schooling inequality and language barriers abstract this article estimates the impact of language barriers on school achievement and the potential ameliorating role of bilingual education using large household data sets from poor rural communities in mexico we find that parental language failure to speak spanish represents an important barrier to the schooling of indigenous children we provide an empirical test suggesting that this largely reflects parental human capital related to culture language rather than unobserved wealth effects using double difference estimators with community fixed effects to address endogenous program placement we demonstrate that schools with bilingual education narrow the gap in the educational performance of children with monolingual mothers versus bilingual and nonindigenous mothers

two party competition with persistent policies abstract when campaigning for reelection incumbent parties promises to voters are constrained by their records in office while opposition parties can use their time away from power to develop new platforms in this paper i introduce incumbent policy persistence in a dynamic game of electoral competition between two policy motivated parties and characterise the long run outcomes of its markov perfect equilibria incumbents reduced policy flexibility leads to alternation in power and policy dynamics that converge to alternations at policies equally preferred by the median voter convergence of policies towards the median is a robust equilibrium outcome while convergence to the median is not while alternations far from the median are never limits of equilibrium dynamics alternations close to the median can be reached only if policy dynamics start exactly there i show that these results are robust to voters being forward looking and to limited policy commitment by parties

why and when does the gender gap reverse diversity goals and the pay premium for high potential women abundant research has documented a gender pay gap women earn less than men all else being equal against the backdrop of an overall female penalty we propose that the widespread adoption of dive

an economic model of representative democracy this paper develops an approach to the study of democratic policy making where politicians are selected by the people from those citizens who present themselves as candidates for public office the approach has a number of attractive features first it is a conceptualization of a pure form of representative democracy in which government is by as well as of the people second the model is analytically tractable being able to handle multidimensional issue and policy spaces very naturally third it provides a vehicle for answering normative questions about the performance of representative democracy

spatial equilibrium with entry this paper examines spatial equilibrium in political competition when established parties choose their platforms competitively while rationally anticipating entry of a vote maximizing third party the resulting equilibrium is substantially different from the hotelling median equilibrium established parties are spatially separated and third parties will generally lose the election this provides one theoretical explanation for the stability of two party systems namely that non cooperative behavior between established parties can effectively prevent third parties from winning

the wage gap between francophones and anglophones a canadian perspective 1970 2000 the wage gap between francophone and anglophone men from 1970 and 2000 fell by 25 percentage points within quebec but only by 10 points canada wide largely because the wages of quebec anglophones fell by 15 points relative to other canadian anglophones accordingly the canadian measure of the francophone gap better reflects the changing welfare of francophones than the quebec measure over half of the reduction in the canadian francophone wage gap is explained by rising francophone education levels in quebec the declining number and relative wages of anglophone workers is best explained by a falling demand for english speaking labour l ecart de salaires entre les hommes francophones et anglophones est tombe de 25 points de pourcentage au quebec entre 1970 et 2000 mais seulement de 10 points a l echelle canadienne largement parce que les salaires des anglophones au quebec sont tombes de 15 points par rapport aux autres canadiens anglophones en consequence la mesure canadienne de l ecart prend mieux la mesure du changement de bien etre des francophones que la mesure quebecoise plus de la moitie de la reduction dans l ecart au niveau canadien s explique par l accroissement des niveaux d education des francophones au quebec le nombre en declin des travailleurs anglophones et la chute de leurs salaires relatifs s expliquent par un declin dans la demande de travailleurs parlant anglais

political reputations and campaign promises we analyze conditions under which candidates reputations may affect voters beliefs over what policy will be implemented by the winning candidate of an election we develop a model of repeated elections with complete information in which candidates are purely ideological we analyze an equilibrium in which voters strategies involve a credible threat to punish candidates who renege on their campaign promises and in which all campaign promises are believed by voters and honored by candidates we characterize the maximal credible campaign promises and find that the degree to which promises are credible in equilibrium is an increasing function of the value of a candidate s reputation jel d8

blind ambition the effects of social networks and institutional sex composition on the job search outcomes of elite coeducational and women s college graduates in this paper i develop a perspective on women s career attainment focused on how employers salary offers may be constructed based on their assumptions regarding women s access to comparative salary information therefore although the use of social networks in job search may enhance women s actual knowledge of prevailing wages i hypothesize that institutional characteristics that employers could assume to constrain women s networks and concomitant access to salary information will directly affect salary offers as well as moderating the influence of network ties on pay to test this perspective job search outcomes of women attending elite coeducational and women s colleges were examined regarding the number of offers obtained women who consulted with proportionally more male peer and employed adult male advice ties received significantly more job offers than women using fewer male advice contacts with regard to salary offers this study reveals an institutional sex composition effect women exiting single sex institutions i e women s colleges received significantly lower salary offers than women from coeducational schools even after accounting for human capital job characteristics and institutional reputation the effects of social networks on pay were moderated by institutional sex composition such that women exiting women s colleges received lower returns in the form of salary to their cross gender advice ties than did women from a matched coeducational institution implications of these results for theories of social capital and women s occupational attainment are discussed

credibility and policy convergence in a two party system with rational voters the traditional approach to modeling political parties behavior based upon the contribution of anthony downs 1957 assumes that the parties unique objective is to win elections thus they maximize their popularity the crucial implication of this assumption for a two party system is that if the two parties have the same information about voters preferences full convergence of policies results from electoral competition this is the crucial implication of the median voter theorem more generally it may be argued that different parties are motivated differently because they represent different constituencies parties may not care only about winning elections per se but also about the quality of the policies resulting from an election in this case the candidates of the two parties view winning an election not only as a goal per se but also as a means of implementing a better policy for their respective constituencies this paper shows that electoral competitions imply dynamic inconsistency if the voters are modeled as rational and forwardlooking agents and parties do not care exclusively about being elected but also about which policy to implement once elected the dynamic inconsistency arises as follows the parties have an incentive to announce convergent platforms to increase their chances of election however if the elected party is not committed to its electoral platform it has an incentive to follow its most preferred policy rather than the policy announced in its platform if voters are rational they account for this incentive thus in general in a one shot electoral game the only timeconsistent equilibrium is one in which no convergence is possible the two parties follow their most preferred policies and the voters rationally expect this outcome full convergence of parties platforms results only as a limiting case when the parties are completely indifferent with respect to the quality of the policies resulting from the election thus these results differ from the existing literature on ideologically motivated politicians for instance donald wittman 1977 1983 randall calvert 1985 which implicitly assumes the possibility of binding commitments to electoral platforms complete or partial policy convergence can be the outcome of political competition if the interaction between the parties and the voters is modeled as an infinitely repeated game in fact if the candidates have concave objective functions the welfare maximizing policy rule implies a complete convergence of parties policies however this cooperative and agreed upon policy may or may not be sustainable as a subgame perfect equilibrium depending on parameter values in particular it depends on the discount rates of the two parties the degree of polarization of their preferences and the relative popu graduate school of industrial administration carnegie mellon university pittsburgh pa 15213 and national bureau of economic research cambridge ma 02138 this paper is based upon a chapter of my unpublished doctoral dissertation at harvard university i am greatly indebted to jeffrey sachs for directing my attention toward these issues and for many conversations i also wish to thank andrew abel dilip abreu olivier blanchard ramon caminal andrew caplin alex cukierman morris fiorina benjamin friedman herschel grossman howard rosenthal and the referees for very useful comments the responsibilitv af anv n mtnkieis af calrirp nfnlv mine the result of policy convergence in a two party system is more general than the median voter theorem for discussions of convergence results not at the median see john ledyard 1984 peter coughlin 1984 coughlin and shmuel nitzan 1981 melvin hinich 1977 for earlier work on spatial competition see richard mckelvey 1975 hinich ledyard and peter ordeshook 1972 1973 and the references quoted therein the present paper focuses on the result of convergence rather than on the median voter theorem per se

equilibria and efficiency in bilingual labour markets abstract we consider a labour market where two languages are commonly in use and each individual may make a costly investment to learn the language which is not his or her mother tongue language skills are productive in a human capital sense and can also be used to signal unobservable traits to employers due to the informational asymmetry between workers and employees the equilibrium rate of bilingualism in the economy may exceed the socially efficient level on the other hand the spillovers associated with second language acquisition may imply there is not enough bilingualism relative to the social optimum we consider the circumstances under which either the signalling or the network welfare effects dominate in equilibrium depending on the parameter values of the model policies of either encouraging or discouraging the investment in language skills may be welfare enhancing

information and strategic political polarisation we develop a model of electoral competition in which two opportunistic candidates select their policy position and invest in quality policy positions are observed and during the campaign the press reveals some information about quality we demonstrate that when information is imperfect the blackdowns median voter theorem fails to hold for intermediate information levels the unique equilibrium is such that candidates propose policies different from the median voter s bliss point by contrast convergence to the median occurs when quality is almost always or almost never revealed we also show that a profit maximising press may collect more information than socially optimal during the 1995 electoral campaign in belgium the vld a traditionally right wing

bilingualism and network externalities the authors develop a model in which the benefit of language acquisition is increasing in the number of individuals who speak the language this gives rise to a network externality and if language acquisition is costly the language acquisition decisions by individuals may be inefficient if the available policy instruments affect all members of a language group homogeneously then policies that effectively subsidize language acquisition are warranted only for the majority language

is polarization bad abstract the adverse effects of political and social polarization on government policies are empirically well documented yet some democracies seem to cope well or even benefit from diversity in this paper we develop a theoretical model to show how elections in polarized societies contribute to improve quality of government we consider both polarization among citizens and political actors political polarization where the second is endogenously determined by parties competing to win the support of the majority of voters we find that more heterogeneous societies are more likely to be politically polarized but that the divergence of positions in the political arena helps the electorate control government corruption by raising electoral stakes our results which are consistent with the findings of a substantial empirical literature suggest that when funneled into political competition polarization may help improving quality of government and policies

english as a lingua franca facts benefits and costs how much further can we expect the spread of english to go what are the gains what are the costs the paper first tries to identify the areas of life where english already serves as a lingua franca in the world and those where the language faces sharp competition the discussion goes on to show that the future advance of english will depend heavily on the motives to learn the other major languages in the world as well the cultural market is the single one where the extraordinary progress of english threatens to go too far

industrialization and bilingualism in india bilingualism is a distinct and important form of human capital in linguistically diverse countries when communication among workers increases productivity there can be economic incentives to learn a second language i study how the growth of industrial employment increased bilingualism in india between 1931 and 1961 during that period indian factories were linguistically mixed i exploit industrial clustering and sectoral demand growth for identification the effect on bilingualism was strongest in import competing districts and among local linguistic minorities bilingualism was mainly the result of learning rather than than migration or assimilation and was not a byproduct of becoming literate my results shed new light on human capital investment in developing economies and on the long run evolution of languages and cultures

the hidden cost of raising voters expectations reference dependence and politicians credibility abstract two politicians compete to get elected each politician is characterized by a valence which is unobservable to the electorate and can take one of two values high or low the representative voter prefers politicians with high valence but random shocks may lead him to appoint a low valence politician politicians make statements concerning their valence if the voter is a standard expected utility maximizer politicians statements lack any credibility and no information transmission takes place by introducing reference dependence and loss aversion we show that truthful communication is possible in equilibrium and we characterize the conditions under which it can arise intuitively these behavioral biases introduce a cost of overstating one s valence as overstatements may shift the electorate s preferences toward better skilled opponents

a theory of political cycles abstract we study how the proximity of elections affects policy choices in a model in which policymakers want to improve their reputation to increase their reelection chances policymakers equilibrium decisions depend on both their reputation and the proximity of the next election typically incentives to influence election results are stronger closer to the election for a given reputation level as argued in the political cycles literature and these political cycles are less important when the policymaker s reputation is better our analysis sheds light on other agency relationships in which part of the compensation is decided upon infrequently

linguistic equilibrium with local and world languages challenges of globalisation in this paper we introduce a model of a society with two distinct linguistic groups each consisting of heterogeneous individuals speaking their native language there is also a world language so that every individual is faced with four learning choices to study the other local language only to study the world language only to study both and to refrain from studying either language we examine the nash equilibiria of that game determined by communicative benefits selten pool and address inefficiency of the equilibrium we then show that government subsidies for language learning could serve as welfare enhancing policies finally we analyze the three language policy certain variants of which have been adopted in multilingual countries or regions

native language spoken language translation and trade we construct new series for common native language and common spoken language for 195 countries which we use together with series for common official language and linguistic proximity in order to draw inferences about 1 the aggregate impact of all linguistic factors on bilateral trade 2 the separate role of ease of communication as distinct from ethnicity and trust and 3 the contribution of translation and interpreters to ease of communication the results show that the impact of linguistic factors all together is at least twice as great as the usual dummy variable for common language resting on official language would say in addition ease of communication plays a distinct role apart from ethnicity and trust and so far as ease of communication enters translation and interpreters are significant finally emigrants have much to do with the role of ethnicity and trust in linguistic influence

competence and ideology we develop a dynamic repeated election model in which citizen candidates are distinguished by both their ideology and valence voters observe an incumbent s valence and policy choices but only know the challenger s party our model provides a rich set of novel results in contrast to existing predictions from static models we prove that dynamic considerations make higher valence incumbents more likely to compromise and win re election even though they compromise to more extreme policies consequently we find that the correlation between valence and extremist policies rises with office holder seniority this result may help explain previous empirical findings despite this result we establish that the whole electorate gains from improvements in the distribution of valences in contrast fixing average valence the greater dispersion in valence associated with a high valence political elite always benefits the median voter but can harm a majority of voters when voters are sufficiently risk averse we then consider interest groups igs or activists who search for candidates with better skills we derive a complete theoretical explanation for the intuitive conjectures that policies are more extreme when igs and activists have more extreme ideologies and that such extremism reduces the welfare of all voters

economics and english language growth in economic perspective and the lord said look they are one people and they have all one language and this is only the beginning of what they will do nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them come let us go down and confuse their language there so that they will not understand one another s speech genesis 11 6 7 the bond of language is perhaps the strongest and most lasting that can unite men tocqueville 1835 1840 2000 p 29 i am a friend to neology it is the only way to give to a language copiousness and euphony without it we should still be held to the vocabulary of alfred or of ulphilas and held to their science also thomas jefferson to john adams august 15 1820 emphasis in the original polonius what do you read my lord hamlet words words words act ii 2 1 introductionlanguage use is a distinguishing characteristic of homo sapiens 1 human beings are programmed to construct hundreds of thousands of words from a comparative handful of sounds a phenomenon known to linguists as duality pinker 1996 from a purely economic perspective language can be seen as an exchange facilitating institution just as important in its own right as other more deeply studied underpinnings of orderly markets such as clearly defined property rights and rules for enforcing contracts exchange of course is not the only economic function of language since language can be used for many purposes including coercion arrest that man the paradigm of exchange has nonetheless proven analytically fruitful and indeed has been applied by economists to help explain the functioning of political markets patterns of trade within the family crime drug addiction and many other seemingly noneconomic aspects of human behavior e g becker 1976 1996 becker and murphy 2001 viewing language as an exchange friendly institution locates the study of its growth and impact squarely within the singular perspective of economic science 2 this analytical framework in no way diminishes the importance of more traditional approaches to the subject it simply calls attention to an emerging literature in which economists have begun colonizing the study of language 3language as friedrich von hayek 1960 stressed repeatedly is an example of spontaneous order in other words language was not created deliberately it evolved in the absence of human plan or conscious design viewed in that perspective the evolution of language has much in common with that of another exchange friendly institution money both of these institutions emerged spontaneously as rational individuals searched for mutually acceptable ways of communicating and of acting on their natural propensities to truck barter and exchange one thing for another smith 1776 1976 bk i chap ii p 17 over time independent responses to novel situations produced words and rules for their use that facilitated communication in much the same way that attempts to cope with the rarity of dual coincidences of wants led to the selection of one commodity as money as hayek 1988 p 106 puts it trade migration and the increase and mixture of population must not only have opened people s eyes but also loosened their tongues it was not simply that tradesmen inevitably encountered and sometimes mastered foreign languages during their travels but that this must have forced them also to ponder the different connotations of key words if only to avoid either affronting their hosts or misunderstanding the terms of agreements to exchange and thereby come to know new and different views about the most basic matters 4 what materialized over millennia as a result of competition among alternative media of exchange and means of communication were efficient monies and languages in modern parlance language is the archetypal network good i

incumbent performance and electoral control in the pure theory of electoral competition citizens compare the platforms of the candidates and vote for the one whose platform is preferred candidate strategies are identified with promises about future performance in office models of this sort have been developed in both static mckelvey 1975 and dynamic kramer 1977 i settings and all appear to have the property that if the set of alternatives is large enough in some sense equilibrium platforms rarely exist but these models have another feature that is quite as disturbing as their instability in the static setting discussed by mckelvey little attention is paid to the possibility that once in office the politician s preferences may diverge from those of his constituents and that he may therefore choose policies at variance from his platform instead it is simply assumed that promises will be kept whether or not such behavior is congruent with the interest of the officeholder it is sometimes argued that an enforcement mechanism may exist to discipline politicians for failing to keep promises but without a specification of the mechanism it is not obvious that it would be in the interests of the

once in the door gender tryouts and the initial salaries of managers although women pursue managerial credentials at nearly the same rate as men gender disparities in wages exist because of the shortfall in wages women sustain relative to men at the onset of their careers this article develops a tryout approach to test for the presence of demand side contributions to initial wage inequality while also developing and testing theory on why it may be lessened through internships using detailed data on graduates from an elite management program from 2009 2010 our analyses reveal that internships are associated with the gap in men s and women s initial salaries for men there is no difference in salary offers from employers where an internship occurs versus one where an internship does not occur however women receive higher salaries from employers where an internship first takes place this paper was accepted by olav sorenson organizations

optimal retention in agency problems this paper studies the interaction between a single long lived principal and a series of short lived agents in the presence of both moral hazard and adverse selection we assume that the principal can influence the agents behavior only through her choice of a retention rule this rule is further required to be sequentially rational i e no precommitment is allowed we provide general conditions under which equilibria exist where a the principal adopts a cut off rule under which agents are retained only when the reward they generate exceeds a critical bound and b agents separate according to type with better agents taking superior actions we show that in equilibrium a retained agent s productivity is necessarily declining over time but that retained agents are also more productive on average than untried agents due to selection effects finally we show that for each given type agents of that type are more productive in the presence of adverse selection than when there is pure moral hazard i e when that type is the sole type of agent in the model nonetheless adding uncertainty about agent types cannot benefit the principal except in uninteresting cases

are moderates better representatives than extremists a theory of indirect representation few if any elected representatives are capable of unilaterally implementing their platforms rather they choose between options generated by other actors and or external events we present a theory of voters preferences over representatives who will cast votes on their behalf and show that in this setting voters preferences over candidates platforms will not look like voters preferences over policies we demonstrate that these induced preferences for representation tend to favor more extreme representatives and we present two models of electoral competition in which induced preferences over representatives lead to elite polarization

political competition party polarization and government performance lack of party competition may impair government efficiency if the voters are ideologically predisposed to cast their votes in favor of one political party they may reelect an underperforming incumbent party polarization may magnify this effect since the median voter faces a higher cost of selecting a better but ideologically distant incumbent alternatively if the electorate is evenly divided between parties polarization may induce parties to invest more effort in improving their election prospects the current paper analyzes efficiency in norwegian local governments efficiency has been measured by means of panel data on government service output over a 10 year period electoral dominance has been measured as number of elections wherein one party bloc receives at least 60 of the votes measured over six consecutive elections party polarization is defined as the ideological distance between the two party blocs and it is measured on basis of survey data on the ideological preferences of elected politicians lack of party competition reduces efficiency the effect being stronger in governments where more party polarization exists these agency losses are larger in high revenue municipalities

electoral ambiguity and political representation we introduce a downsian model in which policy relevant information is revealed to the elected politician after the election the electorate benefits from giving the elected politician discretion to adapt policies to his information but limits on discretion are desirable when politicians do not share the electorate s policy preferences optimal political representation generally consists of a mixture of the delegate no discretion and trustee full discretion models ambiguous electoral platforms are essential for achieving beneficial representation nevertheless electoral competition does not ensure optimal representation the winning candidate s platform is generally overly ambiguous while our theory rationalizes a positive correlation between ambiguity and electoral success it shows that the relationship need not be causal

bending the pipeline executive search and gender inequality in hiring for top management jobs we study the sources of women s underrepresentation in hiring for top management jobs by focusing on the context of executive search using data that include proprietary information on 10 970 individuals considered by a search firm we examine the sources of the low proportion of women placed in senior roles contrary to received wisdom we find limited evidence that demand side screeners strongly contribute to gender disadvantage in this setting what gender differences exist tend to play out at the start of the hiring process and are driven both by supply side and demand side actors once considered for a position women are no less likely than men to be hired though they are slightly less likely to be interviewed by the search firm our findings highlight the theoretical importance of disentangling candidates self steering behavior from the pipeline bending of hiring agents we discuss the implications of our results for understanding gender inequality at upper echelons of the labor market this p

market standards in financial contracting the euro s effect on debt securities abstract the introduction of the euro ushered in a rise to dominance of english contract law in european debt securities corporate issuers in the euro zone chose english law significantly more often than a control group from other european countries the euro effect on choice of law is particularly strong for debt securities in local markets that arguably were most affected by the euro the euro effect is not explained by differences in the suitability of english law compared to other laws a change in issuer composition or debt securities types and the greater market share of british and american underwriters we argue that increased standardization benefits network effects from a boost in cross border investment provide the best account of why english law conquered the european debt securities market

signaling character in electoral competition we study a one dimensional hotelling downs model of electoral competition with the following innovation a fraction of candidates have character and are exogenously committed to a campaign platform this is unobservable to voters character is desirable and a voter s utility is a convex combination of standard policy preferences and her assessment of a candidate s character this structure induces a signaling game between strategic candidates and voters since a policy platform affects voters utilities not only directly but also indirectly through inferences about a candidate s character the model generates a number of predictions starting with a failure of the median voter theorem jel d72 d82

the political economy of dynamic elections accountability commitment and responsiveness we survey the literature on dynamic elections in the traditional settings of spatial preferences and rent seeking under perfect and imperfect monitoring of politicians we define stationary electoral equilibrium which encompasses notions used by barro 1973 ferejohn 1986 banks and sundaram 1998 and others we show that repeated elections mitigate the commitment problems of politicians and voters and that a responsive democracy result holds under general conditions term limits however attenuate the responsiveness finding we also touch on related applied work and we point to areas for fruitful future research including the connection between dynamic models of politics and economics

markets and linguistic diversity abstract producers of cultural goods and media products can make their specific contents available to their audiences and readerships only through a particular language the choice of language is a non trivial decision in markets with bilingual or multilingual consumers in this paper i argue that the very existence of bilingual consumers may seriously bias market outcomes against minority languages in particular i show that the level of linguistic diversity determined by profit maximizing firms tends to be inefficiently low except when and where the cost of producing a second linguistic version becomes sufficiently low thus the model provides an efficiency argument supporting policies that protect the presence of minority languages in these markets

rational voting and candidate entry under plurality rule we analyze a formal model of electoral competition under plurality rule that is characterized by two novel features first rather than assuming a fixed field of candidates we allow candidates to make decisions regarding entry as well as location second voters in our model are strategically rational that is they maximize utility over expected policy outcomes rather than simply voting for the ideologically closest candidate given these assumptions all equilibria in this model are such that the set of entrants locates at the median voter s ideal point this result stands in sharp contrast to earlier models of multicandidate competition in which entry is not allowed and voters vote sincerely

key currencies after the euro on january 1 1999 eleven european countries introduced a new european currency the euro which by mid 2002 will lead to the complete withdrawal of their existing national currencies this change is a bold monetary experiment of unprecedented magnitude it will require substantial changes both in the execution of day to day economic transactions and in the overall functioning of european economies an enormous amount of effort has been devoted to making the change as smooth as possible and to understanding the consequences of the change within europe

not just a formality pay system formalization and sex related earnings effects drawing on neoclassical economic internal labor market and devaluation theories we examine how the sex composition of jobs and the sex of individual workers affect earnings depending upon the formalization of the pay type using personnel data for over 8 000 employees we confirm the existence of a negative relationship between earnings and the proportion female in a job we also find that for less formalized pay types cash incentive bonuses sex composition and individual sex effects are larger than for more formalized pay merit raises and base salary together these findings support devaluation explanations suggest that incentive bonuses may widen the earnings gap between women and men and have implications for the design of pay structures in organizations

job search and network composition implications of the strength of weak ties hypothesis workers find jobs through personal contacts weak and strong ties and formal sources alternative formulations of the strength of weak ties hypothesis suggest 1 weak ties relay job offers more frequently than strong ties or 2 weak tie offers are drawn from a better distribution a formal model shows that both formulations imply a correlation between network composition and a job seeker s minimum acceptable wage however the use of a weak tie is never associated with higher expected wages under the firstformulation and is only sometimes associated with higher expected wages under the secondformulation these results suggest that researchers shouldfocus on job seekers network structures

spatial models of political competition under plurality rule a survey of some explanations of the number of candidates and the positions they take this paper surveys work that uses spatial models of political competition to explain the number of candidates and the positions that they take in plurality rule elections

candidates credibility and re election incentives i study elections between citizen candidates who cannot make binding policy commitments before taking office but who are accountable to voters due to the possibility of re election in each period a representative voter chooses among heterogeneous candidates with known policy preferences the elected candidate chooses the policy to implement and how much rent seeking to engage in when in office as the voter decides both which candidate to elect and subsequently whether the candidate is retained this framework integrates elements of electoral competition and electoral accountability i show that in the best stationary equilibrium when utility functions are concave over policy non median candidates are elected over candidates with policy preferences more closely aligned with the voter in this equilibrium there are two candidates who are elected at some history and the policies these candidates implement in office do not converge this divergence incentivizes candidates to engage in less rent seeking increasing voter welfare copyright 2013 oxford university press

separate and unequal occupation establishment sex segregation and the gender wage gap the authors report the first large scale empirical investigation of within job wage differences between men and women in the same occupation and establishment using data first on blue collar and clerical employees from 16 u s industries in 1974 83 and second on employees in 10 professional and administrative occupations the authors report three findings first wage differences at the occupation establishment level were small even without controls for individual level characteristics hence within job wage discrimination was much less important than occupation establishment segregation for observed wage differences second establishment segregation was an important cause although not as important as occupational segregation of wage differences third establishment segregation was extensive as was occupational segregation

a model of political competition with citizen candidates the authors develop a model of electoral competition in which citizens choose whether or not to run as candidates a winner implements her favorite policy the equilibrium number of candidates depends negatively on the cost of running and positively on the benefits of winning for some parameter values all equilibria under plurality rule have exactly two candidates whose positions are distinct two candidate elections are more likely under plurality rule than under a runoff system the candidates positions are less differentiated under a runoff system there exist equilibria under both systems in which some candidates have no chance of winning

electoral rules and political selection theory and evidence from a field experiment in afghanistan voters commonly face a choice between competent candidates and those with policy preferences similar to their own this article explores how electoral rules such as district magnitude mediate this trade off and affect the composition of representative bodies and the quality of policy outcomes we show formally that anticipation of bargaining over policy causes voters in elections with multiple single member districts to prefer candidates with polarized policy positions over more competent candidates results from a unique field experiment in afghanistan are consistent with these predictions specifically representatives selected by elections with a single multi member district are better educated and exhibit less extreme policy preferences

learning about challengers we examine a political agency problem in repeated elections where an incumbent runs against a challenger from the opposing party whose policy preferences are unknown by voters we first ask do voters benefit from attracting a pool of challengers with more moderate ideologies when voters and politicians are patient moderating the ideology distribution of centrist and moderate politicians those close to the median voter reduces voter welfare by reducing an extreme incumbent s incentives to compromise we then ask do voters benefit from informative signals about a challenger s true ideology we prove that giving voters informative but sufficiently noisy signals always harm voters because they make it harder for incumbents to secure re election