rule making in community forestry institutions the difference women make abstract forest use rules determine what products are extracted from community governed forests in what quantity by what methods and by whom the nature of rules and the process by which they are formulated e g who participates in formulating them can impinge critically on institutional sustainability given their potential impact on the commitment and incentive to protect and on equity and conservation outcomes this is well recognized in the substantial literature on institutions governing common pool resources cprs it is also well recognized although in relation to other types of institutions such as legislatures and village councils that there can be notable differences in women s and men s policy priorities yet there is surprisingly little existing work on or statistical testing of potential gender differences in rule making in institutions managing natural resources such as forests this paper based on the author s primary data for india and nepal seeks to fill this conceptual and empirical gap it examines why we might expect women to favour different rules from men and statistically tests whether the gender composition of the executive committees ecs the main decision making bodies of community forestry institutions cfis in south asia makes a difference to the strictness of forest use rules this is analyzed both by specifying a strictness index which aggregates rules across products and by examining rules for selected products and both for all sample districts together and for each district separately gender is found to make a significant difference to the rules specified but not always in the expected direction given their substantial and daily dependence on local forests especially for firewood and fodder rural women may normally be expected to veer toward lenient rules of extraction in fact groups with more ec women and especially with all women ecs tend to make stricter rules than other groups in most of the sample districts except one district where they tend to make less strict rules greater strictness is attributable especially to the resource constraint faced by all women groups ie cfis with all women ecs which receive smaller and more degraded forests than groups with men less strict rules among cfis in the exceptional district are attributable especially to the disproportionate presence of landless women on their ecs in other words not simply women s presence in rule making but also their economic class can matter strictness also varies by type of product forest and population characteristics the ec s average age and dominant caste and monitoring constraints the potential implications for equity institutional sustainability and forest conservation are also discussed

on the efficiency of law a public choice perspective economists have not yet developed a comprehensive theoretical framework incorporating transaction cost economics within a public choice perspective for predicting when there will be an efficiency problem with the law transaction cost reasoning and the rent seeking insight have not been applied systematically in a dynamic institutional context to evaluate when the law will be used to increase or not minimize problems of bounded rationality and opportunism this paper takes a first step at identifying and remedying this deficiency the paper first provides a critical review of relevant theoretical contributions made by becker 1983 1985 posner 1977 priest 1977 rubin 1977 1982 williamson 1975 1985 and others we then show how analysis of the efficiency of law can be synthesized into a broader whole by incorporating transaction cost economics more fully into existing understanding of rentseeking in the political realm thus within the public choice paradigm this paper develops a deeper transaction cost analysis of the efficiency of law building on prior research by the authors crew and rowley 1988a 1988b twight 1983 1988 the paper identifies variables that position legal rules on a spectrum that ranges from those that are predominantly transaction cost

women as policy makers evidence from a randomized policy experiment in india this paper uses political reservations for women in india to study the impact of women s leadership on policy decisions since the mid 1990 s one third of village council head positions in india have been randomly reserved for a woman in these councils only women could be elected to the position of head village councils are responsible for the provision of many local public goods in rural areas using a dataset we collected on 265 village councils in west bengal and rajasthan we compare the type of public goods provided in reserved and unreserved village councils we show that the reservation of a council seat affects the types of public goods provided specifically leaders invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to the needs of their own genders

conceptualising environmental collective action why gender matters this paper demonstrates how institutions for natural resource management such as community forestry groups which appear to be participative equitable and efficient can be found lacking on all three counts from a gender perspective it also examines possible gender differences in social networks values and motivations although there is little to suggest that women are inherently more conservationist than men the distinctness of women s social networks embodying prior experience of successful cooperation their higher dependence on these networks as also on the commons in general and their potentially greater group homogeneity relative to men could provide an important and largely ignored basis for organising sustainable environmental collective action the paper also outlines the factors that can constrain or facilitate women s participation in formal environmental management groups illustrative examples are drawn from rural south asia

the role of rural producer organizations for agricultural service provision in fragile states this article assesses the extent of external linkages and the provision of agricultural services by rural producer organizations in a post conflict setting using new survey data collected by the international food policy research institute in three provinces of the democratic republic of the congo this study finds that various internal and external factors affect the capacity of organizations to interact with external organizations external linkages ability to collect financial support from their members management capacity and formal governance structures all contribute to explaining relative performance in agricultural service delivery we also find that exogenous events affect the relative performance of rural producer organizations our results suggest that closeness to conflict reduces the capacity of producer organizations to provide agricultural services

competition in political and economic markets do anomalies play an important role in explaining economic and political choices are political decisions more prone to anomalies irrationality and inefficiency than economic decisions in their integration of results derived from experimental psychology and applied political economy frey and eichenberger 1990 argue that social scientists ought to answer these questions in the affirmative after examining a large body of choice data frey and eichenberger conclude that individuals deviate from the axioms of rational choice in their view the resultant anomalies in individual behavior are unaffected by the aggregation which occurs in the economic marketplace they conclude that political decision making systems correct no larger a proportion of these anomalies than are corrected by the economic market in many institutional settings outlined in their paper decision making systems can be expected to magnify individuals deviations from rational behavior system wide irrational behavior will then produce less frequent trading and a less efficient allocation of resources in this note we examine two components of frey and eichenberger s argument first we reconsider their evidence for irrational behavior in light of a larger body of experimental data which includes choices made in market settings second we argue that competition in political markets will tend to eliminate aggregate anomalies just as it does in economic markets experimental economists often generate data which distinguish between choices individuals indicate in unstructured environments and transactions individuals consummate in markets initial statements regarding choices are often inconsistent with subsequent trading behavior these data indicate that the economist s maximization paradigm based on tenets of rational choice is

a spatial model of legislative voting with perceptual error this paper presents a unidimensional spatial model of voting in which members of congress vote based on an imprecise perception of roll call alternatives the model is applied to the senate roll call votes of 1977 to estimate the ideal points of the senators and to examine the role of a liberal conservative dimension in describing votes on economic issues relative to social issues in light of the spatial model the paper argues that standard models of roll call voting are not based on a theory of choice and hence that it is difficult to interpret their results alternatives to standard models based on the spatial model are developed and are used to analyze the role of ideology in deciding a specific economic issue coal strip mining

toward a public choice theory of monopoly regulation its many dimensions from the perspective of market economics this new thrust was consolidated in 1976 by s peltzman who developed a formal market model in which regulations were viewed as commodities brokered via political markets in response to bids and counter bids by those who stood to gain or to lose from specific regulation outcomes the subsequent contribution by becker 1983 added insights and institutional flesh to the stigler peltzman embryo confirming regulation as an integral component of mainstream market economics an important implication of such contributions especially those from the chicago perspective is that regulation for the most part confirms resource efficiency within market process that political markets in the absence of entry barriers are just as effective as are competitive commodity markets in achieving economic efficiency defined within a comparative institutions framework nowhere is this complacency more apparent than in the conclusion drawn by becker 1983 from a detailed formal analysis of competition among pressure groups for political influence

groundwater management efficiency and equity considerations abstract groundwater has the characteristics of commonly owned property and its use is likely to be inefficient in the absence of regulation several management tools can be used to regulate groundwater withdrawals with no one tool dominating the others in terms of efficiency of water use however the welfare distributional effects of various management schemes on individual users who vary in their derived demands for groundwater might be quite substantial and different users may find considerably different schemes attractive the equity problems associated with the division of management benefits may dominate the decisions about support of or opposition to groundwater management and hence they must be undertaken with considerable care and resolved by consensus among users although the negotiations are expected to be extensive and complicated there is a substantial basis for agreement because all users stand to gain the question is who will gain the most

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

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

the economics of conjunctive groundwater management with stochastic surface supplies abstract groundwater management with stochastic surface flows and artificial recharge is considered theoretical analysis characterizes the decision rules and establishes conditions for convergence of socially optimal and common property withdrawals and pumping lifts to limiting probability distributions an empirical application to kern county california finds that optimal withdrawals are generally increasing in hydraulic head and decreasing in surface flows however nonmonotone behavior is observed in some instances artificial recharge is not observed in the limiting distribution due to an interaction of several factors optimal management implies relatively small gains over unregulated groundwater use when preferences are risk neutral

towards an understanding of the role of standard setters in standard setting abstract we investigate the effect of standard setters in standard setting we examine how certain professional and political characteristics of fasb members and sec commissioners predict the accounting reliability and relevance of proposed standards notably we find fasb members with backgrounds in financial services are more likely to propose standards that decrease reliability and increase relevance partly due to their tendency to propose fair value methods we find opposite results for fasb members affiliated with the democratic party although only when excluding financial services background as an independent variable jackknife procedures show that results are robust to omitting any individual standard setter

incomplete information and ideological explanations of platform divergence one of the paradoxes of formal spatial voting models is the robustness of the theoretical result that candidates will converge toward centrists positions and the empirical observation of persistent policy divergence of candidates a solution is that candidates are ideological have policy preferences when candidates have policy preferences and incomplete information about voter preferences then platform divergence is theoretically predicted experimental tests of the ideological model are presented it is shown that platform divergence is significant when candidates are ideological and have incomplete information about voter preferences however candidate positions are more convergent on average than the theory predicts suggesting that subjects value winning independently of the expected payment

the demand for irrigation water in the high plains of texas 1957 80 a new method of calculating groundwater pumpage is used to estimate water demand these results are used via the gisser sanchez model to show that pumpage regulation is unlikely to be beneficial in the texas high plains a sensitivity analysis is performed on present value profits under optimal control and competitive schemes using different water demand slope and intercept values the results indicate that the gisser sanchez rule is useful in determining the divergence in pumpage time paths and percentage difference in profits under the two schemes but it is not insightful in determining the nominal difference in profits

demand for environmental goods evidence from voting patterns on california initiatives this article studies voting behavior on 16 environmental ballot propositions in california in order to characterize the demand for environmental goods the environment is found to be a normal good for people with mean incomes but some environmental goods are inferior for those with high incomes at least when supplied collectively an important price of environmental goods is reduced income in the construction farming forestry and manufacturing industries income and price can explain most of the variation in voting there is little need to introduce preference variables such as political ideology

cadillac desert revisited property rights public policy and water resource depletion to alleviate arizona s dependence on groundwater the federal government subsidized construction of the central arizona project cap to import water from the colorado river in exchange for the subsidy arizona reformed its groundwater law to eliminate common property pumping and to ban groundwater mining after the year 2025 we build a model of water resource development in which imported water is a capacity constrained backstop the model is applied to quantify the welfare effects of alternative cap construction dates and arizona groundwater laws we reach two general conclusions first cap was completed 86 years too early in 1987 at a deadweight loss of 2 612 billion ironically construction in 1987 yielded lower surplus than never constructing cap second the political exchange of reform for subsidy introduced a greater loss 2 612 billion than it corrected 0 810 billion the exchange was worse than doing nothing at all

ideological conviction and persuasion in the rent seeking society abstract the paper develops a model of rent seeking in a democratic political context where voting as well as rent seeking matters in this context the paper demonstrates that voter ideology is a constraint on the rent seeking game as well as a possible avenue of rent seeking in a setting where there are both rent seeking and ideological interest groups rent seekers can free ride on the efforts of ideologues which tends to reduce rent seeking effort in a setting where complementary economic and ideological interest groups coordinate their efforts both rent seeking and ideological conflict tend to increase

benefits from groundwater management magnitude sensitivity and distribution empirical estimates of benefits from groundwater management are reported for an area in california with heavy reliance on groundwater supplies benefits are quite sensitive to the water demand schedule and interest rate but less sensitive to other parameters however in all cases considered the increases in welfare from groundwater management are less than ten percent tax revenues received under a system of pump taxes are four to five times as large as the benefits from management thus groundwater users gain under a system of quotas but may suffer substantial welfare losses under pump taxes

does women s proportional strength affect their participation governing local forests in south asia summary the gender and politics literature has long debated how women s proportional strength affects policy formulation within legislatures studies on gender and environmental governance have focused mainly on women s limited participation in local institutions both bodies of work leave important aspects unexplored the former neglects the in between process the impact of women s numbers on their effective participation such as attending and speaking up at meetings and holding office the latter neglects to ask what impact would increasing women s proportions have on participation and what proportions are effective rigorous empirical analysis is also scarce addressing these gaps this paper based on primary data for community forestry institutions in india and nepal statistically tests if a group s gender composition affects women s effective participation and if there are any critical mass effects the results support the popularly emphasized proportions of one quarter to one third but women s economic class also matters as do some factors other than women s numbers

the new economics of organization over the last ten years or so an important new approach to the study of organizations has emerged within economics it is perhaps best characterized by three elements a contractual perspective on organizational relationships a theoretical focus on hierarchical control and formal analysis via principal agent models this paper provides political scientists with an overview of the new economics of organization and explores its implications for the study of public bureaucracy so far positive political theory has not contributed much to our understanding of public bureaucracy in part this is due to the unsympathetic treatment that rational modeling and most other modes of quantitative analysis have long received from students of public administration the other side of the coin however is that positive theorists have not made much of an effort to develop theories of bureaucracy their concerns have centered around two basic mechanisms of social choice voting and markets and they have devoted little systematic attention to a third mechanism that is clearly important for understanding how societies and other aggregates make collective decisions this third and relatively unexplored mechanism is hierarchy movement toward a positive theory of hierarchies would fill a serious gap in the social choice literature while at the same time making a theoretical contribution that strikes to the essence of public bureaucracy indeed of all organizations in fact significant steps toward a positive theory of hierarchies have very recently been taken but by economists not political scientists in small numbers of course economists made contributions to the study of public bureaucracy some time ago with the pioneering works of downs 1967 tullock 1965 and niskanen 1971 but this new wave of theoretical work is different it is already a large complex body of literature that is the focus of innovation and excitement among a growing number of economists and it reflects an unusual degree of theoretical coherence and cumulative effort work in this tradition tends to receive orientation from a distinctive economic approach to the analysis of organizations an approach perhaps best characterized by three elements a contractual perspective on organizational relationships a focus on hierarchical control and formal analysis via principal agent models this approach has emerged from recent attempts to move beyond the neoclassical theory of the firm which assumes away all organizational considerations to a theory of economic organizations that can explain why firms corporations and other enterprises behave as they do propo

income distributional effects of using market based instruments for managing common property resources in this article the authors show the trade offs between efficiency and equity that arise from the application of market based instruments to a heterogenous population of agents drawing from a natural resource pool using the example of groundwater they find that there are overall losses in allocative efficiency when the centralized planner is constrained by equity considerations and that the distribution of gains or losses to management becomes skewed asymmetrically across agents these results demonstrate the importance of considering both efficiency gains and disparities in distributional inequity when designing policy instruments that create winners and losers with potentially serious sociopolitical ramifications

using tradable water permits in irrigated agriculture the present paper examines both theoretically and empirically the environmental and economic benefits of introducing a policy to optimally manage groundwater used in irrigated agriculture and the efficiency potential of allowing trading of water permits we confirm the results appearing separately in the literature on optimal resource management and tradable permits that both tradable water permits and non tradable quotas provide the basic mechanism for sustainable water use and yield substantial economic benefits and that allowing trading of water permits improves efficiency in order to derive the above results we develop a discrete time model to realistically describe farmer s myopic behavior while using a continuous time model to describe optimal management we also incorporate into the analysis the economic effect of sea water intrusion in the aquifer and we estimate the cost of water overexploitation under myopic behavior the empirical part of the paper is based on simulations using data from an agricultural region in northern greece the main contribution of the paper is the introduction of heterogeneity in crops production and market characteristics we show that the more diverse are the crops in technology and market prices and the stricter is the water constraint the higher are the benefits from using a tradable water permit system

the market for sulfur dioxide emissions the 1990 clean air act amendments initiated the first large scale use of the tradable permit approach to pollution control the theoretical case for this approach rests on the assumption of an efficient market for emission rights the authors empirical analysis shows that the emission rights market created by the 1990 amendments had become reasonably efficient by mid 1994 they also show that the auctions specified in the amendments to jump start trading had become a small part of the overall market finally the authors demonstrate that the strategic bidding behavior discussed in the literature has had no effect on market prices copyright 1998 by american economic association

groundwater use under incomplete information abstract this paper introduces a game theoretic model of groundwater extraction in a two cell aquifer under incomplete information a novel assumption is that individual users have incomplete knowledge of the speed of lateral flows in the aquifer although a user is aware that his neighbor s water use has some influence on his future water stock he is uncertain about the degree of this impact we find that the lack of information may either increase or decrease the rate of water use and welfare in a two period framework the relevant characteristic is the ratio of the periodic marginal benefits of water use depending on whether this ratio is convex or concave the average speed with which the aquifer is depleted decreases or increases when users learn more about the local hydrologic properties of groundwater in principle welfare may decrease even in cases when the groundwater allocation is closer to the efficient groundwater allocation

participatory exclusions community forestry and gender an analysis for south asia and a conceptual framework abstract the idea of people s participation has long been part of development thinking but today the management of local natural resources by village communities is widely accepted as an institutional imperative it is therefore essential to examine how these institutions perform especially from the perspective of the more disadvantaged based on extensive fieldwork among community forestry groups in india and nepal and existing case studies this paper demonstrates how seemingly participatory institutions can exclude significant sections such as women it provides a typology of participation spells out the gender equity and efficiency implications of such exclusions and analyzes what underlies them it also outlines a conceptual framework to help analyze the process of gender exclusion and how it might be alleviated

economic interests and ideological conviction a note on pacs and agricultural acts abstract this note seeks to determine factors in the u s senate s voting behavior on agricultural issues a narrowly defined capture model based on peltzman s economic theory of regulation does poorly in explaining and predicting votes compared to a model enhanced by the addition of each senator s personal ideological convictions while ideology is found to be significant contributions from agricultural political action committees are insignificant in explaining and predicting the u s senate s votes on eight 1981 and six 1985 farm bill amendments

why is there so little money in u s politics in this paper we argue that campaign contributions are not a form of policy buying but are rather a form of political participation and consumption we summarize the data on campaign spending and show through our descriptive statistics and our econometric analysis that individuals not special interests are the main source of campaign contributions moreover we demonstrate that campaign giving is a normal good dependent upon income and campaign contributions as a percent of gdp have not risen appreciably in over 100 years if anything they have probably fallen we then show that only one in four studies from the previous literature support the popular notion that contributions buy legislators votes finally we illustrate that when one controls for unobserved constituent and legislator effects there is little relationship between money and legislator votes thus the question is not why there is so little money politics but rather why organized interests give at all we conclude by offering potential answers to this question this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

current issues in the economics of groundwater resource management the issue of groundwater management remains a practical concern in many regions throughout the world while water managers continue to grapple with the question of how to manage this resource in this article we attempt to bring the most advanced and appropriate tools to bear on the issue of resource allocation involving groundwater our objective is to demonstrate the state of the art in the literature on ways to think about this complex resource and to deal with the important economic issues emanating from its complexity we present the conceptual framework within which economists examine the elements interacting in the management of groundwater resources indicate why the role of the market is limited with respect to the price of this very complex resource and point to the mechanisms that can pull competitive groundwater price and quality graded quantity of groundwater in line with their equilibrium levels in particular we critically review economic models of groundwater use examine the potential for groundwater management discuss the difficulties encountered in the estimation of the relevant control variables of such models and identify the advantages and limitations of the instruments devised for the efficient use allocation of this resource finally we argue that devised regulatory schemes usually ignore the information and knowledge needed for their implementation and we suggest a core of conditions necessary for successful groundwater management reforms

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

the effects of well management and the nature of the aquifer on groundwater resources we compare groundwater use under collective well management in china where village leaders allocate water among households and under private well management where farmers either pump from their own wells or buy water from wells owned by other farmers villages are divided into connected or isolated groups depending on whether there are lateral groundwater flows between aquifers underlying a village and neighboring ones in rural china households under collective well management use less water even under collective management households located in connected villages use more water indicating that the connectedness of the aquifers may undermine leaders incentives to conserve water

competitive versus efficient extraction of a common property resource the groundwater case abstract in this paper socially optimal and private extraction of a common property aquifer are compared open loop equilibrium and feedback equilibrium in linear strategies have been computed to characterize private extraction the use of these two equilibrium concepts allows us to distinguish between cost and strategic externalities as long as the open loop solution captures only the cost externality and the feedback solution captures both the results show that strategic behaviour increases the overexploitation of the aquifer compared to the open loop solution however if the groundwater storage capacity is large the difference between the socially optimal and private extraction the latter characterized by a feedback equilibrium is negligible

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

a dynamic approach to pes pricing and finance for interlinked ecosystem services watershed conservation and groundwater management a theory of payment for ecosystem services pes pricing consistent with dynamic efficiency and sustainable income requires optimized shadow prices since ecosystem services are generally interdependent this requires joint optimization across multiple resource stocks we develop such a theory in the context of watershed conservation and groundwater extraction the optimal program can be implemented with a decentralized system of ecosystem payments to private watershed landowners financed by efficiency prices of groundwater set by a public utility the theory is extended to cases where land is publicly owned conservation instruments exhibit non convexities on private land or the size of a conservation project is exogenous in these cases conservation investment can be financed from benefit taxation of groundwater consumers while volumetric conservation surcharges induce inefficient water use a dynamic lump sum tax finances investment without distorting incentives since the optimal level of conservation is generated as long as payments are correct at the margin any surplus can be returned to consumers through appropriate block pricing the present value gain in consumer surplus generated by the conservation induced reduction in groundwater scarcity serves as a lower bound to the benefits of conservation without explicit measurement of other benefits such as recreation biodiversity and cultural values

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

the influence on congress by the thrift industry abstract the investigation of the influential role of the thrift industry on congress as demonstrated by voting behavior on regulatory policy changes in the eighties is the focus of this study specifically we search for the degree to which the inadequately capitalized component of the thrift industry has captured the house of representatives we examine the influence on congress by the thrift industry using the votes by the house of representatives associated with three different legislative acts the garn st germain act the competitive equality banking act and the financial institutions reform recovery and enforcement act addressing the thrift crisis using a multi chotomous voting model we identify traditional public choice variables that could influence the probability of voting for legislation to capture the variation of the thrifts interests we consider a series of financial variables motivated by the thrift literature of failure prediction models these variables allow us to investigate the influences from the health of the congressional district s thrifts their asset composition characteristics and their reliance on regulatory forbearance

information and the coase theorem abstract some economists think the coase theorem implies a lot about the proper scope of government intervention in the economy and about the welfare consequences of laissez faire others see it as a mere tautology that if people negotiate efficiently then every outcome will be efficient the coase theorem is important only if we believe that efficient negotiation is likely of course we can attribute inefficiencies to bargaining imperfection but it may not be useful to do so such attitudes sometimes seem to depend more on ideology than on reason this article gives one economist s reasoned view it discusses the coase theorem as a decentralization result and why decentralization results are interesting it considers mechanism design for revealing private information and describes the problems of centralization should the coase theorem should be viewed as a second best result property rights are more efficient than some reasonable alternative does the coase theorem recommend an institution or make

joint quantity quality management of groundwater economic literature on groundwater managementhas traditionally been split into two areas there are papers that evaluate different schemes of dynamicaquifer management considering that pumping costs vary with stock but ignoring water quality on the other hand there are papers that considercontamination problems caused by specificpollutants this paper presents two alternative models for joint quantity quality management and it shows that existing models are in fact special cases of these the framework isdynamic and considers both the stock of waterquantity and a stock measure of water quality optimal taxes are derived and shown to be different from those in existing quantity only or quality only models implementationproblems are briefly discussed

strategic behavior and efficiency in the common property extraction of groundwater groundwater has always been regarded as a common property resource where entry is restricted by land ownership and private exploitation is inefficient in 1980 gisser and sanchez presented a first estimation of this inefficiency cornparing socially optimal exploitation with private competitive exploitation using a model with linear water demand average extraction cost independent of the rate of extraction and linearly decreasing with respect to the water table level they characterized the private exploitation of the aquifer assuming that farmers are myopic and choose their rate of extraction to maximize their current profits whereas optimal exploitation is obtained by maximizing the present value of the stream of aggregate profits their results show that if the storage capacity of the aquifer is relatively large the difference between the two systems is so small that it can be ignored for practical consideration this result has been called the gisser sanchez rule by nieswiadomy 1985 and it has and important policy implication regulation of the resource does not seem justified since the profits it brings are not very high 1

sweet and sour changes in trade regimes sugar is an important export for a number of developing countries especially in the african caribbean and pacific regions in many of these countries preferential access to the eu market has been a key factor to develop their sugar sectors the recent and proposed changes to the international sugar trade regimes particularly in the eu are threatening this preferential access we study the possible implications of such changes on acp countries sugar production and exports by using a spatial price equilibrium model specifically developed for the sugar market the results suggest that the effects of these changes are likely to vary according to the prevailing level of world sugar market price and according to whether acp countries are current exporters to the eu

self interest altruism and health risk reduction an economic analysis of voting behavior while classical economic theory suggests that the demand for private goods is motivated by economic self interest a growing body of literature suggests that the demand for public goods is driven both by self interest and by altruistic motives the political arena has been a major testing ground for this hypothesis recently a number of studies have tried to empirically isolate and determine the importance of economic versus ideological factors in explaining political choices by representatives kau and rubin 1979 peltzman 1984 kalt and zupan 1984 while congressional voting records have provided a rich source of data for empirical analysis a consensus opinion on the importance of self interest versus altruism has not been reached and remains controversial altruistic motivations have also been

coalitions in congressional voting scholars of congress generally agree on four points concerning roll call votes first roll call votes are important to members of congress who care about reelection public policies or both second members have neither sufficient resources nor incentives to acquire process and interpret information about the content and consequences of hundreds of roll call votes considered on the floor each year 1 third insufficient resources and incentives induce members to apply simple decision rules on most votes fourth a voting model should conform to the choices members make under uncertainty 2 the scholars however differ in their specification of the simple rules members adopt familiar specifications include voting decisions rooted in two or three party alignments one or more policy dimensions self interest or ideology and cue taking to varying degrees most command an intuitive appeal and empirical support clearly it is important to evaluate each model based on its a refutable implications or b performance relative to the competing models to test a unidimensional voting model in which members vote based on an imprecise perception of the issues involved 4 this paper adopts the first approach it seeks to refute a pair of comparative static implications of the model two reasons account for the adoption of approach a and not b first to the extent feasible a comparison of the unidimensional model with the competing voting models appears in poole and rosenthal 1985a 1985b second the likelihood ration test considered to be statistically unambiguous requires that competing models generate a nested set of hypotheses see amemiya 1981 unfortunately models of roll call voting with substantially different origins 5 seldom meet this requirement

non binding linked issues referenda analysis and an application non binding referenda petitions are an instrument of direct democracy that allows citizens to signal preferences to politicians outside the electoral cycle this paper provides a simple theoretical and empirical analysis of a particular form of non binding referenda so called linked issues petitions it analyzes the ability of issue linkage to increase participation levels above those of single issue petitions and applies the analytical insights to a controversial referendum held in austria in 2002 that linked issues of transboundary nuclear risk and eastern enlargement of the european union

separating economic from political influences on government decisions abstract the public interest theory is a poor predictor of government decisions relative to interest group theories but a sophisticated public interest theory is a more serious alternative to the former testing the sophisticated theory s predictions is problematic however when public interest is coincident with an interest group s interests a four step method is developed that disentangles public interest and interest group interests by separating economic from political incentives applying the method to the national forest service decisions about wilderness designations indicates whether interest groups were successful in influencing allocation decisions and whether allocation decisions were in the public interest

pareto improving water management over space and time the honolulu case we model welfare gains from efficient allocation of groundwater over space and time relative to the status quo policy of financial cost recovery in order to promote political feasibility an intertemporal compensation plan is devised that renders the reform pareto improving gainers from the reform finance the compensation in proportion to their benefits through a block pricing scheme for the honolulu case only 7 of the 441 million in gains to winners is needed to compensate losers from the reform future winners from the reform also repay the deficit created by the compensation package much as state and local governments finance capital improvements copyright 2009 oxford university press

do voters affect or elect policies evidence from the u s house there are two fundamentally different views of the role of elections in policy formation in one view voters can affect candidates policy choices competition for votes induces politicians to move toward the center in this view elections have the effect of bringing about some degree of policy compromise in the alternative view voters merely elect policies politicians cannot make credible promises to moderate their policies and elections are merely a means to decide which one of two opposing policy views will be implemented we assess which of these contrasting perspectives is more empirically relevant for the u s house focusing on elections decided by a narrow margin allows us to generate quasi experimental estimates of the impact of a randomized change in electoral strength on subsequent representatives roll call voting records we find that voters merely elect policies the degree of electoral strength has no effect on a legislator s voting behavior for example a large exogenous increase in electoral strength for the democratic party in a district does not result in shifting both parties nominees to the left politicians inability to credibly commit to a compromise appears to dominate any competition induced convergence in policy

campaign war chests as a barrier to entry in congressional races i introduction issues surrounding the nature and degree of competition in political races have been examined extensively in both the economic and political science literature with most attention focused on the interplay between incumbent and challenger expenditures and electoral success this study extends our understanding of political competition by investigating the impact of an incumbent s war chest on a challenger s decision to mount a campaign 1 for this purpose a war chest is defined as a pool of unencumbered funds accumulated prior to the start of a campaign for elective office 2 sorauf 1988 182 has observed that early receipts even without early spending discourage competition in the primary and attractive challengers in the general election jacobson 1985 26 has argued the most effective strategy for keeping a seat in congress is to avoid serious opposition contemporary critics and reformers of campaign financing practices use such words as frighten intimidate and overpower to describe the role of an incumbent s war chest 3 despite this kind of attention little is actually known about the degree to which war chests diminish entry or reduce the quality of a challenge we present three alternative mechanisms to explain how an incumbent s war chest might deter entry each is based upon a war chest serving as a credible commitment to spend heavily if challenged specifically war chests may either represent excess capacity in financing a campaign or serve as a signal of non observable incumbent characteristics that define a formidable opponent aside from determining whether an incumbent is challenged a war chest might also affect the quality of the challenger for example potential candidates with prior political experience may be unwilling to risk their political capital on a long shot proposition to test for these effects on entry into house races a trichotomous logit model is estimated the choices are uncontested race contested by an ordinary challenger and contested by an experienced challenger although the empirical model is not sufficiently rich to fully distinguish among competing mechanisms the regression results are robust incumbent war chests negatively affect the likelihood of a contested race and the quality of the challenger ii war chests as a barrier to entry becker 1958 106 in comparing economic and political competition observed i n an ideal political democracy competition is free in the sense that no appreciable costs or artificial barriers prevent an individual from running for office in the theory of the firm entry occurs when the expected postentry stream of profits minus the cost of entry is positive analogously an individual will enter a political race when the expected gain from holding office is positive expected gain as defined by baron 1989 is a function of campaign costs the probability of winning and the personal valuation placed by the candidate on the office the first two determinants are partly endogenous depending upon the strategic interplay of the candidates the third aside from its direct effects indirectly affects the first two for example persons hungry for office may be committed to expending greater effort and funds on their campaigns thus increasing their probability of winning similarly as lott has emphasized nontransferable brand name capital would be another factor creating a commitment to aggressively pursue office thereby affecting campaign costs and the probability of winning 4 that some challengers are deterred however need not imply the existence of a political market failure in a contestability sense the lack of a viable challenger on the ballot does not imply a lack of competition good representation will discourage entry similarly the fact that some incumbents will aggressively seek re election frightening away potential challengers is not a sign that competition is lacking

earning through learning in legislatures this inquiry applies gary becker s theoretical notions of general and specific training to the experiential learning that occurs within political institutions in particular the u s congress in the process we isolate economic facets of these legislative experiences that influence the rental value of human capital derived from congressional training we identify four factors that structure legislators post elective wages pre congressional salary year of entry tenure and variables closely related to general training in congress specifically assignment to powerful legislative committees acquisition of broad skill packages investment in expanding skill set proficiencies and to a lesser extent life cycle driven declines in such investments