Essays on law, migration, and economic growth
(2022)
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PhDDissertationAdamLevai2022Sept.pdf
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- Abstract
- This dissertation is composed of three chapters investigating three different law dimensions and their connection with migration, economic growth, and the stock market. The first chapter evaluates the importance of access to justice (ATJ) for economic growth. We create a new database on the number of professional judges per 100,000 inhabitants by collecting data from various public institutions. We draw on these data as a macro-level proxy capturing the fundamental and historical evolution of ATJ from 1970 to 2014 for a wide range of developed and developing countries. Using an instrumental variable approach in a dynamic panel setting to deal with endogeneity, we show that ATJ is a positive and significant determinant of economic growth. The results hint at a stronger impact of ATJ on economic development in less developed societies. The second chapter analyses if immigration (in terms of both size and composition) can affect the labor market regulation in the destination country. To examine this link, we build a novel workers' protection measure based on 36 labor law variables over a sample of 70 developed and developing countries from 1970 to 2010. Exploiting a dynamic panel setting using both internal and external instruments, we establish a new result: immigration impacts workers' protection in the direction of the origin country workers' protection (composition channel), while we find a small negative or null effect for the immigrant population (size channel). The third and last chapter investigates the impact of temporary border controls on stock market returns. To do so, we first document a unique dataset on the reintroduction of border controls constructed from official documents. Then, we consider two complementary research designs: an event study exploiting the first refugee-induced border control in Germany in September 2015, and a difference-in-difference analysis covering all border controls in the Schengen area between 2006 and 2016. In both analyses, we find a negative and short-lived effect on daily stock returns. These results are confirmed across various sectors, causes of border controls, and firm sizes. The temporary reintroduction of border controls does not seem to have affected firms' expectations in a persistent manner.
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Levai, A. (2022). Essays on law, migration, and economic growth. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/101323