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"Fisman, Raymond"
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Economic gangsters : corruption, violence, and the poverty of nations
A fascinating exploration of the dark side of economic development, this book takes readers inside the heads of the developing world's dictators, warlords, and corrupt politicos.
Book
The Mortality Cost of Political Connections
We study the relationship between the political connections of Chinese firms and workplace fatalities. In our preferred specification, we find that the worker death rate for connected companies is two to three times that of unconnected firms (depending on the sample employed), a pattern that holds for withinfirm estimations. The connections-mortality relationship is attenuated in provinces where safety regulators' promotion is contingent on meeting safety targets. In the absence of fatalities, connected firms receive fewer reports of major violations for safety compliance, whereas in years of fatal accidents the rate of reported violations is identical. Moreover, fatal accidents produce negative returns at connected companies and are associated with the subsequent departure of well-connected executives. These results provide suggestive evidence that connections enable firms to avoid (potentially costly) compliance measures, rather than using connections to avoid regulatory response after accidents occur. Our findings emphasize the social costs of political connections, and suggest that appropriate regulatory incentives may be useful in mitigating these costs.
Journal Article
Corruption, Norms, and Legal Enforcement: Evidence from Diplomatic Parking Tickets
We study cultural norms and legal enforcement in controlling corruption by analyzing the parking behavior of United Nations officials in Manhattan. Until 2002, diplomatic immunity protected UN diplomats from parking enforcement actions, so diplomats’ actions were constrained by cultural norms alone. We find a strong effect of corruption norms: diplomats from high‐corruption countries (on the basis of existing survey‐based indices) accumulated significantly more unpaid parking violations. In 2002, enforcement authorities acquired the right to confiscate diplomatic license plates of violators. Unpaid violations dropped sharply in response. Cultural norms and (particularly in this context) legal enforcement are both important determinants of corruption.
Journal Article
Estimating the Value of Political Connections
This paper has concentrated on the valuation of rents for a relatively small subsample of Indonesian firms. However, the 25 groups associated with these firms account for a very large percentage of economic activity in Indonesia, with revenues of more than US $60 billion in 1995. Thus, for a very large part of the Indonesian economy, political connections apparently matter a lot. Although the analysis focused on Indonesia, there is reason to believe that the results apply to many other countries.
Journal Article
Governance and CEO Turnover: Do Something or Do the Right Thing?
We study how corporate governance affects firm value through the decision of whether to fire or retain the chief executive officer (CEO). We present a model in which weak governance-which prevents shareholders from controlling the board-protects inferior CEOs from dismissal, while at the same time insulates the board from pressures by biased or uninformed shareholders. Whether stronger governance improves retain/replace decisions depends on which of these effects dominates. We use our theoretical framework to assess the effect of governance on the quality of firing and hiring decisions using data on the CEO dismissals of large U.S. corporations during 1994-2007. Our findings are most consistent with a beneficent effect of weak governance on CEO dismissal decisions, suggesting that insulation from shareholder pressure may allow for better long-term decision making.
This paper was accepted by Brad Barber, finance.
Journal Article
The Distortionary Effects of Incentives in Government: Evidence from China's \Death Ceiling\ Program
We study a 2004 program designed to motivate Chinese bureaucrats to reduce accidental deaths. Each province received a set of \"death ceilings\" that, if exceeded, would impede government officials' promotions. For each category of accidental deaths, we observe a sharp discontinuity in reported deaths at the ceiling, suggestive of manipulation. Provinces with safety incentives for municipal officials experienced larger declines in accidental deaths, suggesting complementarities between incentives at different levels of government. While realized accidental deaths predict the following year's ceiling, we observe no evidence that provinces manipulate deaths upward to avoid ratchet effects in the setting of death ceilings.
Journal Article
Nationalism and Economic Exchange: Evidence from Shocks to Sino-Japanese Relations
We study the impact of nationalism and interstate frictions on international economic relations by analyzing market reaction to adverse shocks to Sino-Japanese relations in 2005 and 2010. Japanese companies with high China exposure suffer relative declines during each event window; a symmetric effect is observed for Chinese companies with high Japanese exposure. The effect on Japanese companies is more pronounced for those operating in industries dominated by Chinese state-owned enterprises, whereas firms with high Chinese employment experience lower declines. These results emphasize the role of countries' economic and political institutions in mediating the impact of interstate frictions on firm-level outcomes.
Journal Article
Individual Preferences for Giving
We utilize graphical representations of Dictator Games which generate rich individual-level data. Our baseline experiment employs budget sets over feasible payoff-pairs. We test these data for consistency with utility maximization, and we recover the underlying preferences for giving (trade-offs between own payoffs and the payoffs of others). Two further experiments augment the analysis. An extensive elaboration employs three-person budget sets to distinguish preferences for giving from social preferences (trade-offs between the payoffs of others). And an intensive elaboration employs step-shaped sets to distinguish between behaviors that are compatible with well-behaved preferences and those compatible only with not well-behaved cases.
Journal Article
Trade Credit, Financial Intermediary Development, and Industry Growth
Recent work suggests that financial development is important for economic growth, since financial markets more effectively allocate capital to firms with high value projects. For firms in poorly developed financial markets, implicit borrowing in the form of trade credit may provide an alternative source of funds. We show that industries with higher dependence on trade credit financing exhibit higher rates of growth in countries with weaker financial institutions. Furthermore, consistent with barriers to trade credit access among young firms, we show that most of the effect that we report comes from growth in the size of preexisting firms.
Journal Article