stochastic asymmetric blotto games an experimental study we consider a model where two players compete for n items having different common values in a blotto game players must decide how to allocate their common budgets across all n items the winner of each item is determined stochastically using a lottery mechanism which yields a unique equilibrium in pure strategies we analyze behavior under two competing payoff objectives found in the blotto games literature that have not been previously compared i players aim to maximize their total expected payoff and ii players maximize the probability of winning a majority value of all n items we report results from an experiment where subjects face both payoff objectives and we find support for the differing theoretical predictions

contests with small noise and the robustness of the all pay auction this paper considers all pay contests in which the relationship between bids and allocations reflects a small amount of noise prior work had focused on one particular equilibrium however there may be other equilibria to address this issue we introduce a new and intuitive measure for the proximity to the all pay auction this allows in particular to provide simple conditions under which actually any equilibrium of the contest is both payoff equivalent and revenue equivalent to the unique equilibrium of the corresponding all pay auction the results are shown to have powerful implications for monopoly licensing political lobbying electoral competition optimally biased contests the empirical analysis of rent seeking and dynamic contests

pressure and the division of a public budget this paper considers the division of a public budget among competing interests the planner determines the optimal allocation by maximizing a weighted social welfare function these weights reflect society s attitudes to different recipient groups and are not constrained to be constant by exerting pressure the recipients can attempt to manipulate the weights and hence influence the division of the budget the amount of resources used on pressure and the effects on the preference weights are calculated an important parameter in the model is the elasticity of pressure for which an appropriate estimate is presented from the case of competition for a share of a health services budget in norway

the contained rivalry requirement and a triple feature program for business ethics this paper proposes a description of the moral obligations of economic agents it will show that a threefold division should be adopted to distinguish moral obligations applying to their interactions in the market obligations applying to their interactions inside business firms and obligations applying to their interactions with agents outside the market competition might be permissible in the first case since markets are special patterns of social interactions called adversarial schemes they produce their benefits when agents try to satisfy exclusive preferences at the expense of others however moral obligations inside the firm and moral obligations outside the market are of a different nature this argument will be developed in the two first parts of this paper in the third part it will outline the relevant strengths of that account in relation with two popular views of economic agents moral obligations the shareholder primacy view and the stakeholder theory

two stage team rent seeking experimental analysis this paper presents a two stage team rent seeking model with a contest prize that is not excludable among winning team members when early effort is a perfect substitute for late effort early actors can free ride on their late moving teammates however when early and late efforts are complements all team members exert positive effort levels asymmetries in early effort reduce effort choices for all late movers the theory is tested with laboratory experimental methods although subjects overinvest relative to the nash equilibrium in all treatments chosen effort levels provide limited support for the model early movers exerted higher effort in the complement treatment and second stage effort choices were broadly consistent with best response functions surprisingly in both single shot and repeated play environments early movers in the substitute treatment did not free ride choosing effort levels similar to those of late movers

do prediction markets aid defenders in a weak link contest abstract laboratory experiments have demonstrated that prediction market prices weakly aggregate the disparate information of the traders about states moves of nature however in many practical applications one is attempting to predict the move of a strategic rival this is particularly important in aggressor defender contests this paper reports an experiment where the defender may have the advantage of observing a prediction market on the aggressor s action the results of the experiments indicate that the use of prediction markets does not increase the defender s win rate prediction markets contain reliable information regarding aggressors decisions that is not being exploited by defenders and the existence of a prediction market does not alter the behavior of the aggressor whose behavior is being forecast

side effects of campaign finance reform because campaign finance reform is usually motivated by the concern that existing legislation cannot effectively prevent campaign contributions to buy favors this article assumes that contributions influence political decisions but given that it is also widely recognized that interest groups achieve influence by providing political decision makers with policy relevant information we also assume that lobbies engage in non negligible informational lobbying we focus on a single political decision to be taken and offer a simple model in which the optimal influence strategy is a mixture of both lobbying instruments our main result is to show that campaign finance reform may have important side effects it may deter informational lobbying so that less policy relevant information is available and as a result political decisions become less efficient jel c72 d72

the political economy of immigration in a direct democracy the case of switzerland abstract in this paper we analyze the determination of immigration policy in a direct democracy setting we formulate a model of voting and participation behavior integrating instrumental and expressive motivations the model is estimated using data drawn from a survey carried out after a vote in switzerland in 2000 on a popular initiative proposing to implement immigration restrictions the model enables us to recover estimates of participation costs and preferences towards immigration and analyze how these preferences are translated into actual voting outcomes the results reveal a substantial gap participation bias between attitudes towards immigration in the general population 43 favorable to restrictions and the outcome of the vote 26

team contests with multiple pairwise battles abstract we consider a multi battle team contest in which players from two rival teams form pairwise matches to fight in distinct component battles which are carried out sequentially or partially

learning the structure of a simple rent seeking game this paper considers a form of the tullock imperfectly discriminating rent seeking game in which the contestants are uncertain about the value of a bias parameter in the probability of winning function beliefs about this unknown parameter are not constrained to be static we consider two methods by which the players prior beliefs on this parameter can be updated first we allow for information to emerge by considering the case in which the game is played twice with the outcome of the first game known before the second begins the identity of the winner of the first contest represents information which emerges endogenously that can be used to revise beliefs on the unknown bias parameter second information can be produced outside of the model by an external agency this gives rise to exogenous learning we consider the consequences for rent seeking in each of these two cases

the optimal allocation of prizes in contests we study a contest with multiple not necessarily equal prizes contestants have private information about an ability parameter that affects their costs of bidding the contestant with the highest bid wins the first prize the contestant with the second highest bid wins the second prize and so on until all the prizes are allocated all contestants incur their respective costs of bidding the contest s designer maximizes the expected sum of bids our main results are 1 we display bidding equlibria for any number of contestants having linear convex or concave cost functions and for any distribution of abilities 2 if the cost functions are linear or concave then no matter what the distribution of abilities is it is optimal for the designer to allocate the entire prize sum to a single first prize 3 we give a necessary and sufficient conditions ensuring that several prizes are optimal if contestants have a convex cost function

party control of state government and the distribution of public expenditures this paper examines the effects of party control of state governments on the distribution of intergovernmental transfers across counties from 1957 to 1997 we find that the governing parties skew the distribution of funds in favor of areas that provide them with the strongest electoral support this is borne out in two ways i counties that traditionally give the highest vote share to the governing party receive larger shares of state transfers to local governments ii when control of the state government changes the distribution of funds shifts in the direction of the new governing party we find only weak evidence that parties reward electorally pivotal counties or counties in electorally pivotal legislative districts finally we find that increased spending in a county increases voter turnout in subsequent elections this suggests that parties have an electoral incentive to skew the distribution of funds to influence future election results and the mechanism through which this works is mobilization rather than conversion of voters in a fixed electorate

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

the road to power partisan loyalty and the centralized provision of local infrastructure this paper sets out a simple dynamic probabilistic voting model in which a government allocates a fixed budget across electoral districts that differ in their loyalties to the ruling party the model predicts that the geographic pattern of spending depends on the way the government balances long run machine politics considerations and the more immediate concern to win over swing voters empirical results obtained from a panel of electoral districts in quebec provide robust evidence that districts which display loyalty to the incumbent government receive disproportionately more spending especially close to an election at odds with the standard swing voter view

strategic campaigns and redistributive politics the article investigates strategic informative campaigning by two parties when politics concern redistribution voters are uncertain about whether parties favour special groups parties will target campaigns on groups where most votes are gained by informing about policies in equilibrium campaigning will be most intensive in groups where the uncertainty is largest and where voters are most mobile most likely to vote most receptive to campaigns and relatively uninformed initially these groups will become more informed about policy parties will therefore gain more votes by treating these groups well so these groups will gain from strategic campaigning welfare effects are assessed

campaign spending and senate elections 1978 84 this paper uses a sample of recent senate election results and estimates vote equations that show challenger spending hurts and incumbent spending helps incumbent re election while both types of spending have diminishing returns the effects are asymmetrical challenger spending is more productive at lower levels of spending but incumbents can spend greater amounts more profitably than can challengers these results can explain why senate incumbents spend money why they typically outspend their challenger and why incumbents who can outspend their challenger would tend to be against spending limits or public financing

election goals and the allocation of campaign resources this paper compares the equilibrium behavior and outcomes in a model of two party competition for legislative seats under two different assumptions about the parties goals 1 parties maximize the expected number of seats won and 2 parties maximize the probability of winning a majority of the seats the two goals may lead to qualitatively different behavior and studying the differences yields insights into the relationship between the goals and the role of assymetries between the parties

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

the regional allocation of infrastructure investment the role of equity efficiency and political factors abstract this paper analyses the main determinants of the regional allocation of infrastructure investment the estimated investment equation is derived from a general specification of the government s objective function berhman and craig am econom rev 77 1987 315 which accounts both for the equity efficiency trade off and for deviations from this rule that arise because of political factors the reaction of investment to changes in the regional output provides information about the strength of the equity efficiency trade off the main political factor considered is a measurement of the electoral productivity of funds invested in each region the equation is estimated from panel data on investment and the capital stock of transportation infrastructure i e roads rails ports and airports for the spanish departments nuts3 during the period 1987 1996 we use a dynamic specification of the equation that allows for slow adjustment and which is estimated by gmm methods arellano and bond rev econom stud 58 1991 277 the results suggest that efficiency criteria play only a limited role in the geographical distribution of government infrastructure investment specific regional infrastructure needs and political factors both appear to be factors that do explain the regional allocation of infrastructure investment

campaign finance reform a public choice perspective the federal election campaign act as passed in 1971 and amended in 1974represented landmark federal legislation it imposed new restrictions oncampaign contributions and contained path breaking provisions for the useof public funds to partially finance the campaigns of qualifyingpresidential candidates the nominal intent of the legislation was torestrain the skyrocketing campaign costs and the feared abuses thatgrowing dependencies on such money engendered three decades later withthe campaign spending arms race still raging congress sought toimpose further constraints on campaign spending with enactment of thebipartisan campaign reform act of 2002 bcra competing theories ofgovernment regulation are reviewed to better understand the intent andlikely consequences of the 2002 legislation in particular and campaignfinance regulation in general a simple model of the campaign spendingprocess highlights the likely causes of the rapid growth in campaignspending data and evidence are presented to test hypotheses concerningthe timing of and underlying motivations for bcra

does delegation of fiscal policy to an independent agency make a difference evidence from intergovernmental transfers in india abstract one area of fiscal policy in which several countries have delegated responsibility to an independent agency is the distribution of national resource transfers across regional and local governments such delegation is expected to promote equity and efficiency and mitigate distortions created by political incentives this paper tests whether delegation to an independent agency indeed makes a difference by contrasting the impact of partisan politics on two types of fiscal transfers to states in the indian federation over a period of time 1972 1995 the pattern of evidence shows that while the transfers that are determined by the central political executive are indeed distributed to favor particular states that are politically important for the central ruling party the transfers that are delegated to an independent agency serve to constrain such partisan impact

presidential campaign expenditures evidence on allocations and effects this paper analyzes the impact of presidential campaign spending on election results analyses of expenditures and voting are often plagued by simultaneity between campaign spending and expected vote share however game theoretic models of resource allocation decisions made by a central actor i e a presidential campaign suggest that candidates will spend more in close races and in races likely to be pivotal we provide empirical support for this theory using federal communications commission data from the 1972 presidential election we find that expenditures were higher in states where the election was expected to be closer and in states likely to be pivotal we use these two factors as instruments in a two stage least squares model to estimate the effect of spending on votes we find that contrary to previous theory and research presidential campaign spending significantly increases a candidate s vote share

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

decomposing political advertising effects on vote choices this paper studies the channels through which political television advertising influences individuals voting decisions scholars are interested to learn whether advertising primarily persuades people to change their choices of candidates or mobilizes people to vote i find that advertising does both about 60 to 70 of advertising s effect is persuasion and 30 to 40 of it is mobilization advertising s effects are stronger on those who did not plan to vote for a major party candidate to decompose the impact into its components the present paper estimates a multinomial probit model that permits analysis of decisions of turnout and candidate choice jointly in a markov chain framework in contrast to most studies that estimate the effects of aggregated exposure to advertising on voters choices on election day i study how advertising influences peoples monthly voting intentions leading up to election day in the context of the 2008 presidential election the magnitude of the advertising effect is not large enough to overcome john mccain s significant deficit but it potentially could have changed the outcomes of other close elections such as those in 2000 and 2016

early round upsets and championship blowouts i introduction popular discussions of tournament play often celebrate the success of underdogs in early rounds and decry the prevalence of unexciting finals such a pattern might be just a statistical illusion there are many early round matches so some upsets are inevitable and there is only one final so it is unlikely to be the most exciting match of the tournament in this article we consider instead whether the pattern might have a real foundation in the strategic allocation of effort by tournament participants we analyze a two round tournament in which a favorite and underdog play in each of the two semifinals and then one player from each match advances to the final victory in a match is probabilistic in that the chance of winning is increasing in each player s relative quality and in his relative effort expenditure 1 each player has a fixed amount of effort to exert over the two rounds unused effort is of no value and the only payoff is from winning the tournament to maximize the chance of winning each player must balance out the benefits of expending more effort in the semifinal against the opportunity cost of having less effort available for the final favorites and underdogs both have an incentive to conserve resources for the final but the trade offs they face are different a favorite plays a weak opponent in the semifinal but is likely to face a tough opponent in the final so it has a strong incentive to hold back conversely an underdog already plays a tough opponent in the semifinal so it has less incentive to conserve effort for the final 2 because of these different incentives we find that in any symmetric nash equilibrium underdogs exert more effort than favorites do in the semifinal the extra effort does not fully compensate for lower ability and underdogs are still likely to lose but the chance of an upset rises in the final round each player expends all its remaining resources so differences in abilities are no longer compressed by strategic considerations instead an underdog who makes it to the final has fewer resources left to spend than the favorite so differences in abilities are amplified and the chance of a blowout by the favorite rises if a favorite loses to an underdog in the early rounds it is often accused of looking past the underdog to its next match even if a player s strategy is optimal ex ante it might turn out to be unsuccessful ex post so such criticism is often unfair our results imply that it is rational for the favorite to hold back on resources in the semifinal even if it correctly anticipates that in equilibrium the underdog will be playing harder sometimes the strategy will backfire but on average the favorite benefits from being in a better position for the final these results are derived using a standard contest model in which each player s probability of victory in a match is a strictly increasing function of his ability and effort 3 such models were first developed to analyze rent seeking tullock 1967 1980 and similar models appear in a wide variety of areas including patent races loury 1979 election campaigns snyder 1989 compensation schemes nalebuff and stiglitz 1983 career ladders lazear and rosen 1981 lobbying baye et al 1993 and sports contests szymanski 2003 4 more specifically we model the contest as a sequential elimination ladder tournament in which players first compete in separate groups and the winners then compete against each other rosen 1986 our result that underdogs do indeed try harder than favorites in the semifinals contrasts with that of rosen 1986 p 707 8 because the favorite has a better chance of victory in the final rosen finds that winning a semifinal match is more valuable to the favorite so the favorite tries harder than the underdog we reach the opposite conclusion because we assume that there is a fixed supply of effort to be used across rounds and unused effort in the tournament has no value

money and votes a simultaneous equation model this paper has specified and estimated a model of the interaction between money and voting in american politics convincingly establishing the identification of a system of equations can be difficult even when theory provides a guide in the study of money in politics however no theoretical perspective has been established in the literature to make the case for identification as unambiguous as possible this paper has done two things first the specification was based in part on theory which has formally been developed elsewhere and which satisfactorily describes data at the economic interest group level welch 1980 second part of the question of identification revolves around the relationship between party strength and socioeconomic variables because there are questions as to the best measurement of party strength results based on two measures were presented for a number of reasons the presidential vote was the preferred measure this study draws four conclusions first money influenced voting in u s house elections in 1972 although its effect was small second patterns of total contributions to a u s house candidate are consistent with the hypothesis that a majority of dollars come from contributors who prefer to support likely winners third the total contributions made to a candidate are a positive function of the district s median years of schooling completed and the gini coefficient total contributions made to a democratic candidate are also a positive function of the median income finally had house campaigns been financed in the early 1970s even to the point of giving each major party candidate 150 000 in 1978 dollars few elections would have been changed it is also worth mentioning some of the things about the financing of political campaigns that we still do not know the above conclusions involve only elections to the u s house there are good reasons for suspecting that money is more influential in u s senate elections ols statistics support this belief and the greater visibility of those races help justify it although money has little effect on house elections we do not know whether contributions affect legislative voting in the house representatives apparently believe that expenditure influences their reelection chances given the complexity of the process it should be no surprise that this belief conflicts with our findings acting on this belief a representative s vote may very well be influenced by the sources of his contributions either directly or indirectly through the giving of access to contributors finally we should be reminded that the above model is static while the electoral process is dynamic the amount contributed to a candidate is affected by his probability of winning in the previous time period e g week month and in turn affects that probability in the following time period as usual what we know is overshadowed by what we do not know the above questions are both interesting in their own right and of interest to policy making

multi battle contests an experimental study this study examines behavior of subjects in simultaneous and sequential multi battle contests in simultaneous contests subjects make positive bids in each battle 80 of the time and bids fall within the predicted boundaries however 35 of the time subjects make positive bids in only two instead of all three battles and they significantly overuse moderately high bids in sequential contests theory predicts sizable bids in the first battle and no bids in the subsequent battles contrary to this prediction subjects significantly underbid in the first battle and overbid in subsequent battles consequently instead of always ending in the second battle contest proceeds to the third battle 38 of the time finally in both simultaneous and sequential settings subjects make higher aggregate bids than predicted resulting in negative expected payoffs

war and conflict in economics theories applications and recent trends we review the main economic models of war and conflict these models vary in details but their implications are qualitatively consistent highlighting key commonalities across a variety of conflict settings recent empirical literature employing both laboratory and field data in many cases confirms the basic implications of conflict theory however this literature also presents important challenges to the way economists traditionally model conflict we finish our review by suggesting ways to address these challenges

using repeat challengers to estimate the effect of campaign spending on election outcomes in the u s house previous studies of congressional spending have typically found a large positive effect of challenger spending but little evidence for effects of incumbent spending those studies however do not adequately control for inherent differences in vote getting ability across candidates high quality challengers are likely to receive a high fraction of the vote and have high campaign expenditures even if campaign spending has no impact on election outcomes to avoid that bias this paper examines elections in which the same two candidates face one another on more than one occasion differencing eliminates the influence of any fixed candidate or district attributes estimates of the effects of challenger spending are an order of magnitude below those of previous studies campaign spending has an extremely small impact on election outcomes regardless of who does the spending campaign spending limits appear socially desirable but public financing of campaigns does not

the impact of campaign spending on votes in multiparty elections abstract the impact of candidate campaign spending on votes and abstention in multiparty elections is estimated from the specification of a structural model of voter behavior this model accounts for the endogeneity of campaign spending as well as the heterogeneity in voter preferences empirical results are estimated from aggregate actual election data the results demonstrate the importance of spending during the campaign period and voter heterogeneity with respect to these expenditures the own and cross expenditure vote share elasticity estimates reveal that political campaign spending not only redistributes voters across parties but also decreases the size of the abstaining group of the electorate

the effects of campaign spending in house elections new evidence for old arguments the question of how campaign spending affects election results remains open because the simultaneity problem has proven so intractable green and krasno s 1988 recent attempt to solve the problem and to demonstrate that marginal returns on spending are as great for incumbents as for challengers again comes up short a panel feature of the abc newslwashington post congressional district poll conducted during the 1986 elections offers a fresh perspective on the question analysis of changes in voting intentions during the final six weeks of the campaign shows that as the tainted ols studies have invariably suggested the amount spent by the challenger is far more important in accounting for voter s decisions than is the amount spent by the incumbent

the determinants of industry political activity 1978 1986 c ampaign contributions made by corporate political action committees pacs are increasingly important and controversial in u s elections influence purchasing is often alleged by pundits and campaign finance reform is continually debated in congress in the academy social scientists have analyzed the allocation of interest group monies and have looked for possible impacts on legislation few however have tried to explain the total contributions of economic interest groups we shall analyze variations in contributions across industries and over time with an empirical model based on organizationally constrained profit maximizing behavior we assume that corporate pac contributions in an industry are raised to enhance industry profits subject to the constraints of organization costs and freeriding incentives our empirical work covers 124 industries over five election cycles from 1978 through 1986 both the costs and benefits of political activity vary across industries we argue that the benefits of political action are determined by direct contact with the government as a regulator or purchaser of industry output by government s ability to ameliorate adverse market conditions and by the industry s ability to solve collective action problems without government assistance the costs of industry political action arise mainly from collective action problems because effective political activity often requires concerted action by the constituent firms in each industry we also make a methodological contribution previous studies use statistical techniques that suffer from sample selectivity bias or else force the probability of acting politically to be explained by the same set of coefficients as is the amount of action taken we explain and employ a technique that accounts for both problems the results are consistent with the theses that industries follow investment oriented goals in deciding the amount of political action to undertake and that collective action problems are important constraints on industry political activity we can explain between 60 and 80 of the variation in contributions in our sample first we review existing work on corporate political activity particularly papers examining patterns of aggregate pac spending by industry then we present an organization cost constrained industryprofit maximizing model based on a comparison between an idealized zero organization cost industry and the more realistic case where organizing collective action is difficult the independent variables used in the analysis are also discussed and defined next we discuss the dependent variable and total industry contributions and explain our statistical method then the results are presented followed by a discussion of industry structure and political activity to make clear how our results can explain different contribution patterns we give examples using five actual industries

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

campaign advertising and election outcomes quasi natural experiment evidence from gubernatorial elections in brazil whether campaign advertising influences election outcomes is an open question a paradox given the amount spent on campaigning in general and tv advertising in particular we argue that such absence of documentation is due to the focus of the empirical literature on the u s where the allocation of campaign spending and advertising is decentralized we explore a quasi natural experiment that enables us to mitigate the omitted variables and reverse causality problems caused by decentralized allocation in brazil gubernatorial elections work in a two round system in the first round candidates tv time shares are determined by their coalitions share of seats in the national parliament in the second round tv time is split equally between the first round winner and runner up using differences between rounds as a source of variation we find a large causal effect of tv advertising on election outcomes

efficiency and ethically responsible management one common justification for the pursuit of profit by business firms within a market economy is that profit is not an end in itself but a means to more efficiently produce and allocate resources profit in short is a mechanism that serves the market s purpose of producing pareto superior outcomes for society this discussion examines whether such a justification if correct requires business managers to remain attentive to how their firm s operation impacts the market s purpose in particular it is argued that the value of efficiency despite views to the contrary cannot be fully separated from the planning and intentions of business managers as long as those managers direct their firms in an ethically responsible fashion this position is inspired by and serves as a supportive clarification of joseph heath s so called market failures approach to business ethics

gavel to gavel congressional television coverage as political advertising the impact of c span on legislative sessions kamal p upadhyaya this article examines the effect of television on the length of legislative sessions at the federal level in the united states data from the u s congress during the period 1972 96 are employed during part of which time each house of congress received significant television coverage by c span and c span2 evidence from a parks regression suggests that the presence of c span has increased house sessions by 88 250 hours and the presence of c span2 has increased senate sessions by a striking 252 431 hours other things constant additional estimates suggest that house sessions are about two minutes longer per bill introduced under the eye of c span and senate sessions are about four minutes longer per bill introduced in the presence of c span2 longer sessions which represent low cost forms of advertising for incumbents are not without costs to taxpayers we estimate that these costs lie somewhere between 16 million and 392 million in real terms per session of congress jel d72 h11 i introduction as grain and goff 1988 point out the number of political watchers c span junkies seems to be on the rise from a 1986 estimate of 40 million since 1986 the grain and goff 1988 study has been the only significant empirical study of the impact of television on representative democracy despite the potential availability of relevant data and statistical techniques the purpose of the present article is to partially fill the void concerning the impact of television on the democratic process by concentrating on the effect of television on the length of legislative sessions in the u s congress this study makes use of a voter shopping construct that analyzes political services as search experience goods and employs data from the u s house of representatives and the u s senate during the period 1972 96 during some of which time each branch of congress received significant television coverage by c span or c span2 ii product classifications and the provision of political services as grain and goff 1988 point out the theory of product advertising parallels the theory of information as in stigler 1961 and nelson 1970 1974 these articles define search goods as goods for which consumer judgments about quality or performance can be made prior to purchase and experience goods as those for which consumer judgments about product quality performance can be made only after purchase nelson points out that information regarding experience good search good quality can be obtained by consumers at high cost low cost for experience goods ads contain cues indirect on the reputation of the seller which is verifiable at low cost and from which the buyer can make inferences regarding product quality 1 crain and goff 1988 point out that one point of view in the literature holds that political services are like search goods because candidates records are available to voters for verification and evaluation at low cost on the other hand it might be costly for voters to gather information on candidates prior to an election and or difficult for voters to draw inferences about the future behavior of politicians which suggests that political services are experience goods crain and goff 1988 11 in this regard any technological advancement that changes the costs of information gathering by voters will alter the nature of political services as in crain and goff 1988 19 because televising legislative proceedings lowers the cost of evaluating a politician s advertised qualities against his or her actual qualities political services would be more like search goods it is within this framework that we analyze the impact of television on the length of legislative sessions however we argue that there are differences in this regard with state level legislatures which were analyzed by crain and goff 1988 and the u

do formula based intergovernmental transfer mechanisms eliminate politically motivated targeting evidence from ghana abstract various countries have adopted formulas for determining intergovernmental transfers as a strategy to limit the role of political considerations in resource allocation in this paper we investigate a formula based system of allocating resources from a central government to local governments to determine whether the political characteristics of recipient areas have any bearing on their allocation specifically we study the sharing of resources of the district assemblies common fund dacf in ghana amongst the country s district governments over the period 1994 to 2005 we find evidence that the mechanism does not eliminate politically motivated targeting of the grants per capita dacf grants were higher in districts where vote margins in the previous presidential election were lower suggesting that swing districts were targeted we find evidence that dacf formula indicators and their weighting were chosen and amended to produce politically desired patterns of transfers

non parametric production analysis in non competitive environments we extend the non parametric methodology for empirical production analysis to deal with endogenous prices as price endogeneity is often complemented by price uncertainty we consider both the case of certain prices and the case of uncertain prices the extensions are fully compatible with existing tools for eliciting and representing technology and price information and preserves the tractable mathematical programming structure of the original methodology an empirical application to the dutch electricity distribution sector illustrates our extension

winner take all and proportional prize contests theory and experimental results abstract this study provides a unified framework to compare three canonical types of contests winner take all contests won by the best performer winner take all lotteries where probability of success is proportional to performance and proportional prize contests in which rewards are shared in proportion to performance we derive equilibria and observe outcomes from each contest in a laboratory experiment equilibrium and observed efforts are highest in winner take all contests lotteries and proportional prize contests have the same nash equilibrium but empirically lotteries induce higher efforts and lower more unequal payoffs behavioral deviations from theoretical benchmarks in different contests are caused by the same underlying attributes such as risk aversion and the utility of winning finally we find that subjects exhibit consistent behavior across different types of contests with subjects exerting higher effort in one contest also exerting higher effort in another contest

how to split the pie optimal rewards in dynamic multi battle competitions abstract multi battle competitions are ubiquitous in real life in this paper we examine the effort maximizing reward design in sequentially played multi battle competitions between two players the organizer has a fixed prize budget and rewards players contingent on the number of battles they win in a three battle contest a full spectrum of contest technologies in the tullock family is accommodated we find that the optimal design varies with the discriminatory power of the contest technology in particular when it is in the low range winner take all is optimal for the intermediate range as discriminatory power increases the optimal prize structure evolves continuously from winner take all to the proportional division rule due to the need to mitigate the growing momentum discouragement effect for the high range a wide span of prize structures extracts full surplus and is thus optimal several robustness checks confirm that mitigating the momentum discouragement effect is essential for effort maximizing prize design in dynamic multi battle contests

forecasting the presidential vote in the states this research examines an equation developed to forecast the two party presidential vote in the states the equation is composed of 16 independent variables measured at the national regional and state levels it includes national trial heat polls from early in the campaign the growth in the national economy presidential incumbency the state s voting record in the previous two presidential elections home state and regional advantages for the candidates the partisan division of the state legislature following the last midterm election an index of state ideology based on the roll call voting of its house delegation and five regional trend variables to take into account partisan shifts over time the equation is estimated over 531 state elections from 1948 to 1988 the overall fit of the equation is quite good it accounts for nearly 85 of the variance leaves a standard error of less than four percentage points and has an average error of just three percentage points of the vote this level of accuracy is comparable to that of steven rosenstone s equation in his forecasting presidential elections 1983 moreover the equation is quite parsimonious and yields forecasts by early september of the election year

money and votes reconsidered congressional elections 1972 1982 the evolution of congressional campaign finance over the past decade is characterized by steady growth in campaign spending and other notable changes in campaign finance practices the main purpose of the research reported here was to determine whether these changes have altered the effects of campaign spending on election outcomes this required reexamination of auxiliary questions concerning how sending effects operate and can be measured it also required facing the limits of what analysis of aggregate campaign spending data can tell us about money in elections replication of ols and 2sls analyses of campaign spending effects produced solidly consistent results over the six congressional elections held between 1972 and 1982 taken at face value the evidence is overwhelming that the challenger s level of spending has a strong impact on the vote whereas that of the incumbent has virtually no impact at all but the evidence remains open to doubt on two grounds one is the probable inadequacy of the 2sls model or perhaps any possible model leaving the issue of simultaneity bias unsettled if bias remains the estimates exaggerate the electoral effects of the challenger s campaign expenditures the issue cannot be resolved with more of the same data but rather requires data of a different sort surveys taken over the course of a sample of campaigns would do the trick meanwhile i think it would be foolish to make policy on the assumption that bias is in fact substantial the greatest likelihood remains that restrictions on campaign money will have the general effect of hurting challengers jacobson 1979 the other doubtful albeit equally stable finding is that incumbents do not gain votes by spending in campaigns no incumbent seems to believe it and there is at least circumstantial evidence from for example the 1982 elections that their skepticism is quite justified if so the problem lies in the limits of what aggregate data of the kind analyzed here can tell us few incumbents do not spend heavily when they are strongly challenged if both candidates spend beyond the point needed to become thoroughly familiar to voters then the substance of the campaigns the contents of campaign messages become the dominant factors incumbents may need to spend money in order to change the message as new circumstances arise to frame new issues that would help them most or damage them least to win the battle of establishing the real issues like nonincumbents sitting members may sometimes need to spend beyond a certain threshold to remain competitive but nearly all of them do so when the necessity arises so aggregate spending data are largely uninformative how the money is spent rather than how much is what matters the two most notable developments in congressional campaign finance have opposing implications national party organizations particularly the republican have assumed an increasingly important role in financing campaigns greater central control leads to a more efficient distribution of the party s collective campaign resources which among other things promises to raise the overall level of electoral competition it also leads to more coordinated campaigning with greater emphasis on national themes and programs thus it should foster more cooperation and loyalty among fellow partisans in congress but pacs have also grown in numbers and in financial importance because most concentrate on gaining access to incumbents they do little to make elections more competitive because they usually pursue narrowly defined interests their influence fragments the congress and weakens party coalitions in this and other ways parties and pacs are natural rivals the most consequential decisions taken in the next round in campaign finance policy will be those which affect the relative importance of parties and pacs see u s congress 1984 for comments on this and other current campaign finance issues

campaign allocations under probabilistic voting we develop a probabilistic voting model where candidates compete by advertising in different media markets ads are viewed by everyone within a market and cannot be targeted to subgroups such as one candidate s partisans candidates estimate the distribution of voter preference intensities in a market and campaign ads then shift this distribution individuals with any intensity vote with some probability for each candidate we derive comparative static implications of changes in a variety of factors on the advertising decisions of each candidate using campaign advertising data from 2002 we find these results to be consistent with actual campaign allocation behavior

contests with multi tasking the standard contest model in which participants compete in a single dimension is well understood and documented multi dimension extensions are possible but are liable to increase the complexity of the contest structure mitigating one of its main advantages simplicity in this paper we propose an extension in which competition ensues in several dimensions and a competitor that wins a certain number of these is awarded a prize the amount of information needed to run the contest is hence limited to the number of dimensions won by each player we look at the design of this contest from the point of view of maximising effort in the contest per dimension and totally and show that there will be a tendency to run small contests with few dimensions the standard tullock model and its results are encompassed by our framework

on the origin content and relevance of the market failures approach the view of business ethics that christopher mcmahon calls the implicit morality of the market and joseph heath calls the market failures approach has received a significant amount of recent attention the idea of this view is that we can derive an ethics for market participants by thinking about the point of market activity and asking what the world would have to be like for this point to be realized while this view has been much discussed it is still not well understood this paper seeks to remedy this problem i begin by showing against some recent commentators that mcmahon s view and heath s view are fundamentally the same second i clarify the sense of efficiency at work in the market failures approach finally i argue that in its current form this view has little relevance to the real world of business i conclude by sketching two ways of modifying it to fit our world

inter regional redistribution through infrastructure investment tactical or programmatic in this paper we study the political economy of the inter regional allocation of investment in infrastructure in an effort to disentangle tactical and programmatic motives where tactical politics refers to the discretionary allocation of investment to districts with more political clout and programmatic politics refers to the allocation of investment according to certain objective criteria e g income level we use a panel of data from the spanish electoral districts for the period 1964 2004 to estimate an equation in which investment depends both on economic and political variables the results show that tactical politics do matter since the districts receiving the most funds are those in which i the incumbent s vote margin is low ii few votes are needed to win an additional seat in the legislature iii the central and regional governments are controlled by the same party and iv regional parties play a pivotal role in the legislature however the results also show that programmatic politics matter since inter regional redistribution is shown to increase i with the arrival of democracy and european union funds ii under leftist governments and iii the weaker the correlation is between political clout and regional income

an adversarial ethic for business or when sun tzu met the stakeholder in the economic literature on the firm especially in the transaction cost tradition a sharp distinction is drawn between so called market transactions and administered transactions this distinction is of enormous importance for business ethics since market transactions are governed by the competitive logic of the market whereas administered transactions are subject to the cooperative norms that govern collective action in a bureaucracy the widespread failure to distinguish between these two types of transactions and thus to distinguish between adversarial and non adversarial relations has led many business ethicists to develop a uniform moral code yet in market transactions the checks and balances built into the system of commercial exchange are such as to permit more instrumental forms of behavior in administered transactions by contrast these checks and balances are absent and thus the institutional context calls for much greater exercise of moral restraint in this paper i begin the task of developing an adversarial ethic for business according to this view the competitive environment licenses a greater range of self interested behavior but also imposes its own constraints on the strategies that firms may adopt in the pursuit of their interests

how the electoral college influences campaigns and policy the probability of being florida this paper analyzes how us presidential candidates should allocate resources across states to maximize the probability of winning the election by developing and estimating a probabilistic voting model of political competition under the electoral college system actual campaigns act in close agreement with the model there is a 0 9 correlation between equilibrium and actual presidential campaign visits across states both in 2000 and 2004 the paper shows how presidential candidate attention is affected by the states number of electoral votes forecasted state election outcomes and forecast uncertainty it also analyzes the effects of a direct national popular vote for president

the arsenal of democracy production and politics during wwii abstract we study the geographic distribution of military supply contracts during world war ii this is a unique case where 3 trillion current day dollars was spent we find robust evidence consistent with the hypothesis that economic factors dominated the allocation of supply contracts and that political factors or at least winning the 1944 presidential election were at best of secondary importance general industrial capacity in 1939 as well as specialized industrial capacity for aircraft production are strong predictors of contract spending across states electoral college pivot probabilities are weak predictors of contract and new facilities spending and under the most plausible assumptions they are essentially unrelated to spending this is true over the entire period 1940 1944 and also for shorter periods leading up to the election in november 1944 that is we find no evidence of an electoral cycle in the distribution of funds

does political competition lessen ethnic discrimination evidence from sri lanka abstract the impact of political competition on ethnic discrimination remains largely unexplored to address this gap this paper explores the relationship between the level of political competition and the probability of receiving government transfers among ethnic minorities in sri lanka in the run up to the national elections of 2000 the paper shows that making politicians dependent on the votes of members of ethnic groups other their own can encourage moderation in discriminatory practices towards ethnic minorities specifically we find that political competition positively influenced the distribution of government food stamps among sri lankan tamils who otherwise are less likely to receive food stamps relative to the sinhalese majority the negative impact of political competition on discrimination is higher when minorities form part of swing constituencies than when they form part of the base support for political parties lessons learnt here suggest that having built in incentives in the design of the electoral process for intergroup bargaining and cooperation in countries with ethnically heterogeneous societies can be an effective restraint on ethnic discrimination this is consistent with other research that considers political institutions to be a key lever for making ethnically divided societies more inclusive

rebuttal to jacobson s new evidence for old arguments in salvation for the spendthrift incumbent green and krasno 1988 we argue that incumbent spending has a sizable effect on the house vote this stands in direct contrast to professor jacobson s well known view that campaign spending by incumbents is not related to how well they do at the polls jacobson 1983 42 emphasis in the original in his rebuttal jacobson criticizes our findings on three grounds first he argues that the instrument we use in our twostage least squares model for incumbent spending is invalid second he complains that our model fails to account for diminishing marginal returns finally jacobson asserts that our findings for the 1978 election do not hold for subsequent years in this paper we briefly respond to these criticisms using data drawn from the 1976 86 elections we demonstrate that incumbent spending has a substantial influence on the vote we then critique the assumptions underlying jacobson s individual level analysis in the end we find little empirical support for jacobson s contention that the effects of incumbent spending are substantively small and statistically insignificant much of jacobson s essay focuses on the question of whether incumbent spending is as effective as challenger spending this comparative question however occupies a minor place in our salvation essay our main objective was to show that incumbent spending has more than a trivial influence on electoral outcomes we do not disagree in fact with jacobson s position that the marginal effect of challenger spending exceeds that of incumbent spending but this is not the only way to gauge the relative importance of incumbent and challenger spending another way would be to compare the yield the number of votes purchased by challengers and incumbents in each district this standard takes into account the fact that incumbents typically outspend their opponents data from 1976 86 indicate that the yield from incumbent spending is both considerable and on par with the yield from challenger expenditures in sum access to financial resources represents one of the important advantages of incumbency for the spendthrift incumbent is able to offset the effects of campaign expenditures by the opposition

communicating on electoral platforms this paper proposes an analysis of strategic communication on platforms by candidates during an electoral campaign a candidate s platform in a possibly multidimensional policy space is fixed but is imperfectly known by voters a candidate strategically decides the emphasis he puts on the various issues and thus the precision of the information he conveys to voters on his position on each issue we show that if voters are fully rational then all the relevant information is revealed at equilibrium whatever the candidate s true position we then study a model of boundedly rational voters who take at face value the messages sent by the politicians without being able to decipher their strategies if voters are boundedly rational in this sense a politician will not transmit all the relevant information his communication strategy will depend on both the prior in the electorate and his true positions unknown to the electorate in particular we show that candidates address all issues with positive probability but tend to talk more often on issues on which they are a priori congruent with the representative voter thereby providing a nuanced version of petrocik s issue ownership theory

a measure of price advantage and its decomposition into output and input specific effects abstract in this paper we develop a price advantage measure obtained as the difference between efficiency scores computed with quantity based and value based data this measure is interpreted as an increase in the firm s profit rate due to a favourable input and output price environment compared to traditional allocative efficiency measure which uses only the evaluated firm s prices price advantage measure considers prices of peers in the market our main contribution is to show that total price advantage decomposes into the sum of output and input specific price advantages the application of the measure to a french farm s dataset in the context of the successive common agricultural policy reforms aiming at the liberalization of agricultural prices 1992 2013 illustrates our theoretical model

political determinants of intergovernmental transfers in a regionally decentralized authoritarian regime evidence from china this article examines the political determinants of the allocation of intergovernmental transfers in the context of china in a regionally decentralized authoritarian regime a government marked by political centralization and fiscal decentralization intergovernmental transfers are employed by politicians as instruments to achieve political goals using china s provincial data from 1994 to 2009 we find that the officials political power is an important factor in the distribution process a party secretary s replacement facilitates an increase in transfers especially if the replacement comes from the central government if a party secretary is a member of the central politburo the province receives more conditional transfers than others the central government allocates the transfers in such a way that the province with a high proportion of the minority population receives more transfers than others

mixed strategy play in single stage first price all pay auctions with symmetric players abstract we consider sealed bid first price all pay auctions with complete information discrete strategy space budget constraint and symmetric players and then construct the equilibrium solution in mixed strategies for both fixed and variable prizes the equilibrium solution yields predictions concerning the effects of group size and value of the prize that are tested experimentally the experimental results support equilibrium play on the aggregate but not individual level adaptive learning on the individual level accounts for the major trends in the aggregate expenditures over time

intergovernmental grants as a tactical instrument empirical evidence from swedish municipalities are grants to swedish municipalities tactical in this essay i derive testable implications from a theoretical voting model and test these on a panel of 255 swedish municipalities 1981 1995 in order to decide which regions that are politically powerful both election results and survey data from the swedish election studies are used the results although somewhat ambiguous support the hypothesis that intergovernmental grants are used in order to win votes

resource allocation and voter calculus in a multicandidate election this paper links campaign resources and voter calculus through a microeconomic optimization framework i assume that candidate policy positions are fixed while personal valence scores and the salience of issue dimensions are malleable low valence candidates with many proximate competitors in the policy space will focus on building valence high valence candidates who are relatively unclustered in the policy space will focus on manipulating issue salience resources devoted to diminishing others valence scores will increase as the number of viable candidates decreases the model s results are tested where feasible using data from the democratic party primary of 2004

the effects of discretionary federal spending on parliamentary election results i introduction three compelling reasons to expect that discretionary federal spending will have a different impact on incumbent majority and opposition candidates in the canadian parliamentary system of government are only the prime minister and his appointed cabinet may propose spending or taxing initiatives the electorate only votes directly for their local member of parliament mp and if the prime minister declares a vote of confidence all majority party mps must vote with the prime minister or leave the party these three characteristics combined with the fact that the opposition does not have enough votes to successfully prevent passage of legislation make it very difficult for opposition mps to influence discretionary spending if the electorate is aware of this situation majority party candidates regardless of incumbency stand to reap the electoral benefits of additional federal discretionary spending furthermore opposition incumbents will lose votes as a consequence if majority candidates receive additional votes to some extent this must be at the expense of votes for opposition incumbents the purpose of this paper is to empirically test these two hypothesis the idea that discretionary spending can be used to influence election outcomes verges on the trite mass media discussions are rife with accusations of pork barrel politics this idea is implicitly contained the entire interest group theory of political decision making and it is formally modeled in papers such as weingast shepsle and johnsen 1981 despite the general agreement on the electoral motivations of discretionary spending empirical findings have been relatively unsuccessful in documenting either important or significant effects of discretionary spending or various other district level explanatory variables typical of this literature jacobson 1978 finds a negative and small effect of incumbent campaign spending and johannes and mcadams 1981 find no effect of case work on election outcomes as explained by fiorina 1981 rivers and fiorina 1989 and stein and bickers 1994 the presence of a simultaneous equation system has biased the empirical estimates since politicians are apt to shift resources towards those electoral districts where the election is expected to be closest ordinary least squares will underestimate the true effect stein and bickers demonstrate a negative correlation between the closeness of elections and the amount of pork barrel spending in congressional races in a more recent article case 2001 finds that federal block grants are negatively influenced by the expected closeness of the election in albania despite the recognition of a simultaneity bias attempts to overcome the problem have generally been unsuccessful a notable exception is that of levitt and snyder 1997 who uses spending outside of a district but inside a state as an instrument for spending in the district levitt and snyder find a positive and significant impact of discretionary spending on the share of the vote for incumbents in u s house elections this paper contributes to the discretionary spending and election literature in two ways using a newly created data set of canadian federal spending at the electoral district level the analysis of discretionary spending can be extended beyond the u s border and presidential system of government to a parliamentary system additionally the results contained herein provide a robustness check of levitt and snyder s methodology using instruments similar to those proposed by nagler and leighley 1992 and levitt and snyder 1997 consistent estimates indicate that increases in federal government spending and national gross domestic product gdp per capita have positive and significant effects on the share of the vote received by majority incumbents yet insignificant effects on opposition incumbents the sign of the point estimates are negative

the economics of governance the economics of governance is an effort to implement the study of good order and workable arrangements where good order includes both spontaneous order in the market which is a venerated tradition in economics adam smith 1776 friedrich hayek 1945 kenneth a arrow and gerard debreu 1954 and intentional order of a conscious deliberate purposeful kind chester irving barnard 1938 p 9 also i interpret workable arrangements to mean feasible modes of organization all of which are flawed in comparison with a hypothetical ideal avinash dixit 1996 pp 4 9 the object is to work out the efficiency logic for managing transactions by alternative modes of governance principally spot markets various long term contracts hybrids and hierarchies interest among social scientists economists included in the study and practice of good order and workable arrangements has been steadily growing in contrast with the orthodox lens of choice prices and output supply and demand the economics of governance is a lens of contract construction broadly in the spirit of james buchanan s 2001 p 29 observation that mutuality of advantage from voluntary exchange is the most fundamental of all understandings in economics the economics of governance as herein described is principally an exercise in bilateral private ordering by which i mean that the immediate parties to an exchange are actively involved in the provision of good order and workable arrangements to be sure the need for private ordering varies with the rules of the game as provided by the state distinctions between lawlessness where the state provides limited or unreliable protection for property and contract dixit 2004 and lawfulness where the state undertakes to protect property and enforce contracts in a principled way are pertinent the first of these applies mainly to primitive and transition economies the second is commonly associated with western democracies recourse to private ordering under conditions of lawlessness is altogether understandable given the absence of state support the walter a haas school of business university of california berkeley ca 94720 1900 the paper has benefited from workshop presentations at the university of california berkeley the university of valencia insead fountainebleau and the 2004 annual conference of the international society for new institutional economics an abbreviated version was also given as the horst claus recktenwald lecture at nuremburg on 4 november 2004 comments and suggestions from fred balderston ernesto dalbo avinash dixit robert gibbons witold henisz ian larkin steven tadelis and dean williamson are especially acknowledged 1 lon fuller s 1954 p 477 definition of eunomics as the science theory or study of good order and workable arrangements is very much in the spirit of what i refer to as governance 2 one of the immediate ramifications of insistently comparing feasible alternatives all of which are flawed is that the purported inefficiencies that are ascribed to failures to achieve first best optimality are not dispositive but invite the query as compared with what i return to this issue in section iv 3 excluding corporate governance the numbers of articles that used the word governance during the period 1998 2000 as compared with the period 1977 1979 in selected economics business management sociology organization and political science journals were 60 vs 1 76 vs 4 79 vs 18 and 60 vs 25 where the journals surveyed were the american economic review journal of political economy quarterly journal of economics rand journal of economics and journal of economic perspectives in economics strategic management journal management science academy of management journal and academy of management review in business management administrative science quarterly organization science american journal of sociology american sociological review and annual review of sociology in sociology organization and american political science review political science quarterly journal of politics and political research quarterly in political science combining these four categories articles using the word governance increased from 48 to 275 over this 20 year interval dixit 2004 pp 149 50 reports that the number of web pages that turn up under the search for governance is huge

the political participation puzzle and marketing abstract this study shows that one of the most intriguing findings on political participation that the participation rate is higher in close elections is due to the omission of variables namely the marketing activities this relationship between closeness and participation is intriguing because 1 it implies that people participate in elections because their vote might be decisive but 2 such an incentive to vote is unreasonable this study presents a theoretical model that suggests that closeness does not affect the turnout rate directly but rather through the marketing activities of the parties in other words in equilibrium close elections attract higher marketing spending which in turn increases turnout the author uses data on the 1996 2004 presidential elections in the united states to examine the model and its implications using structural and nonstructural estimation the author finds that the data support the model and its implications furthermore the effect of marketing on turnout i

electoral politics and the executive veto a predictive theory we argue that winner take all voting in states and the unequal distribution of electoral votes across states in presidential elections makes incumbent presidents rationally place more weight on the preferences of voters in closely contested larger states when making policy decisions this hypothesis is tested by examining whether presidential veto decisions are influenced by the floor votes of senators from these electorally crucial states in a pooled sample of 325 individual bills from 1970 through 1988 we find significant evidence of this behavior by incumbent presidents

assessing the influence of campaign expenditures on voting behavior with a comprehensive electoral market model this paper extends previous single equation econometric modeling efforts of the sales advertising relationship in elections operating within the perspective of the general demand context of voting behavior it develops a comprehensive electoral market model that takes account of potential simultaneous relationships among votes cast campaign expenditures and voting participation turnout the model is estimated using 3sls techniques with aggregate electoral district data from each of eight canadian provincial elections the model appears to yield consistent and therefore generalizable empirical results across the eight election events chief among the empirical results is the expected relationship between campaign efforts and voting behavior own communications efforts as proxied by campaign expenditures have a positive impact on votes received while competitive communications efforts draw votes away from a candidate

strategic competition in sequential election contests this paper studies a sequential election contest such as theamerican presidential primary in which several electionsoccur one at a time until a single winner emerges theconventional wisdom is such a system benefits a candidatefavored in the initial elections because of momentum thispaper uncovers a potentially opposing force if participationis costly and candidates exit when they have unfavorablefuture prospects a candidate with friendly elections at theend of the contest will typically benefit from the resultinggame theoretic competition tension between this strategic effect and momentum helpsexplain several empirical regularities of presidentialprimaries

the effects of partisan alignment on the allocation of intergovernmental transfers differences in differences estimates for spain abstract in this paper we test the hypothesis that municipalities aligned with upper tier grantor governments i e controlled by the same party will receive more grants than those that are unaligned we use a rich spanish database which provides information on grants received by nearly 900 municipalities during the period 1993 2003 from three different upper tier governments i e central regional and upper local since three elections were held at each tier during this period we have enough within municipality variation in partisan alignment to provide differences in differences estimates of the effects of alignment on the amount of grants coming from each source moreover the fact that a municipality may simultaneously receive grants from aligned and unaligned grantors allows us to use a triple differences estimator which consists of estimating the effects of changing alignment status on the change in grants coming from the aligned grantors relative to the change in grants coming from the unaligned ones the results suggest that partisan alignment has a sizeable positive effect on the amount of grants received by municipalities for example with majority governments at the two layers aligned municipalities receive over 40 more grants than unaligned ones

primaries and the new hampshire effect candidates for u s presidential elections are determined through sequential elections in single states the primaries we develop a model in which candidates can influence their winning probability in electoral districts by spending money on campaigning the equilibrium replicates several stylized facts very well campaigning is very intensive in the first district the outcome of the first election then creates an asymmetry in the candidates incentives to campaign in the next district which endogenously increases the equilibrium probability that the first winner wins in further districts on the normative side our model oers a possible explanation for the sequential organization it leads in expectation to a lower level of advertising expenditures than simultaneous elections moreover if one of the candidates is the more eective campaigner sequential elections also perform better with regard to the selection of the best candidate

a model of rivalries with endogenous prize and strength abstract this paper extends bevia and corchon 2013 to a model with both endogenous contestable prize and endogenous relative strength such a setting is ideal for the study of intra organizational rivalries commonly observed in family sports promotion and duopoly we find that when the game starts with asymmetric players the weaker player exerts more effort than the stronger player as a result the weaker player partially overcomes the disadvantage of being weak in this setting neither domino nor avalanche effect exists

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

allocative efficiency measurement with endogenous prices abstract in the nonparametric measurement of allocative efficiency output prices are fixed if prices are endogenous the overall output in the market determines the allocative efficient point we develop an alternative semi nonparametric model that allows prices to be endogenously determined

presidential particularism and divide the dollar politics when inuencing the allocation of federal dollars across the country do presidents strictly pursue maximally ecient outcomes or do they systematically target dollars to politically inuential constituencies in a county level analysis of federal spending from 1984 to 2008 we nd that presidents are not universalistic but particularistic that is they reliably direct dollars to specic constituents to further their political goals as others have noted presidents target districts represented by their co partisans in congress in the pursuit of inuence visavis the legislature but we show that at much higher levels presidents target both counties within swing states and counties in core states that strongly supported the president in recent elections swing state particularism is especially salient during presidential reelection years and core partisan counties within swing states are most heavily rewarded rather than strictly pursuing visions of good public policy or pandering to the national median voter our results suggest that presidents systematically prioritize the needs of politically important constituents

election goals and income redistribution recent evidence from albania this paper examines the impact of political competition on block grants from federal to sub federal levels of government we model the extent and direction of income redistribution as determined proximately by the political agendas of central decision makers and at a deeper level by the institutions within which they nd themselves operating we contrast two political objective functions that yield di erent empirical predictions of the ways in which politics should a ect scal policy lessons learned here may prove important in understanding limits on the types of redistribution possible via block grants given the institutional framework in both developing and developed countries 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved jel classixcation h1 h7 o1

the use and effect of political propaganda in democracies this paper examines the influence of political propaganda on voters and analyses the behavior of the interest groups in the face of the influence being exercised by propaganda semi truths are distributed among the electorate the decision taken by a voter results from his basic opinion and from the parts of information he receives the analysis shows that the greater the likelihood of a certain decision being reached by a fully informed electorate the more probable it is that the same decision will be reached by a rationally uninformed electorate the pecuniary interest of an interest group is however also positively correlated with the probability that the electorate reaches a decision which is agreeable to that interest group it has finally become appar ent that the results of the approach concur well with empirical studies

campaign spending limits incumbent spending and election outcomes abstract we study the impact of campaign spending limits for candidates in canadian federal elections we first demonstrate that spending limits are binding mostly for incumbent candidates we then use this information to produce endogeneity corrected estimates for the impact of incumbent spending on electoral vote shares furthermore we examine the impact of spending limits on broader measures of electoral outcomes finding that larger limits lead to less close elections fewer candidates and lower voter turnout

do polls create momentum in political competition abstract we explore how public opinion polls affect candidates campaign spending in political competition generally polls lead to more asymmetric behavior under a majority rule there always exists an equilibrium in which the initially more popular candidate invests more in the campaign and thereby increases her lead in expectation polls create momentum when campaigning is very effective and the race is very close a second type of equilibrium may exist the trailing candidate outspends and overtakes his opponent regardless of the type of equilibrium polls have a tendency to decrease expected total campaigning expenditures by amplifying ex ante asymmetries between candidates and thus defusing competition when candidates care also for their vote share in addition to having the majority candidates incentives crucially depend on the distribution of voters candidate preferences

asymmetry and corrective public policy in contests the proposal of an inefficient policyusually stimulates a political strugglebetween the affected interest groups theresulting wasteful lobbying activities mayreduce welfare even if the proposed policyis not approved in this paper weshow that sufficient asymmetry in payoffsnot only tends to reduce lobbying effortsin standard rent seeking contests as iswell known but it is in fact a necessarycondition for the implementation of asuccessful effective correctivetax transfer policy that complements theproposal of the inefficient policy such apolicy induces an efficient equilibriumoutcome which is in addition optimal fromthe viewpoint of the players that take partin the public policy game

electoral goals and center state transfers a theoretical model and empirical evidence from india we construct a model of redistributive politics where the central government is opportunistic and uses its discretion to make transfers to state governments on the basis of political considerations these considerations are the alignment between the incumbent parties at the central and state levels and whether a state is a swing state or not a testable prediction from the model is that a state that is both swing and aligned with the central government is especially likely to receive higher transfers we test this prediction using indian data for 14 states from 1974 75 to 1996 97 we find that a state which is both aligned and swing in the last state election is estimated to receive 16 higher transfers than a state which is unaligned and non swing

the seeds of negativity knowledge and money this paper studies the tendency to use negative ads for this purpose we focus on an interesting industry political campaigns and an intriguing empirical regularity the tendency to go negative is higher in close races we present a model of electoral competition in which ads inform voters either of the good traits of the candidate or of the bad traits of his opponent we find that in equilibrium the proportion of negative ads depends on both voters knowledge and the candidate s budget furthermore for an interesting subset of the parameter space negativity increases in both knowledge and budget using data on the elections for the u s house of representative in 2000 2002 and 2004 we examine the model and its implications using nonstructural estimation we find that negativity indeed increases in both voters knowledge and the candidate s budget furthermore we also find that knowledge and budget mediate the effect of closeness on negativity using structural estimation we reinforce these findings specifically we find that the model s parameters are within the subset of the parameter space discussed above thus the evidence implies that the model is not only helpful in identifying variables that were ignored by previous studies i e knowledge and budget but also in explaining an intriguing empirical regularity

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

a blotto game with incomplete information we consider a blotto game with incomplete information a pure strategy symmetric monotonic bayesian equilibrium is found and its properties are discussed

electoral competition with informed and uninformed voters i present a model of electoral competition in which candidates raise campaign contributions by choosing policies that benefit interest groups and then expend those contributions to influence voters who are uninformed about the policies informed voters however vote based on those policies so candidates face a trade off between choosing a policy to generate funds to attract the uninformed vote and choosing a policy to attract the informed vote electoral equilibria are characterized for two categories of policies particularistic and collective in the case of particularistic policies the equilibrium policies of the candidates are separated if the proportion of uninformed voters is sufficiently high and the degree of separation is an increasing function of that proportion the model is extended to include the public financing of elections and incumbency advantages for the case of collective policies the candidates locate at the median of the ideal points of the informed voters and contributions are zero