the democratic political economy of progressive income taxation why do both left and right political parties typically propose progressive income taxation schemes in political competition analysis of this problem has been hindered by the two dimensionality of the issue space to give parties a choice over a domain that contains both progressive and regressive income tax policies requires an issue space that is at least two dimensional nash equilibrium in pure strategies of the standard two party game whose players have complete preferences over a two dimensional policy space generically fails to exist i introduce a new equilibrium concept for political games based on the fact of factional conflict within parties each party is supposed to consist of reformists militants and opportunists each faction has a complete preference order on policy space but together they can only agree on a partial order nash equilibria of the two party game where the policy space consists of all quadratic income tax functions and each party is represented by its partial order exist and it is shown that in such equilibria both parties propose progressive income taxation

occupational choice and the process of development this paper models economic development as a process of institutional transformation by focusing on the interplay between agents occupational decisions and the distribution of wealth because of capital market imperfections poor agents choose working for a wage over self employment and wealthy agents become entrepreneurs who monitor workers only with sufficient inequality however will there be employment contracts otherwise there is either subsistence or self employment thus in static equilibrium the occupational structure depends on distribution since the latter is itself endogenous we demonstrate the robustness of this result by extending the model dynamically and studying examples in which initial wealth distributions have long run effects in one case the economy develops either widespread cottage industry self employment or factory production employment contracts depending on the initial distribution in the other example it develops into prosperity or stagnation

candidate reputations and the incumbency effect abstract a major shortcoming of the classical median voter model is that its central prediction convergence of platforms to the median voter s ideal is seldom observed one reason is that the classical model neglects the importance of voter expectations as a determinant of votes here we associate voters expectations about candidates with past as well as current candidate pronouncements and assume that incumbents whose actions are consistent with their reputations are perceived as less risky than challengers in equilibrium candidates choose distinct platforms typically neither adopts the median voter s ideal point either candidate may win depending on how well the incumbent s reputation reflects current voter tastes and how relatively risky the electorate perceives the challenger to be

some design lessons from market based greenhouse gas regulation in the restructured australian electricity industry abstract there is growing worldwide interest in the use of market based policy instruments for climate change regulation in the electricity sector these mechanisms would seem to offer some efficiency and flexibility advantages over more traditional regulatory approaches while being highly compatible with competitive market based electricity industries australia has been an early and enthusiastic adopter of both electricity industry restructuring and market based environmental instruments this paper first outlines some of these recent policy developments in particular we describe the objectives design and outcomes to date of electricity industry restructuring the mandatory renewable energy target the nsw greenhouse benchmarks the queensland 13 gas scheme and government accredited green power from this we draw some key design lessons for such market based instruments these include the perils of abstraction in scheme design the vital importance of setting appropriate baselines in baseline and credit schemes the possibility that such measures may interact in ways that reduce their environmental effectiveness market for lemon risks with tradable instruments that have measurement verification or additionality difficulties and the challenges of creating transparent liquid markets for these mechanisms the mixed performance of these australian schemes to date illustrates the need for great care in designing such market based approaches

implications of ethnic diversity ethnically differentiated societies are often regarded as dysfunctional with poor economic performance and a high risk of violent civil conflict the author distinguishes between dominance in which one group constitutes a majority and fractionalization in which there are many small groups in terms of overall economic performance the research shows that both theoretically and empirically fractionalization is normally unproblematic in democracies although it can be damaging in dictatorships in terms of the risk of civil war the author shows that both theoretically and empirically fractionalization actually makes societies safer while dominance increases the risk of conflict a policy implication is that fractionalized societies are viable and secession should be discouraged

empirical observations of bidding patterns in australia s national electricity market abstract for more than a decade electricity industries have been undergoing reform worldwide however there are various sometimes contradictory conclusions about the performance of these restructured electricity markets market performance depends largely on how each market participant responds to the market design including market rules market operational procedures and information revelation in this paper we identify and examine the strategies adopted by generators in australia s national electricity market based on publicly available data for the period from may 1 2002 to may 31 2003 we try to understand and answer some basic questions like how generators respond collectively or individually to changes in market conditions e g load changes and why they behave in this way the statistics calculated from the data show that wide variations in the frequency of strategic bidding and rebidding exist that generators more frequently use capacity offers as a strategic tool than price offers that large generating units are more likely to use capacity strategies to control market prices and that generators are capable of responding to changes in market conditions

environment market share and market power in this paper we develop a process model relating market share to firm profits in particular we specify average price and average cost equations as a function of previous year market share position changes in market share environmental conditions and interactions of environmental conditions with the lagged market position and market share change variables we estimate these equations using pims data after controlling for unobservable factors our results suggest that firms with high market shares derive no extra market power benefits except if they operate in environments with little buyer power instead environmental factors and changes in market share most strongly influence price and cost an analysis of the market share associated with maximal firm profits indicates that for the majority of firms in our sample steadily increasing market share does not always associate with increasing profits giving credence to the proposition that more market share is not always better

group loyalty and the taste for redistribution interpersonal preferences preferences that depend on the characteristics of others are typically hard to infer from observable individual behavior as an alternative approach this paper uses survey data to investigate interpersonal preferences i show that self reported attitudes toward welfare spending are determined not only by financial self interest but also by interpersonal preferences these interpersonal preferences are characterized by a negative exposure effect individuals decrease their support for welfare as the welfare recipiency rate in their community rises and racial group loyalty individuals increase their support for welfare spending as the share of local recipients from their own racial group rises these findings help to explain why levels of welfare benefits are relatively low in racially heterogeneous states

fairness self interest and the politics of the progressive income tax all advanced democracies have adopted income taxes with considerable progression in marginal tax rates to explain this we examine the nature of individual and collective preferences over alternative tax schedules in the context of a simple two sector model we first consider the case of altruistic or sociotropic citizens who view the income tax as a means of achieving a fairer or more egalitarian distribution of income we show that greater marginal rate progressivity may well be less fair that a fairest tax however defined is always a linear or flat rate schedule in which all incomes are taxed at the same marginal rate and that with a purely sociotropic electorate there exists a flat rate schedule which is a majority equilibrium we then show that with self interested voters who seek to minimize their own tax burdens greater marginal rate progression may well be preferred by middle and upper income voters that for middle income citizens the optimal schedule is a sharply progressive one and that within the set of individually optimal schedules there exists a majority equilibrium which is a progressive schedule which minimizes the burden on median income or middle class citizens at the expense of lower and upper income taxpayers

immigration redistribution and universal suffrage the effect of immigration on redistribution has been widely debated this paper contributes to this debate by testing two explanations which are that i immigration tends to reduce redistribution due to people s higher levels of xenophobia and that ii immigration affects redistribution because immigrants do not have the right to vote since the demand for redistribution depends on the expected gap between median voter income and mean income immigrants affect the demand for redistribution because as non citizens they do not change the median voter s income but as economic stakeholders they do affect the mean income four empirical consequences of i and ii are tested at the individual level evidence from the european values survey in 45 countries confirms ii showing that immigrants expected competitiveness on the labor market affects preferences for redistribution and that it is amplified when the perceived number of immigrants is high in contrast i is globally rejected since the impact of the citizens declared level of solidarity with immigrants tends to be weak and depends on the type of measurement or specification used

fractionalization and the size of government i study the effect of voters with a group based social conscience voters care more about the well being of those belonging to their own group than the rest of the population within a model of political tax determination both fractionalization and group antagonism reduce the support for redistribution whereas within group inequality increases support for redistribution inequality between groups has the opposite effect these results hold even if a poor group forms a majority using a panel constructed from us micro data i find support for the hypothesis that within race inequality increases redistribution while between race inequality decreases redistribution

optimizing an emission trading scheme for local governments a stackelberg game model and hybrid algorithm this study investigates a policy making problem for a local government to implement an emission trading scheme by considering the interactive production decisions of firms in its administrative region the market based allowance trading price formed freely among the firms in the region is investigated by taking into account regional environmental bearing capacities under the scheme the government sets the emission reduction target of the region and allocates tradable initial allowances to firms and firms plan their production according to their allowances on hand a stackelberg game model is formulated to analyze the decisions of the government and firms aiming to maximize the social welfare of the region and maximize the profit of each firm in view of the non concavity and discreteness of the decision model for the government we propose a hybrid algorithm to solve the game model efficiently this algorithm consists of a polynomial time dynamic programming binary search and genetic algorithm results reveal that i the stackelberg game model greatly supports local governments policy making on the market driven emission allowance trading scheme and that ii the social welfare is a great metric for policy making decisions on environmental regulations the market driven emission trading scheme is an effective mechanism for local governments to induce emission reduction through green technology adoption by firms however governments should set their emission reduction targets appropriately because a tight or easy regulation policy significantly affects the environmental and economic benefits as well as the social welfare

a multimarket decision making framework for genco considering emission trading scheme in a multimarket environment a genco produces electricity subject to a number of factors including physical and environmental constraints together with trading strategies in the electricity market em fuel market fm and carbon market cm to assist a genco to maximize its profits from em fm and cm this paper proposes a dynamic decision making model with two consecutive stages fuzzy differential evolution algorithm is used to solve this decision making problem taking transactions in the three interactive markets into account the proposed model has been tested for a genco consisting of seven thermal units and a wind farm a rational tradeoff between the profit making and emission reduction has been demonstrated by the genco using the proposed model indicating a well alignment with the intended goal of the introducing emission trading scheme ets

organizing emissions trading the barrier of domestic permit allocation abstract this paper uses a barrier model of politics to analyse the issue of permit allocation as a major political obstacle to organizing inter national greenhouse gas emissions trading it is argued that permit allocation constitutes a barrier because among other things various types of emitters have conflicting interests in trying to lobby for as much allocated permits as possible and because international differences in domestic permit allocation procedures are perceived to potentially distort inter firm competitiveness relations permit allocation is circumvented by applying intergovernmental or project based emissions trading the project approach is preferable in particular because it avoids the trading of hot air

does centralization increase the size of government abstract are fiscal programs larger or smaller if they are run centrally rather than locally in a prospective federation we abstract completely from well understood economic issues and focus instead on the political effects of centralization for fiscal programs with benefits broadly spread in the population such as redistributive transfer schemes social insurance and general government consumption centralization changes the coalition of voters who favor a large program in a direction that depends on the nature of the redistributive instrument for fiscal programs with localized benefits such as provision of local public goods centralization creates opportunities for rent seeking which increases the size of government

unequal societies income distribution and the social contract this paper develops a theory of inequality and the social contract aiming to explain how countries with similar economic and political fundamentals can sustain such different systems of social insurance fiscal redistribution and education finance as those of the united states and western europe with imperfect credit and insurance markets some redistributive policies can improve ex ante welfare and this implies that their political support tends to decrease with inequality conversely with credit constraints lower redistribution translates into more persistent inequality hence the potential for multiple steady states with mutually reinforcing high inequality and low redistribution or vice versa

unobservable effects and business performance while unobservable factors such as corporate culture access to scarce resources management skill and luck can be postulated to be principal determinants of business success their effects are all but ignored in studies of business performance this study making use of the pims data base reports empirical evidence indicating that failure to control for unobservable factors influencing profitability both biases and exaggerates the effect of strategic factors indeed the influence of unobservable factors is so pervasive as to invalidate many of the conclusions drawn from studies failing to control for their effects

decentralized taxation and the size of government evidence from swiss state and local governments according to the leviathan model fiscal federalism is seen as a binding constraint on a revenue maximizing government the competitive pressure of fiscal federalism is supposed to reduce public sector size as compared to unitary states however empirical results concerning the leviathan hypothesis are mixed this study uses a state and local level panel data set of swiss cantons from 1980 to 1998 to empirically analyze the effect of different federalist institutions on the size and structure of government revenue because of the considerable tax autonomy of sub national swiss governments it is possible to investigate different mechanisms by which fiscal federalism may influence government size the results indicate that tax exporting has a revenue expanding effect whereas tax competition favors a smaller size of government fragmentation has essentially no effect on the size of government revenue for swiss cantons the overall effect of revenue decentralization leads to fewer tax revenue but higher user charges thus revenue decentralization favors a smaller size of government revenue and shifts government revenue from taxes to user charges

allocation under dictatorship research in stalin s archives we survey recent research on the soviet economy in the state party and military archives of the stalin era the archives have provided rich new evidence on the economic arrangements of a command system under a powerful dictator including stalin s role in the making of the economic system and economic policy stalin s accumulation objectives and the constraints that limited his power to achieve them the limits to administrative allocation the information flows and incentives that governed the behavior of economic managers the scope and significance of corruption and market oriented behavior and the prospects for economic reform

ethnic diversity social sanctions and public goods in kenya abstract this paper examines ethnic diversity and local public goods in rural western kenya the identification strategy relies on the stable historically determined patterns of ethnic land settlement ethnic diversity is associated with lower primary school funding and worse school facilities and there is suggestive evidence that it leads to poor water well maintenance the theoretical model illustrates how inability to impose social sanctions in diverse communities leads to collective action failures and we find that school committees in diverse areas do impose fewer sanctions on defaulting parents we relate these results to the literature on social capital and economic development and discuss implications for decentralization in less developed countries

inequality segregation and redistribution abstract mainstream economic theory predicts that countries with large inequalities in pre tax income distribution will be more redistributive than countries which are more equal in this respect empirical studies however offer no strong support for this theoretical prediction in fact a number of studies indicate that the opposite may be true namely that countries which are more equal in terms of pre tax income distribution are more redistributive than less egalitarian societies the present paper offers an explanation to this puzzle in a model of endogenous choice of location and endogenous aversion against inequality we argue that large pre tax differences in income may lead to a residential segregation of rich and poor such segregation may reduce the social attachment between groups in society and reduce the willingness of the rich to make transfers to the poor conversely societies with small pre tax differences in income may be characterized by larger transfers and a less segregated population structure

community composition and collective action analyzing initial mail response to the 2000 census this paper analyzes how community heterogeneity influences resident decisions to undertake actions generating public benefits the decision in question is completing and returning the 2000 census questionnaire an action which secures a significant amount of federal grants for the community the model developed to explain this action allows members of societal groups to differentially value public benefits that accrue to other group members racial generational and socioeconomic class heterogeneity all predict significantly lower response rates at the county level the potential for endogenous sorting into heterogeneous counties implies that the magnitude of true behavioral effects exceeds these estimates

polarization politics and property rights links between inequality and growth most efforts to trace the effects of income inequality on growth have focused on redistribution however empirical investigation has not substantiated either the positive association of income inequality with redistribution or the negative association of redistribution with economic growth the authors analyze the effects of inequality in the broader context of social polarization they argue that social polarization whether rooted in income inequality or in ethnic tension makes large changes in current policies including those guaranteeing the security of contract and property rights more likely under a wide range of institutional arrangements the resulting uncertainties in the policy and contractual environment hinder growth they find strong empirical support for both parts of this argument the policy implications of their argument are quite distinct from those of arguments that inequality reduces growth by increasing pressures for redistribution if redistributive policies per se were to blame for the low growth resulting from inequality governments that seek to mitigate income inequality must inevitably confront a tradeoff between equity and growth if on the other hand the insecurity of property rights slows growth in unequal or otherwise polarized societies governments that commit over the long run to particular redistributive policies incur less risk of slowing economic growth fiscal redistribution that reduces inequality may actually increase growth by reducing the risks of political uncertainty

case study on initial allocation of shanghai carbon emission trading based on shapley value abstract carbon emission trading is an effective measure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide china has publicized plans to initiate the demonstration of carbon emission trading in seven regions as of 2013 initial allocation is fundamental but it proposes difficulty in the mechanism design of the carbon emission trading system benchmark grandfathering and the shapley value have been employed to simulate a specific case which consists of the initial allocation of carbon emission allowances of three power plants in shanghai china the results of the shapley value are regarded as a theoretical equitable reference the results of benchmark are similar to those of the shapley value however it is apparent that the allocation regarding grandfathering is inequitable considering other factors we proposed the following at the introduction of experimental stage free allocation pertaining to grandfathering can be adopted meanwhile benchmark should be prepared and adopted at the appropriate time furthermore a portion of the initial allowances can be reserved for auction and this portion for auction will escalate to the extent of 100 upon entering the formal stage in addition the tiered price mechanism and the subsidy policy are also suggested

one dollar one vote this paper revisits the relationship between inequality and redistribution in a panel of advanced oecd countries using panel data methods that hold constant a variety of determinants of redistributive spending i find a non monotonic relationship between pre tax and transfer distribution of income and redistribution relative to mean income a more affluent rich and middle class are associated with less redistribution and a richer poor class is associated with more redistribution these results are consistent with a one dollar one vote politico economic equilibrium when the income of a group of citizens increases aggregate redistributive policies tilt towards this group s most preferred policies

optimal flexible operation of a co _ 2 capture power plant in a combined energy and carbon emission market since co2 capture and storage ccs is a viable co2 abatement option co2 capture power plants ccpps could become a significant part of the future generation mix this paper investigates the flexibility of the operation of a representative post combustion ccpp with ancillary facilities a mathematical model of the operation of such a plant is developed this model quantifies the relation between the major operating characteristics of a ccpp including efficiency penalty capacity penalty net power output and net co2 emission on this basis a profit maximization model is proposed this model would help a ccpp decide its power output schedule co2 capture schedule and bidding strategies in response of volatile power and carbon prices in a day ahead energy market and a cap and trade carbon emission market the validity and the usefulness of the proposed model are demonstrated using numerical results

an experimental study on emission trading behaviors of generation companies the overall performance of emission trading et a market based emission regulation tool strongly relies on participants participation and responses in order to improve market design it is important for policy makers to understand the participants trading behaviors in different market environments however human behaviors cannot be easily modeled with conventional analytical methods due to its bounded rationality characteristics in this paper based on the complementary features between experimental and agent based computational methods a hybrid interactive simulation methodology is proposed to solve human behaviors related problems human subjected experiment based on european union emissions trading system price data in 2006 is conducted the results show that there is no fixed emission trading interval for generation companies and the strategic behaviors of market participants are observed major driving factors of emission trading are categorized into emission price emission quantity and time related factors which are in accordance with empirical analysis results on eu ets 2005 2006 transaction dataset furthermore more human subjected experiments are conducted under different emission price scenarios to obtain samples for quantitative analysis based on thousands of samples obtained the joint influences of driving factors on emission trading behaviors are analyzed the quantitative analysis results obtained can reflect the trading patterns of human participants which provide basis for constructing computer agents that can act as useful substitutes for human participants

why the poor do not expropriate the rich an old argument in new garb we consider a political economy with two partisan parties each party represents a given constituency of voters if one party labour represents poor voters and the other christian democrats rich voters if a redistributive tax policy is the only issue and if there are no incentive considerations then in equilibrium the party representing the poor will propose a tax rate of unity if however there are two issues tax policy and religion for instance then this is not generally the case the analysis shows that if a simple condition on the distribution of voter preferences holds then as the salience of the non economic issue increases the tax rate proposed by labour in equilibrium will fall possibly even to zero even though a majority of the population may have an ideal tax rate of unity 1998 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

when more poor means less poverty on income inequality and purchasing power we show theoretically that the poor can benefit from price changes induced by higher income inequality as the number of poor increases the market for products aimed toward the poor grows and such products become more profitable as a result there are circumstances where an increase in income inequality associates with higher purchasing power of the poor using cross country data on the price of one kilogram of rice and the price of a big mac hamburger we confirm a negative association between income inequality and the price of inferior goods robust to the inclusion of a large set of control variables results are also robust to a first difference specification and to a two stage instrumental variables approach examining economic well being it is thus important to analyze not only the incomes of households but also the prices of the products and services that they buy

tribe or nation nation building and public goods in kenya versus tanzania this article examines how government policies affect ethnic relations by comparing outcomes across two nearby districts one in kenya and one in tanzania using colonial era boundary placement as a natural experiment despite similar geography and historical legacies governments in kenya and tanzania have followed radically different language education and local institutional policies with tanzania consistently pursuing more serious nation building the evidence suggests that nation building has allowed diverse communities in rural tanzania to achieve considerably better local public goods outcomes than diverse communities in kenya to illustrate while kenyan communities at mean levels of diversity have 25 percent less local school funding than homogeneous communities on average the comparable figure in the tanzanian district is near zero the kenya tanzania comparison provides empirical evidence that serious reforms can ameliorate social divisions and suggests that nation building should take a place on policy agendas especially in africa

inequality social insurance and redistribution is the political support for welfare policy higher or lower in less egalitarian societies we answer the question using a model of welfare policy as publicly financed insurance that pays benefits in a redistributive manner when voters have both redistributive and insurance motives for supporting welfare spending the effect of inequality depends on how benefits are targeted greater inequality increases support for welfare expenditures when benefits are targeted to the employed but decreases support when benefits are targeted to those without earnings with endogenous targeting support for benefits to those without earnings declines as inequality increases whereas support for aggregate spending is a v shaped function of inequality statistical analysis of welfare expenditures in advanced industrial societies provides support for key empirical implications of the model

can good projects succeed in bad communities abstract the lack of social capital is frequently given as an explanation for why communities perform poorly yet to what extent can project design compensate for these community specific constraints i address this question by examining determinants of collective success in a costly problem for developing economies the upkeep of local public goods it is often difficult to obtain reliable outcome measures for comparable collective tasks across well defined communities in order to address this i conducted detailed surveys of community maintained infrastructure projects in northern pakistan the findings show that while community specific constraints do matter their impact can be mitigated by better project design inequality social fragmentation and lack of leadership in the community do have adverse consequences but these can be overcome by changes in project complexity community participation and return distribution moreover the evidence suggests that better design matters even more for communities with poorer attributes the use of community fixed effects and instrumental variables offers a significant improvement in empirical identification over previous studies these results provide evidence that appropriate design can enable projects to succeed even in bad communities

redistribution and affirmative action abstract the paper develops an integrated political economy model in which individuals are distinguished by earning ability and an ascriptive characteristic race the policy space is a transfer payment to low income workers financed by a flat tax on wages and an affirmative action constraint on firms hiring decisions the distribution of income and the policy are endogenous with the latter being the outcome of a legislative bargaining game between three legislative blocs the model provides support for the common claim that racial divisions reduce support for welfare expenditures even when voters have color blind preferences we show that relatively advantaged members of both the majority and minority group benefit from the introduction of a second dimension of redistribution while the less advantaged members of the majority are the principal losers

tax and education policy in a heterogeneous agent economy what levels of redistribution maximize growth and efficiency this paper studies the effects of progressive income taxes and education finance in a dynamic heterogeneous agent economy such redistributive policies entail distortions to labor supply and savings but also serve as partial substitutes for missing credit and insurance markets the resulting tradeoffs for growth and efficiency are explored both theoretically and quantitatively in a model that yields complete analytical solutions progressive education finance always leads to higher income growth than taxes and transfers but at the cost of lower insurance overall efficiency is assessed using a new measure that properly reflects aggregate resources and idiosyncratic risks but unlike a standard social welfare function does not reward equality per se simulations using empirical parameter estimates show that the efficiency costs and benefits of redistribution are generally of the same order of magnitude resulting in plausible values for the optimal rates aggregate income and aggregate welfare provide only crude lower and upper bounds around the true efficiency tradeoff

the political economy of regionalism we examine the incentives of regions to unite and separate separation allows for greater influence over the nature of political decision making while unification allows regions to exploit economies of scale in the provision of government our paper explores the influence of size location and the diversity within regions in shaping this trade off we then examine the way in which alternative political institutions aggregate regional preferences and thereby define the number of countries

partial carbon permits allocation of potential emission trading scheme in australian electricity market emission trading is widely considered to be the most effective policy to minimize the overall costs for co2 abatement however the political feasibility of an emission trading scheme may crucially depend on the free initial allocation of emission permits to carbon intensive industries in order to offset the reduction in profits this paper aims to analyze these potential profit impacts and the possible compensation to affected generation companies through modeling the australian national electricity market under a potential emission trading scheme historical emission based and historical generation based allocation approaches are used in this paper to calculate and compare the percentages of carbon permits that should be freely allocated two carbon permit price scenarios are used to analyze the sensitivity of the optimal percentage of free allocation to carbon permit price

allocation of carbon permits within a country a general equilibrium analysis of the united kingdom abstract the kyoto agreement includes international trade in carbon permits from 2008 we have used a cge model to evaluate methods of allocating permits within the uk auctioning is broadly similar to a carbon tax with revenues recycled to reduce other distortions grandfathering some permits free to large firms would mean a loss of recycling and possibly give windfall profits to foreigners alternatively regularly revised allocation using best practice estimates would be similar to recycling revenue as an output subsidy such a system could allow much of the potential double dividend to be realised though an auction system might still be preferable

effects of social norms and fractionalization on voting behaviour in japan this article uses prefecture level panel data from japan spanning the period 1989 2003 to examine the influence of social norms and fractionalization on voting behaviour the key findings obtained from analysis via the fixed effects estimation which controls for unobserved prefecture specific fixed effects are as follows 1 the voter turnout is higher in close knit communities indicating that social norms enhance voting 2 fractionalization from both economic and generational standpoints lowers the voter turnout and 3 a lack of social capital can lead to the distribution of votes being spread thinly among the competing parties

ethnic diversity public spending and individual support for the welfare state a review of the empirical literature we review the empirical literature that studies the effect of ethnic diversity on public spending and on individual support for the welfare state the survey puts a particular focus on the fast growing literature that uses experiments to study the effects of ethnic diversity many of these studies have appeared since the pioneering survey by alesina and la ferrara and have not been covered by a survey before

the decline of welfare benefits in the u s the role of wage inequality welfare benefits in the u s have experienced a much studied secular decline since the mid 1970s we explore a new hypothesis for this decline related to the increase in wage inequality in the labor market and the decline of real wages at the bottom of the distribution we posit that voters prefer benefits which are tied to low skilled wages we test the hypothesis using a 1969 1992 panel of state level data an additional contribution of our analysis is the use of general social survey data on voter preferences for welfare which we combine with current population survey data to determine the voter in each state who has the median preferred welfare benefit level our analysis reveals considerable evidence in support of a role for declining real wages in the decline of welfare benefits

on the number and size of nations this paper studies the equilibrium determination of the number of countries in different political regimes and in different economic environments with more or less economic integration we focus on the trade off between the benefits of large jurisdictions and the costs of heterogeneity of large and diverse populations our model implies that i democratization leads to secessions ii in equilibrium one generally observes an inefficiently large number of countries iii the equilibrium number of countries is increasing in the amount of economic integration

distributive politics and economic growth a crude distinction between economics and politics would be that economics is concerned with expanding the pie while politics is about distributing it in this paper we analyze the relationship between the two we focus on how an economy s initial configuration of resources shapes the political struggle for income and wealth distribution and how that in turn affects long run growth our main conclusion is that inequality is conducive to the adoption of growth retarding policies we derive this result from a simple political economy model of growth and present cross country evidence consistent with it the key feature of our model is that individuals differ in their relative factor endowments we distinguish between two types of factors an accumulated factor called capital and a nonaccumulated factor called labor growth is driven by the expansion of the capital stock which is in turn determined by individual saving decisions long run growth is endogenous as the aggregate production function is taken to be linearly homogeneous in capital and productive government services taken together the provision of government services is financed by a tax on capital because government services are productive a small tax on

intergenerational conflict and the political economy of higher education funding abstract we examine how a population s age distribution and a growing divide between the ethnic composition of older and young generations is likely to affect support for higher education funding using detailed survey data on voter preferences for higher education funding and precinct level vote returns from locally funded community college bond referenda in california we find that older voters are significantly less supportive of higher education funding than younger voters and that support among older non hispanic white voters is particularly weak when those voters reside in a jurisdiction where the college age population is more heavily hispanic

the dynamics of the wealth distribution and the interest rate with credit rationing are uniquely determined and wealth dispersion among individuals or firms is irrelevant introducing credit rationing into the solow model modifies these conclusions multiple stationary interest rates and wealth distributions can exist because higher initial rates can be self reinforcing through higher credit rationing and lower capital accumulation the wealth accumulation process is ergodic in every steady state but wealth mobility is lower with higher steady state interest rates aggregate output is higher in steady states with lower interest rates because credit is better allocated short run interest rate or distribution shocks can be self sustaining and can have long run effects on output through the induced dynamics of the wealth distribution and credit rationing

allocation of co2 emissions permits a general equilibrium analysis of policy instruments what are the effects of different ways of allocating co2 emissions permits under a tradable permit scheme numerical simulations show that using the permit revenue to lower existing taxes implies by far the lowest welfare cost but also a large reduction in employment in energy intensive sectors and substantial stranded costs grandfathering the permits compensates owners for losses on stranded investments but comes at a welfare cost and does not mitigate the adjustment imposed on the economy finally distributing the permits according to market shares reduces the degree of sectoral adjustment but also comes at a high welfare cost

multi stage flexible expansion co planning under uncertainties in a combined electricity and gas market natural gas is an important fuel source in the power industry electricity and natural gas are both energy that can be directly consumed to improve the overall efficiency of the energy infrastructure it is imperative that the expansion of gas power plants electricity transmission lines and gas pipelines can be co planned the co planning process is modeled as a mixed integer nonlinear programming problem to handle conflicting objectives simultaneously we propose a novel model to identify the optimal co expansion plan in terms of social welfare to evaluate the robustness of plans under different scenarios the flexibility criterion is used to identify each plan s adaptation cost to uncertainties such as demand growth fuel cost and financial constraints etc we developed a systematic and comprehensive planning model to understand develop and optimize energy grids in order to reach higher social welfare and is therefore of great importance in terms of supporting and guiding investment decisions for the power and gas industry meanwhile we use the sequential importance sampling sis to perform scenario reduction for achieving a higher computational efficiency a comprehensive case study on the integrated ieee 14 bus and a test gas system is conducted to validate our approach

composite dependent variables and the market share effect farris parry and ailawadi 1992 hereafter denoted fpa demonstrate that bias can arise in a regression involving a composite dependent variable where a subset of components of the dependent variable are used as explanatory factors they correctly observe that the jacobson and aaker 1985 hereafter denoted ja model has explanatory factors that are also components of the roi dependent variable and as such is subject to composite variable bias fpa note that another way of viewing composite variable bias is that the coefficients in the model reflect not their impact on the dependent variable but rather their impact on the dependent variable less the elements of the components included as explanatory factors as such additional effects analogous to indirect effects may be present to the extent strategic factors influence the included components fpa conclude that such bias explains the low estimate of the market share effect reported in ja however fpa s attempt to replicate our analysis and assess composite variable bias is flawed by a mistake in their analysis i e their disaggregate models do not follow from the ja aggregate specification the purpose of this note is to correctly assess the extent to which the ja estimate of the market share effect is affected by composite variable bias and to suggest approaches for modeling a composite dependent variable in the presence of unobservable factors in particular we i show that the disaggregate specifications of fpa do not follow from ja ii look at specifications not subject to composite variable bias to investigate the magnitude of the composite variable bias in ja and iii provide a disaggregate modeling framework that controls for unobservable effects