【主讲】Antonia Reinecke (The University of Hagen，研究员)
【主题】Estimating the local effectiveness of institutions: a latent-variable approach（with Hans-Jörg Schmerer）
【时间】2018年5月14日 (周一) 15：30-17：00
【地点】上海财经大学经济学院楼701室
【语言】英文
【摘要】There is consensus in the academic debate that strong institutions promote exports. Most existing studies in this field build on country- or province-level estimates of institutional quality without taking regional heterogeneity into consideration. Our new identification strategy allows constructing more detailed proxies on the effectiveness of institutions at the firm-level. An otherwise identical firm located in an environment with good institutions and better government effectiveness should be able to export more. Put differently, the export performance comprises information on the institutional quality the firm is faced with. We argue that this interdependence can be uncovered if effectiveness is linked to the firm's distance from its political hub. Development in earlier stages is likely more focused on provincial capitals. Development in the hinterland takes place with a certain lag. This second hypothesis enables us to use distance as a proxy for the effectiveness of institutions. Using methods of structural equation modeling we predict unobserved institutional quality at the zip-code level. We test the impact of this novel identification strategy in a treatment effect analysis that compares the coefficients obtained from provincial measure of institutions with our new index. We can show that the magnitude of the effect of institutional quality on the propensity to export is biased in estimates that neglect regional differences in institutional effectiveness.
