#working paper

Women in Love–the novel, #15, 2018 Watercolor on Fabriano paper. 20 x 26 in.

Not unordered, 2019 Watercolor on Fabriano paper. 22 x 30 in.

The Barbara Walters Gallery at the Barbara Walters Campus Center part of Sarah Lawrence College is pleased to present its latest exhibit, Working Paper by Julie Abraham. The exhibit runs through March 22.

Printmaking is a queer art. Treated as a marginal practice. Once an imitation—the mode by which paintings or drawings were reproduced. Now a phase—touted as a respite from or an aid to more serious work. Multiplying images that are and are not the same, repetitions that should but might not be identical, printmakers act out the excess and the confusion of sameness and difference key to persisting cultural fantasies about queer persons.

Abstract: Standard theoretical arguments suggest that republics ought to grow faster than monarchies and experience lower transitional costs following reforms. We employ a panel of 27 countries observed from 1820‐2000 to explore whether regime types and institutional reforms have differential growth effects in monarchies and republics. A set of Barro‐type regressions show that there are no significant growth differences between the two regime types and that the effects of incremental reforms do not differ between them, but that those of large‐scale reforms do. Specifically, we find a strong “valley‐of‐tears” effect of large reforms in republics while monarchies benefit from such reforms in the ten‐year perspective adopted here. We offer some tentative thoughts on the underlying mechanisms responsible for the results.

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Since the 1950s, the study of different political institutions has been part of political economy and political science under the joint heading of “public choice” and more recently of the ʺnew institutional economics” and the “new public economics”, and these lines of research have produced immense amounts of theoretical and empirical results regarding the possible consequences of political institutions. Nonetheless, only very few papers have been devoted to the study of monarchical arrangements. As noted in the introduction, many scholars seem to view monarchy as an essentially outdated institution not even worthy of academic interest. Yet, the study of monarchy as a political institution deserves wider attention: it has been around almost as long as mankind and historically has been the dominant regime type, and it arguably can have real social, political and economic consequences, even in modern times, where a non‐trivial number of countries continue to be monarchical in some form. In the following we shall offer some relatively simple, theoretical considerations that hopefully may enlighten our understanding of the potential differences between monarchies and republics on some central issues of political economy.

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We have in this paper explored the long‐term growth rates in monarchies and republics as well as the growth effects in the medium and long run of institutional reforms in the two types of systems, and in particular of large reform. While economic growth and growth effects of reforms have also been the objects of several previous papers, the innovation of this paper lies in focusing specifically on republics and monarchies and in distinguishing between reforms in the two.

The results of regressing decadal growth rates in the period 1820‐2000 in 27 Western countries on institutional quality and reforms, as measured by the Polity IV index, reveal that large‐scale reforms induce a sizeable reduction in growth in republics, but a growth spurt in monarchies. As such, we find evidence of a “valley of tears” effect of substantial transitional costs in the former but not in the latter countries. This result is robust to excluding potential outliers and does not depend on differences in the timing of the reforms. Furthermore, monarchies have on average been able to introduce more sweeping reforms than republics when deciding on large‐scale institutional reorganization.

Abstract: The cross-country correlation between social trust and income equality is well documented, but few studies examine the direction of causality. We show theoretically that by facilitating cooperation, trust may increase efficiency and lead to more equal outcomes, while the feedback from inequality to trust is ambiguous. Using a structural equations model estimated on a large country sample, we find that trust has a positive effect on both market and net income equality. Larger welfare states lead to higher net equality but neither net income equality nor welfare state size seems to have a causal effect on trust. We conclude that while trust facilitates welfare state policies that may reduce net inequality, this decrease in inequality does not increase trust.

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A mechanism supporting a causal link from trust to equality is suggested by findings in Bergh and Bjørnskov (2011) and Bjørnskov and Svendsen (2013), which show that historical trust levels explain current welfare state size. If bigger welfare states increase income equality, there will be a link from trust to equality mediated by the welfare state. Moreover, if equality increases trust, positive feed-back dynamics may take place, such that equality increases trust, and trust facilitates the implementation of welfare state redistribution, further fostering equality. Such dynamics are even more likely if universal welfare state policies have a positive effect on trust, as suggested by Barr (2004) and also Kumlin and Rothstein (2005). On the other hand, if the cross- country correlation between income equality and social trust is driven only by the fact that deeply rooted trust levels explain both trust today and the degree of welfare state redistribution, there is no feed-back dynamic from redistributive welfare state policies to trust.

The possible causal relations are illustrated in Figure 1, where full arrows show causal relations argued for in previous literature. This paper investigates the causality between trust and equality, and the potential role of welfare state policies as mediators of the causal associations. We do so by exploring two central questions, not dealt with before. First, do welfare states have an independent effect on income equality, or is the correlation between welfare state size and income equality spurious, in the sense that trust explains both welfare state size and income equality? Second, if welfare states do increase equality of income, does this further increase trust, suggesting a positive feedback dynamics?

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RESOURCES: A new research brief by the ILO on implementation of international labour standards for domestic workers and one of the key findings is:

"There remain many challenges in making decent work a reality for all domestic workers, but member States are implementing innovative and effective measures to ensure that domestic workers’ fundamental rights are respected. These measures address the specific characteristics of domestic work, and include effective labour inspection, industry-specific campaigns to raise awareness on the rights of domestic workers, accessible and affordable legal aid for all domestic workers."