reprint of thawing frozen capital markets and backdoor bailouts evidence from the fed s liquidity programs abstract during the subprime crisis the federal reserve introduced several emergency liquidity programs as supplements to the discount window dw taf pdcf and tslf using data on loans to large commercial banks and primary dealers we find that the programs were used by relatively few institutions and thus provided limited relief to banks that relied on short term debt markets although usage increased after lehman s bankruptcy most commercial banks avoided the dw and taf we also find that the programs were more often used by failed european banks than by healthy us banks likely because these loans are expensive relative to private market funds our results also show that usage of pdcf and tslf programs while higher was more often used by primary dealers in weaker financial position

voter turnout and fiscal policy abstract in this paper we examine whether shocks in voting costs can impact elected representatives quality defined as the capacity to fund projects at the lowest cost using data on french municipalities and local variations in seasonal infections incidence as a shock on voting cost we estimate that higher incidence lowers voter turnout increases subsidies obtained by a municipality decreases harmful financial decisions and increases the municipality s investment in infrastructure we present a model where these predictions would hold in particular for municipalities with a high base level of turnout

jurisdiction size political participation and the allocation of resources this paper analyzes the effect of population size on politicalparticipation and allocative efficiency increasing populationis generally found to reduce political participation however since participation is not evenly spread throughout thepopulation this will have consequences for allocation namely we argue that increasing population size shifts powerto the rich we discuss the consequences for the optimal sizeof jurisdictions the size of government and the measurementof publicness

voter turnout in the industrial democracies during the 1980s there are two contending accounts of cross national variation in voter turnout rates one emphasizes the role of institutions and electoral attributes whereas the other stresses cultural and historical factors the authors evaluate the merits of these two arguments they first apply the model developed by r w jackman to turnout rates during the 1980s expanding the sample of industrial states to include three newer democracies with recent authoritarian histories greece portugal and spain they then examine the potential impact of cultural variables on voter turnout rates the authors conclude that the institutional argument outperforms the cultural account of conventional political participation

is diversity good or bad evidence from esports teams analysis we use esports data to construct an empirical model to measure the effect of diversity on team performance different kinds of diversities are considered diversity of culture diversity of languag

imposing a turnout threshold in referendums we construct a model of a yes no referendum for which the outcome is valid only if the voter turnout rate is greater than a predetermined value with such a turnout threshold three types of equilibria exist in each of which the voters who favor the status quo either go to the polls abstain or use mixed strategies we show that abstaining is more likely to realize the status quo than going to the polls if the threshold is sufficiently high whereas one of the mixed strategy equilibria is least likely to realize the status quo for any level of threshold

redistribution income and voting a model that reconciles the positive association between income and voting found in cross sectional studies with the negative correlation between income and turnout over time is developed voting is modeled as a group rational activity voter turnout rates in the united states for the 1948 1960 1968 and 1980 elections are used to test the model voter turnout is found first to fall and then to rise as families move up the income distribution voter turnout also rises as real wages fall as educational attainment increases as elections become closer and as poll taxes and literacy tests are removed

turnout across democracies world democracies widely differ in legislative executive and legal institutions different institutional environments induce different mappings from electoral outcomes to the distribution of power we explore how these mappings affect voters participation in an election we show that the effect of such institutional differences on turnout depends on the distribution of voters preferences we uncover a novel contest effect given the preferences distribution turnout increases and then decreases when we move from a more proportional to a less proportional power sharing system turnout is maximized for an intermediate degree of power sharing moreover we generalize the competition effect common to models of endogenous turnout given the institutional environment turnout increases in the ex ante preferences evenness and more so when the overall system has lower power sharing these results are robust to a wide range of modeling approaches including ethical voter models voter mobilization models and rational voter models

media competition and electoral politics we build a framework linking competition in the media market to political participation media outlets report on the ability of candidates running for office and compete for audience through their choice of slant citizens consume news only if the expected utility of being informed about candidates ability is sufficiently large for their group collectively our results can reconcile seemingly contradictory empirical evidence showing that entry in the media market can either increase or decrease turnout while information pushes up independent turnout partisans adjust their turnout to the ability of their preferred candidate and on average they vote less when informed

do voters vote ideologically abstract in this paper we address the following question to what extent is the hypothesis that voters vote ideologically i e they always vote for the candidate who is ideologically closest to them testable or falsifiable we show that using data only on how individuals vote in a single election the hypothesis that voters vote ideologically is irrefutable regardless of the number of candidates competing in the election on the other hand using data on how the same individuals vote in multiple elections the hypothesis that voters vote ideologically is potentially falsifiable and we provide general conditions under which the hypothesis can be tested

political scale and electoral turnout evidence from the less industrialized world this article attempts to bring the politics of scale back into the study of comparative politics explicitly focusing on the question of electoral turnout in the less industrialized world it explo

the nonvoting voter in voting research postelection surveys consistently overestimate voter turnout by a substantial margin this paper compares via discriminant analysis of data from the 1978 national election study the characteristics of respondents who falsely claim to have voted with the characteristics of actual voters and admitted nonvoters more importantly it undertakes two parallel analyses of the factors affecting voting or nonvoting the first employs respondent supplied voting data and the second employs officially validated voting data even though misreporters differ in some respects from actual voters and admitted nonvoters the parallel analyses in the latter part of the paper indicate that substantive conclusions about the factors that influence voting or nonvoting are largely unaffected by the use of validated as opposed to reported voting data

social incentives and voter turnout evidence from the swiss mail ballot system this paper uses a natural experiment to document the impact of social pressure on voting behavior the main hypothesis is that social pressure creates incentives to vote for the purpose of being seen at the voting act this incentive is particularly high in small and close knit communities empirically i analyze the effect of postal voting on voter participation in switzerland optional postal voting decreased the voting costs but simultaneously removed the social pressure to vote in spite of the large reduction in voting costs the effect on aggregate turnout was small however voter participation was more negatively affected in the smaller communities this lends support to the view that social incentives played a role for certain people s voting decisions jel h0 z13

did women s suffrage change the size and scope of government this paper examines the growth of government during this century as a result of giving women the right to vote using cross sectional time series data for 1870 1940 we examine state government expenditures and revenue as well as voting by u s house and senate state delegations and the passage of a wide range of different state laws suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise contrary to many recent suggestions the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s and it helps explain why american government started growing when it did

tax limits and local elections this paper exploits variation in tax limits across over 7000 italian municipalities during the 2000s to investigate their impact on voter turnout and local election outcomes the empirical analysis is based on a panel data estimator on about 14 000 municipal elections during the 2001 2010 decade and on a quasi experimental approach focusing on the fiscal limitation treatment of municipalities local income surcharge freeze in the years 2001 and 2006 where the trajectory of local turnout in the concurrent general elections is used as the counterfactual the evidence suggests that tax limits provoke a a modest fall in voter turnout in mayoral elections b a mild decrease in the number of mayoral candidates c a sizeable widening of elected mayors win margins and some improvement in mayors valence proxies the evidence is compatible with the hypothesis that the imposition of tax limits lowers the ideological stakes of local elections favors party line crossing and promotes vote convergence based on the valence of candidates

the downsian voter meets the ecological fallacy this paper presents evidence that voter participation does not depend on the probability that one vote is decisive an extensive summary of the empirical participation literature is provided which shows that most but not all studies have found that turnout in an electoral district is higher when the race is closer individual level vote regressions for the 1979 and 1980 canadian national elections are estimated using objective measures of closeness as opposed to self reported measures the main finding is that a citizen is no more likely to vote in a close election than in a lands lide election district level turnout regressions for the same elections are also estimated and a significant relation between closeness and turnout is observed this suggests that aggregation bias may generate a spurious closeness turnout relation in district level regressions

rational choice and turnout turning out to vote is the most common and important act of political participation in any democracy voting is also less well understood and explained empirically than other political acts engaged in regularly by citizens turnout however presents a special problem for rational choice theories of politics for it is taken to be the paradigmatic example of the problem of collective action in which although all may benefit from voting it is rarely in the individual s self interest to vote this paper begins by examining the problem of explaining turnout a basic form of rational choice models of turnout is developed basic in the sense that it is common to all such models this basic model is shown to be incomplete and the two most important models the calculus of voting and the minimax regret model are illustrated as alternative ways to complete this basic model along with mention of game theoretic models their strengths and weaknesses are then assessed the remainder of the paper argues that rational choice accounts of turnout are possible the first step is to argue that turnout is not an especially problematic version of the collective action problem because it is for many a low cost low expected benefit decision a strategic politicians account of turnout and campaigns is examined next a reinterpretation of the intrinsic benefits of voting is then considered and is used to examine the most important substantive problem in the turnout literature its decline these steps i argue make theories of ordinary political decisions at once both more political and more integrated into the politics of the larger system

closeness expenditures and turnout in the 1982 u s house elections students of elections have repeatedly found that the closeness of an election is modestly correlated with turnout this may be due to a direct response of instrumentally motivated voters but recent theoretical work casts doubt on the adequacy of this explanation another possibility is that elite actors respond to closeness with greater effort at mobilization we explore the latter possibility by using fec and state data on campaign expenditures in house senate and gubernatorial races our results indicate that closeness has an effect at both the mass and elite levels we also provide quantitative estimates of the effect of senate and gubernatorial expenditure on house turnout

low cost decisions as a challenge to public choice in the last 25 years we have seen a great deal of success in the scientific research programme called public choice one of the main aims of this programme is to develop positive theories of political processes like theories of voting behaviour of government behaviour of bureaucratic behaviour and of interest group behaviour just to mention the most important theory sets in this area 1 the methodological core of this research programme consists in the economic model of behaviour the homo oeconomicus or rational evaluating maximising man remm as he is sometimes called see e g brunner 1987 it is assumed that individuals subjectively evaluate different action possibilities according to the perceived costs and benefits and that they choose that action which promises the highest expected net benefit during recent decades this standard methodological approach in economics has in a kind of imperialism been applied to decisions largely outside the realm of traditional economics thus new sub disciplines have been created for example the economic analysis of law the economic analysis of the family or the economics of arts to name just a few public choice is the application of this approach to political public sector decisions and in this area it is a successful competitor of traditional political science which follows more or less a public interest approach i e assuming that political decision makers do not follow their own personal interests but have strong enough incentives to pursue the interests of society or at least of the social group to which they belong

cities and cultures we investigate whether cultural diversity across us cities measured as the variety of native languages spoken by city residents is associated with any effect on their productivity diversity of cultures may imply diversity of production skills of abilities and of occupations that enhances the productive performance of a city on the other hand transaction costs and frictions across groups may hurt productivity similarly diversity in available goods and services can increase utility but distaste for or hostility to different cultural groups may decrease it using census data from 1970 to 1990 we find that wages and employment density of us born workers were systematically higher ceteris paribus in cities with richer linguistic diversity these positive correlations reveal a net positive effect of diversity on productivity that survives robustness checks and instrumental variable estimation this effect is found to be stronger for highly educated workers and for white workers we also show that better assimilated non native speakers i e those who speak english well and have been in the us for more than five years are most beneficial to the productivity of us born workers

discount window borrowing and federal reserve operating regimes i introduction the borrowing behavior of banks at the federal reserve s discount window is a component of most models of the monetary sector including the model used by the federal reserve 1 as several researchers have noted 2 however the policy importance of accurate predictions of borrowing behavior depends on the federal reserve s short run operating procedure if the federal reserve uses a federal funds rate target to control money growth as it did in the 1970s inaccurate predictions of borrowing behavior have no effect on money supply growth if the federal reserve uses a nonborrowed reserves target as is usually assumed for the october 1979 to october 1982 period or a borrowed reserves target as was used after october 1982 then poor predictions of bank borrowing are a potentially significant source of errors in controlling money 3 given the importance of accurate borrowing predictions to monetary control under current short run operating procedures admissions by the federal reserve that its borrowing equation poorly explains recent borrowing behavior are cause for concern 4 part of the problem may lie with inadequate allowance for differences in bank borrowing behavior under different operating procedures the choice of operating procedure determines not only the importance of accurate borrowing predictions but also affects borrowing behavior by affecting the stochastic process characterizing the spread between the federal funds rate and the discount rate 5 the standard model for aggregate borrowing typified by goldfeld and kane 1966 assumes a positive relationship between borrowing and the spread the optimizing model of individual bank borrowing decisions of goodfriend 1983 used by cosimano 1988 and dotsey 1989 among others suggests that borrowing also depends negatively on banks expectations about future levels of the spread specifically goodfriend s model of risk neutral banks predicts a larger impact on borrowing of a spread change that banks expect to be temporary than one that banks expect to be more persistent to the extent that banks predict future spreads using an autoregressive model changes in the stochastic process characterizing the spread should change the impact realizations of the spread have on borrowing 6 moreover if banks are risk averse changes in the operating procedures that produce less predictable spreads may affect both banks borrowing and excess reserve behavior 7 because the spread s stochastic behavior depends on the federal reserve s operating procedure borrowing behavior in turn should depend on the federal reserve s operating procedure consequently the federal reserve should not assume that the borrowing equation in its model is invariant to changes in operating procedure as goodfriend notes such an assumption is another example of the lucas critique bryant 1983 and dutkowsky and foote 1988 show that borrowing equations estimated during the period when the federal reserve targeted the federal funds rate produce poor forecasts of borrowing after the regime change of 6 october 1979 these papers do not however provide evidence on how the borrowing equation changed after october 1979 one purpose of this paper is to investigate whether bank borrowing behavior changed with changes in federal reserve operating procedures leading to estimated borrowing equations that differ significantly under different operating procedures in addition to the changes in operating procedures the federal reserve also changed the reserve accounting rules in february 1984 replacing lagged reserve accounting with contemporaneous reserve accounting although the effect of this switch on bank reserve management is difficult to predict the increased uncertainty about reserve needs and the decrease in information about the aggregate demand for reserves make it plausible that banks became more conservative affecting their excess reserve behavior and their discount window borrowing

multicandidate elections aggregate uncertainty in the laboratory the rational voter model is often criticized on the grounds that two of its central predictions the paradox of voting and duverger s law are at odds with reality recent theoretical advances suggest that these empirically unsound predictions might be an artifact of an arguably unrealistic assumption the absence of aggregate uncertainty about the distribution of preferences in the electorate in this paper we propose direct empirical evidence of the effects of aggregate uncertainty in multicandidate elections adopting a theory based experimental approach we explore whether aggregate uncertainty indeed favors the emergence of non duverger s law equilibria in plurality elections our experimental results support the main theoretical predictions

the downsian model of electoral participation formal theory and empirical analysis of the constituency size effect this paper applies a game theoretic model of participation under uncertainty to investigate the negative relationship between constituency size and voter turnout rates theconstituency size effect we find that this theoretical model accounts for almost all of the variation in turnout due to size in cross sectional data from school budget referenda

concurrent elections and turnout causal estimates from a german quasi experiment conventional wisdom suggests that scheduling elections concurrently with other contests increases turnout however causal empirical evidence in favor of this claim is scarce at best moreover it is a priori unclear whether theory would predict a higher turnout if two low office elections are combined instead of a combination of a low office election and a major electoral race using a quasi experiment and a difference in differences estimation approach at the german municipality level i provide evidence that combining two low office elections significantly increases turnout

voting and turning out for monetary integration the case of the french referendum on the maastricht treaty this article analyses the voting and abstention patterns in french departments in the 1992 referendum on the maastricht treaty in light of the potential impact of monetary union we observe that departmental characteristics implying either greater benefits or lower costs from monetary union are significantly correlated with the approval rate this supports the view that the voting behaviour of individual agents depended on their self interest the impact of economic characteristics on the abstention rate is less clear indeed the variable that is most significantly correlated with abstention in the referendum is average abstention in other elections

explaining voter turnout patterns an information theory voting research is rich in empirical regularities yet a parsimonious theory of voter turnout that can match the facts has proven to be elusive this paper argues that voter turnout patterns can be explained by extending the traditional rational voter model to include limited information a model is presented in which utility maximizing consumers receive higher payoffs from voting the more confident they are of their vote choice the model provides an explanation for the most important cross sectional voter turnout patterns in addition it suggests a novel explanation for the post 1960 decline in u s participation

who wins the olympic games economic resources and medal totals this paper examines determinants of olympic success at the country level does the united states win its fair share of olympic medals why does china win only 6 of the medals even though it has one fifth of the world s population we consider the role of population and economic resources in determining medal totals from 1960 to 1996 at the margin population and income per capita have similar effects suggesting that both a large population and high per capita gdp are needed to generate high medal totals we also provide out of sample predictions for the 2000 olympics in sydney

the economic model of voter participation a further test the central hypothesis of the economic model of voter participation was put to an empirical test it was found that the coefficient of population size which represents the subjective probability of affecting election results is negative and significant in municipal local elections but insignificant in national knesset elections therefore this variable is unable to represent subjective probability in the latter case

a global trend toward democratic convergence a lijphartian analysis of advanced democracies the article offers a systematic analysis of the comparative trajectory of international democratic change in particular it focuses on the resulting convergence or divergence of political systems borrowing from the literatures on institutional change and policy convergence to this end political institutional data in line with arend lijphart s 1999 2012 empirical theory of democracy for 24 developed democracies between 1945 and 2010 are analyzed heteroscedastic multilevel models allow for directly modeling the development of the variance of types of democracy over time revealing information about convergence and adding substantial explanations the findings indicate that there has been a trend away from extreme types of democracy in single cases but no unconditional trend of convergence can be observed however there are conditional processes of convergence in particular economic globalization and the domestic veto structure interactively influence democratic convergence

referendum design quorum rules and turnout in this article we focus on the consequences of quorum requirements for turnout in referendums we use a rational choice decision theoretic voting model to demonstrate that participation quorums change the incentives some electors face inducing those who oppose changes in the status quo and expect to be in the minority to abstain as a result paradoxically participation quorums decrease electoral participation we test our model s predictions using data for all referendums held in current european union countries from 1970 until 2007 and show that the existence of a participation quorums increases abstention by more than ten percentage points

the effects of coworker heterogeneity on firm level output assessing the impacts of cultural and language diversity in the national hockey league this paper uses data from the national hockey league nhl to consider the potential gains to firms from employing culturally diverse work teams it finds that the presence of foreign workers does increase firm level performance nhl teams that employed a higher proportion of european players performed better however the results also indicate that teams perform better when their european players come from the same country rather than being spread across many european countries when teams have players from a wide array of european countries integration costs associated with language and cultural differences may start to over ride any gains from diversity

when costly voting is beneficial abstract we present a costly voting model in which each voter has a private valuation for their preferred outcome of a vote when there is a zero cost to voting all voters vote and hence all values are counted equally regardless of how high they may be by having a cost to voting only those with high enough values would choose to incur this cost we show that by adding this cost welfare may be enhanced even when the cost of voting is wasteful such an effect occurs when there is both a large enough density of voters with low values and the expected value of voters is high enough

a group rule utilitarian approach to voter turnout theory and evidence this paper explores a group rule utilitarian approach to understanding voter turnout inspired by the theoretical work of john c harsanyi 1980 and timothy j feddersen and alvaro sandroni 2002 it develops a model based on this approach and studies its performance in explaining turnout in texas liquor referenda the results are encouraging the comparative static predictions of the model are broadly consistent with the data and a structurally estimated version of the model yields reasonable coefficient estimates and fits the data well the structurally estimated model also outperforms a simple expressive voting model

fixed costs and the behavior of the federal funds rate abstract this paper presents an equilibrium model of the federal funds market that ties movements in the funds rate to changes in the supply of reserves and to a fixed cost facing banks that borrow at the discount window it is found that the existence of the fixed cost is capable of explaining a number of features of the funds market in particular it is critical for explaining occasional instances of extremely high funds rates it also provides an explanation for heterogeneous behavior across banks towards the discount window and for higher average funds rates at the end of maintenance periods

length of compulsory education and voter turnout evidence from a staged reform this study estimates the impact of education on voter turnout the identification relies on a reform which increased the length of compulsory schooling in norway from seven to nine years the impact is measured both at the individual and the municipality level both sets of analysis suggest that additional education has no effect on voter turnout the impact of education on various measures of civic outcomes is also estimated of these only the likelihood of signing a petition is found to be positively affected by education

announcements and the effectiveness of monetary policy a view from the us prime rate abstract until 1994 the us prime rate was said to be sticky because of its irresponsiveness to short term interest rates after the fed started the practice of announcing its intended funds rate in 1994 however the prime rate has come to react immediately to shifts in the target rate this paper attempts to explain how the fed s policy announcements changed the behavior of the prime rate by using a simple menu cost model it shows that an increase in the expected duration of funds rate targets was essential to the improvement in the target rate pass through

crisis and responses the federal reserve in the early stages of the financial crisis in summer 2007 u s and global financial markets found themselves facing a potential financial crisis and the u s federal reserve found itself in a difficult situation it was becoming clear that banks and other financial institutions would ultimately lose tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars from their exposure to subprime mortgage market loans bank lending is closely tied to bank capital or net worth specifically bank regulators require that loans not exceed a certain multiple of capital thus the federal reserve faced the danger of a sharp contraction in credit and bank lending in a way that threatened a deep recession or worse when this kind of event happens the job of the central bank is to assure that financial institutions have the necessary funds to conduct their daily business that they have the liquidity they need to make timely payments and transfers modern financial institutions need to replenish their funding every day in the united states alone literally trillions of dollars are transferred between banks each day to support the 50 trillion credit outstanding in the economy as a whole commercial banks require funds to initiate the mortgages auto loans and credit card debt they then sell into financial markets while investment banks finance much of their activity with daily borrowing in the early stages of the crisis the situation often arose in which a wellcapitalized bank was forced to make sudden large loans based on previously committed lines of credit in this circumstance central bank actions can ease

leadership and conflict we model the choice of leaders of groups within society where leaders influence both the mode of interaction between groups either peaceful compromise or costly conflict and the outcome of these interactions group members may choose leaders strategically instrumentally or they may choose leaders expressively we characterize the equilibria of the instrumental choice model and also argue that leadership elections may overemphasise the role of expressive considerations in the choice of leader and that this may result in increased conflict between groups

law enforcement and political participation italy 1861 65 abstract does tougher law enforcement positively affect political participation this paper addresses this question which hinges upon the causal impact of formal institutions on informal ones by using a historical event from 19th century italy this event was the pica law which was introduced in 1863 to fight a surge of criminal violence in southern italy and to ensure a safer environment for wealthy people the only ones allowed to vote at that time our main finding obtained using a spatial regression discontinuity technique in a diff in diffs framework is that voter turnout greatly increased in those areas where the pica law was applied compared with bordering and otherwise similar areas this result is confirmed by a number of robustness checks and placebo exercises and turns out to be persistent over time

discount window borrowing monetary policy and the post october 6 1979 federal reserve operating procedure abstract a demand schedule for discount window borrowing based on profit maximizing bank behavior is derived a feature of non price rationing at the discount window making longer duration borrowing more costly is shown to make lagged borrowing and expected future spreads between the federal funds rate and the discount rate relevant to the current borrowing decision consequently both the size of the coefficients in the borrowing functions as well as the form of the function itself depend on expected fed policy toward the spread the demand function for discount window borrowing provides the critical link by which non borrowed reserve control affects short term interest rates and ultimately the money supply under post october 6 1979 reserve targeting the analysis suggests some reasons why the fed has experienced difficulty in specifying estimating and utilizing a discount window borrowing function in the non borrowed reserve operating procedure

monetary policy transparency and pass through of retail interest rates abstract this paper examines the degree of pass through and adjustment speed of retail interest rates in response to changes in benchmark market rates in new zealand during the period 1994 2004 we consider the effects of policy transparency and financial structure of the monetary transmission mechanism new zealand is the first oecd country to adopt a full fledged inflation targeting regime with specific accountability and transparency provisions policy transparency was further enhanced by a shift from quantity settlement cash to price interest rate operating targets in 1999 using phillips loretan estimates of cointegrating regressions we find complete long term pass through for some but not all retail rates our results also show that the introduction of the official cash rate ocr increased the pass through of floating and deposit rates but not fixed mortgage rates in line with previous studies we find the immediate pass through of market interest rates to bank retail rates to be incomplete although we find no statistical evidence for asymmetric response of retail rates to changes in market rates other than for business lending rates in the pre ocr period differences in the magnitude of mean adjustment lags indicate that banks appear to pass on decreases to fixed mortgage rates faster overall our results confirm that monetary policy rate has more influence on short term interest rates and that increased transparency has lowered instrument volatility and enhanced the efficacy of policy

voter participation and strategic uncertainty the paradox of not voting is examined in a model where voters have uncertainty about the preferences and costs of other voters in game theoretic models of voter participation under complete information equilibrium outcomes can have substantial turnout even when voting costs are relatively high in contrast when uncertainty about preferences and costs is present only voters with negligible or negative net voting costs participate when the electorate is large

is mandatory voting better than voluntary voting we investigate the welfare effects of policies that increase voter turnout in costly voting models in a generalized costly voting model we show that if the electorate is sufficiently large then increasing voter turnout is generically efficient increasing turnout in small elections is only inefficient if the electorate is evenly divided or if there is already almost complete voter participation finally we argue that the effects underlying our results are robust in a large class of endogenous participation models

the behavioural economics of climate change this paper attempts to bring some central insights from behavioural economics into the economics of climate change in particular it discusses i implications of prospect theory the equity premium puzzle and time inconsistent preferences in the choice of discount rate used in climate change cost assessments and ii the implications of various kinds of social preferences for the outcome of climate negotiations several reasons are presented for why it appears advisable to choose a substantially lower social discount rate than the average return on investments it also seems likely that taking social preferences into account increases the possibilities of obtaining international agreements compared to the standard model however there are also effects going in the opposite direction and the importance of sanctions is emphasized

a passion for voting we model expressive voting as a dynamic game with informed and ignorant voters a voter has selective memory for actions and he is aware of it we find a unique symmetric equilibrium with ignorant voting public signal in favor of one particular alternative creates the bandwagon and underdog effects when the signal is sufficiently strong the majority outcome is biased this is a possible reason for persistence of public policies

abstention in elections with asymmetric information and diverse preferences we analyze a model of a two candidate election with costless voting in which voters have asymmetric information and diverse preferences we demonstrate that a strictly positive fraction of the electorate will abstain and that nevertheless elections effectively aggregate voters private information using examples we show that more informed voters are more likely to vote than their less informed counterparts increasing the fraction of the electorate that is informed however may lead to higher levels of abstention we conclude by showing that a biased distribution of information can lead to a biased voting population but does not lead to biased outcomes

turnout in gubernatorial and senatorial primary and general elections in the south 1922 90 a rational choice model of the effects of short run and long run electoral competition on relative turnout using data on non presidential year elections for governor and u s senators in eight southern states over the period 1922 1990 we provide a rational choice inspired model of the factors that should be expected to affect the relative levels of turnout in primaries as compared to general elections both v o key and anthony downs have argued that voters will be more likely to participate in the elections in which they can most expect to be decisive v o key 1949 proposed that when general elections are usually lop sided because of one party dominance of a state s politics the primary of the dominant party of the state should have a higher turnout than the general election downs argued that turnout should be higher in competitive elections our modelling combines these ideas we use as our dependent variable the ratio of primary to general election turnout in each year we posit that this ratio will increase 1 the greater the degree of within party competition in the primary especially that within the dominant party of a state if there is one and 2 the weaker the degree of between party competition in the general election in addition to election specific effects we also posit long run effects such that the ratio for the offices of governor and u s senator will be affected not merely by the degrees of competition within and between parties specific to any given election but also by the long run trends in party competition this hypothesis leads us to expect that 3 in the south with the rise of the republican party the ratio of primary to general election turnout should decline over time all of our expectations about the links between turnout and competition are strongly supported we argue that rational choice models of turnout perform quite well when we view them in a comparative statics perspective rather than using them to make predictions about who will and who will not vote in any given election

discount window borrowing after 2003 the explicit reduction in implicit costs abstract in 2003 the federal reserve introduced primary credit as its main discount window lending program this program replaced the adjustment credit program which subject to a number of restrictions had generated a stigma associated with borrowing from the federal reserve lessening the stigma of borrowing was viewed as essential for reducing the reluctance to borrow from the federal reserve we develop a structural model of daily borrowing using this model we estimate the implicit cost associated with borrowing our results suggest that the stigma of borrowing is significantly reduced

everyone likes a winner an empirical test of the effect of electoral closeness on turnout in a context of expressive voting under instrumental voting closer elections are expected to have higher turnout under expressive voting however turnout may increase with decreasing closeness when voters have a preference for winners an empirical test using data on belgian municipal elections supports this we find that turnout reaches a local maximum when the largest party in the election obtains just over 52 of the seats and then falls supporting the instrumental closeness argument there is however another turning point the presence of a highly dominating party receiving at least two thirds of the votes stimulates turnout despite the fact that dominance implies lower closeness

the rational behavior theory of voting participation evidence from the 1970 and 1982 elections in recent years a substantial literature on the determinants of voting participation has been developed in many of these studies voting is assumed to be an expression of rational behavior that is people vote when they expect that the benefits will exceed the related costs voting is largely an act of consumption based upon the widely held belief that one should vote to fulfill a civic duty or upon some combination of personal characteristics which is sufficiently vague to make precise measurement impossible the rational behavior theory however holds that voting is influenced at the margin by personal and environmental factors which incrementally affect expected benefits and costs making the act of voting more or less rational those factors which increase expected benefits will ceteris paribus enhance the probability that one will vote those factors which increase expected costs will of course have the opposite effect this study is presented as a primarily empirical contribution to the literature which assumes that since voting is an expression of rational behavior it can be modeled and tested using standard economic analysis and methodology

dynamic implicit cost and discount window borrowing an empirical investigation abstract this paper investigates dynamic implicit cost in aggregate discount window borrowing we utilize goodfriend s formulation with nonprice rationing based upon the bank s current request and its past borrowing record estimation by generalized method of moments reveals a positive systematic implicit cost structure which dampens over time significance extends back to nine biweekly reserve maintenance intervals we also specify implicit cost as a geometrically declining distributed lag of past borrowing and derive a semi reduced form for borrowed reserve demand empirical results support this specification as well

the impact of closeness on electoral participation exploiting the italian double ballot system we investigate whether the degree of political competition affects electoral turnout by using italian municipal election data from 1993 to 2011 relying on elections held using a double ballot system we apply an instrumental variable technique exploiting the actual closeness between the two leading candidates in the first round as an instrument for closeness in the second round the use of this strategy to estimate the impact of closeness on turnout is new to the literature controlling for municipal fixed effects and candidates characteristics we find that expected closeness significantly increases turnout thus supporting the idea that the expected benefits of voting increase in tighter political races the estimated effect is much larger than that found when measuring closeness with ex post electoral results suggesting quite a relevant endogeneity bias in previous studies

globalisation and the market for team mates the globalisation of firms is explored at theoretical and empirical levels the idea is that a global firm is a multi cultural team the existence of a global firm is somewhat puzzling combining workers who have different cultures legal systems and languages imposes costs on the firm that would not be present were all workers to conform to one standard in order to offset the costs of cross cultural dealing there must be complementarities between the workers that are sufficiently important to overcome the costs the search for the best practice is analysed and empirical support from an examination of trading patterns is provided

monetary policy implementation and the federal funds rate this paper investigates how the implementation of monetary policy affects the dynamics and the volatility of the federal funds rate since the early 1980s the most important changes in the fed s conduct of monetary policy refer to the role of the federal funds rate target and the reserve requirement system we show that the improved communication and transparency regarding the federal funds rate target has significantly increased the fed s influence on the federal funds rate since 1994 by contrast the declining role of required reserves in the u s has contributed to higher federal funds rate volatility our results suggest that the planned introduction of remunerated reserves will further enhance the controllability of the federal funds rate

a deeper look at the proportionality turnout nexus evidence that turnout is higher under proportional representation pr than in majoritarian elections is overwhelming yet previous research has largely failed to explain why one line of argument maintains that higher turnout under pr is a by product of larger party systems however a larger number of parties has been demonstrated to depress turnout alternatively it is argued that majoritarian electoral systems tend to produce safe seats and that voters have little incentive to turn out there thus uneven turnout over electoral districts due to variable intensities of local competition is made responsible for the lower overall turnout empirical evidence on this conjecture is scant this article scrutinizes the relationship between electoral rules competition and turnout with district level data from 31 national elections results from a heteroscedastic model indicate that lower net turnout in majoritarian systems is indeed a consequence of uneven turnout over districts due to variable levels of lo

a structural model of turnout and voting in multiple elections this paper develops a unified approach to study participation and voting in multiple elections the theoretical setting combines an uncertain voter model of turnout with a spatial model of voting behavior we apply our framework to the study of turnout and voting in u s presidential and congressional elections we structurally estimate the model using individual level data for the 2000 elections and quantify the relationships between observed individual characteristics and unobserved citizens ideological preferences information and civic duty we then use the estimated model which replicates the patterns of abstention selective abstention split ticket voting and straight ticket voting observed in the data to assess the effects of policies that may increase citizens information and sense of civic duty on their turnout and voting behavior

should a team be homogeneous abstract should an organization hire people with similar backgrounds or with different backgrounds we formulate this question within the framework of team theory the team is formed by n agents the type of each agent is endogenous and determines his information structure and his cost for the team we show that the sign of complementarity between jobs determines workforce homogeneity with positive complementarities the team should be composed of agents of the same type while with negative complementarities workforce heterogeneity is optimal these results do not rely on the restrictions on the way uncertainty is modeled or on the feasible set of agent types they can be explained in terms of correlation between errors committed by different agents

the performance of rational voter models in recent presidential elections in an economic theory of democracy downs hypothesized that rational utility maximizing citizens would calculate the benefits from voting as opposed to abstaining altogether and then vote if this expected benefit exceeded voting cost this hypothesis is logically derived from economic principles of rational behavior but is counterintuitive even if the utility increment is plausibly large the probability of casting a pivotal tie breaking vote in any sizable polity is minute hence the expected benefit will be less than the time cost of voting and no rational person will vote nevertheless a number of statistical studies have found that voter turnout does respond to differences in the probability of casting a decisive vote even though that probability may be small this article uses data gathered at the state level from the 1968 1972 1976 and 1980 general elections to reestimate the relationship between voter turnout and the probable closeness of the election pooled data least squares dummy variable lsdv regressions are used whenever preliminary tests indicate that such pooling is permissible the empirical results suggest that the relationship between closeness and turnout is weak unstable or nonexistent in all of the models tested

choosing not to choose on the link between information and abstention abstract we use a dataset that allows us to circumvent a number of estimation difficulties that have plagued previous studies of the relationship between information and abstention our results show that information is a major determinant of abstention

economic theories of voter turnout i the voting paradox why would the rational individual bother to spend time and resources to become well informed go to the polls on the election day and maybe even wait in a queue why would a rational voter vote downs 1957 ii the paradox of indeterminacy if they vote why do they care who they vote for kirchgassner 1992 kirchgassner and pommerehne 1993 iii the paradox of ignorance to the extent that information is costly the rational voter must be ignorant about relevant aspects of his decision making downs 1957

turnout and closeness evidence from 60 years of bavarian mayoral elections one prediction of the calculus of voting is that electoral closeness positively aects turnout via a higher probability of one vote being decisive i test this theory with data on all mayoral elections in the german state of bavaria between 1946 and 2009 importantly i use constitutionally prescribed two round elections to measure electoral closeness and thereby improve on existing work that mostly uses expost measures that are prone to endogeneity the results suggest that electoral closeness matters a one standard deviation increase in closeness increases turnout by 1 68 percentage points which corresponds to 1 of a standard deviation in this variable i also evaluate how other factors like electorate size or rain on election day aect turnout dierentially depending on the closeness of the race

an evolutionary analysis of turnout with conformist citizens abstract we propose an evolutionary analysis of a voting game where citizens have a preference for conformism that adds to the instrumental preference for the electoral outcome multiple equilibria arise and some generate high turnout simulations of best response dynamics show that high turnout is asymptotically stable if conformism matters but its likelihood depends on the reference group for conformism high turnout is more likely when voters care about their own group s choice as this better overrides the free rider problem of voting games comparative statics on the voting cost distribution and the groups composition are also done

team effects on compensation an application to salary determination in the national hockey league leo h kahane studies of salary determination largely model pay as a function of the attributes of the individual and the workplace i e employer size job characteristics and so forth this article empirically investigates an additional factor that may influence individual pay specifically coworker productivity data from professional sports are used to evaluate this question because both salary and teammate performance measures are readily available we find that team attributes have both direct effects on an individual s pay and indirect effects through altering the rates at which individual player productive characteristics are valued jel j31 l83 i introduction when complementary exists between labor inputs individual productivity may be poorly measured by treating the individual worker separately from the character of the organization or team within which he works namely individual productivity may vary when working in different settings to the extent that coworkers offer different degrees of assistance 1 if such complementary between human capital inputs is present say a team dynamic it suggests the possible existence of both team and individual effects on productivity and hence compensation empirical analysis of team effects has been hindered by the lack of data on individuals and their coworkers including managers one source though that contains much of this requisite information is data on professional sports teams in this article we exploit this unique attribute of professional sports data in order to empirically assess the effect of complementarities between labor inputs on individual compensation specifically we use a team sport setting to situate the worker in an organizational environment where we can observe the impact of coworkers on individual productivity thereby allowing us to examine the separate effects of individual and team productivity on salary determination the general question asked is whether individual attributes are valued or rewarded differently in different work environments or in our specific case on different teams this study will investigate these questions by empirically assessing the effects of coworker productivity that is the effects of the qual ity productivity of teammates on individual compensation although a number of different highly team oriented sports would serve our purpose such as basketball this particular study uses data from professional hockey to investigate team effects on compensation 2 the remainder of the article is organized as follows section ii outlines the empirical framework used to analyze the posited team effects and discusses some of the theoretical issues relating to team effects on compensation section iii describes the data used in the analysis section iv reports the empirical results and section v reports our conclusions and directions for further work ii team and coworker effects as noted above the goal of this study is to evaluate empirically whether average coworker attributes 1 affect individual salaries 2 affect the rate at which individual attributes are valued by the firm and 3 are complementary inputs to the attributes of individual team members the question arises though as to why we might expect on theoretical grounds that individual players would earn any part of the team s contribution the classic model of alchian and demsetz 1972 suggests that the capitalist manager will reap the returns from any incremental team output as the primary function of the manager is to discover complementarities between inputs and enhance organizational output by optimally combining resources and to monitor effort so as to reduce shirking as a result the manager will capture all of the returns that are not specific to the inputs in which case we would not expect to observe team effects on individual compensation yet although a manager acting as the residual claimant is one solution to the problem of reducing shirking in the context of complementary inputs whose effort is difficult to monitor other models suggest that it may be desirable to compensate team members based on the value of team output in order to provide optimal incentives for effort for example see akerlof 1982

is political rivalry an incentive to vote according to the theory of the rational voter s behavior riker and ordeshook 1968 the decision to vote depends among other things on the expected effectiveness of his vote to bring to power his preferred candidate or party though this hypothesis is valid in the case of a two party political system in the case of a multi party system one has to take into consideration the influence of the competition2 between parties upon the vote s efficiency and on the distribution of the votes among parties3 in a multi party system quite often no one party is in a position to win an overal majority and the result is a governmental coalition therefore the voter is in more doubt about the effectiveness of his vote for a given number of parties the closer the outcome of the election the more likely people would be to vote see tullock 1972 110 an increase in the number of parties might be considered as contributing to a better representation of the electorate s preferences and therefore as an incentive to vote on the other hand when parties become too numerous there could be a weakening of power among them and that in turn would cancel out the incentive to vote therefore an optimal degree of competition encouraging electoral participation as shown in figure 1 must exist4 this paper will concentrate on the assessment of the explanatory power of the competition among parties upon the rate of electoral participation it should however not be overlooked that in practice there are many factors of an institutional as well as of a psychological nature which prevent such an ideal balance being attained factors affecting the voter s behavior such as compulsory participation tend to reduce considerably the margin between the expected benefit from voting and the costs the development of efficient lobbies considered by the voter to be more likely to support his preferences in parliament tend to reduce the

mobilization social networks and turnout evidence from japan the strategic elites model of turnout argues that elites mobilize more when the probability of their effort deciding the electoral outcome is greater although the literature assumes that this probability depends solely on how close the election is logically it depends jointly on how many votes are needed to affect the outcome closeness and on how many additional votes elite efforts are likely to garner vote yield because the vote yield of mobilizational effort varies with the social capital of the district that elites face the level of elite mobilizational effort hence turnout should depend interactively on closeness and social capital the authors test their predictions using data from japanese lower house elections for the years 1967 90 japan is an interesting test case both because its former electoral system differs from that for which the model was first developed and because the literature clearly stresses the role of elite mobilization through social networks but does not examine the particular hypotheses advanced here

rational choice theory and the paradox of not voting at least since downs s 1957 seminal work an economic theory of democracy rational choice theorists have appreciated the paradox of not voting in a large election the probability that an individual vote might change the election outcome is vanishingly small if each person only votes for the purpose of influencing the election outcome then even a small cost to vote like a minor schedule conflict or mildly bad weather should dissuade anyone from voting yet it seems that many people will put up with long lines daunting registration requirements and even the threat of physical violence or arrest in order to vote given the central place of voting within political economy the lack of an adequate rational choice model of large elections with costly voting presents an obvious problem for the most part theorists have bypassed the turnout problem either by eliminating voters as strategic actors or by assuming that the decision to vote is independent of other strategic choices the problem with the first approach is that the empirical literature on voting behavior provides considerable evidence of apparently strategic behavior in primary elections there is evidence that voters condition their vote choice on the viability of candidates abramson aldrich paolino and rohde 1992 in a seminal and comprehensive study cox 1997 shows that voting patterns and election outcomes are broadly consistent with patterns of behavior predicted by strategic voting models for example under plurality rule in which the candidate with the most votes wins the election

de centralization and voter turnout theory and evidence from german municipalities a vast academic literature illustrates that voter turnout is affected by the institutional design of elections e g compulsory voting electoral system postal or sunday voting in this article we exploit a simple downsian theoretical framework to argue that the institutional framework of public good provision and in particular the distribution of political and administrative competences across government levels likewise affects voters turnout decisions by influencing the expected net benefit of voting empirically we exploit the institutional variation across german municipalities to test this proposition and find supportive evidence

follow the leader theory and evidence on political participation using state by state voting data for u s presidential elections the authors observe that voter turnout is a positive function of predicted closeness to explain the strategic component of political participation they develop a follow the leader model political leaders expend effort according to their chance of being pivotal which depends on the expected closeness of the race at both state and national levels and how voters respond to their effort structural estimation supports this model for example a 1 percent increase in the predicted closeness at the state level stimulates leaders efforts which increases turnout by 0 34 percent

electoral turnout in rational voting and consumption perspectives a single equation econometric model of voting participation behavior is developed within the context of rational voter and household investment consumption theories the model is tested using aggregate electoral district level data from 10 canadian provincial elections and the 1970 canadian census the regression estimates show substantial consistency across the various elections which comprise this study s data base despite considerable collinearity education and income appear to be strongly related to voting turnout in a manner which is consistent with the predictions of economic theory

the swing voter s curse the authors analyze two candidate elections in which some voters are uncertain about the realization of a state variable that affects the utility of all voters they demonstrate the existence of a swing voter s curse less informed indifferent voters strictly prefer to abstain rather than vote for either candidate even when voting is costless the swing voter s curse leads to the equilibrium result that a substantial fraction of the electorate will abstain even though all abstainers strictly prefer voting for one candidate over voting for another copyright 1996 by american economic association

political rents and voter information in search equilibrium abstract political parties committed to grab rents may run for election and even win if citizens are uninformed but how is the political equilibrium affected if citizens can mitigate this information problem through costly information search we propose a political equilibrium theory with endogenous information search and turnout we show that i the political equilibrium generates political uncertainty characterized by a distribution of rent policies i i the expectation of this rent distribution is inversely u shaped in the information search cost i i i turnout is lower and rents are higher the more proportional is the electoral system

identification and estimation of preference distributions when voters are ideological this article studies the non parametric identification and estimation of voters preferences when voters are ideological we establish that voter preference distributions and other parameters of interest can be identified from aggregate electoral data we also show that these objects can be consistently estimated and illustrate our analysis by performing an actual estimation using data from the 1999 european parliament elections

optimal gerrymandering sometimes pack but never crack standard intuitions for optimal gerrymandering involve concentrating one s extreme opponents in unwinnable districts packing and spreading one s supporters evenly over winnable districts cracking these intuitions come from models with either no uncertainty about voter preferences or only two voter types in contrast we characterize the solution to a problem in which a gerrymanderer observes a noisy signal of voter preferences from a continu ous distribution and creates n districts of equal size to maximize the expected number of districts she wins under mild regularity conditions we show that cracking is never optimal one s most ardent supporters should be grouped together moreover for sufficiently precise signals the optimal solution involves creating a district that matches extreme republicans with extreme democrats and then continuing to match toward the center of the signal distribution jel d72

voter participation and the redistributive state the redistributive theory of the state implies that voter participation rates should be highest among those who have the most to gain or lose or a v shaped relationship between income and voting participation should exist we use a data set that contains nearly 21 000 observations on individual survey responses about voting behavior in the u s between 1972 and 1993 to show that the participation rate generally rises monotonically with income perhaps except at very high income levels it does report other findings consistent with an economic theory of voting based on returns to association and with the hypothesis that public employees vote more