do legislators votes reflect constituency preference a simple way to evaluate the senate u s senators frequently vote against the preference of their constituency assuming that such a preference exists both of a state s senators represent the same constituency whenever they split their votes one or the other is necessarily going against the constituency preference for the sample of defense related votes analyzed above misrepresentation either observable vote splitting or unobservable vote matches that go against the constituency preference occurred at least 37 percent of the time at least 46 percent on one vote although party differences accounted for more than two thirds of the vote splitting a substantial number of splits remained besides a party difference for a state s senatorial pair is itself problematical

population increase economic growth educational inequality and income distribution some recent evidence abstract using a recent inter country sample impacts of population increase short run growth rate and educational level and inequality on income distribution are assessed as in almost all other studies high population increase is observed to be a disequalizer however unlike the position indicated in several earlier studies rapid short run economic growth seems to reduce income inequality while higher mean schooling level appears to be a mild equalizer contrary to the results reported by earlier researchers no adverse effect of educational inequality on income distribution is found

state abortion legislation as a public good before and after roe v wade utilization of a theoretical model of the public demand for abortion legislation suggests that should the 1973 roe vs wade ruling be overturned the availability of abortion in the us would not be as limited as it was before this landmark decision the model conceptualized public demand for abortion as a combination of 2 factors 1 external demand measured by voter preference and reflecting the external costs or benefits conferred on the public by the relative availability of abortion and 2 private demand based on the direct effect of abortion access by women of childbearing age the type of abortion legislation in each state prior to roe vs wade prohibited except to save the mothers life or in cases of rape restricted to specific situations such as preserving the mothers health and unrestricted was used as an indicator of public sentiment toward abortion among the factors considered to correlate with sentiment toward abortion availability were income education marital status race and religious affiliation the model predicts that 20 states compared to 30 in 1970 would prohibit abortion and 8 compared to 4 in 1970 would place no restrictions on abortion if each state were to select its own abortion policy omission of the private demand component from the model resulted in even less restrictive access to abortion 11 states with an abortion ban and 11 with unrestricted access these findings are consistent with the national opinion polls indicating support for less restrictive abortion legislation

a decomposition analysis of the trend in uk income inequality post war britain has experienced a number of dramatic demographic and social changes that have undoubtedly influenced the distribution of income there has been a rise in the number of pensioners whose incomes are relatively low a considerable increase in the number of young and old households living on their own and a remarkable expansion in the proportion of working wives the potential importance of these structural changes suggests that their impact on the income distribution needs to be examined systematically before any attempt can be made to interpret the observed trend in overall income inequality adequately the method usually adopted for this purpose attempts to create a comparable time series of distributions based on the structural characteristics pertaining in one particular year for example if we wished to investigate the effect of shifts in the age structure of the population this approach would disaggregate the distribution in one year tl and estimate what the distribution would have been like if the age structure had been the same as that observed in some other year to on the assumption that other distributional characteristics such as ageincome differentials and inequality within age groups remain invariant to this demographic change the comparison between the actual distribution at t1 and the constructed distribution at t1 with to s age structure is taken to indicate the impact of changes in the age structure over the period concerned this comparison can be presented in terms of quantile shares summary measures of inequality or the entire lorenz curves this approach known as shift share analysis or standardising the inequality series see semple i975 love and wolfson i976 dinwiddy and reed i977 royal commission i977 rowley and henderson i978 macleod and horner i980 is perfectly adequate for simple and straightforward structural changes when several changes are occurring simultaneously however it becomes difficult to identify the contribution of the individual factors and to assess their relative importance to the overall trend in inequality furthermore the combined impact of several structural influences will not in general sum up to the inequality change requiring explanation the purpose of this paper is to propose an alternative method of analysing

shirking and sorting in a political market with finite lived politicians this paper analyzes principal agent slack in the context of a political market composed of voters challengers and incumbents the introduction of a last period via finite livedness in combination with voters imperfect information about politicians preferences causes time varying shirking behavior on the part of politicians political markets eventually sort out those politicians with significantly deviant policy preferences potentially providing a solution to the last period problem and enabling politicians to make credible commitments in the extreme sorting can insure that it is not worthwhile for potential shirkers to run for office a systematic relationship between political shirking and number of terms in office may exist and depends on how quickly sorting takes place we show that evidence of little if any shirking is quite consistent with politicians having diverse and strongly held policy preferences in addition if sorting is a significant feature of political markets cross sectional studies will tend to oversample little and non shirking politicians compared to longitudinal studies reinterpretations of existing empirical work are also discussed

ageing the great challenge to health care reform abstract this contribution is an attempt to analyze an issue that seems to be frequently skirted over when discussing reforms of today s health care systems practitioners of health insurance point out the fact that a major share of medical care services goes to the uppermost age brackets who are believed to be unresponsive to the financial incentives such as cost sharing and bonuses for no claims that are being considered as innovations in the financing of health care at the same time rapid growth in the numbers of the old and very old is predicted for virtually all oecd countries acting in combination these two factors appear to undercut the rationale of conventional cost containment strategies in health care a closer look at the matter even reveals that a major part of lifetime health resources are spent during the last few months of human life economists are therefore challenged to explain a puzzle why is it that such a great deal of resources is dedicated to investments that will in all likelihood be characterized by a very short payoff period in an attempt at answering this question the decision situations facing the dying patient and his family treating physicians and politicians acting as agents of the population at large will be examined in turn of course no easy way out can be expected to result from this exercise nevertheless economic analysis can be counted upon to provide at least cues concerning the incentives that have to be built into future insurance contracts physician payment schemes and modes of hospital finance for dealing with the challenge to the health care system posed by a rapidly ageing population

an explanation for why senators from the same state vote differently so frequently abstract this paper explains why rational well informed voters elect politicians with divergent platforms given well defined constituencies and the costliness of any individual politician creating transfers across all interest groups we show that different politicians from the same district can successfully represent vastly different constituencies and still have each politician producing the support maximizing level of transfers our explanation focuses on how obtaining wealth transfers reduces successful constituencies returns to obtaining additional transfers the evidence strongly rejects alternative explanations based upon the median voter and polarized policy preference approaches

constituent interest vs legislator ideology the role of political opportunity cost this paper applies the economic model of legislative voting to the automobile industry domestic content vote in the u s house of representatives in 1982 we consider constituent interests for and against the ml and compare the predictive powers of alternative indicators of ideological preferences we also examine the role of political opportunity cost and find that lame ducks were significantly less likely to vote for the bill than were returnees to congress given the political advantages of voting for the bill this is consistent with the view that legislators were influenced by the case for freer trade

a direct test of the lemons model the market for used pickup trucks of the implications of models of markets with asymmetric information in the seminal paper on markets with asymmetric information george akerlof 1970 pointed out two possible outcomes that may occur where sellers have better information about the quality of products than do buyers one possibility is that bad products will drive out good products if buyers cannot distinguish quality until after the purchase has been made there will be no incentive for sellers to provide good quality products and the average quality in the market will decline in the case of cars an often cited example of this phenomenon owners who discover that they have a lemon will attempt to sell it in the used car market to an unsuspecting buyer the owner of a creampuff will not sell his car since it is indistinguishable from a lemon to buyers and must therefore sell for the price of a car of average quality the effect of quality uncertainty is to reduce the volume of transactions in the used car market below the socially optimal level a second possibility suggested by akerlof is that institutions may develop to counteract the effects of quality uncertainty warranties and brand names can be used to give the buyer some assurance of quality these institutions may prevent good products from being driven from the market but they will

economists and the welfare state abstract this paper constrasts the views of the welfare state of economists in the 1940s and 1950s with those of the current generation it is argued that economists as a profession in particular in the scandinavian countries have changed from being strong spokesmen for the welfare state to becoming much more critical the reasons for this are sought both in the expansion of the public sector in recent decades and in the development of economic theory in the areas of public finance insurance and incentives and public choice an attempt is made to evaluate the importance of the empirical and theoretical developments for the changing views of the welfare state

quality corrected price indices the case of the dutch new passenger car market 1990 1999 market dynamics and technological developments constitute a major challenge to the proper measurement of the price evolution of durable goods in this study hedonic methods are used to estimate quality corrected price indices of new passenger cars in the netherlands 1990 1999 use is made of a huge set of price quantity and quality information about 11 000 car models obtained from different sources during the observation period the nominal price level of all available car models increased about 20 on average while the shares of car models with airbags tinted glass and power steering increased from almost nothing to about 90 matched model price indices and the official cpi for new passenger cars which partially account for quality adjustments estimate the price increase to be equal to 10 6 14 2 respectively 11 2 for the 1990 1999 period by contrast the hedonic fisher like price indices based on the preferred annually estimated brand weighted semi log hedonic model lead to price changes var

a critical review and an extension of the political shirking literature after substituting actual and real changes for proposed and nominal changes in budgetary and employment levels it is clear that the size and scope of the federal leviathon had not been reduced over 1982 83 it is also clear that the agencies which witnessed real budget cuts over this period were of minor importance in terms of the total u s budget future research on why only small agencies receive real budget cuts will provide us with a better understanding of the budgetary process

public pensions choices for the future abstract the purpose of this paper is to analyze to what extent pay as you go government mandated pensions can provide adequate retirement income to future generations this question is particularly relevant at times when the financial viability of public pensions is threatened by demographic aging and possibly declining productivity and when more importantly there is little consensus as to why those programs exist as they are that is mandatory public and unfunded the gist of our argument is that an aging population particularly if combined with declining productivity would jeopardize the financial and political viability of public pensions if individuals behavior doesn t adjust to this new reality and public authorities don t adopt the appropriate reforms as to mandatory retirement age payroll taxes and benefits structure among key individual decisions we focus on saving labor participation retirement education migration and fertility we consider how sensitive each of these is to changes in the environment and to changes in policy parameters then we turn to a number of issues unsolved either because of analytical complexity or because they arise from new realities

house prices during siting decision stages the case of an incinerator from rumor through operation abstract the impact of an undesirable land use on house prices is not constant over time previous proximity studies which employed only discrete changes in information such as an epa superfund site announcement ignored potentially important phases of the adjustment process this study explicitly measures how the effects of an undesirable land use evolve over the siting process and life of the disamenity some price response to rumors of a facility is indicated and the evidence that prices respond at groundbreaking before operation is strong the distance premium persists at least 7 years after the facility begins operations

the effect of changes in the population on several measures of income distribution an economic model is used to explore the relationship between population growth and 2 of the most commonly used income distribution statistics the share of the rich and the poor in total income and the rate of growth of real income of the rich and the poor brazilian statistics applied to the model illustrate the difficulty of interpreting the common inequality measures under conditions of rapid population growth neither income shares nor growth rates can tell much about the degree of progressivity in the growth strategy of a particular country without adjustment absolute income for the base period poor or base period teenagers was greater than reported for either the poor or teenagers however the rise in inequality was also greater for the base period population growth in brazil was seen to be even more regressive than previously thought significant upward mobility was however still possible

taxes torts and the toxics release inventory congressional voting on instruments to control pollution i introduction governments can choose from a wide variety of policy instruments to control pollution including tax and subsidy schemes marketable permits information provision programs liability systems with well defined property rights and command and control selection of emission standards or technologies economists throughout the 1980s devoted significant effort to modeling the relative merits of these instruments the question of why politicians would prefer one manner of controlling pollution over another also attracted attention starting with buchanan and tullock s 1975 positive theory of externality control in which polluters find direct regulatory controls on emissions more profitable than pollution taxes theories of instrument selection have been developed in which politicians choose policies based on the relative costs and benefits to shareholders workers and environmentalists are affected by the constraints imposed by political institutions and are driven to select the most efficient policy instrument to achieve a given level of redistribution 1 to date however there have been few empirical tests of what drives instrument selection in environmental policy there is a large empirical literature devoted to explaining the level of support for environmental programs in congress most articles focus on the degree to which a legislator s stand on a given environmental bill can be explained by narrow district interests generally the material interests of constituents or by ideology either constituents or the member s own policy preferences studies of voting on environmental legislation by ackerman and hassler 1981 crandall 1983 pashigian 1985 and yandle 1989 offer evidence that legislators actions are in part explained by the district or state level impacts of proposed legislation on their constituents kalt and zupan 1984 find that after controlling for constituents material self interest in proposed strip mining legislation the ideology of constituents and the personal ideologies of their representatives influence voting on this aspect of environmental preservation as grier 1993 demonstrates debate over the general role of the legislator s specific ideology in voting continues in studying votes in the house and senate on the proposed size of the superfund during debate over the program s renewal hird 1993 concludes that congressional voting on superfund is found to represent legislator s environmental and liberal ideologies as much as if not more than narrowly defined self interest he links the importance of ideology to voting on superfund in part to the bill s symbolic environmental appeal in environmental legislation the final impact of a bill on industry and the environment often depends on issues resolved through technical amendments downs s theory of rational ignorance and arnold s theory of the degree to which constituents will link congressional actions with real world outcomes predict that members of congress may be less constrained by general constituent interests on amendment votes since these votes are less likely to be covered in the media than are final legislative votes as denzau and munger 1986 and grier and munger 1991 note groups with specific interests such as affected industries may find it less costly to persuade a member of congress to vote their way on a measure if the representative s constituents are supportive of or indifferent to the measure in the case of technical amendments affected parties may be more influential than on highly visible votes because the lack of media coverage translates into a lower probability that the vote will become a major campaign issue in future elections this implies that voting on the instruments to control pollution will be driven in part by the specific district level costs and benefits of these measures while voting on the final passage of a bill will be more driven by general constituent interests

capital and labor saving technical change in an aging economy does population aging and the associated increase in the old age dependency ratio affect economic growth the answer is given in a novel analytical framework that allows for population aging to affect endogenous capital and labor saving technical change the short run analysis reveals that population aging induces more labor and less capital saving technical change as it increases the relative scarcity of labor with respect to capital due to external contemporaneous knowledge spill overs across innovating firms induced technical change has a first order effect on current aggregate income in the long run capitalsaving technical progress vanishes and the economy s growth rate reflects only labor saving technical change however the mere possibility of capital saving technical change is shown to imply that the economy s steady state growth rate becomes independent of its age structure neither a higher life expectancy nor a decline in fertility affects economic growth in the long run

job duration seniority and earnings an important stylized fact about labor markets is that workers with longer seniority with their current employer have higher earnings than other workers with the same total labor market experience this study shows that workers in longer jobs earn more throughout than workers in a series of shorter jobs and that the measured positive cross sectional return seniority is largely a statistical artifact due to the correlation of seniority with an omitted variable representing the quality of the worker the job or the worker employer match the implication is tha t earnings do not in fact rise very much with seniority copyright 1987 by american economic association

barriers to competition and the effect on political shirking 1953 1992 economists and political scientists have offered a variety of explanations for why legislators might rationally choose to ignore the preferences of their constituents political parties and presidents the broad conclusion of this literature is that there is an element of shirking in congressional voting the objective of this paper is to suggest that the effects of shirking in congressional voting may have increased over time largely in response to the raising of barriers to competition in congressional elections thereby enabling legislators to vote their own preferences without fear of losing reelection we use a quasi experimental design that controls for the effects of party region electoral safety presidential control of the white house and constituency factors in isolating the causal effects of barriers to entry on a continuous series of roll calls regarding the raising of the debt limit between 1953 and 1992 we find that shirking in legislative voting on debt limit legislation is a post 1970s phenomenon

attendance rates political shirking and the effect of post elective office employment attendance rates political shirking and the effect of post elective office employment i introduction political shirking the degree to which a politican s actions deviate from the wishes of his constituents can take many different dimensions economists e g amacher and boyes 1978 davis and porter 1989 dougan and munger 1989 kalt and zupan 1984 lott 1987d nelson and siberberg 1987 and peltzman 1984 have debated whether shirking exists in how a politician votes when he does vote this divergence is measured through some particular special interest voting ratings e g american conservative union americans for democratic action etc however shirking can obviously take as many forms as there are outputs that a politician produces besides how he votes he also produces services for his constituents involving everything from being personally available to listen to the constituents grievances to ensuring effective handling of case work by his staff see for example fiorina 1977 fenno 1978 and cain et al 1987 1 one dimension that has not been sufficiently examined is the extent to which politicians shirk by failing to vote on pending legislation 2 no attention has been given to which mechanisms will make this particular type of shirking relatively more costly most economists agree that opportunitic behavior by politicians is limited by the threat of reelection e g amacher and boyes 1978 barro 1973 kalt and zupan 1984 nelson 1976 and telser 1976 3 by implication the level of shirking should be the greatest when a politician decides to leave office however this opportunistic behavior might be reduced to the extent that political parties or constituencies impose costs for shirking through affecting politicisns post elective office career or the careers of their children thus a politicians last term in elective office may not represent his last period in any meaningful sense the next section outlines the differing views on how politicians act when they no longer face the threat of reelection section iii describes some empirical evidence on what mechanisms may prevent this last period problem the final section discusses the impliactions of these results ii the last period whether economists view politicians as ideologues e g kau and rubin 1979 and kalt and zupan 1984 or as simply attempting to maximize political support e g barro 1973 ferejohn 1986 nelson 1976 and peltzman 1984 the threat of reelection is seen as preventing shirking as kalt and zupan 1984 298 phrase it it appears that the proximity of the next election inhibits ideological shirking even those who do not view the last period as affecting how a politician votes argue that it will affect how often he votes lott 1987a 1987b has argued that if voters can determine and elect politicians that have ideological preferences corresponding exactly to the wishes of constituents politicians voting patterns should continue to reflect those values even when the cost of shirking in terms of forgone future votes is low the penalty to ideologues of not votingfor their constituency in the last period when they no longer face reelection is the forgone utility from not doing what they personally value assuming that politicians also desire leisure politicians should continue to vote for what they believe in but they should vote less frequently since they no longer receive the additional return of larger future support mechanisms to overcome this last period problem have been suggested by becker and stigler 1974 9 10 they argue that opportunistic behavior can be controlled if officeholders face the loss of a pension or equivalently a posted bond in the event of opportunistic behavior in their last term however the actual pension system does not effectively eliminate the last period for politicians since retirement payments are not based on cheating in the last period

a reconsideration of hedonic price indexes with an application to pc s this paper compares hedonic to matched model indexes matched model indexes are averages of the price changes of goods that remain on sampled stores shelves since goods that disappear tend to have falling market values matched model indexes select from the right tail of price changes the bls can construct hedonic indexes that correct for this selection and are justified by standard arguments in an empirical study of pc s hedonics produce sharp price declines while matched model indexes are near zero also though there are modifications to hedonics that seem desirable they are not those in current use

shirking representation and congressional behavior voting on the 1983 amendments to the social security act our central goals at the outset of the paper were three 1 to report on the relative significance of a sophisticated measure of constituent economic interest and a commonly used variable ada score that purports to measure the personal ideology of the candidate 2 demonstrate that the constituent economic interest variable should be adjusted to account for the fact thatvoters not citizens are the only effective principals in influencing a legislator s voting activities and 3 call into question on both theoretical and empirical grounds the claim that legislators shirk their responsibilities to voters by voting their own ideological preferences in order to evaluate our efforts consider table 5 for a large majority 15 of the 18 relevant runs the ideological variable is significant our measure of constituent economic interests does not eliminate the explanatory power of the ideological voting variable but this does not indicate shirking as opposed to shirking we may observe ideological voting because 1 it provides brand name capital 2 it represents the ideological preferences of the constituents or 3 it acts as a measure of median voter economic preferences further ada scores do not allow us to differentiate between these competing explanations for 11 of the 18 models one of the economic variables accounts for a significant portion of the variance in the dependent variables the results derived from our measure of constituent economic interests contradict most findings of the lasi school and raise questions about the validity of the empirical characterization of constituent interests in that research a breakdown of the results by chamber indicates that significant differences in the degree of ideological voting between the house and senate may exist this is important in that most research has focused only on the senate where ideological voting is more prevalent for the house table 5 reveals the constituent economic interest variable isalways significant and in fully one half of the relevant regressions it is theonly significant variable knocking ada out of the race as noted earlier the insignificance of ada is some indication of the absence of ideological shirking though its significance may indicate only measurement error voter ideology or reputational capital in the senate the results are more evenly split though it is clear that the adjusted for reelection constituency economic interest variable is an improvement ada is significant in all 12 senate regressions and the respective economic variables are significant in 5 or just under half this side by side comparison is provocative though it remains to be tested in detail but our preliminary conclusions can be stated as follows first as peltzman 1984 suggested a better specification of economic interest and constituency representation reduces though it does not eliminate the role of the ada variable in the senate second we find evidence that ideological shirking if it exists is much smaller in the house in fact from an institutional perspective it can be argued that economic interests are dominant since house districts are smaller and more homogeneous further the shorter terms for house members may make them more directly accountable to voters and smaller groups of voters may force a lesser reliance on pure ideological campaigning and require a more personal presentation of self

a reexamination of the principal agent relationship in politics abstract that senators from the same state often have a large difference in their ideological voting records has proven inconvenient for a literature that has largely relied on a median voter model of elections one exception is palfrey review of economic studies 1984 51 139 156 whose analysis implies the hypothesis that the expected difference in such voting records varies directly with the variance of that state s density function of constituent ideological preferences this paper provides empirical testing consistent with this hypothesis the paper then argues that currently accepted methodology for measuring senatorial shirking is systematically biased towards indicating shirking and provides empirical analysis consistent with this argument

the influence of ideology on congressional voting i introduction the question of what determines congressional voting on legislation has inspired a number of recent empirical analyses all are in agreement that congressional voting on specific bills is correlated with the economic self interest of the representative s constituents and a measure of the representative s ideology as indicated by his broader voting record however the interpretation of the empirical results regarding the influence of ideology has generated more debate than consensus in the current literature kau and rubin 1979 find evidence that a congressman s ideology influences his voting but also find evidence for an alternative but not mutually exclusive hypothesis that a congressman s rating by ideological groups reflects membership in a logrolling coalition kalt and zupan 1984 argue that although a representative s votes are likely to reflect the economic interests and the ideology of his constituents the weak incentive for the constituent principal to monitor the voting behavior of his representative agent gives the representative the opportunity to shirk or vote according to his personal ideology rather than his constituents both nelson and silberberg 1987 and mcarthur and marks 1988 find that the degree of shirking increases as the opportunity cost of shirking decreases in contrast to the above findings peltzman 1984 argues that ideological voting by congressmen need not necessarily reflect shirking but instead may be a way for the representative to cheaply provide his constituents with information about his general position on issues what appears to be shirking allowed by an imperfect principal agent relationship may instead be signaling designed to at least partially overcome the imperfect nature of the relationship lott 1987 extends peltzman s signaling argument by hypothesizing that if politicians are viewed by constituents as search goods rather than experience goods then they will have an incentive to establish a political brand name by establishing a consistent ideological voting record dougan and munger s 1989 approach is similar to lott s they argue that politicians with strongly held views that match those of their constituents make ideal representatives because they are less likely to vote against their constituents interests when pressured by special interest groups an incumbent therefore has an incentive to invest in reputational capital by maintaining the consistency over time of his broader voting record because this reputational capital generates quasi rents in electoral competition with candidates who possess less of it neither lott nor dougan and munger find evidence of shirking in their analyses of congressmen s broader voting records as measured by ideological groups ratings dougan and munger also develop a variable intensity of commitment version of the reputational capital hypothesis this version contends that voters with unambiguously liberal or conservative ideologies may prefer a candidate whose voting record indicates that his views are more extreme than their own such a zealous candidate voters believe is even less likely to be influenced by special interest groups a congressman serving an unambiguously liberal or conservative constituency therefore has an incentive to establish and maintain an extremely ideological overall voting record in contrast a congressman serving a constituency with centrist ideological preferences has an incentive to establish an overall voting record that matches his constituency s ideological leanings the systematic deviation of a congressman s voting record from his constituents preferences when near either extreme of the ideological spectrum is not inconsistent with a faithful principal agent relationship one cannot help but be struck by the observation that those researchers finding evidence consistent with shirking studied voting on specific legislation whereas those researchers finding no evidence of shirking studied representatives broader voting records as measured by ideological ratings

stigmatized asset value is it temporary or long term stigma is a negative attribute of real estate acquired by environmental contamination and reflected in its value elliot jones 1996 using a model of neighborhood turnover with external economies we show that both temporary stigma and long term stigma are possible equilibrium outcomes after the discovery and cleanup of a hazardous waste site the existence and duration of stigma are examined using hedonic price techniques with data from housing sales prices in dallas county texas we find that results depend critically on distance from the hazardous waste site neighborhood turnover due to changes in the level of poverty also appears likely

savings of the elderly and desired bequests cross section data often show that the wealth of the elderly increases with age even at advanced ages these and other results suggest that the life cycle hypothesis of consumption should be augmented to include a bequest motive for saving in this paper the author proposes a model of bequests and a test for a bequ est motive using panel data he finds that over a ten year period the elderly in the data set dissaved in contradiction to most cross section results the test offers no support for a bequest motive copyright 1987 by american economic association

the ideological component of senate voting different principles or different principals evidence exists on both sides of the question of whether or not legislator specific ideologically driven shirking of constituent interest occurs in this paper we use a well known model of such shirking by senators as our point of departure and add measures of inter state constituent interests the role of campaign contributions and hence the importance of whether or not senators are up for reelection we find some evidence that the model provides a stronger explanation for senators up for reelection than for those who are not and that campaign contributions help determine voting decisions by these legislators finally accounting for inter state constituent interests shirking is not a significant variable in the voting decisions of senators facing reelection thus it appears that the reelection interests of some senators have been mistaken for ideologically driven shirking

legislator voting and shirking a critical review of the literature we set out to critically review the progress in answering two related questions what determines how legislators vote and how can shirking by legislators be measured in the first category the hypothesis that legislators shirk in order to indulge their personal ideological preferences has led researchers astray the theoretical underpinning is shaky on two counts first legislators who indulge their preferences at the expense of their constituents preferences put themselves at a competitive electoral disadvantage second the original two stage procedure used to measure ideological shirking is severely flawed among many other problems the residual measure of shirking implicitly assumes that the median voter is the relevant constituent principal for the legislator agent

legislative voting and the economic theory of politics empirical studies of legislative voting have multiplied since the mid 1970s early work 13 distinguished two modes of representation delegates who vote as voters want and trustees who use their own judgment more recently researchers have considered only delegates claiming that legislators who use their own ideology are shirking following principal agent theory representatives are conceived as conduits through which citizens transmit and express interests empirical work on this question however has found that the legislator s ideology explains more variation in vote choices than is explained by measures of constituent interest the seeming contradiction has led some 9 10 17 to reject the economic theory of legislator behavior as erroneous the truth is that no such theory has ever been fairly stated much less tested estimating equations have been ad hoc and the usual approach to measuring ideology has imposed correlation between the equation error and an explanatory variable 8 in both cases the result is

health status and the demand for health results on price elasticities the relationship between measured health status and the elasticity of demand for ambulatory physician services is estimated using data from the national medical care utilization and expenditure survey nmcues although the theoretical relationship between health status and demand elasticity is ambiguous results obtained in this study suggest that declines in health reduce the elasticity of the initial decision to seek care but have no discernible effect on the elasticity of demand at mean levels of consumption these results are consistent with the findings of rand s hie and suggest that consumer price sharing has little effect on initial access to physicians for those in poor health

the dynamics of population growth differential fertility and inequality studies of population growth relative to income distribution from single equation and simultaneous equation models have shown that higher population growth rates increase inequality the reasons for this inequality contain important welfare issues including the fact that different income groups grow at different rates with lower income the fastest the differential fertility of the income groups complicates these issues the lorenz curve has often been used as a foundation of the theory of inequality comparisons and uses cumulative shares of income as a function of cumulative shares of population the mortality rates age of new entrants and the mobility across income groups must be factored in these can be analyzed simultaneously using a multistate life table which describes simultaneous transitions across age groups and states data from brazil was used to test whether increase in the fertility rates of the poor would affect income inequality the results indicate a 100 increase in the fertility of the poor which increases the percentage of poor in the equal fertility case there were decreases in the percent of poor from the original number these results confirm that inequality measures can give conflicting signals and could be inconsistent with real changes in relative welfare analyzing relationships between population growth and inequality is difficult and standard measures are inadequate to test hypotheses about the distribution effects of migration or high fertility it appears to be impossible to differentiate changes in population make up from changes in economic status

aging population problems and policy options in the us and germany aging population axel borsch supan the expected change in the age structure of the industrialized countries will lead to a dramatically higher proportion of older people in germany for example 100 employed persons now support about 40 elderly by 2030 this ratio will rise to 85 elderly people per 100 employed persons this process will deeply affect labour financial and housing markets it will strain the social security systems change the accumulation of aggregate wealth and skew its intergenerational distribution while imposing a growing burden on family support by the young generation when the elderly are becoming frail and unable to live independently this paper investigates the mechanisms at work in labour financial and housing markets drawing systematically on comparisons between german and us institutions to determine the role of taxes subsidies and regulations the evidence demonstrates that economic policies have powerful effects some of them are also currently distortionary and interact with existing market imperfections so that a serious consideration of policy options which may moderate the implications of population aging is called for

ideology and legislator shirking we argue that legislator shirking voting on the basis of personal ideology rather than the interests of one s constituents can exist but its appearance should conform to the law of demand we test and confirm this theory using votes on defense expenditure bills in the u s senate in 1982 we assume the cost of shirking is relatively higher on narrowly focused bills on specific weapons systems with well defined beneficiaries and relatively lower on general defense expenditure bills with uncertain final distribution of funds we find greater influence for senators ideology in general versus specific bills

a theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence this paper presents a theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence political equilibrium depends on the efficiency of each group in producing pressure the effect of additional pressure on their influence the number of persons in different groups and the deadweight cost of taxes and subsidies an increase in deadweight costs discourages pressure by subsidized groups and encourages pressure by taxpayers this analysis unifies the view that governments correct market failures with the view that they favor the politically powerful both are produced by the competition for political favors

free trade fair trade strategic trade and protectionism in the u s congress 1987 88 what conditions led the one hundredth congress of the united states to enact fair trade and strategic trade policies into law during 1987 88 political partisanship is an important force with democrats supporting and republicans opposing all types of trade intervention otherwise the coalitions of support for and opposition to the various trade policies differ particularly in the senate in that body international business is associated with support for fair trade policies and with opposition to classical protectionism while domestic u s business is associated with support for classical protectionism liberalism is strongly associated with support for fair and strategic trade policies but is not associated with classical protectionism in the house of representatives the long standing protectionist coalition remains an influence few forces in support of free trade remain in u s politics changing international market conditions rapidly affect the making of u s trade policy

the dynamics of population growth differential fertility and inequality note this note challenges the proposition david lam made in his attempt to examine the relationship between population growth and the distribution of income in the first 2 sections of his paper in which no income mobility was allowed lam successfully analyzed the effects of adding to the economy a group of immigrants with income distribution different from the original residents on 2 inequality measures in the 3rd section lam made the strong proposition that claims in effect in order to determine whether an increase in the ith income groups fertility would increase or reduce the steady state proportion of the ith income group all the information needed is the ith row of the mobility matrix a counterexample is presented here along with a correction for the error that is made in the derivation of lams proposition

population pensions and endogenous economic growth abstract we study the effect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor saving technical change and ask how this effect is influenced by institutional characteristics of the pension scheme when labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increase labor productivity are more profitable we incorporate this channel in a new dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous economic growth and heterogeneous overlapping generations we calibrate the model for the us economy and obtain the following results first the effect of a decline in population growth on labor productivity growth is positive and quantitatively significant in our benchmark it is predicted to increase from an average annual growth rate of 1 74 over 1990 2000 to 2 41 in 2100 second institutional characteristics of the pension system matter both for the growth performance and for individual welfare third the assessment of pension reform proposals may depend on whether economic growth is endogenous or exogenous

assessing changes in capital and investment as a result of fishing capacity limitation programs this paper provides a framework to evaluate the effectiveness of the european multiannual guidance programmes on capacity limitation based on the evolution of the prices of used fishing vessels and on the measures of capital and investment derived from the estimation of a hedonic price function related to vessels characteristics attention is paid not only to the correct specification of the numerical variables but also to testing for sample selection bias to checking for structural change to analysing the convenience of using alternative estimation methods and to discussing the potential bias as a result of asymmetric information in the used markets the application of this framework to the basque fleets evidences clear and coincident signs of successful adjustment after magp3 but also a substantial investment in the next periods as a result of the modernisation of the fleets

evidence on electoral accountability in the u s senate are unfaithful agents really punished many have questioned whether voters are able to hold incumbent officials electorally accountable through a retrospective voting strategy we examine u s senate elections from 1962 to 1990 in forty one states explaining which incumbents ran for reelection and their success in seeking reelection we find that an incumbent s deviation from her state party platform decreases the probability that she will run for reelection and win if she runs furthermore the electoral mechanism is found to be more efficient when voters are better informed finally we find that our divergent party platform model provides a better fit than the median voter model

explaining legislators positions on outside income limits voting on honoraria ceilings in the u s senate 1981 1983 this article examines roll call voting by members of the u s senate on three proposals to limit members outside income in the 1980s i find that several factors influenced legislators votes on outside income limits legislation oill first financial self interest was an important constraint on members willingness to support oill members who earned more honoraria were less likely to vote yes but this opposition was neutralized when limits were attached to the compensating mechanism of a pay raise senators from poorer states were generally more likely to support honoraria limits alone but less likely to support limits linked to a pay raise suggesting a responsiveness to constituent interests in both cases finally when oill was linked to a pay raise electoral considerations became prominent in legislators vote decisions with electorally vulnerable members less likely to vote yes

on the mis measurement of legislator ideology and shirking in this paper we show that current statistical measures of legislator s shirking are implicitly based on the electoral concept of a unique majority rule equilibrium point in the policy space where elections are contested we note that such equilibria do not exist generically and present statistical results showing that cross sectional regressions where legislators voting indices are predicted by district average demograhic and economic data are mis specified we also discuss a weaker equilibrium construct the uncovered set and present statistical evidence showing that differences in voting behavior between senators from the same state are positively related to the heterogeneity of the electorate we argue that current evidence alleged to show shirking by senators is equally consistent with senators who perfectly represent an idiosyncratic constituency that cannot be represented by district average data

economic consequences of an aging population pip europe and japan are experiencing the aging of their populations aging implies a restructuring of the economy political issues which arise in an aging society include 1 a voting majority for the interests of the elderly 2 a voting majority of females 3 the domination of the decision power in corporate and similar ruling bodies and 4 unemployment or a long wait for promotion for younger people economic issues of an aging society include 1 population aging often occurs under reduced rates of growth of per capita national income 2 the relative economic status of the elderly very much depends on the currently existing tax transfer systems and 3 the income of families whose head is over age 65 has generally been more unequally distributed than the income for younger families issues concerning the labor supply of the elderly include 1 the availability of pension income and health limitations strongly influence decisions to retire and 2 older workers become disheartened and choose early retirement when facing bad reemployment prospects in general population aging is likely to have its most substantive effect on the overall level of productivity in an economy where technical knowledge is changing rapidly and strong competition necessitates a high degree of adaptability of the labor force

empirical advances in political economy editor s note i wish to thank coeditor mark zupan who took responsibility for organizing and implementing both the special symposium on public choice and the processing of papers through the refereeing and editorial process for this special section on behalf of all the editors i also would like to express thanks to carolyn williams editorial coordinator for taking on yet another responsibility in arranging the conference symposium meetings and the management of the files the symposium on public choice was held at lake tahoe during the 1993 we a meetings the many efforts of authors referees editors and staff have resulted in an exciting complement to this year s economic inquiry offerings