are future taxes discounted in this paper i examine empirically the question of whether or not the public recognizes the future taxes implied by current deficitfinanced expenditures as discussed by barro 1 it seems that such recognition does not occur but that by a new hypothesis presented here the aggregate economy behaves much as if it did this alternative hypothesis relies on the widely accepted efficient markets and permanent income hypotheses and it requires considerably less sophistication and information on the part of the average economic agent than does barro s hypothesis

political cycles in oecd economies this paper studies whether the dynamic behaviour of gnp growth unemployment and inflation is systematically affected by the timing of elections and of changes of governments the sample include the last three decades in 18 oecd economies we explicitly test the implication of several models of political cycles both of the opportunistic and of the partisan type also we confront the implication of recent rational models with more traditional approaches our results can be summarized as follows a the political business cycle hypothesis as formulated in nordhaus 1975 on output and unemployment is generally rejected by the data b inflation tends to increase immediately after elections perhaps as a result of pre electoral expansionary monetary and fiscal policies c we find evidence of temporary partisan differences in output and unemployment and of long run partisan differences in the inflation rate as implied by the rational partisan theory by alesina 1987 d we find virtually no evidence of permanent partisan differences in output growth and unemployment

government capital and the production function for u s private output abstract theoretical and policy discussions make unsupported assumptions about the productivity of capital which governments own estimates of an aggregate production function for u s private business 1949 1973 show government capital to be significant statistically and in economic terms

towards an attention based view of the firm the central argument is that firm behavior is the result of how firms channel and distribute the attention of their decision makers what decision makers do depends on what issues and answers they focus their attention on what issues and answers they focus on depends on the specific situation and on how the firm s rules resources and relationships distribute various issues answers and decision makers into specific communications and procedures the paper develops these theoretical principles into a model of firm behavior and presents its implications for explaining firm behavior and adaptation 1997 by john wiley sons ltd

pressure groups and redistribution abstract the simple pressure group model of political redistribution can predict more with less restrictive assumptions instead of ready made pressure groups composed of individuals who vote their pocketbooks we posit heterogeneous agents each of whom decides which group to join and how much effort to expend on political activity our model then examines social affinity conditions that foster pressure group formation political sympathies based on social affinity imply testable effects of growth rate and income distribution on progressive transfers effects that prove substantial in pooled time series cross section regressions for 13 oecd countries 1960 1981

explaining public investment in western europe budgetary consolidations are considered the obvious explanation for the decline in public investment that most western european countries experienced over the past three decades however regressions based on budgetary variables tend to overpredict public investment during the post 1990 period i e when the budgetary stress eased we supplement the budgetary consolidation approach to public investment with ideas from behavioural economics to explain why these investments do not increase when additional budgetary resources are available we use the peak end evaluation procedure to capture the frustration of voters as cuts in government consumption expenditures accumulate this memory effect of budgetary consolidations implies that voters recall the previous peak in government consumption expenditures they remain discontent as long as current expenditures are below the peak value when the budgetary situation improves policy makers will choose to increase government consumption because this is electora

new tests of the life cycle and tax discounting hypotheses abstract we first test a version of the permanent income consumption function recently suggested by barro the results support the theory except that consumption expenditures show sensitivity to transitory income next we use the consumption model to test the tax discounting hypothesis which is strongly supported this support for tax discounting disagrees with results from some earlier studies using more traditional specifications of the consumption function however we show that when certain obviously inadequate estimation procedures are corrected the traditional models also support tax discounting this uniform support for tax discounting suggests that the sensitivity of consumption to transitory income is not due to liquidity constraints

macroeconomic policy in a two party system as a repeated game this paper considers the interaction of two parties with different objectives concerning inflation and unemployment and rational and forward looking wage setters if discretionary policies are followed an economic cycle related to the political cycle results in equilibrium this cycle is significantly different from the traditional political business cycle reputational mechanisms due to the repeated interaction of the two parties and the public or commitments to a common policy rule can improve upon the discretionary outcome by reducing or eliminating the magnitude of the economic fluctuations

finite lifetimes and the effects of budget deficits on national saving abstract even though realistic deficit policies shift sizable tax burdens to future generations the assumption of an infinite horizon is a good approximation for analyzing a deficit s short run saving effect on individuals who are neither liquidity constrained nor myopic recent u s experience casts significant doubt on these assumptions however and appears difficult to reconcile with the ricardian equivalence proposition that the timing of taxes does not affect national saving recent deficits have coincided with reduced national saving and a substantial increase in the share of gnp devoted to consumption

environmental policy public goods and the marginal cost of public funds if private goods are perfect substitutes for public goods and environmental quality greener preferences reduce employment raise abatement and improve environmental quality if the elasticity of substitution between private goods and leisure exceeds one the tax rate increases thereby reducing private consumption however if labor supply bends backwards private utility rises while the tax rate and public consumption fall with imperfect substitution between private and public consumption greener policies boost labor supply if the substitution elasticity between private and public consumption and the elasticity of the effectiveness of public abatement are small and the labor supply curve bends backwards copyright 1994 by royal economic society

a comprehensive analysis of expenditure decentralization and of the composition of local public spending sacchi a and salotti s a comprehensive analysis of expenditure decentralization and of the composition of local public spending regional studies many industrialized countries have recently implemented fiscal decentralization reforms assigning more spending responsibility to sub national governments this paper investigates the causes of the decentralization of different categories of public expenditure in 19 developed countries over the period 1980 2006 different models for each of the spending functions under analysis are estimated adopting a general to specific empirical approach results confirm existing findings on the negative link between regional income disparities and expenditure decentralization a similarly negative relationship is found for a set of demographic variables leading to the conclusion that macroeconomic and more importantly political factors are responsible for the recent increase in decentralization finally the analysis is completed by a study of the factors driving sub n

demographic political institutional and financial determinants of regional social expenditure the case of spain abstractdemographic political institutional and financial determinants of regional social expenditure the case of spain regional studies this paper contributes to the literature on the determinants of regional social spending using a dataset of the 17 regional governments in spain with both a fixed effects static and a dynamic model results suggest that demography inputs institutional design and resources are critical in determining the size of regional social budgets empirical evidence was found about the existence of economies of scale but social services do not seem to follow a luxury goods pattern left wing governments seem to spend more while federal regulations work as constraints of regional autonomy finally strong evidence that the foral system of regional financing is creating horizontal inequalities in the access to essential public services was found while the common regime seems to be working well enough

government spending cycles ideological or opportunistic this paper examines whether partisan and opportunistic motives affect government expenditure growth in the netherlands the time series analysis covering the period 1953 1993 allows for different types of government spending in general spending is inspired by ideological and opportunistic motives all government expenditure categories show an upward drift during election times and the partisan motives behind government spending are clearly revealed left wing cabinets attach greater importance to social security and health care than right wing cabinets and right wing cabinets value expenditure on infrastructure and defense more than left wing parties

political business cycles 40 years after nordhaus the aim of this article is to survey the huge literature that has emerged in the last four decades following nordhaus s rev econ stud 42 2 169 190 1975 publication on political business cycles pbcs i first propose some developments in history of thought to examine the context in which this ground breaking contribution saw the light of the day i also present a simplified version of nordhaus s model to highlight his key results i detail some early critiques of this model and the fields of investigations to which they gave birth i then focus on the institutional context and examine its influence on pbcs the actual research agenda finally i derive some paths for future research

asset stock accumulation and sustainability of competitive advantage given incomplete factor markets appropriate time paths of flow variables must be chosen to build required stocks of assets that is critical resources are accumulated rather than acquired in strategic factor markets barney barney j 1986 strategic factor markets expectations luck and business strategy management sci october 1231 1241 sustainability of a firm s asset position hinges on how easily assets can be substituted or imitated imitability is linked to the characteristics of the asset accumulation process time compression diseconomies asset mass efficiencies inter connectedness asset erosion and causal ambiguity

public capital and the demand for private inputs abstract this paper investigates the impact the provision of public capital has on the demand for private inputs using a cost function with public capital included as a fixed unpaid factor of production the productivity effects of public capital provision are recovered by using duality theory the model is applied to a panel of 31 two digit industries of the west german manufacturing industry it is shown that private and public capital are complements whereas a substitutive relation emerges for labour the empirical evidence suggests that the provision of public capital has a stabilizing but steadily decreasing impact on private input demand

government spending and budget deficits in the industrial economies fiscal policy nouriel roubini and jeffrey sachs this paper examines the evolution of the size of government and of budget deficits in oecd economies we highlight the rapid increase in government spending in the 1970s the sharp rise in budget deficits and public debt after 1973 and the reversal in these trends in the 1980s the increase in the size of government was associated in part with the slowdown in growth after 1973 but also reflected gradual adjustment of the ratio of spending to output towards a long run target which depends on political and institutional characteristics of the economy the political orientation of the government the degree of wage indexation and the degree of stability of the political system such factors also explain the size of budget deficits when faced with an adverse shock subsequent deficit reduction requires a measure of political consensus we note that such consensus is hard to achieve in multi party coalitions in consequence countries with such a political structure tended in consequence countries with such a political structure tended toin consequence countries with such a political structure tended to experience much more rapid increases in their debt gnp ratios

fiscal federalism and economic growth this paper uses an endogenous growth model with overlapping generations to explore the connection between fiscal federalism and economic growth the analysis shows that federalism which allows public good levels to be tailored to suit the differing demands of young and old consumers who live in different jurisdictions increases the incentive to save this stronger incentive in turn leads to an increase in investment in human capital and a byproduct of this higher investment is faster economic growth

government spending and the optimal rates of consumption and capital accumulation this paper investigates the effects of a temporary change in government expendit ure on private consumption and investment the model employed is one of a closed economy populated by infinitely lived utility maximizing individuals the analysis focuses on the implications of alternative assumptions concerning the relationship between public and private c onsumption in the household s utility function a temporary increase in government expenditure is found to reduce investment if public and private goods are edgeworth complements or independent however if they are substitutes there exists the possibility of an increase in investment

the efficiency paradox bureaucratic and organizational barriers to profitable energy saving investments abstract the paradox of why profitable energy saving investments are not undertaken continues to provoke debate the underlying phenomenon might be called the efficiency paradox because it represents a case in which business firms which are often presumed or taken axiomatically to be economically efficient make decisions that do not maximize profits new data from one of the us environmental protection agency s voluntary pollution prevention programs enables this paradox to be explored statistically the data show that both the level and variation in returns to lighting upgrade investments cannot be explained by standard economic models substantial gains in energy efficiency can be achieved without sacrificing profitability both economic and organizational factors account for some of the variation in observed returns to these investments but the results suggest a need for improved and more comprehensive theories of the investment behavior of firms and other organizations

the economic benefits of public infrastructure the impact of the provision of public infrastructure on private economic activity is examined using a flexible functional form of a cost function with public infrastructure as an additional extern

regional decentralization and fiscal incentives federalism chinese style abstract aligning the interests of local governments with market development is an important issue for developing and transition economies using a panel data set from china we investigate the relationship between provincial government s fiscal incentives and provincial market development we report three empirical findings first we find that during the period of fiscal contracting system the discrepancy between ex ante contracts and ex post implementation was relatively small suggesting that the fiscal contracts were credible second we find a much higher correlation about four times between the provincial government s budgetary revenue and its expenditure during 1980s and 1990s as compared to 1970s demonstrating that provincial governments faced much stronger ex post fiscal incentives after reform third we find that stronger ex ante fiscal incentives measured by the contractual marginal retention rate of the provincial government in its budgetary revenue are associated with faster development of the non state sector as well as more reforms in the state sector in the provincial economy this holds even when we control for the conventional measure of fiscal decentralization finally we compare federalism chinese style to federalism russian style

the resource based theory of the firm interest in the resource based view of the firm continues to grow in the field of business policy and strategy recently most of this interest seems to have been focused on understanding the empirical implications of this theory and especially on how a firm s resources and capabilities can affect its performance evaluating the empirical implications of the resource based view is of course a worthwhile endeavor we present an overview of contributions in this issue

tightening environmental standards the benefit cost or the no cost paradigm ms ff ichael porter and claas van der linde have written a paper that is interesting and to us at least somewhat astonishing it is a defense of environmental regulation indeed an invitation to more stringent regulation that makes essentially no reference to the social benefits of such regulation this approach contrasts starkly with the methods that economists and other policy analysts have traditionally used when assessing environmental or other regulatory programs the traditional approach consists of comparing the beneficial effects of regulation with the costs that must be borne to secure these benefits for environmental regulation the social benefits include the reductions in morbidity or premature mortality that can accompany cleaner air the enhanced recreational opportunities that can result from water quality improvements the increased land values that might attend the cleanup of a hazardous waste site the enhanced vitality of aquatic ecosystems that might follow reductions in agricultural pesticide use or any of the other potentially significant benefits associated with tighter standards from this benefit cost approach emerges the standard tradeoff discussed in virtually every economics textbook porter and van der linde deny the validity of this approach to the analysis of environmental regulation claiming it to be an artifact of what they see as a static mindset in their view economists have failed to appreciate the capacity of

fiscal policy and monetary integration in europe fiscal policy economists policy makers and the media often argue that the maastricht treaty and the stability and growth pact make it difficult for governments of emu countries to stabilize their economies with appropriate fiscal policy and to provide adequate public investment our empirical analysis offers little support to this view discretionary budget deficits have actually become more counter cyclical in emu countries after the maastricht treaty as well as in the other eu and non eu industrialized countries we study and while public investment has declined recently in emu countries a similar tendency is apparent in other countries and started well before the maastricht treaty was signed jordi gali and roberto perotti

toward a new conception of the environment competitiveness relationship accepting a fixed trade off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation they typically overestimated compliance costs neglected innovation offsets and disregarded the affected industry s initial competitiveness rather than simply adding to cost properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets allowing companies to improve their resource productivity shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward it is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity

public expenditures in canadian provinces an empirical study of politico economic interactions it is widely believed that government ideology and electoral constraints are two major factors that influence the level of public expenditures however frey and schneider argue that the effects of the two phenomena are not simultaneous only when a government is popular can it pursue ideological goals and when popularity is low energies must be redirected toward gaining support from voters to win the next election data draw from the canadian provincial case are used to test empirically this hypothesis the findings support the frey and schneider explanation

decentralization and the composition of public expenditure in spain gonzalez alegre j decentralization and the composition of public expenditure in spain regional studies this paper examines the effects of fiscal decentralization on the economic distribution of public expenditures using panel data from the seventeen spanish regions 1984 2003 it is shown that fiscal decentralization is a crucial determinant of the share of the public budget devoted to capital the estimation run is based on a model in which the utility of the representative agent from the current public expenditure depends on the distance to the level of the administration that provides it that could be the cause why decentralized economies experience a higher share of current expenditure in the budget of the public administrations gonzalez alegre j la decentralisation et la structure des depenses publiques en espagne regional studies cet article cherche a examiner l impact de la fiscalite decentralisee sur la distribution economique des depenses publiques a partir des donnees provenant d une

the causes of government expenditure growth a survey of the u s evidence abstract the growth of government budgets can be broken down into a institutional and institutional components the former component the familiar substitution income and population public goods tax sharing effects is estimated to contribute about two fifths of the growth of u s government spending the latter component rent seeking political redistributions bureaucracy and perceptual informational impedimentia is important too but an exact imputation cannot be asserted given the state of the art in empirical public choice theory the cross effects on spending of the growth of regulation and tax preferences or tax expenditures though interesting is not pursued

equilibrium political budget cycles political business cycle theories generally rely on nominal rigidities and voter myopia this paper offers an equilibrium theory that preserves some basic insights from earlier models though with significant refinements the political budget cycle emphasized here is in fiscal policy rather than output and inflation it arises via a multidimensional signal process one can consider the welfare implications of proposals to mitigate the cycle and the effects of altering the electoral structure copyright 1990 by american economic association

intertemporal output and employment effects of public infrastructure capital evidence from 12 oecd economies this paper utilises an intertemporal optimisation framework to study the effects of public infrastructure capital on output supply and input demands in 12 oecd countries we find that in all 12 countries i public capital has positive long run effects on both output supply and input demands ii its mean short run rates of return are fairly low while the corresponding long run rates are much higher but declining over time these findings underscore important under investment gaps in infrastructure during the 1970s and 1980s these gaps however narrowed down significantly in a few cases completely by the early 1990s

public capital and total factor productivity new evidence from the italian regions 1970 98 destefanis s and sena v 2005 public capital and total factor productivity new evidence from the italian regions 1970 98 regional studies 39 603 618 this paper analyses the relationship between industrial total factor productivity and public capital across the 20 italian administrative regions it adds upon the existing literature in a number of ways it analyses a longer period 1970 98 it allows for the role of human capital accumulation it tests for the existence of a long run relationship between total factor productivity and public capital through previously suggested panel techniques and for weak exogeneity of public capital and it assesses the significance of public capital within a non parametric set up based on the free disposal hull the results confirm that public capital has a significant impact on the evolution of total factor productivity particularly in the southern regions this impact is mainly ascribed to the core infrastructures road and airports harbours railroads w

long run growth and welfare effects of public policies with distortionary taxation abstract in a one sector growth model with infrastructure investment we study the impact of fiscal policies on growth the government collects taxes on labor income and profits the government uses these revenues to purchase infrastructure investment provide utility enhancing government services and to provide transfer payments to the households we show that the balanced growth rate is an increasing function of the percent of government revenues that goes to infrastructure we find that the growth maximizing mix of taxes depends on the elasticity of substitution between inputs in particular with distortionary taxes the growth maximizing tax rate on capital is higher the lower the elasticity of substitution between private physical capital and public capital in addition the growth maximizing size of the government is higher when the elasticity of substitution between public and private inputs is low we also investigate welfare effects of other public expenditures as well depending on the elasticity of substitution in production the welfare implications of different public policies can be substantial

fiscal decentralization and economic growth abstract fiscal decentralization may indeed have a direct impact on economic growth but the theoretical underpinnings for this relationship remain largely undeveloped a fair summary of the empirical search for a direct relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth is that it remains an open question much less attention has been devoted in the literature to the indirect channels through which fiscal decentralization may affect economic growth we argue that much work remains to be done before policy advisors and decision makers can formulate and implement decentralization programs on the basis of improving the rate of economic growth

on the determinants of fiscal centralization theory and evidence abstract this paper presents a simple model that unifies most of the results of the literature on fiscal federalism the model describes an economy characterized by two levels of government one public good and a private good the predictions of the model are tested by using a new set of measures of fiscal centralization the main findings are that country size income per capita ethnic fractionalization and level of democracy are negatively correlated with the degree of fiscal centralization the model is tested using ols tobit and semi parametric estimators the paper also shows that the variables included in the regression are helpful in the prediction of changes in the level of centralization

investment in energy efficiency do the characteristics of firms matter the literature on energy efficiency provides numerous examples of apparently profitable technologies that are not universally adopted yet according to the standard neoclassical theory of investment profit maximizing firms should undertake all investments with a positive net present value the standard theory also holds that the discount rate for computing the present value of a project should be the return available on other projects in the same risk class and therefore should not depend on characteristics of the firm this model as applied to energy saving investments is tested by examining whether firms characteristics influence their decision to join the environmental protection agency s voluntary green lights program a discrete choice regression is estimated over a large sample of participating and nonparticipating firms missing values in the data matrix are replaced with multiple imputations from a distribution estimated using the expectation maximization algorithm the results show that 1 sub

barriers within firms to energy efficient investments abstract many investments in energy efficiency fail to be made despite their apparent profitability internal hurdle rates are often set at levels higher than the cost of capital to the firm reasons for these practices include bounded rationality principal agent problems and moral hazard the policy implication is that government can simultaneously improve overall energy efficiency and increase private sector productivity by providing informational and organizational services that go beyond the traditional regulatory framework

the equilibrium approach to fiscal policy this paper lays out a simple model for the purpose of bringing together the various strands of the analysis of fiscal policy in an optimizing competitive equilibrium model the discussion centers on the critic al assumptions lying behind the ricardian equivalence proposition th e role of the time profile and composition of public expenditure and the timing of distortional taxation copyright 1988 by ohio state university press

interest rates and expected future budget deficits in the united states several recent empirical studies have found no evidence of a positive association between interest rates and current and past budget deficits one possible explanation for this finding is that interest rates are related much more to the expectation of future budget deficits than to current and past budget deficits in this paper i investigate whether this explanation is valid finding no evidence that it is section ii briefly formulates and discusses the hypothesis under consideration stating some of its implications section iii presents the results of regressing the commercial paper rate moody s aaa bond rate and the ex post real commercial paper rate on current and past government spending budget deficits and real money supplies the regressions have been fitted to the entire sample of monthly data spanning the period between june 1908 and march 1984 and to 11

sustainable energy systems and company performance does the implementation of sustainable energy systems improve companies financial performance abstract the main aim of this paper is to analyse whether the adoption of sustainable energy systems improves corporate financial performance to this end we obtained data from a sample of 574 multinational companies from 36 countries in the 2008 2013 period on this data we implement a dynamic system panel data method our findings show that the adoption of sustainable energy systems allows firms to improve their short term corporate financial performance while not leading them to reduce their corporate financial performance in the long term specifically our results indicate that an increase in energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy sources do not significantly affect corporate financial performance neither does the integration of energy efficiency systems and renewable energy sources have any significant influence on corporate financial performance while the level of implementation of sustainable energy management systems has a significant effect on short term but not long term corporate financial performance furthermore other control variables such as research and development expenditure and year are also relevant in explaining firms financial performance the adoption of sustainable energy systems helps to improve corporate financial performance in the short term but has no affect in the long term this might be because the monitoring of energy efficiency using key performance indicators allows firms to detect and correct failures in the production process and hence improve short term financial performance however this measure does not generate competitive advantages for firms and therefore has no effect on long term corporate financial performance from a scientific perspective of energy this paper contributes to the literature by providing a detailed explanation of how the adoption of sustainable energy systems proposed by peura 2013 influences corporate financial performance on the basis of new empirical evidence these explanations provide a strong rationale for improving the efficient use of energy and harvesting low hanging fruits in the short term from a managerial perspective policymakers should encourage firms to align sustainable energy systems with their core business strategy by developing green technologies that allow them to acquire rare and valuable capabilities and abilities which generate competitive advantage and therefore allow firms to increase their long term corporate financial performance

strategic fiscal interaction among oecd countries this paper investigates whether oecd countries compete with each other for mobile factors by using various fiscal tax spending policy instruments we use a panel dataset of 20 oecd countries over the 1982 2000 period results reveal evidence that international capital inflows fdi are affected by fiscal policy at home and abroad also there is evidence that domestic capital tax rates react i positively to changes in capital tax rates in neighboring countries and ii negatively to changes in public investment spending in neighboring countries in contrast strategic interdependence over public investment spending decisions is not established

government debt government spending and private sector behavior a current period tax reduction financed by issuing government debt shifts the timing of tax collection from the current period to the future if the future taxes implied by government debt are not fully perceived and discounted by the private sector there will be a net wealth effect that increases private sector consumption thus reducing capital accumulation and growth if on the other hand the implied future taxes are perceived and discounted by the private sector the current period tax reduction will be used to increase private saving to pay for the future taxes and government debt will be absorbed without any real effects on the economy the effects of government spending financed by current period taxation also depend upon private sector perceptions 2 if the benefits of government spending are ignored private sector consumption will decrease in accordance with the reduction in permanent disposable income to the extent that government spending is on consumption type goods that are perceived as substitutes for privately provided consumption goods there will be a relatively greater reduction in private sector consumption to the extent that government spending is on investment type goods yielding future goods and services that are perceived as substitutes for future privately provided consumption goods there will be a relatively smaller reduction in private sector consumption the standard approach to modeling private sector consumption saving behavior involves a rather asymmetric set of assumptions as to how the private sector perceives the various elements of government fiscal policy 3 current period taxes are assumed to be fully perceived but current period government spending is implicitly assumed to be completely ignored by the private sector in considering permanent personal disposable income the private sector is assumed to be forward looking in its assessment of income and taxation the stock of government debt is nevertheless included as part of the stock of private wealth the implicit assumption associate professor of economics graduate school of business university of chicago 1101 east 58th street chicago il 60637 i thank eugene fama levis kochin michael mussa paul evans and an anonymous referee for helpful comments i am particularly grateful to daniel benjamin for contributing many hours of discussion and laura lahaye who was a research assistant and valuable adviser on earlier drafts the theoretical debate on the burden of the debt has been long standing gerald o driscoll 1977 documents ricardo s nineteenth century position robert barro 1974 reopened the debate by introducing the fundamental issue of intergenerational transfers also discussed in merton miller and charles upton 1974 the empirical side of the debate was initiated by levis kochin s 1974 attempt to test for the effects of deficits on consumption and by martin feldstein s 1974 attempt to test for the effects of social security wealth on consumption other empirical contributions include jess yawitz and laurence meyer 1976 myself 1978 and j earnest tanner 1978 1979 with respect to the effects of government deficits and debt and barro 1978 michael darby 1979 and dean leimer and selig lesnoy 1982 with respect to social security wealth see also interesting recent papers by john seater 1982 who generates detailed tests of the effects of deficits and debt on consumption charles plosser 1982 who explores the effects of government spending and debt shocks on interest rates and feldstein 1982 who attempts tests similar to some in this paper see fn 29 2martin bailey s 1962 1971 development of the effects of government spending on private consumption and aggregate economic activity is the seminal contribution paul david and john scadding 1974 extend bailey s ideas and provide some supporting empirical evidence more recently willem buiter 1977 and myself 1978 developed models based on bailey s earlier work barro 1981 has an interesting paper on related issues see also david aschauer 1982 3the standard approach incorporates fiscal policy through the concept of personal disposable income and by including the stock of government debt as part of personal wealth see for example the empirical specification of albert ando and franco modigliani 1963 which has been the basis of most empirical consumption studies since and feldstein 1974 for one of the more influential papers based on the ando modigliani specification

strategy complexity and economic rent this paper discusses important friction forces that future theories of strategy must incorporate some of these are technological and environmental but the most important ones it is argued are psychological the view is developed that strategy at its core concerns the development and testing of heuristics for high stake decisions in environments too unstable and complex to be optimized the paper especially highlights the behavioral dimension in the belief that strategies should incorporate both the rational and suboptimal aspects of human behavior the rational approach is in many ways the easier as there may be only one way to be right yet the great variety in which people and companies can err gives strategy its creative and real world challenge the tension between the rational and behavioral components is what the field of strategy should seek to exploit

serial correlation and the fixed effects model this paper generalizes the durbin watson type statistics to test the ols residuals from the fixed effects model for serial independence also generalized are the tests proposed by sargan and bhargava for the hypothesis that the residuals form a random walk a method for efficient estimation of the parameters is also developed finally an earnings function is estimated using the michigan survey of income dynamics in order to illustrate the uses of the tests and the estimation procedures developed in this paper

government financing decisions and asset returns abstract this paper presents an empirical investigation of the relation between government financing decisions and asset returns in particular the focus is on whether a substitution of debt financing for tax financing of a given level of expenditures is associated with an increase in interest rates the paper brings a different perspective to empirical investigations of government fiscal policies by examining the response of asset prices in an efficient capital market to such policies rather than focusing on aggregate consumption behavior the results are consistent with the idea that asset prices are unrelated to how the government finances its expenditures the results however also indicate that the capital market is not indifferent with respect to the level of government expenditures as higher interest rates are associated with increases in government purchases

decentralization and economic growth revisited an empirical note abstract although it is theoretically expected that decentralization leads to efficient provision of local public services and stimulates economic development there is a mixed picture of the decentralization effect on economic growth across earlier empirical studies using the instrument variables iv technique with the latest cross country data for the period from 1997 to 2001 this paper found that fiscal decentralization has a significant positive impact on per capita gdp growth therefore when the focus is placed on the latest information on the economic situation in the latter 1990s decentralization particularly on the fiscal expenditure side is instrumental in economic growth

fiscal decentralisation and idc economic growth an empirical investigation the impact of fiscal decentralisation on ldc economic growth and development is widely debated in the development literature notwithstanding this there has been little attempt to test systematically this relationship accordingly in this note we present an empirical examination of the relationship between the level of fiscal decentralisation and economic growth rates across a sample of twenty three ldcsfrom 1974 to 1991 we fail to find however any strong systematic relationship between the two among our sample of ldcs

government science and technology budgets in times of crisis abstract following a recent paper by filippetti and archibugi filippetti a archibugi d 2011 innovation in times of crisis national systems of innovation structure and demand research policy 40 2 179 192 this article aims to contribute to the sparse literature on the impacts of the recent economic downturn on the government expenditures and innovative activities of the countries of the enlarged european union eu 27 using eurostat s socio economic objectives i e the nomenclature for the analysis and comparison of scientific programmes and budgets nabs 2007 classification this paper addresses the impact of the recent economic downturn on governments science and technology s t budgets across the 27 eu countries most countries followed a pro cyclical pattern where the government s t budgets in most nabs shrunk along slowing gross domestic product growth in similar pace with total government expenditure the new member states of eastern europe were the most affected

a new approach to test the effects of decentralization on public infrastructure investment this paper proposes a simple theoretical framework to obtain a tractable equation that considers the traditional criteria for allocating public infrastructure investment and variables to capture de

organizational capabilities and the economic history of the industrial enterprise in my book scale and scope 1990 i focused on the history of the modern industrial firm from the 1880s when such firms first appeared through world war ii i did so by comparing the fortunes of more than 600 enterprises the 200 largest industrial firms at three points in time world war i 1929 and world war ii in each of the three major industrial economies those of the united states britain and germany in this paper i first describe the similarities in the historical beginnings and continuing evolution of these enterprises and then outline my explanation for these similarities next i relate my explanation of these empirical regularities to four major economic theories relating to the firm the neoclassical the principal agent the transaction cost and the evolutionary finally i suggest the value of the transactions cost and evolutionary theories to historians and economists who are attempting to explain the beginnings and growth of modern industrial enterprises

is public expenditure productive abstract this paper considers the relationship between aggregate productivity and stock and flow government spending variables the empirical results indicate that i the nonmilitary public capital stock is dramatically more important in determining productivity than is either the flow of nonmilitary or military spending ii military capital bears little relation to productivity and iii a core infrastructure of streets highways airports mass transit sewers water systems etc has most explanatory power for productivity the paper also suggests an important role for the net public capital stock in the productivity slowdown of the last fifteen years

an integrated test for electoral cycles in the u s economy this paper offers the first integrated test of the electoral model of business cycles the test begins with unrestricted estimates of presidential electoral patterns in u s economic outcomes real gnp unemployment and inflation and policies money growth and the adjusted budget surplus these estimates are then used to determine whether the estimated electoral patterns in macropolicy yield predicted electoral patterns for macro outcomes that are consistent with estimates of both actual electoral patterns in outcomes and voting behavior the results indicate that four year electoral cycles in macroeconomic outcomes and policies are strongly significant for the united states for the period 1951i to 1986ii copyright 1989 by mit press

an econometric analysis of health care expenditure a cross section study of the oecd countries this paper is an empirical examination of the determinants of aggregate health care expenditure the paper presents a systematic analysis of relationships across 19 oecd countries showing the effects of aggregate income institutional and socio demographic factors on health care expenditure the results indicate that institutional factors of the health systems in addition to per capita gross domestic product gdp contribute significantly to the explanation of the health care expenditure variation between countries for example the way physicians in outpatient care are paid and the mixture of public private funding and inpatient outpatient care

can decentralization be beneficial abstract a conventional justification for government hierarchy in the fiscal federalism literature is based upon asymmetry in policy tools or in information access that is available to different levels of government this paper demonstrates that even if these asymmetries are eliminated addition of local regional governments to a one tier central government can be strictly welfare improving

the impact of fiscal decentralization on the composition of public expenditure panel data evidence from italy grisorio m j and prota f the impact of fiscal decentralization on the composition of public expenditure panel data evidence from italy regional studies this paper is an original contribution to the understanding of the relationship between fiscal decentralization and public expenditure composition it studies the effects of the ongoing decentralization process in italy on the share of different categories of public spending in total expenditure of the italian regional administrations over the period 1996 2008 the data used allow one to go beyond the usual distinction between current and capital expenditures and to present a functional classification of public expenditures through a panel data analysis the paper shows that the level of decentralization influences the composition of expenditure

the productivity effect of government capital in developing and industrialized countries this paper uses an aggregate production function to examine the effect of government capital formation on growth of labour productivity in an annual panel of 12 developing and 12 oecd economies covering the period 1976 1989 the results from a pooled model of all 24 countries indicate that contribution of government capital to labour productivity is positive and statistically significant this result also holds in separate samples of the industrialized and developing economies where we find that while there are productivity differentials between the two types of economies with respect to private capital there are no differences with regards to public capital

ownership structure institutional organization and measured x efficiency efficiency measurement has become a very popular field in applied economics in recent years and with this interest there has been a large intellectual investment in refining the empirical methods available to researchers in the area in this paper we relate these developments to harvey leibenstein s original 1966 insight into the psychological ideas underlying the notion that economic agents may not achieve maximal efficiency in their productive decisions and behavior of course it is always possible to argue that apparent inefficiency only arises from a failure of the observer to realize what it is that is being maximized however we shall evade this easy escape route into nonfalsifiable hypothesizing and instead shall take at face value the fact that too many empirical studies have come up with substantial measures of inefficiency for us to ignore its importance for normative economics

beyond the fiction of federalism macroeconomic management in multitiered systems recent research on federalism is extremely divided while some tout the benefits of market preserving federalism others point to the fragmentation and incoherence of policy in federal states this research bridges the divide by analyzing the political and fiscal structures that are likely to account for the highly divergent economic experiences of federal systems around the world to test these propositions the authors use an original data set to conduct analyses of budget balance and inflation in fifteen federations around the world from 1978 through 1996 the empirical research suggests that the level of fiscal decentralization the nature of intergovernmental finance and vertical partisan relations all influence macroeconomic outcomes the findings have broad implications for the widespread move toward greater decentralization and for the theoretical literatures on federalism and macroeconomics

efficiency gains within firms under voluntary environmental initiatives this paper focuses on efficiency gains that voluntary environmental initiatives may achieve within the firm current debate concerning the extent and significance of inefficiencies within firms is critically important to the progress of energy and environmental policies several recent lines of inquiry in microeconomics help explain the persistence of inefficiencies within firms in addition two of the most prominent new approaches in the field of business strategy resource based strategy and the capabilities perspective focus on the heterogeneity among firms and the resulting pockets of inefficiency within firms they suggest at least three generic strategies for voluntary environmental initiatives challenging outdated organizational routines creating opportunities for differentiation or complementing firms resource investment trajectories these generic approaches suggest that there is considerable scope for further experimentation with voluntary environmental initiatives

recent evolutionary theorizing about economic change this famous passage from marshall s principles of economics it first appeared in the fifth edition which came out in 1907 nicely brings out two issues which are as germane to economics today as they were when marshall wrote the first is the heavy reliance by economists in their formal theorizing on the notion of equilibrium the other is the appeal that biological conceptions3x201d have for many economists particularly when their focus is on economic change

measuring the contribution of public infrastructure capital in sweden the authors purpose is to examine ways of evaluating and measuring the contribution of public infrastructure capital to private sector output and productivity growth in sweden they do this by specifying and implementing empirically a number of alternative econometric models using annual data for sweden from 1960 to 1988 applying a dual cost function approach they find that increases in public infrastructure capital ceteris paribus reduce private sector costs the authors compute that amount of public infrastructure capital that would rationalize the cost savings incurred by the private business and manufacturing sectors and find that the amount that can be rationalized in this manner is less than what was in fact available in 1988 but that the extent of excess public infrastructure capital has been falling in the 1980s copyright 1992 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

new evidence on deficits and interest rates it is generally assumed on theoretical grounds that increases in government borrowing cause interest rates to rise 1 but empirical support for this proposition has been weak at best several recent papers have uncovered no strong relationship between deficits and short terrn interest rates however the research reported here indicates that although the relationship between deficits and short terrn interest rates may be tenuous there is strong evidence that larger deficits are associated with higher long terrn interest rates much of the debate about whether there is a strong relationship between federal borrowing and interest rates concerns the crowding out question this controversy centers on the direct and indirect eilffects of government fiscal actions on private spending these effects have been well documented in the theoretical literature e g buiter 1977 carlson and spencer 1975 blinder and solow 1973 many of the crowding out effects studied in this literature depend on the connection between government borrowing and high interest rates friedman 1978 meyer 1975 silber 1970 this is called short run indirect crowding out and may occur when increases in government spending and borrowing cause interest rates to rise which then may cause private spending to be reduced buiter 1977 pp 310 13

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

fiscal decentralization and economic growth a cross country study abstract we use a panel data set of 46 countries over the 1970 1989 period to investigate the relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth we find a negative relationship between fiscal decentralization and growth in developing countries but none in developed countries several explanations are offered for our findings

voting on the budget deficit this paper analyzes a model in which a group of rational individuals votes over the composition and time profile of public spending all voters agree that a balanced budget is ex ante optimal however if there is disagreement between current and future majorities a balanced budget is not a political equilibrium under majority rule under certain conditions a majority of the voters favors a budget deficit and the equilibrium deficit is larger the greater is the polarization among voters copyright 1990 by american economic association

the energy efficiency gap what does it mean abstract as renewed attention has been given by policy makers to energy conservation issues it has frequently been asserted that an energy efficiency gap exists between actual and optimal energy use the critical questions is how to define the optimal level of energy efficiency this paper seeks to disentangle some confusing strands of argument that are frequently brought to bear on this question by identifying the major conceptual issues that determine the set of feasible answers we identify five separate and distinct notions of optimality the economists economic potential the technologists economic potential hypothetical potential the narrow social optimum and the true social optimum each of these has associated with it a corresponding definition of the energy efficiency gap our analysis demonstrates that necessary preconditions for identifying the right measure of the energy efficiency gap include understanding and disentangling market failure and non market failure explanations for the gradual diffusion of energy efficient technologies

the composition of public expenditure and economic growth abstract noting that the literature has focused on the link between the level of public expenditure and growth we derive conditions under which a change in the composition of expenditure leads to a higher steady state growth rate of the economy the conditions depend not just on the physical productivity of the different components of public expenditure but also on the initial shares using data from 43 developing countries over 20 years we show that an increase in the share of current expenditure has positive and statistically significant growth effects by contrast the relationship between the capital component of public expenditure and per capita growth is negative thus seemingly productive expenditures when used in excess could become unproductive these results imply that developing country governments have been misallocating public expenditures in favor of capital expenditures at the expense of current expenditures

infrastructure investment and canadian manufacturing productivity this paper examines the relationship between canadian public infrastructure and private output using a constant elasticity and substitution translog ces tl cost model to describe the interaction of the public and private sectors the ces tl was first specified by pollak et al 1984 we find public capital a substitute for private capital within the canadian manufacturing sector additionally the services of public capital enhance the productivity of private capital canadian manufacturing costs are characterized by economies of scale indicating that less than optimal plant sizes dominated canadian manufacturing sector during the study period advances in disembodied technical progress are also indicated

optimal tax debt and expenditure policies in a growing economy abstract this paper employs an endogenous growth model to analyze the role of a consumption tax in enhancing growth and welfare provided government expenditure impacts directly on the decisions of private agents two fiscal instruments are necessary to replicate the first best optimum the tradeoff between consumption and income taxes to achieve this outcome is discussed and shown to depend upon the degree of congestion associated with the public good and the level of government expenditure relative to its social optimum in general the analysis suggests a potentially important role for a consumption tax as part of an overall optimal fiscal package

distributive politics and the costs of centralization this paper studies the choice between centralization and decentralization of fiscal policy in a political economy setting with centralization regional delegates vote over agendas comprising sets of region specific projects the outcome is inefficient because the choice of projects is insufficiently sensitive to within region benefits the number of projects funded may be non monotonic in the strength of project externalities the efficiency gains from decentralization and the performance of constitutional rules such as majority voting which may be used to choose between decentralization and centralization are then discussed in this framework weaker externalities and more heterogeneity between regions need not increase the efficiency gain from decentralization

does decentralization increase government responsiveness to local needs evidence from bolivia this paper examines whether decentralization increases the responsiveness of public investment to local needs using a unique database from bolivia empirical tests show that investment patterns in human capital and social services changed significantly after decentralization these changes are strongly and positively related to objective indicators of need nationally these changes were driven by the smallest poorest municipalities investing devolved funds in their highest priority projects the findings contradict common claims that local government is too corrupt institutionally weak or prone to interest group capture to improve upon central government s allocation of public resources d 2002 published by elsevier b v

public infrastructure and productivity growth in greek agriculture recent research has focused on the effect of public infrastructure on economic performance in this paper a model of greek agriculture s technology and behaviour is constructed based on the dual cost function framework the model provides a decomposition of productivity growth into the components technical change returns to scale and public infrastructure the empirical estimates indicate that public infrastructure investment provides a significant return to agriculture and augments productivity growth over the period 1960 1995 the impact of public infrastructure on productivity growth in livestock and crop production is found to be positive although it has been declining since the late 1970s these results strongly suggest that a decline in public infrastructure investment can partly explain the observed decline in the productivity growth of greek agriculture in the 1980s

economic outcomes and voting behaviour in a multi party system an application to the netherlands this paper is an empirical study to the effects of economic outcomes on party choice for the netherlands in the first part of the paper we employ a multinomial logit model to examine the links between voters characteristics and party choice the results suggest that there are long run movements in party choice which are unlikely be the result of changing economic outcomes in the second part we use time series analysis to determine the effects of economic conditions on short run and medium run movements in votes shares the estimations results provide support for the responsibility hypothesis and for the predictions of the partisan voter model that left wing right wing parties benefit suffer from favourable economic growth prospects

voluntary environmental agreements good or bad news for environmental protection abstract there has been growing interest in the use of voluntary agreements vas as an environmental policy tool this article uses a simple model to determine whether vas are likely to lead to efficient environmental protection we consider cases where polluters are induced to participate either by a background threat of mandatory controls the stick approach or by cost sharing subsidies the carrot approach the results suggest that the overall impact on environmental quality could be positive or negative depending on a number of factors including the allocation of bargaining power the magnitude of the background threat and the social cost of funds