arXiv subjects

Nuno Garoupa

Publications and source records attributed to Nuno Garoupa.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Assaults on Judicial Independence under the Pretense of Modernization: Evidence from Venezuela

We investigate how government-orchestrated assaults on the judiciary, disguised as modernization efforts, undermine judicial independence. Our study focuses on Venezuela's constitutional overhaul in the early 2000s, initiated by Hugo Chávez and implemented through a judicial emergency committee. We employ a hybrid synthetic control and difference-in-differences approach to estimate the impact of populist attacks on judicial independence trajectories. By comparing Venezuela to a stable pool of countries without radical constitutional changes, our identification strategy isolates the effect of populist assaults from unobservable confounders and common time trends. Our findings reveal that authoritarian interventions lead to an immediate and lasting breakdown of judicial independence. The deterioration in judicial independence vis-á-vis the estimated counterfactual is robust to variations in the donor pool composition. It does not appear to be driven by pre-existing judicial changes and withstands numerous temporal and spatial placebo checks across over nine million randomly sequenced donor samples.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2025

Revolutions as Structural Breaks: The Long-Term Economic and Institutional Consequences of the 1979 Iranian Revolution

This paper examines whether major political institutional disruptions produce temporary shocks or structural breaks in long-term development. Using the 1979 Iranian Revolution as a natural experiment, we apply the synthetic control method to estimate its causal effect on economic growth and institutional quality. Drawing on a panel of 66 countries from 1950 to 2015, we construct counterfactual trajectories for Iran in the absence of revolutionary change. Our results show a persistent and statistically significant divergence in per capita GDP, institutional quality, and legal constraints on executive power. We perform in-space and in-time placebo tests to rule out confounding events, such as the Iran-Iraq War and international sanctions, and propose confidence interval estimation to address uncertainty in treatment effects. The findings identify the Iranian Revolution as a structural institutional rupture, with implications for the classification of institutional change more broadly. We contribute a generalizable empirical framework for distinguishing between temporary and structural institutional shocks in long-run development.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2024

Populist Constitutional Backsliding and Judicial Independence: Evidence from Turkiye

The synthetic control method has emerged as a widely utilized empirical tool for estimating the causal effects of public policies, natural disasters, and other interventions on various economic, social, institutional, and political outcomes. In this study, we demonstrate the potential application of this method in empirical comparative law by estimating the impact of the 2010 constitutional referendum in Turkiye on the trajectory of judicial independence. By comparing Turkiye with a salient Mediterranean donor pool of countries that did not experience similar interventions during the period from 1987 to 2021, we provide evidence of a severe breakdown and erosion of judicial independence. This deterioration appears to be a direct response to the populist constitutional backsliding initiated by the government-orchestrated assault on the judiciary, which was carried out under the guise of judicial modernization in 2010, before the additional constitutional reforms in 2017.

econ.GN↗