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Economic Impact of Voting and Procurement Rules
Palguta, Ján ; Filer, Randall (advisor) ; Guriev, Sergei (referee) ; Gylfason, Thorvaldur (referee)
In the first chapter of this dissertation, I examine the impact of increasing the number of parties in political representation bodies on public spending and selection of politically-connected suppliers in public procurement. By exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the vote share of parties near the representation threshold in Czech municipal elections, I find that municipalities having more parties represented in their councils allocate fewer procurements to corporate donors of political parties, attract more suppliers to procurement tenders and reduce procurement prices. The impact of broader party representation is pronounced in politically competitive councils, but is not related to whether marginally represented parties are incumbent or not. The second chapter presents evidence of how policies that create opportunities to avoid open competition in procurement lead to the manipulation of procurement values. We exploit a policy reform in which public bodies were given autonomy to preselect potential contractors below newly defined discretionary thresholds. Manipulation is revealed through bunching of procurements just below the thresholds in construction works and services, and to a lesser degree, in goods. Among manipulated contracts, we document a threefold increase in the probability...
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Essays on Stock Market Integration and on the Curse of Natural Resources
Černý, Alexandr ; Filer, Randall (advisor) ; Gylfason, Thorvaldur (referee) ; Podpiera, Richard (referee)
The thesis contains three essays, each of which calls into question generally accepted empirical results through the use of more appropriate data or econometric techniques. In the first essay using a unique dataset covering two years of high frequency data on the indices from markets in the U.S., London, Frankfurt, Paris, Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest I perform Cointegration and Granger causality tests with data of frequencies ranging from 5 minutes to 1 day. The aim is to describe the time structure in which markets react to the information revealed in prices on other markets. The results suggest that the speed of information transmission is very fast and that the use of daily data may be misleading when analyzing the issues of stock market integration and information transmission among markets. The other two essays focus on the curse of natural resources. In the second essay I test the robustness of the curse of natural resources with respect to various measures of the quality of democracy and regime stability. I also employ smoothed least trimmed squares, a robust estimation procedure, to estimate the curse. The often stressed robustness of the curse of natural resources is confirmed. The evidence presented indicates that the intensity of the curse depends on the level of civil liberties. In the...
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