two party competition with persistent policies abstract when campaigning for reelection incumbent parties promises to voters are constrained by their records in office while opposition parties can use their time away from power to develop new platforms in this paper i introduce incumbent policy persistence in a dynamic game of electoral competition between two policy motivated parties and characterise the long run outcomes of its markov perfect equilibria incumbents reduced policy flexibility leads to alternation in power and policy dynamics that converge to alternations at policies equally preferred by the median voter convergence of policies towards the median is a robust equilibrium outcome while convergence to the median is not while alternations far from the median are never limits of equilibrium dynamics alternations close to the median can be reached only if policy dynamics start exactly there i show that these results are robust to voters being forward looking and to limited policy commitment by parties

entrepreneurs perceived chances for success abstract entrepreneurs involved in planning or starting firms must engage in a continuing process of appraising prospects for success these assessments presumably bear upon the preparations they make as well as at some later point whether they decide to make major changes or even to discontinue the business in this study data from 2994 entrepreneurs who had recently become business owners were analyzed to determine their perceived changes of success although previous evidence on business survival led to the hypothesis that the entrepreneurs would only be cautiously optimistic this was not the case they perceived their prospects as very favorable with 81 seeing odds of 7 out of 10 or better and a remarkable 33 seeing odds of success of 10 out of 10 in considering the prospects for other businesses like their own they perceived odds which were significantly lower but still moderately favorable based upon previous research on factors associated with new business success it was hypothesized that those who were more likely to succeed based upon their personal backgrounds and the nature of their new firms would be more optimistic however this was not the case those who were poorly prepared were just as optimistic as those who were well prepared at this point shortly after having become business owners the assessment by entrepreneurs of their own likelihood of success was dramatically detached from past macro statistics from perceived prospects for peer businesses and from characteristics typically associated with higher performing new firms the psychological literature on post decisional bolstering suggests that decision makers in many settings tend to bolster or exaggerate the attractiveness of an option after it has been chosen this coupled with the tendency of entrepreneurs to believe that they can control their own destinies implies that the extreme optimism observed here is probably a typical occurrence for entrepreneurs the findings suggest that it is probably natural to experience feelings of entrepreneurial euphoria when first becoming a business owner with the available evidence it is difficult to judge whether this leads to inadequate preparations or an inability to diagnose problems and make adjustments after the business is started this extreme optimism probably does contribute to the heavy personal commitments observed here in which the median entrepreneur devoted more than 60 hours per week to the business the entrepreneur would seem well advised to form relationships with outsiders such as board members and professional advisors who can be objective and detached in diagnosing problems and assessing objectively the prospects for the business in its current form

equal pay by gender and by nationality a comparative analysis of switzerland s unequal equal pay policy regimes across time what explains the adoption of two different policies on equal pay by gender epg and by nationality epn in switzerland and why is the liberal litigation based equal pay policy regime set up by the gender equality act of 1996 much less effective than the neocorporatist accompanying measures to the bilateral european union switzerland agreement on free movement of persons adopted in 1999 to ensure equal pay for workers of different national origins the formation of two different policy regimes cannot be explained by different levels of political will equally different varieties of capitalism cannot explain the setup of the two different equal pay policy regimes within the very same country instead our qualitative comparative analysis across time suggests that the differences can be best explained by a particular constellation of attributes namely the use of different policy frames that is anti discrimination in the epg and unfair competition in the epn case and the different setting of interest politics epitomised by the opposite stances adopted by switzerland s employer associations in the two cases

an economic model of representative democracy this paper develops an approach to the study of democratic policy making where politicians are selected by the people from those citizens who present themselves as candidates for public office the approach has a number of attractive features first it is a conceptualization of a pure form of representative democracy in which government is by as well as of the people second the model is analytically tractable being able to handle multidimensional issue and policy spaces very naturally third it provides a vehicle for answering normative questions about the performance of representative democracy

spatial equilibrium with entry this paper examines spatial equilibrium in political competition when established parties choose their platforms competitively while rationally anticipating entry of a vote maximizing third party the resulting equilibrium is substantially different from the hotelling median equilibrium established parties are spatially separated and third parties will generally lose the election this provides one theoretical explanation for the stability of two party systems namely that non cooperative behavior between established parties can effectively prevent third parties from winning

political reputations and campaign promises we analyze conditions under which candidates reputations may affect voters beliefs over what policy will be implemented by the winning candidate of an election we develop a model of repeated elections with complete information in which candidates are purely ideological we analyze an equilibrium in which voters strategies involve a credible threat to punish candidates who renege on their campaign promises and in which all campaign promises are believed by voters and honored by candidates we characterize the maximal credible campaign promises and find that the degree to which promises are credible in equilibrium is an increasing function of the value of a candidate s reputation jel d8

are women more risk averse we find that single women exhibit relatively more risk aversion in financial decision making than single men using u s sample data we examine household holdings of risky assets to determine whether there are gender differences in financial risk taking as wealth increases the proportion of wealth held as risky assets is estimated to increase by a smaller amount for single women than for single men gender differences in financial risk taking are also influenced by age race and number of children greater financial risk aversion may provide an explanation for women s lower levels of wealth compared with men s jel j16 d81 g11

unemployment benefits crowd out nascent entrepreneurial activity analyzing a cross country panel of 16 oecd countries from 2002 to 2005 we find that higher unemployment benefits crowd out nascent entrepreneurial activity our results hold regardless of entrepreneurial motivation necessity or opportunity and entrepreneurial type imitative or innovative

a short history of the gender wage gap in britain after closing dramatically during world war two the gender wage gap gwg was roughly constant in the decades prior to the equal pay act it closed substantially in the mid 1970s due to the act but the subsequent rate of narrowing has been very slow despite improvements in equal opportunities legislation and convergence in men s and women s educational attainment and work experience within cohort the gwg increases until employees reach their 40s after which it falls the gwg has closed across birth cohorts at all points in the adult life cycle but it remains substantial among those born in 1958 the raw gwg was 16 percentage points among workers aged 23 rising to 35 percentage points at 42 among those born 12 years later the gaps were 9 and 31 percentage points at age 26 and age 42 respectively regression adjustment for human capital investments reduces the size of the gap especially when accounting for full time work experience where differences open up between men and women in mid life following divergence of gender roles in the home results are insensitive to adjustments for sample attrition the gwg is a little larger early in the life cycle in both birth cohorts when accounting for non random selection into employment but selection plays no role later in life policy options for closing the remaining gap are considered

equal pay as a moving target international perspectives on forty years of addressing the gender pay gap this paper provides an overview of the key factors impacting upon the gender pay gap in the uk europe and australia forty years after the implementation of the first equal pay legislation the pay gap remains a key aspect of the inequalities women face in the labour market while the overall pay gap has tended to fall in many countries over the past forty years it has not closed in some countries it has been stubbornly resistant or has even widened in reviewing the collection of papers that make up this special issue we identify four broad themes with which to group the contributions and draw out the explanations for diverse trends theoretical and conceptual debates legal developments and their impacts wage setting institutions and changing employer demands and newly emerging pay inequalities between and within educational and ethnic groups across the four themes we underline how the trends in the gender pay gap capture the dynamism of inequalities as the market power of different groups and stakeholders changes over times three key dimensions emerge from the papers to provide a framework for future research and policy discourse the relationship between litigation and bargaining strategies the interaction between wage setting institutions and new organisational practices and the increasing and range of diversity or equality strands competing for equal treatment we conclude that progress towards closing the gender pay gap will not be easy will require a collective effort of various actors and will not be quick

credibility and policy convergence in a two party system with rational voters the traditional approach to modeling political parties behavior based upon the contribution of anthony downs 1957 assumes that the parties unique objective is to win elections thus they maximize their popularity the crucial implication of this assumption for a two party system is that if the two parties have the same information about voters preferences full convergence of policies results from electoral competition this is the crucial implication of the median voter theorem more generally it may be argued that different parties are motivated differently because they represent different constituencies parties may not care only about winning elections per se but also about the quality of the policies resulting from an election in this case the candidates of the two parties view winning an election not only as a goal per se but also as a means of implementing a better policy for their respective constituencies this paper shows that electoral competitions imply dynamic inconsistency if the voters are modeled as rational and forwardlooking agents and parties do not care exclusively about being elected but also about which policy to implement once elected the dynamic inconsistency arises as follows the parties have an incentive to announce convergent platforms to increase their chances of election however if the elected party is not committed to its electoral platform it has an incentive to follow its most preferred policy rather than the policy announced in its platform if voters are rational they account for this incentive thus in general in a one shot electoral game the only timeconsistent equilibrium is one in which no convergence is possible the two parties follow their most preferred policies and the voters rationally expect this outcome full convergence of parties platforms results only as a limiting case when the parties are completely indifferent with respect to the quality of the policies resulting from the election thus these results differ from the existing literature on ideologically motivated politicians for instance donald wittman 1977 1983 randall calvert 1985 which implicitly assumes the possibility of binding commitments to electoral platforms complete or partial policy convergence can be the outcome of political competition if the interaction between the parties and the voters is modeled as an infinitely repeated game in fact if the candidates have concave objective functions the welfare maximizing policy rule implies a complete convergence of parties policies however this cooperative and agreed upon policy may or may not be sustainable as a subgame perfect equilibrium depending on parameter values in particular it depends on the discount rates of the two parties the degree of polarization of their preferences and the relative popu graduate school of industrial administration carnegie mellon university pittsburgh pa 15213 and national bureau of economic research cambridge ma 02138 this paper is based upon a chapter of my unpublished doctoral dissertation at harvard university i am greatly indebted to jeffrey sachs for directing my attention toward these issues and for many conversations i also wish to thank andrew abel dilip abreu olivier blanchard ramon caminal andrew caplin alex cukierman morris fiorina benjamin friedman herschel grossman howard rosenthal and the referees for very useful comments the responsibilitv af anv n mtnkieis af calrirp nfnlv mine the result of policy convergence in a two party system is more general than the median voter theorem for discussions of convergence results not at the median see john ledyard 1984 peter coughlin 1984 coughlin and shmuel nitzan 1981 melvin hinich 1977 for earlier work on spatial competition see richard mckelvey 1975 hinich ledyard and peter ordeshook 1972 1973 and the references quoted therein the present paper focuses on the result of convergence rather than on the median voter theorem per se

information and strategic political polarisation we develop a model of electoral competition in which two opportunistic candidates select their policy position and invest in quality policy positions are observed and during the campaign the press reveals some information about quality we demonstrate that when information is imperfect the blackdowns median voter theorem fails to hold for intermediate information levels the unique equilibrium is such that candidates propose policies different from the median voter s bliss point by contrast convergence to the median occurs when quality is almost always or almost never revealed we also show that a profit maximising press may collect more information than socially optimal during the 1995 electoral campaign in belgium the vld a traditionally right wing

is polarization bad abstract the adverse effects of political and social polarization on government policies are empirically well documented yet some democracies seem to cope well or even benefit from diversity in this paper we develop a theoretical model to show how elections in polarized societies contribute to improve quality of government we consider both polarization among citizens and political actors political polarization where the second is endogenously determined by parties competing to win the support of the majority of voters we find that more heterogeneous societies are more likely to be politically polarized but that the divergence of positions in the political arena helps the electorate control government corruption by raising electoral stakes our results which are consistent with the findings of a substantial empirical literature suggest that when funneled into political competition polarization may help improving quality of government and policies

what distinguishes entrepreneurs evidence on the motives for self employment abstract previous studies distinguish between survival and aspirations based on ex ante declarations in this paper we propose an identification strategy based on objective criteria using evidence from a standard labour force survey we find that self employed who switched from wage employment and created additional jobs were systematically over compensated relative to those who did not switch and to those who switched but have not created additional jobs

the hidden cost of raising voters expectations reference dependence and politicians credibility abstract two politicians compete to get elected each politician is characterized by a valence which is unobservable to the electorate and can take one of two values high or low the representative voter prefers politicians with high valence but random shocks may lead him to appoint a low valence politician politicians make statements concerning their valence if the voter is a standard expected utility maximizer politicians statements lack any credibility and no information transmission takes place by introducing reference dependence and loss aversion we show that truthful communication is possible in equilibrium and we characterize the conditions under which it can arise intuitively these behavioral biases introduce a cost of overstating one s valence as overstatements may shift the electorate s preferences toward better skilled opponents

a theory of political cycles abstract we study how the proximity of elections affects policy choices in a model in which policymakers want to improve their reputation to increase their reelection chances policymakers equilibrium decisions depend on both their reputation and the proximity of the next election typically incentives to influence election results are stronger closer to the election for a given reputation level as argued in the political cycles literature and these political cycles are less important when the policymaker s reputation is better our analysis sheds light on other agency relationships in which part of the compensation is decided upon infrequently

start up capital does gender matter female and male entrepreneurs differ in the way they finance their businesses this difference can be attributed to the type of business and the type of management and experience of the entrepreneur indirect effect female start ups may also experience specific barriers when trying to acquire start up capital these may be based upon discriminatory effects direct effect whether gender has an impact on size and composition of start up capital and in what way is the subject of the present paper the indirect effect is represented by the way women differ from men in terms of type of business and management and experience the direct effect cannot be attributed to these differences and is called the gender effect we use of a panel of 2000 dutch starting entrepreneurs of whom approximately 500 are female to test for these direct and indirect effects the panel refers to the year 1994 we find that female entrepreneurs have a smaller amount of start up capital but that they do not differ significantly with respect to the type of capital on average the proportion of equity and debt capital bank loans in the businesses of female entrepreneurs is the same as in those of their male counterparts

competence and ideology we develop a dynamic repeated election model in which citizen candidates are distinguished by both their ideology and valence voters observe an incumbent s valence and policy choices but only know the challenger s party our model provides a rich set of novel results in contrast to existing predictions from static models we prove that dynamic considerations make higher valence incumbents more likely to compromise and win re election even though they compromise to more extreme policies consequently we find that the correlation between valence and extremist policies rises with office holder seniority this result may help explain previous empirical findings despite this result we establish that the whole electorate gains from improvements in the distribution of valences in contrast fixing average valence the greater dispersion in valence associated with a high valence political elite always benefits the median voter but can harm a majority of voters when voters are sufficiently risk averse we then consider interest groups igs or activists who search for candidates with better skills we derive a complete theoretical explanation for the intuitive conjectures that policies are more extreme when igs and activists have more extreme ideologies and that such extremism reduces the welfare of all voters

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

the effects of embeddedness on the entrepreneurial process abstract this paper uses giddens theory of structuration to develop the conception of entrepreneurship as an embedded socio economic process the qualitative examination of the actions of rural entrepreneurs finds that embeddedness plays a key role in shaping and sustaining business being embedded in the social structure creates opportunity and improves performance embedding enabled the entrepreneurs to use the specifics of the environment thus both recognition and realisation of opportunity are conditioned by the entrepreneurs role in the social structure

are litigation and collective bargaining complements or substitutes for achieving gender equality a study of the british equal pay act we present a socio legal case study of the recent equal pay litigation wave in britain which saw an unprecedented increase in the number of claims triggered in part by the entry of no win no fee law firms into this part of the legal services market although the rise in litigation led to greater adversarialism in pay bargaining litigation and collective bargaining mostly operated as complementary mechanisms in advancing an equality agenda although there are limits to the effectiveness of law driven strategies in the face of organisational pressures to canalise and diffuse human rights litigation may be a more potent force for social change than some recent accounts have suggested

optimal retention in agency problems this paper studies the interaction between a single long lived principal and a series of short lived agents in the presence of both moral hazard and adverse selection we assume that the principal can influence the agents behavior only through her choice of a retention rule this rule is further required to be sequentially rational i e no precommitment is allowed we provide general conditions under which equilibria exist where a the principal adopts a cut off rule under which agents are retained only when the reward they generate exceeds a critical bound and b agents separate according to type with better agents taking superior actions we show that in equilibrium a retained agent s productivity is necessarily declining over time but that retained agents are also more productive on average than untried agents due to selection effects finally we show that for each given type agents of that type are more productive in the presence of adverse selection than when there is pure moral hazard i e when that type is the sole type of agent in the model nonetheless adding uncertainty about agent types cannot benefit the principal except in uninteresting cases

are moderates better representatives than extremists a theory of indirect representation few if any elected representatives are capable of unilaterally implementing their platforms rather they choose between options generated by other actors and or external events we present a theory of voters preferences over representatives who will cast votes on their behalf and show that in this setting voters preferences over candidates platforms will not look like voters preferences over policies we demonstrate that these induced preferences for representation tend to favor more extreme representatives and we present two models of electoral competition in which induced preferences over representatives lead to elite polarization

political competition party polarization and government performance lack of party competition may impair government efficiency if the voters are ideologically predisposed to cast their votes in favor of one political party they may reelect an underperforming incumbent party polarization may magnify this effect since the median voter faces a higher cost of selecting a better but ideologically distant incumbent alternatively if the electorate is evenly divided between parties polarization may induce parties to invest more effort in improving their election prospects the current paper analyzes efficiency in norwegian local governments efficiency has been measured by means of panel data on government service output over a 10 year period electoral dominance has been measured as number of elections wherein one party bloc receives at least 60 of the votes measured over six consecutive elections party polarization is defined as the ideological distance between the two party blocs and it is measured on basis of survey data on the ideological preferences of elected politicians lack of party competition reduces efficiency the effect being stronger in governments where more party polarization exists these agency losses are larger in high revenue municipalities

being in someone else s shoes the role of gender in nascent entrepreneurship several studies have shown the existence of significant differences in the rate of new business creation between men and women specifically it has been shown that women are much less likely to be involved in entrepreneurship than men worldwide it is not yet understood however if such differences are the result of personal characteristics of the individual and of her economic environment or are instead the result of universal and perhaps evolutionary phenomena our empirical analysis is conducted using representative samples of population for 37 countries and a special form of bootstrapping that allows us to equalize individuals conditions and as a result analyze the choices of men and women put in identical economic environments and socio economic circumstances

explaining international variations in self employment evidence from a panel of oecd countries organisation for economic cooperation and development oecd data from 1972 to 1996 reveals substantial differences in the levels and trends of self employment rates across countries this article uses recently developed panel integration and cointegration techniques to explore the determinants of aggregate self employment rates we find that within the panel self employment rates are positively and significantly related to personal income tax rates and negatively and significantly related to the unemployment benefit replacement rate this accords a central role to government tax and transfer policies in contrast to nonrobust influences from macroeconomic variables which have been widely used in previous studies

electoral ambiguity and political representation we introduce a downsian model in which policy relevant information is revealed to the elected politician after the election the electorate benefits from giving the elected politician discretion to adapt policies to his information but limits on discretion are desirable when politicians do not share the electorate s policy preferences optimal political representation generally consists of a mixture of the delegate no discretion and trustee full discretion models ambiguous electoral platforms are essential for achieving beneficial representation nevertheless electoral competition does not ensure optimal representation the winning candidate s platform is generally overly ambiguous while our theory rationalizes a positive correlation between ambiguity and electoral success it shows that the relationship need not be causal

experience and gender effects in an acquiring a company experiment allowing for value messages this paper focuses on a bargaining experiment in which the privately informed seller of a company sends a value message to the uninformed potential buyer who then proposes a price for acquiring the company participants are constantly in the role of either seller or buyer and interact over 30 rounds with randomly changing partners in the other role we test how overstating the value of the company underpricing the received value message and acceptance of price offers are affected by experience and gender constellation like in our companion paper on single play di cagno et al 2015 we control via treatments for awareness of gender constellation one main hypothesis is that gender constellation matters but that the effects become weaker with more experience and that the main experience effects apply across gender constellations

the political economy of dynamic elections accountability commitment and responsiveness we survey the literature on dynamic elections in the traditional settings of spatial preferences and rent seeking under perfect and imperfect monitoring of politicians we define stationary electoral equilibrium which encompasses notions used by barro 1973 ferejohn 1986 banks and sundaram 1998 and others we show that repeated elections mitigate the commitment problems of politicians and voters and that a responsive democracy result holds under general conditions term limits however attenuate the responsiveness finding we also touch on related applied work and we point to areas for fruitful future research including the connection between dynamic models of politics and economics

signaling character in electoral competition we study a one dimensional hotelling downs model of electoral competition with the following innovation a fraction of candidates have character and are exogenously committed to a campaign platform this is unobservable to voters character is desirable and a voter s utility is a convex combination of standard policy preferences and her assessment of a candidate s character this structure induces a signaling game between strategic candidates and voters since a policy platform affects voters utilities not only directly but also indirectly through inferences about a candidate s character the model generates a number of predictions starting with a failure of the median voter theorem jel d72 d82

understanding the variations of unions litigation strategies to promote equal pay reflection on the british case despite their traditional mistrust of the use of the law and their uneasy relationship with the concept of equality british trade unions have used the law in various ways in order to advance both gender and pay equality since 1970 some trade unionists have been making use of european legislation to improve legal norms and build a strong body of case law they have developed legal expertise and detailed knowledge of the practicalities of the law and have supported numerous claims however this use of litigation has not developed consistently over time and across unions litigation has been quite controversial within the trade union movement this article seeks to investigate what are the conditions under which some trade unionists have decided to rely upon litigation to further their female members interests depending on the time period the article emphasises the crucial role these local trade unionists have played in the development of equal pay litigation the paper builds on a developmental approach that differentiates several stages or phases in which union s litigation strategies for equal pay figure differently

self employment wealth and job creation the roles of gender non pecuniary motivation and entrepreneurial ability this paper uses national child development study data for a large cohort of british individuals to explore the influence of education inheritance and other background characteristics on the propensity to become self employed and also on subsequent success as measured by job and wealth creation for the first time we study the effects of our regressor variables on our success measures via disaggregation of our sample by gender and in this way reveal striking differences between the determinants of male and female entrepreneurial performance

rational voting and candidate entry under plurality rule we analyze a formal model of electoral competition under plurality rule that is characterized by two novel features first rather than assuming a fixed field of candidates we allow candidates to make decisions regarding entry as well as location second voters in our model are strategically rational that is they maximize utility over expected policy outcomes rather than simply voting for the ideologically closest candidate given these assumptions all equilibria in this model are such that the set of entrants locates at the median voter s ideal point this result stands in sharp contrast to earlier models of multicandidate competition in which entry is not allowed and voters vote sincerely

financial decision making are women really more risk averse 40 males 33 females gain gambling gain domain loss gambling loss domain a contextual frames b abstract gambling frames studies the application of experimental methods provided stronger control of the economic environment in which decisions were made we elicited data which call into question the prevalence of stereotypic risk attitudes in financial decision making first we find that the comparative risk propensity of male and female subjects is strongly dependent on the financial decision setting second and more important we observe no gender differences in risk propensity when subjects face contextual decisions since in practice financial decisions are always contextual our results suggest that the above gender stereotype may not reflect true male and female attitudes toward financial risks i gender specific risk behavior an experimental design our experiment was designed to examine gender specific risk propensity in decisions relevant for investors and managers table 1 gives an overview of the experimental design in the main treatment we implemented risky choices in the form of investment and insurance decisions choice behavior in this treatment henceforth called the context treatment directly measures the risk behavior of male and female subjects in contextual financial decisions we also ran a control treatment in which the same risky choices were presented as abstract gambling decisions this control treatment henceforth called the abstract treatment allows us to validate the risk behavior induced by our experimental procedure in the light of the above mentioned gambling evidence in the context treatment subjects were confronted with risky choices in two different decision contexts subjects first had to complete a series of investment decisions they were then presented with a series of identical choices this time however framed as insur1 wealth effects from income differences outside the laboratory may still affect risk behavior in our experiment they are controlled for in our model 2 experimental instructions are available in german from the authors or in english from our web page www wif ethz ch publikationen htm ance decisions each investment and insurance decision incorporated a choice between a risky lottery and a certain payoff with the series of choices implemented in the two frames we elicited our subjects certainty equivalents for the same four risky lotteries l1 l2 l3 l4 in both contexts we implemented two frames in the context treatment in order to measure the risk propensity of subjects toward both perceived gains and perceived losses in both frames all possible payoffs for each decision were positive in the investment frame these payoffs were also presented as gains while in the insurance frame the same payoffs were presented as losses relative to an initial endowment therefore elicited certainty equivalents in the investment frame measure subjects risk propensities in the gain domain while certainty equivalents in the insurance frame measure risk propensity in the loss domain if in contextual financial decisions female subjects are generally more risk averse than men our results should display ceteris paribus lower female certainty equivalents in both the investment and insurance frames 3 the four lotteries l1 l2 l3 and l4 each had two possible outcomes payoffs in swiss francs 1 sfr a 0 60 and their probabilities were 30 sfr 6 10 sfr 6 30 sfr 2 10 sfr 2 30 sfr 6 10 sfr 6 and 50 sfr 2 20 sfr 2 respectively 4 experimental evidence suggests that individual risk propensity will vary systematically between the gain and loss domain daniel kahneman and amos tversky 1979 383 vol 89 no 2 gender and economic transactions 3y16 my68 mp 383 friday dec 10 08 20 am lp aer my68 figure 1 differences in mean certainty equivalents ce between male and female subjects by frame note certainty equivalents and male female differences are measured in swiss francs in the abstract treatment we confronted a different group of subjects with exactly the same risky decisions as those in the main treatment however as mentioned before all choices in this control treatment were framed as abstract gambling decisions again two frames were implemented in the gaingambling and loss gambling frames we measured the risk attitudes of subjects toward gambles in the gain and loss domain respectively subjects in both treatments were told in advance that one of their choices would determine their experimental earnings further all subjects completed a post experimental questionnaire which yielded information on each subject s disposable income this information is necessary to exclude wealth effects due to income differences outside the laboratory as an explanation of gender specific choice behavior

spatial models of political competition under plurality rule a survey of some explanations of the number of candidates and the positions they take this paper surveys work that uses spatial models of political competition to explain the number of candidates and the positions that they take in plurality rule elections

candidates credibility and re election incentives i study elections between citizen candidates who cannot make binding policy commitments before taking office but who are accountable to voters due to the possibility of re election in each period a representative voter chooses among heterogeneous candidates with known policy preferences the elected candidate chooses the policy to implement and how much rent seeking to engage in when in office as the voter decides both which candidate to elect and subsequently whether the candidate is retained this framework integrates elements of electoral competition and electoral accountability i show that in the best stationary equilibrium when utility functions are concave over policy non median candidates are elected over candidates with policy preferences more closely aligned with the voter in this equilibrium there are two candidates who are elected at some history and the policies these candidates implement in office do not converge this divergence incentivizes candidates to engage in less rent seeking increasing voter welfare copyright 2013 oxford university press

a model of political competition with citizen candidates the authors develop a model of electoral competition in which citizens choose whether or not to run as candidates a winner implements her favorite policy the equilibrium number of candidates depends negatively on the cost of running and positively on the benefits of winning for some parameter values all equilibria under plurality rule have exactly two candidates whose positions are distinct two candidate elections are more likely under plurality rule than under a runoff system the candidates positions are less differentiated under a runoff system there exist equilibria under both systems in which some candidates have no chance of winning

electoral rules and political selection theory and evidence from a field experiment in afghanistan voters commonly face a choice between competent candidates and those with policy preferences similar to their own this article explores how electoral rules such as district magnitude mediate this trade off and affect the composition of representative bodies and the quality of policy outcomes we show formally that anticipation of bargaining over policy causes voters in elections with multiple single member districts to prefer candidates with polarized policy positions over more competent candidates results from a unique field experiment in afghanistan are consistent with these predictions specifically representatives selected by elections with a single multi member district are better educated and exhibit less extreme policy preferences

learning about challengers we examine a political agency problem in repeated elections where an incumbent runs against a challenger from the opposing party whose policy preferences are unknown by voters we first ask do voters benefit from attracting a pool of challengers with more moderate ideologies when voters and politicians are patient moderating the ideology distribution of centrist and moderate politicians those close to the median voter reduces voter welfare by reducing an extreme incumbent s incentives to compromise we then ask do voters benefit from informative signals about a challenger s true ideology we prove that giving voters informative but sufficiently noisy signals always harm voters because they make it harder for incumbents to secure re election