Papers by Samuel Standaert
Annals of Regional Science, May 25, 2023
We take advantage of a new data set on Belgian cities to test random growth, that is, Gibrat's la... more We take advantage of a new data set on Belgian cities to test random growth, that is, Gibrat's law. This unique data set provides annual population estimates for all Belgian municipalities (2680 cities) from 1880 to 1970. The use of panel data methodology and unit root tests can provide a precise test of Gibrat's law (a unit root is equivalent to random growth). We run both time series and panel data unit root tests, thus obtaining strong support for random growth in the long term. Results hold when allowing for the presence of one and two structural breaks in the mean, with the timing of the breaks coinciding with some major historical events, such as the World Wars and the economic crisis of 1929-1933.
World Development, Jul 1, 2017
The intensified international migration pressures of the recent decades prompted many developed c... more The intensified international migration pressures of the recent decades prompted many developed countries to revise their immigration regulations and increase border controls. However, the development of these reforms as well as their effectiveness in actually managing new immigration flows remains poorly understood. The main reason is that migration regulations are hard to quantify, which has prevented the construction of a universal measure of migration policy. To fill this gap in the literature, we construct an indicator of the restrictiveness of immigration entry policy across countries as well as a more comprehensive indicator of migration policy that also accounts for staying requirements and regulations to foster integration. These indexes are then used to disentangle the factors determining the toughness of migration regulations. Our empirical framework combines elements from the median voter and interest group approach and accounts for cross-country correlation in migration ...
This chapter examines the specific problems that arise when creating an index of structural chang... more This chapter examines the specific problems that arise when creating an index of structural change and development, and offers recommendations to address them. It first considers the four steps to composing a policy index and an outcome index: define what the index is trying to measure; identify suitable indicators that track (parts of) the definition decided upon in the first step; normalize the individual indicators and aggregate them into the final index; and analyse the index and report on the results. The chapter then discusses traditional approaches to measuring structural transformation, along with their shortcomings, before introducing a new approach. Insights from New Structural Economics are highlighted, including the argument that the desired structural characteristics of countries are determined by their comparative advantage, which in turn depends on their level of development.
Social Science Research Network, 2016
International trade has been an important driver for the development of our modern world, but cap... more International trade has been an important driver for the development of our modern world, but capturing trade patterns and their change over time continues to prove a daunting task. Painting a detailed picture of historical trade patterns not only puts a high demand on the availability and quality of data, it also begs for an intuitive and succinct way to describe the resulting patterns. To uncover the overall patterns in the data we adopt the complex network perspective. After constructing the historical trade integration network, we use temporal stochastic block models to extract the meso-scale network structure. This SBM methodology makes full use of all available data, takes the time dimension into account and does not make a priori assumptions about the structure of the network.
Social Indicators Research, Aug 10, 2018
In this paper, we put forth an index of Inclusive Sustainable Transformation that captures the ex... more In this paper, we put forth an index of Inclusive Sustainable Transformation that captures the extent to which a country has developed a modern industry or services-based economy that at the same time protects the environment and is gender inclusive. This index distinguishes itself from other indicators that track the structural characteristics of the economy by ensuring that the comparisons between countries account for differences in the level of development, in line with New Structural Economics thinking. The index evaluates how well a country scores given its available resources. In addition, by addressing data availability problems using multiple imputation techniques, the index is able to compare performances on a wide range of topics for almost 200 countries over 25 years, including a large group of developing countries that are often left out. In addition to monitoring the progress made towards the establishment of an inclusive and environmentally friendly, modern economy, the index is a useful tool for policy makers and analysts. By decomposing the total score back into its components, it can help identify areas that require additional attention, as well as 'best practices' in countries at similar levels of development.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2017
Economists that study long-term changes during the 19 th and 20 th century are fundamentally rest... more Economists that study long-term changes during the 19 th and 20 th century are fundamentally restricted by the availability of qualitative data, as the latter is often inversely proportional to quality. This is further compounded by administrative changes that alter what exactly is being measured over time as well as an overall decrease of data availability the further we go back in time. This is particularly inconvenient in historical population data, as census data is often only available ever decade. As a result, researchers are forced to either impute qualitative data, or otherwise combine datasets of varying quality in some way. In this article, we demonstrate the versatility of state-space models in addressing these problems, enabling us to compose large data series of a high quality. Moreover, unlike more simple techniques it also provides an estimate of the reliability of the results, allowing any subsequent analyses to take this into account. We illustrate this by combining growth and level data on the population of Belgian cities into a dataset that contains yearly estimates of the population of over 2600 cities from 1880 to 1970.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, Dec 1, 2014
This paper studies the structure and the evolution of worldwide trade integration from 1880 up to... more This paper studies the structure and the evolution of worldwide trade integration from 1880 up to 1995. Starting from historical trade and GDP data we use a state-space model to construct a bilateral historical trade index. This index is subsequently used to study globalization and the distance puzzle. The increased coverage of this index allows us to expand the period of analysis to include both the first and second globalization waves. We find that the first wave was marked by a strong diversification in the formation of trade links as well as a strong decrease in the effect of distance. The second globalization wave was marked by an initial strong decrease in the importance of distance which leveled out in the 1960s.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, Mar 1, 2017
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, May 17, 2017
In this paper, we put forth an index of Inclusive Sustainable Transformation (IST) that captures ... more In this paper, we put forth an index of Inclusive Sustainable Transformation (IST) that captures the extent to which a country has developed a modern industry or services-based economy that at the same time protects the environment and is gender inclusive. This index distinguishes itself from other indicators that track the structural characteristics of the economy by ensuring that the comparisons between countries account for differences in the level of development, in line with New Structural Economics thinking. In other words, it evaluates how well the country scores given its available resources. In addition, by addressing data availability problems using multiple imputation techniques, the index is able to compare the performance on a wide range of topics for almost 200 countries over 25 years, including a large group of developing countries that are often left out. In addition to monitoring the progress made towards the establishment of an inclusive and environmental-friendly modern economy, the index is a useful tool for policy makers and analysts. By decomposing the total score back into its components, it can help identify areas that require additional attention, as well the ‘best practice’ in countries at similar levels of development.
Journal of Comparative Economics, Aug 1, 2015
This paper outlines a new methodological framework for combining indicators of corruption. The me... more This paper outlines a new methodological framework for combining indicators of corruption. The methodology of the World Governance Indicators is extended to fully make use of the time-structure present in corruption data. The resulting state-space framework is estimated using a Bayesian Gibbs sampler algorithm. The state-space framework holds many advantages from a practical, an estimation and a theoretical point of view. Most importantly, the indicator significantly increases data availability while at the same time addressing the selection bias issues that plague the CPI and WGI indexes. It produces estimates that are more stable and reliable. Because the estimation framework is transparent and data is entered without any manipulations, the resulting indicator should also be more objective.
European Journal of Political Economy, Sep 1, 2020
Over the last 20 years, a large number of papers have tried to quantify the effect of property ri... more Over the last 20 years, a large number of papers have tried to quantify the effect of property rights on a wide range of variables like growth, trade and to a lesser extent, inequality. However, these studies have been inherently limited by measures of the security of property rights that are currently available. These suffer from any of a number of shortcomings, ranging from a lack of availability, objectivity, or the fact that they measure a broader concept like the rule of law. This paper tries to address this gap by proposing a new index of property rights. Specifically, we use a state-space model to combine all available indicators tracking the security of property rights into an index that covers 191 countries over the period 1994-2014. We compare it to the existing indicators by revisiting the link between inequality, democracy and property rights, using a panel threshold regression model with fixed-effects. Depending on the measure of property rights that is used, there can be considerable differences in the size, significance and even the sign of the estimated parameters. Specifically, in contrast with existing measures, we find that a strengthening of the security of property rights reduces inequality in highly democratic countries only via the government's redistribution channel.
The Annals of Regional Science
We take advantage of a new data set on Belgian cities to test random growth, that is, Gibrat’s la... more We take advantage of a new data set on Belgian cities to test random growth, that is, Gibrat’s law. This unique data set provides annual population estimates for all Belgian municipalities (2680 cities) from 1880 to 1970. The use of panel data methodology and unit root tests can provide a precise test of Gibrat’s law (a unit root is equivalent to random growth). We run both time series and panel data unit root tests, thus obtaining strong support for random growth in the long term. Results hold when allowing for the presence of one and two structural breaks in the mean, with the timing of the breaks coinciding with some major historical events, such as the World Wars and the economic crisis of 1929–1933.
Research Papers in Economics, Mar 1, 2017
Social Indicators Research, 2018
In this paper, we put forth an index of Inclusive Sustainable Transformation that captures the ex... more In this paper, we put forth an index of Inclusive Sustainable Transformation that captures the extent to which a country has developed a modern industry or services-based economy that at the same time protects the environment and is gender inclusive. This index distinguishes itself from other indicators that track the structural characteristics of the economy by ensuring that the comparisons between countries account for differences in the level of development, in line with New Structural Economics thinking. The index evaluates how well a country scores given its available resources. In addition, by addressing data availability problems using multiple imputation techniques, the index is able to compare performances on a wide range of topics for almost 200 countries over 25 years, including a large group of developing countries that are often left out. In addition to monitoring the progress made towards the establishment of an inclusive and environmentally friendly, modern economy, the index is a useful tool for policy makers and analysts. By decomposing the total score back into its components, it can help identify areas that require additional attention, as well as 'best practices' in countries at similar levels of development.
Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 2017
Economists that study long-term changes during the 19 th and 20 th century are fundamentally rest... more Economists that study long-term changes during the 19 th and 20 th century are fundamentally restricted by the availability of qualitative data, as the latter is often inversely proportional to quality. This is further compounded by administrative changes that alter what exactly is being measured over time as well as an overall decrease of data availability the further we go back in time. This is particularly inconvenient in historical population data, as census data is often only available ever decade. As a result, researchers are forced to either impute qualitative data, or otherwise combine datasets of varying quality in some way. In this article, we demonstrate the versatility of state-space models in addressing these problems, enabling us to compose large data series of a high quality. Moreover, unlike more simple techniques it also provides an estimate of the reliability of the results, allowing any subsequent analyses to take this into account. We illustrate this by combining growth and level data on the population of Belgian cities into a dataset that contains yearly estimates of the population of over 2600 cities from 1880 to 1970.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2016
International trade has been an important driver for the development of our modern world, but cap... more International trade has been an important driver for the development of our modern world, but capturing trade patterns and their change over time continues to prove a daunting task. Painting a detailed picture of historical trade patterns not only puts a high demand on the availability and quality of data, it also begs for an intuitive and succinct way to describe the resulting patterns. To uncover the overall patterns in the data we adopt the complex network perspective. After constructing the historical trade integration network, we use temporal stochastic block models to extract the meso-scale network structure. This SBM methodology makes full use of all available data, takes the time dimension into account and does not make a priori assumptions about the structure of the network.
World Development, 2017
The intensified international migration pressures of the recent decades prompted many developed c... more The intensified international migration pressures of the recent decades prompted many developed countries to revise their immigration regulations and increase border controls. However, the development of these reforms as well as their effectiveness in actually managing new immigration flows remains poorly understood. The main reason is that migration regulations are hard to quantify, which has prevented the construction of a universal measure of migration policy. To fill this gap in the literature, we construct an indicator of the restrictiveness of immigration entry policy across countries as well as a more comprehensive indicator of migration policy that also accounts for staying requirements and regulations to foster integration. These indexes are then used to disentangle the factors determining the toughness of migration regulations. Our empirical framework combines elements from the median voter and interest group approach and accounts for crosscountry correlation in migration ...
European Journal of Political Economy, 2020
Over the last 20 years, a large number of papers have tried to quantify the effect of property ri... more Over the last 20 years, a large number of papers have tried to quantify the effect of property rights on a wide range of variables like growth, trade and to a lesser extent, inequality. However, these studies have been inherently limited by measures of the security of property rights that are currently available. These suffer from any of a number of shortcomings, ranging from a lack of availability, objectivity, or the fact that they measure a broader concept like the rule of law. This paper tries to address this gap by proposing a new index of property rights. Specifically, we use a state-space model to combine all available indicators tracking the security of property rights into an index that covers 191 countries over the period 1994-2014. We compare it to the existing indicators by revisiting the link between inequality, democracy and property rights, using a panel threshold regression model with fixed-effects. Depending on the measure of property rights that is used, there can be considerable differences in the size, significance and even the sign of the estimated parameters. Specifically, in contrast with existing measures, we find that a strengthening of the security of property rights reduces inequality in highly democratic countries only via the government's redistribution channel.
The Oxford Handbook of Structural Transformation, 2019
This chapter examines the specific problems that arise when creating an index of structural chang... more This chapter examines the specific problems that arise when creating an index of structural change and development, and offers recommendations to address them. It first considers the four steps to composing a policy index and an outcome index: define what the index is trying to measure; identify suitable indicators that track (parts of) the definition decided upon in the first step; normalize the individual indicators and aggregate them into the final index; and analyse the index and report on the results. The chapter then discusses traditional approaches to measuring structural transformation, along with their shortcomings, before introducing a new approach. Insights from New Structural Economics are highlighted, including the argument that the desired structural characteristics of countries are determined by their comparative advantage, which in turn depends on their level of development.
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Papers by Samuel Standaert
The state-space framework holds many advantages from a practical, an estimation and a theoretical point of view. Most importantly, it significantly expands the period for which the index can be computed while at the same time addressing the selection bias issues that trouble the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). In addition, its estimates are more stable and have smaller confidence intervals than both CPI and WGI. Because the estimation is transparent and data is entered without any manipulations, the estimation procedure is more objective.