long live the doge death as a term limit on venetian chief executives can an electorate use the projected life expectancy of a lifetime appointed chief executive to enforce binding informal term limits informal term limits based on the life expectancy of a chief executive candidate at election would enable an electorate to exercise discretion in adjusting tenure lengths to minimize expected turnover and tenure length costs while also providing a strictly binding term limit death we provide a detailed historical case study of venice from 1172 to 1797 when the ruling patricians utilized informal term limits on their chief executive the doge relying on the projected life expectancy of ducal candidates

reputational capital opportunism and self policing in legislatures this paper examines the question of whether reputational capital can deter opportunistic behavior among legislators preparing to exit the house of representatives i create a measure of reputational trustworthiness based upon pooled samples of constituency opinion derived from the national election studies surveys i then examine the extent to which such reputational good will among constituents deters lame duck foreign travel by exiting house incumbents within the context of a quasi experimental research design the analysis suggests that legislators may be self policed by their reputations for honesty and trustworthiness to the point of discouraging unethical activity urveys i then examine the extent to which such s derived from the national election studies

access to credit for non formal micro enterprises in botswana the literature on micro enterprises identifies a lack of capital as a primary constraint to enterprise development potentially botswana could be different as the commercial banking system has excess liquidity and the government has established relevant lending institutions and several financial assistance programmes on the basis of a 1992 survey of 1 140 micro enterprises engaged in non formal activities in seven urban centres and villages in botswana this study finds the situation in botswana to be similar to the conclusions reported in the literature for other countries there is a need for institutional changes which channel loanable funds to micro enterprises in a manner that addresses their respective capital constraints and encourages the entrepreneurs to become responsible savers and borrowers the article draws on the literature and on the experience of several successful micro enterprise loan schemes to outline the essential features of needed programme delivery changes

urban self employment in kenya panacea or viable strategy abstract kenya s employment challenge is daunting given the country s continuing rapid population growth and already significant unemployment government documents give high priority to the promotion of rural nonagricultural self employment especially to stem migration and to self employment in urban small scale enterprises yet formidable obstacles to self employment remain after placing urban self employment in its broader employment context this study examines the barriers to entry and growth in self employment especially the difficulties encountered by small scale unregistered nonagricultural activities in urban areas the study then reviews existing policies and programs aimed at supporting such activities and points to the need for more comprehensive policy analysis and reform

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

entrepreneurship selection and performance a meta analysis of the impact of education in developing economies this meta analytical review of empirical studies of the impact of schooling on entrepreneurship in selection and performance in developing economies looks at variations impact across specific characteristics of the studies a marginal year of schooling in developing economies raises enterprise income by an average of 5 5 percent which is close to the average return in industrial countries the return varies however by gender rural or urban residence and the share of agriculture in the economy furthermore more educated workers typically end up in wage employment and prefer nonfarm entrepreneurship to farming the education effect that separates workers into self employment and wage employment is stronger for women possibly stronger in urban areas and also stronger in the least developed economies where agriculture is more dominant and literacy rates are lower

skills schooling and household income in ghana this article examines the impact of cognitive skills on the income of households in ghana it uses scores on mathematics and english tests to measure cognitive skills and estimates the returns to these skills based on farm profit off farm income and total income the article uses powell s censored least absolute deviations and symmetrically trimmed least squares estimators to estimate farm and off farm income in contrast to heckman s two step or the tobit estimator powell s estimators are consistent in the presence of heteroscedasticity and are robust to other violations of normality the results show that cognitive skills have a positive effect on total and off farm income but do not have a statistically significant effect on farm income

brand names and barriers to entry in political markets the most obvious implication of this discussion is that barriers to entry in politics will raise the costs of governments transferring wealth more generally it will raise the cost of public provision of goods and services in the case of transfers the inefficiency created by barriers depends on whether one values government transfers the total transfer the transfer to the beneficiaries plus the politician s commission is maximized by the politician who can create support the most efficiently for other governmental services which are viewed as efficiency creating e g national defense these barriers reduce the amount of a valuable output we desire to purchase this result also supplies a possible efficiency explanation for the limitation on the number of terms imposed on the presidency and many governorships brand names are not really the barriers information costs are what cause brand name to be used and are the more fundamental barrier to entry what we are arguing is that private and not public organizations can in certain respects better overcome these information costs

shirking and political support in the u s senate 1964 1984 several empirical studies have suggested that legislators engage in a surprisingly large degree of on the job consumption or ideological behavior these findings cast doubt on the hypothesis that legislators can be modelled as though they seek to maximize political support this paper attempts to determine whether commonly used proxies for ideology in fact represent behavior to which voters are averse the results show that legislators who engage in more of this behavior lose general election support without generally receiving compensating increases in partyprimary support a corollary to this result is that voters punish shirking legislators significantly

leviathan at bay constitutional versus political controls on government a dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on government but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions james madison federalist no 51 i introduction citizens possess two main methods of controlling politicians elections and constitutional constraints the british system of parliamentary supremacy and america s written constitution with judicial review by the supreme court reflect the contrasting approaches political theorists continue to debate the relative effectiveness of constitutional and electoral controls on politicians these controls seemingly are substitutes if elections effectively control politicians constitutional constraints become redundant and can only lower the effectiveness of government public choice theory separately examines elections and constitutions an extensive literature beginning with barro 1973 analyzes electoral controls but has not considered constitutional controls constitutional political economy examines various constraints on politicians buchanan 1987 brennan and buchanan 1980 yet assumes elections insufficiently control politicians recent studies of term limits i e dick and lott 1993 represent one effort to analyze constitutional and electoral controls together i integrate constitutional limits on government into a model of electoral control of politicians my model features two types of politicians knaves who abuse discretionary powers at their disposal and angels who never misuse power citizens delegate a variable amount of discretionary power to government which provides benefits if properly employed but lowers welfare if abused the interaction between constitutional limits and elections is complicated constraints complement electoral controls based on politician payoffs selection and incentive effects while the screening and sorting effects substitute for constraints i proceed in this paper as follows section ii describes the citizen s constitutional delegation of authority to government and incorporates electoral screening of candidates optimal delegation of power increases with the effectiveness of screening but unless screening is perfect constitutional limits help keep leviathan at bay section iii endogenizes the candidate pool and examines the selection effect constitutional controls the composition of the candidate pool depends on delegation to government which has implications for the propensity of politicians to pursue their personal self interest while constitutional political economy relies heavily on the threat from knavish politicians many political observers contend that most politicians sincerely pursue the public interest as they perceive it i show that politicians observed honesty does not invalidate the argument for chains section iv considers the ability of repeated elections to sort knaves out of office the sorting effect increases optimal delegation of power to government but constraints can still play a useful role if knaves try for office and electoral review is not continuous section v allows knaves to act opportunistically and considers the incentive effect of retrospective voting and post political incentives constitutional constraints complement electoral incentives by limiting opportunistic knaves gain from shirking the final section concludes ii constitutional choice in a model of angels and knaves i adopt a principal agent view of government a representative citizen selects an agent to exercise the powers of government on her behalf the representative citizen framework abstracts from differences amongst the population about the actions the agent should undertake the control of politicians becomes difficult in the absence of a common interest both positively and normatively consequently models of electoral control typically employ this assumption 1 the agency model assumes a conflict of interest between the principal and agent

returns to investment in education a global update the author updates compilations of rate of return estimates to investment in education published since 1985 and discusses methodological issues surrounding those estimates some key patterns among the three main levels of education primary education continues to exhibit the highest social profitability in all world regions private returns are considerably higher than social returns because of the public subsidization of education the degree of public subsidy increases with the level of education which is regressive social and private returns at all levels generally decline by the level of a country s per capita income overall the returns to female education are higher than those to male education but at individual levels of education the pattern is more mixed the returns to the academic secondary school track are higher than the vocational track since unit cost of vocational education is much higher and the returns for those who work in the private competitive sector of the economy are higher than in the public noncompetitive sector and the returns in the self employment unregulated sector of the economy are higher than in the dependent employment sector controversies in the literature are discussed in the light of the new evidence the undisputable and universal positive correlation between education and earnings can be interpreted in many ways the causation issue on whether education really affects earnings can be answered only with experimental data generated by randomly exposing different people to various amounts of education given the fact that moral and pragmatic considerations prevent the generation of such pure data researchers have to make do with indirect inferences or natural experiments some have been attempted the author looks at the research on overeducation or surplus schooling the conclusions reinforce earlier patterns they confirm that primary education continues to be the number one investment priority in developing countries they also show that educating females is marginally more profitable than educating males that the academic secondary school curriculum is a better investment than the technical vocational tract and that the returns to education obey the same rules as investment in conventional capital that is they decline as investment is expanded

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

political parties and political shirking using ada roll call voting scores for the 1947 2006 period i find that senators shirk in their last term the degree of shirking is limited by political parties which constrain the politician in his last term and varies by post senate career choices the results highlight the importance of political parties in the repeated game that is electoral politics

televising legislatures some thoughts on whether politicians are search goods the evidence that televising legislative sessions helps politicians from homogeneous districts where everyone agrees with his positions but hurts politicians from heterogeneous districts does not differentiate between whether politicians are search or experience goods while evidence does exist that politicians are search goods e g lott 1987b it relies on the presence of the last period problem if the conclusion that politicians are search goods is correct it has important implications because it contradicts the commonly held belief that it is the threat of re election that prevents politicians from behaving opportunistically it also indicates that there are fundamental differences between firm and political brand names

dynastic political privilege and electoral accountability the case of u s governors 1950 2005 i introduction political dynasties which pass on public offices and other political privileges from family member to family member have been important in the united states throughout its history this paper investigates whether dynastic political privilege enhances incumbent accountability to voters as incumbents with family political capital work to maintain favorable reputations even in the incumbents last period this would mitigate last period problems in contrast with earlier empirical results in which incumbents in their last period in office deliver inferior economic results we test the hypothesis that dynastic political privilege increases accountability using data for 1950 2005 on u s governors including a new data set on the family relationships of politicians the constitution of the united states embodies the political ideals of the founders whose goal was to establish a republican national government that was responsible to the nation s people that specified the powers of the federal government that recognized the rights of the states and that incorporated checks and balances which would limit governmental power this new government was to be a direct contrast to and repudiation of monarchy in one of the most explicit repudiations of monarchy the constitution forbids the grant of titles of nobility by both the federal government and the states constitution of the united states article i sections 9 and 10 see the federalist papers number 39 for james madison s statements on the most decisive importance of the ban on titles of nobility library of congress 1961 242 interestingly however the constitution does not directly forbid hereditary office provided that the inheritor of the office is elected to it or appointed to it by constitutional means for example early in the nineteenth century the nation elected john quincy adams son of the second president as its sixth president dal bo dal bo and snyder 2009 carefully examine u s congressional dynasties from 1789 to 1996 and find that political power in the united states is self perpetuating this seems not only contrary to our nation s fundamental political principles but it also seems to hand over opportunities for rent seeking to relatives of successful politicians furthermore it is inefficiently anticompetitive because under such a system many highly qualified candidates are frozen out of office for reasons other than qualifications and anticipated productivity in office thus at first glance this process of family privilege in politics appears repugnant and contrary to the republican principles of our national political system there are however at least two other views of inherited political privilege which see it as socially useful first it is possible that political skills are actually inheritable so that dynastic political privilege may be socially productive that is relatives of office holders may gain special access to knowledge and skills that is only available to other potential office holders at much higher cost if at all the second and perhaps more important way in which inherited political privilege could be socially productive is that it may mitigate public sector principal agent problems the political system of the united states presents substantial principal agent problems as the voters cannot directly control the behavior of incumbent officials this gives office holders opportunities to act against the voters interests through corruption shirking on the job consumption at public expense promoting narrow ideology and others dynastic political privilege may make these behaviors more costly the possibility that opportunistic behavior in office may damage other family members political prospects disciplines current office holders making them more likely to exercise care in serving their constituents interests the main mechanism for voters to discipline incumbents is through elections

self employment and self selection in developing country labor markets labor markets in less developed countries ldcs have traditionally been characterized as non competitive this view is expressed in well known models in the development economics literature for example the labor surplus model of lewis 16 asserts that labor in rural areas of ldcs in early stages of development is so abundant that if the wage rate were determined competitively it would be below the subsistence level hence institutions are assumed to arise to determine the wage rate non competitively and to provide the resulting excess supply of labor to agriculture with a subsistence level of living the harristodaro 11 model of rural urban migration asserts that labor unions minimum wage laws public sector hiring practices and other institutional factors tend to keep formal sector wages in urban areas above labor market clearing levels the resulting excess supply of labor in urban areas is assumed to survive at a subsistence level by becoming selfemployed in the low productivity informal sector recent empirical studies provide little support for the non competitive view of ldc labor markets evidence from india thailand malaysia kenya and guatemala suggests that labor markets are much less imperfect than often assumed an important empirical finding in several of these studies is that self employed workers appear to have higher earnings than their wage employee counterparts in urban areas 2 this fact is inconsistent with the notion that self employment is typically a low productivity occupation engaged in by individuals who are searching for scarce well paying formal sector jobs the purpose of this study is to analyze and estimate a model of individual choice between wage and self employment in the ldc context the model incorporates a production function in the self employment sector that includes managerial ability as an input analysis of the influence of managerial ability on the choice of self employment leads to a theory that can explain the observed pattern of earnings of the urban self employed compared to wage employees implications of the model for estimation of production function

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

formalizing the informal sector in a changing south africa small scale manufacturing on the witwatersrand abstract this paper examines a recent south african policy initiative aimed at assisting small mainly informal black traders and manufacturers by providing facilities assistance and a comparatively deregulated work environment in desegregated industrial parks outside the black urban townships the impact on these businesses has been generally positive thus far with some dramatic improvements recorded it is necessary however to understand these efforts to semi formalize the informal sector within the broader south african context during the 1980s the state and major capitalist interests sought to modernize apartheid not least by promoting the evolution of a sizable black middle class this process is currently becoming even more crucial as the struggle to secure the continued dominance of capitalist relations of production in postapartheid south africa intensifies

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

the effect of minimum wages on actual wages in formal and informal sectors in costa rica summary as in many economies wage gaps between formal and informal sectors have been persistent in costa rica using 12 years of microdata we test whether increases in minimum wages raise actual wages we find they not only raise wages in large urban and rural enterprises traditionally referred to as formal but they also raise wages of workers covered by minimum wage legislation in what are traditionally regarded as informal sectors where the legislation is often considered not to be enforced small urban and small rural enterprises furthermore minimum wages raise wages in these informal sectors more than in larger firms and hence work to reduce wage differentials between the larger and smaller firms however minimum wages have no significant impact on wages in the informal sector not covered by minimum wage legislation the self employed

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

wage functions and occupational selection in a rural less developed country setting economists are just beginning to develop empirical knowledge about the basic relationships that determine the distribution of incomes and allocation of resources in the poor rural regions of the world understanding interactions between agriculture and the rest of the economy is particularly important in this context this paper empirically investigates the allocation of human resources between farm work and other jobs and the compensation received by individuals for their work in agriculture and elsewhere specifically two related tasks are undertaken in this paper 1 the estimation of wage functions and 2 the estimation of functions determining the allocation of time among occupations there have been a series of papers which estimate the earnings function using data from poor countries for examples see blaug 1974 chiswick 1977 and valdes 1971 however this study focuses not on total earnings but on the wage rates a person may earn in labor market work because the wage rate is the relevant price of time for many allocative decisions for example in dividing the work year between self employed farming and work as an employee off the farm a key price is the potential wage rate the person can earn in the labor market for discussion and evidence on this issue see sumner 1978 recently a few studies have appeared which illustrate the importance of understanding potential wage variations across individuals in less developed countries rosenzweig 1978 uses wage estimates from aggregate indian data in a model determining the impact of land reform bardhan 1979 develops wage functions from a sample survey in rural india as a step in estimating labor supply for rural households kusnic and davanzo 1980 use wage functions to impute potential incomes and to measure the full income distribution these previous studies illustrate the importance of understanding the determinants of market wages the present paper develops wage functions in more detail focusing especially on industrial differentials in many rural areas employment opportunities may be usefully categorized into 1 self employment mainly on small farms 2 work for wages on large farms and 3 work for wages in non farm industries the combination of selfemployment and work as an employee is also important in many rural areas in both rich and poor countries this paper examines the impact of personal characteristics on the choice to participate in work for wages and on the choice of industry these estimates also form a basis for studying industrial wage differentials tentative estimates of the dependence of participation on expected wages are also presented below the empirical analysis in this paper is based on a 1974 sample of five villages in central guatemala see corona 1978 and stein 1978 one village petapa is larger richer and more urban than the others it lies south of guatemala city within commuting distance of the capital the other villages are outside the capital city region the population sampled is almost exclusively ladino spanish culture as opposed to indian data are available on the earnings hours of work industry age schooling literacy and village of 1 005 male heads of households approximately one third of the sample work as both self employed farmers and hired workers and most of these men work on fincas large plantations another quarter of the sample work as self employed farmers and do no work for wages the suburban village has mostly nonagricultural workers whereas the four other villages have predominantly farmers and farm employees in received for publication june 21 1979 revision accepted for publication december 31 1980 north carolina state university research on this paper began while i was a rockefeller foundation supported post doctoral fellow in the labor and population group of the economics department of the rand corporation and continued at north carolina state university supported by the agricultural research service at rand robert newman served as my research assistant and at n c state james cochell provided able assistance i have benefited from the comments of colleagues at both institutions and from members of the labor economics workshop at the university of north carolina at chapel hill i also thank two anonymous referees for useful suggestions this is paper number 6558 of the journal series of the north carolina agricultural research service raleigh n c

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

reconciling voters behavior with legislative term limits a puzzle exists over why voters continually re elect their congressional and state representatives although these same voters often support initiatives to limit the number of terms that their legislators may serve residents of california colorado and oklahoma voted in 1990 to limit the terms of their state legislators to tenures ranging from six to twelve years 1 in california these same voters however re elected 87 of 91 or 96 percent of all incumbent state representatives and senators whose terms they sought to limit 2 among re elected incumbents 67 or 77 percent had served as long as or longer than the maximum term prescribed under their state s term limit initiative voters defeated only two incumbents who would have been removed under the terms of california s tenure restrictions had they been in effect similar voter behavior characterized recent state elections in colorado and oklahoma 3 more generally these seemingly contradictory voter preferences also are apparent in public opinion polls at the federal level while 62 percent of voters immediately prior to the 1990 general elections indicated their intentions to reelect their congressman that same poll showed that only 24 percent said they approve of the way congress is handling its job gallup and newport 1990 pp 36 37 support for term limit initiatives and the low public esteem of legislators as a group both appear to be inconsistent with voters strong preferences for their own representative and the regular reelection of incumbents

incumbent performance and electoral control in the pure theory of electoral competition citizens compare the platforms of the candidates and vote for the one whose platform is preferred candidate strategies are identified with promises about future performance in office models of this sort have been developed in both static mckelvey 1975 and dynamic kramer 1977 i settings and all appear to have the property that if the set of alternatives is large enough in some sense equilibrium platforms rarely exist but these models have another feature that is quite as disturbing as their instability in the static setting discussed by mckelvey little attention is paid to the possibility that once in office the politician s preferences may diverge from those of his constituents and that he may therefore choose policies at variance from his platform instead it is simply assumed that promises will be kept whether or not such behavior is congruent with the interest of the officeholder it is sometimes argued that an enforcement mechanism may exist to discipline politicians for failing to keep promises but without a specification of the mechanism it is not obvious that it would be in the interests of the

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

term limits time horizons and electoral accountability term limits have been known to reduce electoral accountability by removing the possibility of reelection thus affecting economic policy choices i e the lame duck effect we show that the magnitude and statistical significance of this effect is influenced by the expected length of a future career by using incumbent age as a proxy for expected career length we find that the lame duck effect is statistically observable only among those politicians with long careers ahead using data on us governors from 1950 to 2005 we find evidence that the influence of term limits is heterogeneous primarily influencing young incumbents who hope to have long careers and thus have stronger incentives to remain accountable to voters indeed we find little evidence of a lame duck effect among older incumbents suggesting that their already shortened time horizons may offset the term limit effect

v goods and the role of the urban informal sector in development this paper analyzes the role of the urban informal sector in a developing country in relation to the performance of agriculture and other rural activities on the one hand and that of urban formal sector activities on the other it decomposes the sectors into traditional and modernizing components traceable to production and consumption linkages with the rest of the economy as well as the character of government interventions over time the paper contrasts success cases a la taiwan in which the overall size of the urban informal sector remains modest the modernizing sub sector grows in relative importance and the end of overall labor surplus is reached rather early with non success cases a la the philippines in which rapid rural urban migration enhances the overall size of the urban informal sector the traditional sub sector grows relatively and the end of the labor surplus condition is substantially delayed authors

cartels in an nth best world the wholesale foodstuff trade in ibadan nigeria abstract the purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding of the economic functions and associated welfare implications of the cooperative associations that dominate the wholesale trade in two staple foods questionnaire responses lead to several conclusions individual traders face incomplete markets imperfect information and little government provided institutional and physical infrastructure the associations are sophisticated coase like responses to this market environment they focus on reducing their members transaction costs and hence the marginal private costs of trading thus it is likely that these associations enhance efficiency we conclude with a critique of current government policy with respect to this trade

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

read my lips but only if i was elected experimental evidence on the effects of electoral competition on promises shirking and trust abstract we experimentally test whether electoral competition reduces shirking behavior by office holders and increases citizens trust using a novel multi person investment game with voting we indeed find that elected office holders shirk less i e they back transfer more to citizens relative to investments than randomly appointed office holders surprisingly this effect is not driven by electoral competition inflating office holders promises instead elected office holders feel more committed to their promises than their randomly appointed counterparts elections initially also increase citizens trust because voters select candidates with the right kind of promises neither low nor non credibly high however over the course of the entire experiment we find no evidence that electoral competition increases citizens trust

abstention in daylight strategic calculus of voting in the european parliament as in large elections substantialabstention is frequently observed inlegislative assemblies this paper analyzesroll call votes from the third and fourthlegislatures 1989 1999 of the europeanparliament to test predictions from threetypes of theories of abstention 1 decision theoretic approach of rationalchoice theory 2 game theoretic approachof rational choice theory and 3 theswing voter s curse theory the resultsindicate that closeness significantlydecreases the rate of abstention thefindings also show that an increase in theprobability of being in the majorityincreases turnout overall findings aresupportive of the decision theoreticapproach of rational choice theory butnot of the game theoretic approach toabstention or the swing voter s cursetheory

favorite sons intergenerational wealth transfers among politicians in this paper we investigate the degree of occupational following in politics and its impact upon the career success and behavior while in office of both sons and fathers we find that sons follow into their politician fathers footsteps to a degree surpassed in the general population only among farmers and self employed proprietors there is substantial indirect evidence which suggests that following is motivated to a large extent by the transfer of valuable name recognition and voter loyalty

an explanation for public provision of schooling the importance of indoctrination this article was completed while i was a national fellow at the hoover institution and represents the unpublished theory and cross country empirical sections from my 1984 university of california los angeles dissertation armen alchian harold demsetz gertrud fremling david friedman robert hansen ben klein ed lazear russell roberts finis welch e g west an unusually helpful anonymous referee from this journal and the participants in seminars at auburn university the university of california at los angeles and at davis california state university at hayward and northridge the hoover institution george mason university the university of houston southern methodist university the u s department of education texas a m university and the 1987 public choice meetings in tucson arizona provided valuable discussions i would like to thank maury pearl for very helpful research assistance any remaining errors are of course my responsibility

the nature of political services legislative turnover and television we have considered the possibility that the number of new members in a state legislative session may be determined by some other things beside the seats up for election district size and the presence of multimember districts when we do this we call into question crain and goff s conclusion that states with televised legislative sessions constitute a different population but even controlling for other institutional details our empirical work supports their hypotheses apparently television changes the nature of political services makes them more like search goods and may even affect the nature of the returns from being a legislator

the short and long run effects of fiscal policy this article develops a dynamic dual economy general equilibrium model that can be adapted to analyze the short and long run effects of a variety of fiscal policies the model provides a complete description of how the private capital stock underemployment and real wages evolve during the adjustment process the main policy message conveyed by the results is that the method by which the fiscal deficit is lowered is important there is a strong presumption that higher prices for publicly produced intermediate inputs and cutbacks in government expenditure to support social infrastructure will reduce private investment real wages in both the formal and informal sectors and the share of the labor force employed in the high wage manufacturing sector by contrast layoffs in the final goods and services sectors can potentially improve the external balance without sacrificing output and employment growth

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

a test for pure or apparent ideology in congressional voting a politician s preferences do matter he is not simply a captured agent speaking only for his constituent s interests some latitude exists for him to shirk his responsibility to serve his constituents interests and to cast votes consistent with his own personal ideology more important to our understanding and modeling of voting behavior shirking for ideological consumption is seen to increase with age once a threshold of about 53 years old is reached shirking is not a phenomena of the politicians final term in office rather it likely exists in every term and begins to increase significantly two terms prior to the expected horizon sixty percent of the sample of senators were seen to exhibit increasing ideological consumption with age

self employment earnings and mobility in peninsular malaysia abstract this study tests several hypotheses about self employment in ldcs that derive from the common view of the self employed as part of the informal sector of a dualistic labor market the empirical findings based upon malaysian survey data reject the hypotheses that the self employed earn less than wage employees ceteris paribus and that the self employed in urban areas are typically recent migrants an alternative interpretation of the determinants of self employment is suggested based upon these findings

inside informality the links between poverty microenterprises and living conditions in nairobi s slums summary using households rather than enterprises as the analytical unit this study of 1 755 households in nairobi s slums reveals that informal household microenterprises are indeed helping offset poverty microenterprises are helping households that are a priori more likely to be poor better microenterprise performance is associated with certain business related factors such as sales area time in and sector of operation but living conditions residential tenure and infrastructure access also strongly influence both creation and success of microenterprises interventions that improve infrastructure and reduce tenure insecurity and rent induced pressures to move may be crucial for incubating microenterprises and reinforcing their contribution to poverty alleviation in nairobi s slums

intra household labour allocation migration and remittances in rural el salvador abstractmigration can affect labour participation decisions back home either by stimulating work to replace foregone labour or reducing it through the role of remittances using evidence from a r

deagrarianization and rural employment in sub saharan africa a sectoral perspective abstract sub saharan africa is steadily becoming less rural in character for decades development thinking has prescribed industrialization as the virtuous path leading away from economic dependence on agriculture but africa s industrial record has been plagued with underperformance an alternative perspective centered on the process of deagrarianization and attendant rural employment generation may offer more explanatory power and policy direction this paper outlines key theoretical components and practical concerns of a deagrarianization approach the nature and incidence of deagrarianization in sub saharan africa is contrasted with that experienced in developed industrial countries conceptual approaches dealing with rural non agricultural employment are identified within different social science disciplines through a thematic review of the literature the conclusion highlights the need for more focused study of the deagrarianization process and rural service sector development

gender wage differences in malaysia parametric and semiparametric estimation this paper is an empirical study on the labor force in peninsular malaysia parametric and semiparametric estimated wage equations which correct for sample selection bias are used to assess the returns to education and extent of gender discrimination to estimate in the semiparametric case the wage equation intercept which is needed for the oaxaca wage decomposition consistently we apply the newly developed andrews schafgans andrews d w k schafgans m m a 1998 semiparametric estimation of the intercept of a sample selection model review of economic studies 65 497 518 estimator the results suggest that discrimination favoring men in malaysia is still quite prevalent while for malays the sons of the soil the strong level of discrimination favoring malay men is negated by the semiparametric estimation results

an empirical investigation of lawn mower safety regulation 1990 an empirical investigation of lawn mower safety regulation applied economics vol 22 no 6 pp 795 804

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

wages and unemployment in an urban african labour market this paper argues that urban labor markets in africa exhibit a wage curve similar to those found in the united states britain canada and other developed countries drawing on data from the ivory coast the author finds that urban wages are depressed by higher levels of unemployment this result is robust to changes in model specification and level of aggregation it is consistent with the model of wage determination developed by c shapiro and j stiglitz 1984 and d blanchflower and a oswald 1995 but not with claims that urban wages are invariant to unemployment copyright 1996 by royal economic society

transaction costs and coalition stability under majority rule 1 introduction under a majority voting rule representatives of specific political districts must bargain with representatives of other districts to build a coalition for enacting legislation that benefits their narrow constituencies but the theoretical public choice literature warns of potential for unstable majorities minimum winning coalitions divide program benefits just among their members creating incentives for those left out to entice defection by offering rewards to those who leave and form a different coalition as noted in mueller 1989 new coalitions emerge undermining the old ones leading to cyclical majorities short term programs and highly skewed distributions of program benefits 1 despite these dire predictions there is a general consensus in the literature such as tullock 1981 that programs are more stable and allocations more equal than the theory suggests 2 in an effort to explain the discrepancy between prediction and observation researchers have pointed to institutional rules and practices in congress for example as stated in shepsle and weingast 1981a and weingast and marshall 1988 the committee system provides a structure induced equilibrium that limits the possible range of vote trading and thereby helps maintain coalitions further shepsle and weingast 1981b miller and oppenheimer 1982 and collie 1988 argue that universalist sharing of program benefits enlarges the winning coalition and extends its political support 3 in this article we offer additional evidence of broad stable sharing in many programs enacted by congress by describing interstate distributions from the federal highway trusts fund htf the allocation formula for the htf was initiated in 1916 but despite wide divergence across the states in growth of various economic factors over the rest of the twentieth century such as vehicle registration and population that might have led to redirection of highway funds there were comparatively limited htf allocation adjustments analysis of state receipts from the htf relative to tax payments into the fund reveals that some states collect much more than they contribute whereas others pay in more than they receive even so interstate ratios of htf apportionments to payments have remained stable across the years varying less than changes in highway use measures would suggest going beyond this specific program we examine overall federal expenditure and tax shares among the states from 1975 to 1997 and show that there has been a similar continuity in the interstate distribution of federal funds and taxes 4 as with the highway program there is broad stable sharing of federal expenditures across the states with some receiving more than they contribute in taxes to the federal government to better understand this observed stability and use of relatively egalitarian sharing rules and to go beyond existing explanations we emphasize the desire of politicians to minimize the high transaction costs of negotiating and enforcing political coalitions politicians have incentive to prevent unraveling of political agreements to avoid the costs of searching for new coalition partners reaching agreement on the nature and distribution of program benefits and costs and verifying compliance these activities detract from a legislator s ability to address other voter concerns moreover legislators seek to protect constituent benefits accruing from long term programs that would be lost if coalitions unraveled 5 accordingly we argue that politicians assemble greater than minimum sized coalitions to build broad political support for their legislative programs offering benefits to a larger constituency in exchange for additional votes considerable negotiation over the distribution of program benefits a nd costs may be required so that once agreements are reached politicians will be loath to consider a major reallocation that could undermine the coalition

the lulling effect the impact of child resistant packaging on aspirin and analgesic ingestions in 1972 the food and drug administration imposed a protective bottlecap requirement on aspirin and other selected drugs this regulation epitomizes the technological approach to social regulation the strategy for reducing children s poisoning risks was to design caps that would make opening containers of hazardous substances more difficult this engineering approach will be effective provided that children s exposure to hazardous products does not increase if however parents leave protective caps off bottles because they are difficult to open or increase children s access to these bottles because they are supposedly child proof the regulation may not have a beneficial effect indeed in this case there was no significant impact of the regulation on aspirin poisoning rates but there has been an alarming upward shift in the trend of analgesic ingestion rates since 1972 the source of this pattern appears to be attributable to a general reduction in parental caution with respect to such medicines which has had an adverse spillover effect on unregulated products the economic mechanisms involved can be best understood by considering the nature of individuals response to regulatory protection

nairobi s informal sector dynamic entrepreneurs or surplus labor the 1972 international labour office ilo report on kenya and its use of the term informal sector sparked off a great deal of controversy in the development literature over the meaning and usefulness of such a concept some critics have argued that the motivations and activities of participants in what is called the informal sector are so fundamentally diverse in nature that to write of a single sector which can be usefully incorporated in models of the urban economy of ldcs is fruitless partly as a response to these critics others have disaggregated the urban economy into two or three subsectors which are then used to analyze the interdependence and explain the dynamics of the urban labor market through time unfortunately the empirical base for testing these models and resolving some of these arguments is extremely sketchy and in most cases nonexistent in a partial attempt to fill this lacuna especially in kenya a survey of informal sector enterprises in nairobi was launched in mid 1977 the results of the survey are used to test some general hypotheses about the sector and the paper offers an alternative view of the role of the sector in the urban economy of an ldc with particular reference to kenya

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

political hierarchies and political shirking abstract we analyze how citizens can screen candidates for high political office in a political hierarchy in our model politicians differ in willingness to misuse discretionary powers of office those politicians willing to abuse the powers of office knaves can be induced in a hierarchy to reveal their type while in low office thus disqualifying themselves for advancement hierarchy s capacity for screening knaves out of high office depends on the conditions for reappointment to low office a seemingly perverse rule that reappoints shirking politicians can perform well to demonstrate an empirical application we analyze shirking in the house bank check bouncing scandal

the return to education street vendors in mexico abstract a simple accounting identity model estimated using data collected from a 1994 survey of street vendors revealed a rate of return on capital approaching 20 participation in vendor associations significantly increased the return by approximately 2 5 since educational attainment and capital investment were positively correlated in the sample data omitting the return to capital in an earnings equation as many researchers have done will overstate returns to education controlling for differences in capital each additional year of education increased earnings an average of us 06 per hour an increase significant at the 0 0001 level

motor carrier deregulation and highway safety an empirical analysis the passage of the motor carrier reform and modernization act of 1980 mca 1980 effectively marked the end of rate and entry regulation in the interstate trucking industry and most economists agree that this legislation has created many important economic benefits during the 1980s for example shipping rates fell in real terms service expanded and improved in quality and generally resources were used more efficiently there is increasing concern however that deregulation has led firms to reduce safety expenditures in order to remain competitive and that trucking accidents and fatalities have increased as a consequence 4 9 indeed brock adams former u s secretary of transportation claims that trucking accidents have increased since 1980 for this very reason 2 the limited empirical evidence reported in the literature suggests otherwise moore 17 for example shows that accident fatality and injury rates have fallen since 1980 despite the rapid increase in the number of truck miles traveled 13 his analysis however is based on a comparison of rates across time and does not reveal any of the potential economic or institutional forces that may be affecting the evolution of these data in a more systematic analysis traynor 22 finds that deregulation has reduced accident rates in california although it may be difficult to extend his results to the national experience as a whole this paper has two major objectives the first is to estimate an empirical model using a pooled cross section of state data to determine whether the evidence traynor 22 reports for california holds in general for all other states the second objective is to determine empirically those factors that may be driving the results in moore 17 pooling these data allow us to test

time series evidence on shirking in the u s house of representatives this paper presents time series evidence on the voting behavior of members of the u s house of representatives from 1975 to 1990 the empirical results indicate that voting behavior of individual congressmen is remarkably stable over time we find no evidence of economically significant last term effects on voting behavior nor are there important effects of legislative tenure on voting patterns the most significant deviations in voting behavior occur for congressmen who failed to win their reelection bid suggesting that sizable deviations from previous policy positions may result in swift retribution by constituents in the district

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