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

workfare wellbeing and consumption evidence from a field experiment with kenya s urban poor abstract restrictions like work requirements and constraints on voucher transfers are often used in social welfare systems but little empirical evidence exists on their impact on wellbeing we conducted a 10 day randomized experiment with 432 individuals living below the poverty line in the kawangware settlement of nairobi kenya testing two elements of social welfare design workfare versus welfare and restricted versus unrestricted vouchers participants were randomly assigned to a work condition involving daily work for unrestricted vouchers or one of two wait conditions involving daily waiting for vouchers that were either unrestricted or partially restricted to staple foods we find that working improved psychological wellbeing relative to waiting suggesting that the means of implementing welfare programs may have important effects on individuals beyond the impact of monetary benefit alone furthermore although the restrictions were inframarginal partially restricted vouchers crowded in spending on staple foods suggesting the existence of a flypaper effect in spending from restricted vouchers

indirect effects of an aid program how do cash transfers affect ineligibles consumption cash transfers to eligible households indirectly increase the consumption of ineligible households living in the same villages this effect operates through insurance and credit markets ineligible households benefit from the transfers by receiving more gifts and loans and by reducing their savings thus the transfers benefit the local economy at large looking only at the effect on the treated underestimates the impact one should analyze the effects of this class of programs on the entire local economy rather than on the treated only and use a village level randomization rather than selecting treatment and control subjects from the same community

the short term impact of unconditional cash transfers to the poor experimental evidence from kenya we use a randomized controlled trial to study the response of poor households in rural kenya to unconditional cash transfers from the ngo givedirectly the transfers differ from other programs in that they are explicitly unconditional large and concentrated in time we randomized at both the village and household levels furthermore within the treatment group we randomized recipient gender wife versus husband transfer timing lump sum transfer versus monthly installments and transfer magnitude us 404 ppp versus us 1 525 ppp we find a strong consumption response to transfers with an increase in household monthly consumption from 158 ppp to 193 ppp nine months after the transfer began transfer recipients experience large increases in psychological well being we find no overall effect on levels of the stress hormone cortisol although there are differences across some subgroups monthly transfers are more likely than lump sum transfers to improve food security whereas lump sum transfers are more likely to be spent on durables suggesting that households face savings and credit constraints together these results suggest that unconditional cash transfers have significant impacts on economic outcomes and psychological well being

is workfare cost effective against poverty in a poor labor surplus economy workfare schemes impose work requirements on beneficiaries this has seemed an attractive idea for self targeting transfers to poor people this incentive argument does not imply however that workfare is more cost effective against poverty than even poorly targeted options given hidden costs of participation in particular even poor workfare participants in a labor surplus economy can be expected to have some forgone income when they take up such a scheme a survey based method is used to assess the cost effectiveness of india s employment guarantee scheme in bihar participants are found to have forgone earnings although these fall well short of market wages on average factoring in these hidden costs the paper finds that for the same budget workfare has less impact on poverty than either a basic income scheme providing the same transfer to all or uniform transfers based on the government s below poverty line ration cards for workfare to dominate other options it would have to work better in practice reforms would need to reduce the substantial unmet demand for work close the gap between stipulated wages and wages received and ensure that workfare is productive that the assets created are of value to poor people cost effectiveness would need to be reassessed at the implied higher levels of funding

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

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

learning dynamics for mechanism design an experimental comparison of public goods mechanisms in a repeated interaction public goods economy incomplete information and dynamic behavior may affect the realized outcomes of mechanisms known to be efficient in a complete information oneshot game an experimental test of five public goods mechanisms indicates that subjects with private information appear to best respond to recent observations this provides predictions about which mechanisms will generate convergence to their efficient equilibrium allocations these predictions match the experimental result that globally stable efficient mechanisms realize the highest efficiency in practice the simplicity of the suggested best response model makes it useful in predicting stability of mechanisms not yet tested

decentralization and efficiency of subsidy targeting evidence from chiefs in rural malawi abstract lower income countries spend vast sums on subsidies beneficiaries are typically selected via either a proxy means test pmt or through a decentralized identification process led by local leaders a decentralized allocation may offer informational advantages but may be prone to elite capture we study this trade off in the context of two large scale subsidy programs in malawi for agricultural inputs and food decentralized to traditional leaders chiefs who are asked to target the needy using household panel data we find that nepotism exists but has only limited mistargeting consequences importantly we find that chiefs target households with higher returns to farm inputs generating an allocation that is more productively efficient than what could be achieved through strict poverty targeting this could be welfare improving since within village redistribution is common productive efficiency targeting is concentrated in villages with above median levels of redistribution

external validity in a stochastic world evidence from low income countries we examine empirically the generalizability of internally valid micro estimates of causal effects in a fixed population over time when that population is subject to aggregate shocks using panel data we show that the returns to investments in agriculture in india and ghana small and medium non farm enterprises in sri lanka and schooling in indonesia fluctuate significantly across time periods we show how the returns to these investments interact with specific measurable and economically relevant aggregate shocks focusing on rainfall and price fluctuations we also obtain lower bound estimates of confidence intervals of the returns based on estimates of the parameters of the distributions of rainfall shocks in our two agricultural samples we find that even these lower bound confidence intervals are substantially wider than those based solely on sampling error that are commonly provided in studies most of which are based on single year samples we also find that cross sectional variation in rainfall cannot be confidently used to replicate within population rainfall variability based on our findings we discuss methods for incorporating information on external shocks into evaluations of the returns to policy

political shirking and the last term problem evidence for a party administered pension system studies of political shirking have disagreed both over whether the voting behavior of members of congress changes in their last term and over the manner in which last term shirking can be controlled through electoral sorting or through a pension system this paper presents evidence that members of congress who leave the house to run for statewide office do alter their voting behavior between the two sessions of their last house term and that this change includes an ideological shift toward their state party delegations the results suggest that a party driven pension system influences the voting of house members who aspire to higher office but that the pension system is not sufficient to control the last term shirking likely to occur if term limitations were imposed on house members

the groves ledyard mechanism an experimental study of institutional design the groves ledyard mechanism theoretically can solve the free rider problem in public good provision in certain environments two questions are of overriding importance in implementing the mechanism the first is related to the actual performance of the mechanism in general the second is the choice of a punishment parameter which is the only parameter that is available for those who may want to actually use the mechanism thus the determination of the role of this variable on mechanism performance is fundamental for any advances along the lines of actual implementation in studying the groves ledyard mechanism we show that the punishment parameter plays a crucial role in the performance of the mechanism by using 1 and 100 we show that under the higher punishment parameter the groves ledyard equilibrium is chosen much more frequently a higher level of the public good is provided and efficiency is higher by examining two behavioral models we show that a higher leads to an increase in the probability of an individual choosing a best response predicted by the model the parameter alone explains nearly 70 of the data in both the cournot and the carlson auster behavioral model we also found that convergence to cournot behavior is faster and more stable under a high than under a low

the impact of ethiopia s productive safety net programme and its linkages abstract this paper assesses the impact of ethiopia s productive safety nets programme psnp the largest social protection programme in sub saharan africa outside of south africa using propensity score matching techniques we find that the programme has little impact on participants on average due in part to transfer levels that fell far below programme targets participants with access to both the psnp and packages of agricultural support are more likely to be food secure to borrow for productive purposes use improved agricultural technologies and operate non farm own business activities however beneficiaries did not experience faster asset growth

the impact of the social cash transfer scheme on food security in malawi abstract the malawi social cash transfer scheme scts was launched in 2006 to improve food security by directly providing cash transfers to the country s most destitute households although government implemented cash transfer schemes have gained popularity throughout latin america these schemes are just emerging in africa while where there is evidence of the beneficial impact of cash transfers on food security from latin american countries there is a dearth of evidence from resource poor countries in africa in order to fill this gap we conducted a longitudinal randomized community control study of the pilot scts in mchinji malawi from march 2007 to april 2008 in this study we describe the impact of approximately us 14 per month on food security among recipient households compared to control households using indicators of food consumption and expenditures and dietary diversity we present compelling evidence whereby each of the tested outcomes yields large effect sizes that are highly statistically significant demonstrating a sizeable impact of cash transfers on food security and food diversity in rural malawi the scts appears to be an effective tool within the national social welfare policy for improving food security in the country s destitute households

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

on the existence of optimal truth dominant mechanisms abstract the existence of optimal dominant strategy mechanisms has been shown only for quadratic valuation functions this paper shows that non trivial pareto efficient and truth dominant mechanisms exist for a slightly larger set of valuation functions

beyond baseline and follow up the case for more t in experiments the vast majority of randomized experiments in economics rely on a single baseline and single follow up survey if multiple follow ups are conducted the reason is typically to examine the trajectory of impact effects so that in effect only one follow up round is being used to estimate each treatment effect of interest while such a design is suitable for study of highly autocorrelated and relatively precisely measured outcomes in the health and education domains this paper makes the case that it is unlikely to be optimal for measuring noisy and relatively less autocorrelated outcomes such as business profits household incomes and expenditures and episodic health outcomes taking multiple measurements of such outcomes at relatively short intervals allows the researcher to average out noise increasing power when the outcomes have low autocorrelation it can make sense to do no baseline at all moreover the author shows how for such outcomes more power can be achieved with multiple follow ups than allocating the same total sample size over a single follow up and baseline the analysis highlights the large gains in power from ancova rather than difference in differences when autocorrelations are low and a baseline is taken the paper discusses the issues involved in multiple measurements and makes recommendations for the design of experiments and related non experimental impact evaluations

generalized groves ledyard mechanisms abstract groves and ledyard 1977 construct a mechanism for public goods procurement that can be viewed as a direct revelation groves mechanism in which agents announce a parameter of a quadratic approximation of their true preferences the mechanism s nash equilibrium outcomes are efficient the budget is balanced because groves mechanisms are balanced for the announced quadratic preferences tian 1996 subsequently discovered a richer set of budget balancing preferences we replicate the groves ledyard construction using this expanded set of preferences and uncover a new set of complex mechanisms that generalize the original groves ledyard mechanism the original mechanism however remains the most appealing in terms of both simplicity and stability

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

how high are rates of return to fertilizer evidence from field experiments in kenya the idea that peasant farmers are rational profit maximizers has been a staple of development economics since theodore schultz 1964 it has also been influential in shaping policy for example agricultural experts have stressed the importance of fertilizer use in raising agricultural yields pointing to impressive results on experimental farms and to huge differences in agricultural productivity across countries with different levels of fertilizer use robert evenson and douglas gollin 2003 historically many countries subsidized fertilizer in response but economists have been skeptical of claims that farmers are leaving money on the table noting that fertilizer may not have the same returns on real world farms as on experimental farms that returns to fertilizer may be low for many farmers even if they are high on average tavneet suri 2007 that fertilizer may require complementary inputs or may be risky many countries have withdrawn or scaled back fertilizer psychology and development theory and experimental evidence

instability in the implementation of walrasian allocations abstract the existence of game forms which implement walrasian allocations as cournot nash equilibrium outcomes is well known however if the equilibria are also required to be locally dynamically stable at least for environments with unique walrasian allocations this paper shows that the requisite game forms do not exist our definition of a game form entails certain regularity conditions and requires the cournot equilibrium to be unique when the walrasian equilibrium is unique the main result is that for such a game form there does not exist a continuous time strategy adjustment process which ensures the local stability of cournot equilibria throughout a certain class of environments having unique walrasian equilibria each trader adjusts his strategy in response to his own characteristics and the observed current strategies of others but the direction and magnitude of adjustments are not constrained by any behavioral assumptions the definitions permit the inclusion of an artificial player such as an auctioneer so the well known tatonnement instability emerges as a special case

income timing and liquidity constraints evidence from a randomized field experiment abstract people in developing countries sometimes desire deferred income streams which replace more frequent income flows with a single later lump sum we study the effects of short term wage deferral using a randomized experiment with participants in a temporary cash for work program workers who are assigned to lump sum payments are five percentage points more likely to purchase a high return investment we discuss the role of both barriers to saving and credit constraints in explaining our results while stated preferences for deferred payments suggest a role for savings constraints the evidence is also consistent with a simpler model of credit constraints alone

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

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

direct and indirect effects of malawi s public works program on food security labor intensive public works programs are important social protection tools in low income settings intended to supplement income of poor households and improve public infrastructure in this evaluation of the malawi social action fund an at scale government operated program across and within village randomization is used to estimate effects on food security and use of fertilizer there is no evidence that the program improves food security and some negative spillovers to untreated households these disappointing results hold even under modifications to the design of the program to offer work during the lean rather than harvest season or increase the frequency of payments

essays in social experimentation what experiments are needed for manpower policy experiments where prospective participants are randomly assigned into experimental and control groups are often regarded as the ideal approach to evaluation of manpower policies this examination shows that such experimental designs can yield misleading and incomplete information about program impacts in cases where program effects vary among individuals when individual heterogeneity is present such designs at best provide unbiased estimates of average program effects not of marginal effects the latter are often more important for policy than the former this paper proposes alternative experimental designs that permit estimation of the marginal as well as average program impacts

are there lasting impacts of aid to poor areas abstract the paper re visits the site of a large world bank financed rural development program in china 10 years after it began and four years after disbursements ended the program emphasized community participation in multi sectoral interventions including farming animal husbandry infrastructure and social services data were collected on 2000 households in project and non project areas spanning 10 years a double difference estimator of the program s impact on top of pre existing governmental programs reveals sizeable short term income gains that were mostly saved only small and statistically insignificant gains to mean consumption emerged in the longer term though in rough accord with the average gain to permanent income the use of community based beneficiary selection greatly reduced the overall impact given that the educated poor were under covered the main results are robust to corrections for various sources of selection bias including village targeting and interference due to spillover effects generated by the response of local governments to the external aid

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

can social protection work in africa the impact of ethiopia s productive safety net programme abstractthis study evaluates a large social protection program in rural ethiopia the productive safety net programme psnp the effectiveness of the psnp is of interest because the program was implemented at scale in one of africa s poorest countries which has limited physical and communications infrastructure and scarce administrative resources using longitudinal survey data collected in 2006 2008 and 2010 at the household and locality levels we employ an extension of the propensity score matching method to continuous treatments to estimate the impact of transfers from the psnp and a separate program on household food security against the formidable background of rising food prices and widespread drought participation in the public works component of the psnp has modest effects the psnp reduced the length of the last hungry season by 1 29 months among households that received transfers for 5 years compared to eligible households that received almost nothing five years of participation raises l

social protection response to the covid 19 crisis options for developing countries the public health response to covid 19 in many countries has involved strict restrictions on movement and economic activity which threaten the livelihoods of economically vulnerable households in response governments are adopting emergency economic measures to provide households with some safety net we provide an overview of the policies that could form a comprehensive social protection strategy in low income and middle income countries with examples of specific policies that have been adopted our core argument is that these countries can cast an emergency safety net with extensive coverage if they use a broader patchwork of solutions than higher income countries these strategies could include expanding their social insurance system building on existing social assistance programmes and involving local governments and non state institutions to identify and assist vulnerable groups who are otherwise harder to reach

representation voluntary retirement and shirking in the last term there is disagreement over whether or not representatives shirk previous studies however have used raw interest group scores thatdo not allow for accurate comparisons over time i take advantageof recently published indexed ada scores by groseclose levitt andsnyder 1999 that adjust for temporal differences to test forshirking i compare results from adjusted ada scores to poole androsenthal s nominate scores with a simple straightforward test ofdyadic representation i provide additional evidence that shirkingexists among voluntarily retiring members of congress