benefit incidence public spending reforms and the timing of program capture assessments of the distributional effects of public spending reforms have generally been based on average rates of program participation by income or expenditure group this practice can be deceptive because the socioeconomic composition of participants can change as a social program expands or contracts the geographic variation found in 1993 94 household survey data for rural india is used to estimate the marginal odds of participating in schooling and antipoverty programs the results suggest early capture of these programs by the non poor it is shown that conventional methods for assessing benefit incidence underestimate the gains to the poor from higher public outlays and underestimate the losses from cuts

introducing incentives in the market for live and cadaveric organ donations we evaluate the introduction of monetary incentives in the market for live and cadaveric organ donations we show that monetary incentives would increase the supply of organs for transplant sufficiently to eliminate the very large queues in organ markets and the suffering and deaths of many of those waiting without increasing the total cost of transplant surgery by more than about 12 percent we build on the value of life literature and other parts of economic analysis to estimate the equilibrium cost of live transplants for kidneys and livers we also show that market price for kidneys will be determined by the cost of live donations even though most organs will come from cadavers

sacred values the effect of information on attitudes toward payments for human organs abstract are attitudes about morally controversial and often prohibited market transactions affected by information about their costs and benefits we address this question for the case of payments for human organs we find in a survey experiment with us residents n 3 417 that providing information on the potential efficiency benefits of a regulated price mechanism for organs significantly increased support for payments from a baseline of 52 percent to 71 percent the survey was devised to minimize social desirability biases in responses and additional analyses validate the interpretation that subjects were reflecting on the case specific details provided rather than just reacting to any information

risk aversion and the earnings of us immigrants and natives the literature on the earnings of natives and immigrants has heretofore ignored differences in compensating wages for job risks it is possible that the risk involved in migration may indicate a greater willingness on the part of immigrants to accept riskier jobs than natives alternatively immigrants may attempt to protect their migration investment by choosing occupations with less risk indicating a higher degree of risk aversion this paper examines differences in risk aversion between us immigrants and natives and corresponding differentials in wage premiums for job risk our analysis suggests that on average immigrants are exposed to 21 less risk than natives but receive a 25 higher risk premium the higher degree of risk aversion of immigrants and their lower exposure to risk and thus lower earnings explains 5 of the higher observed earnings of natives we also find that earlier immigrant cohorts pre 1970 are employed in riskier jobs than are recent cohorts but the difference accounts fo

decentralisation and accountability in infrastructure delivery in developing countries many developing countries are experimenting with decentralisation of public service delivery to elected local governments instead of bureaucrats appointed by a central government we study the resulting implications in a theoretical model in which the central government is uninformed about local need and unable to monitor service allocations bureaucrats charge bribes for services as monopoly providers resulting in underprovision of services especially for the poor local governments are directly responsive to their citizens needs but may be subject to capture by elites effects of decentralisation on service volumes efficiency and equity are analysed under different financing arrangements for local governments the theme of the 2004 world development report is summarised by its opening paragraph too often services fail poor people in access in quantity in quality but the fact that there are strong examples where services do work means governments and citizens can do better how by putting poor people at the center of service provision by enabling them to monitor and discipline service providers by amplifying their voice in policymaking and by strengthening the incentives for providers to serve the poor problems of accountability associated with traditional modes of delivery involving centralised bureaucracies include cost padding service diversion limited responsiveness to local needs limited access and high prices charged especially to the poor 1 many developing countries have thus begun to experiment with initiatives to increase accountability of service providers by providing greater control rights to citizen groups these include decentralisation of service delivery to local governments community participation direct transfers to households and contracting out delivery to private providers and ngos the programmes include a wide range of infrastructure services water sanitation electricity telecommunications roads and social services education health and welfare programmes countries where such trends have gathered

capture and governance at local and national levels 135 despite the importance of this issue not much systematic research appears to have been devoted to assessing the relative susceptibility of national and local governments to interestgroup capture here we describe a model of two party electoral competition with probabilistic voting behavior and lobbying by specialinterest groups based on david baron 1994 and gene grossman and elhanan helpman 1996 that helps identify determinants of relative capture at different levels of government these include relative levels of voter awareness and interest group cohesiveness electoral uncertainty electoral competition heterogeneity of districts with respect to inequality and the electoral system while some of these uphold the traditional madisonian presumption others are likely to create a tendency for lower capture at the local level so the net effect is theoretically ambiguous this suggests that the extent of relative capture may be context specific and needs to be assessed empirically

markets and morality it is common knowledge that adam smith the acknowledged father of economics as we know it had written the theory of moral sentiments 1759 before he wrote the wealth of nations 1776 more sophisticated students of economics today would also know that adam smith held the chair in moral philosophy from 1752 after a year as professor of logic at glasgow university therefore that economics has evolved from moral philosophy and has affinity by birth with it and therefore is a moral science should not surprise anyone yet the analysis of the interaction between economics and moral philosophy or perhaps simply morality has raised interesting issues over time in the following i concentrate on a few salient ones today

the quantity and quality of life and the evolution of world inequality gdp per capita is usually used to proxy for the quality of life of individuals living in different countries welfare is also affected by quantity of life however as represented by longevity this paper incorporates longevity into an overall assessment of the evolution of cross country inequality and shows that it is quantitatively important the absence of reduction in cross country inequality up to the 1990s documented in previous work is in stark contrast to the reduction in inequality after incorporating gains in longevity throughout the post world war ii period health contributed to reduce significantly welfare inequality across countries this paper derives valuation formulas for infra marginal changes in longevity and computes a full growth rate that incorporates the gains in health experienced by 96 countries for the period between 1960 and 2000 incorporating longevity gains changes traditional results countries starting with lower income tended to grow faster than countries starting with higher income we estimate an average yearly growth in full income of 4 1 percent for the poorest 50 percent of countries in 1960 of which 1 7 percentage points are due to health as opposed to a growth of 2 6 percent for the richest 50 percent of countries of which only 0 4 percentage points are due to health additionally we decompose changes in life expectancy into changes attributable to 13 broad groups of causes of death and three age groups we show that mortality from infectious respiratory and digestive diseases congenital perinatal and ill defined conditions mostly concentrated before age 20 and between ages 20 and 50 is responsible for most of the reduction in life expectancy inequality at the same time the recent effect of aids together with reductions in mortality after age 50 due to nervous system senses organs heart and circulatory diseases contributed to increase health inequality across countries

marketplaces markets and market design marketplaces are often small parts of large markets and both markets and marketplaces come in many varieties market design seeks to understand what marketplaces must accomplish to enable different kinds of markets marketplaces can have varying degrees of success and there can be marketplace failures i ll discuss labor markets like the market for new economists and also markets for new lawyers and doctors that have suffered from the unraveling of appointment dates to well before employment begins markets work best if they enjoy social support but some markets are repugnant in the sense that some people think they should be banned even though others want to participate in them laws banning such markets often contribute to the design of illegal black markets and this raises new issues for market designers i ll briefly discuss markets and black markets for narcotics marijuana sex and surrogacy and the design of markets for kidney transplants in the face of widespread laws against and broader repugnance for compensating organ donors i conclude with open questions and engineering challenges

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

one chance in a million altruism and the bone marrow registry stem cell transplants save lives of many patients with blood diseases donation is painful but rarely has lasting adverse effects patients can accept transplants only from donors with compatible immune systems those lacking a sibling match must seek donations from the general population the probability that two unrelated persons are compatible is less than 1 10 000 health authorities maintain a registry of several million genetically tested potential donors who agree to donate if asked we find that the benefits of adding registrants of every race exceed costs we also explore the peculiar structure of voluntary public good provision that faces potential donors jel d64 h41 i11 aq 1

decentralizing antipoverty program delivery in developing countries we study the effects on accountability in government service delivery of decentralizing administration of an antipoverty program while governments at both central and local levels are vulnerable to antipoor policy biases owing to political capture centralized delivery systems are additionally prone to bureaucratic corruption owing to problems in monitoring bureaucratic performance decentralizing the delivery system promotes cost effectiveness and improves intraregional targeting at low program scales but interregional targeting may deteriorate as central grants to high poverty regions shrink owing to high capture of local governments by local elites in such regions

property tax revenues and multidimensional poverty reduction in colombia a spatial approach summary fiscal decentralization as an instrument to reduce poverty is an open debate that still takes place with little and contradictory empirical evidence regarding whether or not it has served the poor this paper focuses on analyzing the impact of municipalities per capita property tax revenues on multidimensional poverty in the colombian case this locally raised tax is used as an indicator of the state capacity that municipalities exercise when fiscal decentralization takes place to estimate its impact on poverty we control for the possible endogeneity biases that might affect this relationship while taking into account that multidimensional poverty exhibits strong spatial correlation among colombian municipalities we find statistically significant results that demonstrate a causal and diminishing effect of property tax revenues on the poverty headcount ratio and gap we also find that this effect has substantial spillovers across municipalities the findings of the paper highlight the need to strengthen subnational revenue systems through policy designs to increase locally raised revenues we simulate four different counterfactual scenarios to evaluate the potential effect of alternative policy designs on multidimensional poverty the results of these policy scenarios demonstrate that spatially differentiated policy schemes have greater effectiveness in reducing multidimensional poverty than geographically mute designs

counting and multidimensional poverty measurement this paper proposes a new methodology for multidimensional poverty measurement consisting of an identification method k that extends the traditional intersection and union approaches and a class of poverty measures m our identification step employs two forms of cutoff one within each dimension to determine whether a person is deprived in that dimension and a second across dimensions that identifies the poor by counting the dimensions in which a person is deprived the aggregation step employs the fgt measures appropriately adjusted to account for multidimensionality the axioms are presented as joint restrictions on identification and the measures and the methodology satisfies a range of desirable properties including decomposability the identification method is particularly well suited for use with ordinal data as is the first of our measures the adjusted headcount ratio we present some dominance results and an interpretation of the adjusted headcount ratio as a measure of unfreedom examples from the us and indonesia illustrate our methodology

the value of risk measuring the service output of u s commercial banks rather than charging direct fees banks often charge implicitly for their services via interest spreads as a result much of bank output has to be estimated indirectly in contrast to current statistical practice dynamic optimizing models of banks argue that compensation for bearing systematic risk is not part of bank output we apply these models and find that between 1997 and 2007 in the u s national accounts on average bank output is overestimated by 21 percent and gdp is overestimated by 0 3 percent moreover compared with current methods our new estimates imply more plausible estimates of the share of capital in income and the return on fixed capital

getting more organs for transplantation the united states and most other nations suffer from a shortage of human organs for transplant in the united states over 120 000 people are on waiting lists for organ transplant and every year over 10 000 people die while waiting organ procurement and transplantation network there are a number of fronts on which research has made progress to address this shortage but there is still significant work to be done we describe how organs are acquired and allocated strategies that have been implemented to increase the number or organ donations for transplantation from living donors and work we are conducting to understand how we can recover more organs from deceased donors for example how organs are allocated can moderate their scarcity not just through efficiencies in allocation but also through changes in donor behavior we will describe a market design being explored in israel to increase organ donor registration by providing priority on organ waiting lists for individuals who previously registered as organ donors we will also report results that raise concern over policies that have recently been implemented in the united kingdom and several us states namely changing the way the organ registration question is asked to a mandated choice frame organs for transplant can be recovered from living donors and deceased donors living donors give an organ while alive living donation of kidneys which represented 96 per cent of all us living organ donations in 2012 optn is possible since humans have two kidneys but can live a healthy life with only one allowing the other to be removed and donated

decentralization of governance and development all around the world in matters of governance decentralization is the rage even apart from the widely debated issues of subsidiarity and devolution in the european union and states rights in the united states decentralization has been at the center stage of policy experiments in the last two decades in a large number of developing and transition economies in latin america africa and asia the world bank for example has embraced it as one of the major governance reforms on its agenda for example world bank 2000 burki perry and dillinger 1999 take also the examples of the two largest countries of the world china and india decentralization has been regarded as the major institutional framework for the phenomenal industrial growth in the last two decades in china taking place largely in the nonstate nonprivate sector india ushered in a landmark constitutional reform in favor of decentralization around the same time it launched a major program of economic reform in the early 1990s on account of its many failures the centralized state everywhere has lost a great deal of legitimacy and decentralization is widely believed to promise a range of benee ts it is often suggested as a way of reducing the role of the state in general by fragmenting central authority and introducing more intergovernmental competition and checks and balances it is viewed as a way to make government more responsive and efe cient technological changes have also made it somewhat easier than before to provide public services like electricity and water supply relatively efe ciently in smaller market areas and the lower levels of government have now a greater ability to handle certain tasks in a world of rampant ethnic cone icts and separatist movements decentralization is also regarded as a way of diffusing social and political tensions and ensuring local cultural and political autonomy these potential benee ts of decentralization have attracted a very diverse range

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

the effect of cadaveric kidney donations on living kidney donations an instrumental variables approach i introduction as of march 19 2012 there are 113 465 patients awaiting an organ transplant only 28 535 transplants were performed in the previous year 1 the critical shortage of organs is the result of an artificial price ceiling instituted by the national organ transplant act nota of 1984 which legislates financial compensation for organs to be unlawful for this reason the current supply of organs is generated by altruistic cadaveric and living donors lds these donors willfully supply organs without any expectation of compensation but the decision to donate is not the same for both cadaveric and lds unlike cadaveric donors cds where the functional value of the organ to the donor is small lds must consider the potential long term healthcare costs associated with donating an organ these costs include an increase in mortality risk morbidity risk loss in quality of life and lost wages generated by time away from work during recovery potential lds and their recipients must weigh these costs versus alternative sources of organs cadaveric organs and other lds and consider their own future demand for organs when deciding to donate even so the number of lds has increased dramatically from 1 769 in 1988 to 5 955 in 2008 an increase of 237 figure 1 over the same period the percentage of blood related or biological donors has decreased from 93 to 60 of all lds several factors can account for these changes introduction of tax incentives for organ donation compatibility websites relaxing donor match requirements and the implied responsiveness of potential lds to increases in the number of persons on the waiting list for deceased donors an increase from 40 000 to 52 000 from 2000 to 2009 2 figure 1 omitted the topic of organ donation has received considerable attention in both the academic literature and the press but there is limited empirical evidence identifying potential causes for the increase in ld rates the trade offs between living and cadaveric kidney donations and the change in ld composition from primarily blood related donors to an increase in non blood related donors 3 two concurrent studies address the substitutability between living and cadaveric donations howard 2011 utilized geographic variation in waiting times for organ transplants to estimate the substitution effect the author finds that a decrease of five kidneys from cadaveric donations is correlated with one additional living kidney donation sweeney 2010 exploits a discontinuity in panel reactive antibody pra 4 blood levels within a regression discontinuity framework and finds a 10 increase in the likelihood of receiving a cadaveric donation decreases the likelihood of receiving a living kidney donation by 2 3 we find similar results as these studies but we utilize a completely different identification method in this article we propose using variation in traffic safety laws between states as an instrumental variable to identify the substitution patterns between living and cadaveric kidney donations a benefit of our approach is that we can analyze how obesity influences the supply of donations the demand for transplantation and the use of living versus cadaveric donations we also analyze substitutability across classes of lds which helps to establish the plausibility of our results and the mechanisms underlying the substitution effects with respect to motor vehicle safety laws we study how changes in seat belt helmet and speed limit laws indirectly affect the number of living donations by shifting the supply of cadaveric organ donations previous studies have considered how changes in these safety laws would affect motor vehicle fatalities and cadaveric donations according to the organ procurement and transplantation network optn roughly 16 of cadaveric donations are the result of a motor vehicle accident mva

migration and asymmetric information comment a comment on an article by viem kwok and hayne leland concerning the relationship between asymmetric information and the brain drain of skilled labor from developing countries is presented a reply by kwok and leland p 535 is also included annotation

a theory of misgovernance this paper tries to explain why government bureaucracies are often associated with red tape corruption and lack of incentives the paper identifies two specific ingredients that together can provide an explanation the fact that governments often act precisely in situations where markets fail and the presence of agency problems within the government we show that these problems are exacerbated at low levels of development and in bureaucracies dealing with poor people we also argue that we need to posit the existence of a welfare oriented constituency within the government in order to explain red tape and corruption

financial incentives for kidney donation a comparative case study using synthetic controls although many commentators called for increased efforts to incentivize organ donations theorists and some evidence suggest these efforts will be ineffective studies examining the impact of tax incentives generally report zero negative coefficients but these studies incorrectly define their tax variables and rely on difference in differences despite likely failures of the parallel trends assumption we identify the causal effect of tax legislation to serve as an organ donor on living kidney donation rates in the u s states using more precise tax data and allowing for heterogeneous time variant causal effects employing a synthetic control method we find that the passage of tax incentive legislation increased living unrelated kidney donation rates by 52 percent in new york relative to a comparable synthetic new york in the absence of legislation it is possible that new york is unique but our methodology does not allow us to measure accurately effects in other states

the ethics of incentivizing the uninformed a vignette study abstract our recent working paper ambuehl ockenfels and stewart 2017 shows theoretically and experimentally that people with higher costs of information processing respond more to an increase in the incentive for a complex transaction and decide to participate based on a worse understanding of its consequences here we address the resulting tradeoff between the principle of informed consent and the principle of free contract respondents to our vignette study on oocyte donation overwhelmingly favor the former and support policies that require donors to thoroughly understand the transaction this finding helps design markets that are not only efficient but also considered ethical

altruism fertility and the value of children health policy evaluation and intergenerational welfare abstract this paper accounts for the value of children and future generations in the evaluation of health policies this is achieved through the incorporation of altruism and fertility in a value of life type of framework we are able to express adults willingness to pay for changes in child mortality and also to incorporate the welfare of future generations in the evaluation of current policies our model clarifies a series of puzzles from the literature on the value of life and on intergenerational welfare comparisons we show that by incorporating altruism and fertility into the analysis of the recent u s experience the estimated welfare gain of a young adult from reductions in mortality easily doubles

designing tax policy in federalist economies an overview abstract the emerging economic federations of the european union russia and south africa along with the established federations in australia canada and the united states confront the task of designing the institutions for federal fiscal policy this paper reviews the literature on the design of tax policy in federalist economies we conclude that taxation by lower level governments can lead to significant economic inefficiencies and inequities the usual assignment view of federalis recommends central government policies for example resident based taxation or grants in aid to correct these failures these recommendations assume that the central government will act as a benevolent social planner the political economy view of federalism suggests that this assumption is in error and that additional federalist institutions must be considered alternative legislative structures and constitutional rules are considered

the elasticity of taxable income during the 1990s new estimates and sensitivity analyses author affiliation seth h giertz sgiertz2 unl edu acknowledgment the author wishes to thank david weiner ed harris bob dennis doug hamilton tom woodward emmanuel saez chris bollinger and three anonymous referees for their comments and assistance 1 introductioneconomists have long recognized that taxation creates economic inefficiency by distorting relative prices often between leisure and all other goods in the economy even a broad based income tax can have substantial efficiency costs so long as leisure remains untaxed harberger 1964 uses this as motivation for comparing the efficiency implications of direct versus indirect taxation in so doing he shows how labor supply elasticities can be used to measure the efficiency implications of income taxation 1 harberger s analysis had a profound influence on public and labor economists spurring increased research into labor supply elasticities which were seen as proxies for the efficiency costs from taxation more than two decades after harberger economists began to emphasize the variety of other margins over which taxes can distort behavior in addition to hours worked these economists noted that these other behavioral responses may too have important implications for efficiency an important building block in the evolution of this literature was set forth by slemrod 1990 who presented a hierarchy of behavioral responses to taxation slemrod divided behavior into three categories based on their responsiveness to taxes his least responsive category real responses includes individuals changing consumption and work patterns and businesses altering investment and production decisions second in order of responsiveness is circumvention which includes both illegally evasion and legally avoidance bypassing the tax system 2 in the case of evasion income is concealed from tax authorities or factors that offset tax liabilities such as expenses and deductions are inflated beyond what is legally permitted in the case of avoidance income is shifted in order to receive more favorable tax treatment diverting income into a tax deferred retirement account is an example of avoidance 3 included in circumvention is the expenditure of time and money necessary to avoid or evade taxation third on the hierarchy and the most responsive is the timing of income receipt which includes pulling the receipt of income into the previous year or pushing it into the next in order to take advantage of more favorable tax treatment while not altering real behavior 4 slemrod further recognizes that the type of behavioral response could have implications for both tax revenue and tax incidence and in some cases efficiency predating slemrod s insights lindsey 1987 produced elasticity estimates for taxable income although what lindsey termed taxable income more closely approximates adjusted gross income agi instead of labor supply 5 lindsey s estimated elasticities were much larger than the labor supply literature would have suggested lindsey emphasized the revenue implications of the elasticity of taxable income eti but not its efficiency implications building on slemrod and lindsey feldstein 1995 produced eti estimates but went much further than lindsey in describing the behaviors that could affect taxable income he argued that many of these behaviors were not captured by labor supply elasticities furthermore feldstein posited that income taxation creates economic inefficiency not only by distorting the relative price between labor and leisure but more broadly by distorting the relative price between goods or activities that are taxed and those that are not taxed since leisure is not the only untaxed activity for example in response to taxes not only work hours but also work effort might change

accountability and decentralisation in government an incomplete contracts model this paper approaches the question of the appropriate level of decentralisation of power in government as a problem in the allocation of control rights under incomplete contracts the model of the paper compares allocations of power to local central and regional government as alternative means of motivating governments to act in the interests of citizens centralisation allows benefits from policy coordination but has costs in terms of diminished accountability which can be precisely defined as the reduced probability that the welfare of a given region can determine the re election of the government the model is extended to allow for conflicts of interest within regions and externalities between central and local governments in a federation it is also applied to determining levels of fiscal transfer between localities and to circumstances where governments may act as leviathans appropriating resources for their own use

monetary policy and the global housing bubble what caused the housing boom of the 2000s a number of researchers have suggested that loose monetary policy during the first half of the 2000s was a primary cause of the substantial run up in house prices in many countries however using a common statistical approach we find that monetary policy was not the main factor that should not be surprising although low interest rates raise house prices the increase in prices during the mid 2000s was much larger than the historical relationship between the two variables would suggest instead we investigate further the link between the marked loosening in terms and standards for mortgage credit and the most rapid increases in house prices this link provides some evidence for a story where credit provision and the demand for housing fed on each other and helped spur the housing boom our work suggests a greater role for macroprudential regulation rather than monetary policy in managing asset price booms jane dokko brian m doyle michael t kiley jinill kim shane sherlund jae sim and skander van den heuvel

motivations of south african emigrants reasons for emigration from south africa particularly of professionals are investigated using data from a recent survey the authors conclude that although direct fear of potential violence is not a major factor emigrants are concerned about changes in living standards resulting from economic problems or changes in government structure annotation

subsidizing altruism in living organ donation the current supply of deceased donor organs is insucient to meet the growing demand for transplantable organs the median waiting time for a kidney from a deceased donor is over three years consequently candidates for kidney transplantation are strongly encouraged to nd a living donor however many potential donors have low incomes and donation related costs may discourage them from volunteering to be a donor in 2008 the department of health and human services began to reimburse donor s travel related expenses via the national living donor assistance center nldac using within transplant center variation in their applications for donor assistance we use a dierence in dier ence model to estimate the impact of the nldac on the number of living donor kidney transplants we nd that among participating transplant centers the program increased the number of living donor kidney transplants by approximately 14 the nldac program provides an eective subsidy for donor s altruism

an economic model of the brain drain asymmetric information in the labor market is discussed as a major cause of the exodus of foreign trained students from developing countries the authors suggest that employers in the country in which the students have been trained have a more accurate judgment of the true productivity of students than have employers in the students native country an illustrative numerical model is developed and its implications are analyzed annotation

market and non market mechanisms for the optimal allocation of scarce resources a number of identical objects is allocated to a set of privately informed agents agents have linear utility in money the designer wants to assign objects to agents that possess specific traits but the allocation can only be conditioned on the willingness to pay and on observable characteristics i solve for the optimal mechanism the choice between market or non market mechanisms depends on the statistical linkage between characteristics valued by the designer and willingness to pay

electoral competition with informed and uninformed voters i present a model of electoral competition in which candidates raise campaign contributions by choosing policies that benefit interest groups and then expend those contributions to influence voters who are uninformed about the policies informed voters however vote based on those policies so candidates face a trade off between choosing a policy to generate funds to attract the uninformed vote and choosing a policy to attract the informed vote electoral equilibria are characterized for two categories of policies particularistic and collective in the case of particularistic policies the equilibrium policies of the candidates are separated if the proportion of uninformed voters is sufficiently high and the degree of separation is an increasing function of that proportion the model is extended to include the public financing of elections and incumbency advantages for the case of collective policies the candidates locate at the median of the ideal points of the informed voters and contributions are zero

the market for public office why the indian state is not better at development abstract how and why officials are transferred from one post to another can in india does have far reaching consequences for the effectiveness of public service organizations such as irrigation agriculture forestry and soil conservation departments the transfer mechanism used in many departments of indian states involves a kind of internal labor market a truer market than in the way that term is often used by labor market economists it allows pressures for corrupt behavior to bear down on the incumbents of certain posts and itself amplifies those pressures frequently the pressures on officials to be corrupt cause them to behave in ways contrary to the ostensible objectives of their departments why is the indian state not better at promoting development to an important degree because of the corruption transfer mechanism and its effects on bureaucratic initiatives