how to combine long and short return histories efficiently a common challenge in portfolio risk analysis is that certain assets have shorter return histories than others unfortunately many standard portfolio risk analysis techniques including historical tail risk measurement regime dependent risk analysis and bootstrapping simulations require full return histories for all assets or risk factors the author presents easy instructions on how to efficiently combine data for investments whose histories differ in length and offers a new model to better account for non normal distributions

media markets and localism does local news en espanol boost hispanic voter turnout the same time the availability of these products reduces the consumption of local news not only because some consumers prefer national and global content to local information but also because local media products that lose a significant number of consumers are forced to cut qual ity and they may even cease to exist if their audience falls below a critical threshold for these reasons some scholars claim that the rise of integrated media markets undermines local civic engagement robert d putnam 2000 against this backdrop many regulatory agencies including the federal communications commission fcc of the united states seek to protect local media and promote localism for instance by limiting ownership concentration 1 however localism is desirable only if there are in fact positive spillovers from the provision of local content that can help justify the loss of private welfare that integrated media markets would provide in this paper we propose a simple test for the existence of spillovers from local news pro gramming asking if the presence of local television news affects civic behavior the ubiq uity of local news programming across all us metro areas makes it impossible to study its effects on the general population in contrast the availability of spanish language news has increased considerably in recent years providing us with an experiment to study the effect of local news on one important measure of civic engagement voter turnout in local elections in particular we use a differencing approach asking whether hispanic voter turnout is higher in relation to non hispanic turnout in metro areas with spanish language local television news our results indicate that spanish language local television news raises hispanic turnout by more than 4 percentage points local news targeted at hispanics has no effect on the participa tion of non hispanics and as one would expect a significantly smaller effect in years with a presidential race in markets with spanish language news about a quarter of hispanics turn to these programs our estimates thus imply that news in spanish caused about a fifth of spanish language news viewers to start voting interestingly hispanics with access to news in spanish do not increase the time they spend watching news content analyses of spanish language news programs in the united states find that these shows are much more likely to report on

media competition and electoral politics we build a framework linking competition in the media market to political participation media outlets report on the ability of candidates running for office and compete for audience through their choice of slant citizens consume news only if the expected utility of being informed about candidates ability is sufficiently large for their group collectively our results can reconcile seemingly contradictory empirical evidence showing that entry in the media market can either increase or decrease turnout while information pushes up independent turnout partisans adjust their turnout to the ability of their preferred candidate and on average they vote less when informed

political scale and electoral turnout evidence from the less industrialized world this article attempts to bring the politics of scale back into the study of comparative politics explicitly focusing on the question of electoral turnout in the less industrialized world it explo

a bottom up approach to the risk adjusted performance of the buyout fund market we use the burgiss dataset to study private equity buyout fund performance our findings on performance before risk adjustments are consistent with those in the literature and indicate significant outperformance of buyout fund investments using a bottom up approach we identify the systematic risks of underlying companies in buyout funds to inform an appropriate risk adjusted benchmark which we determine to be a levered size and sector adjusted public index after making these risk adjustments we find no significant outperformance of buyout fund investments versus the public market equivalent on a dollar weighted basis we contend that even without significant risk adjusted outperformance buyout funds can play a valuable role in institutional investors portfolios

the risk in hedge fund strategies theory and evidence from trend followers hedge fund strategies typically generate option like returns linear factor models using benchmark asset indices have difficulty explaining them following the suggestions in glosten and jagannathan 1994 this article shows how to model hedge fund returns by focusing on the popular trend following strategy we use lookback straddles to model trend following strategies and show that they can explain trend following funds returns better than standard asset indices though standard straddles lead to similar empirical results lookback straddles are theoretically closer to the concept of trend following our model should be useful in the design of performance benchmarks for trend following funds

human capital investments or norms of role transition how women s schooling and career affect the process of family formation proponents of the new home economics hypothesize that women s growing economic independence largely accounts for the rise in delayed marriage and motherhood in industrialized societies this article assesses this hypothesis for the federal republic of gernamy by estimating the dynamic effects of women s educational and career investments on the timing of family events eventhistory analysis shows that the delaying effect on the timing of the first marriage across cohorts does not result from an increase in the quality of women s human capital investiments as posited by the new home economics rather women s extended participation in schooling delays their transition to adulthood an effect aligned with normative expectations that young women in school are not ready for marriage and motherhood increasing career resources however do lead women to postpone or avoid having children

uninformed votes information effects in presidential elections theory recent scholarship has emphasized the potential importance of cues information shortcuts and statistical aggregation processes in allowing relatively uninformed citizens to act individually or collectively as if they were fully informed hypotheses uninformed voters successfully use cues and information shortcuts to behave as if they were fully informed failing that individual deviations from fully informed voting cancel out in a mass electorate producing the same aggregate election outcome as if voters were fully informed methods hypothetical fully informed vote choices are imputed to individual voters using the observed relationship between political information and vote choices for voters with similar social and demographic characteristics estimated by probit analysis of data from national election study surveys conducted after the six most recent united states presidential elections results both hypotheses are clearly disconfirmed at the individual level the average deviation of actual vote probabilities from hypothetical fully informed vote probabilities was about ten percentage points in the electorate as a whole these deviations were significantly diluted by aggregation but by no means eliminated incumbent presidents did almost five percentage points better and democratic candidates did almost two percentage points better than they would have if voters had in fact been fully informed

a theory of credibility this paper presents models in which one agent must decide whether to trust another whose motives are uncertain reliability can only be communicated through actions in this context it pays for people to build a reputation based on reliable behaviour someone becomes credible by consistently providing accurate and valuable information or by performing useful services the theory provides a justification for long term arrangements without binding contracts it also describes those situations where it pays an agent to cash in on his reputation many decisions depend on trusting someone consumers must decide whether to believe advertisements banks need to judge the reliability of loan applicants and employers must decide how much responsibility to delegate to their employees this paper attempts to model situations that arise when someone is uncertain about whether to trust the people he deals with in this context reputations for reliability are valuable an agent becomes credible by consistently providing accurate valuable information or by always acting responsibly i analyse a series of simple abstract models of information transmission in the basic model there are two agents the sender s and the receiver r who are to play the game a known finite number of times at each stage both players learn the value of a parameter measuring the importance of that period s play of the game that is the value of making a correct decision and s obtains payoff relevant information s then sends a signal to r who makes a decision that affects the welfare of both players after both players learn the consequences of r s decision the process repeats at each stage r must decide what action to take in order to do that he must assess the credibility of s the difficulty arises because r is uncertain about s s preferences when play begins i model this by assuming that with positive probability s has identical preferences to r s is a friend and with positive probability s has completely opposed preferences to r s is an enemy this uncertainty creates a trade off for enemy senders at each stage providing honest information enhances s s reputation but only at the expense of foregoing an opportunity for immediate gain by duping r the possibility that s is a friend lends credibility to what he says but this credibility may also be exploited by an enemy s the principal equilibrium has the following form in the basic model where s has no control over the importance of a given play s typically conveys accurate information for the first several periods r raises the probability he places on s being friendly after receiving accurate information if he believes that an enemy would have lied to him with positive probability the more important the information the more likely an enemy will attempt to deceive r an enemy will eventually take advantage of r by misleading him when this happens the sender loses all opportunities for deception in the future i

the effect of the expansion of the voting franchise on the size of government this paper examines the claim that expansion of the voting franchise has been an important factor in the growth of government state government spending and state and local spending are explained using a panel of 46 states for 1950 88 elimination of poll taxes and literacy tests led to higher turnout particularly among the poor and a poorer pivotal voter as predicted we find that these changes a fall in the income of voters relative to state income and the ouster of republicans from state government led to a sharp rise in welfare spending but no change in other spending

rational expectations in elections some experimental results based on a multidimensional model while our experimental results do not show convincingly the superiority of our model over alternative hypotheses these results do not reject the rational expectations approach to handling incomplete information in elections this is not to say of course that our model provides the most appropriate treatment of incomplete information since it relies primarily on one source of information polls certainly other data exist such as the historical record of the parties primary election outcomes and the coalitions observed at nominating conventions which voters might use for information on their choices what we hope our analysis has begun however is a more rigorous study of how citizens can interpret such data and the role played by the various media in supplying these data

rational choice and turnout turning out to vote is the most common and important act of political participation in any democracy voting is also less well understood and explained empirically than other political acts engaged in regularly by citizens turnout however presents a special problem for rational choice theories of politics for it is taken to be the paradigmatic example of the problem of collective action in which although all may benefit from voting it is rarely in the individual s self interest to vote this paper begins by examining the problem of explaining turnout a basic form of rational choice models of turnout is developed basic in the sense that it is common to all such models this basic model is shown to be incomplete and the two most important models the calculus of voting and the minimax regret model are illustrated as alternative ways to complete this basic model along with mention of game theoretic models their strengths and weaknesses are then assessed the remainder of the paper argues that rational choice accounts of turnout are possible the first step is to argue that turnout is not an especially problematic version of the collective action problem because it is for many a low cost low expected benefit decision a strategic politicians account of turnout and campaigns is examined next a reinterpretation of the intrinsic benefits of voting is then considered and is used to examine the most important substantive problem in the turnout literature its decline these steps i argue make theories of ordinary political decisions at once both more political and more integrated into the politics of the larger system

closeness expenditures and turnout in the 1982 u s house elections students of elections have repeatedly found that the closeness of an election is modestly correlated with turnout this may be due to a direct response of instrumentally motivated voters but recent theoretical work casts doubt on the adequacy of this explanation another possibility is that elite actors respond to closeness with greater effort at mobilization we explore the latter possibility by using fec and state data on campaign expenditures in house senate and gubernatorial races our results indicate that closeness has an effect at both the mass and elite levels we also provide quantitative estimates of the effect of senate and gubernatorial expenditure on house turnout

bayes stein estimation for portfolio analysis in portfolio analysis uncertainty about parameter values leads to suboptimal portfolio choices the resulting loss in the investor s utility is a function of the particular estimator chosen for expected returns so this is a problem of simultaneous estimation of normal means under a well specified loss function in this situation as stein has shown the clas sical sample mean is inadmissible this paper presents a simple empirical bayes estimator that should outperform the sample mean in the context of a portfolio simulation analysis shows that these bayes stein estimators provide significant gains in portfolio selection problems

getting out the vote participation in gubernatorial elections scholarship on electoral turnout has long emphasized two main themes explanations of nonvoting in terms of individual characteristics and in terms of contextual variables these investigations have deeply enriched our understanding of electoral participation but their limitations have also sensitized us to the remaining problems of explanation perusal of the work on american politics exposes a rather striking tendency in studies of participation to ignore or soft pedal the effects of active political mobilization in this article we formulate two models of electoral turnout socioeconomic and political mobilization and apply them to aggregate data on voting in gubernatorial elections of 1978 and 1980 the socioeconomic model of turnout includes such influences as income age and educational attainment to assess the effects of political mobilization we have considered campaign spending partisan competition electoral margin and the presence or absence of a simultaneous race for the united states senate both of the models perform quite well individually producing significant and meaningful coefficients and adequate fits yet in the final analysis we demonstrate that quite apart from major sources of variation in gubernatorial turnout such as region and presidential versus nonpresidential years the mobilizing influences of campaign activism and competitiveness have a strong impact on electoral participation electoral law i e closing date of registration retains a small but significant effect on voting for governor and socioeconomic characteristics included in a fully specified model have little to contribute independently to an explanation of electoral turnout these findings are very much in the same vein as related cross national investigations which emphasize the crucial role of electoral law and political parties and downplay individual characteristics as determinants of electoral participation on the basis of the research reported here we argue that scholars need to pay more attention to political mobilization as an explanation of electoral turnout in the presidential election between cox and harding in 1920 only half of the eligible voters participated this relatively low turnout together with the historically minimal rates of participation in state and local elections created deep concern among those who believed that reasonably high levels of political involvement are crucial in maintaining a healthy democratic politics it was in this atmosphere of worry about low electoral turnout that charles e merriam and harold f gosnell 1924 conducted in the city of chicago the first systematic study of nonvoting subsequently gosnell 1927 went even further and executed the first experimental study in modern political science demonstrating conditions that could stimulate electoral turnout we too worry about low participation in elections today at every level of government and we believe these classic studies

the case for nil votes voter behavior under asymmetric information in compulsory and voluntary voting systems in an informational voting environment we study the impact of an explicit nil vote option on the ballot when some voters are uninformed and face the swing voters curse we postulate a simple model of strategic voting in which voters entertain heterogeneous thresholds on legitimacy of different voting actions we predict that introducing a nil vote option reduces the number of uninformed and invalid votes increasing expected welfare in both voluntary and compulsory voting we test our model in a pen and paper laboratory experiment and find that the predictions of the model hold in the data for both voting systems

does education improve citizenship evidence from the united states and the united kingdom abstract many studies document an association between schooling and civic participation but none credibly investigate causal links we explore the effect of extra schooling induced through compulsory schooling laws on the likelihood of becoming politically involved in the united states and the united kingdom we find that educational attainment is related to several measures of political interest and involvement in both countries we find a strong and robust relationship between education and voting for the united states but not for the united kingdom our us results approach the uk findings when conditioning on registration possibly indicating that registration rules present a barrier to participation

asset allocation risk models for alternative investments often the lack of mark to market data lures investors into the misconception that alternative asset classes and strategies represent somewhat of a free lunch this article proposes solutions to measuring mark tomarket risk in alternative and illiquid investments the authors describe how to estimate risk factor exposures when the available asset return series may be smoothed owing to the difficulty of obtaining market based valuations they show that alternative investments are exposed to many of the same risk factors that drive stock and bond returns i nvestors have long recognized that asset class returns are driven by a common set of risk factors asset allocators often use the risk factor approach to improve portfolio diversification and to translate macroeconomic views into expected asset returns in practice implementing a risk factor approach to asset allocation requires mapping asset classes to their underlying factor exposures which can be challenging especially for asset classes for which the available historical data are limited or biased in this article we propose solutions to measuring mark to market risk in alternative and illiquid investments we describe how to estimate risk factor exposures when the available asset return series may be smoothed owing to the difficulty of obtaining market based valuations we show that alternative investments are exposed to many of the same risk factors that drive stock and bond returns our approach has profound implications for risk estimation in an asset allocation context for example figure 1 shows the difference between adjusted and reported from index returns volatilities for several alternative investments as well as for public markets equities and bonds it also shows a measure of autocorrelation which highlights how return smoothing contributes to the misestimation of volatility the bottom line is that alternative investments are much more volatile on a mark to market basis than their reported index returns would suggest this bias tends to be more pronounced for indices that are smoothed in this article we describe the methodology used to arrive at these adjustments and include other key risk measures relevant to asset allocation we recognize that there already is a significant body of literature that attempts to estimate risk factor exposures for various individual alternative investments and strategies however little research has been done to estimate the risk factor exposures across all alternatives within an internally consistent unified risk factor framework given increased allocations to alternative investments in institutional investors portfolios we see an urgent need to develop a consistent approach that directly integrates the risks of alternative assets with the rest of investors portfolios

fees eat diversification s lunch although diversification is often spoken of as the only free lunch in investing the authors show that it is not free and that it must be considered in light of its costs they also show that fees on diversifying asset classes are high relative to their risk adjusted diversification benefit with the more exotic asset classes carrying higher price tags because there is meaningful cross sectional variation fees need to be considered when making strategic asset allocation decisions

political ignorance and collective policy preferences in contrast with the expectations of many analysts i find that raw policy specific facts such as the direction of change in the crime rate or the amount of the federal budget devoted to foreign aid have a significant influence on the public s political judgments using both traditional survey methods and survey based randomized experiments i show that ignorance of policy specific information leads many americans to hold political views different from those they would hold otherwise i also show that the effect of policy specific information is not adequately captured by the measures of general political knowledge used in previous research finally i show that the effect of policy specific ignorance is greatest for americans with the highest levels of political knowledge rather than serve to dilute the influence of new information general knowledge and the cognitive capacities it reflects appears to facilitate the incorporation of new policy specific information into political judgments

explaining voter turnout patterns an information theory voting research is rich in empirical regularities yet a parsimonious theory of voter turnout that can match the facts has proven to be elusive this paper argues that voter turnout patterns can be explained by extending the traditional rational voter model to include limited information a model is presented in which utility maximizing consumers receive higher payoffs from voting the more confident they are of their vote choice the model provides an explanation for the most important cross sectional voter turnout patterns in addition it suggests a novel explanation for the post 1960 decline in u s participation

the paradox of information and voter turnout the most prominent explanation for the paradox of voter turnout is that citizens are willing to bear the cost of voting because they perceive a benefit e g fulfilling a civic duty or expressing themselves that is independent of the election outcome however a separate literature highlights the empirical importance of information for voter participation and existing explanations for this are that uninformed citizens either expect smaller benefits from voting or defer strategically to peers who know more this paper simply points out that while either of these theories offers a plausible explanation for the importance of information neither is robust if the motivation for voting is unrelated to the election outcome this is because citizens with positive net voting costs should abstain no matter how well informed while those with negative net voting costs should vote no matter how poorly informed thus the purported resolution to the turnout paradox raises a new paradox of information and voter turnout intuitively the quality of a vote should matter only if the vote is somehow instrumental suggesting that future work should continue to explore instrumental rationales for voting

an econometric model of serial correlation and illiquidity in hedge fund returns the returns to hedge funds and other alternative investments are often highly serially correlated in sharp contrast to the returns of more traditional investment vehicles such as long only equity portfolios and mutual funds in this paper we explore several sources of such serial correlation and show that the most likely explanation is illiquidity exposure i e investments in securities that are not actively traded and for which market prices are not always readily available for portfolios of illiquid securities reported returns will tend to be smoother than true economic returns which will understate volatility and increase risk adjusted performance measures such as the sharpe ratio we propose an econometric model of illiquidity exposure and develop estimators for the smoothing prole as well as a smoothing adjusted sharpe ratio for a sample of 908 hedge funds drawn from the tass database we show that our estimated smoothing coecien ts vary considerably across hedge fund style categories and may be a useful proxy for quantifying illiquidity exposure

internet and politics evidence from u k local elections and local government policies we empirically study the effects of broadband internet diffusion on local election outcomes and on local government policies using rich data from the u k our analysis shows that the internet has displaced other media with greater news content i e radio and newspapers thereby decreasing voter turnout most notably among less educated and younger individuals in turn we find suggestive evidence that local government expenditures and taxes are lower in areas with greater broadband diffusion particularly expenditures targeted at less educated voters our findings are consistent with the idea that voters information plays a key role in determining electoral participation government policies and government size

knowledge is power a theory of information income and welfare spending no voters cast their votes based on perfect information but better educated and richer voters are on average better informed than others we develop a model where the voting mistakes resulting from low political knowledge reduce the weight of poor voters and cause parties to choose political platforms that are better aligned with the preferences of rich voters in us election survey data we find that income is more important in affecting voting behavior for more informed voters than for less informed voters as predicted by the model further in a panel of us states we fi nd that when there is a strong correlation between income and political information congress representatives vote more conservatively which is also in line with our theory

radio s impact on public spending if informed voters receive favorable policies then the invention of a new mass medium may affect government policies since it affects who is informed and who is not these ideas are developed in a voting model the model forms the basis for an empirical investigation of a major new deal relief program implemented in the middle of the expansion period of radio the main empirical finding is that u s counties with many radio listeners received more relief funds more funds were allocated to poor counties with high unemployment but controlling for these and other variables the effects of radio are large and highly significant

lower class mobilization and policy linkage in the u s states theory political participation by lower class voters should create pressures for government to respond with supportive policies hypotheses lower class voting is associated with more generous state welfare policies political forces and institutions structure this relationship methods a pooled time series analysis for the 50 u s states from 1978 to 1990 results we demonstrate an enduring relationship between the degree of mobilization of lower class voters and the generosity of welfare benefits provided by state governments this relationship can be vitiated by remarkable political and economic events such as the new federalism and the economic recession in the early 1980s finally the importance of lower class mobilization for redistributive policy is enhanced by the liberalism and competitiveness of state democratic parties

advertising effects in presidential elections presidential elections provide both an important context in which to study advertising and a setting that mitigates the challenges of dynamics and endogeneity we use the 2000 and 2004 general elections to analyze the effect of market level advertising on county level vote shares the results indicate significant positive effects of advertising exposures both instrumental variables and fixed effects alter the ad coefficient advertising elasticities are smaller than are typical for branded goods yet significant enough to shift election outcomes for example if advertising were set to zero and all other factors held constant three states electoral votes would have changed parties in 2000 given the narrow margin of victory in 2000 this shift would have resulted in a different president

patents and cumulative innovation causal evidence from the courts cumulative innovation is central to economic growth do patent rights facilitate or impede such follow on innovation this paper studies the effect of removing patent protection through court invalidation on the subsequent research related to the focal patent as measured by later citations we exploit random allocation of judges at the u s court of appeal for the federal circuit to control for the endogeneity of patent invalidation we find that patent invalidation leads to a 50 percent increase in subsequent citations to the focal patent on average but the impact is highly heterogeneous patent rights appear to block follow on innovation only in the technology fields of computers electronics and medical instruments moreover the effect is entirely driven by invalidation of patents owned by large patentees that triggers entry of small innovators suggesting that patents may impede the democratization of innovation

public protests and policy making technological advances and the development of social media have made petitions public protests and other form of spontaneous activism increasingly common tools for individuals to influence decision makers to study these phenomena in this article i present a theory of petitions and public protests that explores their limits as mechanisms to aggregate information the key assumption is that valuable information is dispersed among citizens through petitions and protests citizens can signal their private information to the policy maker who can then choose to use it or not i first show that if citizens individual signals are not sufficiently precise information aggregation is impossible no matter how large is the population of informed citizens even if the conflict with the policy maker is small i then characterize the conditions on conflict and the signal structure that guarantee information aggregation when these conditions are satisfied i show that full information aggregation is possible as the population grows to infinity when they are not satisfied i show that information aggregation may still be possible if social media are available

incumbent performance and electoral control in the pure theory of electoral competition citizens compare the platforms of the candidates and vote for the one whose platform is preferred candidate strategies are identified with promises about future performance in office models of this sort have been developed in both static mckelvey 1975 and dynamic kramer 1977 i settings and all appear to have the property that if the set of alternatives is large enough in some sense equilibrium platforms rarely exist but these models have another feature that is quite as disturbing as their instability in the static setting discussed by mckelvey little attention is paid to the possibility that once in office the politician s preferences may diverge from those of his constituents and that he may therefore choose policies at variance from his platform instead it is simply assumed that promises will be kept whether or not such behavior is congruent with the interest of the officeholder it is sometimes argued that an enforcement mechanism may exist to discipline politicians for failing to keep promises but without a specification of the mechanism it is not obvious that it would be in the interests of the

performance competition in local media markets abstract this paper investigates the impact of tax and public service performance on english local government popularity by using data on local property taxes service performance ratings and local election results after the introduction of a system of evaluation of local government performance comprehensive performance assessment the evidence emerging from estimation of a re election equation offers a somewhat more rounded portrait of the voter than the conventional fiscal conservative icon by highlighting the beneficial consequences of public service performance on government popularity and pointing to the role of local media networks the bbc regional television local radio and web network in shaping consensus by spreading tax related information

marriage market mismatches in japan an alternative view of the relationship between women s education and marriage in japan unlike in most other industrialized societies the decline in marriage rates has been most pronounced among highly educated women theoretical interpretations of this distinctive pattern of change have typically emphasized increasing economic independence for women and reductions in the gains to marriage in this paper the authors develop and evaluate an alternative explanation that emphasizes women s continued dependence on men s economic resources and decline in the relative supply of highly educated men using data from four rounds of the japanese national fertility survey the authors decompose the observed decline in marriage rates into changes in the propensity to marry and changes in the educational composition of the marriage market results indicate that change in the availability ofpotential spouses accounts for one fourth of the decline in marriage among university educated women and explains a substantial proportion of the growing educational differences in marriage the conclusion is that the relatively large decline in marriage among highly educated japanese women likely reflects both increasing economic independence and continued economic dependence on men

elections with privately informed parties and voters this paper studies a situation in which parties are betterinformed than voters about the optimal policies for voters weshow that voters are able to infer the parties information byobserving their electoral positions even if parties have policypreferences which differ substantially from the median voter s unlike previous work that reach opposite conclusions we assumethat voters have some private information of their own if theinformation available to voters is biased parties attempts toinfluence voters beliefs will result in less than fullconvergence even if parties know with certainty the optimalpolicy for the median voter

the impact of competition on management quality evidence from public hospitals in this paper we examine the causal impact of competition on management quality we analyze the hospital sector where geographic proximity is a key determinant of competition and english public hospitals where political competition can be used to construct instrumental variables for market structure since almost all major english hospitals are government run closing hospitals in areas where the governing party has a small majority is rare due to fear of electoral punishment we find that management quality measured using a new survey tool is strongly correlated with financial and clinical outcomes such as survival rates from emergency heart attack admissions ami more importantly we find that higher competition as indicated by a greater number of neighboring hospitals is positively correlated with increased management quality and this relationship strengthens when we instrument the number of local hospitals with local political competition adding another rival hospital increases the index of management quality by one third of a standard deviation and leads to a 10 7 reduction in heart attack mortality rates

women s age at first marriage and long term economic empowerment in egypt sustainable development goal sdg 5 calls on nations to promote gender equality and to empower women and girls sdg5 also recognizes the value of women s economic empowerment entailing equal rights to economic resources and full participation at all levels in economic decisions also according to sdg5 eliminating harmful practices such as child marriage before age 18 is a prerequisite for women s economic empowerment using national data for 4 129 married women 15 43 years who took part in the egypt labor market panel survey elmps 1998 2012 we performed autoregressive cross lagged panel analyses to assess whether women s first marriage in adulthood at 18 years or older as reported in 2006 was positively associated with their long term post marital economic empowerment measured as their engagement in market work and latent family economic agency in 2012 women s first marriage in adulthood had positive unadjusted associations with their market work and family economic agency in 2012 these associations persisted after accounting for market work and family economic agency in 2006 pre marital resources for empowerment and cumulative fertility policies to discourage child marriage may show promise to enhance women s long term post marital economic empowerment

politics institutions and welfare spending in industrialized democracies 1960 82 electoral turnout as well as left and center governments increase welfare effort that the welfare efforts of governments led by particular types of parties show significant differences and vary notably with the strength of oppositional and junior coalitional parties and that relatively neocorporatist centralized and traditionalistic polities are high on welfare effort overall our findings suggest that contrary to many claims both partisan and nonpartisan facets of democratic politics and political institutions shape contemporary social welfare effort

covariance misspecification in asset allocation series of returns to broad asset classes often possess histories of unequal length and have been subject to smoothing estimates of covariances are generally based on the common although shorter series length and covariances for smoothed series are necessarily biased downward these characteristics pose serious problems that can generate suboptimal and misleading allocations among asset classes the article discusses elements of the underlying theory in proposing an informationally efficient covariance estimator the estimator is then compared with conventional covariance estimates in an empirical application covariance estimates are found to be sensitive to both truncated estimates involving shorter series and the effects of smoothing

abstention in elections with asymmetric information and diverse preferences we analyze a model of a two candidate election with costless voting in which voters have asymmetric information and diverse preferences we demonstrate that a strictly positive fraction of the electorate will abstain and that nevertheless elections effectively aggregate voters private information using examples we show that more informed voters are more likely to vote than their less informed counterparts increasing the fraction of the electorate that is informed however may lead to higher levels of abstention we conclude by showing that a biased distribution of information can lead to a biased voting population but does not lead to biased outcomes

bayesian learning in social networks we study the perfect bayesian equilibrium of a sequential learning model over a general social network each individual receives a signal about the underlying state of the world observes the past actions of a stochastically generated neighbourhood of individuals and chooses one of two possible actions the stochastic process generating the neighbourhoods defines the network topology we characterize pure strategy equilibria for arbitrary stochastic and deterministic social networks and characterize the conditions under which there will be asymptotic learning convergence in probability to the right action as the social network becomes large we show that when private beliefs are unbounded meaning that the implied likelihood ratios are unbounded there will be asymptotic learning as long as there is some minimal amount of expansion in observations we also characterize conditions under which there will be asymptotic learning when private beliefs are bounded

continuous decisions by a committee median versus average mechanisms abstract a group of strategic agents with diverse private information and interdependent preferences has to take a continuous collective decision i study the design of the decision making procedure from the viewpoint of a utilitarian social planner for uniformly distributed information the implementation of the average report as decision dominates the implementation of the median report when the set of admissible reports is optimally designed this is true for any number of agents and for any degree of interdependence the result extends to a general class of distributions when the number of agents is large

does political knowledge increase turnout evidence from the 1997 british general election a number of recent formal models predict a positive effect of political knowledge on turnout both information acquisition and turnout however are likely to be determined by a similar set of variables rendering hard the identification of a causal link in empirical investigations available empirical regularities should therefore be interpreted as mere correlations i address this problem by using an intrumental variables approach where the instruments are represented by various proxies of information supply on mass media using survey data from the 1997 british general election study i show that political knowledge has a sizeable influence on the probability of voting and that mass media play an important role in influencing political participation

american federalism welfare policy and residential choices the relationship between welfare benefit levels and the residential choices of the poor raises two issues for federalism in the united states do state benefit levels affect the residential choices of the poor do residential choices of the poor affect the level at which a state sets its benefit levels empirical studies have seldom studied the interconnection between these two issues this research estimates simultaneously the mutual effects of welfare benefits and poverty rates while controlling for other economic and political variables when benefit levels become high the size of the poverty population increases conversely when poverty rates become high benefit levels are cut the findings are consistent with the claim that state determined benefit levels distort policy and residential choices

politics information and the urban bias abstract governments in many ldcs skew public resources towards urban sectors despite a majority of citizens residing in rural areas this paper develops a novel political argument for this urban bias phenomenon in a framework where all voters rural and urban have equal voice but differ in their access to information we argue that this difference is sufficient to give governments an incentive to inefficiently over allocate resources towards urban areas the bias is shown to worsen during adverse economic times leading to increased migration we also examine how voter informativeness affects efficiency of the electoral process in weeding out incompetent governments

choosing not to choose on the link between information and abstention abstract we use a dataset that allows us to circumvent a number of estimation difficulties that have plagued previous studies of the relationship between information and abstention our results show that information is a major determinant of abstention

information aggregation in polls we study information transmission via polling a policymaker polls constitu ents who differ in their information and ideology to determine policy full rev elation is an equilibrium in a poll with a small sample but not with a large one in large polls full information aggregation can arise in an equilibrium where constituents endogenously sort themselves into centrists who respond truth fully and extremists who do not we find polling statistics that ignore strate gic behavior yield biased estimators and mischaracterize the polvs margin of error we construct estimators that account for strategic behavior finally we compare polls and elections jel c42 d83

till death do us part or i get my pension wives pension holding and marital dissolution in the united states wives financial independence gained from their pension may increase the risk of marital dissolution especially when wives are approaching retirement age the older wives independence hypothesis applying single and simultaneous equations probit models to data from the panel study of income dynamics we investigate the effect of wives pension holding in 1984 on the risk of subsequent marital dissolution results from the single equation model appear to support the older wives independence hypothesis however results from the simultaneous equations model suggest that interpreting the single equation results as a sign of older wives economic independence may be misleading

follow the leader theory and evidence on political participation using state by state voting data for u s presidential elections the authors observe that voter turnout is a positive function of predicted closeness to explain the strategic component of political participation they develop a follow the leader model political leaders expend effort according to their chance of being pivotal which depends on the expected closeness of the race at both state and national levels and how voters respond to their effort structural estimation supports this model for example a 1 percent increase in the predicted closeness at the state level stimulates leaders efforts which increases turnout by 0 34 percent

the swing voter s curse the authors analyze two candidate elections in which some voters are uncertain about the realization of a state variable that affects the utility of all voters they demonstrate the existence of a swing voter s curse less informed indifferent voters strictly prefer to abstain rather than vote for either candidate even when voting is costless the swing voter s curse leads to the equilibrium result that a substantial fraction of the electorate will abstain even though all abstainers strictly prefer voting for one candidate over voting for another copyright 1996 by american economic association

abstention ideology and information acquisition we consider an election in which each voter can collect information of different precision voters have asymmetric information and preferences that vary both in terms of ideology and intensity in contrast to all other models of voting with endogenous information in equilibrium voters collect information of different qualities we show that information and abstention are not necessarily negatively correlated some voters are more likely to abstain the more informed they are we also discuss the manner in which incentives to acquire information are non monotonic in terms of both ideology and the level of intensity

busy voters agenda control and the power of information t he correspondence between individual preferences and electoral outcomes is often affected by the existence of information asymmetries among electoral participants and the presence of individuals or groups who exercise some form of agenda control while the effects of agenda control in political decision making are widely recognized the effects of information asymmetries are not as well understood since information asymmetries are fundamental characteristics of most elections a deep understanding of the correspondence between individual preferences and electoral outcomes requires a serious consideration of the effects of information i develop a generalizable agenda control model that takes as given the observation that most voters are not naturally inclined to invest in political information the model allows me to provide a dynamic description of how voters and political elites can adapt to the information problems that characterize political decision making it also allows me to demonstrate the effect of these adaptations on electoral outcomes