Conventional wisdom holds that international trade agreements can be used as external pressures and credible commitments to overcome opposition and lock in domestic economic reforms. This belief, however, underestimates the ability of politicians to use international trade agreements to leverage...

This article examines a specific form of state capitalism in Egypt under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, characterized by the central role of the military in economic affairs. Following the events of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, the Egyptian military not only secured its position as a key...

This study examines the effect of regulatory independence of the central bank in shaping the impact of electoral cycles on bank lending behaviour in Africa. It employs the dynamic system Generalized Method of Moments (SGMM) Two-Step estimator for a panel dataset of 54 African countries over the...

We investigate why governments restrict exports of exotic raw materials taking rare earth elements as a case study. Trade restrictions on exotic materials do not have immediate macroeconomic effects. Relocating rare earth intensive industries is found to be the main reason behind China's export...

In today's increasingly competitive business environment, many firms in declining industries have been confronted with the need to restructure. However, lobbies in these industries have often managed to attract government subsidies instead. The current paper looks at the decision of loss-making...

We study the selection of the political elite in an autocratic state. Using detailed CV data on potential politicians in the German Democratic Republic, we track and quantify the position of individuals in the state hierarchy over time and exploit exogenous connections between individuals that...

Autocratic regimes can use carrots and/or sticks to prevent being overthrown by protests. Carrots, i.e. resource allocation, reduce the probability of protests, but cannot help to end them. Sticks, i.e. repression, reduce the probability that protests overthrow the regime, but also decrease its...

We investigate why governments restrict exports of exotic raw materials taking rare earth elements as a case study. Trade restrictions on exotic materials do not have immediate macroeconomic effects. Relocating rare earth intensive industries is found to be the main reason behind China's export...

Conventional wisdom holds that international trade agreements can be used as external pressures and credible commitments to overcome opposition and lock in domestic economic reforms. This belief, however, underestimates the ability of politicians to use international trade agreements to leverage...

Using a unique dataset for 14 transition economies, we propose a new measure for individual evaluations of transitional reforms, which we use to study, for the first time, the evolution of support for economic and political reforms from 1991 to 2004. We show that support for economic changes has...