an empirical re examination of wagner s law abstract it is argued in this paper that for a more meaningful test of wagner s law allowance must be made in regard to prevalence of peace and stability using six different versions and employing both nominal and real data from ten states of the united states wagner s law is vindicated

wagner s hypothesis evidence from kuwait using cointegration tests this paper investigates the relationship between public expenditure and a number of socioeconomic variables including the level of income in kuwait a general form of the public expenditure function is formulated and recent developments in time series econometrics including unit roots and cointegration tests and an error correction model are used given the characteristics of the economy alternative measures for each variables are used the analysis in the paper is based on time series data covering the period from 1969 70 to 1994 95 in general the findings lend little support to the existence of long run equilibrium relationship between public expenditure and the socioeconomic variables and the evidence does not lend support to the validity of wagner s law in kuwait

causality between public expenditure and national income this paper deploys the granger method to determine the directions and patterns of causality between national income and total as well as various components of public expenditure empirical results based on the data for india 1950 81 suggest that while at the disaggregate level the causal process is rather diverse it is essentially feed back type at the aggregate level it neither confirms the wagnerian income public expenditure nor the keynesian public expenditure national income view the paper recommends that two variables be treated as jointly dependent in both the public finance and macroeconometric studies

experiencing breast cancer at the workplace we study a dynamic natural experiment involving nearly 3000 american women of age 50 64 to understand how a woman s propensity to receive an annual mammography changes over time after a co worker is diagnosed with breast cancer we find that in the year this event occurs the probability of screening drops by about 6 percentage points off a base level of 70 this impact effect is persistent for at least two years underlying mechanisms and implications for health policy are discussed

executive shareholding compensation and analyst forecast of chinese firms abstractwe examine the impact of executive and leadership shareholding and cash compensation on analyst forecast error and dispersion as proxies for information asymmetry we find that firms pay higher compensation or excess compensation to executives and directors are associated with higher information asymmetry the positive association is stronger where executives and directors shareholdings are higher shareholding appears to facilitate managerial entrenchment and gives highly paid executives leadership stronger structural power which adversely affects information disclosure leading to larger forecast error and dispersion these results are robust to different measures of compensation and alternative models controlling for the predictability of firm level earnings our findings indicate that executive director shareholding and compensation do not provide sufficient incentives for information disclosure by chinese firms

an econometric test of wagner s law for six countries based on cointegration and error correction modelling techniques the present study empirically examined five different versions of wagner s law by employing annual time series data on six countries over the period 1951 1996 three countries are part of the emerging industrialized countries of asia south korea taiwan thailand and three are industrialized countries japan usa and the united kingdom the analysis is an advance over previous work in two ways first the stationarity propertities of the data and the order of integration of the data are empirically investigated using the augmented dickey fuller adf and the kwiatkowski et al journal of econometrics 1 1992 kpss tests and second the hypothesis of a long run relationship between income and government spending is tested using bivariate cointegrated systems and employing the methodology of cointegration analysis as suggested by johansen journal of economic dynamics and control 12 1988 and johansen and juselius oxford bulletin of economics and statistics 52 1990 the results indicate that

testing theories of real government size u s experience 1959 89 in a recent article west 17 argued that the existence of so many strands of analysis attempting to explain the growth of government calls ultimately for one consolidated or generalized theory accordingly he produced a model that integrated four such theories two on the cost side and two on the demand side the purpose of the present paper is to derive empirical measures of all four theories using u s data for the period 1959 1989 the presumption is that each one separately might contribute in its own way to a composite explanation of government growth and that what is currently most needed is a set of jointly determined empirical estimates showing relative importance while all our measures of government size consolidate federal state and local government expenditures two other measurement issues should be emphasized since they distinguish our work from other contributions to this literature the government component of our main dependent variable the real size of government is measured in two different ways the first uses the national accounts definition of government purchases which excludes transfer payments from the measure of size whereas the second includes final purchases plus net government transfer payments since we are interested in the effects of changes in the productivity of supplying government services the first of these definitions is expected to be more relevant and is so used as the basis of our empirical work however since there is a sense in which changes in the productivity of government may affect the output of transfers we also use the second definition to produce a more complete empirical exercise the other distinguishing feature of our analysis is that both definitions of government size are analyzed in real as distinct from the more usual nominal share of government in gross domestic product gdp this distinction becomes immediately more striking when it is pointed out that while most authors hitherto have attempted to explain the phenomenon of positive growth in the ratio of nominals over the past half century the ratio of reals has actually fallen for most of our

an empirical analysis of energy demand in namibia abstract using a unique database of end user local energy data and the recently developed autoregressive distributed lag ardl bounds testing approach to cointegration we estimate the long run elasticities of the namibian energy demand function at both aggregated level and by type of energy electricity petrol and diesel for the period 1980 2002 our main results show that energy consumption responds positively to changes in gdp and negatively to changes in energy price and air temperature the differences in price elasticities across fuels uncovered by this study have significant implications for energy taxation by namibian policy makers we do not find any significant cross price elasticities between different fuel types

a bound testing analysis of wagner s law in nigeria 1970 2006 this study tests wagner s law the tendency for government activities to expand along with economic expansion for nigeria using annual time series data between 1970 and 2006 it adopts the bounds test approach proposed by pesaran et al 2001 based on unrestricted error correction model uecm and toda and yamamoto s 1995 granger noncausality tests empirical results from the bounds test indicate that there exists no long run relationship between government expenditure and output in nigeria in addition toda and yamamoto s 1995 causality test results show that wagner s law does not hold for more than the period being tested rather we found a weak empirical support in the proposition by keynes that public expenditure is an exogenous factor and a policy instrument for increasing national income

wagner s hypothesis in time series and cross section perspectives evidence from real data for 115 countries internationally comparable data on income and government expenditure for 115 countries covering the period 1950 80 are used to assess the validity of wagner s hypothesis individual country time series data and several intercountry cross sections are studied besides a tremendous diversity in the position for various countries the results indicate that while there is support for the hypothesis in some time series data sets such support is lacking in most cross section estimates much of the support for the hypothesis reported in many earlier studies therefore was probably due to either use of limited samples or inadequate data comparability across the observations studied copyright 1987 by mit press

a causal relationship between government spending and economic development an empirical examination of the greek economy during the past few years in many countries both developed and developing there has been a tendency to increase government spending this article intends to examine this tendency of the public sector as well as the existing relationship between the extent of government spending and economic development the data used cover a time period between 1960 and 2001 an effort is made to determine causal relationships between spending and economic development through the use of wagner s theory

the role of information and social interactions in retirement plan decisions evidence from a randomized experiment this paper analyzes a randomized experiment to shed light on the role of information and social interactions in employees decisions to enroll in a tax deferred account tda retirement plan within a large university the experiment encouraged a random sample of employees in a subset of departments to attend a benee ts information fair organized by the university by promising a monetary reward for attendance the experiment multiplied by more than e ve the attendance rate of these treated individuals relative to controls and tripled that of untreated individuals within departments where some individuals were treated tda enrollment e ve and eleven months after the fair was signie cantly higher in departments where some individuals were treated than in departments where nobody was treated however the effect on tda enrollment is almost as large for individuals in treated departments who did not receive the encouragement as for those who did we provide three interpretations differential treatment effects social network effects and motivational reward effects to account for these results

psychological expected utility theory and anticipatory feelings we extend expected utility theory to situations in which agents experience feelings of anticipation prior to the resolution of uncertainty we show how these anticipatory feelings may result in time inconsistency we provide an example from portfolio theory to illustrate the potential impact of anticipation on asset prices

mechanism experiments and policy evaluations randomized controlled trials are increasingly used to evaluate policies how can we make these experiments as useful as possible for policy purposes we argue greater use should be made of experiments that identify the behavioral mechanisms that are central to clearly specified policy questions what we call mechanism experiments these types of experiments can be of great policy value even if the intervention that is tested or its setting does not correspond exactly to any realistic policy option

testing wagner s law using disaggregated public expenditure data in the case of greece 1958 93 the factors that have influenced the growth of public expenditures have been the subject of extensive theoretical and empirical research the validity of wagner s law in the case of greece is tested using disaggregated public expenditure data for the period 1958 93 the methodology employed is that of cointegration and the related notion of error correction results reported here suggest that in the case of greece only the growth of defence expenditure may be explained in terms of wagner s law

keynes versus wagner public expenditure and national income for three african countries the public expenditure income hypothesis has long been debated in economics following keynes public expenditure is seen as an exogenous factor to be used as a policy instrument to influence growth on the other hand wagner argues that expenditure is an endogenous factor or an outcome not a cause of growth in national income the purpose of this paper is to apply both the granger and holmes hutton statistical procedures to test the income expenditure hypothesis for three african countries ghana kenya and south africa we find that the hypothesis of public expenditure causing national income is not supported by the data for these african countries

anticipation and the valuation of delayed consumption this paper presents a model of intertemporal choice that incorporates savoring and dread i e utility from anticipat ion of delayed consumption the model explains why an individual with positive time preference may delay desirable outcomes or get unpleas ant outcomes over with quickly contrary to the prediction of convent ional formulations of intertemporal choice implications of savoring and dread for savings behavior empirical estimation of discount rate s and public policy efforts to combat myopic behavior are explored the model provides an explanation for common violations of the indepe ndence axiom as applied to intertemporal choice copyright 1987 by royal economic society

level of aggregation variable elasticity and wagner s law abstract this paper contends that income elasticities of all types of u s government expenditures but one are constant and less than unity the u s non defense government expenditure is the only one that supports wagner s law as it suggests this expenditure grows faster than income

public expenditure and economic growth in the gulf cooperation council countries this article uses a dynamic model calibrated to the gulf cooperation council gcc countries data to examine the nature of the relationship between government expenditure and economic growth the article finds that national income is a predictive factor of the expanding role of government as postulated by wagner empirical investigations do not support the hypothesis of public expenditure causing national income as proposed by the keynesian theory

public expenditure growth in greece and portugal wagner s law and beyond in the tradition of wagner s law this study examines the relationship between aggregate income and public expenditures in greece and portugal during the years 1958 85 unlike more conventional specifications our analysis focuses on the movement of different componenets of public expenditures permanent income relative prices stabilization policy and socio political factors emerge as thomain determinants of public expenditures while the results reveal significant difference in responses to these determinants across components of expenditures and between the two countries

the saving and investment nexus for china evidence from cointegration tests the saving and investment nexus as postulated by feldstein and horioka fh 1980 is revisited the saving investment correlation for china is estimated over the periods 1952 1998 and 1952 1994 the latter culminating in a period of fixed exchange rate regime amongst the key results it is found that saving and investment are correlated for china for both the period of the fixed exchange rate and the entire sample period with high saving investment correlation the results suggest that the chinese economy is in conformity with the fh hypothesis this is a valid outcome for in china capital mobility was fairly restricted over the 1952 1994 period as indicated by the relatively low foreign direct investment

government expenditure and economic growth evidence from g7 countries this paper examines wagner s law of public expenditure which emphasizes economic growth as the fundamental determinant of public sector growth using time series data drawn from the g7 industrialized countries over the sample period 1960 1993 it presents evidence on both the short and long run effects of growth in national income on government expenditure by resorting to recent developments in the theory of cointegrated processes an attempt is also made in this study to examine if wagner s law holds between certain key components of government expenditure and income