Leader value added: Assessing the growth contribution of individual national leaders
中文摘要
既有文献表明，总体而言，领导人对经济增长具有重要影响。本文探讨的问题是：哪些领导人具有影响？我们提出一种方法，用于估计各领导人相对于本国同侪的特有增长贡献，并借鉴 Armstrong 等（2022）的方法，通过稳健经验贝叶斯置信区间（EBCI）计算其不确定性。我们表明，对领导人贡献最直观的估计——其任期内的平均增长率——在衡量其贡献方面几乎毫无用处；估计领导人效应需要对这一未经调整的平均增长率进行大幅调整。只有相对少数领导人的贡献较大、其95%稳健EBCI不包含零，这表明利用增长数据很难识别哪些领导人有利或不利于经济增长。尽管采用我们的方法确实可以识别出一些表现突出的领导人，但其中许多人选出人意料。此外，非民主国家的领导人被识别为有利或不利于经济增长的可能性，并不比民主国家的领导人高出多少。
Abstract
Previous literature suggests that leaders matter for growth in general. This paper asks: which leaders matter? We develop a method to estimate the idiosyncratic growth contribution of individual leaders (relative to their compatriots) and, drawing on Armstrong et al. (2022), calculate its uncertainty via a robust empirical Bayes confidence internal (EBCI). We show that most intuitive estimate of a leader's contribution—the average growth rate during their tenure—is mostly useless for measuring his or her contribution and estimating the leader effect requires major adjustments to that raw growth average. Relatively few leaders have large contributions with zero outside the 95% robust EBCI, which suggests it is difficult to identify which leaders are good or bad for growth using growth data. Although there are some leaders that stand out using our method, many of those leaders are surprises. Moreover, leaders in non-democratic countries are not much more likely to be identified as good or bad for growth than leaders in democratic ones.