state lotteries and consumer behavior abstract this paper investigates two central issues regarding state lotteries first analyses of multiple sources of micro level data demonstrate that household lottery spending is financed primarily by a reduction in non gambling expenditures not by a reduction in expenditures on other forms of gambling the introduction of a state lottery is associated with an average decline of 46 per month or 2 4 percent in household non gambling expenditures low income households reduce non gambling household expenditures by 2 5 percent on average 3 1 percent when the state lottery includes instant games these households experience statistically significant declines in expenditures on food and on rent mortgage and other bills second consumer demand for lottery products responds positively to the expected value of the gamble controlling for other statistical moments and product characteristics including the nominal top prize amount this finding is consistent with informed choice among consumers of lottery products although other forms of irrational or misinformed choice cannot be ruled out

state lottery adoptions as policy innovations an event history analysis two types of explanations of state government innovation have been proposed internal determinants models which posit that the factors causing a state government to innovate are political economic and social characteristics of a state and regional diffusion models which point toward the role of policy adoptions by neighboring states in prompting a state to adopt we show that the two are conceptually compatible relying on mohr s theory of organizational innovation then we develop and test a unified explanation of state lottery adoptions reflecting both internal and regional influences the empirical results provide a great degree of support for mohr s theory for the empirical analysis we rely on event history analysis a form of pooled cross sectional time series analysis which we believe may be useful in a wide variety of subfields of political science event history analysis may be able to explain important forms of political behavior by individuals organizations or governments even if they occur only rarely

why get technical corruption and the politics of public service reform in the indian states the emergence of new information and communication technologies in the 1990s offered governments opportunities to deliver public services more effectively to their citizens yet national and subnational authorities have employed such technologies in highly uneven ways drawing on a new data set of technology policy adoption by indian states the author argues that political calculations drive variation in the timing and scope of technology policies politicians weigh the expected electoral benefits from providing new goods to citizens against the expected electoral costs of reduced access to corrupt funds because of increased transparency the author shows that the level of bureaucratic corruption in a state is the best predictor of both when states implement policies promoting computer enabled services and the number of services made available this finding contrasts with arguments that posit economic or developmental conditions or alternative electoral and institutional characteristics as the major dri

from state to market private participation in china s urban infrastructure sectors 1992 2008 summary public private partnership ppp has gained popularity during the market oriented reforms in china s urban infrastructure sectors this paper explores how city characteristics spatial pressures and other institutional forces condition the extent of liberalization reforms in local infrastructure markets the findings advance the policy diffusion literature by suggesting that the different diffusion mechanisms not only function independently but also moderate each other s effects under certain conditions specifically this research finds that the effects of peer pressure undermine the effects of spatial exposure and the influence of provincial government reduces the effectiveness of peer pressure and epistemic influences

specifying a model of state policy innovation how should policy innovations undertaken by states be modeled frances stokes berry and william d berry presented an event history analysis of the determinants of lottery adoptions by state governments in the june 1990 issue of this review howard front argues that the way berry and berry tested for interaction among variables is invalid on the grounds that what they take to be empirical results are only artifacts of the model specification in response the berrys elaborate their original model and add alternative specifications

factors influencing the adoption of state lotteries this paper explores the factors influencing the adoption of state lotteries in the united states the conceptual framework utilizes a common utility framework in which a representative legislator maximizes utility derived from the current and expected fiscal position of a state subject to a political constraint the empirical results support the theoretical hypotheses including the finding that changes in the fiscal health of the state the predicted profit potential of a lottery and the political climate of the state all affect the likelihood that a lottery is adopted by introducing a sound conceptual framework using better data than used in previous studies utilizing an appropriate estimation technique and obtaining strong results this study advances our knowledge of why states adopt lotteries

divided we reform evidence from us welfare policies abstract divided government is often thought of as causing legislative deadlock i investigate the link between divided government and economic reforms using a novel data set on welfare reforms in us states between 1978 and 2010 panel data regressions show that under divided government a us state is around 25 more likely to adopt a welfare reform than under unified government several robustness checks confirm this counter intuitive finding case study evidence suggests an explanation based on policy competition between governor senate and house

the conditional effect of specialized governance on public policy what are the policy consequences of creating functionally specialized venues for decision making this study directly compares special districts with general purpose local governments to evaluate how specialization influences responsiveness and policy choice previous theorizing has assumed that specialization should have the same effect across all policy contexts the findings presented here show instead that its effect is conditional on the status of public problems objective conditions related to a policy issue more strongly influence the responsiveness of multipurpose legislatures than that of special districts thus the institutional effect of functional specialization varies with the severity of the public problem the result is that governing structure matters most where problems are least severe the findings demonstrate the importance of considering policy context when analyzing the effects of political institutions

inter governmental institutions as promoters of energy policy diffusion in a federal setting this article is about diffusion processes behind the innovation of sub national energy policy measures in a federal system typically for the federal political system in switzerland the elements of the energy policy field are shaped by the principle of subsidiarity the aim is that cantons promote innovative problem solutions and regionally adapted implementation for this reason policy differences between cantons are large and create a need for coordination more concretely i will analyze the impact of inter cantonal institutions on different innovations in the field of energy policy the research question is approached with an event history analysis on three different innovative measures in the swiss cantons from 1990 to 2007 a more comprehensive picture of diffusion in one policy field is drawn with this approach the main contribution of this paper is the finding that intergovernmental institutions promote diffusion in one policy field only for measures with certain characteristics the internal determinants are therefore not a sufficient explanation

religious beliefs gambling attitudes and financial market outcomes this study investigates whether geographic variation in religion induced gambling norms affects aggregate market outcomes we conjecture that gambling propensity would be stronger in regions with higher concentrations of catholics relative to protestants consistent with our conjecture we show that in regions with higher catholic protestant ratios investors exhibit a stronger propensity to hold lottery type stocks broad based employee stock option plans are more popular the initial day return following an initial public offering is higher and the magnitude of the negative lottery stock premium is larger collectively these results indicate that religion induced gambling attitudes impact investors portfolio choices corporate decisions and stock returns

formal and informal sector credit institutions and interlinkage abstract nationalized banks in poor countries often ration rural credit this creates demand for loans from monopolistic landlord moneylenders who often interlink credit and product contracts allowing the latter to extract more of the tenant s consumer surplus in the presence of asymmetric information such arrangements can be inefficient we find that increasing the fixed credit allocation to the rural sector at a subsidized rate does not reduce that inefficiency the entire benefit of the subsidy is extracted by the moneylender an alternative policy of providing credit at subsidized rates but in a flexible manner is more effective in reducing the inefficiency

who learns from what in policy diffusion processes the idea that policy makers in different states or countries may learn from one another has fascinated scholars for a long time but little systematic evidence has been produced so far this article improves our understanding of this elusive argument by distinguishing between the policy and political consequences of reforms and by emphasizing the conditional nature of learning processes using a directed dyadic approach and multilevel methods the analysis of unemployment benefits retrenchment in oecd countries demonstrates that policy makers learn selectively from the experience of others right governments tend to be more sensitive to information on the electoral consequences of reforms while left governments are more likely to be influenced by their policy effects

multilevel innovation policy mix a closer look at state policies that augment the federal sbir program this paper examines nested multilevel innovation policies paying particular attention to u s federal and state small business innovation research programs with 45 states offering a range of sbir outreach and sbir match programs specifically designed to enhance the federal sbir program such programs provide a useful lens for examining the nature of the multilevel innovation policy mix the contributions of this article are twofold first the article provides theoretical motivation for multilevel innovation policy responses placing emphasis on positive policy responses in which state policies enhance federal policies second the article provides an empirical analysis examining the multilevel factors associated with a state government response that augments the federal sbir program the results from this analysis indicate these state policy actions are associated with a confluence of multilevel factors driven not only from top to down federal actions but also from bottom to up internal state political and economic factors as well as from lateral pressures from peer states

determinants of the probability and timing of commercial casino legalization in the united states the adoption of lotteries by state governments has received significant attention in the economics literature but the issue of casino adoption has been neglected by researchers casino gambling is a relatively new industry in the united states outside nevada and new jersey as of 2007 11 states had established commercial casinos several more states are considering legalization we analyze the factors that determine a state s decision to legalize commercial casinos using data from 1985 to 2000 a period which covers the majority of states that have adopted commercial casinos we use a tobit model to examine states fiscal conditions political alignments intrastate and interstate competitive environments and demographic characteristics which yields information on the probability and timing of adoptions the results suggest a public choice explanation that casino legalization is due to state fiscal stress to efforts to keep gambling revenues and the concomitant gambling taxes within the state and to attract tourism or export taxes

toward a comprehensive model of welfare exits the case of afdc pressures to reform the welfare system in the united states give rise to a need for improved information about individual welfare recipients using data from the survey of income and program participation and event history analysis this paper profiles the probabilistic tendencies of conditions associated with welfare exits the joint influences of policy economic conditions and individual circumstances and characteristics are considered in an attempt to build a comprehensive model of program turnover

diffusion of regulatory impact analysis among oecd and eu member states with the exception of few comparative case studies the literature on regulatory reform and regulatory impact analysis ria tends to focus on internal political actors activities and processes furthermore empirical analyses of new public management have overlooked the dynamics of communications among networks of administrative reformers this article fills these gaps presenting results of an event history analysis on the diffusion of ria it probes rationales for the origin of ria and administrative capacity explanations in combination with variables referring to international and transnational communication channels of administrative reforms a hypothesis based on legal origin is also tested the findings show that the decision to adopt ria rests on transnational networks as well as administrative variables such as government expenditure and legal origin

overcoming collective action barriers to energy sustainability a longitudinal study of climate protection accord adoption by local governments abstract high levels of observed city involvement in energy and climate initiatives indicate that free riding has been much less of a barrier to local climate protection efforts than suggested by theories of collective action this study investigates why local governments have adopted various energy and climate change policy instruments despite the non excludability of climate benefits this paper advances theories of institutional collective action ica and policy diffusion by testing ica based hypotheses that local officials are able to overcome collective action problems to the extent that the costs of these initiatives are minimized through policy network interactions the extent to which climate action produces localized benefits or compliments local environmental development or growth management efforts and the extent to which energy and climate protection efforts generate selective benefits to elected and appointed local government officials who advance their career interests depending on the existing configurations of political system institutions analysis of adoptions of the climate protection agreements by florida cities indicates larger cities are more likely to adopt climate agreement while district elections decrease the likelihood of climate policy adoption moreover economic development rather than growth management or environmental problem situation is linked to climate initiatives

intergovernmental political competition in american federalism many policies in the united states are jointly determined by federal and state actions in the game theoretic model offered here politicians in both the state and national governments seek credit for providing goods desired by the public and avoid blame for the taxes necessary to provide the goods in line with peterson s 1995 theory of functional federalism the level of government that is better able to supply particular goods and services tends to take the lead in their provision even to the extent of fully crowding out much less efficient governments however under a broad set of circumstances both state and national politicians seek credit via public spending and their joint provision leads to a relative oversupply of public goods and services and thus to overtaxation under joint provision states vary in their responses to changing federal spending patterns based both on the causes of the national changes and on state characteristics

explaining government choices for promoting renewable energy abstract many advanced industrialized countries have in recent years experienced a significant expansion of electricity production from renewables yet we know quite little about the dynamics of the underlying policychoices in this area using new data on adoptions and changes in feed in tariff and green certificate schemes in 26 advanced industrialized countries over 20 years we examine both domestic driving forces as well as international determinants the findings suggest that three factors play a particularly important role in pushing countries towards market based support systems characteristics of the existing energy supply system a federalist structure of the political system and eu membership particularly noteworthy is the finding that higher shares of fossil and nuclear energy in the national energy supply as well as higher co 2 intensity of the economy do not as we had expected stand in the way of policies for supporting renewables in electricity production to the contrary they increase the likelihood of a country adopting such policies we also find however that higher economic growth and higher growth in solar and wind energy capacity tend to reduce the political appetite for reforms of existing schemes

watershed partnerships and the emergence of collective action institutions this paper examines the emergence of local cooperative institutions watershed partnerships that resolve collective action problems involved in the management of natural resources the political contracting approach to institutional supply suggests that watershed partnerships are more likely to emerge when potential benefits outweigh the transaction costs of developing and maintaining new institutions we analyze the impact of social political economic and ecological features of watersheds that affect benefits and transaction costs on the emergence of 958 watershed partnerships in the more than 2 100 watersheds in the united states our findings demonstrate that watershed partnerships are most likely to emerge in watersheds confronting severe pollution problems associated with agricultural and urban runoff with low levels of command and control enforcement and containing the resources to offset transaction costs

economies in transition and public land use policy discrete duration models of eastern wilderness designation land use policies may affect the structure of local economies as they respond to internal and external factors we apply a discrete duration model to estimate the effect of designated wilderness on the rate and timing of counties economic transition in the appalachian region from 1969 to 2000 transitions are measured as the year in which non labor sources of income and services sector employment dominate the aggregate of resource extraction and manufacturing sectors as sources marginal effects and elasticities show designated wilderness had no practical effect on rates and timing of transition

polarization and corruption in america abstract using panel data from the us states we document a robust negative relationship between state level government corruption and ideological polarization this finding is sustained when state polarization is instrumented using lagged state neighbor ideology we argue that polarization increases the expected costs of engaging in corruption especially deterring marginal low level corruption consistent with this thesis federal prosecutorial effort falls and case quality increases with polarization tangible anti corruption measures including the stringency of state ethics laws and independent commissions for redistricting are also associated with increased state polarization

the taxman tools up an event history study of the introduction of the personal income tax abstract the introduction of income taxation was a landmark in the historical development of the fiscal state of the now developed world this paper presents an event history study of the adoption of the income tax in 17 countries from western europe north america oceania and japan between 1815 and 1939 we find evidence that spending pressures reductions in tax collection costs and to a lesser extent social learning played a significant role for the adoption decision we also find evidence that the extension of the franchise at first reduced the likelihood of adoption of the income tax but eventually as universal suffrage was approached increased the likelihood

disneyland monopoly interlinkage and usurious interest rates abstract interlinkage between labour and credit markets is interpreted as a consequence of a monopolistic moneylender s attempt to extract consumer s surplus from the borrower by levying a two part tariff this analogy enables us to draw on the literature on non linear pricing to high light issues in agrarian structure the consequence of policy interventions like taxes and minimum wage legislation is studied it is shown that the moneylender will charge usurious interest rates if wages are rigid downwards or there is a tax on agricultural income or borrowers have heterogeneous preferences some geometry for analysing interlinkage is developed and used for deriving some of the results

a formal model of learning and policy diffusion we present a model of learning and policy choice across governments governments choose policies with known ideological positions but initially unknown valence benefits possibly learning about those benefits between the model s two periods there are two variants of the model in one governments only learn from their own experiences while in the other they learn from one another s experiments based on similarities between these two versions we illustrate that much accepted scholarly evidence of policy di usion could simply have arisen through independent actions by governments that only learn from their own experiences however di erences between the gametheoretic and decision theoretic models point the way to future empirical tests that discern learning based policy di usion from independent policy adoptions

using geographic information systems to study interstate competition scholars have proposed two distinct explanations for why policies diffuse across american states 1 policymakers learn by observing the experiences of nearby states and 2 states seek a competitive economic advantage over other states the most common empirical approach for studying interstate influence is modeling an indicator of a state s policy choice as a function of its neighbors policies with each neighbor weighted equally this can appropriately specify one form of learning model but it does not adequately test for interstate competition when a policy diffuses due to competition states responses to other states vary depending on the size and location of specific populations we illustrate with two substantive applications how geographic information systems gis can be used to test for interstate competition we find that lottery adoptions diffuse due to competition rather than to learning but find no evidence of competition in state choices about welfare benefits our empirical approach can also be applied to competition among nations and local jurisdictions

diffusion of food policy in the u s the case of organic certification organic food certification policy and programs are an interesting case to explore in terms of policy diffusion as there has been interesting dynamics between the federal and state levels and great diversity in the pace of diffusion across states at the same time this policy diffusion underlies a very dynamic marketplace that has relied on government based certification policies and programs to stabilize and support growth of the organic food sector the focus of this paper is a cross section time series analysis of organic policy adoptions over the past several decades to explore the types of factors that have influenced diffusion across time and space although federal policy activity has been a key driver of this dynamic there are several other state specific factors that also help to explain the differential diffusion of policies in this realm

lotto nothing the budgetary impact of state lotteries lottery revenues are often touted as an independent revenue source for states using 32 years of state financial data the fallacy of such thinking is demonstrated being the first to control for the self selection of being a lottery state it is found that overall tax revenues decline with increased lottery sales moreover it is discovered that this decline is driven by a decrease in revenues from general sales and excise taxes which is only partially offset by increases in income tax receipts such findings are attributed to a combination of behavioural and political responses following the lottery s implementation

interlinked contracts an empirical study this study investigates the contractual relationship between farmers and sugar mills in colonial taiwan our investigation is based on a model of interlinked contracts which is adapted from gangopadhyay and sengupta 1987 the validity of our model s predictions is verified by analyzing a data set consisting of contracts between taiwan s cane farmers and sugar mills during the period of japanese occupation our data suggest that the contractual relationship is consistent with a second best scenario where the interest rates charged by sugar mills on cash loans to farmers are set in order to prevent diversion of funds to non production uses

the mechanisms of policy diffusion local policy adoptions provide an excellent opportunity to test among potential mechanisms of policy diffusion by examining three types of antismoking policy choices by the 675 largest u s cities between 1975 and 2000 we uncover robust patterns of policy diffusion yielding three key findings first we distinguish among and find evidence for four mechanisms of policy diffusion learning from earlier adopters economic competition among proximate cities imitation of larger cities and coercion by state governments second we find a temporal component to these effects with imitation being a more short lived diffusion process than the others third we show that these mechanisms are conditional with larger cities being better able to learn from others less fearful of economic spillovers and less likely to rely on imitation

studying the effects of the intensity of us state growth management approaches on land development outcomes driven by negative externalities from suburban sprawl many states in the us have adopted comprehensive growth management legislation in an effort to regulate land development more directly most extant scholarship evaluating the effects of growth management programmes employs a design that averages growth management s effect across all of the growth management states yet this approach largely ignores descriptive analyses of individual state growth management approaches which show large variation in both the methods and intensity of means by which states manage growth this paper seeks to ascertain if differences in growth management intensity yield different evaluative outcomes analysis of panel data for nine growth management states using fixed effects regressions across eight different model specifications shows that only states with the strongest growth management intensity experience consistent success at reducing the expansion of urban land and increasing population densities

the party of lincoln and the politics of state fair employment practices legislation in the north 1945 1964 from 1945 to 1964 more than a score of northern states passed laws mandating nondiscrimination in employment why did some states pass such fair employment practice fep laws much more slowly than other states this article presents archival and statistical evidence that partisan control of policy making institutions namely republican control of veto points in the legislative process is associated with a substantial reduction in the likelihood that a state would pass fep legislation even when controlling for potentially confounding variables this finding casts doubt on the leading account of the electoral realignment that began in the mid 1960s and culminated in the reagan bush years well before the advent of affirmative action key numbers of gop officeholders allied with organized business and motivated by a free market antiregulatory ideology worked successfully to block the adoption of color blind laws mandating formal racial equality

sharecropping and the interlinking of agrarian markets one of the often noted features of less developed agrarian economies is the existence of interlinkages among the land labor credit and product markets the landlord is often the supplier of credit he frequently purchases and markets the output of the tenant farmers and often sells raw materials and even consumption goods to his tenant farmers how can this phenomenon be explained what are the welfare consequences of attempts to restrict these practices which often seem to constitute restraints on free trade these are the questions to which this paper is addressed a general set of arguments applicable to both competitive and noncompetitive environments are presented to situations where all the terms of the contract are determined in an optimal way as well as to situations where many of the terms are specified institutionally section i examines interlinked credit and tenancy contracts section ii examines interlinked marketing and tenancy contracts section iii points out the possible interlinking between labor contracts and consumption goods markets and section iv presents the different equilibrium frameworks discussed in the paper such as monopoly monopsony competition and equilibria with surplus labor

trendy solutions why do states adopt sustainable energy portfolio standards abstract thirty four states had adopted sustainable energy portfolio standards seps or similar goals by the end of 2008 with 14 adoptions since 2006 there appears to be something trendy about seps and states may adopt seps when internal variables would indicate otherwise this analysis extends the current discussion of seps adoption beyond internal variables relying on innovation and diffusion theory logistic regression with seps adoption as the dependent variable is used to test internal determinants and diffusion measures for the years 1997 2008 of the internal determinants variables affluence and government ideology were found to be positive and significant the results show that regional and neighbor diffusion variables are significant in seps adoption decisions even when accounting for ideological distance from previous adopters

potential impacts of the proposed west african monetary zone on cowpea trade member countries of the economic community of west african states ecowas are expected to form a west african monetary zone wamz by december 2009 whereby members would use a common currency in an attempt to promote regional integration evidence suggests that reduction in transaction cost as a result of a decrease or elimination of nontariff barriers ntbs and real interest rates in response to elimination of exchange rate differentials positively influence trade the objective of this study is to quantify the effects of a a 7 real interest rate on capital and b zero ntbs within ecowas countries on cowpea vigna unguiculata l walp trade to provide a measure of the potential impacts of the wamz on grain trade the study applies a spatial and temporal price equilibrium model formulated in a mixed complementary programming mcp framework and solved using gams path the focus is on the nigerian cowpea grainshed ncg comprising benin burkina faso cote d ivoire ghana mali niger nigeria and togo in ecowas and cameroon chad and gabon in the central african economic and monetary community caemc the results show that if wamz results in reduced real interest rates within ecowas the larger of the two monetary unions consumers in the relatively larger coastal economies and producers in the smaller sahelian economies would benefit while all others lose however net social welfare would increase by 0 19 over the base case of 6 3 billion us bus removing ntbs among countries in the larger trading bloc may alter the pattern of cowpea flows with total trade volume increasing by 3 but inter bloc trade decreasing by about 8 the net total regional social welfare would increase by 0 14 or 15 million us mus benefiting only consumers in importing countries and producers in exporting countries the results emphasize the importance of specialization based on regional comparative advantage but also draw attention to the need to devise ways to ensure acceptable welfare distribution among producers and consumers in line with policy objectives of the individual countries within the proposed wamz finally this article contributes to the literature on the application of spatial and temporal models incorporating both ad valorem tariffs and differential interest rates in developing economies

tax innovation in the states capitalizing on political opportunity this paper assesses the factors that prompt states to adopt taxes during the twentieth century we test five explanations of state tax innovation derived from the literature economic development fiscal health election cycle party control and regional diffusion using event history analysis a pooled cross sectional time series technique while little support is found for the economic development and party control explanations our empirical results are highly consistent with a political opportunity explanation of state tax adoptions 1 the presence of a long time until the next election 2 the existence of a fiscal crisis and 3 the presence of neighboring states that have previously adopted a tax all create opportunities for politicians to shield themselves from the political costs of supporting a tax increase and are all shown by empirical analysis to increase the probability of a tax adoption this empirical evidence is consistent across different tax instruments and different periods of analysis throughout the twentieth century

international trade and the gender wage gap new evidence from india s manufacturing sector summary this study examines how increasing competitive forces from india s trade liberalization have affected women s relative wages and employment neoclassical theory implies that costly discrimination against female workers should diminish over time with increased competition we incorporate this idea into a theoretical model of competition and industry concentration and test the model using repeated cross sections of india s national sample survey organization nsso household survey data merged with trade and production data from 1983 to 2004 estimates from ordinary least squares ols and fixed effects regressions at the industry level indicate that increasing openness to trade is associated with larger wage gaps in india s concentrated manufacturing industries