a political economy model of congressional careers our main goal is to quantify the returns to a career in the united states congress we specify a dynamic model of career decisions of a member of congress and estimate this model using a newly collected dataset given estimates of the structural model we assess reelection probabilities estimate the effect of congressional experience on private and public sector wages and quantify the value of congressional seat moreover we assess how an increase in the congressional wage or the imposition of term limits would affect the career decisions of politicians and the returns from a career in congress

time use and food consumption people are getting fat the rise in obesity rate has been particularly pronounced in the united states since the middle of the 1970s but has by now extended into many other areas of the world several sources of technological change have been singled out as potential explanations for why people have been gaining so much weight increased productivity in agriculture has lowered the relative price of food darius lakdwalla tomas philipson and jayanta bhattacharya 2005 while innovations in food processing have reduced the time cost of preparing food david m cutler edward l glaeser and jesse m shapiro 2003 technological change has also affected how people spend their time in a way that may systematically have reduced calories expended first physically less demanding jobs in the service sector have replaced physically more demanding jobs in agriculture and manu facturing second the allocation of time across different activities has changed dramatically over the last few decades people are spending less time working decline in labor market work for men decline in home production work for women and more time in mainly sedentary forms of leisure such as watching tv mark aguiar and erik hurst 2007 while the focus so far has been on the rela tionship between how people spend their time and how many calories they expend we argue in this piece that there might also be an inter esting relationship between how people spend their time and how many calories they consume motivating this question is a at first glance rather counterintuitive finding from the time use surveys the fact that people in the united states

habit formation in children evidence from incentives for healthy eating we present findings from a field experiment conducted at 40 elementary schools involving 8000 children and 400 000 child day observations which tested whether providing short run incentives can create habit formation in children over a 3 or 5 week period students received an incentive for eating a serving of fruits or vegetables during lunch relative to an average baseline rate of 39 providing small incentives doubled the fraction of children eating at least one serving of fruits or vegetables two months after the end of the intervention the consumption rate at schools remained 21 above baseline for the 3 week treatment and 44 above baseline for the 5 week treatment these findings indicate that short run incentives can produce changes in behavior that persist after incentives are removed

special interest group perspective before and after the clayton and federal trade commission acts the performance of prices and output is explored for the period 1904 1925 the 11 years before and after passage of the clayton and federal trade commission acts hereinafter clayton ftc acts in the usa in 1914 and compared with performance for 1890 1901 the 11 year period prior to and following the passage of the sherman act while proponents of the sherman act and the clayton ftc acts claim that they serve the public interest the empirical results suggests that they appear as susceptible to the influence of special interest groups as any other public policy

common agency and coordination general theory and application to government policy making we develop a model of common agency with complete information and general preferences with nontransferable utility and we prove that the principals nash equilibrium in truthful strategies implements an efficient action we apply this theory to the construction of a positive model of public finance where organized special interests can lobby the government for consumer and producer taxes or subsidies and targeted lump sum taxes or transfers the lobbies use only the nondistorting transfers in their noncooperative equilibrium but their intergroup competition for transfers turns into a prisoners dilemma in which the government captures all the gain that is potentially available to the parties

time consistency and bureaucratic budget competition high employment protection in the public sector results in strategic over employment if government divisions compete for budgets in a dynamic setting bureaucrats who are interested in maximising their divisions output employ excess labour since this induces the sponsor to provide complementary inputs in the future restrictions on hiring decisions in the public sector can be regarded as provisions to reduce strategic hiring we also provide evidence from a survey of decision makers in a public sector bureaucracy with very high employment protection the results confirm that decision makers are aware of the strategic effects of their hiring decisions on budget allocation 2008 the author s journal compilation royal economic society 2008

separation of powers and political accountability political constitutions are incomplete contracts and therefore leave room for abuse of power in democracies elections are the primary mechanism for disciplining public officials but they are not sufficient separation of powers between executive and legislative bodies also helps to prevent the abuse of power but only with appropriate checks and balances checks and balances work by creating a conflict of interest between the executive and the legislature yet requiring both bodies to agree on public policy in this way the two bodies discipline each other to the voters advantage under appropriate checks and balances separation of powers also helps the voters elicit information

the rise of the chicago packers and the origins of meat inspection and antitrust the meat inspection act of 1891 and the sherman act of 1890 are closely tied this link makes clearer congress intent in enacting the legislation both laws were products of economic conditions after 1880 and reflected in part widespread concern about the market power of chicago meat packers the concerns of local slaughterhouses which were being displaced by new low cost refrigerated beef and of farmers who sold livestock to the large chicago packers were echoed elsewhere by other small businesses and farmers who feared for their livelihood during a time of structural change in the economy i introduction in the few years between 1887 and 1891 the legislative basis was established for major intervention by the federal government into the american economy the interstate commerce act of 1887 the sherman act of 1890 and the meat inspection act of 1891 1 with these laws the federal government became directly involved in the regulation of railroad rates antitrust enforcement and the inspection and certification of food quality for consumers representing a significant break from what had previously been considered an appropriate role for the federal government this legislation provided a new and permanent mandate for government regulation in the market economy despite the importance of these laws the link between the economic and political environment in the united states in the late nineteenth century on the one hand and the legislative histories of the laws on the other has not been thoroughly explored as a result the motives of congress for enacting these laws remain both unclear and controversial consider meat inspection and antitrust although most attention in the literature is focused on the 1906 meat inspection act made popular by the publication of upton sinclair s the jungle the initial legislation the meat inspection act of 1891 came fifteen years earlier and it addressed the production and consumption of fresh beef but as reported in this paper there is no evidence of a major health crisis regarding the consumption of beef at the time something else appears to have been on the mind of congress when it passed the legislation in 1891 the objectives of congress in enacting the sherman act are even more controversial because of the prominence of the law debate revolves around whether the sherman act was designed to promote competition and consumer welfare or to limit competition and protect special interests 2 this paper argues that to gain a better understanding of the origins of this important legislation and its early economic effects the laws must be placed into the context of the extraordinary changes taking place in the american economy in the late nineteenth century the linkages among the laws help to identify the underlying political and economic forces behind the legislation three broad characteristics of the economy must be kept in mind in analyzing this period first the post civil war period was a time of general deflation between 1864 and 1900 the consumer price index fell by 47 percent u s department of commerce 1975 211 in general prices for farm products followed the overall pattern but prices for cattle fell in real terms after the mid 1880s fluctuations in farm prices also appear to have coincided with periods of agrarian unrest 3 second as described by higgs 1971 and chandler 1977 the period after 1880 was a time of major structural change in the economy the economy was becoming more industrial and biased technological change economies of scale in production distribution and marketing as well as the lowering of transportation costs were fundamentally altering production methods and products this affected the competitive positions of many firms creating winners and losers james 1983 burns 1983 atack 1985 emerging large firms expanded from local to national and international markets and existing small firms found their local markets threatened by new competitors

social contracts as assets a possible solution to the time consistency problem this paper presents a new solution to the time consistency problem that appears capable of enforcing ex ante policy in a variety of settings in which other enforcement mechanisms do not work the solution involves formulating a social contract institution or agreement that specifies the optimal ex ante policy the social contract is effectively sold by succesive old generations to successive young generations who pay for the social contract through the payment of taxes both old and young generations have an economic incentive to fulfill the social contract for the old generation breaking the social contract makes the social contract valueless and the generation suffers a capital loss by not being able to sell it for the young generation the economic advantage of purchasing the existing social contract exceeds its price as well as the economic gain from setting up the a new social contract

the politics of infrastructure a number of recent studies attempt to measure the productivity of public capital some estimates indicate that government investments are a potential well spring for economic progress while others indicate that public infrastructure has a negligible effect on private sector output this article investigates political institutions and processes underlying the decisions for public infrastructure spending we apply the framework of strategic models of fiscal policy and develop an empirical model to analyze the substantial differences in public capital across american states institutions such as term limits citizen initiative and budgeting procedures were significant determinants of state public capital stocks and the flow of new public investments during the 1980s the results further suggest that political conditions such as legislative stability and voter volatility are systematically related to infrastructure differences across states

antitrust and competition historically considered although antitrust laws enjoy wide support among economists there was almost no such support during the early years of the sherman act one reason for this transformation is a change in the theory of competition until the 1920s most economists viewed competition as a dynamic rivalrous process that would be stifled by antitrust laws once the perfect competition model which largely ignores rivalry was accepted economists opinions of antitrust grew more favorable to the extent that antitrust interferes with rivalry and enterprise the competitive model has very likely misdirected the profession at least as far as antitrust policy is concerned

incentives and children s dietary choices a field experiment in primary schools we conduct a field experiment in 31 primary schools in england to test the effectiveness of different temporary incentives on increasing choice and consumption of fruit and vegetables at lunchtime in each treatment pupils received a sticker for choosing a fruit or vegetable at lunch they were eligible for an additional reward at the end of the week depending on the number of stickers accumulated either individually individual scheme or in comparison to others competition overall we find no significant effect of the individual scheme but positive effects of competition for children who had margin to increase their consumption competition increases choice of fruit and vegetables by 33 and consumption by 48 these positive effects generally carry over to the week immediately following the treatment but are not sustained effects six months later we also find large differences in effectiveness across demographic characteristics such as age and gender

state contingent inflation contracts and unemployment persistence this paper shows that if unemployment or some other real variable follows a dynamic autoregressive process the government can still achieve its precommitment outcome in monetary policy by offering the central banker a linear inflation contract where the penalty for incremental inflation depends positively on lagged unemployment this note therefore offers an extension of recent results of c walsh 1995 to the case of persistence in real economic variables such as output or unemployment copyright 1997 by ohio state university press

on the form of transfers to special interests an important question in political economy concerns the form of transfers to special interests the chicago view is that political competition leads politicians to make such transfers efficiently the virginia position is that lack of information on the part of voters leads politicians to favor inefficient sneaky methods of redistribution this paper analyzes the form of transfers in a model of political competition in which politicians have incentives to make transfers to special interests it shows that when voters have imperfect information about both the effects of policy and the predispositions of politicians inefficient methods of redistribution may be employed

how lasting is voter gratitude an analysis of the short and long term electoral returns to beneficial policy dominant theories of electoral behavior emphasize that voters myopically evaluate policy performance and that this shortsightednessmayobstructthewelfare improvingeffectofdemocraticaccountability however weknowlittleabouthow long governments receive electoral credit for beneficial policies we exploit the massive policy response to a major natural disaster the 2002 elbe flooding in germany to provide an upper bound for the short and long term electoral returns to targeted policy benefits we estimate that the flood response increased vote shares for the incumbent party by 7 percentage points in affected areas in the 2002 election twenty five percent of this short term reward carried over to the 2005 election before the gains vanished in the 2009 election we conclude that given favorable circumstances policy makers can generate voter gratitude that persists longer than scholarship has acknowledged so far and elaborate on the implications for theories of electoral behavior democratic accountability and public policy

credibility of optimal monetary delegation while optimal monetary policy is subject to a credibility problem it is often argued that the government should appoint a central banker whose incentives differ from the government s the author argues however that such delegation does not overcome credibility problems given that delegation is discretionary and without costs reappointment costs of delegation are shown to improve suboptimal outcomes but credibility of optimal monetary policy turns out be worsened at best delegation therefore has no effects on credibility but only if reappointment has no costs copyright 1997 by american economic association

the economists and the problem of monopoly for much too long a time students of the history of the american antitrust policy have been at least mildly perplexed by the coolness with which american economists greeted the sherman act was not the nineteenth century the period in which the benevolent effects of competition were most widely extolled should not a profession praise a congress which seeks to legislate its textbook assumptions into universal practice and with even modest foresight should not the economists have seen that the sherman act would put more into economists purses than perhaps any other law ever passed of course there were partial explanations the coolness of the economists sometimes rested more on disbelief in the efficacy of the sherman act than on hostility to its purpose the route of regulation was preferred although this preference hardly restores the reputations of those economists as prophets one might even point out that there were not many good american economists at the time although an undeniable giant such as irving fisher shared the common view i intend on this occasion to review the attitudes of economists toward monopoly as a problem in public policy my subject however is a good deal broader than the sherman act and its reception the last two centuries of the economic writings on monopoly policy particularly in england and the united states will be surveyed thereafter i shall examine the reciprocal effects of economics and antitrust policy

does price framing affect the consumer price sensitivity of health plan choice this paper provides field evidence on how price framing affects consumers decision to switch health plans in 2009 german federal regulation required insurers to express premium differences between standardized health plans in absolute euro values relative to a federal reference price rather than in percentage point payroll tax differences representative individual level panel data and aggregated health plan level panel data on the universe of health plans show that the reform strongly increased enrollees willingness to switch plans with demand elasticities increasing fourfold the salience of premium differences and the default premium are obviously key driving forces in the decision to switch insurers

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

multiple tasks and political organization consider an environment such as a political election where a principal requires the completion of multiple tasks but an agent can only be rewarded with a hire fire decision rather than an endogenously chosen monetary payment when the principal hires a single agent to perform multiple tasks the agent allocates effort between the tasks inefficiently i demonstrate that even though hiring multiple agents completely mitigates this effort distortion problem the principal is still better off hiring a single agent if the exogenous rewards for the tasks are sufficiently different in contrast to similar results in the multi task literature this finding is not driven by risk aversion or noise rather it is a direct result of the restricted contract space inherent to the environment

empirical evidence on a special interest group perspective to antitrust while the antitrust laws claim to serve the public interest they are as susceptible to the influence of special interest groups as are any public policies this paper extends the empirical literature regarding the special interest theory of antitrust our additional empirical evidence addresses some of the shortcomings in previous approaches in particular we conduct a more rigorous statistical examination this paper separates two crucial issues first what happened to prices and output from 1880 to 1900 prior to and following passage of the sherman act in 1890 second what do these empirical results mean for the origin history and development of antitrust

effects of term limits on fiscal performance evidence from democratic nations political reputation models feature forward looking rational voters who re elect incumbents based on their estimate of an incumbent s ability level fiscal policy is one of the ways an incumbent establishes a reputation and thereby signals this ability level to voters the reputation building framework implies that term limits should affect fiscal performance a term limited incumbent places less value on reputation building than an incumbent eligible for re election does we examine differences in fiscal performance in democratic countries under alternative executive term limit regimes our results generally agree with the prior findings of besley and case 1995a who analyzed gubernatorial term limits in the american states we provide new evidence that the fiscal effects of term limits differ under a two term rule versus a single term rule

why a stubborn conservative would run a deficit policy with time inconsistent preferences a conservative government in favor of a low level of public consumption knows that it will be replaced by a government in favor of a larger level of public consumption we show that the resulting level of public consumption is in between the levels the two governments would choose if each were in power both in the present and in the future in particular we show that if the conservative government is more stubborn in a particular sense than the succeeding government the conservative government will borrow more than it would had it remained in power in the future

the political economy of benefits and costs a neoclassical approach to distributive politics this essay offers a rational political explanation for the notorious inefficiency of pork barrel projects with an optimization model of legislative behavior and legislative institutions the model emphasizes the economically arbitrary from a welfare point of view importance of the geographic incidence of benefits and costs owing to the geographic basis for political representation we explore the implications of a legislator s objective function and derive conditions under which a representative legislature will select an omnibus of projects each of which exceeds the efficient scale

the option to wait in collective decisions we also explore the robustness of our model when second period valuations are correlated across individuals and when each individual s first and second period types are correlated

majority rule bargaining and the under provision of public investment goods abstract despite evidence that modern democracies systematically shortchange public investment goods relatively little theoretical work exists to explain this phenomenon we build on baron and ferejohn s american political science review 83 4 1989 1181 1206 bargaining model to describe public investments in a setting of budgetary politics specifically we show that underinvestment inherently arises from distributive politics within a majoritarian institution the inability of current majorities to contract with future ones drives a wedge between spending on consumption today and investing for future consumption extensions to the model demonstrate that earmarking future returns to specific players and or detaching consumption from investment decisions yields more efficient levels of public investment

sources of inefficiency in a representative democracy a dynamic analysis this paper studies the efficiency of policy choice in representative democracies it extends the citizen candidate model of democratic policy making to a dynamic environment equilibrium policy choices are shown to be efficient in the sense that in each period conditional on future policies being selected through the democratic process there exists no alternative current policy choices which can raise the expected utilities of all citizens however policies that would be declared efficient by standard economic criteria are not necessarily adopted in political equilibrium the paper argues that these divergencies are legitimately viewed as politicalfailures

is there a politically optimal level of judicial independence independent courts render current policy more durable by raising the cost of future policy changes but may also engage in policy making of their own this paper asks is there an optimal level of judicial independence from the perspective of incumbent officials in the other branches to answer that question the paper develops a model of strategic institutional choice and tests it on the judicial institutions of the american states consistent with the model s predictions the most independenceenhancing institutions are found where political competition between rival parties is tightest and differences between party platforms are largest

incentive contracts and elections for politicians with multi task problems abstract we consider a model with a politician facing a multi task problem while in office the reelection mechanism distorts the allocation of effort in favor of tasks whose outcomes can be measured more precisely than others we show that a combination of elections and incentive contracts can alleviate this inefficiency the incentive contract does not require direct information about the performance of the politician and is self financing across terms

an economy of scales a selective review of obesity s economic causes consequences and solutions this paper reviews the economic research on obesity covering topics such as the measurement of and trends in obesity the economic causes of obesity e g the monetary price and time cost of food food assistance programs income education macroeconomic conditions and peer effects and the economic consequences of obesity e g lower wages a lower probability of employment and higher medical care costs it also examines the extent to which obesity imposes negative externalities and economic interventions that could potentially internalize such externalities such as food taxes subsidies for school based physical activity programs and financial rewards for weight loss it discusses other economic rationales for government intervention with respect to obesity such as imperfect information time inconsistent preferences and irrational behavior it concludes by proposing a research agenda for the field overall the evidence suggests that there is no single dominant economic cause of obesity a wide variety of factors may contribute a modest amount to the risk there is consistent evidence regarding the economic consequences of obesity which are lower wages and higher medical care costs that impose negative externalities through health insurance studies of economic approaches to preventing obesity such as menu labeling taxes on energy dense foods and financial rewards for weight loss find only modest effects on weight and thus a range of policies may be necessary to have a substantial effect on the prevalence of obesity

the option to wait in collective decisions and optimal majority rules abstract we consider a model in which voters over time receive more information about their preferences concerning an irreversible social decision voters can either implement the project in the first period or they can postpone the decision to the second period we analyze the effects of different majority rules individual first period voting behavior may become less conservative under supermajority rules and it is even possible that a project is implemented in the first period under a supermajority rule that would not be implemented under simple majority rule we characterize the optimal majority rule which is a supermajority rule in contrast to individual investment problems society may be better off if the option to postpone the decision did not exist these results are qualitatively robust to natural generalizations of our model

the legislative history of the sherman act re examined according to robert bork s influential analysis the sherman act was expressly instituted by the 51st congress to advance consumer welfare but has often been misinterpreted by federal courts handing down anticonsumer decisions this paper suggests that the political coalition backing the 1890 antitrust statute sought multiple social ends and did not faithfully seek to impose economic efficiency the key evidence includes historical economic trends congressional debate the legislative agenda of senator john sherman and the political conflict generated by the most contentious and most electorally important issue of the 51st congress the highly protectionist mckinley tariff act i the consumer welfare hypothesis economists have singled out the sherman antitrust act as a uniquely proconsumer piece of legislation while the general economic analysis of political processes has proceeded from george stigler s presumption that a s a rule regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily in its benefit stigler 1971 114 no similar cynicism has enveloped the nation s preeminent antitrust statute strong evidence that the federal trade commission act of 1914 was shaped by the protectionist vision of louis brandeis mccraw 1981 or even a solid economic consensus as to the anticompetitive sentiment behind the 1936 antitrust law the robinson patman act see sowell 1980 210 ross 1984 243 schwartz 1986 has failed to cloud the sherman act s good name as stigler himself has concluded i like the sherman act so far as i can tell it s a public interest law in the same sense in which i think having private property enforcement of contracts and suppression of crime are public interest phenomena stigler 1984 46 see also stigler 1985 1 this proconsumer view of antitrust is all the more ironic in light of recent dissatisfaction with anticonsumer consequences of antitrust policy generally see goldschmid et al 1974 demsetz 1978 baxter 1980 brozen 1982 armentano 1982 johnson 1983 baumol and ordover 1985 hazlett 1986 bittlingmayer 1992 there is widespread concern that antitrust law has been employed against competitive market rivalry moreover the central paradox of an 1890 antimonopoly law remains why should an economy rapidly expanding outputs in virtually all major industrial sectors move to quash restrictions of output baxter 1980 dilorenzo 1985 particularly when such output increases were intrinsically tied to the emergence of large corporate forms chandler 1977 it is also troubling that the interstate commerce act of 1887 generally rejected as a proefficiency measure occurred under such close and similar political auspices hilton 1966 indeed a recent re examination of the commerce act has nicely revealed a multiple interest group demand for legislation gilligan et al 1989 perhaps the consumer welfare model differs sharply from the popular notions of monopoly that the sherman act sought to discourage in law yet this would tend to jeopardize the notion that the act was wholly proconsumer and american economists of the sherman act era in typically viewing competition as a dynamic market phenomenon largely rejected the antitrust approach as failing to advance the consumer s long run interests dilorenzo and high 1988 the proconsumer view of the sherman act has been most thoroughly elaborated by robert bork who writes the legislative history of the sherman act displays the clear and exclusive policy intention of promoting consumer welfare 1978 61 while competing motivations for antitrust legislation were admittedly advanced with only trivial exceptions it is impossible to find even colorable language suggesting most of the other broad social or political purposes that have occasionally been suggested as relevant to the application of the sherman act bork 1966 42

using incentives to encourage healthy eating in children there is growing interest in the situations in which incentives have a significant effect on positive behaviors particularly in children using a randomized field experiment we find that incentives increase the fraction of children eating a serving of fruits or vegetables during lunch by 80 percent and reduce the amount of waste by 33 percent at schools with a larger fraction of low income children the increase in the fraction of children who eat a serving of fruits or vegetables is even larger indicating that incentives successfully target the children who are likely to benefit the most from the increased consumption

the making of economic policy a transaction cost politics perspective economic policymaking as a political process the normative approach to policy analysis the positive view of political economy a synthesis the policy process in real time a theme transaction costs the transaction cost politics framework political outcomes and economic efficiency transaction cost analysis in politics mechanisms to cope with transaction costs in politics national differences two case studies to illustrate transaction cost politics tax and expenditure reform in the united states the gatt and national trade politics some reflections and suggestions some lessons for the policy process the role of the economist concluding comments appendix multiprincipal multitask agencies

voting on the budget deficit this paper analyzes a model in which a group of rational individuals votes over the composition and time profile of public spending all voters agree that a balanced budget is ex ante optimal however if there is disagreement between current and future majorities a balanced budget is not a political equilibrium under majority rule under certain conditions a majority of the voters favors a budget deficit and the equilibrium deficit is larger the greater is the polarization among voters copyright 1990 by american economic association

emergence and persistence of inefficient states we present a theory of the emergence and persistence of inefficient states based on patronage politics the society consists of rich and poor the rich are initially in power but expect to transition to democracy which will choose redistributive policies taxation requires the employment of bureaucrats by choosing an inefficient state structure the rich may be able to use patronage and capture democratic politics so reducing the amount of redistribution in democracy moreover the inefficient state creates its own constituency and tends to persist over time intuitively an inefficient state structure creates more rents for bureaucrats than would an efficient one when the poor come to power in democracy they will reform the structure of the state to make it more efficient so that higher taxes can be collected at lower cost and with lower rents for bureaucrats anticipating this when the society starts out with an inefficient organization of the state bureaucrats support the rich who set lower taxes but also provide rents to bureaucrats we obtain that the rich bureaucrats coalition may also expand the size of bureaucracy excessively so as to generate enough political support the model shows that an equilibrium with an inefficient state is more likely to arise when there is greater income inequality when bureaucratic rents take intermediate values and when individuals are sufficiently forward looking jel p16 h11 h26 h41

the strategic advantage of being poor private and public provision of public goods when people know that a public good is to be privately provided in the future economic behaviour may change in periods before the one with the private provision game individuals have a distortionary incentive to reduce their disposable income so as to shift the burden of provision to others the incentive is eliminated if the government provides a sufficient amount of the public good in a second best world private provision of public goods has been claimed to be a reasonably good alternative to public provision this claim needs to be reconsidered in the light of these results

the politics of infrastructure investment the role of product market competition abstract in spatial competition public infrastructure plays a crucial role in determining product market outcomes in our model consideration of infrastructure s impact on the product market drives the preferences of consumers in their dual role as voter taxpayers the spatial heterogeneity of consumers produces conflicting political interests and in many cases inefficient outcomes however across both exogenous and endogenous market environments product market competition consistently leads to higher levels of publicly funded infrastructure than monopoly collusion furthermore competition s boost to the popular support for infrastructure investment is often excessive while monopoly leads to underinvestment

competition in the us meatpacking industry is it history the us meatpacking industry has become concentrated to a degree not experienced since the days of the beef trust a century ago a number of mainstream studies have investigated if such concentration has been detrimental to competition just as earlier studies may have helped shape competition policy towards meatpacking a century ago contemporary studies have made their way into current discussions and may shape competition policy at the turn of this century this paper asks whether or not contemporary studies are useful in informing competition policy after comparing how competition looks from the econometric vantage point with how it looks from the vantage point of the industry s 300 yr history this article concludes that mainstream studies are more useful for a competition policy targeting conduct rather than structure

patience among children abstract recent policy initiatives offer cash payments to children and often their families to induce better health and educational choices these policies implicitly assume that children are especially impatient i e have high discount rates however little is known about the nature of children s patience how it varies across children and whether children can even make rational inter temporal choices this paper examines the inter temporal choices of 5 to 16 year old children in an artefactual field experiment we examine their choices between varying levels of compensation received in 2 or 4 months in the future and in 0 or 2 months in the future we find that children s choices are consistent with hyperbolic discounting boys are less patient than girls older children are more patient and that mathematical achievement test scores private schooling and parent s patience are not correlated with children s patience we also find that although more than 25 of children do not make rational inter temporal choices within a single two period time frame we cannot find variables that explain this behavior other than age and standardized mathematical achievement test scores

does banning carbonated beverages in schools decrease student consumption abstract i evaluate the effectiveness of carbonated beverage bans in schools by investigating their impact on household soda consumption i match households in nielsen homescan data to their school district s carbonated beverage policies over an eight year period 2002 2009 i find that when high schools ban the sale of carbonated beverages to students households with a high school student experiencing the ban increase their consumption of non diet soda by roughly the equivalent of 3 4 cans per month i present evidence that this is a substantial offsetting 67 75 of the average non diet carbonated beverage consumption in high schools when these are available to students thus demonstrating the persistence of preferences when attempting to alter unhealthy habits