TY - JOUR A1 - Hallerberg, Mark A1 - Copelovitch, Mark A1 - Gandrud, Christopher T1 - Financial Data Transparency, International Institutions, and Sovereign Borrowing Costs JF - International Studies Quarterly N2 - Recent events in international finance illustrate the close connection between the viability of a country's major private financial institutions and the sustainability of its sovereign debt. We explore the precise nature of this connection and the ways in which it shapes investors’ expectations of sovereign creditworthiness. We consider how investors use the overall level of information available about the private financial sector—and the potential risks it poses to government finances—when making decisions about investing in sovereign debt. We expect that governments providing more information about the private financial sector will have lower, and less volatile, borrowing costs. In order to test this argument, we create a new Financial Data Transparency (FDT) Index measuring governments’ willingness to release credible financial system data. Using the FDT and a sample of high-income OECD countries, we find that such transparency reduces sovereign borrowing costs. The effects are conditional on the level of public indebtedness. Transparent countries with low debt enjoy lower and less volatile borrowing costs. Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqx082 SN - 1468-2478 VL - 62 IS - 1 SP - 23 EP - 41 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gandrud, Christopher A1 - Hallerberg, Mark T1 - When all is said and done: updating “Elections, special interests, and financial crisis” JF - Research and Politics N2 - How do elections affect the costliness of financial crises to taxpayers? Previous research contends that more electorally competitive countries choose policies that are less costly to taxpayers. In this paper, we update Keefer’s seminal 2007 article published in International Organization with revised data. The original article found that more electorally competitive countries had lower fiscal costs from responding to crises. The commonly used IMF/World Bank data set Keefer employed has since been extensively corrected and expanded. We update the original analysis with the newest version of this data set. After doing so, we find no evidence for an association between electoral competitiveness and the fiscal costs of responding to financial crises both within the original sample and outside of it. Our update highlights a broader methodological lesson: that the costs of responding to financial crises can take many years to be settled. Future research should explicitly address and model this delayed cost resolution. KW - Financial crisis KW - Fiscal policy KW - Electoral competitiveness Y1 - 2015 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-15509 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168015589335 SN - 2053-1680 VL - 2 IS - 3 SP - 1 EP - 9 PB - Sage CY - London [u.a.] ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gandrud, Christopher A1 - Hallerberg, Mark T1 - Does Banking Union Worsen the EU’s Democratic Deficit? The Need for Greater Supervisory Data Transparency JF - Journal of Common Market Studies N2 - Does banking union exacerbate the European Union’s democratic deficit? Using Scharpf’s ‘input’ and ‘output’ legitimacy concepts, it is argued in this article that its design does worsen the democratic deficit. There are good reasons to limit ‘input legitimacy’ for politically independent institutions. ‘Output legitimacy’ is then even more relevant. Transparency is a key part of ‘output legitimacy’. It enables actors to judge whether the regulator is acting in the public’s interest and can improve their outputs. This article focuses on the banking data that the supervisors collect. Data available to the European public is evaluated and compared to America’s banking union. European practices are not comparable in terms of availability or detail. An original survey of relevant officials is conducted, which results in the finding that only 11 of 28 Member States release any information on the banks they supervise. Both EU and national supervisors should provide publicly available, timely and consistent individual bank data. Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.12226 SN - 0021-9886 SN - 1468-5965 VL - 53 IS - 4 SP - 769 EP - 785 PB - Blackwell CY - Oxford [u.a.] ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gandrud, Christopher A1 - Hallerberg, Mark A1 - Deo, Sahil A1 - Franz, Christian T1 - Preventing German Bank Failures: Federalism and decisions to save troubled banks JF - Politische Vierteljahresschrift N2 - We examine government decisions to support troubled banks. Our contribution is the examination of how federalism can affect decisions to classify banks as systemically important. Whether a bank is viewed by politicians as ‘systemically important’ varies based on how its failure would affect supporters of the government. How a federation is designed has a strong influence on which banks are given public assistance. Where the top level of government is solely responsible for banks, there will be fewer systemically important institutions and so more banks will be allowed to fail. Where lower levels are responsible, governments will allow fewer failures. We use this approach to understand government support for failing banks in Germany. Our findings are relevant for the European Banking Union. Y1 - 2015 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-15475 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5771/0032-3470-2015-2-159 SN - 0032-3470 VL - 56 IS - 2 SP - 159 EP - 181 PB - Westdt. Verl. CY - Köln [u.a.] ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bearce, David A1 - Hallerberg, Mark T1 - Democracy and De Facto Exchange Rate Regimes JF - Economics and Politics Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0343.2011.00381.x SN - 0954-1985 VL - 23 IS - 2 SP - 172 EP - 194 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hallerberg, Mark T1 - Fiscal federalism reforms in the European Union and the Greek crisis JF - European Union Politics Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/1465116510387652 SN - 1465-1165 VL - 12 IS - 1 SP - 127 EP - 142 ER - TY - BOOK A1 - Hallerberg, Mark A1 - Scartascini, Carlos G. A1 - Stein, Ernesto Hugo T1 - Who decides the budget? : a political economy analysis of the budget process in Latin America T1 - Quienes deciden el presupuesto? La economía polítca del proceso presupuestario en américa Latina Y1 - 2009 SN - 1-59782-089-x SN - 978-1-59782-089-9*pbk PB - Inter-American Development Bank [u.a.] CY - Washington, DC [u.a.] ER - TY - BOOK A1 - Hallerberg, Mark T1 - Domestic Budgets in a United Europe : Fiscal Governance from the End of Bretton Woods to EMU Y1 - 2004 SN - 0801442710 PB - Cornell Univ. Press CY - Ithaca [u.a.] ER - TY - BOOK A1 - Döring, Herbert A1 - Hallerberg, Mark T1 - Patterns of parliamentary behavior : Passage of legislation across Western Europe Y1 - 2004 SN - 0-7546-3936-3 SN - 9780754639367 PB - Ashgate CY - Aldershot [u.a.] ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gandrud, Christopher A1 - Hallerberg, Mark T1 - Statistical Agencies and Responses to Financial Crises : Eurostat, Bad Banks and the ESM JF - West European Politics Y1 - 2016 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Stolfi, Francesco A1 - Hallerberg, Mark T1 - Clientelistic budget cycles: evidence from health policy in the Italian regions JF - Journal of European Public Policy Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2015.1075577 SP - 1 EP - 18 ER - TY - RPRT A1 - Focanti, Diego A1 - Hallerberg, Mark A1 - Scartascini, Carlos T1 - Tax Reforms in Latin America in an Era of Democracy IDB Working Paper No. IDB-WP-457 Y1 - 2013 UR - http://ssrn.com/abstract=2367703 UR - https://publications.iadb.org/handle/11319/4693 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Clark, William R. A1 - Hallerberg, Mark A1 - Keil, Manfred A1 - Willett, Thomas D. T1 - Measures of financial openness and interdependence JF - Journal of Financial Economic Policy Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1108/17576381211206497 SN - 1757-6385 VL - 4 IS - 1 SP - 58 EP - 75 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Burdekin, Richard C.K. A1 - Banaian, King A1 - Hallerberg, Mark A1 - Siklos, Pierre L. T1 - Fiscal and monetary institutions and policies: onward and upward? JF - Journal of Financial Economic Policy Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1108/17576381111182918 SN - 1757-6385 VL - 3 IS - 4 SP - 340 EP - 354 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hallerberg, Mark A1 - Wehner, Joachim T1 - When do you get Economists as Policy-Makers? JF - British Journal of Political Science N2 - We analyze when economists become top-level “economic policy-makers”, focusing on financial crises and the partisanship of a country’s leader. We present a new dataset of the educational and occupational background of 1200 political leaders, finance ministers, and central bank governors from 40 developed democracies from 1973 to 2010. We find that left leaders appoint economic policy-makers who are more highly trained in economics and finance ministers who are less likely to have private finance backgrounds but more likely to be former central bankers. Finance ministers appointed during financial crises are less likely to have a financial services background. A leader’s exposure to economics training is also related to appointments. This suggests one crucial mechanism for affecting economic policy is through the selection of certain types of economic policy-makers. Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123417000801 SN - 1469-2112 SP - 1 EP - 13 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hallerberg, Mark A1 - Gandrud, Christopher T1 - The Measurement of Real-Time Perceptions of Financial Stress: Implications for Political Science JF - British Journal of Political Science N2 - How do politicians and voters respond to financial market stress, and with what political effects? Previous research addressing these questions lacks a crucial variable: a continuous, real-time indicator of the level of financial market stress that policy makers and voters perceived. We need a measure of actors’contemporary perceptions of financial market conditions to understand why they made a given choice and with what effects. Previous binary crisis measures are constructed post hoc, so tend to be biased towards severe crises and away from circumstances in which governments effectively responded to emerging trouble. As such, they suffer from clear selection bias. Annual post hoc measures do not necessarily capture conditions as they were perceived at the time of events such as elections. As dichotomous indicators, they do not measure crisis severity or how it varies over time. They use ad hoc methods to determine when crises have ended. Previous continuous measures of financial market stress are less common and suffer from other problems. They capture quantities whose importance, measurement, and reporting varies significantly across countries and over time. To overcome these issues, we develop a continuous measure of real-time perceptions of financial market stress with a kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) of detailed qualitative data, namely monthly Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) reports. We call it the EIU Perceptions of Financial Market Stress Index, or FinStress for short. FinStress enables new political research possibilities. As a continuous measure, it could be used to examine which policies can effectively prevent or reduce extreme stress, and which political conditions are conducive to implementing these policies. As a comparable continuous monthly indicator, FinStress could be used to test hypotheses that rely on sub-annual data and follow the intensity of stress over time. Here we provide examples for studying the impact of financial market stress on voters’choices and on revisions to European Union government budget figures. We thus contribute to the wider methodological toolkit by showing how KPCA can be used to summarize vast quantities of similarly formatted qualitative texts into continuous cross-sectional time-series indicators. Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123417000291 SP - 1 EP - 13 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hallerberg, Mark A1 - Gandrud, Christopher T1 - Explaining variation and change in supervisory confidentiality in the European Union JF - West European Politics N2 - Some European Union member states’ financial regulators choose to make some of the data they routinely collect on individual banks publicly available. Others treat this data as confidential. What explains this difference? This paper considers the possible effects of crises, path-dependent legal institutions, and the design of deposit insurance schemes. At the national level, the paper focuses on contrasting German and Dutch cases. After the recent economic crisis, the Dutch released more data while the German authorities maintained strict confidentiality rules. The design of deposit insurance schemes provides a key reason why the level of secrecy varies, with the Dutch move from an ex post to an ex ante scheme where the government served as the ultimate backstop leading to questions about the accounts of individual banks while the German system favoured continued secrecy. The paper also describes the level of transparency at the EU level. Multilevel legal restrictions and bureaucratic capacity tilt EU banking union practices towards member states that treat financial supervisory data as confidential. Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2017.1389421 SN - 0140-2382 N1 - Published online: 06 Nov 2017 VL - 41 IS - 4, Secrecy in Europe SP - 1025 EP - 1048 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Hallerberg, Mark T1 - Fiscal Governance and Fiscal Outcomes under EMU before and after the Crisis T2 - The Political and Economic Dynamics of the Eurozone Crisis Y1 - 2016 SN - 9780198755739 PB - Oxford University Press CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hallerberg, Mark A1 - Strauch, Rolf A1 - von Hagen, Jürgen T1 - The design of fiscal rules and forms of governance in European Union countries JF - European Journal of Political Economy N2 - This paper uses a new data set on budgetary institutions in Europe to examine the impact of fiscal rules and budget procedures in EU countries on public finances. It briefly describes the main pattern of budgetary institutions and their determinants across the EU 15 member states. Empirical evidence for the time period 1985–2004 suggests that the centralisation of budgeting procedures restrains public debt. In countries with one-party governments or coalition governments where parties are closely aligned and where political competition among them is low, this is achieved by the delegation of decision-making power to the minister of finance. Fiscal contracts that require countries to set multi-year targets and that reinforce those targets increase fiscal discipline in countries with ideologically dispersed coalitions and where parties regularly compete against each other. Y1 - 2007 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2006.11.005 SN - 1873-5703 VL - 23 IS - 2 SP - 338 EP - 359 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Hallerberg, Mark ED - Ayuso-i-Casals, Joaquim ED - Deroose, Servaas ED - Flores, Elena ED - Moulin, Laurent T1 - Who Provides Signals to Voters about Government Competence on Fiscal Matters? The Importance of Independent Watchdogs T2 - Policy Instruments for Sound Fiscal Policies N2 - The Maastricht Treaty set a series of convergence criteria that Member States have to meet to join the euro area. The Treaty is not specific, however, about how to prevent free-riding fiscal behaviour once Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is in place. The Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) represents an institutional response.1 Its design includes preventive and corrective mechanisms. The emphasis for the preventive arm rests on the monitoring of Member State behaviour. Euro-area Member States produce Stability Programme updates yearly in the autumn. The European Commission, for its part, assesses the programmes and makes recommendations to the Council of Economic and Finance Ministers (henceforth ‘ECOFIN’) on whether the programmes meet European fiscal objectives, which in particular includes the achievement of budget positions ‘close to balance or in surplus’. In order to move to the formal corrective arm of the Pact, a Member State would have to be found to have an ‘excessive deficit’. Y1 - 2007 SN - 978-0-230-27179-1 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230271791_11 PB - Palgrave Macmillan CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hallerberg, Mark A1 - Basinger, scott T1 - Remodeling the Competition for Capital: How Domestic Politics Erases the Race to the Bottom JF - American Political Science Review N2 - This paper proposes and tests a new formal model of the competition for capital, using the analogy of a “tournament” as a substitute for the ”race-to-the-bottom” model. Our key insight is that political costs that accompany legislating have both direct and indirect effects on the likelihood and scale of reforms. While countries with higher political costs are less likely themselves to enact reforms, the presence of these costs also reduces competing countries' incentives to reform regardless of their own political costs. Domestic politics therefore mitigates the pressures for downward convergence of tax policy despite increased capital mobility. We examine the capital tax policies in OECD countries during the period from 1980 to 1997 and find that states are sensitive to tax reforms in competitor countries, although their responses to reforms are mediated by their own domestic costs to reform. We define two potential sources of political costs of reform: transaction costs, due to the presence of multiple veto players in the legislative process, and constituency costs, due to ideological opposition to policy changes that benefit capital. Our evidence reveals that a reduction in these costs either domestically or abroad increases the likelihood that a country enacts tax reforms. Y1 - 2004 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055404001133 SN - 1537-5943 VL - 98 IS - 2 SP - 261 EP - 276 ER -