politics partisanship and the power to veto does gubernatorial line item veto power affect state budgets abstracthow does line item veto liv power affect a governor s ability to structure the state budget is liv power only relevant as a partisan tool is it still relevant when the state legislature can override the veto we use a rich disaggregated data set to test the effect of the gubernatorial liv on state budgets controlling for political factors such as party affiliation of the governor and legislature minority status of the governor and the legislature s ability to override a liv our results suggest that liv power has very weak influence if any on governors ability to influence state budgets

global warming and the energy efficiency of spanish industry this paper uses a stochastic frontier production function model to analyze the energy efficiency of spanish industry we used minimum cost input demand equations as the reference in order to calculate the demand for electricity gas and other fuels on this basis we found that there is no inherent conflict between the objectives of achieving productive efficiency and reducing energy consumption indeed it is possible to reduce the industrial emissions of co2 by up to 29 4 by means of a bottom up energy efficiency policy however if the government wants firms to reduce their emissions even further then it would be necessary to implement some form of energy regulatory policy in this respect we estimate the cost of reducing co2 emissions by 20

the power of the proposal maker in a model of endogenous agenda formation in a distributive setting this study examines a voting procedure for which agenda formation is endogenous it is found not surprisingly that agenda formation is another avenue for strategic manipulation of the voting process and provides the member to first take the floor an asymmetric advantage what is surprising is the degree of this advantage we find that the initial proposal maker earns a share of the fixed resource exceeding 1 for an majority rule and this is regardless of the number of members the voting rule is found to be an effective instrument in at least partially offsetting the power of the proposal maker while maintaining the stability of the voting process

roll call vote selection implications for the study of legislative politics roll call votes provide scholars with the opportunity to measure many quantities of interest however the usefulness of the roll call sample depends on the population it is intended to represent after laying out why understanding the sample properties of the roll call record is important we catalogue voting procedures for 145 legislative chambers finding that roll calls are typically discretionary we then consider two arguments for discounting the potential problem a roll calls are ubiquitous especially where the threshold for invoking them is low or b the strategic incentives behind requests are sufficiently benign so as to generate representative samples we address the first defense with novel empirical evidence regarding roll call prevalence and the second with an original formal model of the position taking argument for roll call vote requests both our empirical and theoretical results confirm that inattention to vote method selection should broadly be considered an issue for the study of legislative behavior

energy use efficiency in the indian manufacturing sector an interstate analysis abstract this paper approaches the measurement of energy efficiency from a production theoretic framework and uses data envelopment analysis to measure energy efficiency in the indian manufacturing sector using data from the annual survey of industries for the years 1998 99 through 2003 04 the study compares the energy efficiency in manufacturing across states based on several models the results show considerable variation in energy efficiency across states comparing the results across our models we find that the relative pricing of energy does not provide the appropriate incentives for energy conservation a second stage regression analysis reveals that states with a larger share of manufacturing output in energy intensive industries have lower energy efficiency also higher quality labor force associates with higher energy efficiency finally the power sector reforms have not yet had any significant impact on achieving energy efficiency

an examination of the market for favors and votes in congress this paper examines the strategies that horse traders and power brokers adopt in trading favors to pass legislation although the favors that they trade are generally impossible to observe the paper develops a model that allows tests of favor trading with data from the senate vote on the byrd amendment to the 1990 clean air act i conduct such a test the test provides evidence that on this vote i favor trading occurred ii the coalition leaders practiced price discrimination and iii the coalition leaders did not collude with each another

a kuznets curve in environmental efficiency an application on oecd countries the role of the environment is an important issue in policy making andthe accurate assessment of the environmental conditions is vital inthis paper using nonparametric techniques an environmental efficiencyindex is developed for each of the oecd countries these indexes allowone both to do cross section comparisons on the state of each country sproduction process in its treatment of undesirable outputs and also totrace each country s modification of their production processesovertime furthermore in this study we investigate the factorsunderlying societies environmental concerns that eventually lead tochanges in the environmental efficiency the results provide furtherempirical evidence for the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis

multilateral productivity comparisons when some outputs are undesirable a nonparametric approach multilateral productivity comparisons of firms producing multiple outputs some of which are undesirable are obtained by making two modifications to the standard farrell approach to efficiency measurement the restriction that production technology satisfy strong disposability of outputs is relaxed to allow for the fact that undesirable outputs may be freely disposable and the efficiency measures are modified to allow for an asymmetric treatment of desirable and undesirable outputs performance measures that satisfy these requirements are calculated as solutions to programming problems the methodology is applied to a sample of mills producing paper and pollutants

why should majority voting be unfair the common use of majority rule in group decision making is puzzling in theory it inequitably favors the proposer and paradoxically it disadvantages voters further if they are inequity averse in practice however outcomes are equitable the present paper analyzes data from a novel experimental design to identify the underlying social preferences our experiment compares one shot and indefinite horizon versions of random proposer majority bargaining the baron ferejohn game which allow us to disentangle behaviors compatible with altruism inequity aversion and reference dependent altruism most subjects are classified as reference dependent altruists around 10 are inequity averse subjects are egoistic when their payoff is below their reference point they become efficiency concerned when satisfied and the reference point is either the ex ante expectation or the opponent s payoff finally we successfully test rda out of sample on a number of distribution and bargaining games from three seminal social preference experiments

proposal rights and political power in a canonical model of sequential collective bargaining over a divisible good we show that equilibrium expected payoffs are not restricted by players voting rights or their impatience for all monotonic voting rules and discount factors and for all divisions of the good among players there exists a stationary proposal making rule such that this division represents players expected payoffs in a stationary subgame perfect nash equilibrium in pure strategies the result highlights the significance of proposal rights in determining political power in collective deliberations t he purpose of this article is to further our understanding of political power in a committee environment we consider the problem of a group of two or more agents who must split a fixed divisible good agents cannot use physical force to divide this good our goal is to clarify the role and relative significance of other features of the political environment such as voting rights proposal rights agents patience etc in determining political power following shapley and shubik 1954 we gauge political power in terms of expected outcomes rather than a priori equate it with individual prerogatives 1 in that spirit political power is the share of the divisible good that agents can expect to obtain when their behavior conforms to an appropriately defined equilibrium notion 2 we model committee interaction using a canonical sequential bargaining game in each period a member of the committee is recognized with some probability that is fixed across periods and proposes a division of the good committee members then vote on the proposal if the proposal is approved in accordance with the underlying voting rule the proposed division is implemented and the

why do members of congress support agricultural protection it seems paradoxical that until recently developed countries have continued subsidizing agriculture even though their agricultural sectors had been declining in relative importance since the middle of the 20th century what drives support for agricultural protection the broad array of subsidies to farmers and taxes and quotas imposed on agricultural imports in developed countries we answer this question by testing three competing hypotheses about what drives support for agricultural protection in the us i legislator preferences ii electoral incentives or iii lobbying using data on the roll call votes of the members of the 106th through the 110th congresses 1999 2009 and the scores given to each legislator by the farm bureau our findings suggest that electoral incentives explain a great deal of the variation in support for agricultural protection but that legislator preferences and lobbying might play a role too moreover legislator preferences and electoral incentives appear to be substitutes for one another why does congress support agricultural protection because many members have electoral incentives to and because many of those who do not still have other personal or strategic interests at stake

estimating ideal points in the british house of commons using early day motions this article develops a new method for estimating the ideological preferences of members of the british house of commons existing methods produce implausible results due to high levels of party cohesion and strategic voting on the part of opposition parties to circumvent these problems this article estimates mp preferences using early day motions edms as an alternative to roll call votes the bayesian ideal point model for the decision to sign an edm takes into account both policy preferences and signing costs the estimates obtained have greater face validity than previous attempts to measure preferences in the house of commons recovering the expected order of parties and of members within parties the estimates successfully predict voting behavior in the house of commons as with other bayesian ideal point methods this approach produces natural uncertainty estimates and allows for easy calculation of quantities of interest such as member ranks

energy polarization and popular representation evidence from the russian duma in this article we introduce the term energy polarization to explain the politics of energy market reform in the russian duma our model tests the impact of regional energy production party cohesion and ideology and electoral mandate on the energy policy decisions of the duma deputies oil gas and electricity bills and resolution proposals between 1994 and 2003 we find a strong divide between single member district smd and proportional representation pr deputies high statistical significance of gas production is demonstrated throughout the three duma terms and shows gazprom s key position in the post soviet russian economy oil production is variably significant in the two first dumas when the main legislative debates on oil privatization occur there is no constant left right continuum which is consistent with the deputies proclaimed party ideology the pro and anti reform poles observed in our poole based single dimensional scale are not necessarily connected with liberal and state oriented regulatory policies respectively party switching is a solid indicator of russia s polarized legislative dynamics when it comes to energy sector reform

executive veto legislative override and structure induced equilibrium in this study the structure induced equilibrium approach for modeling democratic institutions is extended to allow for the added structural features of executive veto and legislative override a multidimensional model is presented for a budgetary process involving three actors a legislature an appropriations committee and an executive in order to focus attention on the role of the veto and override possibilities simplifying assumptions are made with regard to other aspects of the agenda formation process in particular the committee has monopoly agenda power a closed amendment control rule is operative and perfect foresight expectations are held by the committee and the executive given these assumptions utility maximization by the several actors generates a budget outcome characterized as a structure induced equilibrium the general model is illustrated geometrically with a two dimensional example permitting budget outcomes to be analyzed for various combinations of veto rules and override provisions the analysis demonstrates that budget outcomes are sensitive to alternative specifications of veto rules and override provisions in the illustration executive veto power is shown to vary directly with both the permissiveness of the veto rule and the stringency of the override provision similar relationships however are not found to exist for total budget expenditures

political interaction in the senate estimating a political spatial weights matrix and an application to lobbying behavior many motivations exist that cause legislators to behave strategically when voting these include logrolling towing the party line or political favor trading however it has proven difficult in the existing literature to uncover the magnitude of the interaction among politicians this paper takes a spatial approach to the problem using a spatial autoregressive model to not only uncover the magnitude of interactions but also the direction of the interactions in contrast to most applications of spatial econometrics i allow the elements of the spatial weights matrix to be estimated as parameters the political spatial weights matrix is calculated for 96 senators in the 110th u s congress furthermore in a marginal effects simulation i calculate the overall effect on voting from flipping a senator s vote allowing flipped votes to have a cascading effect i apply these measures to study political fundraising mildly suggesting that political interest groups direct donations to senators with the most influence

rationality of energy efficiency improvement targets under the pat scheme in india a case of thermal power plants abstract the market based perform achieve and trade scheme was introduced in india to enhance the energy efficiency of energy intensive sectors and for thermal power plants by reducing their specific energy consumption within the framework of a tradable certificate scheme international experience suggests that effectiveness of such schemes is greatly influenced by the assigned targets of the obligated units setting rational targets is thus a key aspect of successful implementation of the scheme in the present study we examine the rationality of the targets set for the power sector of india based on comparing it with energy saving potential of the plants and the targets assigned to the respective plants data envelopment analysis models are used to determine relative efficiency and energy saving potential the study results indicate that in most cases i the targets are much less than the actual potentials of the thermal power sector ii there exist substantial inefficiencies within the system in both energy use and managerial dexterity and iii if the sector realizes its full potential then the energy saving certificate market may witness a surplus of 4 7 million certificates on account of thermal power sector alone

divided government and u s trade policy theory and evidence if different parties control the u s congress and white house the united states may maintain higher import protection than otherwise this proposition follows from a distributive politics model in which congress can choose to delegate trade policymaking to the president when the congressional majority party faces a president of the other party the former has an incentive to delegate to but to constrain the president by requiring congressional approval of trade proposals by up or down vote this constraint forces the president to provide higher protection in order to assemble a congressional majority evidence confirms that 1 the institutional constraints placed on the president s trade policymaking authority are strengthened in times of divided government and loosened under unified government and 2 u s trade policy was significantly more protectionist under divided than under unified government during the period 1949 90

an activity analysis model of the environmental performance of firms application to fossil fuel fired electric utilities the productivity of firms when some outputs pollution are undesirable has been studied in the literature for some time in this paper we introduce an environmental performance indicator based on the decomposition of overall factor productivity into a pollution index and an input output efficiency index this indicator is compared to the more conventional jaggi and freedman 1992 model results are given for illustrative purposes using data from u s fossil fuel fired electric utilities the rankings of the utilities obtained with the two models show significant divergence which is due to the different ways in which the undesirable outputs are dealt with as well as due to the different possible tradeoffs between the pollutants released into the atmosphere and the resources used as inputs

the impact of federal spending on house election outcomes while it is widely believed by academics politicians and the popular press that incumbent members of congress are rewarded by the electorate for bringing federal dollars to their district the empirical evidence supporting that claim is extremely weak one explanation for the failure to uncover the expected relationship between federal spending and election outcomes is that incumbents who expect to have difficulty being reelected are likely to exert greater effort in obtaining federal outlays since it is generally impossible to adequately measure this effort the estimated impact of spending is biased downward because of an omitted variable bias we address this estimation problem using instrumental variables for each house district we use spending outside the district but inside the state containing the district as an instrument for spending in the district federal spending is affected by a large number of actors e g governors senators mayors and other house members in the state delegation

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

supermajority rule and the law of 1 n this paper investigates the impact of a supermajority rule on the law of 1 n which posits that a larger number of districts increases the size of government our analysis suggests that supermajority rule despite the claim that it restrains excessive spending increases the 1 n effect because qualified majorities require logrolling to attract additional members using data from us states from 1970 to 2007 we find that the adoption of a supermajority rule has a robust worsening effect on the fiscal commons problem identified by the law of 1 n

regulation and the theory of legislative choice the interstate commerce act of 1887 this article concerns the economic incidence of the interstate commerce act of 1887 ica our focus is the short haul pricing constraint a provision of the ica that prohibited railroads from charging higher rates to isolated primarily agrarian shippers than it charged to intercity shippers of similar commodities utilizing the event study methodology we find that the impending passage of the ica generated a distribution of abnormal returns to railroads and shipping firms that is consistent with the theoretical implications of our analysis of the short haul pricing constraint shpc however early interpretations of the shpc by the interstate commerce commission reduced some of the abnormal returns to railroads in a manner that is inconsistent with the hypothesis that the short haul pricing constraint was an important mechanism of early railroad regulation the analysis does support a multiple interest interpretation of the interstate commerce act and has implications for the positive theory of regulation

capture and ideology in the economic theory of politics the economic theory of regulation long ago put public interest theories of politics to rest these theories have correctly been viewed as normative wishings rather than explanations of real world phenomena they have been replaced by models of political behavior that are consistent with the rest of microeconomics anthony downs 1957 james buchanan and gordon tullock 1965 george stigler 1971 sam peltzman 1976 recently however debate has arisen over whether some version of a public interest theory of regulation will have to be readmitted to our thinking about actions and results in the political arena what is at issue is the empirical importance of the altruistic publicly interested goals of rational actors in determining legislative and regulatory outcomes james kau and paul rubin 1979 kalt 1981 peltzman 1982 this study assesses the nature and significance of publicly interested objectives in a particular instance of economic policymaking u s senate voting on coal strip mining regulations the existence of such objectives is of course no contradiction of the economic view of human behavior kenneth arrow 1972 gary becker 1974 and may well be rooted in genetic biological history becker 1976 jack hirshleifer 1978 generally however individuals altruistic publicly interested goals have been given little attention this reflects the judgment that such goals are so empirically unimportant as to allow the use of occam s razor in positive models or well founded apprehensions that these goals are unusually difficult to identify measure and analyze notwithstanding the latter problem we find that approaches which confine themselves to a view of political actors as narrowly egocentric maximizers explain and predict legislative outcomes poorly the tracking and dissecting of the determinants of voting on coal strip mining policy suggest that the economic theory of politics has been prematurely closed to a broader conception of political behavior

dynamic legislative policy making abstract we prove existence of stationary markov perfect equilibria in an infinite horizon model of legislative policy making in which the policy outcome in one period determines the status quo for the next we allow for a multidimensional policy space and arbitrary smooth stage utilities and we assume preferences and the status quo are subject to arbitrarily small shocks we prove that equilibrium continuation values are differentiable and that proposal strategies are continuous almost everywhere we establish upper hemicontinuity of the equilibrium correspondence and we provide weak conditions under which each equilibrium of our model determines an aperiodic transition probability over policies we establish a convergence theorem giving conditions under which the invariant distributions generated by stationary equilibria must be close to the core in a canonical spatial model finally we extend the analysis to sequential move stochastic games and to a version of the model in which the proposer and voting rule are determined by play of a finite perfect information game

a comment on weak disposability in nonparametric production analysis in his 2005 paper in this journal kuosmanen argues that shephard s specification of weak disposability in activity analysis dea models is not correct we show that shephard s specification does satisfy weak disposability and is the smallest technology to do so

the provision of public goods under alternative electoral incentives politicians who care about the spoils of office may underprovide a public good because its benefits cannot be targeted to voters as easily as pork barrel spending we compare a winner take all system where all the spoils go to the winner to a proportional system where the spoils of office are split among candidates proportionally to their share of the vote in a winner take all system the public good is provided less often than in a proportional system when the public good is particularly desirable we then consider the electoral college system and show that it is particularly subject to this inefficiency

ranking income distributions a large variety of policy questions involve choices between social states and a consequent ordering of the feasible alternatives when these social states are related to the levels of welfare experienced by individuals or households two central issues stand out in determining the relative desirability of different social outcomes one of these is the essentially positive exercise of achieving comparability between households with different characteristics such as composition or preferences operating in different environments for example facing different price structures the other concerns the normative judgments implicit in the evaluation of alternative allocations of resourcesthe emphasis placed on inequality between households and the extent to which greater inequality can be compensated by higher average living standards this paper focuses on the second of these issues and in doing so we abstract from the problem of household comparability by considering a population of n households identical in all respects except for their incomes the question of ordering social states then becomes one of ranking income distributions over a group of anonymous households or individuals borrowing the usual assumptions imposed on consumer preferences we may suppose that a social ordering of income distributions can be represented by a welfare function 2

economic freedom and government ideology across the german states potrafke n economic freedom and government ideology across the german states regional studies this paper examines whether government ideology influenced economic freedom across the german states the results show that in former west germany rightwing governments promoted economic freedom whereas leftwing governments confined it in the former east germany however rightwing governments were not associated with propagating economic freedom this finding appears to conflict with the common notion of policy convergence at the federal level in fact the observed variation in political preferences across states may indicate that politicians gratify the local electorate and in return offer moderate policies at the federal level potrafke n potrafke n la liberte economique et l ideologie du gou

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

modeling undesirable factors in efficiency evaluation abstract data envelopment analysis dea measures the relative efficiency of decision making units dmus with multiple performance factors which are grouped into outputs and inputs once the efficient frontier is determined inefficient dmus can improve their performance to reach the efficient frontier by either increasing their current output levels or decreasing their current input levels however both desirable good and undesirable bad factors may be present for example if inefficiency exists in production processes where final products are manufactured with a production of wastes and pollutants the outputs of wastes and pollutants are undesirable and should be reduced to improve the performance using the classification invariance property we show that the standard dea model can be used to improve the performance via increasing the desirable outputs and decreasing the undesirable outputs the method can also be applied to situations when some inputs need to be increased to improve the performance the linearity and convexity of dea are preserved through our proposal

presidential pork executive veto power and distributive politics mitigated to the extent that the president prefers spending in some districts over others the model also generates new insights and predictions about fiscal policy under the separation of powers including the effects of divided government electoral rules and term limitations for the executive

total factor energy efficiency of regions in china abstract this paper analyzes energy efficiencies of 29 administrative regions in china for the period 1995 2002 with a newly introduced index most existing studies of regional productivity and efficiency neglect energy inputs we use the data envelopment analysis dea to find the target energy input of each region in china at each particular year the index of total factor energy efficiency tfee then divides the target energy input by the actual energy input in our dea model labor capital stock energy consumption and total sown area of farm crops used as a proxy of biomass energy are the four inputs and real gdp is the single output the conventional energy productivity ratio regarded as a partial factor energy efficiency index is computed for comparison in contrast to tfee our index is found fitting better to the real case according to the tfee index rankings the central area of china has the worst energy efficiency and its total adjustmentof energy consumption amount is over half of china s total regional tfee in china generally improved during the research period except for the western area a u shape relation between the area s tfee and per capita income in the areas of china is found confirming the scenario that energy efficiency eventually improves with economic growth

legislative bargaining under weighted voting organizations often distribute resources through weighted voting we analyze this setting using a non cooperative bargaining game based on the baron ferejohn 1989 model unlike analyses derived from cooperative game theory we find that each voter s expected payoff is proportional to her voting weight an exception occurs when many high weight voters exist as low weight voters may expect disproportionately high payoffs due to proposal power the model also predicts that ex post the coalition formateur the party chosen to form a coalition will receive a disproportionately high payoff using data from coalition governments from 1946 to 2001 we find strong evidence ofsuch formateur effects

computation of equilibrium values in the baron and ferejohn bargaining model abstract computation of exact equilibrium values for n player divide the dollar legislative bargaining games as in baron and ferejohn 1989 with general quota voting rules recognition probabilities and discount factors can be achieved by solving at most n bivariate square linear systems of equations the approach recovers eraslan s 2002 uniqueness result and relies on a characterization of equilibria in terms of two variables that satisfy a pair of piecewise linear equations

the hunt for party discipline in congress ttt e analyze party discipline in the house of representatives between 1947 and 1998 the effects of 1 v party pressures can be represented in a spatial model by allowing each party to have its own cutting line on roll call votes adding a second cutting line makes at best a marginal improvement over the standard single line model analysis of legislators who switch parties shows however that party discipline is manifest in the location of the legislator s ideal point in contrast to our approach we find that the snyder groseclose method of estimating the influence of party discipline is biased toward exaggerating party effects

the flypaper effect identifying areas for further research the flypaper effect literature dates back three decades it is overwhelmingly neo classical in approach attempting to improve the median voter demand model and or temper it with public choice supply side perspectives whilst this approach provided valuable early substantial analytical insights more recent papers seem to have contributed only marginally to an understanding of the flypaper effect if indeed it exists at all hence as well as providing a long overdue comprehensive review of the literature on the flypaper effect this paper identifies more productive avenues for further research

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

what should government do problems of social cost externalities and all that public choice as a field introduced the framework for a methodical economic analysis of political markets the output of these markets of course is reflected by the role that government plays that is specifically true with respect to the organization of economic activity gordon tullock has studied a myriad of aspects of this topic for more than half a century we examine his answers to the question of what should government do and how they have influenced and are still impacting the discussion on the proper role of government in the economy

weak disposability in nonparametric production analysis with undesirable outputs environmental economics and natural resources group at wageningen university in the netherlands weak disposability of outputs means that firms can abate harmful emissions by decreasing the activity level modeling weak disposability in nonparametric production analysis has caused some confusion this article identifies a dilemma in these approaches conventional formulations implicitly and unintentionally assume all firms apply uniform abatement factors however it is usually cost effective to abate emissions in those firms where the marginal abatement costs are lowest this article presents a simple formulation of weak disposability that allows for non uniform abatement factors and preserves the linear structure of the model

a noncooperative theory of legislative coalitions this noncooperative theory is based on a model that incorporates an institutional structure that reflects the sequential process of agenda formation and voting in a legislature that has the task of allocating particularistic benefits among legislative districts the theory is intended to identify the incentives for the formation of proposal coordinating coalitions as a function of characteristics of the political system and the rules that govern agenda formation coalition proposals allocate all the benefits to their districts and whenever the coalition has discipline or controls the chair it will be of minimal winning size when proposals are governed by a closed rule when coalition discipline is absent and the chair is neutral the coalition will be comprised of approximately 70 of the legislature a legislative rule that allows amendments may result in larger coalitions coalition composition is also considered

chaotic shop talk or efficient parliament the reichstag the parties and the problem of governmental instability in the weimar republic the german parliament in the weimar republic was very instable and governments did not last long historical research has tried to determine what caused this instability those historical hypotheses are re examined by studying a completely new dataset covering 489 roll call bills in the parliament during the 14 years in question according to the findings of this study it is very unlikely that it was only the system its conditions and its actors that caused instability and that the reasons rather have to be found outside parliament

the influence of aggregation on the ordering of distributions researchers often compare distributions using some criterion or other of inequality poverty or welfare it is standard practice to base such comparative analysis on aggregated data but will the results obtained be dependent on the degree of aggregation of the data this paper argues on the basis of a simulation study that they will be since the probability of obtaining a ranking can increase rapidly with the degree of aggregation aggregation exaggerates the differences between similar distributions and overlooks crossings at the lower tail a change in research strategy is warranted aggregation should be avoided where possible copyright 1996 by the london school of economics and political science

tax incidence in madagascar an analysis using household data this article discusses tax incidence in madagascar and asks who pays the taxes that finance government spending its main concern is to identify the progressivity of different taxes levied in madagascar based on the consumption and income patterns found in the 1994 enquete permanente aupres des menages a nationally representative survey the results suggest that most taxes are progressive meaning that wealthy households pay proportionately more of these taxes relative to their expenditures than do poor households two notable exceptions are taxes on kerosene and export duties on vanilla both of which are regressive these results are consistent with those of a study of ghana the only other comparable research on tax incidence in africa that study found taxes on kerosene and cocoa exports to be the most regressive taxes in ghana making firm policy recommendations for tax reform would require an analysis of the economic efficiency and administrative efficacy of different taxes to complement this article s work on their equity implications nevertheless the results suggest that the movement away from trade taxes especially export duties and toward broadly based value added or income taxes would be more equitable and more economically efficient the only legitimate impediment to such reforms in madagascar is administrative that is the government s ability to collect different taxes effectively although administrative efficiency may be a problem for value added or income taxes taxes on petroleum products except kerosene are highly progressive and provide a good tax handle

weak disposability in nonparametric production analysis reply to fare and grosskopf fare and grosskopf this issue claim that a single abatement factor suffices for modeling weak disposability in nonparametric production models and that the kuosmanen 2005 technology that uses multiple abatement factors is larger than necessary this article demonstrates by a numerical example that a single abatement factor does not suffice to capture all feasible production plans and that its use leads to the violation of convexity one of the maintained assumptions of the model we also prove that the kuosmanen technology is the correct minimum extrapolation technology under the stated axioms

a general equilibrium model of congressional voting in this paper we specify a model in which congressmen constituents and campaign contributors simultaneously decide on behavior constituents and contributors desire to influence the voting behavior of congressmen congressmen on the other hand want to be elected and vote accordingly we empirically test this model using roll call voting on eight bills dealing with economic regulation and find support for the model our results indicate that part of the voting behavior of congressmen may be explained by noneconomic factors we also find that unions and businesses as campaign contributors are sometimes influential unions are more often influential than is business ideological factors are also important in explaining voting

predictability and power in legislative bargaining the rules and procedures of legislatures often provide legislators with information bearing on the identities of upcoming proposers for a broad class of legislative bargaining games we establish that markovian equilibria necessarily deliver all economic surplus to the first proposer whenever the information structure permits the legislators to rule out some minimum number of proposers one round in advance this result holds regardless of the recognition process and even if players vary in patience and risk aversion it raises the possibility that procedures adopted in the interest of transparency may contribute to the imbalance of political power

bargaining in legislatures bargaining in legislatures is conducted according to formal rules specifying who may make proposals and how they will be decided legislative outcomes depend on those rules and on the structure of the legislature although the social choice literature provides theories about voting equilibria it does not endogenize the formation of the agenda on which the voting is based and rarely takes into account the institutional structure found in legislatures in our theory members of the legislature act noncooperatively in choosing strategies to serve their own districts explicitly taking into account the strategies members adopt in response to the sequential nature of proposal making and voting the model permits the characterization of a legislative equilibrium reflecting the structure of the legislature and also allows consideration of the choice of elements of that structure in a context in which the standard institution free model of social choice theory yields no equilibrium

optimal capital structure and bankruptcy choice dynamic bargaining versus liquidation abstract we model a firm s optimal capital structure decision in a framework in which it may later choose to enter either chapter 11 reorganization or chapter 7 liquidation creditors anticipate equityholders ex post reorganization incentives and price them into the ex ante credit spreads using a realistic dynamic bargaining model of reorganization we show that the off equilibrium threat of costly renegotiation can lead to lower leverage even with liquidation in equilibrium if reorganization is less efficient than liquidation the added option of reorganization can actually make equityholders worse off ex ante even when they liquidate on the equilibrium path

a literature study for dea applied to energy and environment abstract this study systematically summarizes previous research efforts on data envelopment analysis dea applied to energy and environment in the past four decades including concepts and methodologies on dea environmental assessment industrial developments are very important for all nations in terms of their economic prosperities a problem is that the development produces various pollutions on air water and other types of contaminations all of which are usually associated with our health problems and climate changes thus it is necessary for us to consider how to make a balance between economic success and pollution mitigation to maintain a high level of social sustainability in the world it is widely considered that dea is one of the methodologies to examine the level of sustainability this study examines a recent research trend on dea applications from 1980s to 2010s nowadays many researchers have paid serious attention on how to combat various difficulties in the areas of energy and environment as a result the number of articles on dea applications on energy and environment has dramatically increased particularly after 2000s however it is true that dea has strengths and drawbacks in the applications therefore it is very important for us to carefully use dea for guiding large policy issues and business strategies such as the global warming and climate change an underlying premise of this study is that technology innovation in engineering and natural science may solve various problems by linking it with political and managerial efforts the use of dea provides a methodological linkage among them so enhancing the practicality in mitigating problems due to climate change and environmental pollutions this literature study along with a summary on conceptual and methodological developments provides us with guidelines for our future research works on dea on energy and environment issues

the design of direct taxation and family benefits abstract the subject of this paper is the design of the personal income tax and social security benefits that vary with the size of the family it is concerned with the analytical problems of policy design that arise from constraints on the instruments which may be used from differences in social judgements about the desirability of redistribution and from differences of view about the disincentive effects of taxation the paper considers these issues in the context of the french tax benefit system and the implications of the french system being harmonised towards certain features of the british system

uniqueness of stationary equilibrium payoffs in coalitional bargaining we study a model of sequential bargaining in which in each period before an agreement is reached the proposer s identity is randomly determined the proposer suggests a division of a pie of size one each other agent either approves or rejects the proposal and the proposal is implemented if the set of approving agents is a winning coalition for the proposer the theory of the fixed point index is used to show that stationary equilibrium expected payoffs of this coalitional bargaining game are unique this generalizes eraslan 34 insofar as a there are no restrictions on the structure of sets of winning coalitions b different proposers may have different sets of winning coalitions c there may be a positive probability that no proposer is selected

the line item veto and public sector budgets evidence from the states abstract the paper examines the claim that gubernatorial line item veto power reduces state spending analysis of a rich set of state budget data indicates that long run budgets are not altered by an item veto and that in the short run the item veto s potency is contingent upon the political setting in certain circumstances governors with political incentives to use an item veto alter spending and revenues in a statistically significant and quantitatively important fashion these results suggest that state budgets have not been importantly altered as a result of the existence of the line item veto and shed doubt on the use of the line item veto to reduce federal government spending

non cooperative bargaining theory an introduction the paper provides an informal introduction to some of the main themes of the recent literature on non cooperative or sequential bargaining models it focuses in particular on the relationship between the new approach and the traditional axiomatic approach exemplified by nash bargaining theory it illustrates the new insights offered by the non cooperative approach by reference to a detailed analysis of the manner in which the presence of an outside option available to one of the parties will affect the negotiated outcome finally the difficulties which arise in extending this analysis to two person bargaining with incomplete information and to n person bargaining are discussed this is a revised version of the fourth review of economic studies lecture presented in april 1985 at the joint meeting of the association of university teachers of economics and the royal economic society held in oxford the choice of lecturer is made by a panel whose members are currently professors hahn mirrlees and nobay and the paper is refereed in the usual way this paper aims to provide an informal and elementary introduction to an approach to bargaining which has received a great deal of attention over the past few years the approach involves writing down some particular sequence of moves offers and replies to be made over time in the course of negotiations and then looking for a non cooperative equilibrium in the game thus specified in practice a perfect equilibrium or in games of incomplete information a sequential equilibrium while the approach appears at first sight to be very different in spirit from the traditional axiomatic approach in which a bargaining solution is specified by appealing to a number of general requirements which are deemed appropriate on the basis of some a priori considerations the two approaches are in fact complementary while the

the arsenal of democracy production and politics during wwii abstract we study the geographic distribution of military supply contracts during world war ii this is a unique case where 3 trillion current day dollars was spent we find robust evidence consistent with the hypothesis that economic factors dominated the allocation of supply contracts and that political factors or at least winning the 1944 presidential election were at best of secondary importance general industrial capacity in 1939 as well as specialized industrial capacity for aircraft production are strong predictors of contract spending across states electoral college pivot probabilities are weak predictors of contract and new facilities spending and under the most plausible assumptions they are essentially unrelated to spending this is true over the entire period 1940 1944 and also for shorter periods leading up to the election in november 1944 that is we find no evidence of an electoral cycle in the distribution of funds

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

the potential estimation and factor analysis of china s energy conservation on thermal power industry new huadu business school research fund national social science foundation of china 12zd059 ministry of education 10gbj013

differentiating mixed member electoral systems mixed member majoritarian and mixed member proportional systems and government expenditures the increasing use of mixed member electoral systems has led to an explosion of research attempting to specify their effects yet there has been no work on the economic policy effects of such systems even though this has been a significant subject of debate for scholars analyzing other electoral systems an analysis of mixed member system policy effects is problematic given the wide variation in institutional rules among different systems this article attempts to determine whether the institutional differences between mixed member majoritarian mmm and mixed member proportional mmp systems lead to differences in policy outputs the political economy literature finds that government expenditures are positively correlated with electoral system proportionality our statistical analysis of government expenditures in 17 mixed member systems between 1990 and 2000 shows that mmp systems which are more proportional than mmm systems are correlated with higher levels of government spending thus the mmm mmp

cooperation and punishment under repeated majority voting in light of the extensive theoretical evidence suggesting absence of equilibrium in voting models tullock 1981 asks why so much stability our results suggest the following answer political agents engaged in long term relationships can sustain highly stable allocations if there are strongly held norms for punishment of defectors 1

industrial energy efficiency and driving forces behind efficiency improvement evidence from the pearl river delta urban agglomeration in china abstract improving energy efficiency of industrial sectors is essential to achieve energy conservation in the pearl river delta urban agglomeration prdua in china this study adopted stochastic frontier analysis sfa to evaluate the industrial total factor energy efficiency tfee of nine cities in prdua during 2004 2016 and then to decompose the growth of tfee into technical change tc technical efficiency change tec and economies of scale sc effects results show that the tfee of industrial sectors of prdua had an overall downward trend during the study period and that technical change was the major driving force behind the growth of tfee the tobit model was then adopted to further investigate the determinants of energy efficiency improvement and test the robustness of empirical results the main contributions of this study to the existing literature lie in showing that 1 the degree of openness local government spending foreign direct investment factor input structure environmental regulation strength and gdp per capita have positive impacts on the industrial tfee 2 enterprise scale and energy consumption structure have a negative impact on industrial energy efficiency finally we address policy implications for energy management regarding their economic and environmental aspects in industrial sectors of the prdua

fiscal discipline and the budget process the critical economic policy issue for many oecd countries developing countries and transition economies currently is fiscal consolidation and the maintenance of long run fiscal balance two related components underlie this general goal first several countries face the issue of deficit reduction particularly those countries with high debt gdp ratios second it is becoming increasingly apparent that major reforms of the welfare system and specifically of social security systems are critical ingredients of a long lasting fiscal consolidation see alesina and perotti 1995a in the case of monetary policy a constructive discussion has generated a widespread consensus about the benefits of different monetary institutions relatively few economists dispute the benefits of a certain amount of central bank independence even though different commentators and policymakers may disagree on the optimal degree of independence also a contracting approach has highlighted the benefit of inflation targeting and of certain institutional relationships contracts between the executive and the central bank a similar theoretical and empirical discussion on the role of budget procedures and budget institutions is just beginning in this paper we ask the following two questions i do budget procedures matter for the determination of the budget balance and its composition ii are there certain institutional reforms that one should feel comfortable in recommending based on the relatively scarce empirical evidence available we tentatively answer yes to the first question budget procedures matter on the second question we suggest that the two critical areas of reform are first more transparency second a strengthening of the roles of the executive branch vis a vis the legislature and of the treasury minister vis a vis the rest of the executive branch in order to achieve a centralized and top bottom approach to the budget process

analyzing roll calls with perfect spatial voting france 1946 1958 a recent methodological advance in legislative roll call analysis is especially relevant to the study of legislative behavior outside the setting of the united states congress we argue that poole s 2000 optimal classification method for roll call analysis is preferable to parametric methods for studying many legislatures this is because the nature of party discipline near perfect spatial voting and parliamentary institutions that provides incentives for strategic behavior lead to severe violations of the error assumptions underlying parametric methods the robustness of the nonparametric method to the stochastic nature of the data makes it an ideal candidate for studying strategic behavior in legislatures we illustrate these points with an analysis of data from the french fourth republic 1946 1958 t his article argues that poole s 2000 new optimal classification method for roll call analysis is preferable to parametric methods for studying many legislatures outside of the united states congress the reason is that assumptions about errors in voting that underlie w nominate and other parametric methods generally developed for and tested on congressional roll call data are likely to be inappropriate in most legislative settings we support this point through an analysis of data from the three legislatures of the french national assembly in the short lived and not lamented fourth republic 1946 58 the national assembly had at least five characteristics that make the application of parametric methods problematic variation in discipline across parties unstable party memberships proxy voting near perfect two dimensional spatial voting and parliamentary institutions that provide incentives for strategic voting our analyses demonstrate that poole s nonparametric method allows us to analyze legislative behavior within the theoretically attractive spatial framework when w nominate fails moreover we show that the method s robustness to the stochastic nature of the data

executive budget proposal executive veto legislative override and uncertainty a comparative analysis of the budgetary process this study examines the roles of the executive budgetary proposal the executive veto the legislative override and legislative uncertainty about the executive s preferences in determining the outcome of a budgetary process a sequential model of the budgetary process with three institutional agents a legislature an appropriations committee and an executive is presented to focus attention on the executive proposal the veto the override provision and uncertainty simplifying assumptions are made 1 the appropriations committee has monopoly agenda power and 2 there is a closed amendment control rule in order to characterize sequential equilibria of various combinations of veto rules and override provisions we examine a particular arrangement of agents preferences and a two item budget the results demonstrate that the final budget depends critically on the executive proposal the executive veto rule the override provision and the uncertainty we achieve three striking results first the executive proposal may be effective in reducing the frequency of the exercised veto second for a given override provision a movement from the item veto to the item reduction veto leaves the executive worse off in some cases third with the same change in institutions the government budget may increase

electoral politics and the executive veto a predictive theory we argue that winner take all voting in states and the unequal distribution of electoral votes across states in presidential elections makes incumbent presidents rationally place more weight on the preferences of voters in closely contested larger states when making policy decisions this hypothesis is tested by examining whether presidential veto decisions are influenced by the floor votes of senators from these electorally crucial states in a pooled sample of 325 individual bills from 1970 through 1988 we find significant evidence of this behavior by incumbent presidents

power illusion in coalitional bargaining an experimental analysis abstract one feature of legislative bargaining in naturally occurring settings is that the distribution of seats or voting weights often does not accurately reflect bargaining power game theoretic predictions about payoffs and coalition formation are insensitive to nominal differences in vote distributions and instead only depend on pivotality we conduct an experimental test of the classical baron ferejohn model with five player groups holding real power constant we compare treatments with differences in nominal power we find that initial effects of nominal differences become small or disappear with experience our results also point to the complexity of the environment as having a negative impact on the speed at which this transition takes place finally and of particular importance as a methodological observation giving subjects a pause accelerates learning

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

bargaining in bicameral legislatures when and why does malapportionment matter malapportionment of seats in bicameral legislatures it is widely argued confers disproportionate benefits to overrepresented jurisdictions ample empirical research has documented that unequal representation produces unequal distribution of government expenditures in bicameral legislatures the theoretical foundations for this empirical pattern are weak it is commonly asserted that this stems from unequal voting power per se using a noncooperative bargaining game based on the closed rule infinite horizon model of baron and ferejohn 1989 we assess the conditions under which unequal representation in a bicameral legislature may lead to unequal division of public expenditures two sets of results are derived first when bills originate in the house and the senate considers the bill under a closed rule the equilibrium expected payoffs of all house members are surprisingly equal second we show that small state biases can emerge when 1 there are supermajority rules in the malapportioned chamber 2 the senate initiates bills which produces maldistributed proposal probabilities and 3 the distributive goods are lumpy we thank seminar participants at new york university the university of pennsylvania and the 2002 annual meeting of the american political science association for helpful comments james snyder and michael ting gratefully acknowledge the financial support of national science foundation grant ses 0079035 stephen ansolabehere gratefully acknowledges the support of the carnegie corporation under the carnegie scholars program this paper was written while michael ting was at the university of north carolina at chapel hill and he thanks the department of political science there for their support

rank dominance and international comparisons of income distributions abstract the rank dominance criterion for comparing income distributions assumes the pareto principle anonymity and population size invariance this paper applies rank dominance to compare international income distributions empirically rank dominance is a powerful tool for ordering income distributions our results suggest that much of the power of generalized lorenz dominance is due to efficiency preference and equity preference adds only marginally to the ability to order income distributions

favoritism and reverse discrimination abstract we analyze the inefficiency that may arise in the form of reverse discrimination in the presence of favoritism or nepotism favoritism is typically associated with inefficient transfers to the core support of the incumbent government but inefficiency that is opposite in nature may also arise through the electoral process in a political environment where favoritism is pervasive we show that if the policy maker is sufficiently office seeking a socially efficient action may never be taken if it yields benefits to his core support due to reputational concerns hence the core support of the incumbent may fare worse than other groups we also consider the implications of policies such as anti nepotism laws or term limits in the presence of favoritism

energy efficiency and policy in swedish pulp and paper mills a data envelopment analysis approach the paper provides an empirical assessment of the electricity efficiency improvement potential in the swedish pulp and paper industry by employing data envelopment analysis dea and mill specific input and output data for the years 1995 2000 and 2005 the empirical results are discussed in relation to the reported outcomes of the swedish voluntary energy efficiency programme pfe the estimated electricity efficiency gap is relatively stable over the time period it equals roughly 1 twh per year for the sample mills and this is three times higher than the corresponding self reported electricity savings in pfe this result is largely a reflection of the fact that in the pulp and paper industry electricity efficiency improvements are typically embodied in the diffusion of new capital equipment and there is a risk that some of the reported measures in pfe simply constitute an inefficient speed up of capital turnover the above does not preclude though that many other measures in pfe may have addressed some relevant market failures and barriers in the energy efficiency market overall the analysis suggests that future energy efficiency programs could plausibly be better targeted at explicitly promoting technological progress as well as at addressing the most important information and behaviour related failures

us residential energy demand and energy efficiency a stochastic demand frontier approach this paper estimates a us frontier residential aggregate energy demand function using panel data for 48 states over the period 1995 to 2007 using stochastic frontier analysis sfa utilizing an econometric energy demand model the in efficiency of each state is modeled and it is argued that this represents a measure of the inefficient use of residential energy in each state i e waste energy this underlying efficiency for the us is therefore observed for each state as well as the relative efficiency across the states moreover the analysis suggests that energy intensity is not necessarily a good indicator of energy efficiency whereas by controlling for a range of economic and other factors the measure of energy efficiency obtained via this approach is this is a novel approach to model residential energy demand and efficiency and it is arguably particularly relevant given current us energy policy discussions related to energy efficiency

are legislators ideologues or the agents of constituents abstract legislatures often make important economic decisions a decade ago economists viewed each legislator as the agent if not of the median voter of some pivotal voter in a party constituency therefore the voting decision of a legislator could readily be predicted if one could measure the preferences of the relevant pivotal voter models where interests on specific issues can be simply linked to votes on the same issues are questionable however since votes will be traded across issues political parties are one important vehicle for organizing such trades a simple empirical test for the united states senate however clearly rejects the notion that the representative is the agent of the median voter or a local party constituency even if vote trades are allowed thus there is ample opportunity for politicians even under reelection constraints to either voice their own ideology or that of idiosyncratic support coalitions the relevant theory and empirical evidence is summarized and some validating tests for european parliaments are suggested

presidential particularism and divide the dollar politics when inuencing the allocation of federal dollars across the country do presidents strictly pursue maximally ecient outcomes or do they systematically target dollars to politically inuential constituencies in a county level analysis of federal spending from 1984 to 2008 we nd that presidents are not universalistic but particularistic that is they reliably direct dollars to specic constituents to further their political goals as others have noted presidents target districts represented by their co partisans in congress in the pursuit of inuence visavis the legislature but we show that at much higher levels presidents target both counties within swing states and counties in core states that strongly supported the president in recent elections swing state particularism is especially salient during presidential reelection years and core partisan counties within swing states are most heavily rewarded rather than strictly pursuing visions of good public policy or pandering to the national median voter our results suggest that presidents systematically prioritize the needs of politically important constituents

the president and the distribution of federal spending scholarship on distributive politics focuses almost exclusively on the internal operations of congress paying particular attention to committees and majority parties this article highlights the president who has extensive opportunities both ex ante and ex post to influence the distribution of federal outlays we analyze two databases that track the geographic spending of nearly every domestic program over a 24 year period the largest and most comprehensive panels of federal spending patterns ever assembled using district and county fixed effects estimation strategies we find no evidence of committee influence and mixed evidence that majority party members receive larger shares of federal outlays we find that districts and counties receive systematically more federal outlays when legislators in the president s party represent them

the political economy of the us mortgage default crisis we examine the effects of constituents special interests and ideology on congressional voting on two of the most significant pieces of legislation in us economic history representatives whose constituents experience a sharp increase in mortgage defaults are more likely to support the foreclosure prevention act especially in competitive districts interestingly representatives are more sensitive to defaults of their own party constituents special interests in the form ofhigher campaign contributions from the financial industry increase the likelihood of supporting the emergency economic stabilization act however ideologically conservative representatives are less responsive to both constituent and special interests jel d72 g21 g28

on measuring partisanship in roll call voting the u s house of representatives 1877 1999 on measuring partisanship in roll call voting the u s house of representatives 1877 1999 we propose a method of assessing party influence based on a spatial model our method provides the first test of whether observed values of the widely used rice index of party dissimilarity are consistent with a partyless null model it also avoids problems that beset previous estimators substantively we find evidence of party influence in all but one congress since 1877 moreover our indicator of party pressure is systematically higher for the sorts of roll calls that party theorists believe are more pressured procedural organizational and label defining votes our results refute the widespread notion that parties in the house have typically had negligible influence on roll call voting behavior they also document important changes in party influence associated with the packing of the rules committee in 1961 and the procedural reforms of 1973

energy efficiency in swedish industry a firm level data envelopment analysis this paper assesses energy efficiency in swedish industry using unique firm level panel data covering the years 2001 2008 the efficiency estimates are obtained for firms in 14 industrial sectors by using data envelopment analysis dea the analysis accounts for multi output technologies where undesirable outputs are produced alongside with the desirable output the results show that there was potential to improve energy efficiency in all the sectors and relatively large energy inefficiencies existed in small energy use industries in the sample period also we assess how the eu ets the carbon dioxide co2 tax and the energy tax affect energy efficiency by conducting a second stage regression analysis to obtain consistent estimates for the regression model we apply a modified input oriented version of the double bootstrap procedure of simar and wilson 2007 the results of the regression analysis reveal that the eu ets and the co2 tax did not have significant influences on energy efficiency in the sample period however the energy tax had a positive relation with the energy efficiency

executive veto power and credit claiming the line item veto has often be heralded as an effective tool in reducing pork barrel spending a model of veto bargaining over public goods and pork barrel spending in the presence of credit claiming incentives demonstrates that the item veto does not necessarily reduce pork barrel spending and reduces the executive s ability to attain his preferred level of spending on public goods the item veto also has an ambiguous effect on the balance of power between the executive and the legislature while strengthening the position of the legislative agenda setter within the legislature

seniority in legislatures we construct a stochastic game model of a legislature with an endogenously determined seniority system we model the behavior of the legislators as well as their constituents in an infinitely repeated divide the dollar game each legislative session must make a decision on redistributional issues modeled as a divide the dollar game however each session begins with a vote in which the legislators decide by majority rule whether or not to impose on themselves a seniority system legislative decisions on the redistributional issues are made by the baron ferejohn rule an agenda setter is selected by a random recognition rule which in our model is a function of the seniority system selected the agenda setter makes a proposal on redistributional issues and the legislature then votes whether to accept or reject the agenda setters proposal if the legislature rejects the proposal another agenda setter is randomly selected and the process is repeated if the legislature accepts the proposal the legislative session ends and the voters in each legislative district vote whether to retain their legislator or throw it out of office the voters verdict determines the seniority structure of the next period legislature we find a stationary equilibrium to the game having the property that the legislature imposes on itself a non trivial seniority system and that legislators are always reelected