CEAPS Seminar Series
CEAPS Seminar Series hosts distinguished speakers from around the globe specializing in topics at the intersection of economics, law, and political science.
Seminar schedule for Season 1 (2024-2025)
Episode 1: July 1, 2024, 9:30am, room A409
Yun-chien Chang (Cornell University): "Why Legal Origins Are Irrelevant to Economic Development and Fail as an Instrumental Variable?"
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Speaker's bio: Yun-chien Chang is Jack G. Clarke Professor in East Asian Law at Cornell Law School and director of the Clarke Program in East Asian Law & Culture. He was a visiting professor at New York University, University of Chicago, St. Gallen University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Haifa University and Rotterdam Institute of Law and Economics. He is co-editor of the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, president of the Asian Law and Economics Association, and director of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies.
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Abstract: Is legal origin a valid instrumental variable for studies of economic development? To be a valid IV, legal origins must be correlated with the substance of the law that contributes to the outcome of interests. Although a large body of research has suggested that countries' colonial experiences (including legal and colonial origins) are associated with a range of contemporary outcomes, the link between those experiences and the substance of their contemporary laws remains unclear. We explore this question while making three improvements over past research. First, we use more detailed data on both countries' colonial experiences and their contemporary substantive laws. Second, we directly assess whether countries' shared legal origins (i.e. whether they had a common law or civil law system) or their colonial origins (i.e. which country had previously colonized them) are more associated with differences in their contemporary laws. Third, we use a research design that makes it possible to assess the relationship between countries' colonial experiences across different areas of contemporary laws while accounting for differences in the way those areas of law may have been measured and coded. We find that countries with shared legal origins have greater agreement in the substance of their contemporary laws compared to countries without shared legal origins, but that the effect is roughly twice as large for countries with shared colonial origins compared to those with shared legal origins. Moreover, this relationship is largely consistent across groups of former colonies. This suggests that the connection between a country's colonial experience and its contemporary laws is likely attributable to long-lasting colonial effects or ongoing relationships with former colonizers, rather than the type of legal systems imposed during colonization.
Episode 2: October 22, 2024, 5:00pm, room A409
Christian Bjoernskov (Aarhus University): "How Long is the Economic Legacy of Autocracy?"
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Speaker's bio: Christian Bjørnskov is professor of economics at Aarhus University in Denmark, affiliated researcher at the IFN in Stockholm, and current President of the Public Choice Society. He is a member of the editorial board of the Public Choice and European Journal of Political Economy and the author of approximately 120 articles in prestigious scientific journals in the areas of public choice, long-run development processes, institutional economics, conflict economics, and the economics of happiness.
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Abstract: This study investigates the lasting repercussions of military dictatorship and civilian autocracy on economic and institutional landscapes following transitions to democracy. Despite the global trend toward democratic governance over the past half-century, many countries continue to grapple with an underwhelming economic performance following transitions. We explore the persistence of autocratic legacies, examining how institutional frameworks and economic trajectories evolve—or persist—after regime changes. Our analysis reveals nuanced patterns: while military dictatorships often leave minimal institutional and economic imprints within five years of transition, non-military autocracies frequently bequeath more enduring challenges. By illuminating these dynamics, our study contributes to a deeper understanding of the complexities surrounding post-authoritarian development and may inform more effective policy responses for fostering economically sustainable democratic transitions.
Episode 3: December 10, 2024, 5:00pm, room A409
Niclas Berggren (IFN Stockholm, Prague University of Economics and Business): "Growing Up in Uncertain Times: How Economic and Political Volatility Shapes Tolerance"
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Speaker's bio: Niclas Berggren is a researcher and program director for "Institutions, Markets and Enterprise" at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN) in Stockholm, as well as professor at the Department of Managerial Economics at the Prague University of Economics and Business (VSE). He is a member of the editorial board of Public Choice, and Journal of Comparative Economics, a former member of the Management Board of the European Public Choice Society, and the author of several dozen articles in prestigious scientific journals in the areas of political economy, institutional economics, cultural economics, discrimination and integration.
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Abstract: Tolerance towards minorities is an important characteristic of diverse societies, yet the emergence of tolerance remains only partially understood. Research suggests that the seeds of key values and social attitudes are sown during childhood. Our study explores this with a focus on economic-political uncertainty, utilizing the World Uncertainty Index – a measure of the frequency with which the word "uncertain" and its derivatives are mentioned in the monthly country reports of the Economist Intelligence Unit – as the main explanatory variable. By relating this measure of uncertainty to individual attitudes towards gays and lesbians, as reflected in responses from the European Social Survey, we examine the relationship between childhood experiences of uncertainty and tolerance. The identification approach exploits variation in experiences of uncertainty across birth cohorts and countries. Our findings indicate a negative relationship: individuals who experience higher levels of economic-political uncertainty in their early years exhibit lower tolerance toward an important minority in adulthood. This suggests that experiences of uncertainty during childhood foster a suspicious and maybe fearful attitude toward people who are different later in life. Uncertainty during formative years may thus have destructive consequences for the long-term social fabric.
Episode 4: January 16, 2025, 5:00pm, room A409 (joint meeting with WES - Warsaw Economic Seminars)
Artyom Jelnov (Ariel University): "Democratic Backsliding in Times of Crisis"
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Speaker's bio: Artyom Jelnov is senior lecturer at Ariel University in Israel. He has published extensively in international journals on game theory and its applications to political economy and industrial organization, with particular emphasis on the study of terrorism, e-commerce, and public health.
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Abstract: We provide a theoretical model of democratic backsliding. An incumbent ruler decides between a "restrictive" or a "liberal" policy. Social preference for the policy depends on the state of the world: in a "safe" state, a liberal policy is preferable, whereas in a "risky" state, the restrictive policy is superior. Moreover, there is uncertainty about the future state of the world. One of the consequences of the restrictive policy may be autocratic rule, which will maintain the restrictive policy in the future even if the state of the world becomes safe. We show that if the safe future state is sufficiently likely, then the opposition, or "restrainer", protests against the restrictive policy even in the risky state, where this policy maximizes social good. Owing to the protest, the ruler may abandon the restrictive policy.
Episode 5: March 12, 2025, 5:00pm, room A409
Rok Spruk (University of Ljubljana): "Political Economy of Judicial Backsliding and Reform: In Search of the Prometheus?"
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Speaker's bio: Rok Spruk in an Associate Professor at the School of Economics and Business at University of Ljubljana and member of Econometric Society, American Economic Association, Austrian Society for New Institutional Economics, American Law and Economics Association, as well as German Law and Economics Association. He has published in Journal of Comparative Economics, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Empirical Economics, Economics & Politics, Journal of Regulatory Economics, Journal of Institutional Economics, Applied Economics, and many others. His main interests concentrate at the intersection of empirical political economy and economic growth and development; in his research he applies novel empirical techniques, in particular causal inference methods.
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Abstract: In the past two decades, government-orchestrated attacks on judiciary have become increasingly common both across mature jurisdictions as well as developing countries, leading to undermine judicial independence. Yet, the political context that either facilitates or hampers viral attacks on the judiciary remains poorly understood. One of the most common forms of attacks on the judiciary involves court curbing strategies to reduce the power of the Supreme Court and diminish the impact of its rule. Such attacks proliferated and gained significant foothold in Venezuela, Ecuador, Hungary, Türkiye, Poland, United States and a rapidly increasing number of other countries. We investigate how government-orchestrated assaults on the judiciary, disguised as modernization efforts, undermine judicial independence. Our case studies focus on the constitutional overhauls initiated in Venezuela (in 2000) and Türkiye (in 2011) using cutting-edge hybrid difference-in-differences and synthetic control-based identification strategies. Our findings reveal that authoritarian interventions lead to an immediate and lasting breakdown of judicial independence. The deterioration in judicial independence in both Türkiye and Venezuela vis-á-vis the latent Mediterranean and Latin American counterfactual is robust to variations in the donor pool composition. It does not appear to be driven by pre-existing judicial changes and withstands numerous temporal and spatial placebo checks across over nine million randomly sequenced donor samples. Exploiting a series of the three waves of constitutional reforms in the United Kingdom between 2005 and 2010, we estimate the impact of gradual constitutional reforms on the trajectories of judicial integrity and independence. Based on the novel estimates of noise-free ideal points of judicial independence without coder biases generated across a random sequence of 9 billion chained samples for 23 common-law jurisdictions, we show that contrary to the episodes of democratic erosion in the continental Europe, constitutional reforms in the United Kingdom helped to advance judicial independence further. In the last step, we focus on the economic effects of judicial reforms. In particular, we investigate how timeliness in enforcing legal contracts affects economic growth across countries. We focus on judicial timeliness as a proxy for courts' performance in a large panel of 169 countries over the 2004-2019 period. We show that, by raising uncertainty and promoting opportunistic behavior in business transactions, slower courts hinder economic growth. The relationship is robust to diverse model specifications and appears stronger for business environments more heavily relying on judiciaries such as economies undergoing rapid growth, countries characterized by low human capital levels and civil law jurisdictions.
Episode 6: May 22, 2025, 5:00pm, room A409 (joint meeting with WES - Warsaw Economic Seminars)
Jerg Gutmann (University of Hamburg): tba
In principle, CEAPS Seminar Series is an in-person event taking place at Faculty of Economic Sciences of the University of Warsaw, but if you cannot attend and would like to connect by Zoom, please send a request to at least 3 days before the date of the seminar.