out of step out of office electoral accountability and house members voting does a typical house member need to worry about the electoral ramifications of his roll call decisions we investigate the relationship between incumbents electoral performance and roll call support for their party controlling for district ideology challenger quality and campaign spending among other factors through a series of tests of the 1956 1996 elections the tests produce three key findings indicating that members are indeed accountable for their legislative voting first in each election an incumbent receives a lower vote share the more he supports his party second this effect is comparable in size to that of other widely recognized electoral determinants third a member s probability of retaining office decreases as he offers increased support for his party and this relationship holds for not only marginal but also safe members

the demand for and impact of learning hiv status this paper evaluates an experiment in which individuals in rural malawi were randomly assigned monetary incentives to learn their hiv results after being tested distance to the hiv results centers was also randomly assigned without any incentive 34 percent of the participants learned their hiv results however even the smallest incentive doubled that share using the randomly assigned incentives and distance from results centers as instruments for the knowledge of hiv status sexually active hiv positive individuals who learned their results are three times more likely to purchase condoms two months later than sexually active hiv positive individuals who did not learn their results however hiv positive individuals who learned their results purchase only two additional condoms than those who did not there is no significant effect of learning hiv negative status on the purchase of condoms

are corruption and taxation really harmful to growth firm level evidence exploiting a unique data set containing information about the estimated bribe payments of ugandan firms the authors study the relationship between bribe payments taxes and firm growth in uganda for the period 1995 97 using industry location averages to circumvent the potential problem of endogeneity and to deal with issues of measurement error they find that both the rate of taxation and the rate of bribery are negatively correlated with firm growth for the full data set a one percentage point increase in the bribery rate is associated with three percentage point reduction in firm growth an effect about three times that of taxation moreover after excluding outliers the authors find that bribery has a much greater negative impact on growth and taxation a considerably smaller one this provides some validation of firm level theories of corruption which posit that corruption retards development even more than taxation does

to elect or to appoint bias information and responsiveness of bureaucrats and politicians in this paper we address empirically the trade offs involved in choosing between bureaucrats and politicians in order to do this we map institutions of selection and retention of public officials to the type of public officials they induce we do this by specifying a collective decision making model and exploiting its equilibrium information to obtain estimates of the unobservable types we focus on criminal decisions across us states supreme courts we find that justices that are shielded from voters influence bureaucrats on average i have better information ii are more likely to change their preconceived opinions about a case and iii are more effective make less mistakes than their elected counterparts politicians we evaluate how performance would change if the courts replaced majority rule with unanimity rule

do voters vote ideologically abstract in this paper we address the following question to what extent is the hypothesis that voters vote ideologically i e they always vote for the candidate who is ideologically closest to them testable or falsifiable we show that using data only on how individuals vote in a single election the hypothesis that voters vote ideologically is irrefutable regardless of the number of candidates competing in the election on the other hand using data on how the same individuals vote in multiple elections the hypothesis that voters vote ideologically is potentially falsifiable and we provide general conditions under which the hypothesis can be tested

heterogeneity redistribution and the friedman rule we study monetary models with nondegenerate stationary distributions of money holdings we find that the friedman rule does not typically maximize ex post social welfare an increase in the rate of growth of the money supply has two effects the standard distortionary or rate of return effect makes money a less desirable asset for all moneyholders a second redistributive effect creates a transfer from one type of agent to the other an increase in the rate of growth of money away from the friedman rule can produce a rate of return effect that dominates the standard effect

revealed political power this paper adopts a revealed preference approach to the question of what can be inferred about bias in a political system we examine a dynamic environment in which individuals dier by income each period long run preference profiles are unobserved to an outside observer but are known to belong to a well behaved class in which individual preferences are ordered by income in each state policy data is summarized by a markov policy rule the observer makes inferences about the underlying distribution of political power as if political power were derived from a wealth weighted voting system with weights that can vary across states the weights determine the nature and magnitude of the wealth bias positive weights on relative income in any period indicate an elitist bias in the political system whereas negative weights indicate a populist one we ask what class of weighted systems can rationalize a given policy rule as a weightedmajority outcome each period our first result shows that without further knowledge all forms of bias are possible any markov policy rule can be shown to be rationalized by any system of wealth weighted voting an additional single crossing restriction on preferences can however rule out certain weighting systems we then augment policy data with polling data and show that the set of rationalizing wealth weights are bounded above and below in some cases polls can provide information about the change in political inequality across time

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

expressive vs strategic voters an empirical assessment abstract leading theories of how voters choose between candidates are rooted in two very different paradigms with starkly different behavioral implications exploiting the incentive structure of germany s electoral system i develop a novel set of empirical tests that pit the canonical pivotal voter model against alternative accounts according to which individuals derive expressive utility from supporting their most preferred candidate the results show that neither paradigm can explain the most salient features of the data in addition the evidence suggests that voters cannot be neatly categorized into sincere and strategic types

instruments randomization and learning about development there is currently much debate about the effectiveness of foreign aid and about what kind of projects can engender economic development there is skepticism about the ability of econometric analysis to resolve these issues or of development agencies to learn from their own experience in response there is increasing use in development economics of randomized controlled trials rcts to accumulate credible knowledge of what works without overreliance on questionable theory or statistical methods when rcts are not possible the proponents of these methods advocate quasirandomization through instrumental variable iv techniques or natural experiments i argue that many of these applications are unlikely to recover quantities that are useful for policy or understanding two key issues are the misunderstanding of exogeneity and the handling of heterogeneity i illustrate from the literature on aid and growth actual randomization faces similar problems as does quasi randomization notwithstanding rhetoric to the contrary i argue that experiments have no special ability to produce more credible knowledge than other methods and that actual experiments are frequently subject to practical problems that undermine any claims to statistical or epistemic superiority i illustrate using prominent experiments in development and elsewhere as with iv methods rct based evaluation of projects without guidance from an understanding of underlying mechanisms is unlikely to lead to scientific progress in the understanding of economic development i welcome recent trends in development experimentation away from the evaluation of projects and toward the evaluation of theoretical mechanisms jel c21 f35 o19

the analysis of committee power an application to senate voting on the minimum wage a widely noted empirical regularity of congressional behavior is that standing committees exert disproportionate influence on congressional choices the observed phenomenon has a number of labels committee influence committee power and from the parent chamber s perspective deference to committees and a large body of theoretical and empirical research has sought to determine when and why it exists this paper takes as given only the weakest form the observation namely that committee power exists sometimes it does not directly address the questions of when and why committee power exists although much of the relevant literature is reviewed rather it focuses on a prerequisite to the resolution of disputes about committee power how can committee power be assessed empirically section i reviews three classes of explanations and identifies obstacles to convincing empirical tests of the accounts section ii introduces an econometric approach for analyzing committee power section iii applies the technique to a sequence of votes on minimum wage legislation in the senate in 1977 section iv extends the technique to multi dimensional choice spaces section v is a discussion and summary

capture and ideology in the economic theory of politics the economic theory of regulation long ago put public interest theories of politics to rest these theories have correctly been viewed as normative wishings rather than explanations of real world phenomena they have been replaced by models of political behavior that are consistent with the rest of microeconomics anthony downs 1957 james buchanan and gordon tullock 1965 george stigler 1971 sam peltzman 1976 recently however debate has arisen over whether some version of a public interest theory of regulation will have to be readmitted to our thinking about actions and results in the political arena what is at issue is the empirical importance of the altruistic publicly interested goals of rational actors in determining legislative and regulatory outcomes james kau and paul rubin 1979 kalt 1981 peltzman 1982 this study assesses the nature and significance of publicly interested objectives in a particular instance of economic policymaking u s senate voting on coal strip mining regulations the existence of such objectives is of course no contradiction of the economic view of human behavior kenneth arrow 1972 gary becker 1974 and may well be rooted in genetic biological history becker 1976 jack hirshleifer 1978 generally however individuals altruistic publicly interested goals have been given little attention this reflects the judgment that such goals are so empirically unimportant as to allow the use of occam s razor in positive models or well founded apprehensions that these goals are unusually difficult to identify measure and analyze notwithstanding the latter problem we find that approaches which confine themselves to a view of political actors as narrowly egocentric maximizers explain and predict legislative outcomes poorly the tracking and dissecting of the determinants of voting on coal strip mining policy suggest that the economic theory of politics has been prematurely closed to a broader conception of political behavior

two round elections one round determinants evidence from the french municipal elections using a new database of french municipalities that covers 821 towns and two elections 2001 and 2008 we examine how the budget structure degree of electoral competition and the economic context affect the share of votes for the incumbent we take into account the institutional details of the two round structure of the electoral process created by french electoral rules dual ballot under plurality rules we show that in the first round of the electoral process spending on equipment including infrastructures can influence the voter and that electoral competition has a strong impact on the incumbent s score in the second round the incumbent s vote is affected more by national considerations and local budget variables have no effect we show that the dynamics between the first and the second rounds are intense the results suggest that the determinants of each round s outcome in a two round electoral process are different

identifying structural models of committee decisions with heterogeneous tastes and ideological bias in practice members of a committee often make different recommendations despite a common goal and shared sources of information we study the nonparametric identification and estimation of a structural model where such discrepancies are rationalized by the members unobserved types which consist of ideological bias while weighing different sources of information and tastes for multiple objectives announced in the policy target we consider models with and without strategic incentives for members to make recommendations that conform to the final committee decision we show that pure strategy bayesian nash equilibria exist in both cases and that the variation in common information recorded in the data helps us to recover the distribution of private types from the members choices building on the identification result we estimate a structural model of interest rate decisions by the monetary policy committee mpc at the bank of england we find some evidence that the external committee members are les

inside and outside money as alternative media of exchange we study a random matching model of money in which a subset of people called bankers have known histories and the rest called nonbankers have unknown histories earlier we showed that if there are no outside assets then an optimal arrangement has bankers issuing objects banknotes that are used in trades involving nonbankers here the same model is used to compare such exclusive use of inside money to the exclusive use of outside money we show that the set of implementable outcomes using outside money is a strict subset of the set using inside money

turnout political preferences and information experimental evidence from peru abstract i combine a field experiment with a change in voting laws reducing the fine for abstention to assess the effects of monetary incentives to encourage voter participation in a real world election using experimental variation in the perceived reduction of the fine for abstention i estimate that receiving information about a reduction in the fine by 50 75 percent causes a decrease in turnout of 2 6 5 3 percentage points these estimates imply a cost elasticity of voting of 0 22 the reduction in turnout is driven by voters who are in the center of the political spectrum hold less political information and have lower subjective value of voting the increase in abstention does not change aggregate preferences for specific policies further involvement in politics as measured by the decision to acquire political information is independent of the level of the fine additional results indicate that the reduction in the fine reduces the incidence of vote buying and increases the price paid for a vote

multicandidate elections aggregate uncertainty in the laboratory the rational voter model is often criticized on the grounds that two of its central predictions the paradox of voting and duverger s law are at odds with reality recent theoretical advances suggest that these empirically unsound predictions might be an artifact of an arguably unrealistic assumption the absence of aggregate uncertainty about the distribution of preferences in the electorate in this paper we propose direct empirical evidence of the effects of aggregate uncertainty in multicandidate elections adopting a theory based experimental approach we explore whether aggregate uncertainty indeed favors the emergence of non duverger s law equilibria in plurality elections our experimental results support the main theoretical predictions

constituency opinion and congressional policy making the reagan defense buildup representatives votes on a series of defense budget roll calls in the first year of the reagan administration s pentagon buildup are related to constituency opinions on defense spending during the 1980 election campaign the strong aggregate constituency demand for increased defense spending in 1980 is estimated to have added almost 17 billion about 10 to the total fiscal year 1982 pentagon appropriation the impact of constituency opinion was largely independent of specific political circumstances differential responsiveness in districts with partisan turnover intense districtlevel competition and strong presidential coattails together accounted for less than 1 billion in additional appropriations with the remaining 16 billion attributable to across the board responsiveness by even the most safely incumbent representatives t he appeal of representative democracy hinges on the responsiveness of elected politicians to the preferences and interests of their constituents given the theoretical and practical significance of the connection between constituents opinions and their representatives legislative activities it is remarkable that the large and in some ways quite sophisticated empirical literature addressing this connection includes so few direct estimates of the relationship between constituency opinion and specific legislative outcomes 1 my aim here is to provide one such estimate the policy issue i have chosen to examine is the level of total pentagon spending in the first fy 1982 defense appropriations bill of the reagan administration that bill the first in a series of annual appropriations resulting in a 40 real increase in defense spending during reagan s first five years in office is of obvious political significance but the issue of defense spending is also especially interesting from a broader theoretical perspective because the strong public demand for a defense spending increase at the beginning of the reagan era provides unusual analytical leverage for assessing the potential impact of public opinion on the making of public policy i shall describe some alternative mechanisms of congressional responsiveness to constituency opinion briefly characterize the politics of defense at the beginning of the reagan era present my analysis of representatives preferences regarding fy 1982 defense appropriations relating those preferences to constituency opinions on the defense spending issue and to other political characteristics of the representatives and their districts extend the analysis of fy 1982 defense appropriations from the individual to the aggregate level in an attempt to estimate the impact of congressional responsiveness on the total level of pentagon appropriations and finally touch upon some of the implications of my analysis for the study of linkages between public opinion and public policy

a conversational war of attrition we explore costly deliberation by two differentially informed and possibly biased jurors a hawk lones and a dove moritz alternately insist on a verdict until one concedes debate assumes one of two genres depending on bias a juror say lones is intransigent if he wishes to prevail and reach a conviction for any type of moritz next to concede in contrast lones is ambivalent if he wants the strongest conceding types of moritz to push for acquittal both jurors are ambivalent with small bias or high delay costs as lones grows more hawkish he argues more forcefully for convictions mitigating wrongful acquittals if dovish moritz is intransigent then he softens strategic substitutes leading to more wrongful convictions ambivalent debate is new and yields a novel dynamic benefit of increased polarization for if moritz is ambivalent then he toughens strategic complements and so surprisingly a more hawkish lones leads to fewer wrongful acquittals and convictions so more polarized but balanced debate can improve communication unlike in static cheap talk we also show that patient and not too biased jurors vote against their posteriors near the end of the debate optimally playing devil s advocate we shed light on the adversarial legal system peremptory challenges and cloture rules

the statistical analysis of roll call data modern studies of legislative behavior focus upon the relationship among the policy preferences of legislators institutional arrangements and legislative outcomes in spatial models of legislatures policies are represented geometrically as points in a low dimensional euclidean space each legislator has a most preferred policy or ideal point in this space and his or her utility for a policy declines with the distance of the policy from his or her ideal point see davis hinich and ordeshook 1970 for an early survey the primary use of roll call data the recorded votes of deliberative bodies 1 is the estimation of ideal points the appeal and importance of ideal point estimation arises in two ways first ideal point estimates let us describe legislators and legislatures the distribution of ideal points estimates reveals how cleavages between legislators reflect partisan affiliation or region or become more polarized over time e g mccarty poole and rosenthal 2001 roll call data serve similar purposes for interest groups such as americans for democratic action the national taxpayers union and the sierra club to produce ratings of legislators along different policy dimensions second estimates from roll call analysis can be used to test theories of legislative behavior for instance roll call analysis has been used in studies of the u s congress both contemporary and

bayesian inference for comparative research rv egression analysis in comparative research suffers from two distinct problems of statistical inference first because the data constitute all the available observations from a population conventional inference based on the long run behavior of a repeatable data mechanism is not appropriate second the small and collinear data sets of comparative research yield imprecise estimates of the effects of explanatory variables we describe a bayesian approach to statistical inference that provides a unified solution to these two problems this approach is illustrated in a comparative analysis of unionization a widely used tool in quantitative comparative politics is the linear regression model estimating relationships between institutional and economic variables observed for a set of countries constituting some population of interest a brief survey of recent comparative research finds no shortage of work of this type for instance remmer 1991 identifies economic crisis as a source of electoral volatility in latin american countries in the 1980s robertson 1990 presents evidence that institutions moderating the transaction costs of negotiations between capital and labor reduce industrial conflict and golden 1993 finds that union wage moderation in industrialized democracies results from coordinated collective bargaining although the methodological advantages are well documented jackman 1985 we identify two distinct problems of statistical inference endemic to this type of quantitative comparative research first because the data constitute all the available observations from a population conventional inference based on the long run behavior of some repeatable data mechanism is not appropriate second because data sets tend to be small and collinear the effects of explanatory variables are estimated imprecisely in most applications the first problem is generally ignored and the second is solved by imposing restrictions on the regression model to obtain sensible results the bayesian model of statistical inference provides a unified solution to these two distinct problems of quantitative comparative research two features of bayesian inference are important in this context first probability is conceived subjectively as characterizing a researcher s uncertainty about the parameters of a statistical model this subjective probability concept seems particularly useful in comparative settings where the data are typically convenience samples not generated by a known probability mechanism such as random sampling second bayesian inference allows the inclusion of other information in addition to the quantitative sample information again this seems useful in the comparative context where rich historical material is commonly available sparking ideas for researchers but formally discarded in the final analysis in the bayesian approach this historical material can be formally incorporated into the analysis we begin by detailing why the nonstochastic and weak data typical of comparative research are problematic for conventional linear regression analysis we next introduce some ideas about bayesian inference and describe bayesian regression analysis these ideas are applied to a comparative analysis of unionization the subject of a recent exchange in the american political science review between michael wallerstein and john stephens stephens and wallerstein 1991 wallerstein 1989 the bayesian regressions we present are supplemented with a sensitivity analysis that investigates how our conclusions depend upon the sample data and our prior beliefs although we survey some ideas in bayesian statistics a full introduction to the bayesian approach to statistical inference is beyond our scope here good book length treatments are pollard 1986 lee 1989 and at a slightly higher level press 1989 our intention here is to spotlight problematic but ignored issues of statistical inference in a common area of application the bayesian alternative that we present represents just one way forward to address these inferential problems

deliberation preference uncertainty and voting rules a deliberative committee is a group of at least two individuals who first debate about what alternative to choose prior to these same individuals voting to determine the choice we argue first that uncertainty about individuals private preferences is necessary for full information sharing and second demonstrate in a very general setting that the condition under which unanimity can support full information revelation in debate amounts to it being common knowledge that all committee members invariably share identical preferences over the alternatives it follows that if ever there exists an equilibrium with fully revealing debate under unanimity rule there exists an equilibrium with fully revealing debate under any voting rule moreover the converse is not true of majority rule if there is uncertainty about individuals preferences

financial incentives in health new evidence from india s janani suraksha yojana this paper studies the health effects of one of the world s largest demand side financial incentive programmes india s janani suraksha yojana our difference in difference estimates exploit heterogeneity in the implementation of the financial incentive programme across districts we find that cash incentives to women were associated with increased uptake of maternity services but there is no strong evidence that the jsy was associated with a reduction in neonatal or early neonatal mortality the positive effects on utilisation are larger for less educated and poorer women and in places where the cash payment was most generous we also find evidence of unintended consequences the financial incentive programme was associated with a substitution away from private health providers an increase in breastfeeding and more pregnancies these findings demonstrate the potential for financial incentives to have unanticipated effects that may in the case of fertility undermine the programme s own objective of reducing mortality

can words get in the way the effect of deliberation in collective decision making we quantify the effect of deliberation on the decisions of us appellate courts we estimate a model in which strategic judges communicate before casting their votes and then compare the probability of mistakes in the court with deliberation with a counterfactual of no communication the model has multiple equilibria and preferences and information parameters are only partially identified we find that there is a range of parameters in the identified set when judges tend to disagree ex ante or their private information is imprecise in which deliberation can be beneficial otherwise deliberation reduces the effectiveness of the court

health insurance and the demand for medical care evidence from a randomized experiment we estimate how cost sharing the portion of the bill the patient pays affects the demand for medical services the data come from a randomized experiment a catastrophic insurance plan reduces expenditures 31 percent relative to zero out of pocket price the price elasticity is approximately 0 2 we reject the hypothesis that less favorable coverage of outpatient services increases total expenditure for example by deterring preventive care or inducing hospitalization

a group rule utilitarian approach to voter turnout theory and evidence this paper explores a group rule utilitarian approach to understanding voter turnout inspired by the theoretical work of john c harsanyi 1980 and timothy j feddersen and alvaro sandroni 2002 it develops a model based on this approach and studies its performance in explaining turnout in texas liquor referenda the results are encouraging the comparative static predictions of the model are broadly consistent with the data and a structurally estimated version of the model yields reasonable coefficient estimates and fits the data well the structurally estimated model also outperforms a simple expressive voting model

sequentially rationalizable choice a sequentially rationalizable choice function is a choice function that can be retrieved by applying sequentially to each choice problem the same xed set of asymmetric binary relations rationales to remove inferior alternatives these con cepts translate into economic language some human choice heuristics studied in psychology and explain cyclical patterns of choice observed in experiments we study some properties of sequential rationalizability and provide a full character ization of choice functions rationalizable by two and three rationales

uncovering evidence of conditional party government reassessing majority party influence in congress and state legislatures temporary american legislatures our use of a new analytic technique a grid search program for characterizing the uncovered set enables us to begin with a better model of legislative proceedings that abandons the simple one dimensional spatial models in favor of the more realistic two dimensional version our conclusions are based on the analysis of real world data rather than on arguments about the relative merits of different theoretic assumptions our analysis confirms that when legislators preferences are polarized outcomes will generally be closer to the majority party s wishes even if the majority party leadership does nothing to influence the legislative process this conclusion notwithstanding our analysis also shows that at the margin of the majority party s natural advantage agenda setting by the majority party remains a viable and efficacious strategy in the debate over party organizations in the american congress one side e g aldrich and rohde 1998 2001 argues that the majority party can influence the outcome of legislative proceedings through agenda control or the ability to determine which proposals are considered the other side e g krehbiel 1999 2000 argues that agenda control conveys no power and that the majority party s apparent influence

the value of information in the court get it right keep it tight one should always subordinate his own personal views whether they be economic social political or whatever they may be because when you are talking about your own views you are only one of millions of individuals in the country when you are interpreting the law perhaps you have a special skill and special training that does give you the right to pass on these questions i have to confess that in this open area sometimes inevitably a man is the product of his own background and he may be somewhat influenced but i will do my very best to subordinate those considerations because i think that is the duty of any judge justice john stevens in his senate confirmation hearing

incentives and targets in hospital care evidence from a natural experiment performance targets are commonly used in the public sector despite their well known problems when organisations have multiple objectives and performance is difficult to measure it is possible that such targets may work where there is considerable consensus that performance needs to be improved we investigate this possibility by examining the response of the english national health service to high profile waiting time targets we exploit a natural policy experiment between two countries of the uk england and scotland to establish the global effectiveness of the targets we then use a within england hospital analysis to confirm that responses vary by treatment intensity and to control for differences in resources which may accompany targets we find that targets met their goals of reducing waiting times without diverting activity from other less well monitored aspects of health care and without decreasing patient health on exit from hospital

sincere voting in an electorate with heterogeneous preferences much of the theoretical literature on voting with private information finds that voters do not vote sincerely at the equilibrium yet there is little empirical support for this result this paper shows that when the electorate is sufficiently divided sincere voting is an equilibrium strategy for an arbitrarily large proportion of voters

learning and coordination in the presidential primary system in elections with three or more candidates coordination among like minded voters is an important problem we analyze the trade off between coordination and learning about candidate quality under different temporal election systems in the context of the u s presidential primary system in our model candidates with different policy positions and qualities compete for the nomination and voters are uncertain about the candidates valence this setup generates two effects vote splitting i e several candidates in the same policy position compete for the same voter pool and voter learning as the results in earlier elections help voters to update their beliefs on candidate quality sequential voting minimizes vote splitting in late districts but voters may coordinate on a low quality candidate using the parameter estimates obtained from all the democratic and republican presidential primaries during 2000 2012 we conduct policy experiments such as replacing the current system with a simultaneous system adopting the reform proposal of the national association of secretaries of state or imposing party rules that lead to candidate withdrawal when pre specified conditions are met

the hunt for party discipline in congress ttt e analyze party discipline in the house of representatives between 1947 and 1998 the effects of 1 v party pressures can be represented in a spatial model by allowing each party to have its own cutting line on roll call votes adding a second cutting line makes at best a marginal improvement over the standard single line model analysis of legislators who switch parties shows however that party discipline is manifest in the location of the legislator s ideal point in contrast to our approach we find that the snyder groseclose method of estimating the influence of party discipline is biased toward exaggerating party effects

does hospital competition save lives evidence from the english nhs patient choice reforms recent substantive reforms to the english national health service expanded patient choice and encouraged hospitals to compete within a market with fixed prices this study investigates whether these reforms led to improvements in hospital quality we use a difference in difference style estimator to test whether hospital quality measured using mortality from acute myocardial infarction improved more quickly in more competitive markets after these reforms came into force in 2006 we find that after the reforms were implemented mortality fell i e quality improved for patients living in more competitive markets our results suggest that hospital competition can lead to improvements in hospital quality

estimating ideal points in the british house of commons using early day motions this article develops a new method for estimating the ideological preferences of members of the british house of commons existing methods produce implausible results due to high levels of party cohesion and strategic voting on the part of opposition parties to circumvent these problems this article estimates mp preferences using early day motions edms as an alternative to roll call votes the bayesian ideal point model for the decision to sign an edm takes into account both policy preferences and signing costs the estimates obtained have greater face validity than previous attempts to measure preferences in the house of commons recovering the expected order of parties and of members within parties the estimates successfully predict voting behavior in the house of commons as with other bayesian ideal point methods this approach produces natural uncertainty estimates and allows for easy calculation of quantities of interest such as member ranks

is hospital competition socially wasteful we study the consequences of hospital competition for medicare beneficiaries heart attack care from 1985 to 1994 we examine how relatively exogenous determinants of hospital choice such as travel distances influence the competitiveness of hospital markets and how hospital competition interacts with the influence of managed care organizations to affect the key determinants of social welfare expenditures on treatment and patient health outcomes in the 1980s the welfare effects of competition were ambiguous but in the 1990s competition unambiguously improves social welfare increasing hmo enrollment over the sample period partially explains the dramatic change in the impact of hospital competition

money and interest in a cash in advance economy the authors analyze an aggregative general equilibrium model in which the use of money is motivated by a cash in advance constraint applied to purchases of a subset of consumption goods the system is subject to both real and monetary shocks which are economy wide and observed by all they develop methods for verifying the existence of characterizing and explicitly calculating equilibria copyright 1987 by the econometric society

indifference or indecisiveness choice theoretic foundations of incomplete preferences abstract a commonly held belief in economics is that an individual s preferences that are revealed by her choices must be complete this paper takes issue with this position by showing that one may be able to distinguish between indifference and indecisiveness of an agent upon observing her choice behavior we relax the standard weak axiom of revealed preferences warp and show that a potent theory of individual choice with and without risk can be founded on this weaker axiom when it is coupled with some other standard postulates the most notable features here are that an agent is allowed to be indifferent between certain alternatives and indecisive about others moreover an outside observer can identify which of these actually occur upon examining the observable choice behavior of the decision maker as an application we also show how our theory may be able to cope with the classical preference reversal phenomenon

on the testable implications of collective choice theories we analyze collective choices in game forms from a revealed preference viewpoint we call the joint choice behavior of n agents nash respectively pareto rationalizable if there exist n preferences over the conceivable joint actions such that the joint actions selected from each game form coincide with the nash equilibria respectively the pareto optima of the corresponding game in the two agent case we show that every deterministic joint behavior which is nash rationalizable is also pareto rationalizable the converse is false we further identify general necessary and sufficient conditions for nash rationalizability of an n agent joint choice behavior we also define and characterize partial versions of the nash and pareto rationalizability requirements journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 c92

an experimental study of jury decision rules we present experimental results on groups facing a decision problem analogous to that faced by a jury we consider three treatment variables group size three or six number of votes needed for conviction majority or unanimity and pre vote deliberation we find evidence of strategic voting under the unanimity rule a large fraction of our subjects vote for a decision analogous to conviction even when their private information indicates a state analogous to innocence this is roughly consistent with the game theoretic predictions of feddersen and pesendorfer although individual behavior is explained well by the game theoretic model there are discrepancies at the level of the group decision contrary to feddersen and pesendorfer in our experiments there are fewer outcomes analogous to incorrect convictions under unanimity rule than under majority rule in the case of no deliberation we simultaneously account for the individual and group data using quantal response equilibrium

revealed preference analysis of characteristics models characteristics models have been found to be useful in many areas of economics however their empirical implementation tends to rely heavily on functional form assumptions in this paper we develop a revealed preference approach to characteristics models we derive the necessary and su cient empirical conditions under which data on the market behaviour of heterogeneous price taking consumers are nonparametrically consistent with the consumer characteristics model where these conditions hold we show how information may be recovered on individual consumer s marginal valuations of product attributes in some cases marginal valuations are point identi ed and in other cases we can only recover bounds where the conditions fail we highlight the role which the introduction of unobserved product attributes can play in rationalising the data we implement these ideas using consumer panel data on the danish milk market

a structural model of turnout and voting in multiple elections this paper develops a unified approach to study participation and voting in multiple elections the theoretical setting combines an uncertain voter model of turnout with a spatial model of voting behavior we apply our framework to the study of turnout and voting in u s presidential and congressional elections we structurally estimate the model using individual level data for the 2000 elections and quantify the relationships between observed individual characteristics and unobserved citizens ideological preferences information and civic duty we then use the estimated model which replicates the patterns of abstention selective abstention split ticket voting and straight ticket voting observed in the data to assess the effects of policies that may increase citizens information and sense of civic duty on their turnout and voting behavior

why inside money matters this note observes that in a simple infinite horizon economy with heterogeneous endowments and a cash in advance constraint fiat money can be used to implement a pareto optimum only with type specific taxation by contrast if credit contracts are enforceable the same allocation can be reached in equilibrium without type specific policy we argue that the advantages of inside money and the fact that they depend on the capacity of the economy to enforce the repayment of debt direct us toward the study of the institutional infrastructure underlying self enforcing inside money equilibria

economic theories of voter turnout i the voting paradox why would the rational individual bother to spend time and resources to become well informed go to the polls on the election day and maybe even wait in a queue why would a rational voter vote downs 1957 ii the paradox of indeterminacy if they vote why do they care who they vote for kirchgassner 1992 kirchgassner and pommerehne 1993 iii the paradox of ignorance to the extent that information is costly the rational voter must be ignorant about relevant aspects of his decision making downs 1957

the value of inside and outside money abstract we study dynamic economies in which agents may have incentives to hold both privately issued a k a inside and publicly issued a k a outside circulating liabilities as part of an equilibrium our analysis emphasizes spatial separation and limited communication as frictions that motivate monetary exchange we isolate conditions under which a combination of inside and outside money does and does not allow the economy to achieve a first best allocation of resources we also study the extent to which the use of private circulating liabilities alone or the use of public circulating liabilities alone can address the frictions that lead to monetary exchange

on measuring partisanship in roll call voting the u s house of representatives 1877 1999 on measuring partisanship in roll call voting the u s house of representatives 1877 1999 we propose a method of assessing party influence based on a spatial model our method provides the first test of whether observed values of the widely used rice index of party dissimilarity are consistent with a partyless null model it also avoids problems that beset previous estimators substantively we find evidence of party influence in all but one congress since 1877 moreover our indicator of party pressure is systematically higher for the sorts of roll calls that party theorists believe are more pressured procedural organizational and label defining votes our results refute the widespread notion that parties in the house have typically had negligible influence on roll call voting behavior they also document important changes in party influence associated with the packing of the rules committee in 1961 and the procedural reforms of 1973

inferring strategic voting we estimate a model of strategic voting and quantify the impact it has on election outcomes because the model exhibits multiplicity of outcomes we adopt a set estimator using japanese general election data we nd a large fraction 75 3 80 3 of strategic voters only a small fraction 2 4 5 5 of whom voted for a candidate other than the one they most preferred misaligned voting existing empirical literature has not distinguished between the two estimating misaligned voting instead of strategic voting accordingly while our estimate of strategic voting is high our estimate of misaligned voting is comparable to previous studies

the power of tv cable television and women s status in india cable and satellite television have grown rapidly throughout the developing world the availability of cable and satellite television exposes viewers to new information about the outside world which may affect individual attitudes and behaviors this paper explores the effect of the introduction of cable television on gender attitudes in rural india using a three year individual level panel dataset we find that the introduction of cable television is associated with improvements in womens status we find significant increases in reported autonomy decreases in the reported acceptability of beating and decreases in reported son preference we also find increases in female school enrollment and decreases in fertility primarily via increased birth spacing the effects are large equivalent in some cases to about five years of education in the cross section and move gender attitudes of individuals in rural areas much closer to those in urban areas we argue that the results are not driven by pre existing differential trends these results have important policy implications as india and other countries attempt to decrease bias against women authors

wealth health and health services in rural rajasthan what are the determinants of health and of well being income and wealth are clearly part of the story but does access to health care have a large independent effect as the advocates of more investment in health care such as the world health organization s commission on macroeconomics and health commission on macroeconomics and health 2001 have argued this paper reports on a recent survey in a poor rural area of the state of rajasthan in india intended to shed some light on this issue where there was an attempt to use a set of interlocking surveys to collect data on health and economic status as well as the public and private provision of health care

identification and estimation of preference distributions when voters are ideological this article studies the non parametric identification and estimation of voters preferences when voters are ideological we establish that voter preference distributions and other parameters of interest can be identified from aggregate electoral data we also show that these objects can be consistently estimated and illustrate our analysis by performing an actual estimation using data from the 1999 european parliament elections

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