behavioral modes for a firm facing an uncertain supply or demand curve this paper contains a theoretical analys is of the behavior of a firmfacing a stochastic supply and demand curve certai n behavioral modes can be ranked under weaker conditions than in corresponding s tudies on stochastic demand for other comparisons the authors derive sufficien t conditions for one mode to dominate another earlier results indicate that a f irm which faces demand uncertainty prefers price variability to quantity variabi lity it is shown by a counter example that the price variability preference which is troublesome for proponents of temporary fixed price equilibrium models is a consequence of restrictive stochastic specification copyright 1987 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

cyclical productivity in a model of labor hoarding abstract this paper develops a dynamic model of labor hoarding to explain two empirical facts the cyclical behavior of total factor productivity and the dynamic correlations of sectoral productivity with aggregate variables the model features convex costs of adjusting the labor force which induce firms to vary the intensity of labor utilization over the cycle in particular cyclical variations in labor effort take place as a response to expected future changes in industry conditions i test the restrictions imposed by the model for several two digit manufacturing industries under different assumptions about market structure and returns to scale then using the assumption that aggregate variables carry information about future changes in industry conditions i simulate the model s dynamic response of hours and productivity to aggregate innovations and compare them to those estimated from the data

election goals and the allocation of campaign resources this paper compares the equilibrium behavior and outcomes in a model of two party competition for legislative seats under two different assumptions about the parties goals 1 parties maximize the expected number of seats won and 2 parties maximize the probability of winning a majority of the seats the two goals may lead to qualitatively different behavior and studying the differences yields insights into the relationship between the goals and the role of assymetries between the parties

inventory and price behaviour the point of this paper is that inventory adjustment attenuates downward pressure on price when realized demand is low because firms accumulate inventory hold overs speculating that demand will be stronger in the succeeding period when realized demand is high the firm draws down its inventories until a stock out occurs and price rises to clear the market

granting votes exposing the political bias of intergovernmental grants using the within between specification for panel data instead of alleviating fiscal inequalities intergovernmental grants are often used to fulfill the grantors political goals this study uses a unique panel dataset on more than 500 croatian municipalities over a 12 year period to uncover the extent to which grant distribution is biased owing to grantors electoral concerns instead of the default fixed effects approach to modelling panel data we apply a novel within between specification aimed at uncovering the contextual source of variation focusing on the effects of electoral concerns on grant allocation within and between municipalities we find evidence of a substantial political bias in grant allocations both within and between municipalities particularly when it comes to local level electoral concerns the paper offers researchers a new perspective when tackling the issue of politically biased grant allocation using panel data particularly when they wish to uncover the simultaneous impact of time variant and time invariant factors or when they cannot apply a quasi experimental approach because of specific institutional contexts

rationing of sales and price setting abstract casual empiricism suggests that firms are more often constrained by lack of demand than production capacity can this evidence be interpreted as indicating that activity is demand constrained implying that there is room for demand management policies this is not necessarily the case in a setting with imperfect competition where firms choose prices and production before the actual level of demand is known it is found that the more elastic is demand the more likely is excess demand to prevail and vice versa however demand management policies do not affect the prevalence of imbalances between demand and supply although real policies may affect the level of production i e discrepancies between demand and supply are not necessarily a reliable indicator for the scope of demand management policies

an economic analysis of voting in sweden using data from the swedish election studies between 1985 and 1994 supplemented with time series on inflation and unemployment i compare the impact of macro and microeconomic variables on the individual vote the principal finding is that macroeconomic variables influence the vote a bit more than microeconomic variables do in consequence both self interest and public interest appear to be important explanations of economic voting in sweden macroeconomic variables have however been much more influential in determining election outcomes since previous studies of economic voting have used cross sectional data only it is also worth noting that panel estimates indicate a much greater impact of macroeconomic variables on the individual vote than cross sectional estimates do

a model of political equilibrium in a representative democracy abstract this paper studies political equilibrium in a two party representative democracy in which the political parties are policy motivated and voters trade off their policy preferences against their party identity it is shown that the parties will in general adopt differing policy positions in equilibrium and that under certain qualifications the winning policy will lie between the more popular party s preferred policy and a certain utilitarian optimum the winning policy will be closer to this utilitarian optimum the less biased the electorate is in terms of party identification

lobbying political competition and local land supply recent evidence from spain abstract we analyze whether local land supply is influenced by the degree of political competition and interpret the findings as indications of the influence wielded by land developer lobbies we use a new database including both political and land supply data for more than 2 000 spanish municipalities for the period 2003 2007 in spain land use policies are largely a local responsibility with municipalities needing periodically to pass comprehensive land use plans the main policy variable in these plans and the one analyzed here is the amount of land classified for potential development we measure local political competition as the margin of victory of the incumbent government this variable is however potentially endogenous since not only do votes affect policy but also policy is expected to affect votes to deal with this problem we instrument this variable using the votes at the first national legislative elections following the re establishment of democracy and votes actually obtained regionally at the same type of election the results indicate that stiffer political competition does indeed reduce the amount of new land designated for development this effect is found to be most marked in suburbs in towns with a high percentage of commuters and homeowners and in municipalities governed by the left

balanced budget redistribution as the outcome of political competition this paper models balanced budget redistribution between socio economic groups as the outcome of electoral competition between two political parties equilibrium is unique in the present model and a sufficient condition for existence is given requiring that there be enough stochastic heterogeneity with respect to party preferences in the electorate the validity of hotelling s principle of minimum differentiation and of director s law are examined under alternative hypotheses concerning administrative costs of redistributions and voter s possibilities both of abstaining from voting and of becoming campaign activists for one of the parties the policy strategy of expected plurality maximization is contrasted with the strategy of maximizing the probability of gaining a plurality incomes are fixed and known so lump sum taxation is feasible however constraints on tax transfer differentiation between individuals are permitted in the analysis

labour hoarding price rigidity and the theory of imperfect competition under uncertain demand it is shown that a monopolistic firm under uncertainty may be inclined to keep some of its output unsold when demand is low this gives rise to changes in conventional results under uncertainty a risk neutral monopolistic firm produces more than in a deterministic environment and it refuses to sell its total output when demand is low because the marginal revenue could become negative or lower than the cost of selling the product moreover in this framework prices are shown to be more rigid downwards than upwards the model also provides a new explanation for labour hoarding jel classification d24 d42

explaining intergovernmental grants australian evidence the dodo suddenly called out the race is over and they all croded round it panting and asking but who has won lewis carroll alice s adventures in wonderland

the political determination of intergovernmental grants in australia intergovernmental grants have been conventionally explained on the basis of either equity efficiency and or institutional considerations this paper seeks to model australian intergovernmental grants by including both traditional public finance variables and public choice influences that is grants are used by federal government politicians to purchase political capital thereby enhancing their own chances of reelection the models employed in this paper are tested for six australian states for the period 1981 82 to 1991 92 using unsystematic grant transfers the results provide support for these public choice considerations and highlight the importance of incorporating institutional factors and controlling for misspecification in the error structure in estimates of this type

election goals and income redistribution recent evidence from albania this paper examines the impact of political competition on block grants from federal to sub federal levels of government we model the extent and direction of income redistribution as determined proximately by the political agendas of central decision makers and at a deeper level by the institutions within which they nd themselves operating we contrast two political objective functions that yield di erent empirical predictions of the ways in which politics should a ect scal policy lessons learned here may prove important in understanding limits on the types of redistribution possible via block grants given the institutional framework in both developing and developed countries 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved jel classixcation h1 h7 o1

excess labor and the business cycle this paper compares the medoff fay estimates of labor hoarding during troughs which are based on data from manufacturing plants with aggregate estimates of excess labor on hand the two sets of estimates seem consistent which provides a strong argument in favor of the excess labor hypothesis this is one of the few examples in macroeconomics where a hypothesis has been so strongly confirmed using detailed micro data this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abs this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the political economy of intergovernmental grants evidence from a maturing democracy we evaluate the impact of political forces in the allocation of intergovernmental grants in portugal as it matured from a young to an established democracy using a large and unexplored dataset we show that political variables condition the granting system and that their importance changed over time while tactical manipulation in the distribution of grants among municipalities seems to exist only in the early years of democracy opportunistic effects are stronger in the latter years we argue that the latter effect is due to a change in the political environment and to the electorate s lack of information on intergovernmental grants

ideology tactics and efficiency in redistributive politics we model the electoral politics of redistribution when voters and parties care about inequality in addition to their private concerns for consumption and votes respectively ideological concerns about income redistribution lead each party to adopt a general proportional income tax adjusted to appeal to the ideological leanings of high clout groups with disproportionately many swing voters which the parties also ply with pork barrel projects our results relate to director s law which says that redistributive politics favors middle classes at the expense of both rich and poor

labor hoarding and the business cycle this paper investigates the sensitivity of solow residual based measures of technology shocks to labor hoarding behavior using a structural model of labor hoarding and the identifying restriction that innovations to technology shocks are orthogonal to innovations in government consumption we estimate the fraction of the variability of the solow residual that is due to technology shocks our results support the view that a significant proportion of movements in the solow residual are artifacts of labor hoarding behavior specifically we estimate that the variance of innovations to technology is roughly 50 percent less than that implied by standard real business cycle models in addition our results suggest that existing real business cycle studies substantially overstate the extent to which technology shocks account for the variability of postwar aggregate u s output

electoral goals and center state transfers a theoretical model and empirical evidence from india we construct a model of redistributive politics where the central government is opportunistic and uses its discretion to make transfers to state governments on the basis of political considerations these considerations are the alignment between the incumbent parties at the central and state levels and whether a state is a swing state or not a testable prediction from the model is that a state that is both swing and aligned with the central government is especially likely to receive higher transfers we test this prediction using indian data for 14 states from 1974 75 to 1996 97 we find that a state which is both aligned and swing in the last state election is estimated to receive 16 higher transfers than a state which is unaligned and non swing

intergovernmental grants as a tactical instrument empirical evidence from swedish municipalities are grants to swedish municipalities tactical in this essay i derive testable implications from a theoretical voting model and test these on a panel of 255 swedish municipalities 1981 1995 in order to decide which regions that are politically powerful both election results and survey data from the swedish election studies are used the results although somewhat ambiguous support the hypothesis that intergovernmental grants are used in order to win votes

two alternative stochastic specifications and estimation methods for quantity rationing models a monte carlo comparison quantity rationing disequilibrium models can be characterized either by deterministic or by stochastic switching rules this paper reports on monte carlo experiments suggesting that the ml estimator associated with the deterministic switching rule one market model apparently has better small sample properties than its stochastic switching rule counterpart even when the latter is asymptotically superior this seems to be the result of a systematic residual variance underestimation in the stochastic switching rule model the feasibility of the deterministic switching rule estimator in a two market framework is next investigated

the supply of labour by individuals to a chinese collective farm the case of dahe commune evidence of a significant labour supply response to differences in anticipated earnings we argue however that this failure may be indirect evidence of under differentiation of payments due to egalitarian ideology more importantly we provide the first econometric evidence of three significant findings about china s collective agriculture first our results imply that much of the labour supplied to the teams studied was discretionary and not a response to coercive work norms second and a corollary to the first result is the implication that another significant portion of labour supplied was so coerced third and finally we find support for theoretical models which predict that labour could be oversupplied because marginal payments reflected labour s average net product rather than its marginal product

resources and student achievement evidence from a swedish policy reform a policy change is used to estimate the effect of teacher density on student performance we find that an increase in teacher density has a positive effect on student achievement the baseline estimate obtained by using the grade point average as the outcome variable implies that resource increases corresponding to the class size reduction in the star experiment a reduction of seven students improves performance by 2 6 percentile ranks or 0 08 standard deviations when we used test score data for men potentially a more objective measure of student performance the effect of resources appears to be twice as large

distributive politics and spatial equity the allocation of public investment in chile abstractdistributive politics and spatial equity the allocation of public investment in chile regional studies this paper analyzes the influence of electoral concerns on investment distribution from the central government to chilean municipalities drawing upon panel data it shows that investment is mediated by pork barrel and political budget cycles as well as favouring the relatively better off areas estimations also reveal that resources are channelled to the municipalities where the vote margin in local elections is larger whereas national results are not relevant indicating that local governments lobbying capacity is prioritized over national electoral interests based on these results the implications for regional governance and for reducing the margin of arbitrary allocations are discussed

do formula based intergovernmental transfer mechanisms eliminate politically motivated targeting evidence from ghana abstract various countries have adopted formulas for determining intergovernmental transfers as a strategy to limit the role of political considerations in resource allocation in this paper we investigate a formula based system of allocating resources from a central government to local governments to determine whether the political characteristics of recipient areas have any bearing on their allocation specifically we study the sharing of resources of the district assemblies common fund dacf in ghana amongst the country s district governments over the period 1994 to 2005 we find evidence that the mechanism does not eliminate politically motivated targeting of the grants per capita dacf grants were higher in districts where vote margins in the previous presidential election were lower suggesting that swing districts were targeted we find evidence that dacf formula indicators and their weighting were chosen and amended to produce politically desired patterns of transfers

the timing of elections in federations a disciplining device against soft budget constraints we introduce political economics into the soft budget constraint problem by asking if the timing of elections has the potential to harden budget constraints specifically we ask under which circumstances the soft budget constraint problem is worse with synchronized elections i e simultaneous central and regional office terms or with staggered elections i e terms of office that do not coincide we find that staggered elections clearly improve fiscal discipline at the local level as well as welfare

the impact of federal spending on house election outcomes while it is widely believed by academics politicians and the popular press that incumbent members of congress are rewarded by the electorate for bringing federal dollars to their district the empirical evidence supporting that claim is extremely weak one explanation for the failure to uncover the expected relationship between federal spending and election outcomes is that incumbents who expect to have difficulty being reelected are likely to exert greater effort in obtaining federal outlays since it is generally impossible to adequately measure this effort the estimated impact of spending is biased downward because of an omitted variable bias we address this estimation problem using instrumental variables for each house district we use spending outside the district but inside the state containing the district as an instrument for spending in the district federal spending is affected by a large number of actors e g governors senators mayors and other house members in the state delegation