who benefits from local job growth migrants or the original residents bartik t j 1993 who benefits from local job growth migrants or the original residents reg studies 27 297 311 this paper surveys research on whether the new jobs resulting from growth in a local economy e g a metropolitan area go to inmigrants or the original local residents the empirical evidence suggests that around one quarter of the new jobs from local growth increases the labour force participation rates of local residents in the long run these long run effects may occur because local growth provides residents with valuable employment experience research also suggests that minorities benefit most from growth and that higher wage industries provide greater employment benefits for local residents bartik t j 1993 qui est ce qui beneficie de la croissance d emploi locale les migrants ou la population autochtone reg studies 27 297 311 cet article etudie la recherche effectuee dans le but d evaluer si les nouveaux emplois dus a la croissance d une economic locale par exemple une

blame game politics in a coalition government abstract delays in the adoption of reforms is an important question in political economics this paper explores this issue in the context of a representative democracy where the government is a coalition and citizens observe neither the decision making process nor politicians preferences for a reform we show that a coalition member who favors a reform may nonetheless choose to veto its adoption thus delaying it until after the next election and let his coalition partners share the blame for the non adoption we refer to this strategy as blame game politics we then identify three reasons for a politician to play the blame game one is to make an issue salient in the next election a second reason is to avoid a split in his electorate which is accomplished by hiding his stance on an issue a third reason is to enhance bargaining power during the formation of the next government

coalition and party formation in a legislative voting game we examine a legislative voting game where decisions are being made over both ideological and distributive dimensions and legislators preferences are separable over the two dimensions in equilibrium legislators prefer to make proposals for the two dimensions together rather than offering sequential proposals on the two dimensions separately the equilibria exhibit interaction between the ideological and distributive dimensions and in any equilibrium there is a positive probability that a proposal is made and approved which excludes the median legislator as defined over the ideological dimension in contrast with a game where no distributive decision is being made moreover in any stationary equilibrium there is more than one ideological decision that has a positive probability of being proposed and approved we show that legislators can gain from forming political parties and consider examples where predictions can be made about the composition of parties we discuss the impact of political parties on the outcome

the hidden economy as an unobserved variable abstract the technique of unobserved variables is used to estimate the relative size and development time of the hidden economy of oecd countries the burdens of taxation and regulations and the tax morality turn out to be statistically significant determinants at the end of the scandinavian and benc lux countries are expected to have a relatively large and japan and switzerland a relatively small hidden economy canada and the united states are rank in the middle the size of all hidden sectors is estimated to have increased in the period 1960 1973 relative to officially measured gnp

on the efficiency of equilibria in a legislative bargaining model with particularistic and collective goods this study analyzes the efficiency of equilibria in a multilateral bargaining game in which a legislature divides its budget among collective and particularistic goods in order to disentangle the causes of inefficiency we extend the model of volden and wiseman am polit sci rev 101 79 92 2007 by considering quasi linear utility functions and consensus requirements ranging from simple majority to unanimity although unanimous agreements can be reached under weaker consensus requirements we show that pareto inefficiency is associated with non unanimous consent we also study how i the endogenous selection of the legislature s size or ii a sequential choice of collective and particularistic spending eliminates or attenuates the inefficiency problem

political representation and public contracting evidence from municipal legislatures abstract this study examines how partisan representation in multiparty legislatures affects direct expenditures contract allocation design and selection of politically connected firms as suppliers in public procurement for identification i exploit quasi random variation in partisan electoral outcomes near the effective representation thresholds in czech proportional municipal elections my regression discontinuity estimates suggest that partisan representation matters for public procurement for instance if local level political parties barely enter legislatures at the expense of the national parties municipalities decrease their direct procurement spending and allocate fewer contracts to the corporate donors of the national parties fewer contracts are awarded especially in pre election years and in auctions restricting competition among procurement suppliers the results are not associated with higher government fragmentation or selection of more competent candidates but rather with reduced political power of the national parties

an empirical example of the condorcet paradox of voting in a large electorate social choice theory suggests that the occurrence of cyclical collective preferences should be a widespread phenomenon especially in large groups of decision makers however empirical research has so far failed to produce evidence of the existence of many real world examples of such and none in large electorates this paper demonstrates the existence of a real cyclical majority in a poll of danish voters preferred prime minister using pair wise comparisons this result is compared with those of a similar poll but by using different voting methods each resulting in different choices the example demonstrates the empirical reality of cyclical collective preferences and the importance of the choice of institutions

a model of endogenous government formation political parties bargain over the allocation of cabinet portfolios when forming coalition governments noncooperative theories of legislative bargaining typically predict that the formateur enjoys a disproportionate share of government ministry positions however empirical evidence indicates that parties receive shares of portfolios proportional to their share of legislative seats that a government party contributes to the government coalition in support of gamson s law of portfolio allocation this article examines government formation as a process in which both the government coalition and the formateur are determined endogenously in equilibrium if parties have similar preferences over cabinet portfolios the share of seats they are allocated is proportional to the parties sizes

an expenditure based estimate of britain s black economy abstract we estimate the size of britain s black economy defined narrowly as unreported taxable income by using income and expenditure data drawn from the 1982 family expenditure survey our working assumptions are that all income groups report expenditure on food correctly employees in employment report income correctly and that the self employed under report their income we estimate food exependiture equations for all groups and then invert them to arrive at the conclusion that on average true self employment income is 1 55 times as much as reported self employment income this implies that the size of the black economy is about 5 5 percent of gdp

elections coalitions and legislative outcomes predictions of electoral behavior in a multiparty setting should be a function of the voters beliefs about how parties will perform following an election similarly party behavior in a legislature should be a function of electoral promises and rewards we develop a multistage game theoretic model of three party competition under proportional representation the final policy outcome of the game is generated by a noncooperative bargaining game between the parties in the elected legislature this game is essentially defined by the vote shares each party receives in the general election and the parties electoral policy positions at the electoral stage parties and voters are strategic in that they take account of the legislative implications of any electoral outcome we solve for equilibrium electoral positions by the parties and final policy outcomes

why does trend growth affect equilibrium employment a new explanation of an old puzzle that the employment rate appears to respond to changes in trend growth is an enduring macroeconomic puzzle this paper shows that in the presence of a return to experience a slowdown in productivity growth raises reservation wages thereby lowering aggregate employment the paper develops new evidence that shows this mechanism is important for ex

redistributing income under proportional representation although majoritarian decision rules are the norm in legislatures relatively few democracies use simple majority rule at the electoral stage adopting instead some form of multiparty proportional representation moreover aggregate data suggest that average income tax rates are higher and distributions of posttax income flatter in countries with proportional representation than in those with majority rule while there are other differences between these countries this paper explores how variations in the political system per se influence equilibrium redistributive tax rates and income distributions a three party proportional representation model is developed in which taxes are determined through legislative bargaining among successful electoral parties and the economic decision for individuals is occupational choice political economic equilibria for this model and for a two party winner take all majoritarian system are derived and compared

bargaining complexity and the duration of government formation evidence from flemish municipalities government formation processes have attracted a substantial amount of scholarly attention yet only few scholars try to explain the duration of government formations this article extends the latter literature by examining the relation between the complexity of the bargaining environment and the duration of government formations at the local government level we show that increased bargaining complexity reflected in parties ideological similarity a larger number of potential bargaining partners and an election result allowing for a larger set of mathematically feasible governments is associated with longer bargaining delays

black white wage inequality employment rates and incarceration the observed gap in average wages between black men and white men inadequately reflects the relative economic standing of blacks who suffer from a high rate of joblessness the authors estimate the black white gap in hourly wages from 1980 to 1999 adjusting for the sample selection effect of labor inactivity among working age men in 1999 accounting for labor inactivity including prison and jail incarceration leads to an increase of 7 20 in the black white wage gap adjusting for sample selectivity among men ages 22 30 in 1999 increases the wage gap by as much as 58 increasing selection bias which can be attributed to incarceration and conventional joblessness explains about two thirds of the rise in black relative wages among young men between 1985 and 1998 apparent improvement in the economic position of young black men is thus largely an artifact of rising joblessness fueled by the growth in incarceration during the 1990s

stable governments and the allocation of policy portfolios different members of coalition governments typically have responsibility for different aspects or dimensions of policy such responsibilities are allocated as portfolios to government members given a distribution of such portfolios final government policy is derived as the accumulation of individual members decisions in regard to their respective responsibilities we develop a portfolio allocation model of government formation and policy decision in multiparty legislatures in particular we focus on stable portfolio allocations where a stable allocation is one that yields a policy that no legislative coalition is willing or able to overturn several notions of stability are considered and related to the usual concept of the core among the results are that although stable allocations are not guaranteed such allocations can exist with minority governments and that final policy outcomes associated with stable governments need not be centrist

inefficiency in legislative policymaking a dynamic analysis this paper develops an infinite horizon model of public spending and taxation in which policy decisions are determined by legislative bargaining the policy space incorporates both productive and distributive public spending and distortionary taxation the productive spending is investing in a public good that benefits all citizens e g national defense and the distributive spending is district specific transfers e g pork barrel spending investment in the public good creates a dynamic linkage across policymaking periods the analysis explores the dynamics of legislative policy choices focusing on the efficiency of the steady state level of

the budget process and the size of the budget the new congressional budget process provides members of congress with a new set of institutional mechanisms for making budget decisions this article addresses the question of whether or under what conditions rigid application of the new budget process modeled as first selection of the size of the budget and second its division produces smaller budgets than a piecemeal appropriations process in which the size of the budget is determined residually the theoretical result is that the new process sometimes results in relatively large budgets a testable implication of the theory is that given a choice of how stringently the budget process is to be employed members of congress jointly consider preferences and the expected outcomes under available institutional arrangements and select the arrangement usually a rule that yields the most favorable outcome empirical results from the budget process in the house from 1980 to 1983 are generally supportive of the theoretically derived hypothesis of rational choice of institutional arrangements

intermetropolitan variation in the labour force participation rates of white and black men in the united states we decompose the variance in black and white male labour force participation rates across us metropolitan areas in 1990 into three effects that due to variation in labour force participation within labour force categories across metropolitan areas local labour market effects that due to variation in the distribution of those categories across metropolitan areas labour force structure effects and that due to the covariation between these two effects variation in labour force participation rates within labour force categories local labour market effects accounts for 56 per cent of the variance in labour force participation rates across metropolitan areas for white men but over 75 per cent for black men variation in the frequency of membership in each labour force category is a relatively unimportant factor for both groups the covariance between labour force effects and local effects is negligible for black men but accounts for 25 per cent of the intermetropolitan variance in white male participa

the employment of black men trends in wages and employment of black men are contradictory wages are rising and employment is falling the article first describes employment trends using data from the five decennial censuses 1940 80 noting that education is becoming a more important determinant of participation next it is shown that ratios of average wages have not been severely biased by falling participation of those who would earn the least if they worked the final question asks whether falling participation of black men results from deteriorating job opportunities or from falling labor supply falling supply appears to dominate

direct measurement of hidden labour the hidden economy suddenly appeared in economic research in 1977 and has since attracted much attention from economists the central problems are how to assess the scale and causes of this illicit phenomenon many different methods of measurement have been applied to different western countries unfortunately these methods yield extremely different size estimates they also appear to measure different things this paper reviews the methods used and makes a strong case for direct methods an example of a direct method used in the netherlands is presented the results are used to analyse the relation between hidden and regular activities

coalition theory and its applications a survey we survey some of the major advances in coalition theory in recent years we then look at the recent applications of the theory in the area of political economy and touch upon some important theoretical and applied open questions in the field

policy divergence in multicandidate probabilistic spatial voting existing models of multicandidate spatial competition with probabilistic voting typically predict a high degree of policy convergence yet in actual elections candidates advocate quite divergent sets of policies what accounts for this disparity between theory and empirical observation i introduce two variations on the basic probabilistic vote model which may account for candidate policy divergence 1 a model which incorporates candidate specific variables so that candidates may enjoy nonpolicy related electoral advantages or disadvantages 2 a model which allows nonzero correlations between the random terms associated with voters candidate utilities thereby capturing situations where voters view two or more candidates as similar on nonpolicy grounds i report candidate equilibrium analyses for each model which show far greater policy divergence than exists under the standard probabilistic vote model i then analyze the strategic logic which underlies these results

beyond the median voter preferences district heterogeneity and political representation despite the centrality of the median voter prediction in political economy models overwhelming empirical evidence shows that legislators regularly take positions that diverge significantly from the preferences of the median voter in their districts however all these empirical studies to date lack the necessary data to directly measure the preferences of the median voter we utilize a unique data set consisting of individual level voting data that allows us to construct direct measures of voter preferences we find that legislators are most constrained by the preferences of the median voter in homogeneous districts

logrolling under fragmented authoritarianism theory and evidence from china this paper provides a rigorous theoretical and empirical analysis of the effect of logrolling between interest groups on social welfare in a non democratic political system in particular we focus on china where bureaucratic interest groups are separate vertical organizations reaching down from beijing to the provinces and cities the key question in this paper is what are the effects of the logrolling of parochial interest groups on state policies and social welfare in autocracies we address this question both theoretically and empirically the theory predicts a specific distortion in resource allocation because of logrolling while the empirical results confirm the theoretical prediction we find policy outcomes under logrolling are characterized by excessive spending on all the interest groups preferred goods and insufficient spending on public goods we test the existence of logrolling between the ministry of civil affairs and ministry of health in china our result shows logrolling between the two ministries lead to inefficiencies in social security and health care policies

electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization despite common perception existing theoretical literature lacks a complete for mal argument regarding the relationship between the electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization in this paper we build a model that incorporates the disproportionality of the electoral system in a standard downsian electoral competition setup with mainly but not necessarily purely policy motivated parties we first show that in equilibrium platform polarization is decreasing in the level of the electoral rule disproportionality we then argue that the number of parties has a positive effect on platform polarization when polarization is measured by the distance between the two most distant platforms this effect does not hold when polarization is measured by the widely used dalton index constructing a dataset covering more than 300 elections our main theoretical findings are empirically supported pointing towards the electoral rule disproportionality as a major determinant of polarization

incarceration and racial inequality in men s employment to estimate employment population ratios for black and white men with an adjustment for incarceration a factor overlooked by most research on employment inequality the authors combine data from sur

why so much stability one of duncan black s 1958 more important contributions was a classically simple proof that with complex issues and majority voting a stable outcome is unlikely this very simple proof that there would normally be no motion which can get a majority against all others and hence that any possible outcome is dominated by another has been elaborated and made more precise by later work without most improbable conditions endless cycling would be expected this is particularly true when logrolling is present as it normally is if we look at the real world however we observe not only is there no endless cycling but acts are passed with reasonable dispatch and then remain unchanged for very long periods of time thus theory and reality seem to be not only out of contact but actually in sharp conflict it is the purpose of this article to demonstrate that our existing theory when properly looked at does indeed imply a relatively stable outcome to voting in some cases however this stability will not be a true equilibrium because a random member of a large set will be chosen and then that random outcome will be left unchanged for long periods of time it does not dominate all other outcomes but is retained merely because of its particular history there are already several possible explanations for the observed stability in the literature we will take them up as they become relevant to the general line of reasoning i should however warn the reader that my own previous work including joint work with buchanan will play a major role here this may simply reflect egotism but i think that some of the early work which is now partially forgotten can provide solutions for more modern problems much recent public choice work has involved spatial models and these models frequently ignore logrolling the reason presumably is that it is very hard to put logrolling in a two dimensional diagram we shall begin considering such special models and assume that the issues are the sort that does not lead to logrolling and then turn to more complex logrolling problems with respect to the first situation in which logrolling does not occur there is already one possible explanation for the observed stability in the literature

electoral competition and agricultural support in oecd countries agricultural trade protectionism in developed countries remains a politically charged issue yet few studies have attempted to explain the political dynamics behind this important trade issue we consider agricultural subsidies as a type of distributive policy that targets the agricultural sector at the expense of consumers and taxpayers based on cox 1987 1990 and myerson 1993 we argue that electoral systems that encourage politicians to appeal to a narrow constituency tend to have a higher level of agricultural support we test this theoretical hypothesis using oecd agricultural support data disaggregated by commodity and country a cross classified multilevel model is employed to account for complex variation of agricultural support across countries commodities and time our empirical results show that electoral systems that encourage politicians to target narrow broad constituencies are associated with relatively high low levels of agricultural subsidies

comparing electoral systems a geometric analysis this paper constructs a game theoretic model of elections inalternative electoral systems with three or four candidates each electoral system specifies how the platforms of thecandidates and their scores give rise to an outcome whengeometrical analysis shows that two outcomes can competeagainst each other for victory a pivot probability isassociated to that pair each voter is rational and picks thecandidate that maximizes her expected utility which resultsfrom the balancing of her preferences and beliefs about thepivot probabilities candidate positioning is endogenous andthe result of a nash game the possible equilibria arecomputed for plurality and runoff majority systems

labor market dropouts and trends in the wages of black and white men there is continuing debate over whether and to what degree estimations of black white wage convergence are biased because they leave labor market dropouts out of the picture if a high proportion of blacks become discouraged and cease searching for jobs and if those dropouts have on average poor job prospects the average wage of black workers who remain in the labor market will be an upwardly biased estimate of the average wage across the population this paper introduces a simple method of imputing wages to non workers when non workers are accounted for in the calculations real wage growth for prime age black men over the 1969 98 period is reduced approximately 40 and black white wage convergence is reduced by approximately one third the author finds that a source of bias as important as falling employment rates is the growing gap between wages of workers and potential wages of non workers

voting weights and formateur advantages in the formation of coalition governments over the last two decades a large and important literature has emerged that uses game theoretic models of bargaining to study legislative coalitions to test key predictions of these models we examine the composition of coalition governments from 1946 and 2001 these predictions are almost always expressed in terms of parties minimal integer voting weights we calculate such weights for all parliamentary parties in addition we develop a statistical model that nests the predictions of many of these models of the distribution of posts we find that for parties that join but did not form the government there is a linear relationship between their share of the voting weight in parliament and their share of cabinet posts the party that forms the government the formateur receives a substantial bonus relative to its voting weight the latter finding is more consistent with proposal based bargaining models of coalition formation and suggests that parties gain disproportionate power not because of their size but because of their proposal power

empirical evidence of paradoxes of voting in dutch elections in this paper we analyze four national elections held in 1982 1986 1989 and 1994 in the netherlands on the occurrence of the condorcet paradox in addition we investigate these elections on the occurrence of three so called majority plurality paradoxes the first paradox states that a party having a majority over another party may receive less seats the second states that a condorcet winner may not receive the largest number of seats and even may not receive a seat at all the third says that the majority relation may be the reverse of the ranking of parties in terms of numbers of seats

the emergence persistence and recent widening of the racial unemployment gap census data show that the ratio of black to white unemployment rates currently in excess of 2 1 was small or nonexistent before 1940 widened dramatically during the 1940s and 1950s and widened again in the 1980s the authors decompose changes in the unemployment gap over the years 1880 1990 to identify the separate contributions of changes in observable worker characteristics and shifts in labor demand nearly all of the widening of the gap during the 1940s and 1950s can be attributed to regional shifts of workers and declining demand in markets where black workers were concentrated after 1970 improvements in the relative educational status of black workers would have narrowed the unemployment gap slightly but demand shifts adverse to black workers more than canceled out these gains

party policy and campaign costs in a multi constituency model of electoral competition in this essay a multi constituency model of electoral competition was developed under the assumption that party candidates possessed no effective autonomy such a model describes the polar extreme opposite that of the more common single constituency framework in which candidates have complete autonomy the existence of a nash equilibrium to the multi constituency election game was established under the assumption that parties maximize the expected number of winning seats or behaved as pure independents under any other reasonable election goal e g maximize probability of winning a majority of constituencies this existence breaks down the nature of any equilibrium was investigated in some detail and the influence of campaign costs both statutory and non statutory on party behaviour analysed this was found to be qualitatively important in particular differingeconomic resources between parties is sufficient to prevent convergence inpolicy space

making the first move a two stage analysis of the role of formateurs in parliamentary government formation a standard conclusion of theorists who model bargaining as a non cooperative game is that the party designated to make the first move the formateur party will determine the bargaining outcome most empirical studies of parliamentary coalition formation have paid surprisingly little attention to the formation process in this paper we model government formation as a two stage unordered discrete choice problem that better reflects this process the first step involves the selection of a formateur party and the second involves the choice of partners by the predicted formateur we evaluate several hypotheses for the two stages using a data set of all cabinets formed in the western european countries from 1970 to 2006 in our analyses of formateur selection we find that party size is clearly the dominant feature in the second stage we show that when predicting government composition it is fruitful to add information drawn from a first stage analysis

cycles and instability in politics evidence from the 2009 danish municipal elections social choice theory predicts that political processes are prone to instability or outright chaos yet the evidence that actual politics is dominated by the phenomena identified in the literature is somewhat anecdotal and widely contested in order to systematically assess the degree to which politics is affected by cyclicality or chaos as predicted by social choice theorists we study the outcome of the 2009 municipal elections in denmark this yields a total of 97 cases which allows for a systematic assessment of the frequency of cycling through a large n study evidence of four cyclical results is presented

demographic diversity and district level party systems scholars of electoral politics have long argued that the size of a party system is jointly determined by social diversity and district magnitude however no clear consensus exists regarding the best operationalization of the diversity of a society furthermore the relationship between diversity and electoral rules on one hand and the effective number of parties on the other hand has never been tested at the level of the electoral district in a cross national comparative context this article aims to fill both holes and introduces the concept of cross district diversity i argue that the extent of cross district diversity in a country exerts a substantial qualifying impact on the relationship between district level diversity and the effective number of parties support for this finding emerges from a multilevel regression analysis that includes thousands of electoral districts in a diverse set of 29 democracies

shades of brown and green party effects in proportional election systems small parties play an important role in proportional election systems for exam ple the emergence and electoral success of environmental and anti immigration parties have constituted one of the central changes in the political landscape in europe over the last three decades but we do not know if this has actually had any implications for policy since no methods exist for credibly estimating the eect of legislative represen tation in proportional election systems because party representation is not randomly assigned both observable and unobservable factors in uence policy outcomes as well as party representation using a part of the legislative seat allocation that is as good as random i estimate the causal eect of party representation on immigration policy environmental policy and tax policy i use data swedish municipalities where key poli cies for each policy area are under direct jurisdiction of the municipal councils the results show that party representation has a large eect on the rst two policies but not on the tax policy

the black white difference in youth employment evidence for demand side factors the 1980 census reveals a serious lag in the employment performance of young black men relative to young white men with census data we test for demand side causes of this lag using both aggregate data for 94 standard metropolitan statistical areas smsas and disaggregate or individual data from the 1 in 100 public use sample variation across smsas in the employment and wages of white youth provides indicators of the demand conditions for black youth and we estimate that feasible increases in these demand factors would lead to about a 25 increase in the employment of black youth

constraints on cabinet formation in parliamentary democracies coalition theory typically treats political parties involved in government formation in parliamentary democracies as if they were unconstrained players in an institution free world yet actual coalition options are often severely constrained by institutional arrangements and prior commitments we develop a systematic account of different constraints on government formation and examine their frequency across 10 parliamentary democracies hypothetical and empirical examples demonstrate how a small number of constraints can dramatically reduce the range of coalition options and redistribute bargaining power among political parties more adequate coalition theories need to recognize the effects of such constraints and to build on the theoretical lessons of the neoinstitutionalist approach to legislative behavior