voter turnout and fiscal policy abstract in this paper we examine whether shocks in voting costs can impact elected representatives quality defined as the capacity to fund projects at the lowest cost using data on french municipalities and local variations in seasonal infections incidence as a shock on voting cost we estimate that higher incidence lowers voter turnout increases subsidies obtained by a municipality decreases harmful financial decisions and increases the municipality s investment in infrastructure we present a model where these predictions would hold in particular for municipalities with a high base level of turnout

the performance of pivotal voter models in small scale elections evidence from texas liquor referenda abstract this paper explores the ability of pivotal voter models to explain voter behavior in small scale elections using data from texas liquor referenda the findings provide little support for the view that pivotal voter models are a reasonable theory for understanding small scale elections interestingly this is not because they cannot explain the levels of turnout in the data but rather because they cannot explain the size of the winning margins the logic of pivotal voter models implies that elections must be expected to be close even if there is a significant difference between the sizes of the groups or the intensity of their preferences with even a relatively small number of eligible voters elections that are expected to be close ex ante must end up being close ex post however in the data winning margins are often significant

do parties matter estimating the effect of political power in multi party systems abstract when there are more than two parties policy outcomes are typically the result of a bargaining process we investigate whether changes in political power for various parties have an effect on tax policies we use an instrumental variable approach where close elections provide the exogenous variation in our variable of interest voting power in order to isolate close elections in a proportional election system we develop a new simulation algorithm using data from german municipalities in the state of bavaria our estimation results suggest that political power does matter for policies somewhat surprisingly the center left party spd is found to lower all three locally controlled taxes whereas the greens increase both property taxes considerably these results remain robust across a range of specifications our partisan effect for the spd is also confirmed by a simple regression discontinuity estimation using mayoral elections

imposing a turnout threshold in referendums we construct a model of a yes no referendum for which the outcome is valid only if the voter turnout rate is greater than a predetermined value with such a turnout threshold three types of equilibria exist in each of which the voters who favor the status quo either go to the polls abstain or use mixed strategies we show that abstaining is more likely to realize the status quo than going to the polls if the threshold is sufficiently high whereas one of the mixed strategy equilibria is least likely to realize the status quo for any level of threshold

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

testing for common features in north american energy markets abstract using recent advances in the field of applied econometrics we explore the strength of shared trends and shared cycles between north american natural gas and crude oil markets in doing so we use daily data from january 1991 to april 2001 on spot u s henry hub natural gas and wti crude oil prices the results show that there has been decoupling of the prices of these two sources of energy as a result of oil and gas deregulation in the united states we also investigate the interconnectedness of north american natural gas markets and find that north american natural gas prices are largely defined by the u s henry hub price trends

social incentives and voter turnout evidence from the swiss mail ballot system this paper uses a natural experiment to document the impact of social pressure on voting behavior the main hypothesis is that social pressure creates incentives to vote for the purpose of being seen at the voting act this incentive is particularly high in small and close knit communities empirically i analyze the effect of postal voting on voter participation in switzerland optional postal voting decreased the voting costs but simultaneously removed the social pressure to vote in spite of the large reduction in voting costs the effect on aggregate turnout was small however voter participation was more negatively affected in the smaller communities this lends support to the view that social incentives played a role for certain people s voting decisions jel h0 z13

a theory of participation in elections we analyze a model of participation in elections in which voting is costly and no vote is pivotal ethical agents are motivated to participate when they determine that agents of their type are obligated to do so unlike previous duty based models of participation in our model an ethical agent s obligation to vote is determined endogenously as a function of the behavior of other agents our model predicts high turnout and comparative statics that are consistent with strategic behavior jel d72

does gender matter for political leadership the case of u s mayors abstract what are the consequences of electing a female leader for policy and political outcomes we answer this question in the context of u s cities where women s participation in mayoral elections increased from negligible numbers in 1970 to about one third of the elections in the 2000 s a novel data set of u s mayoral elections from 1950 to 2005 was used and a regression discontinuity design was employed to deal with the endogeneity of female candidacy to city characteristics in contrast to most research on the influence of female leadership we find no effect of gender of the mayor on policy outcomes related to the size of local government the composition of municipal spending and employment or crime rates these results hold both in the short and the long run while female mayors do not implement different policies they do appear to have higher unobserved political skills as they have at least a 5 percentage point higher incumbent effect than a comparable male but we find no evidence of political spillovers exogenously electing a female mayor does not change the long run political success of other female mayoral candidates in the same city or of female candidates in local congressional elections

asymmetric price responses market integration and market power a study of the u s natural gas market we studied the market performance at selected representative natural gas trading hubs in the u s and documented different price behaviors among various hubs with nymex prices as the competitive benchmark we found empirically that the spot price responses at some trading hubs were systematically asymmetric thus demonstrating a market advantage by either buyers or sellers we further found that the presence of market power was a very plausible explanation for this price behavior at some hubs

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

low cost decisions as a challenge to public choice in the last 25 years we have seen a great deal of success in the scientific research programme called public choice one of the main aims of this programme is to develop positive theories of political processes like theories of voting behaviour of government behaviour of bureaucratic behaviour and of interest group behaviour just to mention the most important theory sets in this area 1 the methodological core of this research programme consists in the economic model of behaviour the homo oeconomicus or rational evaluating maximising man remm as he is sometimes called see e g brunner 1987 it is assumed that individuals subjectively evaluate different action possibilities according to the perceived costs and benefits and that they choose that action which promises the highest expected net benefit during recent decades this standard methodological approach in economics has in a kind of imperialism been applied to decisions largely outside the realm of traditional economics thus new sub disciplines have been created for example the economic analysis of law the economic analysis of the family or the economics of arts to name just a few public choice is the application of this approach to political public sector decisions and in this area it is a successful competitor of traditional political science which follows more or less a public interest approach i e assuming that political decision makers do not follow their own personal interests but have strong enough incentives to pursue the interests of society or at least of the social group to which they belong

evolution of the u s natural gas industry in response to changes in transaction costs the u s natural gas industry traditionally had producers interstate pipelines and distributors linked together via bilateral long term contracts recently the federal energy regulatory commission has encouraged buyers and sellers to deal directly with each other leading first to a spot market and marketers then to market hubs and a slight trend back to longer term contracts marketers and pipelines have consolidated to take advantage of economies of scope and systems effects which larger networks provide we use transaction cost economics to explain the evolution of exchange relationships with open access to transportation and the unbundling of transportation and storage from sales

motivations to remit evidence from botswana in this article a theory of motivations to send remittances is described and tested with data from botswana altruism is one of the motivations tested and found to be an insufficient explanation for remittances among migrants in botswana a refinement of the model stipulates a modified altruism or enlightened self interest in this model the relationship between the migrant and family is tempered by an implicit understanding of mutual benefit the household strategy may be to encourage some members to migrate as a means of spreading risk and sharing gains the household strategy is similar to an insurance policy where migration is to places where market potential is high the risks incurred might be high the example is given of migration during a drought in botswana migrant remittances were greater in households with more cattle or households with more to lose drought alone was not statistically related to remittances increases in remittances were related to increased levels of education it is suggested that repayment was the motive for parents investment in migrants education migrants gains are identified as the potential for an inheritance the security of channeling investments through a trusted family member and security in having a home to return to it is pointed out that the altruism and family remittances from urban migration were strategies that bridged the simple dynamic of either urban development or rural development impacting on family welfare it is suggested that household models of economy adopt some measure to express the relationship of household wealth to remittances from urban migrants

analyzing the turnout competition link with aggregate cross sectional data numerous papers by public choice oriented scholars and others have sought to test the hypothesis inspired by downs 1957 that ceteris paribus turnout should be higher when elections are close most look in cross sectional terms at variations in turnout at the constituency level for elections of a given type by and large the results have been disappointing see e g foster 1984 we are skeptical of these weak findings and argue that a complete portrait of the turnout competition link requires us to examine that link for at least three different types of turnout turnout among potential eligibles turnout among registrants and turnout for a given office relative to other offices such as top of the ticket and to take into account longitudinal changes in turnout for recent off year elections to the u s senate and also for off year elections to the u s house of representatives in states where there was no gubernatorial or senatorial contest on the ballot we find strong evidence for higher turnout among eligibles in close contests for these elections to the u s senate we also find evidence for an ecological effect that leads to turnout being maximized at values of competition other than 50 50 moreover when we look at turnout for office relative to top of the ticket voting in the california assembly and the u s senate in presidential years we again find some evidence for an ecological effect in which turnout is maximized at a value of republican vote share above 50 percent and find further strong evidence for a clear link between competition and turnout for office among those at the polls

dynamic parties and social turnout an agent based model1 the authors develop an agent based model of dynamic parties with social turnout built upon developments in different fields within social science this model yields significant turnout divergent platforms and numerous results consistent with the rational calculus of voting model and the empirical literature on social turnout in a simplified version of the model the authors show how a local imitation structure inherently yields dynamics that encourage positive turnout the model also generates new hypotheses about the importance of social networks and citizen party interactions

deliverability and regional pricing in u s natural gas markets during the 1980s and early 90s interstate natural gas markets in the united states made a transition away from the regulation that characterized the previous three decades with abundant supplies and plentiful pipeline capacity a new order emerged in which freer markets and arbitrage closely linked natural gas price movements throughout the country after the mid 1990s however u s natural gas markets tightened and some pipelines were pushed to capacity we look for the pricing effects of limited arbitrage through causality testing between prices at nodes on the u s natural gas transportation system and interchange prices at regional nodes on north american electricity grids our tests do reveal limited arbitrage which is indicative of bottlenecks in the u s natural gas pipeline system

a group rule utilitarian approach to voter turnout theory and evidence this paper explores a group rule utilitarian approach to understanding voter turnout inspired by the theoretical work of john c harsanyi 1980 and timothy j feddersen and alvaro sandroni 2002 it develops a model based on this approach and studies its performance in explaining turnout in texas liquor referenda the results are encouraging the comparative static predictions of the model are broadly consistent with the data and a structurally estimated version of the model yields reasonable coefficient estimates and fits the data well the structurally estimated model also outperforms a simple expressive voting model

measuring the effects of natural gas pipeline constraints on regional pricing and market integration abstract natural gas pipeline capacity sets physical limits on the quantity of gas that can be moved between regions with attendant price effects we find support for the hypothesis of integrated regional markets using data on daily pipeline flows and capacities in florida and southern california we estimate reduced form price effects of capacity constraints we find that pipeline congestion increased realized citygate prices by at least 11 over the mean in florida and by 6 over the mean in southern california we attribute the difference in price effects to more binding capacity constraints in the florida pipeline network our estimates provide guidance for interstate pipeline investments

competition in gas markets abstract this paper discusses some of the current regulatory issues that arise in gas markets under perfect or imperfect competition it first presents a benchmark model of gas transportation pricing when all markets are competitive optimal prices and capacities are characterized both without and with a break even constraint for the transportation operator elaborating on this framework it then studies the appropriate dimensioning of the transportation network when an otherwise unregulated supplier exerts market power specifically it points to the possibility of building up excess transmission capacity in order to mitigate local market power

motives for private transfers over the life cycle an analytical framework and evidence for peru abstract this paper tests for the motives for private income transfers we consider two motives altruism and exchange the question of private transfer motives is important because such motivation can influence the effects of public income transfers on the distribution of income using a household survey for peru we find that transfer amounts received increase with recipient pre transfer income which contradicts a key prediction of the strong form of the altruism hypothesis but is consistent with exchange we also find that capital market imperfections are likely to be an important cause of private transfers and that social security benefits crowd out the incidence of private transfers

turnout in gubernatorial and senatorial primary and general elections in the south 1922 90 a rational choice model of the effects of short run and long run electoral competition on relative turnout using data on non presidential year elections for governor and u s senators in eight southern states over the period 1922 1990 we provide a rational choice inspired model of the factors that should be expected to affect the relative levels of turnout in primaries as compared to general elections both v o key and anthony downs have argued that voters will be more likely to participate in the elections in which they can most expect to be decisive v o key 1949 proposed that when general elections are usually lop sided because of one party dominance of a state s politics the primary of the dominant party of the state should have a higher turnout than the general election downs argued that turnout should be higher in competitive elections our modelling combines these ideas we use as our dependent variable the ratio of primary to general election turnout in each year we posit that this ratio will increase 1 the greater the degree of within party competition in the primary especially that within the dominant party of a state if there is one and 2 the weaker the degree of between party competition in the general election in addition to election specific effects we also posit long run effects such that the ratio for the offices of governor and u s senator will be affected not merely by the degrees of competition within and between parties specific to any given election but also by the long run trends in party competition this hypothesis leads us to expect that 3 in the south with the rise of the republican party the ratio of primary to general election turnout should decline over time all of our expectations about the links between turnout and competition are strongly supported we argue that rational choice models of turnout perform quite well when we view them in a comparative statics perspective rather than using them to make predictions about who will and who will not vote in any given election

voter participation and strategic uncertainty the paradox of not voting is examined in a model where voters have uncertainty about the preferences and costs of other voters in game theoretic models of voter participation under complete information equilibrium outcomes can have substantial turnout even when voting costs are relatively high in contrast when uncertainty about preferences and costs is present only voters with negligible or negative net voting costs participate when the electorate is large

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

television and voter turnout i use variation across markets in the timing of television s introduction to identify its impact on voter turnout the estimated effect is significantly negative accounting for between a quarter and a half of the total decline in turnout since the 1950s i argue that substitution away from other media with more political coverage provides a plausible mechanism linking television to voting as evidence for this i show that the entry of television in a market coincided with sharp drops in consumption of newspapers and radio and in political knowledge as measured by election surveys i also show that both the information and turnout effects were largest in off year congressional elections which receive extensive coverage in newspapers but little or no coverage on television

the size of government in majoritarian and consensus democracies this article looks at the effect of democratic institutions on the size of government with the help of the ordinary least squares regression analysis of data from the organization for economic cooperation and development oecd countries from 1974 to 1995 the study provides considerable evidence that the variance in the type of democracy measured by the lijphart index of majoritarian consensus political institutions has a systematic effect on the variance in the size of government measured both by total government outlays as well as total government revenue as a percentage of gross domestic product the article further argues that such institutional effects on the size of government are strengthened by partisan politics more specifically the analysis demonstrates the presence of the multiplicative interaction effect of the mutually reinforcing nature between the institutional structure and partisan composition of government in their association with the size of government

what drives natural gas prices a structural var approach abstract in this study we develop a structural vector autoregressive model var for the german natural gas market our setup allows us to analyze the determinants of the natural gas price in a comprehensive framework in particular we illustrate the usefulness of our approach by disentangling the effects of different fundamental influences on gas prices during three recent supply interruptions the russian ukrainian gas dispute of january 2009 the libyan civil war in 2011 and the withheld russian exports in february 2012 our results show that the natural gas price is affected by temperature storage and supply shortfalls in the short term while the long term development is closely tied to both crude oil and coal prices capturing the economic climate and the substitution relationship between the different energy commodities

using weather variability to estimate the response of savings to transitory income in thailand this paper measures the extent to which farmers are able to use savings and dissavings to smooth consumption in response to unexpected shocks to income time series information on regional rainfall is used to construct estimates of transitory income due to rainfall shocks the relationship between these measures of transitory income and savings indicates that farm households save a significantly higher fraction of transitory income than nontransitory income jel d91 016 the incomes of farm households in developing countries are notorious for being both low and uncertain policies that increase the incomes of farmers may well be different

full insurance in the presence of aggregate uncertainty this paper tests implications of full consumption insurance the object is to determine how much mileage can be obtained from a model with complete markets with such features as private information or liquidity constraints omitted the implication exploited is that individual consumption responds to aggregate risk but not to idiosyncratic risk the test involves regressing the change in household consumption onto the change in aggregate consumption and other right hand side variables such as the change in household income and change in employment status all variables other than the change in aggregate consumption are predicted to be insignificant in explaining the change in household consumption with observations on consumption and income for 10 695 households from the consumer expenditure survey the results are mixed the results for one specification exponential utility are mostly consistent with full consumption insurance the results for the other specification power utility are not

estimating the electoral effects of voter turnout there are two undercurrents to much of the literature on voter turnout a normative belief that high rates of voter participation are desirable and an empirical expectation that variation in voter turnout will have electoral consequences to some extent these undercurrents flow together although one might argue that high turnout is preferable for purely expressive reasons the typical normative claim asserts that increased levels of voter participation improve the quality of representation by reducing any bias that might result from dissimilarities between voters and nonvoters assumed differences between those who vote and those who do not are also at the heart of the commonly hypothesized empirical relationship between aggregate turnout and partisan vote share as argued originally by the authors of the american voter campbell et al 1960 96 115 if nonvoters and occasional voters hold preferences that differ from those of habitual or core voters then variation in turnout is likely to have meaningful electoral implications higher turnout might advantage one party over another might advantage incumbents or perhaps

the impact of closeness on electoral participation exploiting the italian double ballot system we investigate whether the degree of political competition affects electoral turnout by using italian municipal election data from 1993 to 2011 relying on elections held using a double ballot system we apply an instrumental variable technique exploiting the actual closeness between the two leading candidates in the first round as an instrument for closeness in the second round the use of this strategy to estimate the impact of closeness on turnout is new to the literature controlling for municipal fixed effects and candidates characteristics we find that expected closeness significantly increases turnout thus supporting the idea that the expected benefits of voting increase in tighter political races the estimated effect is much larger than that found when measuring closeness with ex post electoral results suggesting quite a relevant endogeneity bias in previous studies

nonconvex equilibrium models for gas market analysis failure of standard techniques and alternative modeling approaches abstract this paper provides a first approach to assess gas market interaction on a network with nonconvex flow models in the simplest possible setup that adequately reflects gas transport and market interaction we elaborate on the relation of the solution of a simultaneous competitive gas market game its corresponding mixed nonlinear complementarity problem mncp and a first best benchmark we provide conditions under which the solution of the simultaneous game is also the solution of the corresponding mncp however equilibria cannot be determined by the mncp as the transmission system operator s tso s first order conditions are insufficient which goes back to nonconvexities of the gas flow model this also implies that the welfare maximization problem may have multiple solutions that sometimes do not even coincide with any of the market equilibria our analysis shows that even in the absence of strategic firms market interaction fails to implement desirable outcomes from a welfare perspective due to the tso s incentive structure we conclude that the technical environment calls for a market design that commits the tso to a welfare objective through regulation and propose a design where the market solution corresponds to a welfare maximum and vice versa

your vote counts on account of the way it is counted an institutional solution to the paradox of not voting when we explicitly lay out all its steps we find that the paradox of not voting since the chance of one vote s making a difference is about zero why trouble to vote rests on a false but hitherto unremarked assumption about the institutional context of elections my solution to the paradox is more conservative than others that have been proposed and it yields a rational choice model of voting whose consequence accord well with empirical findings on turnout

turnout and closeness evidence from 60 years of bavarian mayoral elections one prediction of the calculus of voting is that electoral closeness positively aects turnout via a higher probability of one vote being decisive i test this theory with data on all mayoral elections in the german state of bavaria between 1946 and 2009 importantly i use constitutionally prescribed two round elections to measure electoral closeness and thereby improve on existing work that mostly uses expost measures that are prone to endogeneity the results suggest that electoral closeness matters a one standard deviation increase in closeness increases turnout by 1 68 percentage points which corresponds to 1 of a standard deviation in this variable i also evaluate how other factors like electorate size or rain on election day aect turnout dierentially depending on the closeness of the race

economic theories of voter turnout i the voting paradox why would the rational individual bother to spend time and resources to become well informed go to the polls on the election day and maybe even wait in a queue why would a rational voter vote downs 1957 ii the paradox of indeterminacy if they vote why do they care who they vote for kirchgassner 1992 kirchgassner and pommerehne 1993 iii the paradox of ignorance to the extent that information is costly the rational voter must be ignorant about relevant aspects of his decision making downs 1957

the performance of rational voter models in recent presidential elections in an economic theory of democracy downs hypothesized that rational utility maximizing citizens would calculate the benefits from voting as opposed to abstaining altogether and then vote if this expected benefit exceeded voting cost this hypothesis is logically derived from economic principles of rational behavior but is counterintuitive even if the utility increment is plausibly large the probability of casting a pivotal tie breaking vote in any sizable polity is minute hence the expected benefit will be less than the time cost of voting and no rational person will vote nevertheless a number of statistical studies have found that voter turnout does respond to differences in the probability of casting a decisive vote even though that probability may be small this article uses data gathered at the state level from the 1968 1972 1976 and 1980 general elections to reestimate the relationship between voter turnout and the probable closeness of the election pooled data least squares dummy variable lsdv regressions are used whenever preliminary tests indicate that such pooling is permissible the empirical results suggest that the relationship between closeness and turnout is weak unstable or nonexistent in all of the models tested

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

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

inferring strategic voting we estimate a model of strategic voting and quantify the impact it has on election outcomes because the model exhibits multiplicity of outcomes we adopt a set estimator using japanese general election data we nd a large fraction 75 3 80 3 of strategic voters only a small fraction 2 4 5 5 of whom voted for a candidate other than the one they most preferred misaligned voting existing empirical literature has not distinguished between the two estimating misaligned voting instead of strategic voting accordingly while our estimate of strategic voting is high our estimate of misaligned voting is comparable to previous studies

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

political rents and voter information in search equilibrium abstract political parties committed to grab rents may run for election and even win if citizens are uninformed but how is the political equilibrium affected if citizens can mitigate this information problem through costly information search we propose a political equilibrium theory with endogenous information search and turnout we show that i the political equilibrium generates political uncertainty characterized by a distribution of rent policies i i the expectation of this rent distribution is inversely u shaped in the information search cost i i i turnout is lower and rents are higher the more proportional is the electoral system

open access and the evolution of the u s spot market for natural gas federal regulations promoting open access transportation dramatically altered the organizational structure of the u s market for natural gas in the 1980s generally unbundling the merchant and transport functions of interstate pipelines an empirical analysis of wellhead spot prices is undertaken to examine the effect of open access on the geographic scope of the spot market using monthly spot price data from 1984 91 three statistical tests are applied and compared price correlations granger causality and cointegration we find that open access integrated the regional wellhead markets into a national competitive market for natural gas the effects of unbundling on contracts for natural gas are then investigated incentives for long term contracts between pipelines and producers are shown to be effectively removed by the introduction of competitive buying and selling of gas at the wellhead through open access

consumption smoothing migration and marriage evidence from rural india a significant proportion of migration in low income countries particularly in rural areas is composed of moves by women for the purpose of marriage we seek to explain these mobility patterns by examining marital arrangements among indian households in particular we hypothesize that the marriage of daughters to locationally distant dispersed yet kinship related households is a manifestation of implicit interhousehold contractual arrangements aimed at mitigating income risks and facilitating consumption smoothing in an environment characterized by information costs and spatially covariant risks analysis of longitudinal south indian village data lends support to the hypothesis marriage cum migration contributes significantly to a reduction in the variability of household food consumption farm households afflicted with more variable profits tend to engage in longer distance marriage cum migration the hypothesized and observed marriage cum migration patterns are in dissonance with standard models of marriage or migration that are concerned primarily with search costs and static income gains

are remittances insurance a basic theoretical result is that if there is a pareto efficient allocation of risk across individual entities in this case individual household members in a risk sharing arrangement individual consumption should not be affected by idiosyncratic income shocks data and sample construction the empirical analysis uses data from linked household surveys conducted by the philippine national statistics office covering a nationally representative household sample the labor force survey the survey on overseas filipinos the family income and expenditure survey and the annual poverty indicators survey the variables included in the vector of controls wh are a set of household characteristics in the first period january june 1997 an indicator for urban location five indicators for the household head s highest level of education completed elementary some high school high school some college and college or more less than elementary omitted six indicators for head s occupation professional cl