Having only completed my exams on Wednesday, I haven’t had time to read many papers in the NBER’s latest batch of releases, but here are some abstracts that caught my eye:

NYU’s Jan De Loecker says that previous studies have overestimated the productivity impact of trade liberalization by using sales data as a proxy for output. He models demand explicitly and finds a productivity impact that, while still positive, is smaller than the typical estimates. Ungated pdf.

Torsten Persson & Guido Tabellini estimate the impact of political transitions on growth using semiparametric techniques and are more pessimistic about democratization than other studies. “In particular, we find an average negative effect on growth of leaving democracy on the order of -2 percentage points implying effects on income per capita as large as 45 percent over the 1960-2000 panel.” Ungated pdf.

Jiandong Ju & Shang-Jin Wei: “While financial globalization always improves the welfare of a developed country with a good financial system, its effect is ambiguous for a developing country with an inefficient financial sector/poor corporate governance. However, the net effect for a developing country is more likely to be positive, the stronger its property rights protection. This is consistent with the observation that developed countries are often more enthusiastic about capital account liberalization around the world than many developing countries.” NBER W13148.

Paul R. Bergin, Robert C. Feenstra & Gordon H. Hanson develop a stochastic model of outsourcing to explain fluctuations in value added for outsourcing industries in Mexico. Ungated pdf.