but who will monitor the monitor suppose that providing incentives for a group of individuals in a strategic context requires a monitor to detect their deviations what about the monitor s deviations to address this question i propose a contract that makes the monitor responsible for monitoring and thereby provides incentives even when the monitor s observations are not only private but costly too i also characterize exactly when such a contract can provide monitors with the right incentives to perform in doing so i emphasize virtual enforcement and suggest its implications for the theory of repeated games jel c78 d23 d82 d86

comment general competitive analysis in an economy with private information prescott and townsend 1984 extend the literature on general equilibrium theory to economies in which agents have private information about their preferences they examine the extent to which the classical welfare theorems carry over in this environment the existence of nonverifiable information imposes limits on the economy s contract structure contracts cannot be written to require an agent to reveal information unless truthful revelation is optimal incentive compatiblity constraints typically nonlinear are thereby introduced into the corresponding planner s problem as a result the space of feasible deterministic allocations is typically not convex the authors circumvent this problem by allowing for random allocations where the planner is choosing over the space of probability distributions of consumption allocations the incentive compatibility constraints in this space are linear in the planner s choice variables rendering the set of feasible consumption allocations convex some of the attainable random allocations pareto dominate the set of incentive feasible allocations attainable via deterministic allocation rules randomized allocations have two functions they convexify the planner s choice set and they may allow for pareto superior allocations to be achieved prescott and townsend s presentation may leave readers with the misleading conclusion that the nonconvexity of the choice set under deterministic allocations is necessary for random allocations to be pareto superior but one can attain pareto superior allocations with lotteries even when the choice set under deterministic allocation rules is convex this note demonstrates that prescott and townsend s own example has this property

does right or left matter cabinets credibility and fiscal adjustments abstract this paper tests the widely held assumption that left wing cabinets favor higher public spending and examines whether cabinet ideology affects the persistence of major fiscal adjustments in a panel of large fiscal adjustments in oecd countries during the last 40 years we find evidence that left wing and right wing cabinets are partisan the left tends to reduce the deficit by raising tax revenues while the right relies mostly on spending cuts our testable hypothesis is that cabinets can signal commitment by undertaking fiscal adjustments in ways that are not favored by their constituencies in other words the left gains credibility when it cuts spending while the right becomes more credible when it increases tax revenues probit estimates of the determinants of persistence in fiscal adjustments confirm that spending cuts by the left and tax increases by the right are associated with persistent adjustments the effect is significant for cuts in public spending public consumption wage or nonwage increases in total revenues direct taxes on businesses and other taxes we test for the role of several other determinants of persistence confirming that coalition and majority cabinets are associated with less persistence while periods of high or rising levels of indebtedness favor persistence the estimates of the impact of ideology and other variables on gdp and its components show that it is the size of the spending cut rather than cabinet ideology that is most important

communication in repeated games with private monitoring abstract the paper considers repeated games where each player can be observed by only a subset of the other players and where players can make public announcements about the behavior of the players they observed we address the following question what is the minimal level of observability that is required to obtain efficient outcomes the main result is that the limit set of sequential equilibrium payoffs when the discount factor tends to one contains the set of individual rational payoffs whenever each player is observed by at leasttwoother players journal of economic literatureclassification number c73

state responses to fiscal crises the effects of budgetary institutions and politics this paper explores the dynamics of state taxes and spending during the late 1980s when regional economic downturns and increased expenditure demands led to substantial state budget deficits more restrictive state fiscal institutions such as no deficit carryover rules and tax and expenditure limitations are correlated with more rapid fiscal adjustment to unexpected deficits political factors are also important when a single party controls the state house and the governorship deficit adjustment is much faster than when party control is divided in gubernatorial election years tax increases and spending cuts are both significantly smaller than at other times

wars of attrition in italian government coalitions and fiscal performance 1948 1994 we test the war of attrition models of fiscalperformance on the sample of italian governments from1948 to 1994 we control for conditioning phenomena like government stability majority size central bankindependence political budget cycle and externaleconomic constraints as well as for business cycleindicators we improve on the standard specificationsof war of attrition models by considering the role ofthe opposition and by using ex ante measures ofcoalitions fragmentation once these phenomena areaccounted for data support the implications of ourversion of the war of attrition models

asymmetric effects of oil price changes on the balance of trade evidence from selected african countries the main new contribution of this study was to delve into the asymmetric impacts of changes in oil prices on the trade balance in the framework of six major african economies to tackle this topic carefully we employ three measures of external balances oil non oil and total trade balances and assess the asymmetric response of the external balances of those six economies to oil price changes in the short and long run like most previous studies we first assume the impacts of oil price fluctuations to be symmetric and employ the linear autoregressive distributed lag ardl method to explore the topic we then separate oil price hikes from oil price plunges and implement the non linear ardl method to reveal that the price of crude oil has a vital role to play in the trade balances for those six african economies further there is evidence of significant asymmetric impacts of oil prices typically on the oil trade balance of africa s top oil producing countries for the non oil and total trade balances in contrast there is little evidence of the asymmetry of oil price changes

the impact of within party and between party ideological dispersion on fiscal outcomes evidence from swiss cantonal parliaments the impact of the fragmentation of executive and legislative bodies on the level and composition of government expenditure is a feature of politics that has attracted considerable attention from economists however previous authors have abstracted from two important concepts ideology and intra party politics in this paper we account for these two phenomena explicitly and make two main contributions first we show that both intra and inter party ideological dispersion matter in explaining the level of sub national public spending therefore it is improper to consider parties as monolithic entities we also show that ideological dispersion matters especially for current expenditures and not so much for investment expenditures to do so we construct a panel database 2003 2010 comprising data from a survey that quantifies the policy preferences of party members who were candidates in swiss elections

fragmented government effects on fiscal policy new evidence most industrialized countries entered the 1980s with their public finances in disarray at the time persistent deficits pushed up public debt to gdpratios despite such similarities deficit spending varies substantially between countries and within countries over time recent theoretical and empirical research has considered how differences in political arrangements affecting national policy formation might explain variation in fiscal policies pursued using a panel of 22 oecd countries over the 1971 1996 period this paper extends previous literature on the effects of fragmented government on fiscal policy outcomes in various directions first we focus on data relating to central government instead of general government as all theories refer to central government second not only do we analyze the effect of size fragmentation of government we also examine government s position vis a vis parliament and government s political fragmentation we find evidence that more fragmented government defined in terms of the number of political parties in a coalition or the number of spending ministers have higher deficits there is also some evidence that governments that dispose of excess seats in parliament have lower deficits right wing governments appear to have been fiscally more responsible in the seventies political fragmentation does not affect government s budget deficit

why are stabilizations delayed when a stabilization has significant distributional implications e g tax increases to eliminate a large budget deficit socioeconomic groups may attempt to shift the burden of stabilization onto other groups the process leading to stabilization becomes a war of attrition each group attempting to wait the others out and stabilization occurring only when one group concedes and bears a disproportionate share of the burden the authors solve for the expected time of stabilization in a model of rational delay and relate it to several political and economic variables they motivate this approach and its results by comparison to historical and current episodes copyright 1991 by american economic association

competitive corruption factional conflict and political malfeasance in postwar italian christian democracy this article studies the relationship between cartels of politicians and systemic political corruption in a democratic setting some electoral systems including open list systems of proportional representation encourage intraparty competition for office the authors analyze the relationship between intraparty conflict in postwar italy s dominant political party the christian democrats and charges of malfeasance against christian democratic members of the chamber of deputies in the years between the first postwar parliamentary elections of 1948 and the end of the xi legislature in 1994 when the electoral system was substantially modified suspected malfeasance is operationalized as requests by the judiciary to lift parliamentary immunity in order to proceed with an investigation of a member of the chamber of deputies results show a significant statistical relationship between intraparty conflict and alleged corruption on the part of dc deputies starting in the early 1970s these results are interpreted to mean that the dramatic levels of political corruption observed in italy in recent decades were in part an outgrowth of the search for campaign funds by incumbent dc members of parliament in competition with other candidates from the same party electoral competition with other parties did not significantly affect the extent of charges of malfeasance against dc deputies using maps the authors also provide preliminary evidence that italian corruption did not spread from south to north in a process of cultural contagion as is commonly believed instead they find the determinants of corruption appear to be endogenous to institutions of the postwar political system

a positive theory of fiscal deficits and government debt this paper considers an economy in which policymakers with different preferences alternate in office as a result of elections government debt is used strategically by each policymaker to influence the choices of his successors if different policymakers disagree about the desired composition of government spending between two public goods the economy exhibits a deficits bias that is debt accumulation is higher than it would be with a social planner the equilibrium level of debt is larger the larger is the degree of polarization between alternating governments and the less likely it is that the current government will be re elected

linear inequality methods to enforce partnerships under uncertainty an overview we review different generic conditions on stochastic outcome functions to enforce either efficient or nearly efficient partnerships their logical relationship is explored two kinds of conditions are considered however the property for an action profile to be compatible plays a crucial role in both kinds also two kinds of enforcement mechanisms are considered enforcement through utility transfers and enforcement through repetition

the weak government thesis some new evidence this paper presents new evidence on the hypothesis that coalition governments will find it more difficult to keep their budgets in line after an adverse economic shock than do one party majoritarian governments the estimates are based on a broad sample of oecd countries for the period 1979 1995 using various specifications as suggested in the literature we do not find evidence that the type of government affects cross country variation in fiscal policy however the number of political parties in government affects central government debt growth

why a stubborn conservative would run a deficit policy with time inconsistent preferences a conservative government in favor of a low level of public consumption knows that it will be replaced by a government in favor of a larger level of public consumption we show that the resulting level of public consumption is in between the levels the two governments would choose if each were in power both in the present and in the future in particular we show that if the conservative government is more stubborn in a particular sense than the succeeding government the conservative government will borrow more than it would had it remained in power in the future

the political economy of benefits and costs a neoclassical approach to distributive politics this essay offers a rational political explanation for the notorious inefficiency of pork barrel projects with an optimization model of legislative behavior and legislative institutions the model emphasizes the economically arbitrary from a welfare point of view importance of the geographic incidence of benefits and costs owing to the geographic basis for political representation we explore the implications of a legislator s objective function and derive conditions under which a representative legislature will select an omnibus of projects each of which exceeds the efficient scale

strategic leniency and cartel enforcement the cornerstone of cartel enforcement in the united states and elsewhere is a commitment to the lenient prosecution of early confessors a burgeoning game theoretical literature is ambiguous regarding the impacts of leniency i develop a theoretical model of cartel behavior that provides empirical predictions and moment conditions and apply the model to the complete set of indictments and information reports issued over a 20 year span statistical tests are consistent with the notion that leniency enhances deterrence and detection capabilities the results have implications for market efficiency and enforcement efforts against cartels and other forms of organized crime jel d43 l12 l13 k21 in 1993 the department of justice doj introduced a new leniency program with the intent of destabilizing existing cartels and deterring new cartels the program commits the doj to the lenient prosecution of early confessors in particular it guarantees complete amnesty from federal prosecution to the first confessor from each cartel provided that an investigation into the confes sor s cartel is not already underway it also offers discretionary penalty reductions to conspirators who confess when an investigation is already ongoing the new leniency program has become the cornerstone of cartel enforcement efforts in the united states e g scott d hammond 2004 and recently has inspired antitrust authorities in australia canada the european union japan south korea and elsewhere to introduce similar programs oecd 2002 2003 this paper tests the efficacy of the new leniency program the results have implications for market efficiency and enforcement efforts against cartels and other forms of organized crime a burgeoning game theoretical literature is ambiguous regarding the impacts of leniency a common finding is that leniency may destabilize cartels because conspirators can simultane

deviations from constituent interests the role of legislative structure and political parties in the states this paper investigates the determinants of state spending over 1960 1990 recent empirical studies suggest that state government expenditure is greater than the electorate desires our main finding is that expenditure was positively related to the number of seats in a state s legislature this is consistent with the hypothesis that logrolling leads representatives to spend more than their constituents would like we also find that political parties do not have a pronounced effect on overall levels of expenditure but do influence the composition of spending in particular democratic control of state government is associated with higher levels of welfare spending

fragmented fiscal policy abstract this paper explores on a panel of 19 oecd countries the role of fragmentation in determining fiscal outcomes over the 1970 95 period we first define the notion of fragmentation of fiscal policy making as the degree to which the costs of a dollar of aggregate expenditure are internalized by individual decision makers empirically this notion has two key logical components the number of decision makers and the rules of the game or the budget process in turn the number of decision makers can refer to the number of parties in a coalition or the number of ministers in the cabinet we test all these determinants against each other and against perhaps the oldest explanation of all ideology we show that cabinet size and to a lesser degree coalition size and ideology are significant and robust determinants of fiscal outcomes in particular transfers are the budget items most affected by these factors

optimal corporate leniency programs this study characterizes the corporate leniency policy that minimizes the frequency with which collusion occurs though it can be optimal to provide only partial leniency plausible sufficient conditions are provided whereby the antitrust authority should waive all penalties for the first firm to come forward it is also shown that restrictions should be placed on when amnesty is awarded though it can be optimal to award amnesty even when the antitrust authority is very likely to win the case without insider testimony