Date: 18th Friday, March 2016
Venue: Basement Floor, “Mizuho Hall”, Faculty of Law and Faculty of
Economics, East Bldg. Yoshida Campus, (No.5 building in the map)
http://www.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/access/yoshida/main.html
Language: English

Munir Squires (LSE)
“Kinship Taxation as a Constraint to Microenterprise Growth:
Experimental Evidence from Kenya”

Abstract:
Developing country entrepreneurs face family pressure to share income.
This pressure, a kinship tax, can distort capital allocations. I combine
evidence from a lab experiment-which allows me to estimate an
individual-level sufficient statistic for the distortion-with data I
collected on a sample of Kenyan entrepreneurs, to quantify the
importance of the tax. My data reveal high kinship tax rates for a third
of entrepreneurs in my sample. My quantitative analysis makes use of a
simple structural model of input allocation fitted to my data, and
implies that removing distortions from kinship taxation would increase
total factor productivity by 26%, and increase the share of workers in
firms with five or more employees from 9% to 56%. These effects are
substantially larger than those coming from credit market distortions,
which I estimate using a cash transfer RCT. My analysis also implies
strong complementarities between kinship taxation and credit constraints.

—

Réka Juhász (Princeton Univ. & Columbia Univ. )
“Temporary Protection and Technology Adoption: Evidence from the
Napoleonic Blockade”

Abstract:
This paper uses a natural experiment to assess whether temporary
protection from trade with industrial leaders can foster development of
infant industries in follower countries. Using a new dataset compiled
from primary sources, I find that in the short-run regions
(départements) in the French Empire which became better protected from
trade with the British for exogenous reasons during the Napoleonic Wars
(1803-15) increased capacity in a new technology, mechanised cotton
spinning, to a larger extent than regions which remained more exposed to
trade. Temporary protection had long term effects. In particular, by
exploiting the fact that the post-war location of the cotton industry
was determined to a large extent by the historical accident of the wars,
I first show that the location of cotton spinning within France was
persistent, and firms located in regions with higher post-war spinning
capacity were more productive 30 years later. Second, I find that after
the restoration of peace, exports of cotton goods from France increased
substantially, consistent with evolving comparative advantage in
cottons. Third, I show that as late as 1850, France and Belgium – both
part of the French Empire prior to 1815 – had larger cotton spinning
industries than other Continental European countries which were not
protected from British trade during the wars; this suggests that
adoption of the new technology was far from inevitable.

Contact:
Mieno, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, mieno-lab[at]cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp
Yano, Kono, Souksavan, Graduate School of Economics