Browsing by Author "Jensen, NM"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Can Results-Free Review Reduce Publication Bias? The Results and Implications of a Pilot Study
    (Comparative Political Studies, 2016-11) Findley, MG; Jensen, NM; Malesky, EJ; Pepinsky, TB
    © 2016, © The Author(s) 2016. In 2015, Comparative Political Studies embarked on a landmark pilot study in research transparency in the social sciences. The editors issued an open call for submissions of manuscripts that contained no mention of their actual results, incentivizing reviewers to evaluate manuscripts based on their theoretical contributions, research designs, and analysis plans. The three papers in this special issue are the result of this process that began with 19 submissions. In this article, we describe the rationale for this pilot, expressly articulating the practices of preregistration and results-free review. We document the process of carrying out the special issue with a discussion of the three accepted papers, and critically evaluate the role of both preregistration and results-free review. Our main conclusions are that results-free review encourages much greater attention to theory and research design, but that it raises thorny problems about how to anticipate and interpret null findings. We also observe that as currently practiced, results-free review has a particular affinity with experimental and cross-case methodologies. Our lack of submissions from scholars using qualitative or interpretivist research suggests limitations to the widespread use of results-free review.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Competing for global capital or local voters? The politics of business location incentives
    (Public Choice, 2015-09) Jensen, NM; Malesky, EJ; Walsh, M
    © 2015, Springer Science+Business Media New York. The competition for global capital has led to interjurisdictional competition between countries, states and cities as to who can offer the most attractive incentives to firms. In this study, we examine the domestic politics of this competition by focusing on incentive use in the United States from 1999 to 2012. We define incentives as the targeted tax deductions or exemptions that are used to lure businesses into a locality. Drawing on data from municipal incentive programs, we examine how electoral competition shapes the use and oversight of targeted incentives. We find evidence that cities with elected mayors provide larger incentives than non-elected city managers by taking advantage of exogeneity in the assignment of city government institutions and a database of over 2000 investment incentives from 2010 to 2012. We also find that elected mayors enjoy more lax oversight of incentive projects than their appointed counterparts. Our results have important implications for the study of interjurisdictional competition and the role of electoral institutions in shaping economic policy.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    “Leakage” in international regulatory regimes: Did the OECD Anti-Bribery convention increase bribery?
    (Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2021-10-18) Chapman, TL; Jensen, NM; Malesky, EJ; Wolford, S
    When do well-intended regulatory regimes have unintended consequences? We examine one obstacle to successful regulation, “regulatory leakage,” in the context of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention (ABC). Leakage occurs when regulated behavior decreases for actors under a regime’s jurisdiction, but increases among those outside of it. We analyze a formal model that demonstrates how the ABC may simultaneously reduce bribery among firms from member countries, while increasing bribery by firms from non-ABC member countries. We also show how the ABC may lead firms from ABC member countries to shift to bribery through intermediaries. New empirical evidence of MNC activity in Vietnam shows evidence of both regulatory leakage and bribery through intermediaries.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Monopoly Money: Foreign Investment and Bribery in Vietnam, a Survey Experiment
    (American Journal of Political Science, 2015-02) Malesky, EJ; Gueorguiev, DD; Jensen, NM
    ©2014, Midwest Political Science Association. Prevailing work argues that foreign investment reduces corruption, either by competing down monopoly rents or diffusing best practices of corporate governance. We argue that the mechanisms generating this relationship are not clear because the extant empirical work is too heavily drawn from aggregations of total foreign investment entering an economy. Alternatively, we suggest that openness to foreign investment has differential effects on corruption even within the same country and under the same domestic institutions over time. We argue that foreign firms use bribes to enter protected industries in search of rents, and therefore we expect variation in bribe propensity across sectors according to expected profitability. We test this effect using a list experiment embedded in three waves of a nationally representative survey of 20,000 foreign and domestic businesses in Vietnam, finding that the effect of economic openness on the probability to engage in bribes is conditional on policies that restrict investment.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Nonstate Actors and Compliance with International Agreements: An Empirical Analysis of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention
    (International Organization, 2018) Jensen, NM; Malesky, EJ
    © 2017 The IO Foundation. International relations scholarship has made great progress on the study of compliance with international agreements. While persuasive, most of this work has focused on states' de jure compliance decisions, largely excluding the de facto behavior of nonstate actors whose actions the agreement hopes to constrain. Of particular interest has been whether the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention (ABC) might reduce the propensity of multinational corporations (MNCs) to bribe officials in host countries through its mechanisms of extraterritoriality and extensive peer review. Unfortunately, research is hampered by reporting bias. Since the convention raises the probability of investors' punishment for bribery in their home countries, it reduces both the incentives for bribery and willingness to admit to the activity. This generates uncertainty over which of these incentives drives any correlation between signing the convention and reductions in reported bribery. We address this problem by employing a specialized survey experiment that shields respondents and reduces reporting bias. We find that after the onset of Phase 3 in 2010, when the risk of noncompliance increased for firms subject to the OECD-ABC, those MNCs reduced their actual bribery relative to their nonsignatory competitors.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Pass the Bucks: Credit, Blame, and the Global Competition for Investment
    (International Studies Quarterly, 2014-09) Jensen, NM; Malesky, E; Medina, M; Ozdemir, U
    © 2013 International Studies Association. Both countries and subnational governments commonly engage in competition for mobile capital, offering generous incentives to attract investment. Existing economics research has suggested that these tax incentives have a limited ability to affect investment patterns and are often excessively costly when measured against the amount of investment and jobs created. In this paper, we argue instead that the "competition" for capital can be politically beneficial to incumbent politicians. Building off work on electoral pandering, we argue that incentives allow politicians to take credit for firms' investment decisions. We test the empirical implications of this theory using a nationwide Internet survey, which employs a randomized experiment to test how voters evaluate the performance of incumbent US governors. Our findings illustrate a critical political benefit of offering such incentives. Politicians can use these incentives to take credit for investment flowing into their districts and to minimize the political fallout when investors choose to locate elsewhere.