to produce sugar, tea, timber, and other commodities, and by settlers’ interest in becoming self-sufficient in food. Our findings are robust to the inclusion of multiple indicators of early development, geographical and ecological conditions, to selection issues, and to utilizing the Cox stratified proportional hazard model. Moreover, the results remain robust when a grid-cell level analysis is utilized, suggesting th...
This paper proposes that ancestral use of irrigation reduces contemporary female labor force part... more This paper proposes that ancestral use of irrigation reduces contemporary female labor force participation and female property rights. We test this hypothesis using an exogenous measure of irrigation and data from the Afrobarometer, cross-country data, the European Social Survey, the American Community Survey, and the India Demographic and Household Survey. Our hypothesis receives considerable empirical support. We find negative associations between ancestral irrigation and actual female labor force participation, and attitudes to such participation, in contemporary African and Indian populations, 2nd generation European immigrants, 1.5 and 2nd generation US immigrants, and in cross-country data. Moreover, ancestral irrigation is negatively associated with attitudes to female property rights in Africa and with measures of such rights across countries. Our estimates are robust to a host of control variables and alternative specifications. We propose multiple potential partial mechani...
Journal of Banking & Finance, 2018
A country's cumulative experience with statehood influences its ability to consolidate power and ... more A country's cumulative experience with statehood influences its ability to consolidate power and create a capable bureaucracy. Longer statehood experience gives countries more time to adapt their laws to local needs, provided the legal system is adaptable. We find that, relative to British common law countries with the most flexible laws, German and Scandinavian civil law countries initially exhibit lower financial development. However, as their history of statehood grows longer, financial development improves in countries with adaptable laws such as the German and Scandinavian civil law countries. This is not the case in French civil law countries with more rigid legal systems. Our results mainly show no or at most a weakly negative effect of French civil law legal origin on financial development. We also explore how changes in stock market development over time, financial integration, and financial crisis are impacted by statehood experience, legal origins and their interaction.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2018
Historical evidence indicates that the quest for new territories by the Western European colonize... more Historical evidence indicates that the quest for new territories by the Western European colonizers was driven by strong incentives to produce sugar, tea, timber, and other commodities. Once arrived, settlers also had a strong interest in becoming self-sufficient in food. This paper establishes that the timing and duration of colonization by the Western European powers were strongly influenced by regional agro-ecological factors. In particular, a recently constructed measure of the potential average crop yield is shown to have a robust effect on both the timing and duration of colonization. Areas with higher agricultural productivity tended to be colonized earlier and were subject to colonization for a longer duration of time. The findings are robust to controlling for multiple indicators of early development, geographical and ecological conditions, selection issues, and to the utilization of the Cox stratified proportional hazard model.
European Economic Review, 2017
Several recent contributions to the literature have suggested that the strength of family ties is... more Several recent contributions to the literature have suggested that the strength of family ties is related to various economic and social outcomes. For example, Alesina and Giuliano (2014) highlight that the strength of family ties is strongly correlated with lower GDP and lower quality of institutions. However, the forces shaping family ties remain relatively unexplored in the literature. This paper proposes and tests the hypothesis that the agricultural legacy of a country matters for shaping the strength of its family ties. Using data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, the results show that societies with a legacy in cultivating wheat tend to have weaker family ties. Analysis at the sub-national level (US data) and the country level corroborate these findings. The estimations allow for alternative hypotheses which propose that pathogen stress and climatic variation can potentially also give rise to the formation of family ties. The results suggest that the suitability of land for wheat production is the most influential factor in explaining the variation in the strength of family ties across societies and countries.
Environmental and Resource Economics
This paper offers a new political economy explanation for thepervasive problem of siting hazardou... more This paper offers a new political economy explanation for thepervasive problem of siting hazardous waste treatment facilitiesin federal system. We first show that a decentralized systemyields the first-best waste treatment capacity level and that acentralized structure gives rise to free-riding behavior amonglocal jurisdictions. In our model, each community seeks toinfluence the central government through political contributions.This leads to suboptimal levels of treatment capacity. Thecapacity is increasing in the compensation level if the marginalbenefit of treatment capacity is sufficiently large, and in thegovernment's weight on aggregate social welfare relative tolobbying activities. The centralized system can replicate thedecentralized system with a sufficiently high compensation level.Since compensation has proved difficult, a centralized systemfaces greater obstacles than a decentralized system. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2000
The authors use a proportional hazards framework to investigate the impact of various country cha... more The authors use a proportional hazards framework to investigate the impact of various country characteristics on the duration of time taken to ratify the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). The most significant findings are that the conditional probability of ratification is positively related to total CO2 emissions and the presence of civil liberties. The finding for emissions indicates that large, polluting countries were under great political pressure to ratify the FCCC. The latter finding is consistent with earlier research that found that democratic freedoms raised the probability of signing the Montreal Protocol. Copyright 2000 by Kluwer Academic Publishers
Southern Economic Journal, 2013
In this article, we evaluate the role of elections in governors' state tax policy making. Doe... more In this article, we evaluate the role of elections in governors' state tax policy making. Does it matter for state taxes whether the governor is a Democrat or Republican and whether she is eligible for re‐election or faces a binding term limit? Using a Regression Discontinuity Design and a panel of U.S. states, we find that the manner in which governors of different parties implement different tax policies turns crucially on the incumbent's eligibility for re‐election. Re‐electable Democratic governors increase income taxes relative to similarly situated Republicans, yielding divergence between party policy positions. However, governors facing a binding term limit exhibit the reverse policy difference, resulting in a movement of policy back together.
Globalisation, Economic Transition and the Environment
Southern Economic Journal, 1999
... Leidy and Hoekman discuss the impact of environmental instrument choice on trade barriers. ..... more ... Leidy and Hoekman discuss the impact of environmental instrument choice on trade barriers. ... It also examines the impacts of trade liberalization on lobbying, the pollution tax policy, environmental quality, pollution tax reve-nues, and trade patterns. Section 5 concludes. ...
Regional Science and Urban Economics, 2002
What determines state environmental policymaking in the US? Vogel (Trading Up: Consumer and Envir... more What determines state environmental policymaking in the US? Vogel (Trading Up: Consumer and Environmental Regulation in a Global Economy,
Public Choice, 2009
ABSTRACT We investigate whether the effect of government corruption is conditional on a country’s... more ABSTRACT We investigate whether the effect of government corruption is conditional on a country’s institutional structure. Federal systems have an additional layer of government, making lobbying relatively more costly. We investigate whether the effect of government corruption on environmental policy (in the form of restrictions on energy use) is conditional on a federal system being in place. Using 1982–96 data from 11 industry sectors in 12 OECD economies we find that while greater government corruption reduces the stringency of environmental policy, the effect declines in federal systems.
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 1997
This paper develops a positive theory explaining pollution tax policy outcomes in a small open ec... more This paper develops a positive theory explaining pollution tax policy outcomes in a small open economy. The equilibrium tax rate depends on lobby group membership, the relative importance of lobbying activities, and the tax elasticity of pollution. The equilibrium properties are investigated. The model is extended to incorporate pollution abatement and a pollution abatement subsidy. We show that total pollution may be increasing in the pollution abatement subsidy rate. This effect arises because the equilibrium pollution tax rate may be decreasing in the subsidy rate due to altered political influence of the lobby groups in the political equilibrium.
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2003
This paper explores the effects of trade liberalization on environmental policy outcomes when col... more This paper explores the effects of trade liberalization on environmental policy outcomes when collective action is endogenous. The polluting industry's ability to undertake lobbying is shown to depend on the degree of competition in the product market, establishing a new link between trade and environmental policies. If trade liberalization causes industry collective action to become harder to sustain, the stringency of the environmental policy is likely to rise. These results highlight the role of trade liberalization on product market competition and its consequent impact on the incentive to lobby for less stringent environmental policies.
Economic Inquiry, 2000
We argue that centralized and decentralized environmental governance yield equivalent environment... more We argue that centralized and decentralized environmental governance yield equivalent environmental regulations. We model worker, environmental, and capital owner lobby groups that seek influence by offering political contributions. Worker lobbying in the decentralized case has an effect on environmental regulations identical to that of capital owner lobbying in the centralized case. This is because the aggregate effects of environmental regulations on income are equivalent under two institutional designs. Whereas workers carry the full burden in the decentralized case when capital competition occurs, the burden is shared with the capital owners in the centralized case. We present evidence consistent with our theory.
Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, 2011
We provide a theory of trade policy determination that incorporates the protectionist bias inhere... more We provide a theory of trade policy determination that incorporates the protectionist bias inherent in majoritarian systems, suggested by Grossman and Helpman (2005). The prediction that emerges is that in majoritarian systems, the majority party favors industries located disproportionately in majority districts. We test this prediction using U.S. data on tariffs, Congressional campaign contributions, and industry location in districts represented by the majority party over the period 1989-97. We find evidence of a significant majority bias in trade policy: the benefit to being represented by the majority party appears at least as large in magnitude as the benefit to lobbying.
Economics Working …, 2008
We provide a theory of trade policy determination that incorporates the protectionist bias inhere... more We provide a theory of trade policy determination that incorporates the protectionist bias inherent in majoritarian systems, suggested by Grossman and Helpman (2005). The prediction that emerges is that in majoritarian systems, the majority party favors industries located disproportionately in majority districts. We test this prediction using U.S. tariff data from 1993, and House campaign contribution data from two electoral cycles. We find evidence of a protectionist bias due to majoritarian system politics that is comparable in magnitude to the payoff from being an organized industry.
Land Economics, 2020
How does the historical legacy of agriculture affect democratic traditions in contemporary societ... more How does the historical legacy of agriculture affect democratic traditions in contemporary societies? This paper provides empirical evidence that inherent crop yield and democracy exhibit an inverted U-shaped relationship. This finding is supported by crosscountry data from up to 147 countries, 186 pre-colonial societies, and the U.S. states. The relationship thus exhibits a highly persistent pattern. Crop yield is measured by kilocalories per hectare per year under rain-fed conditions, which has the advantage of being highly exogenous. The hump-shaped relationship holds up to a battery of robustness tests.
Environmental and Resource Economics, 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic was associated with short-term air quality improvements in many countries a... more The COVID-19 pandemic was associated with short-term air quality improvements in many countries around the world. We study whether the degree of democracy and political institutions played a role. We provide novel empirical evidence from 119 countries. A given stringency of COVID-19 containment and closure policies had a stronger effect on air quality in more democratic countries, and in countries with majoritarian rather than proportional electoral rules. Our estimates suggest that the improvement in air quality was around 57% greater in majoritarian systems than in proportional systems. Confidence in government, trust in politicians, and social capital also affected outcomes.
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Papers by Per Fredriksson