S. Tolga Er

While extensive research has examined the impact of populist parties’ electoral victories on financial markets, less is known about the effects of their exit from government. This study addresses this gap by analyzing market response to the democratic transition away from populism in Poland. Leveraging the close competition in Poland’s 2023 general elections as a quasi-experimental framework, we use the event study and synthetic control methods to explore the market reaction to the end of the right-wing populist government. In the short term, we demonstrate a market premium associated with the democratic transition from the right-wing populist bloc to the pro-democratic bloc. Our findings from the synthetic control method corroborate these results, further suggesting enduring positive effects on investor welfare in the longer term.

This study explores the relationship between climate vulnerability and capital investments in tourism across 165 countries, considering the moderating role of readiness. Findings reveal that an increase in vulnerability imposes a substantial economic toll, reducing capital investments. However, a country's preparedness mitigates and sometimes nullifies these adverse effects. Moreover, the improvement in vulnerability presents greater prospects for countries with low readiness, as they benefit more by mitigating the vulnerability.

This study extends the previous literature on the association between country-level economic uncertainty and suicide rate to 141 countries by introducing the World Uncertainty Index. We first examine the role of economic uncertainty on the suicide rates in a global setting for the period 2000–2019 and then analyze if the association varied across different income groups. Our primary findings suggest that a rise in economic uncertainty is related to an increased suicide rate. According to the estimates based on various income levels, higher economic uncertainty is associated with increased suicide risk in high-income countries. For middle- and low-income countries, we find no such impact. Overall, we conclude that contemporaneous and lagged economic uncertainty is a concern for the increased risk of suicide, especially in high-income countries. The results highlight the need for proactive suicide-prevention strategies in uncertain times.

This empirical study investigates the relationship between globalisation and suicide rates. Using panel data from 190 countries over the period 1990–2019, we find that the effect of the KOF Globalisation Index on suicide was initially positive, leading to an increase in the suicide rate before decreasing. Concerning the effects of economic, political, and social dimensions of globalisation, we observe a similar inverted U-shaped relationship. Unlike the middle-income and high-income countries, we find a U-shaped relationship for the case of low-income countries, indicating that suicide decreases with globalisation and then increases as globalisation continues to increase. Moreover, the effect of political globalisation disappears in low-income countries. Our results are robust to dynamic models and models with country-specific time trends.

This paper examines the effect of economic uncertainty proxied by the World Uncertainty Index on life and non-life insurance consumption using a panel dataset from 114 countries between 1996 and 2017. We find evidence that while higher economic uncertainty lowers life insurance penetration, non-life insurance penetration remains unaffected by economic uncertainty