Three empirical essays on political economy
- Autores: Iván Mauricio Durán Pabón
- Directores de la Tesis: Francesc Trillas (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2017
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Roxana Gutiérrez Romero (presid.), Andreas P. Kyriacou (secret.), Yarine Fawaz (voc.), Agustín Cañas Rodríguez (voc.), Oriol Roca i Sagalés (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Economía Aplicada por la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TESEO
- Resumen
This thesis is composed by three essays, each one presenting a contribution to the empirical literature in the field of political economy. The contributions of this thesis are directed to the following areas: i) support for democracy and sociotropic evaluation, ii) political economy of media, and iii) economic costs of conflicts. These essays all entailed the construction of new datasets and the use of the most advanced quantitative technics to address relevant and unresolved questions in political economy.
The first paper examines to what extent the nondemocratic past of countries may affect the citizens’ support for contemporary democracies. To do so, we revisit the relationship between attitudes towards democracy and the individuals’ evaluation of present country economy (sociotropic evaluation). Specifically, we test whether the “deviation in evaluations”, understood as the difference between the individuals’ evaluation of the present country economic situation and the individuals’ evaluation of the last nondemocratic regime, has some effect on support for democracy in Latin America. Using a set of multinomial models and an IV-Probit model, we found that the deviation in evaluations has a strong effect on support for democracy: as the assessment of the last military government gets better and the present country economy worsens, individuals are less likely to support democracy. This finding reveals some important challenges for democratic consolidation: emerging democracies does not only have to show a good economic performance by themselves, but also they must prove to be better than previous nondemocratic regimes.
The second paper explores the question of to what extent the electoral results in Catalonia can be explained by the exposure of individuals to television. This paper sheds light on this question by drawing on a natural experiment based on the geographically differentiated expansion of the public channel TV3 in Catalonia in the early eighties. Using a Difference-in-Differences Kernel matching method, we found that the introduction of TV3 caused an increase in the voter turnout as well as the Convergència i Unió vote share in the 1984 Catalan parliamentary elections, political coalition that has mostly managed the channel since its foundation and has been one of the strongest Catalan nationalist forces in Catalonia.
Finally, the third paper analyzes using event studies how a variety of events related to the Catalan pro-independence movement from 2010 to 2015 affected the stock returns of Catalan firms. We found that the movement, despite its apparent strength and the dramatic claims made by the extremes in the debate, has not had an economically significant impact on the stock returns. Nevertheless, though small, there are some significant effects on both Catalan and non-Catalan firms mostly related to street demonstrations and anti-independence events (i.e. against the movement), as well as some differentiated effects related to the firms’ economic activity sector and their political position respecting the movement. The lack of large economic impacts and the firms’ reaction to some events suggests several possible interpretations about the investors’ attitude toward the movement.
