James T. Bang

Gender Equality and Economic Growth: Is it Equality of Opportunity or Equality of Outcomes?

ABSTRACT This article explores the impact of gender equality on economic growth. In particular, we focus on the multidimensional nature of gender equality with the object of identifying the relative salience of different aspects of equality. Using exploratory factor analysis on five measures of gender equality, we identify two distinct dimensions: equality of economic opportunities and equality in economic and political outcomes. Regression analysis conducted on an unbalanced panel of 101 countries taken over nonoverlapping five-year periods from 1990 to 2000 reveals that a standard deviation improvement in equality in economic opportunity increases growth by 1.3 percentage points and a corresponding improvement in participatory equality improves growth by an average of about 1.2 percentage points. However, this impact is contingent on a countrys stage of development: while developing economies experience significant improvements in growth from greater equality in opportunity, developed societies see significant improvements resulting from greater equality in outcomes.

Financial liberalization and remittances: Recent panel evidence

We investigate the impact of financial liberalization on remittances to 84 countries over the period 1986–2005. Explicitly accounting for the multidimensionality of financial reform, we find that the various dimensions impact remittances differently: Increased economic freedom in the financial sector, as captured by absence of direct government control over the allocation of credit, has a positive and immediate impact. However, the improved robustness of financial markets, as captured by the development of security markets, improvement in the quality of banking supervision, and removal of stringent restrictions on interest rates and international capital, has a negative and lagged effect. The net combined effect reveals that financial liberalization may have a modest negative impact on remittances in the long run.

Media freedom and gender equality: a cross-national instrumental variable quantile analysis

We investigate the impact of media freedom on gender equality in education for a sample of 63 countries taken over the period 1995–2004. Our analysis is motivated by the idea that the impact of media freedom on gender equality may differ over the conditional distribution of the response variable. Using instrumental variable quantile regression to control for endogeneity in per capita income, we find that greater freedom of the media improves gender equality only in the 0.25 and 0.50 quantiles of the conditional distribution. Countries with the greatest disparities in gender outcomes experience no significant impact of media freedom.

Civil war and economic growth: the case for a closer look at forms of mobilization

ABSTRACT This paper explores the idea that the lack of robust evidence on the growth impact of civil war could partially be a consequence of considering civil war as a unified conceptual category, regardless of the ordinate of group identity invoked in mobilizing for war. To do so, we distinguish explicitly between episodes of internal conflict where contestants mobilized along the lines of ethnicity and ones where mobilization occurred along other markers of group identity. Using alternative definitions of civil war and System GMM estimation to address the endogeneity of conflict and per capita income, we obtain a negative contemporaneous impact of non-ethnic civil war on economic growth over the period 1975–2005. By contrast, the impact of ethnic war is statistically insignificant.

Institutions, information, and commitment: the role of democracy in conflict

This paper explores the hypothesis that both the preexisting quality of democracy in a polity at the onset of conflict and the quality of democracy expected to emerge in the aftermath influence the likelihood of civil war. An empirical investigation of the hypothesis presents a challenge due to concerns of endogeneity and selection: the post-conflict level of democracy is endogenous to the pre-conflict level. Further, for a given time period, either a number of countries have not experienced civil war; or if they did, did not resolve the conflict. We overcome this selection bias by implementing a three-step extension to the Heckman procedure using an unbalanced cross-country panel of 77 countries over the period 1971–2005. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that a standard deviation improvement in the existing level of democracy reduces the probability of civil war by approximately 9 percentage points and a corresponding improvement in expected post-conflict democratization increases the probability of conflict by approximately 48 percentage points.

Marriage, fertility and the selection of women into high-skill industries

This article focuses on the selection of women into industries of different skill intensities as another dimension in the discussion of the differences in wages among similarly skilled women. Using the Current Population Survey (CPS) data and controlling for education and other factors, we find evidence that married women tend to work in industries that are less skill intensive and that pay lower wages. We also find that education and experience affect this selection process less favourably for married women compared with single women. Since less skill-intensive industries often pay lower wages for similar occupations, our results contribute to the broader debate over the gaps in wages between single and married women as well as men and women.

Does FDI Attract Immigrants? An Empirical Gravity Model Approach

This study tests whether foreign direct investment (FDI) and migration are substitutes or complements using data on bilateral FDI flows from countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and bilateral immigration to OECD countries over the period 1996 to 2006. Our most conservative estimates, using dynamic panel methods, suggest that a

Does a free media protect labour rights

1 million increase in FDI to another OECD country increases immigration by about 60 migrants, while the same increase to non-OECD locations increases migration by about 1,000. These findings support a core-periphery model of globalization and development.

Predicting a Country’s Growth: A First Look

ABSTRACT Based on a sample of 47 developing economies considered over the period 1992–2012, we find that a free media reduces the legal protection of labour, taken as a whole. However, the impact differs over various aspects of labour regulation: while media freedom correlates with less stringent regulation of work time, less constraints to dismissal, and lower protection of employee representation rights, it also correlates with greater legal parity of part-time and fixed-term labour with full-time and permanent workers.

Predicting Recessions: What We Learn from Widening the Goalposts

In this chapter, we run different algorithm techniques to identify the algorithms that best predict growth. We show how machine learning can be used to validate different growth models. We suggest that validated algorithms enhance the confidence academics should place on any given theoretical growth model. We then show how machine learning can help researchers understand what kinds of concepts may make theoretical growth models more complete.