a dynamic theory of collective goods programs a collective goods program such as an entitlement program distributes benefits and costs according to constituents characteristics this paper presents a dynamic theory of the legislative choice of collective goods programs based on a sequential model of proposal making and voting in a majority rule legislature where the status quo in a session is given by the program last enacted a stationary markov perfect equilibrium is characterized for a unidimensional collective goods program and yields a generalized median voter theorem comparative statics on preferences and legislative procedures and a characterization of the dynamics of such programs equilibrium programs can expand or contract over time but they ultimately converge to the median on the path to that point legislators may act strategically to address the durability problem that a future legislature can undo the actions of the present legislature by strategically positioning the status quo to limit the changes that future legislatures can make

an empirical investigation of coalitional bargaining procedures abstract models of government formation processes in multi party democracies are usually highly sensitive to the rules that govern the selection of formateurs i e the parties selected to propose a potential government the theoretical literature has focused on two selection rules selection proportional to seat share and selection in order of seat share in this paper we use a new data set on government formations in 11 parliamentary democracies to empirically assess which selection rule most closely approximates the data we find that while there is little empirical support for selection in order of seat share proportional selection fits the data well however we also find that a simple alternative that combines the insights of the two selection rules outperforms both of them in their ability to explain the data

power illusion in coalitional bargaining an experimental analysis abstract one feature of legislative bargaining in naturally occurring settings is that the distribution of seats or voting weights often does not accurately reflect bargaining power game theoretic predictions about payoffs and coalition formation are insensitive to nominal differences in vote distributions and instead only depend on pivotality we conduct an experimental test of the classical baron ferejohn model with five player groups holding real power constant we compare treatments with differences in nominal power we find that initial effects of nominal differences become small or disappear with experience our results also point to the complexity of the environment as having a negative impact on the speed at which this transition takes place finally and of particular importance as a methodological observation giving subjects a pause accelerates learning

uniqueness of stationary equilibrium payoffs in the baron ferejohn model abstract we consider a multilateral sequential bargaining model in which the players may differ in their probability of being selected as the proposer and the rate at which they discount future payoffs for games in which agreement requires less than unanimous consent we characterize the set of stationary subgame perfect equilibrium payoffs with this characterization we establish the uniqueness of the equilibrium payoffs for the case where the players have the same discount factor we show that the payoff to a player is nondecreasing in his probability of being selected as the proposer for the case where the players have the same probability of being selected as the proposer we show that the payoff to a player is nondecreasing in his discount factor journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 c78 d70

dictators walking the mogadishu line how men become monsters and monsters become men history offers many examples of dictators who worsened their behavior significantly over time like zimbabwe s mugabe as well as dictators who displayed remarkable improvements like rawlings of ghana the authors show that such mutations can result from rational behavior when the dictator s flow use of repression is complementary to his stock of wrongdoings past wrongdoings then perpetuate further wrongdoings and the dictator can unintentionally get trapped in a repressive steady state where he himself suffers from ex post regret this then begs the question why such a dictator would ever choose to do wrong in the first place the authors show that this can be explained from the dictator s uncertainty over his degree of impunity in relation to wrongdoing which induces him to experiment along this dimension this produces a setting where any individual rising to power can end up as either a moderate leader or as a dreaded tyrant since derailment is accidental and accompanied by ex post regret increasing accountability can be in the interest of both the public and the dictator

econometric analysis of cps type unemployment data analysts studying the unemployment experiences of population members often have access to data collected from a sample of individuals at a point in time which contain the length of the ongoing spell of unemployment for sample members currently unemployed no information regarding the lengths of ongoing employment spells is collected this paper considers how such information may be utilized in the estimation of parameters of alternating renewal process models of labor market attachment in the presence of both observed and unobserved population heterogeneity a number of models are presented and estimation is carried out using a cps type data set from italy

digit preference in cps unemployment data abstract in analyses of cps unemployment duration data it is necessary to smooth the observed responses prior to inference to accommodate the effects of digit preference in this note i show that popular methods of smoothing have significant effects on estimates of expected duration the time series properties of this statistic are less severely affected

coalition and party formation in a legislative voting game we examine a legislative voting game where decisions are being made over both ideological and distributive dimensions and legislators preferences are separable over the two dimensions in equilibrium legislators prefer to make proposals for the two dimensions together rather than offering sequential proposals on the two dimensions separately the equilibria exhibit interaction between the ideological and distributive dimensions and in any equilibrium there is a positive probability that a proposal is made and approved which excludes the median legislator as defined over the ideological dimension in contrast with a game where no distributive decision is being made moreover in any stationary equilibrium there is more than one ideological decision that has a positive probability of being proposed and approved we show that legislators can gain from forming political parties and consider examples where predictions can be made about the composition of parties we discuss the impact of political parties on the outcome

the maximal generic number of pure nash equilibria abstract for finite pure strategy setss1 snife s s1 snis the set of pure strategy nash equilibria for an open set of payoffs vectors then e s maxi si there is an open set of payoff vectors for which there are s maxi si pure nash equilibria journal of economic literature classification number c72

bargaining foundations of shapley value1 a transferable utility economy in which each agent holds a resource which can be used in combination with the resources of other agents to generate value according to the characteristic function v is studied using a dynamic model of bargaining the main theorem establishes that the payoffs associated with efficient equilibria converge to the agents shapley values as the time between periods of the dynamic game goes to zero in addition it is demonstrated that an efficient equilibrium exists and is unique when an additivity condition is satisfied to demonstrate the sensitivity of the solution to the institutional detail we modify the model to allow for partnerships and show that the shapley value is no longer achieved

bargaining in bicameral legislatures when and why does malapportionment matter malapportionment of seats in bicameral legislatures it is widely argued confers disproportionate benefits to overrepresented jurisdictions ample empirical research has documented that unequal representation produces unequal distribution of government expenditures in bicameral legislatures the theoretical foundations for this empirical pattern are weak it is commonly asserted that this stems from unequal voting power per se using a noncooperative bargaining game based on the closed rule infinite horizon model of baron and ferejohn 1989 we assess the conditions under which unequal representation in a bicameral legislature may lead to unequal division of public expenditures two sets of results are derived first when bills originate in the house and the senate considers the bill under a closed rule the equilibrium expected payoffs of all house members are surprisingly equal second we show that small state biases can emerge when 1 there are supermajority rules in the malapportioned chamber 2 the senate initiates bills which produces maldistributed proposal probabilities and 3 the distributive goods are lumpy we thank seminar participants at new york university the university of pennsylvania and the 2002 annual meeting of the american political science association for helpful comments james snyder and michael ting gratefully acknowledge the financial support of national science foundation grant ses 0079035 stephen ansolabehere gratefully acknowledges the support of the carnegie corporation under the carnegie scholars program this paper was written while michael ting was at the university of north carolina at chapel hill and he thanks the department of political science there for their support

predictability and power in legislative bargaining the rules and procedures of legislatures often provide legislators with information bearing on the identities of upcoming proposers for a broad class of legislative bargaining games we establish that markovian equilibria necessarily deliver all economic surplus to the first proposer whenever the information structure permits the legislators to rule out some minimum number of proposers one round in advance this result holds regardless of the recognition process and even if players vary in patience and risk aversion it raises the possibility that procedures adopted in the interest of transparency may contribute to the imbalance of political power

the green paradox and budgetary institutions abstract we examine oil production strategies in response to the rise of alternative energy in context of saudi arabia and the united states in a unified simultaneous equation model sem over the period 1976 2015 we investigate the extent to which budget balance behaviour explains the nature of oil production strategies we find that green regulations have a positive impact on u s oil production while an inverse relationship holds for saudi arabia we argue that the nature of budgetary institutions prevents saudi arabia from following a profit maximising behaviour saudi arabia is incentivised to ensure political cohesion through adopting a procyclical fiscal policy rather regulators seem incentivised to channel surplus towards individuals to gain popularity in the united states a thriving shale oil industry is a plausible rationale for u s production strategies also known as a weak green paradox this is problematic for climate change initiatives to reduce global emissions climate experts may wish to pay more attention to the supply side of oil markets when designing decarbonisation plans the results challenge conventional wisdom of the green paradox neglecting the role of incentive structure between different types of oil producers

the distribution of unemployment spells canada 1978 82 this paper empirically examines entire distributions of unemployment spells according to a novel duration share approach based on decile shares and lorenz curves of unemployment the approach is applied to a canadian micro data source akin to the work experience surveys for the united states the major empirical findings are that long term unemployment accounts for a very substantial proportion of total weeks of unemployment despite the short duration of the average spell of unemployment the structure of unemployment spell distribution differs significantly by gender age education and region and significant cyclical effects on the distribution of unemployment spells are associated with the severe recession in 1982

bargaining in legislatures bargaining in legislatures is conducted according to formal rules specifying who may make proposals and how they will be decided legislative outcomes depend on those rules and on the structure of the legislature although the social choice literature provides theories about voting equilibria it does not endogenize the formation of the agenda on which the voting is based and rarely takes into account the institutional structure found in legislatures in our theory members of the legislature act noncooperatively in choosing strategies to serve their own districts explicitly taking into account the strategies members adopt in response to the sequential nature of proposal making and voting the model permits the characterization of a legislative equilibrium reflecting the structure of the legislature and also allows consideration of the choice of elements of that structure in a context in which the standard institution free model of social choice theory yields no equilibrium

bargaining in standing committees with an endogenous default committee voting has mostly been investigated from the perspective of the standard baron ferejohn model of bargaining over the division of a pie in which bargaining ends as soon as the committee reaches an agreement in standing committees however existing agreements can be amended this article studies an extension of the baron ferejohn framework to a model with an evolving default that reflects this important feature of policymaking in standing committees in each of an infinite number of periods the ongoing default can be amended to a new policy which is in turn the default for the next period the model provides a number of quite different predictions i from a positive perspective the key distinction turns on whether the quota is less than unanimity in that case patient enough players waste substantial shares of the pie each period and the size principle fails in some pure strategy markov perfect equilibria in contrast the unique markov perfect equilibrium payoffs in a unanimity committee coincide with those in the corresponding baron ferejohn framework ii if players have heterogeneous discount factors then a large class of subgame perfect equilibria including all markov perfect equilibria are inefficient

why is there no revolution in north korea the political economy of revolution revisited the paper critically assesses the acemoglu robinson approach to revolutions as it is focused on inequality of wealth or income rather than on collective action problems we show that income inequality is not a sufficient and not even a necessary condition for a revolution to occur rather a necessary condition for a revolution is that any subpopulation can expect net benefits from it for which inequality is not a precondition as a result a certain structure of commitment devices or their absence rather than inequality is crucial for explaining why revolutions sometimes occur and sometimes not

bargaining one dimensional social choices we analyze bargaining over the one dimension characteristic of a public good among n impatient players when decisions require q favorable votes q 2 stationary subgame perfect equilibrium strategies are characterized for all games with deterministic protocol we provide a monotonicity condition satisfied by all single peak strictly quasi concave and concave utilities that assures uniqueness for every q whenever player s utilities are symmetric around the peak without symmetry the monotonicity condition assures uniqueness for qualified majorities q n 2 provided that agents are sufficiently patient and utilities satisfy an additional regularity condition asymptotic uniqueness is assured for qualified majorities by imposing only the monotonicity condition

a structural model of government formation in this paper we estimate a bargaining model of government formation in parliamentary democracies we use the estimated structural model to conduct constitutional experiments aimed at evaluating the impact of institutional features of the political environment on the duration of the government formation process the type of coalitions that form and their relative stability

a bargaining model of collective choice we present a general model of legislative bargaining in which the status quo is an arbitrary point in a multidimensional policy space in contrast to other bargaining models the status quo is not assumed to be bad and delay may be pareto efficient we prove existence of stationary equilibria the possibility of equilibrium delay depends on four factors risk aversion of the legislators the dimensionality of the policy space the voting rule and the possibility of transfers across districts if legislators are risk averse if there is more than one policy dimension and if voting is by majority rule for example then delay will almost never occur in one dimension delay is possible if and only if the status quo lies in the core of the voting rule and then it is the only possible outcome this core selection result yields a game theoretic foundation for the well known median voter theorem our comparative statics analysis yield two noteworthy insights i if the status quo is close to the core t hen equilibrium policy outcomes will also be close to the core a moderate status quo produces moderate policy outcomes and ii if legislators are patient then equilibrium proposals will be close to the core legislative patience leads to policy moderation

recognition without replacement in legislative bargaining abstract this paper studies infinite horizon sequential bargaining among n 3 players in which a proposer is randomly selected from the pool of potential proposers if the proposal is rejected the current and previous proposers are excluded from the pool of potential proposers and the game moves on to the next round until every player has had the same number of opportunities to be the proposer to analyze the model with a particular time dependency within each sequence of n rounds a cycle i characterize the stationary equilibrium of a stochastic game which i call cycle stationary subgame perfect cssp equilibrium the cssp equilibrium is unique in payoffs and analogous to the subgame perfect equilibrium of some forms of finite horizon bargaining even when every player is entirely patient the proposer s share in the cssp equilibrium is smaller than that predicted by the stationary equilibrium of the baron ferejohn legislative bargaining model

toward an alternative explanation for the resource curse natural resources immigration and democratization why do many resource rich countries maintain autocratic political regimes the authors proposed answer focuses on the causal effect of labor imports or immigration using the logic offered by ace

inefficiency in legislative policymaking a dynamic analysis this paper develops an infinite horizon model of public spending and taxation in which policy decisions are determined by legislative bargaining the policy space incorporates both productive and distributive public spending and distortionary taxation the productive spending is investing in a public good that benefits all citizens e g national defense and the distributive spending is district specific transfers e g pork barrel spending investment in the public good creates a dynamic linkage across policymaking periods the analysis explores the dynamics of legislative policy choices focusing on the efficiency of the steady state level of

protection of property rights and growth as political equilibria abstract this paper presents a survey of the literature on property rights and economic growth different theoretical mechanisms that relate property rights to economic development are discussed lack of protection of property rights can result in slow economic growth through different channels expropriation of private wealth corruption of civil servants excessive taxation and barriers to adoption of new technologies the origins of property rights are also considered different theories are illustrated but more attention is paid to the social conflict view and its success and limitations the second part of the paper illustrates relevant empirical works on property rights and growth

uniqueness of stationary equilibrium payoffs in coalitional bargaining we study a model of sequential bargaining in which in each period before an agreement is reached the proposer s identity is randomly determined the proposer suggests a division of a pie of size one each other agent either approves or rejects the proposal and the proposal is implemented if the set of approving agents is a winning coalition for the proposer the theory of the fixed point index is used to show that stationary equilibrium expected payoffs of this coalitional bargaining game are unique this generalizes eraslan 34 insofar as a there are no restrictions on the structure of sets of winning coalitions b different proposers may have different sets of winning coalitions c there may be a positive probability that no proposer is selected

efficient labor contracts with employment risk this article analyzes efficient employment agreements where the demand for consumption insurance can be satisfied by noncontractual means we assume that workers can save and that consumption is determined by a strong form of the permanent income hypothesis under conditions of asymmetric information about exogenous shocks to labor demand we derive a unique compensation schedule that efficiently guides decisions by both workers and employers efficient employment outcomes are generated without a need for third party enforcement or monitoring and workers choose a consumption policy that leaves them indifferent among realizations of labor demand within this solution it is both costless and efficient for workers to delegate employment decisions to the firm within the context of the model we analyze implications for the equilibrium distribution of wages and for empirical studies of labor supply

democrats dictators and demonstrators 1 introduction a sizable amount of recent empirical literature has focused on the relation between democracy and economic growth however most of these papers such as barro 1996 helliwell 1994 and the studies summarized in przeworski and limongi 1993 concentrate on the relationship between levels of democracy and economic growth this article focuses on the relationships among democratic movements governmental responses to these movements and economic growth democratic movements provide a distinct perspective from analyzing the relationship between levels of democracy and economic variables democratic movements by definition focus on collective action and are reflective of the wishes of large segments of society whereas many actual changes in democracy occur through behind the scenes maneuvers of political elites sometimes but not always in response to popular movements 1 additionally a democratic movement can fail if repression of the movement succeeds as in burma now myanmar in 1988 and china in 1989 in these and other repressed movements although a large segment of society has expressed a desire for a more democratic form of government the existing government has indicated that it is prepared to resist those demands this tension between the actual level of democracy and the level desired by citizens presumably has economic consequences in addition to the consequences of the actual level of democracy of course repression is not the only outcome of democratic movements for example democratic movements in eastern europe in 1989 90 with the partial exception of romania led to concessions and democratic reforms by the governments involved the focus of this article includes both repressed and successful democratic movements as well as democratic transitions that occurred without widespread democratic movements in this article i provide an enhanced version of the data set of democratic movements in minier 2001 incorporating a classification of the government s response to each movement using these data i address two main questions first what are the effects of a democratic movement on the economy specifically how does a democratic movement affect economic growth and given that a democratic movement has occurred what are the economic ramifications of a government s response to that movement in particular does the choice of repression versus concessions affect subsequent growth second democratic transitions do not always require a widespread democratic movement how do subsequent economic conditions differ between countries that become democratic through a democratic movement and countries in which no movement occurs 2 ii background democratic movements relate to both political instability and democracy previous empirical studies have established that political instability is negatively correlated with economic growth and that the level of democracy is positively correlated with income levels although the relationship between democracy and growth is more ambiguous 3 the related theoretical literature has focused on the probability of success for a revolution or insurrection more generally as in grossman 1991 and roemer 1985 or the probability that a government grants democratic concessions as in rosendorff 2001 and acemoglu and robinson 2000 political instability can be measured in a number of ways londregan and poole 1990 use whether or not a coup d etat occurs alesina et al 1996 expand this to include constitutional changes general economic growth studies that include a measure of political instability such as barro 1991 generally use some combination of the average number of revolutions coups and political assassinations in this article i provide additional insight into the relationship between political instability and economic growth by investigating a distinct form of political instability democratic movements

waiting to settle multilateral bargaining with subjective biases abstract we study multilateral bargaining games where agents disagree over their bargaining power we show that if agents are extremely optimistic there may be costly delays in an arbitrarily long finite game but if optimism is moderate all sufficiently long games end in immediate agreement we show that the game with extreme optimism is highly unstable in the finite horizon and we examine the ramifications of this instability on the infinite horizon problem finally we consider other voting rules and show that the majority rule may be more efficient than the unanimity rule when agents are optimistic

proposal rights and political power in a canonical model of sequential collective bargaining over a divisible good we show that equilibrium expected payoffs are not restricted by players voting rights or their impatience for all monotonic voting rules and discount factors and for all divisions of the good among players there exists a stationary proposal making rule such that this division represents players expected payoffs in a stationary subgame perfect nash equilibrium in pure strategies the result highlights the significance of proposal rights in determining political power in collective deliberations t he purpose of this article is to further our understanding of political power in a committee environment we consider the problem of a group of two or more agents who must split a fixed divisible good agents cannot use physical force to divide this good our goal is to clarify the role and relative significance of other features of the political environment such as voting rights proposal rights agents patience etc in determining political power following shapley and shubik 1954 we gauge political power in terms of expected outcomes rather than a priori equate it with individual prerogatives 1 in that spirit political power is the share of the divisible good that agents can expect to obtain when their behavior conforms to an appropriately defined equilibrium notion 2 we model committee interaction using a canonical sequential bargaining game in each period a member of the committee is recognized with some probability that is fixed across periods and proposes a division of the good committee members then vote on the proposal if the proposal is approved in accordance with the underlying voting rule the proposed division is implemented and the

presidential pork executive veto power and distributive politics mitigated to the extent that the president prefers spending in some districts over others the model also generates new insights and predictions about fiscal policy under the separation of powers including the effects of divided government electoral rules and term limitations for the executive

the economics of split ticket voting in representative democracies in u s elections voters often vote for candidates from different parties for president and congress voters also express dissatisfaction with the performance of congress as a whole and satisfaction with their own representative the authors develop a model of split ticket voting in which government spending is financed by uniform taxes the benefits from this spending are concentrated while the model generates split ticket voting overall spending is too high only if the president s powers are limited overall spending is too high in a parliamentary system the authors model can be used as the basis of an argument for term limits copyright 1997 by american economic association

legislative bargaining with heterogeneous disagreement values theory and experiments we study a legislative bargaining game in which failure to agree in a given round may result in a breakdown of negotiations in that case each player receives an exogenous disagreement value we characterize the set of stationary subgame perfect equilibria under all q majority rules under unanimity rule equilibrium payoffs are strictly increasing in disagreement values under all less than unanimity rules expected payoffs are either decreasing or first increasing and then decreasing in disagreement values we conduct experiments involving three players using majority and unanimity rule finding qualitative support for several but not all of our main predictions having a high disagreement value is indeed an advantage under unanimity under majority the player with the highest disagreement value is more likely to be excluded but this does not consistently result in a lower average payoff

are displaced manufacturing workers unemployable an analysis of sectorally based adjustment costs in france despite the richness of the literature on the adjustment costs of displaced workers the impact of the former sector of employment on a displaced worker s jobless durations has received little attention this is curious given the policy responses in several countries although the literature indicates the importance of individual characteristics such as educational attainment and demographic traits a non trivial portion of government assistance is based on a collective attribute of the affected workforces namely the sector in which they formerly worked governments often target assistance to specific sectors in the forms of operating subsidies financial bailout packages and trade protection examples include steelworkers and shipyard workers in france coal miners in the united kingdom and fishery and shipyard workers in canada gray 1995 demonstrates that taxpayer funded early retirement benefits in france are heavily weighted toward workers in manufacturing industries in canada similar benefits are currently being received by the early retirees of algoma steel and the steelworkers union has requested a package for older laid off stelco employees the rationale commonly given by government officials and workers unions is that workers in the affected sectors have virtually no alternative employment opportunities possible reasons for the perception that workers displaced from certain sectors have low re employment probabilities have received little attention in the economics literature the thrust of the conjecture posited by policy makers in france is that there is an ethos described in houseman 1988 according to which workers in sectors such as heavy manufacturing are covered by an implicit contract which has conditioned them to expect guaranteed permanent employment the organizational characteristics of the internal labour market cause them to lack the cognitive skills required to

legislative bargaining under weighted voting organizations often distribute resources through weighted voting we analyze this setting using a non cooperative bargaining game based on the baron ferejohn 1989 model unlike analyses derived from cooperative game theory we find that each voter s expected payoff is proportional to her voting weight an exception occurs when many high weight voters exist as low weight voters may expect disproportionately high payoffs due to proposal power the model also predicts that ex post the coalition formateur the party chosen to form a coalition will receive a disproportionately high payoff using data from coalition governments from 1946 to 2001 we find strong evidence ofsuch formateur effects

coalitional bargaining games with random proposers theory and application abstract we consider a non cooperative coalitional bargaining game with random proposers in a general situation for which players differ in recognition probability and time preference we characterize an efficient equilibrium as the generalized nash bargaining solution that belongs to the core the model is applied to wage bargaining between an employer and multiple workers although involuntary unemployment may occur in equilibrium full employment emerges as players become sufficiently patient

on the timing of political regime changes in resource dependent economies we consider a resource dependent economy initially ruled by the elite the transition from the autocratic to a more democratic regime takes place only if the citizens decide to revolt against the elite the occurrence of a revolution primarily depends on the autocratic regime vulnerability and the level of inequalities both being driven by the elite s redistribution and repression policies first we show that when a political transition is inevitable the elite choose the maximum rate of redistribution to lengthen their period in office second we find that the duration of the autocratic regime is linked to resource abundance and how it relates to the elite s policies more resources lead to a shorter reign of a redistributive regime which may not be the case of a repressive regime finally we interpret the arab spring sequence in light of our findings

voting and vetoing the consequences of veto power in committees is analyzed using the appro ach of noncooperative bargaining theory it is first shown that in equilibrium nonveto players do not share in the benefits gained by the decision making of the committee that is in every equilibrium outcome of the bargaining game nonveto players earn zero some measures for reducing the excessive power of veto members in committees are analyzed specifically i study the effects of imposing a deadline on negotiations and of expanding the committee by increasing the number of nonveto players quantitative results are given for the case of the un security council

computation of equilibrium values in the baron and ferejohn bargaining model abstract computation of exact equilibrium values for n player divide the dollar legislative bargaining games as in baron and ferejohn 1989 with general quota voting rules recognition probabilities and discount factors can be achieved by solving at most n bivariate square linear systems of equations the approach recovers eraslan s 2002 uniqueness result and relies on a characterization of equilibria in terms of two variables that satisfy a pair of piecewise linear equations

economic inequality and its socioeconomic impact abstract income inequality is of fundamental interest not only to economists but also to other social scientists a substantial literature in economics and the social sciences has investigated the relationship between income inequality and economic growth and a variety of social phenomena the links between inequality and economic growth are explored as well as those between inequality and such key social variables as political conflict education health and crime the analysis in this paper follows a two step process first a review of the empirical evidence relating inequality to growth and to each of the above social variables is undertaken second the various causal mechanisms that have been proposed in the social science literature to explain those links are surveyed

comparative politics and public finance we propose a model with micropolitical foundations to contrast different political regimes compared to a parliamentary regime the institutions of a presidential congressional regime produce fewer incentives for legislative cohesion but more separation of powers these differences are reflected in the size and composition of government spending a parliamentary regime has redistribution toward a majority less underprovision of public goods and more rents to politicians a presidential congressional regime has redistribution toward powerful minorities more underprovision of public goods but less rents to politicians the size of government is smaller under a presidential regime this last prediction is consistent with cross country data

estimation of unemployment duration from grouped data a comparative study economists have often found it useful to look at the average length of an unemployment spell in evaluating labor market conditions and in considering the labor market experience of the unemployed usually this statistic has to be estimated from grouped observations on interrupted incomplete unemployment spells this paper is a comparative study of some nonparametric and parametric methods of estimating this quantity using australian department of social security data on unemployment benefit recipients

the duration of unemployment stocks and flows on regional labour markets in the netherlands in this paper flows into and out of the stock of umemployed are estimated by means of a statistical method using aggregate data of incomplete unemployment spells a distinguishing feature of this method is that it is not based on stationarity assumptions of the stock of unemployed results are presented for the netherlands from the period 1983 7 speical attention is paid to inter regional differences in inflow outflow patterns of unemployed an effort is made to explain the observed regional differences in the average length of completed spells of unemployment by differences in professional and demographic patterns and in the number of vacancies per region it appears that the number of vacant jobs in a region has a favourable influence on the duration of unemployment

a dynamic theory of public spending taxation and debt this paper presents a dynamic political economy theory of public spending taxation and debt policy choices are made by a legislature consisting of representatives elected by geographically defined districts the legislature can raise revenues via a distortionary income tax and by borrowing these revenues can be used tofinance a national public good and district specific transfers interpreted as pork barrel spending the value of the public good is stochastic reflecting shocks such as wars or natural disasters in equilibrium policy making cycles between two distinct regimes business as usual in which legislators bargain over the allocation of pork and responsible policy making in which policies maximize the collective good transitions between the two regimes are brought about by shocks in the value of the public good in the long run equilibrium tax rates are too high and too volatile public good provision is too low and debt levels are too high in some environments a balanced budget requirement can improve citizen welfare

on majoritarian bargaining with incomplete information abstract this paper studies a finite horizon version of baron and ferejohn s 1989 majoritarian bargaining with incomplete information our devised model essentially blends spence s signaling and the coalition formation of majoritarian bargaining the main findings include i oversized coalitions may arise in equilibrium and allowing for delay can be optimal for a proposer ii whether being regarded as a high type makes a player better or worse off is not predetermined a priori but depends on two conflicting concerns the offer concern a la spence s signaling the higher the type the higher the offer and the coalition concern in majoritarian bargaining the higher the type the lower the probability of being a member of the majoritarian coalition iii players take action to distinguish themselves via delay however separating equilibria often fail to exist due to the incapability or unprofitability of exercising separation iv separating equilibria if they exist can have a no envy property and pooling equilibria may coexist with the least cost separating equilibrium even after refining the equilibrium set by the intuitive criterion and v equilibria may be non stationary and exhibit the novel feature that pooling proposals arise if a game lasts an even number of sessions but not if there is an odd number of sessions

noncooperative foundations of the nucleolus in majority games abstract this paper studies coalition formation payoff division and expected payoffs in a divide the dollar by majority rule game with random proposers a power index is called self confirming if it can be obtained as an equilibrium of the game using the index itself as probability vector unlike the shapley value and other commonly used power indices the nucleolus has this property the proof uses a weak version of kohlberg s siam j appl math 20 1971 62 balancedness result reinterpreting the balancing weights as probabilities in a mixed strategy equilibrium

precision guided or blunt the effects of us economic sanctions on human rights this study analyzes the consequences of economic sanctions for the target country s human rights situation we offer a political economy explanation for different types of human rights infringements or improvements in reaction to economic shocks caused by sanctions based on that explanation we derive hypotheses linking sanctions to four types of human rights economic rights political and civil rights basic human rights and emancipatory rights we use endogenous treatment regression models to test those hypotheses by estimating the causal average treatment effect of us economic sanctions on each type of human rights within a uniform empirical framework unlike previous studies we find no support for adverse effects of sanctions on economic rights or basic human rights once the endogenous selection of sanctioned countries is modelled with respect to women s rights our findings even indicate a positive effect of sanctions that is associated with improvements in women s economic rights only our results for political rights and civil liberties suggest significant deterioration under economic sanctions we conclude that it is important to account for the potential endogeneity of economic sanctions and to distinguish different dimensions of human rights as the effects of economic sanctions along those dimensions may vary considerably

a quantitative theory of political transitions we develop a quantitative theory of repeated political transitions driven by revolts and reforms in the model the beliefs of disenfranchised citizens play a key role in determining revolutionary pressure which in interaction with preemptive reforms determine regime dynamics we study the quantitative implications of the model by fitting it to data on the universe of political regimes existing between 1946 and 2010 the estimated model generates a process of political transitions that looks remarkably close to the data replicating the empirical shape of transition hazards the frequency of revolts relative to reforms the distribution of newly established regime types after revolts and reforms and the unconditional distribution over regime types

proposal power and majority rule in multilateral bargaining with costly recognition this paper studies a sequential bargaining model in which agents expend efforts to be the proposer in equilibrium agents effort choices are influenced by the prize and cost effects the endogenous prize is 9

information cascades and revolutionary regime transitions we combine acemoglu and robinson s model of the economic origins of democracy with lohmann s model of political mass protest this allows us to analyse the economic causes of political regime change based on the microfoundations of revolution we are able to derive conditions under which democracy arises peacefully when it occurs only after a revolution and when oligarchy persists we model these possibilities in a world of asymmetric information where information cascades are possible and where these cascades may involve errors in the sense that they make everyone worse off

distribution of surplus in sequential bargaining with endogenous recognition i examine a sequential bargaining situation in which agents contest the right to propose an allocation the contest can either take place at a pre bargaining stage yielding persistent recognition to propose or recur throughout the bargaining yielding transitory recognition equilibrium analysis reveals that surplus is distributed more unequally under persistent recognition social cost is higher under persistent recognition if and only if it attracts a sufficient number of active bargainers and individual s incentive to propose under transitory recognition may actually increase in the number of agents while this incentive always diminishes under persistent recognition

the nucleolus of large majority games members of a shareholder meeting or legislative committee have greater or smaller voting power than meets the eye if the nucleolus of the induced majority game differs from the voting weight distribution we establish a new sufficient condition for the weight and power distributions to be equal and we characterize the limit behavior of the nucleolus in case all relative weights become small

voting weights and formateur advantages in the formation of coalition governments over the last two decades a large and important literature has emerged that uses game theoretic models of bargaining to study legislative coalitions to test key predictions of these models we examine the composition of coalition governments from 1946 and 2001 these predictions are almost always expressed in terms of parties minimal integer voting weights we calculate such weights for all parliamentary parties in addition we develop a statistical model that nests the predictions of many of these models of the distribution of posts we find that for parties that join but did not form the government there is a linear relationship between their share of the voting weight in parliament and their share of cabinet posts the party that forms the government the formateur receives a substantial bonus relative to its voting weight the latter finding is more consistent with proposal based bargaining models of coalition formation and suggests that parties gain disproportionate power not because of their size but because of their proposal power

institutions and growth in limited access societies we build a dynamic political economy model with a two class society workers and the elite in which the elite formation the innovation rate and fiscal policy are endogenous the model generates a mapping between institutions and patterns of growth consistent with empirical evidence ex ante when facing constraints in choosing institutions the elite may delegate policy control to some of its members even though such delegation exacerbates the conflict within the elite and causes policy failures committing to such institutional arrangements prevents more harmful outcomes such as rapid entry and subsequent deterioration of the elite s economic and political power

the evolution of job stability in canada trends and comparisons with u s results using data from the 1976 2001 canadian labour force survey we examine the stability of currently held jobs and find no period long drop in job stability however job stability declined across the 1980s and rose across the 1990s for workers with less than one year of tenure when 1987 and 1995 are compared it can be seen that job stability was steady in canada but fell slightly in the united states with the difference concentrated among medium tenured workers we suggest that this difference was due to a slower recovery in canada in the 1990s which caused canadian workers to be less mobile jel classification j63 l evolution de la stabilite des emplois au canada tendances et comparaisons avec les resultats aux etats unis en utilisant les donnees de l enquete sur la population active pour la periode de 1976 a 2001 l auteur examine la stabilite des emplois detenus pour le moment et trouve qu il n y a pas eu de chute de la stabilite des emplois en longue periode cependant la stabilite des emplois a chute dans les annees 1980 et cru dans les annees 1990 pour les travailleurs qui detenaient leur emploi depuis moins d un an si l on compare 1987 et 1995 la stabilite des emplois se maintient au canada mais chute un peu aux etats unis la difference est concentree dans le groupe de travailleurs qui ne detenaient leur emploi que depuis une periode moyennement longue on suggere que les differences entre les deux pays sont attribuables a une reprise economique plus lente au canada dans les annees 1990 qui aurait rendu les travailleurs canadiens moins mobiles

legislative bargaining and coalition formation abstract the finite horizon version of d p baron and j ferejohn s 1989 amer polit sci rev 83 1181 1206 legislative bargaining model is investigated with three or more periods a continuum of divisions is supportable as subgame perfect equilib ria there exist equilibria where coalitions larger than a minimal winning coalition receive strictly positive shares with sufficiently patient players and a sufficiently long horizon any interior distribution is supportable as an equilibrium in contrast a generic uniqueness result applies when introducing heterogenous time preferences the unique backwards induction equilibrium in the perturbed game is nonstationary and neither the original symmetric nor the perturbed game provides guidance for equilibrium selection in the infinite game journal of economic literature classification numbers c73 c78 d72 d78 h49

a noncooperative theory of coalitional bargaining the authors explore a sequential offers model of n person coalitional bargaining with transferable utility and with time discounting their focus is on the efficiency properties of stationary equilibria of strictly superadditive games when the discount factor delta is sufficiently large it is shown that delay and the formation of inefficient subcoalitions can occur in equilibrium the latter for some or all orders of proposer however efficient stationary equilibrium payoffs converge to a point in the core as delta approaches one strict convexity is a sufficient condition for there to exist an efficient stationary equilibrium payoff vector for sufficiently high delta

one dimensional bargaining we study a model of multilateral bargaining over social outcomes represented by the points in the unit interval the acceptance or rejection of a proposal is determined by an acceptance rule represented by the collection of decisive coalitions the focus of the paper is on the asymptotic behavior of subgame perfect equilibria in stationary strategies as the players become infinitely patient we show that along any sequence of stationary subgame perfect equilibria the social acceptance set collapses to a point this point called the limit of bargaining equilibria is independent of the sequence of equilibria and is uniquely determined by the set of players the utility functions the recognition probabilities and the acceptance rule the central result of the paper is a characterization of the limit of bargaining equilibria as a unique zero of the characteristic equation

political economy in a changing world we provide a general framework for the analysis of institutional dynamics in an environment in which payoffs and political powers change stochastically assuming that economic and political institutions as well as individual types can be ordered and preferences and the distribution of political power satisfy natural single crossing increasing differences conditions we prove existence of a pure strategy markov voting equilibrium provide conditions for its uniqueness and present a number of comparative static results we then use this framework to study the dynamics of political rights and repression in the presence of threats from extremist groups and the dynamics of collective experimentation

estimating the value of proposal power this paper investigates the role of proposal power in the allocation of transportation projects across u s congressional districts in 1991 and 1998 the evidence supports the key qualitative prediction of legislative bargaining models members with proposal power those sitting on the transportation authorization committee secure more project spending for their districts than do other representatives support for the quantitative restrictions on the value of proposal power is more mixed i then empirically address several alternative models of legislative behavior including partisan models informational roles for committees models with appropriations committees and theories of committees as preference outliers

democratization or repression abstract regimes controlled by a rich elite often collapse and make way for democracy amidst widespread social unrest such regime changes are often followed by redistribution to the poor at the expense of the former elite we argue that the reason why the elite may have to resort to full scale democratization despite its apparent costs to themselves may be that lesser concessions would be viewed as a sign a weakness and spur further unrest and more radical demands the elite may therefore be forced to choose between repression and the most generous concession a transition to full democracy

uniqueness of stationary equilibria in a one dimensional model of bargaining abstract we prove uniqueness of stationary equilibria in a one dimensional model of bargaining with quadratic utilities for an arbitrary common discount factor for general concave utilities we prove existence and uniqueness of a minimal stationary equilibrium and of a maximal stationary equilibrium we provide an example of multiple stationary equilibria with concave nonquadratic utilities

globalization and the politics of natural resources much political science scholarship including important work in this journal has explored the implications of natural resource endowments particularly oil and other highly valuable export commodities on political and economic outcomes although the first wave of literature emphasized the negative effects of these resources more recent work emphasizes how domestic institutions can condition the relationship sometimes leading to positive effects in this special issue the authors expand this literature in two important ways first they renew attention on the international dimensions of this relationship exploring how trade migration foreign investment and other global forces influence the effects these resources have on countries second they link the study of the globalization natural resources nexus to broader debates in international and comparative political economy such as how domestic institutions shape the impact of globalization and how economic factors affect the political survival of r

a noncooperative coalitional bargaining game with random proposers abstract we extend the stahl rubinstein s alternating offer model ton person coalitional bargaining the key feature of the model is the random selection of proposers at every round no delay of agreement occurs in equilibrium for a super additive game in contrast to the fixed order model of chatterjeeet al rev econ stud 60 1993 463 477 when the discount factor of future payoffs is sufficiently high the agreement on the grand coalition is reached if and only if it has the largest value per capita among all coalitions moreover in the limit as the discount factor goes to one all players divide equally the value of the grand coalition regardless of who makes a proposal journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c72 c73 c78

a noncooperative theory of legislative coalitions this noncooperative theory is based on a model that incorporates an institutional structure that reflects the sequential process of agenda formation and voting in a legislature that has the task of allocating particularistic benefits among legislative districts the theory is intended to identify the incentives for the formation of proposal coordinating coalitions as a function of characteristics of the political system and the rules that govern agenda formation coalition proposals allocate all the benefits to their districts and whenever the coalition has discipline or controls the chair it will be of minimal winning size when proposals are governed by a closed rule when coalition discipline is absent and the chair is neutral the coalition will be comprised of approximately 70 of the legislature a legislative rule that allows amendments may result in larger coalitions coalition composition is also considered

some unpleasant bargaining arithmetic abstract it is commonly believed that voting rules that are relatively more inclusive e g unanimity or supermajority are likely to yield relatively more equitable outcomes than simple majority rule we show that this is not necessarily the case in bargaining environments we study a multilateral bargaining model a la baron and ferejohn 1989 where players are heterogeneous with respect to the potential surplus they bring to the bargaining table we show that unanimity rule may generate equilibrium outcomes that are more unequal or less equitable than under majority rule in fact as players become relatively more patient we show that the more inclusive the voting rule the less equitable the equilibrium allocations

democracy rent seeking public spending and growth abstract does democratization imply faster growth less corruption and less inefficiency past studies yield ambiguous results on the effects of democracy on economic performance and growth we develop a simple two sector endogenous growth model that shows both very young and mature democracies grow faster than countries in mid stages of democratization producing a u effect this effect results from the pattern of rent seeking as it diverts from the provision of public goods rent seekers act as monopolistic competitors initially more democracy increases their number raising aggregate rents however rents per rent seeker fall with the number of rent seekers due to this crowding effect and the increased competition among rent seekers aggregate rents fall in mature democracies thus rents show an inverted u effect in relation to democracy we find fairly robust supportive evidence for the latter

recognition for sale abstract i examine the consequences of letting players compete for bargaining power in a multilateral bargaining game in each period the right to propose an offer is sold to the highest bidder and all players pay their bids if players vote according to any rule in which no player has veto power then the first proposer captures the entire surplus if a full consensus is needed for an offer to be accepted then the first proposer shares the surplus with at most one other player and as the period length between offers vanishes one player may capture virtually the entire surplus in settings with a stochastic or an endogenous surplus players are unwilling to efficiently delay agreement or invest in the surplus

economic policy and special interest politics a great deal of research has been done on the boundary between economics and political science in the last five to ten years this research in political economics spans many subfields such as macroeconomics trade public finance regulation rational choice politics and game theory a common denominator has been to study structural models of the political process agents behave rationally within well specified economic and political institutions where the policymaking process is formulated as an extensive form game methodologically much progress has been made relative to traditional approaches which were often based on inconsistent or irrational political and economic behaviour relying on non derived influence functions political support functions or vote functions yet the modem work has largely developed separately in each subfield without much contact with other subfields and each of the resulting literatures tends to focus on a distinct but partial aspect of the political process in this lecture i shall argue that even though the progress to date has been substantial we can gain a better understanding of policymaking in democracies by combining the insights from different strands of thinking on some economic policy issues the conflicting views both among citizens and politicians basically reduce to a single left to right dimension examples may include the politics of inflation vs unemployment capital taxation or the size of government we can think about policy issues within this domain of general interest politics as being resolved via traditional downsian electoral competition at least to a first approximation but the economic policy process also allows narrow interest groups ample opportunities to concentrate benefits to their own group at the expense of the population as a whole the resulting policy conflict is generically multi dimensional resolving it by voting alone would thus result in condorcet cycles we therefore need to go beyond the simplest electoral models to understand policy determination within this domain of special interest politics this lecture deals with special interest politics to make my point about fruitful analytical arbitrage i will stick to the same underlying policy example throughout this will be a simple model of a society where the government uses

seniority in legislatures we construct a stochastic game model of a legislature with an endogenously determined seniority system we model the behavior of the legislators as well as their constituents in an infinitely repeated divide the dollar game each legislative session must make a decision on redistributional issues modeled as a divide the dollar game however each session begins with a vote in which the legislators decide by majority rule whether or not to impose on themselves a seniority system legislative decisions on the redistributional issues are made by the baron ferejohn rule an agenda setter is selected by a random recognition rule which in our model is a function of the seniority system selected the agenda setter makes a proposal on redistributional issues and the legislature then votes whether to accept or reject the agenda setters proposal if the legislature rejects the proposal another agenda setter is randomly selected and the process is repeated if the legislature accepts the proposal the legislative session ends and the voters in each legislative district vote whether to retain their legislator or throw it out of office the voters verdict determines the seniority structure of the next period legislature we find a stationary equilibrium to the game having the property that the legislature imposes on itself a non trivial seniority system and that legislators are always reelected