environmental policy and exports evidence from chinese cities we study environmental regulation and its role for trade in china specifically we assess the effectiveness of an environmental policy in china that introduced stricter regulations on sulfur dioxide so2 emissions in targeted cities to identify the causal effect of this policy on exports we use sectoral export data for a panel of chinese cities and exploit variations in exports between cities and sectors over time and in a second step between firm types we find a relative fall in sectoral exports in targeted cities after the implementation of the policy which is sharper the more polluting the industry further we find that the observed effect is mainly driven by privately owned firms whereas exports of state owned firms seem to be unaffected by the new policy this finding is consistent with the preferential political treatment of state owned firms in china

partial fiscal decentralization and demand responsiveness of the local public sector theory and evidence from norway this paper provides an empirical test of a principal tenet of fiscal federalism that spending discretion when granted to localities allows public good levels to adjust to suit local demands the test is based on a simple model of partial fiscal decentralization under which earmarking of central transfers for particular uses is eliminated allowing funds to be spent according to local tastes the greater role of local demand determinants following partial decentralization is confirmed by the paper s empirical results which show the effects of the 1986 norwegian reform

on the endogenous allocation of decision powers in federal structures abstract this paper provides a political economy explanation of the degree of centralization in economic policy making to determine which policies are to be centralized regions select representatives who then negotiate the degree of centralization and the regional cost shares of centrally decided policies we show that the resulting degree of centralization is suboptimally low voters strategically delegate to representatives who are averse to public spending and hence prefer decentralized decisions in order to reduce their region s cost share when spillovers are asymmetric strategic delegation is stronger at the periphery than at the center

centralized versus decentralized provision of local public goods a political economy approach abstract this paper takes a fresh look at the trade off between centralized and decentralized provision of local public goods it argues that the sharing of the costs of local public spending in a centralized system will create a conflict of interest between citizens in different jurisdictions when spending decisions are made by a legislature of locally elected representatives this conflict of interest will play out in the legislature depending on precisely how the legislature behaves the result may be excessive public spending or allocations of public goods characterized by uncertainty and misallocation across districts the extent of the conflict of interest between districts is affected by spillovers and differences in tastes for public spending thus the relative performance of centralized and decentralized systems depends upon spillovers and differences in tastes for public spending but for different reasons than suggested in the existing literature

does conditionality work a test for an innovative us aid scheme performance based aid has been proposed as an alternative to the failed traditional approach whereby donors make aid conditional on the reform promises of recipient countries however hardly any empirical evidence exists on whether ex post rewards are effective in inducing reforms we attempt to fill this gap by investigating whether the millennium challenge corporation mcc was successful in promoting better control of corruption we employ a difference in difference in differences ddd approach considering different ways of defining the treatment group as well as different time periods during which incentive effects could have materialized we find evidence of strong anticipation effects immediately after the announcement of the mcc while increasing uncertainty about the timing and amount of mcc aid appears to have weakened the incentive to fight corruption over time

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

bargaining and value we present and analyze a model of noncooperative bargaining among n participants applied to situations describable as games in coalitional form this leads to a unified solution theory for such games that has as special cases the shapley value in the transferable utility tu case the nash bargaining solution in the pure bargaining case and the recently introduced maschler owen consistent value in the general nontransferable utility ntu case moreover we show that any variation in a certain class of our bargaining procedure which generates the shapley value in the tu setup must yield the consistent value in the general ntu setup

environmental regulations and productivity growth the case of fossil fueled electric power generation this paper measures and analyzes the effect of sulfur dioxide emission restrictions on the rate of productivity growth in the electric power industry over the 1973 79 business cycle a firm specific measure of regulatory intensity is developed which depends on the severity of the emission standard the extent of enforcement and the unconstrained emission rate relevant to each utility the results indicate that emission regulations result in significantly higher generating costs primarily from the increased use of low sulfur fuels the average rate of productivity growth was reduced by 0 59 percentage points per year for constrained utilities

neoclassical growth the j curve for abatement and the inverted u curve for pollution abstract this paper reexamines the neoclassical environmental growth model of forster to gain insights into the dynamic relationships among pollution abatement effort and economic development whereas the model has heretofore been used to examine steady state levels of capital consumption and environmental quality it also provides a theoretical basis for recent empirical research on j curves for abatement effort and inverted u curves for pollution

does hazardous waste matter evidence from the housing market and the superfund program this paper uses the housing market to develop estimates of the local welfare impacts of superfund sponsored cleanups of hazardous waste sites we show that if consumers value the cleanups then the hedonic model predicts that they will lead to increases in local housing prices and new home construction as well as the migration of individuals that place a high value on environmental quality to the areas near the improved sites we compare housing market outcomes in the areas surrounding the first 400 hazardous waste sites chosen for superfund cleanups to the areas surrounding the 290 sites that narrowly missed qualifying for these cleanups we find that superfund cleanups are associated with economically small and statistically insignificant changes in residential property values property rental rates housing supply total population and types of individuals living near the sites these findings are robust to a series of specification checks including the application of a regression discontinuity design based on knowledge of the selection rule overall the preferred estimates suggest that the local benefits of superfund cleanups are small and appear to be substantially lower than the 43 million mean cost of superfund cleanups

majority voting with single crossing preferences we clarify and extend a number of sufficient conditions for the existence of a majority voting equilibrium on one dimensional choice domains these conditions variously stated in the previous literature all impose order restrictions on voter preferences for instance monotone marginal rates of substitution which we show to imply or be equivalent to a general ordinal version of the single crossing condition this simple property is economically intuitive and easily checked in applications this ease of application is demonstrated through an examination of voting models of redistributive income taxation and trade union bargaining behaviour

delegation and threat in bargaining abstract two principals nations appoint one agent each to bargain over the provision of a public good two institutional set ups are studied each with a different level of authority given to the agents here authority means the right to decide the own side s provision if negotiations break down in equilibrium the principals choose agents with preferences differing from their own the low authority equilibrium pareto dominates with regard to the principals the case of the principals deciding on the provisions simultaneously autarchy the high authority equilibrium is pareto dominated by the low authority equilibrium and it may even be dominated by autarchy journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c71 and c72

optimal fiscal federalism in the presence of tax competition abstract this paper models the optimal division of public goods provision between central and regional governments in an economy with interregional tax competition regional provision is inefficient because governments compete for scarce capital by lowering their capital taxes and public good levels to inefficiently low levels on the other hand central provision is inefficient because it is determined by the minimum winning coalition within a legislature the optimal degree to which public good provision should be decentralized depends on a tradeoff between these inefficiencies in our main model complete centralization is never optimal regional governments should supply some public goods

on government centralization and fiscal referendums abstract several authors have argued that a centralization of fiscal powers in a federation is less likely to occur if citizens have to approve a change in the assignments of responsibilities by a popular referendum this outcome may be due to the fact that logrolling is more difficult under direct than under representative democracy it may also be caused by citizens fear that a centralization of fiscal authority facilitates the extraction of rents by the government or the legislature in this paper we test the hypothesis that centralization is less likely under referendum decision making in the unique institutional setting of switzerland using a panel of swiss cantons from 1980 to 1998 the empirical analysis provides evidence that referendums induce less centralization of fiscal activities

immigration and housing rents in american cities is there a local economic impact of immigration immigration pushes up rents and housing values in us destination cities the positive association of rent growth and immigrant inflows is pervasive in time series for all metropolitan areas i use instrumental variables based on a shift share of national levels of immigration into metropolitan areas an immigration inflow equal to 1 of a city s population is associated with increases in average rents and housing values of about 1 the results suggest an economic impact that is an order of magnitude bigger than that found in labor markets

economic theories of the break up and integration of nations abstract this paper surveys the recent political economy literature on the size distribution of nations the main themes of this literature are 1 a the spread of democracy leads to the creation of too many sovereign states 2 b the extent of factor mobility plays a key role in determining the incentives towards separation or integration 3 c economic integration through the development of international trade may require greater political integration to create and effectively maintain a level playing field in international trade at the same time economic integration by reducing the economic costs of separation increases the incentives towards political separation

offshoring tasks and the skill wage pattern the paper investigates the relationship between offshoring wages and the occupational task profile using rich individual level panel data our main results suggest that when only considering within industry changes in offshoring we identify a moderate wage reduction due to offshoring for low skilled workers though wage effects in relation to the task profile of occupations are not estimated with sufficient precision however when allowing for cross industry effects of offshoring i e allowing for labor mobility across industries negative wage effects of offshoring are quite substantial and depend strongly on the task profile of workers occupations a higher degree of interactivity and in particular non routine content effectively shields workers against the negative wage impact of offshoring

electoral systems and public spending we study the effects of electoral institutions on the size and composition of public expenditure in oecd and latin american countries we emphasize the distinction between purchases of goods and services which are easier to target geographically and transfers which are easier to target across social groups we present a theoretical model in which voters anticipating government policymaking under different electoral systems have an incentive to elect representatives more prone to transfer public good spending in proportional majoritarian systems the model also predicts higher total primary spending in proportional majoritarian systems when the share of transfer spending is high low after dee ning rigorous measures of proportionality to be used in the empirical investigation we e nd considerable support for our predictions

paying a visit the dalai lama effect on international trade is political compliance a precondition for healthy trade relations with china the chinese government frequently threatens that meetings between its trading partners officials and the dalai lama will be met with animosity and ultimately harm trade ties with china we run a gravity model of exports to china from 159 partner countries between 1991 and 2008 to test the extent to which bilateral tensions affect trade with autocratic china in particular we investigate empirically whether countries that receive the dalai lama despite china s opposition experience a significant reduction of their exports to china in order to account for the potential endogeneity of meetings with the dalai lama the number of tibet support groups and the travel pattern of the tibetan leader are used as instruments our empirical results support the idea that countries officially receiving the dalai lama at the highest political level are punished through a reduction of their exports to china however this dalai lama effect is only observed for the hu jintao era and not for earlier periods furthermore we find that this effect is mainly driven by reduced exports of machinery and transport equipment and that it disappears two years after a meeting took place

the breakup of nations a political economy analysis this paper develops a model of the breakup or unification of nations in each nation the decision to separate is taken by majority voting a basic trade off between the efficiency gains of unification and the costs in terms of loss of control on political decisions is highlighted the model emphasizes political conflicts over redistribution policies the main results of the paper are i when income distributions vary across regions and the efficiency gains from unification are small separation occurs in equilibrium and ii when all factors of production are perfectly mobile all incentives for separation disappear i introduction following the demise of communism the entire map of europe from the atlantic coast to the urals is being redrawn and issues of separation unification and the redrawing of borders are yet again at the forefront of european concerns many of the issues raised by this process are primarily of a political cultural or linguistic nature however there are also economic considerations that bear on this problem the objective of this paper is to analyze some important economic and political determinants of the process of unification and separation of democratic nations the starting point of our analysis is to suppose that from an economic efficiency point of view separation of nations is never desirable a unified nation is always more efficient since free trade among regions is guaranteed duplication costs in defense and law enforcement are avoided and local public goods provision such as transportation and communication networks or common standards can be coordinated furthermore any benefits of decentralization that might be obtained in a world with several nations may also be achieved within a unified nation by replicating the administrative structure of the world with several

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

the economics of split ticket voting in representative democracies in u s elections voters often vote for candidates from different parties for president and congress voters also express dissatisfaction with the performance of congress as a whole and satisfaction with their own representative the authors develop a model of split ticket voting in which government spending is financed by uniform taxes the benefits from this spending are concentrated while the model generates split ticket voting overall spending is too high only if the president s powers are limited overall spending is too high in a parliamentary system the authors model can be used as the basis of an argument for term limits copyright 1997 by american economic association

the political economy of policy centralization direct versus representative democracy abstract this paper analyzes policy centralization outcomes in a two jurisdiction model of public good provision choices with heterogeneous policy preferences and interjurisdictional policy spillovers under two alternative political procedures direct referendum and representative democracy we show that policy centralization is more likely to occur if the choice to centralize is made by elected policymakers rather than by referendum in these situations centralized policies converge to the preferred level of the jurisdiction that least favours centralization rather than to a compromise between the two jurisdictions preferred levels

price taking behavior versus continuous dynamic optimizing abstract in a quantity competition oligopoly previous studies have shown that a price taking firm can outperform any rival with identical technology that produces at a different output level at any intertemporal equilibrium this research seeks to examine this seemingly counter intuitive fact in a heterogeneous duopoly consisting of an adaptive price taker and a dynamic optimizer who dynamically optimizes its either absolute or relative profit stream over an infinite planning horizon with conventional economic assumptions the hamiltonian system always converges to a saddle point if goal of the dynamic optimizer is absolute profit the price taker produces more than the dynamic optimizer at the equilibrium around which there exists a long run relative profitability portion for the price taker consequently the price taker unconsciously makes higher relative profit than the dynamic optimizer in the long run in contrast if the dynamic optimizer pursues the relative profit both firms produce at the competitive level at the equilibrium while the whole optimal path lies in the relative profitability regime of the dynamic optimizer so that it will enjoy a higher profit than the price taker before reaching equilibrium these results provide economical justification for ever growing evolutionary game theoretical literatures in appreciating price taking behavior and additionally clarify possible misunderstandings in interpreting their conclusions

the evolution of walrasian behavior consider an evolutionary context where a given number of quantity setting oligopolists tend to mimic successful behavior occasionally experimenting with some small probability in this context it is shown that the unique long run outcome of the process has all firms playing walrasian i e choosing an output that maximizes profits when taking the market clearing price as given

international environmental agreements and strategic voting two anonymous referees have provided very valuable comments and suggestions we have also benefited from discussions at seminars at the universities of bonn dortmund and dresden and at the conferences of euresco the european economic association and the verein fur socialpolitik this paper was partly written while haupt was visiting the economics department at the university of colorado at boulder he is very grateful to the members of the department particularly to eckhard janeba for their hospitality and for stimulating discussions and to the fritz thyssen stiftung for funding his research visit we also thank the deutsche forschungsgemeinschaft dfg for financial support

the cost of regulation osha epa and the productivity slowdown the slowdown in productivity growth in the u s economy during the 1970 s has been a matter of great concern to policymakers associated as it is with inflation unemployment and declining real wage growth this paper examines the impact on productivity growth of government regulation specifically worker health and safety regulation by the occupational safety and health administration osha and environmental regulation by the environmental protection agency epa looking at data for 450 manufacturing industries between 1958 and 1978 the study finds a large negative relationship between such regulation and productivity growth using these results about 30 percent of the decline in productivity growth in manufacturing during the 1970 s may be attributed to such regulation several previous studies have looked at the contribution of regulation to the productivity slowdown many of these have inferred that the contribution must be small on the basis of the relatively small amount spent on complying with such regulations edward denison 1979 estimates that only about 16 percent of the productivity slowdown in the 1972 75 period was due to regulation 35 percentage points out of a slowdown of 2 17 percentage points paul portney 1981 notes that little of gnp is spent on pollution control under 2 percent concluding that therefore pollution regulations could have little effect on productivity growth norsworthy et al 1979 also find a small impact of pollution abatement capital expenditures on productivity growth studies based on econometric estimation of the regulation productivity relationship have found a wide range of results gregory christainsen and robert haveman 1981 find regulation reduced labor productivity growth by 27 percentage points using time series data and measures of total federal regulation robert crandall 1981 finds a strong relationship between pollution abatement capital and productivity growth but this relationship disappears when a measure of energy intensity is included robin siegel 1979 observes a significant contribution 5 percentage points from pollution control expenditures to the productivity slowdown for 1965 73 but not for later years finally frank gollop and mark roberts 1983 examine data for a set of electric utilities and find that regulation of emissions had a large impact on total factor productivity growth lowering it for regulated firms by 59 percentage points many other factors might help to explain the productivity slowdown including the rise in energy prices the long and severe recession and declines in research and development expenditures there have been a variety of studies examining the contributions of each factor to the slowdown they generally conclude that many factors contributed to the slowdown but that a sizable fraction of the slowdown remains unexplained by the estimated contributions of all the factors considered

identifying local tax mimicking with administrative borders and a policy reform abstract this paper exploits an exogenous reform of the local fiscal equalization scheme in the german state of north rhine westphalia nrw in 2003 to identify tax mimicking by municipalities in the neighboring state of lower saxony nds the reform caused municipalities in nrw to increase their business and property tax rates i study within the difference in difference dd and the spatial lag sl frameworks whether municipalities in nds bordering nrw did react to the exogenous tax increases by nrw municipalities the dd and sl results suggest that there are no interactions in tax rates in contrast traditional sl regressions that rely on variation in neighbors demographic and political characteristics for identification provide strong evidence for immediate strategic interactions these results indicate that most of the existing literature overestimates the importance of local tax mimicking

are profit maximisers the best survivors a darwinian model of economic natural selection abstract this paper demonstrates that the friedman conjecture that profit maximisation summarises appropriately the conditions for firm survival is not generally true if firms have market power profit maximisers are not necessarily the best survivors because of the possibility of spiteful behaviour of the following kind say a firm forgoes profit maximisation and thus decreases its survival chances but its deviation from maximisation harms its profit maximising competitors more than itself though the firm will be less likely to survive than it would if it maximised its profits it will still be more likely to survive than its competitors

does regret matter in public choices for air quality improvement policies a comparison of regret based and utility based discrete choice modelling abstract the choice experiment used to elicit public preferences and willingness to pay is increasingly popular in the studies of air quality improvement policies however the traditional random utility maximization rum models underlying the choice experiment approach ignores the important influence of anticipated regret on individual choice behaviour to explore the importance of regret in public preferences for air quality improvement policies this study introduces random regret minimization rrm models in the analysing of public choices and further compares the performance of utility based and regret based discrete choice modelling based on the multinomial logit and hybrid latent class models the results suggest that the rrm models outperform the rum model regarding goodness of fit and prediction indicating that the rrm models can be used as an alternative and supplement to traditional rum models particularly 55 9 of the choices from respondents are mainly driven by regret our results also reveal that respondents driven by regret based choice paradigm have a stronger preference for increased clean air days reduced haze days and lower mortality whereas utility based respondents prefer to shorten the years of policy delay these findings are useful for the design of socially optimal policies on the sustainable management of air pollution and providing theoretical reference for the development of environment related policies

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

governance choice on a serial network this paper analyzes governance choice in a two level federation in providing road infrastructure across jurisdictions two models are proposed to predict the choice of centralized or decentralized spending structure on a serial road network shared by two districts while the first model considers simple pigouvian behavior of governments the second explicitly models political forces at both a local and central level both models led to the conclusions that the spending structure is chosen based on a satisfactory comprise between benefits and costs associated with alternative decision making processes and that governance choice may spontaneously shift as the infrastructure improves temporally

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

pricing for the clean air evidence from chinese housing market abstract air pollution is widely believed to cause healthy risks and influence nations economic dimensions this paper investigates the impact of air pollution on housing prices in china s 286 prefectural level cities during 2005 2013 to address the endogeneity problem of pm2 5 concentrations in our regression we propose an instrument variable strategy based on ventilation coefficient the estimation results suggest that a 10 increase in pm2 5 concentrations causes a 2 4 reduction in local housing prices air pollution also hinders the progress of urbanization limits cities human capital formation and changes people s expectations of housing prices that we interpret as three potential mechanisms behind our main findings

rent seeking spillovers and the benefits of decentralization abstract in the presence of spillovers decentralized provision of local public goods may lead to a higher surplus than centralized provision even though localities have identical preferences indeed free riding costs associated to decentralization can be lower than the costs of rent seeking and influence activities under centralization actually centralization yields a higher level of regional surplus only if both the spillover effect from local public spending is sufficiently large and the elasticity of the influence function is sufficiently small

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