on the political economy of public good inputs in agriculture the paper analyzes two elements in explaining and prescribing the level of costreducing public good inputs in agriculture the distribution of political influence and the economic properties of markets the incidence of costs benefits of alternative costsharing arrangements between taxpayers and producers is compared to the social optimal and competitive outcomes although one group could lose we focus only on situations of a pareto improvement the model predicts why some sectors have relatively more public versus private research funding and why the degree of underinvestment varies across sectors the observed underinvestment in agriculture may be due to the political power of farmers inelastic demand and highly productive public good inputs

rationing by waiting and the value of time results from a natural experiment the authors analyze data from a natural experiment with rationing by waiting in the situation motorists were confronted with a choice between waiting in line for low priced gasoline or purchasing at a higher price without waiting they view this as a revealed preference experiment and use their choices to estimate the value of time spent waiting as a function of individual characteristics in most cases the estimates of the value of time are quite similar to individuals after tax wages 13 references 7 tables

the welfare effects of balance of payments reform a macro micro simulation of the cost of rent seeking this article proposes a methodology for analysing the effect of balance of payments liberalisation on measures of poverty and distribution and applies it to the case of jamaica in the 1990s the methodology consists of a macro micro simulation in which a cge model provides labour market outcomes which in turn are used to manipulate the sectoral allocation of employment to generate the income distribution consistent with the new labour market outcome in the application to jamaica we find that the reallocation of resources away from rent seeking activities in the presence of exchange controls is significant and has large macroeconomic effects opening up of the current account has little effect on poverty but liberalisation of the capital account reduces poverty especially amongst the very poor neither policy change taken separately nor the combination of the two has more than a negligible effect on the distribution of income

predatory versus productive government the case of u s agricultural policies this essay will argue that agricultural policy in the united states has led to both the enhancement of efficiency through productive policies and the transfer of wealth and income to special interests through redistributive or predatory policies these two activities can be labeled as pests and perts pest policies or political economic seeking transfers are meant to redistribute wealth from one social group to another and are not explicitly concerned with efficiency in contrast perts or political economic resource transactions are intended to correct market failures or to provide public goods these policies have neutral distributional effects at least in design a review of the history of public policy in agriculture reveals not only tension between the pert and pest roles of the public sector but also some coordination between these two types of activities as different interest groups pressure the political process the government trades off pests and perts in its attempts to acquire balance and secure political power at times this has led to combinations of programs that appear incoherent in such a world the challenge for economists is to design and advocate policies that are both economically productive and politically sustainable

the gains from agricultural research under distorted trade abstract this paper explores the gains from research issue within the framework of a product which is traded with the aid of export subsidies because of the taxpayer burden associated with increased exports it is quite possible for the returns to research to be negative a decline in the rate of protection through a rising world market leads to a linear increase in the gains from research while a rise in the internal support price will cause a non linear and negative response if the supply shift is pivotal and a linear and negative response if it is parallel finally global returns to research will be higher than individual country returns and will always be positive in a free trade environment

revisiting the effects of imf programs on poverty and inequality investigating how lending programs of the international monetary fund imf affect poverty and inequality we explicitly address model uncertainty we control for endogenous selection into imf programs using data on 86 low and middle income countries for the 1982 2009 period and analyze program effects on various poverty and inequality measures the results rely on averaging over 90 specifications of treatment effect models and indicate adverse short run effects of imf agreements on poverty and inequality for the whole sample while for a 2000 2009 subsample the results are reversed there is evidence that significant short run effects might disappear in the long run author s abstract

is the united states really underinvesting in agricultural research that the level of public investment in u s agricultural research is too low is widely accepted this paper argues that there are two important limitations to the evidence assembled in support of the underinvestment hypothesis a many authors have compared the social rate of return to public investments with the private rate of return to private investments b costs of public expenditures on agricultural research have been underestimated by a failure to account for the marginal excess burden of the tax collection system taking these two factors into account evidence in support of the underinvestment hypothesis is weakened considerably

general economic conditions and national elections the fact that economic conditions influence voters is a leading commonplace of conversation in election years the question is is this fact in fact a fact despite the overwhelming popularity of the fact it has received neither an explicit theoretical analysis presumably because it is so obvious that economic adversity should create political adversaries nor until recently a satisfactory statistical analysis gerald h kramer has presented a multivariate analysis of congressional elections which would strongly suggest that fluctuations in the rate of unemployment have no appreciable effect upon elections but that fluctuations in per capita real income are influential in the following pages i propose to 1 reaffirm his finding on the electoral unimportance of ordinary fluctuations in unemployment 2 argue that contrary to kramer fluctuations in real income also do not have important electoral effects and 3 present an argument based upon rational voter behavior for the unimportance of general economic conditions in national elections

on home grown ness in politics evidence from the 1998 election for alabama s third congressional district faith and tollison 1983 argue that since itis costly to fire a representative for poor performance voters will rationally prefer local candidates withlongstanding ties to the district such candidates implicitlyput more specific human or other types of capital at risk as aklein and leffler 1981 type of performance bond than doother candidates with lesser ties to the district votersunderstand and appreciate the implied efficiency of castingtheir ballots in favor of someone who has a lot to loselocally from nonperformance as their representative usingprecinct level data from the 1998 election for the thirdcongressional district in alabama we find compelling evidencein support of home grown ness in politics

measuring chronic poverty without a panel abstract a new method of decomposing cross sectional poverty estimates into chronic and transient components is demonstrated using data from a recent household survey in papua new guinea this method is simpler than previously used panel methods because it does not require data on every household in every period the only requirement is that a subset of the surveyed households have a repeat observation made on their welfare indicator some time after the initial observation in the setting considered the chronic and transient components of headcount poverty are roughly equal while three quarters of the mean poverty gap is transient in the sense of being due to within year fluctuations in expenditures

empirical regularities in black markets for currency abstract this paper develops a model of the black or parallel market foreign exchange rate this rate is seen to depend upon the level of the official rate the unobserved equilibrium rate the premium offered for exchange sold through the black market and government reserve level policies the model is then empirically estimated for 10 countries over a period from 1957 through 1983 the results generally support the model specified by theory additionally the paper provides weak form tests concerning the efficiency of the black market the results cannot reject the hypothesis that the current black market rate incorporates all relevant historical price information

a macro micro analysis of the effects of electricity reform in senegal on poverty and distribution abstract this paper uses a computable general equilibrium cge macro micro model to explore the distributional effects of price reform in the electricity sector of senegal in the first part of the paper we analyse the distribution of electricity in senegal by income quintiles between 1995 and 2001 the analysis demonstrates that poor and rural households are not the main beneficiaries of the expanded network the results of the cge model show that direct price effects are weaker than general equilibrium effects on poverty and inequality moreover compensatory policies tested can help attenuate some adverse effects

smuggling and the black market for foreign exchange this paper develops a model of the black market for foreign exchange in which black market currency is demanded and supplied by firms engaged in smuggling it is demonstrated that quotas or foreign exchange rationing are not necessary to induce the coexistence of legal and black foreign exchange markets variants of the model analyze the implications of capital flight unbalanced trade quotas foreign exchange licensing and economies with more than two goods

commodity price stabilization in imperfect or cartelized markets most studies of commodity price stabilization assume that all agents behave competitively however many commodities suitable for stockpiling are produced by countries with a significant share of the world market and commodity agreements themselves often result in cartelization of the market the paper explores the consequences of market power for the choice of storage rule and the degree of price stabilization it finds that with linear demand dominant producers choose more stable prices than under perfect competition and price stability increases with their market share with constant elastic demand the competitive degree of price stabilization is achieved

workers remittances and the real exchange rate a paradox of gifts abstract we test the impact of workers remittances on the real exchange rate using a panel of 13 latin american and caribbean countries the analysis reveals that workers remittances have the potential to inflict economic costs on the export sector of receiving countries by reducing its international competitiveness our findings raise concerns parallel to those raised by dutch disease or resource boom models where resource discoveries result in real exchange rate appreciation and shifting of resources from the traded to the nontraded sectors of the economy

black markets and optimal evadable taxation in a simple model of evadable indirect taxation some surprises emerge because of a market thinning effect of high prices high taxes induce multiple equilibria low price black markets and high price legal markets further evadability introduces a bifurcation to optimal taxation for less effective tax administrations the optimal tax system follows a cash cow pattern with one sector bearing all of the tax but for relatively effective administrations the optimum follows a slightly modified ramsey rule this discontinuity results from the mathematics of evasion incentives and may help explain tax reforms commonly seen over the course of economic development

allocation of goods through non price mechanisms evidence on distribution by willingness to wait abstract this paper discusses a model of market clearing when prices are rigid the estimated model is one in which the waiting time necessary to obtain the scarce goods brings the excess demand in line with current supply in a manner of a flexible price the mechanism of such a market has been discussed by barzel and by nichols smolensky and tideman but little empirical evidence has been reported estimation of consumer demand in such a market is presented here heckman s approach to truncated sample estimation has been employed the approach allows modelling of time costs as a two part tariff the results confirm that consumer s response to waiting time is measurable and in the same order of magnitude as expected from response to changes in prices the study also indicates that rationing by willingness to wait does not necessarily distribute goods to the poor

price controls in liberia abstractin 2009 the liberian government removed a wide reaching set of price controls compared with goods never subject to price ceilings goods whose prices were liberalized showed increased pri

a fractional cointegration analysis of the long run relationship between black and official foreign exchange rates the case of the brazilian cruzeiro this paper applies a relatively new but generalized concept of fractional cointegration to shed some light on the validity of a long run relationship between monthly black and official us dollar rates of the brazilian cruzeiro an investigation of the stochastic properties of these rates reveals that while the relationship is not cointegrated in their logs they appear to be fractionally cointegrated if we allow for mean reverting processes that are ci 1 d with 0 d 1 the paper demonstrates that relaxing the condition that the residual from the cointegration equation must be a i 0 process captures a much wider class of mean reversion behaviour furthermore an analysis of the short run dynamics propelling the long run relationship tends to imply that although the official rate influences the changes in the black rate this is purely over the short run in the longer term the black rate is found to be the initial receptor of any exogenous shock to the equilibrium and it is the official exchange

poverty and basic needs fulfilment in africa during structural change evidence from cote d ivoire abstract much attention is given in the literature to the evolution of social indicators during periods of structural adjustment and economic reform this paper argues that these processes are not distribution neutral from the point of view of basic needs fulfilment and that hence the focus should not be on aggregate indicators but on the distribution of beneficiaries of social services and changes in this distribution evidence is presented for cote d ivoire during the second half of the 1980s a period of intense structural change which shows that the poorest absorbed the bulk of the decline in basic needs fulfilment as a result of structural change this was the case for almost all aspects of basic needs and occurred regardless of the overall trend in the social indicators

adjustment with a human face evidence from jamaica summary in september 1991 jamaica liberalized its exchange rate as part of its structural adjustment program sap the sudden and steep devaluation associated with this policy move had serious repercussions for real purchasing power poverty general inflation and food prices especially staple foods such as rice and flour which are imported this study evaluates the social cost of the liberalization policy by examining the behavior of preschool childrens weight for height or wasting an indicator of nutritional status that is sensitive to short term fluctuations in living conditions using 8 years of national microsurvey data for 1989 96 we apply synthetic cohort analysis to disentangle the separate impacts of childs age date of birth and measurement date on weight for height estimates based on an exhaustive set of controls indicate that children weighed in the aftermath of the policy november and december 1991 are significantly lighter by 0 178 z scores than children weighed just a few months later and children in urban areas were especially affected when food price inflation is explicitly entered into the model it is highly statistically significant and reduces but only slightly the effect of being measured at the end of 1991 the calculated elasticity of weight for height z score with respect to food price inflation is a very high 0 86 during the rapid economic reform in 1991 this elasticity rose to 1 24 indicating a large response of weight for height to food price inflation as is to be expected in a small open economy 2003 elsevier science ltd all rights reserved

us presidential elections and real gdp growth 1961 2004 in this paper i show that since 1960 an electoral cycle in us output growth can both be seen by the naked eye in the raw data and confirmed by a statistical analysis that allows for rational partisan effects as well as a wide range of control variables that is controlling for multiple lags of interest rate changes inflation money growth energy prices lagged output growth government spending or its growth and temporary partisan effects the timing of elections exerts a significant influence on quarterly real gdp growth

queues rations and market comparisons of outcomes for the poor and the rich this paper presents a positive comparison of the outcomes of several alternative allocation systems the queue system convertible and nonconvertible rations and the unhindered market to distribute the limited quantity of a deficit good among heterogeneous individuals the authors show that for the poor the ranking of systems from better to worse is convertible rations nonconvertible rations the queue system and nonintervention the rich are found to be better off under nonintervention than under other systems these and other results are notably robust not only to many parameters of the economy but also to certain types of commodity taxes and administrative costs copyright 1987 by american economic association

econometrics and presidential elections this paper discusses an econometric equation that explains votes for president as a function of economic events and incumbency information the history of the equation is reviewed the update after the 1992 election is discussed and a prediction for the 1996 election is made conditional on an economic forecast

the power to tax analytical foundations of a fiscal constitution preface 1 taxation in constitutional perspective 2 natural government a model of leviathan 3 constraints on base and rate structure 4 the taxation of commodities 5 taxation through time income taxes capital taxes and public debt 6 money creation and taxation 7 the disposition of public revenues 8 the domain of politics 9 open economy federalism and taxing authority 10 toward authentic tax reform prospects and prescriptions epilogue notes selected bibliography index

on perfect rent dissipation if economists are united on anything it is the proposition that monopoly prices reduce economic welfare by preventing the realization of the maximum gains from trade in any market the extent of such distortions to efficiency are often called harberger costs after arnold harberger s 1954 provocative attempt to measure the extent of these losses in the u s economy more recent analysis has revealed that when monopoly power is achieved via regulation at least part of the monopoly rents so gained will not be simple transfers from consumers to producers but will be dissipated by producers rent seeking activity since such activity employs real resources there are additional costs to monopolization beyond the harberger costs as emphasized by gordon tullock 1967 and richard posner 1975 indeed posner and others have argued that if competition for the monopoly rents is perfect all of the expected rents from regulation will be converted to welfare losses while franklin fisher s 1985 comment has qualified this conclusion somewhat the upshot of the debate is that the rent seeking or tullock costs may greatly exceed the harberger costs 1 another recent strand of the analysis concerns the time pattern over which monopoly returns are dissipated by competition to gain and hold the monopoly right robert mccormick et al 1984 emphasize that to the extent such expenditures are sunk they are forever lost and not recoverable by deregulation while conceding the point martin cherkes et al 1986 argue that most rentseeking expenditures are recurring not sunk and therefore large gains from deregulation remain the purpose of this essay is to point out that recurring or sunk even the largest specification of the harberger and tullock costs of regulatory monopolization may fall far short of the actual welfare costs this is because the analysis concentrates on the rent seeking tullock costs and largely ignores the parallel rent defending2 tullock costs a proper assessment of such rent defending tullock costs might more than double the maximum welfare costs of regulation suggested by posner

the home grown presidency empirical evidence on localism in presidential voting 1972 2000 this builds upon the conceptual framework of lewis beck and rice american journal of political science 27 548 56 1983 in combination with the empirical design of kjar and laband public choice 112 143 50 2002 to investigate home grown ness in us presidential elections from 1972 2000 it found that ceteris paribus home state vote shares for us presidential election winners are 5 19 15 11 percentage points higher due to the home grown ness effect in the eight presidential elections analysed this study confirms two aspects of prior work first the estimate of a home grown ness effect in presidential elections of 5 19 percentage points on average supports the 4 percentage point average found by lewis beck and rice 1983 second that support for the winning president monotonically increases as moves are made away from the opponent s home territory confirms the cascading dummy variable series approach developed by kjar and laband 2002

some empirical evidence on rent seeking we tested for the capture of net gains by winners in rent seeking competitions using the most prominent announcements of government favors in the canadian economy over a twelve year period stockholders returns were not significantly different from zero one possible explanation is that government assists firms only when assistance creates political gains refusing to transfer economic rents to firms maximmizes the resources available to serve political purposes this kind of behavior by government officials would imply that government has market power which is consistent with several well known theories of government

the kennedy round evidence on the regulation of international trade in the united states the purpose of this paper is to analyze and provide empirical evidence regarding the regulation of international trade flows our goal is to provide an explanation of the changes in the interindustry pattern of trade restrictions which emerged from the kennedy round of tariff negotiations the principal conclusion of the analysis is that the pattern of protection which resulted from the kennedy round was shaped to minimize the domestic political disruption resulting from liberalization industries which faced significant import threats and whose characteristics enhanced their potential political influence were able to maintain tariff protection in the face of overall liberalization the potential impact of the agreed upon tariff reductions was partially undermined by the introduction of offsetting nontariff trade barriers ntbs in addition ntbs were introduced systematically in industries that were becom

the economics of rotating savings and credit associations evidence from the jamaican partner abstract using a unique sample of rotating savings and credit association rosca members from jamaica we provide the first econometric tests of the recent theoretical advances in the literature on roscas and find considerable support for an economic theory of roscas we find for example that payments to the rosca leader significantly enhance the sustainability of the rosca and that the contractual relationship between the leader and other rosca members is transaction cost minimizing when the degree of asset specificity is higher the contract is more flexible other theoretical predictions we validate are the inverse relationship between size of rosca and size of contribution and the use of rosca funds for durable goods purchase

the gains from research into tradable commodities this paper develops a model for assessing the aggregate level and distribution of the benefits of reseach into tradable commodities it estimates gains to australia and to the rest of the world from research into the wool and wheat industries

determinants of county level voting patterns in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections county level data are used to estimate the incumbent party share of the two party vote in the 2012 and the 2016 u s presidential elections using a seemingly unrelated estimation procedure the r

easing countries transitions from price controls and subsidies abstract in transitional economies initial popular support of market reforms is often followed by disillusionment and repudiation of the reform program to facilitate economic transition this paper proposes a marketable discount coupon system dcs that reassures the public even as an economy moves from nonmarket to market prices unlike price controls subsidies or ration coupons dcs involves no queuing or allocative distortions unlike vouchers dcs would not be negated by inflation to avoid distortions discount coupons would be marketable and redeemable even without purchase of specific products this procedure permits efficient adjustment of domestic prices to international levels

growth distribution and politics we start by arguing that to understand growth differences across countries and time one needs to understand differences in public policies that affect the incentives for productive accumulation of capital human capital or technically useful knowledge and to understand policy differences one needs to understand how political institutions aggregate conflicting interests into public policies we then survey some recent work along these lines which argues that more inequality leads to slower growth next we illustrate some of the basic ideas of this work by help of a simple model of taxation we also present some econometric cross country evidence which is largely supportive of the basic ideas we end by suggestions for further work this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the welfare costs of price controls for cars and color televisions in poland contrasting estimates of rent seeking from recent experience the welfare costs of price controls can vary enormously depending on the method of allocating the goods in shortage and the possible rent seeking costs that may result with full rent dissipation the welfare loss from price controls on polish color televisions in 1989 was about ten times the standard estimates of distortion costs which ignore rent seeking and was more than 100 percent of the value of domestic producers sales the methods of allocating cars however did not result in rent seeking costs the domestic price controls were an unintended implicit subsidy to imports subsidies for cars were estimated at 43 percent and for color televisions at 22 percent

it s the economy and then some modeling the presidential vote with state panel data using data for the 50 us states for presidential elections from 1972 to 2004 two theories for determining state voting outcomes are considered jointly the economy matters and home grown ness theories fixed effects regressions show that measures of the economy matters real income unemployment and a proxy for inflation have the predicted effects on state voting patterns for presidential elections the home grown theory receives mixed support there is weak evidence that incumbent party candidates garner greater support in their home states there is strong support however for the proposition that incumbent party candidates fare worse in the home state of rival party candidates

colombia s black market in foreign exchange abstract decree law 444 in 1967 heavily restricted access to foreign exchange by colombian residents this policy spurred the development of a large black market which had grown to about us 2 5 billion of transaction value per year by 1988 soon after the restrictive policies were imposed marijuana and then cocaine smuggling became large industries in colombia this narcotics boom has apparently driven down the black market exchange rate and largely eliminated the exchange rate premium that is usual for such markets while colombia s government has opened up the official foreign exchange market in the early 1990s the black market is expected to continue to thrive due to the smugglers need to resort to underground means for transacting their business

the international monetary fund in a time of crisis a review of stanley fischer s imf essays from a time of crisis the international financial system stabilization and development stanley fischer was deputy managing director of the imf from 1994 to 2001 and perhaps more than any other individual he personifies the international rapid response to financial crises in the 1990s this book is a collection of essays written during his tenure at the imf taken together the essays represent the strongest and most logical defense of imf initiatives in the 1990s in print my review essay comprises six parts in parts 2 through 4 i provide an overview of fischer s arguments in three central areas of contention stabilization policy the impact of imf programs on poverty and the imf s anticipation of and response to international financial crisis i then compare fischer s arguments to those raised by the imf s critics during that period the controversial issues of these parts can be resolved only through empirical investigation but on the issues of greatest importance from the financial crises of the 1990s both fischer and the imf s critics make logically consistent arguments with little empirical support in part 5 i review the recent empirical literature to illuminate what evidence has been found in support of or counter to the assertions of fischer and the imf s critics part 6 provides conclusions and suggestions for follow on empirical research

party cues in elections under multilevel governance theory and evidence from us states this is the authors accepted refereed and final manuscript to the article the final publication is available at www elsevier com

structural adjustment policies income distribution and poverty a review of the jamaican experience abstract although jamaica has had structural adjustment and standby loans from the world bank and the international monetary fund imf since 1977 the implementation of typical structural adjustment policies such as trade and financial liberalization privatization and labor market reform has for the most part occurred only since 1989 during 1989 1993 when the jamaican economy underwent the most drastic liberalization policies inequality and poverty declined although there were sharp jumps in both inequality and poverty in 1991 when financial liberalization occurred the overall decline in poverty is attributed to the strong performance of domestic agriculture and the increased inflow of remittances and seems unlikely to be sustained

endogenous choice of trade policy instruments abstract recently developed theories of endogenous trade policy formation have attempted to explain tariffs as the result of economic interest seeking by individuals or groups this note demonstrates that tariffs will not emerge as a policy choice if income is redistributed solely through trade policy induced factor price changes a production tax cum subsidy will be adopted as both gainers and losers are better off than with a tariff

the ecological fallacy revisited aggregate versus individual level findings on economics and elections and sociotropic voting several aggregate level studies have found a relationship between macroeconomic conditions and election outcomes operating in intuitively plausible directions more recent survey based studies however have been unable to detect any comparable relationship operating at the individual voter level this persistent discrepancy is puzzling one recently proposed explanation for it is that voters actually behave in an altruistic or sociotropic fashion responding to economic events only as they affect the general welfare rather than in terms of self interested pocketbook considerations it is argued here that the discrepancies between the macro and micro level studies are a statistical artifact arising from the fact that observable changes in individual welfare actually consist of two unobservable components a government induced and politically relevant component and an exogenous component caused by life cycle and other politically irrelevant factors it is shown that because of this individual level cross sectional estimates of the effects of welfare changes on voting are badly biased and are essentially unrelated to the true values of the behavioral parameters of interest they will generally be considerable underestimates and may even be of the wrong sign an aggregate level time series analysis on the other hand will often yield reasonably good if somewhat attenuated estimates of the underlying individual level effects of interest thus in this case individual behavior is best investigated with aggregate rather than individual level data it is also shown that the evidence for sociotropic voting is artifactual in the sense that the various findings and evidence which ostensibly show sociotropic behavior are all perfectly compatible with the null hypothesis of self interested pocketbook voting

distributive politics and economic growth a crude distinction between economics and politics would be that economics is concerned with expanding the pie while politics is about distributing it in this paper we analyze the relationship between the two we focus on how an economy s initial configuration of resources shapes the political struggle for income and wealth distribution and how that in turn affects long run growth our main conclusion is that inequality is conducive to the adoption of growth retarding policies we derive this result from a simple political economy model of growth and present cross country evidence consistent with it the key feature of our model is that individuals differ in their relative factor endowments we distinguish between two types of factors an accumulated factor called capital and a nonaccumulated factor called labor growth is driven by the expansion of the capital stock which is in turn determined by individual saving decisions long run growth is endogenous as the aggregate production function is taken to be linearly homogeneous in capital and productive government services taken together the provision of government services is financed by a tax on capital because government services are productive a small tax on

unequal participation democracy s unresolved dilemma presidential address american political science association 1996 low voter turnout is a serious democratic problem for five reasons 1 it means unequal turnout that is systematically biased against less well to do citizens 2 unequal turnout spells unequal political influence 3 u s voter turnout is especially low but measured as percent of voting age population it is also relatively low in most other countries 4 turnout in midterm regional local and supranational elections less salient but by no means unimportant elections tends to be especially poor 5 turnout appears to be declining everywhere the problem of inequality can be solved by institutional mechanisms that maximize turnout one option is the combination of voter friendly registration rules proportional representation infrequent elections weekend voting and holding less salient elections concurrently with the most important national elections the other option which can maximize turnout by itself is compulsory voting its advantages far outweigh the normative and practical objections to it

employment effects of thanksgiving timing in the united states the period between thanksgiving and christmas has long seen the most intense consumer sales and hence the most active economy this period varies in length depending on the date of thanksgiving years where it is longer see detectably larger seasonal increases in national employment figures so that an earlier thanksgiving appears to serve as economic stimulus in the labor market

a positive theory of agricultural protection the present paper analyses the political economy of agricultural protection in a general equilibrium framework rational politicians offer protectionist policies in return for political support from their constituency individuals in the economy have different factor endowments politicians exploit these differences in establishing redistributive policies when maximizing political support changes in economic variables such as the urban rural income gap capital intensity the share of agriculture in total output and total employment and the share of food in consumer expenditures affect the political equilibrium policy the analysis concludes that the observed correlation between economic development and agricultural protection is caused by a multiplicity of factors

the politics of underinvestment in agricultural research this paper develops a political economy framework that determines the factors causing underinvestment in public research expenditures governments are unable to fully compensate for unequal income distribution effects of research because of either their inability to make credible commitments or ofdeadweight costs associated with compensation

price controls and rent seeking behavior in developing countries abstract when the price of a good is controlled a nonprice allocation rule must necessarily be substituted for allocation by price examples are first come first served allocation which gives rise to rationing by waiting and allocation by an explicit system of ration coupons with rationing by waiting consumers are induced to pursue activities that economize on waiting costs such as buying a larger quantity per purchase although such responses are individually rational they are socially self defeating in the sense that they lower equilibrium consumer welfare rationing by coupons can avoid some but typically not all of these losses these ideas are developed with examples of model economies and their practical relevance is illustrated with evidence from developing countries

jamaica s foreign exchange black market as in many other less developed nations the imposition of foreign exchange controls promoted the growth of a foreign exchange black market in jamaica this article explains the structure and functioning of the market in recent years under controls initially imposed in 1954 this market grew to about us 1 7 billion of transaction value per year by 1990 during the 1980s the main participants in the market seeking to buy foreign exchange were jamaican importers and savers who either were restricted from obtaining foreign exchange in the official market or chose to evade taxes and other rules by using the black market on the supply side were jamaican expatriates living abroad foreign tourists ganja exporters and traders using false invoices thousands of black market exchangers provided the market making service sometimes adding the service of funds transfer overseas a black market exchange rate model supported this interview based institutional description of the market the foreign exchange black

the welfare costs of rationing by waiting with price controls and rationing by waiting rational consumers increase the quantity boughtperpurchase this individually rational response is socially wasteful and the cost of making it is a deadweight loss this cost plus the value of time spent in queues may exceed the total rent transferred from suppliers to consumers by price controls i e the value of resources spent competing for the rent may exceed the rent itself this point is illustrated by an empirical application to gasoline price controls rent seeking exhausts an estimated 116 percent of the rent trangerred the efficiency of the price system is often illustrated lby pointing to the obvious wastes associated with alternative allocation mechanisms for example the queues that accompany price controls and first come first served allocations although rationing by waiting wastes resources in a dramatically visible fashion the magnitude of the waste and the factors that determine it seldom have been examined empirically moreover existing theory on the subject is incomplete unless the first come first served rule is precisely specified consumers will compete for available supplies in ways other than waiting in the model developed below queues cause consumers to compete by increasing amounts bought per trip to the market the analysis demonstrates that such individually rational adjustments only increase the welfare cost of rationing by waiting and thus are socially self defeating the theoretical model is illustrated empirically by estimating the welfare costs of a market wide ceiling on gasoline prices this application was motivated by the availability of two key pieces of information the value of time spent in gasoline queues and the effect of waiting lines on amounts bought per purchase this information was obtained from a survey of motorists conducted during the era of federal gasoline price regulations to focus on competition among consumers one of the inefficiencies that results from price controls is ignored the supply reduction leading to the

the effect of imf programs on labor abstract previous studies find that imf programs have negative effects on income distribution the international monetary fund and latin america economic stabilization and class conflict westview press boulder 1987a world dev 15 1987b 365 world dev 28 2000 1031 no study however has used parametric methods to control for nonrandom selection using a dynamic version of the heckman selection model i study the effect of imf programs on the labor share of income from manufacturing my conclusions are supported by 2 095 observations of 110 countries during 1961 93