a model of candidate location with endogenous valence this work gives a theoretical explanation for the increase in campaign spending and party polarization in u s politics i assume that the effectiveness of persuasive advertising and of costly valence campaigning in general positively depends on the share of nonpartisan voters a decline in the number of partisan voters in a constituency results in greater campaign spending by the candidates if the voters are risk averse the candidates who maximize their expected office rents minus the cost of campaigning will choose divergent policy platforms strategically in order to reduce the costs of subsequent campaign spending the degree of policy divergence positively depends on the share of nonpartisan voters for a broad class of voter disutility and candidate cost of valence functions

party system institutionalization and government formation in new democracies party systems provide the essential structure of the coalition bargaining environment stability in party systems ensures the presence of regularities that can be observed in government formation but most empirical research focuses on established democracies in new democracies party systems are less institutionalized which means that interactions between parties can be unpredictable and has significant implications for coalition formation this article presents the first study of coalition formation in new democracies that employs an empirical design comparable to that of the leading research on western europe the author uses a new data set of potential coalitions in central and eastern europe to examine three explanations for government formation that arise when party systems are weakly institutionalized the results show first that incumbency is a disadvantage for governments in new democracies when formation occurs postelection this disadvantage is due to high levels of electoral volatility caused by policy failure and clientelistic practices incumbents are advantaged when formation takes place midterm as weak party system institutionalization leads to an inchoate pattern of interaction between opposition parties which therefore fail to provide a viable alternative second the presence of former dominant parties influences government formation by stifling the development of programmatic competition instead programmatic competition is subjugated to contestation based on historical enmities and third established parties collude to exclude new parties from coalition formation a possible indicator that a party system is becoming more institutionalized the article provides new insights into the importance of routinized and stable political practices and institutions

constraints on cabinet formation in parliamentary democracies coalition theory typically treats political parties involved in government formation in parliamentary democracies as if they were unconstrained players in an institution free world yet actual coalition options are often severely constrained by institutional arrangements and prior commitments we develop a systematic account of different constraints on government formation and examine their frequency across 10 parliamentary democracies hypothetical and empirical examples demonstrate how a small number of constraints can dramatically reduce the range of coalition options and redistribute bargaining power among political parties more adequate coalition theories need to recognize the effects of such constraints and to build on the theoretical lessons of the neoinstitutionalist approach to legislative behavior

the structure of citizen attitudes and the european political space a common concern regarding the viability of institutional reform of the eu is whether european citizens constitute a political community that facilitates democratic governance one important aspect of this concern is whether public perceptions are structured so as to ease or impede political discourse across europe to investigate this question the authors examine whether the eu mass public organizes its attitudes toward eu policy issues in systematic and meaningful ways specifically they examine whether eu citizens attitudes across a broad range of policies decided at the eu level are structured consistently with several prominent models of the eu policy space using eurobarometer data the authors show that citizens policy positions on eu issues are systematically organized along a single dimension that is different from domestic left right

blame game politics in a coalition government abstract delays in the adoption of reforms is an important question in political economics this paper explores this issue in the context of a representative democracy where the government is a coalition and citizens observe neither the decision making process nor politicians preferences for a reform we show that a coalition member who favors a reform may nonetheless choose to veto its adoption thus delaying it until after the next election and let his coalition partners share the blame for the non adoption we refer to this strategy as blame game politics we then identify three reasons for a politician to play the blame game one is to make an issue salient in the next election a second reason is to avoid a split in his electorate which is accomplished by hiding his stance on an issue a third reason is to enhance bargaining power during the formation of the next government

vote buying supermajorities and flooded coalitions in a recent paper banks 2000 adopting the framework of our model groseclose and snyder 1996 derives several new and noteworthy results in addition he provides a counterexample to our proposition 4 here we explain the error in our proposition but note that we can correct it easily if we invoke an additional assumption in equilibrium the winning vote buyer constructs a nonflooded coalition that is she does not bribe every member of her coalition we conclude with a brief discussion of the substantive implications of banks s proposition 1 we note that it provides additional support for our general claim that minimal winning coalitions should be rare in a vote buying game

coalition and party formation in a legislative voting game we examine a legislative voting game where decisions are being made over both ideological and distributive dimensions and legislators preferences are separable over the two dimensions in equilibrium legislators prefer to make proposals for the two dimensions together rather than offering sequential proposals on the two dimensions separately the equilibria exhibit interaction between the ideological and distributive dimensions and in any equilibrium there is a positive probability that a proposal is made and approved which excludes the median legislator as defined over the ideological dimension in contrast with a game where no distributive decision is being made moreover in any stationary equilibrium there is more than one ideological decision that has a positive probability of being proposed and approved we show that legislators can gain from forming political parties and consider examples where predictions can be made about the composition of parties we discuss the impact of political parties on the outcome

two to tango gender differences in the decisions to publish and coauthor i introduction there is a well developed mythology regarding the presence of old boy networks and their importance in explaining gender differences in labor market outcomes as articulated by saloner 1985 nonetheless aside from works such as simon and warner 1992 there is relatively little empirical evidence examining the impact of networks on market outcomes how these effects differ by gender and whether gender differences in network access change over time as women become more well represented in a profession the paucity of empirical evidence arises in part from the difficulty of measuring the presence of such networks prior work including that of saint paul 2001 and erickson and jacoby 2003 has found evidence that networks facilitate the adoption of team oriented work practices and information sharing that increase average worker productivity in management and professional jobs on the other hand studies such as that by marmaros and sacerdote 2002 have also found that women have less access to networks than their male counterparts in both private and public sector jobs which has been shown to yield gender differences in job placement and other labor market outcomes this article considers how gender differences in networks are manifested in a specific male dominated profession i e academic economists and in a specific work related outcome i e the decision to coauthor articles in which access to networks is likely to be important the analysis uses uniquely detailed individual and job level data for phd economists included in nearly four decades of american economic association aea membership to examine the role of networks on the joint decision to publish and coauthor the unique matching process of phd economists between academic and nonacademic jobs and within the hierarchy of academic departments along with the relative ease of observing joint research provide a rare opportunity to distinguish differential network access and measure joint production the results demonstrate the importance of networks in the production of research output and that new female entrants into a male dominated profession do not have equal access to these professional networks the results also provide evidence that women are able to plug into networks over time as the profession becomes more gender representative our study contributes to the literature on the role of networks in the labor market in several ways first the profession of academic economist is well suited to this study because it is made up of workers who produce a relatively homogenous output i e scholarly journal articles and that share a common set of job related tasks i e teaching research and service second the incidence of coauthorship is an observable outcome measure of network utilization a phenomenon inherently difficult to measure in the tradition of the business productivity literature as found in sabel 1993 third there is extensive evidence in the literature that journal publications are positively linked to academic salaries as found in siegfried and white 1973 and sauer 1988 that the propensity to coauthor is positively associated with publication output as in as found in durden and perri 1995 and maske et al 2003 that there are gender differences in tendencies to coauthor as shown by ferber and teiman 1980 and mcdowell and smith 1992 and that there are gender differences in professional outcomes such as publications salary and promotion as seen in mcdowell 1982 hansen et al 1978 formby et al 1993 and broder 1993 cumulatively these studies suggest that understanding the determinants of coauthorship is important for evaluating the sources and the extent of gender inequity in the profession prior work on coauthorship behavior has analyzed patterns over time and across disciplines several studies including hudson 1996 mcdowell and melvin 1983 and barnett et al

determinants of scholarly productivity among male and female economists i introduction the purpose of this article is to test a model of the determinants of articles produced by male and female academics of particular interest is how article production is influenced by coauthorship institutional research orientation and gender several works have identified and demonstrated the trend toward coauthorship in economics and in other disciplines using data from the journal of economic literature heck and zaleski 1991 demonstrated that the incidence of coauthorship has increased from about 15 of total articles in 1969 to about 35 in 1989 durden and perri 1995 report that as of 1992 the proportion coauthored had grown to more than 38 hudson 1996 finds that by 1993 coauthorship rates in the journal of political economy and american economic review were 39 6 and 54 9 respectively as compared to rates of 6 and 8 in 1950 why do economists coauthor rational interest theory suggests that if scholars collaborate then there must be a utility enhancing result other things equal this could be in the form of higher salaries and increased probabilities of promotion greater access to funded research greater mobility in job markets and the like which might result if collaboration significantly increases the overall production of published papers studies by mcdowell and melvin 1983 barnett et al 1988 and piette and ross 1992 suggest that coauthorship among scholars may increase article production through the division of labor made necessary by increased complexity in the subject matter and by the need to saturate markets to increase the probability of getting papers accepted for publication laband and tollison 2000 find evidence that increasing rates of coauthorship result from the greater quantitative content of articles greater requirement for the use of sophisticated econometric techniques and the fact that cooperation is cheaper in time and other resources as compared to learning what is necessary to publish in another field or discipline hamermesh and oster 2002 discuss nonpecuniary purely consumption benefits such as the pleasure obtained from cooperation and suggest that higher levels of prestige among colleagues may also be relevant although many reasons for cooperation have been developed not much has been done to determine whether the rate of coauthorship among scholars actually affects total article production using cross section data hansen et al 1978 and graves et al 1982 estimate productivity models but coauthorship is not included in either study mcdowell and smith 1992 include a coauthorship variable but find that it neither increases nor decreases article production when articles are discounted by the number of authors hollis 2001 uses panel data to examine the relationship between coauthorship and research productivity he finds that coauthorship leads to better longer and more frequent publications when publications are discounted by the number of authors however coauthorship appears negatively related to research output mcdowell and smith s 1992 and hollis s 2001 results are very counterintuitive because a viable reason for coauthorship is to increase efficiency as shown in durden and perri 1995 durden and perri 1995 estimate a time series model finding that coauthorship is highly instrumental in determining article productivity as far as we know the only study by economists that specifically analyzes the effect of institutional research orientation on publishing output is that by graves et al 1982 using data from 240 schools they estimate total pages published per faculty member in the top 24 economics journals between 1974 78 using a series of independent variables to proxy influences that affect publication they find that secretaries per faculty member helps and teaching load hinders production the effects of ph d status teaching assistance and faculty student ratios are mixed depending on specification of the model

broadband adoption and firm productivity evaluating the benefits of general purpose technology we examine the relationship between the deployment of broadband which we classify as a general purpose technology and the productivity of the deploying firms using panel data that comprises information on all the major local exchange carriers in the united states telecommunications industry from 1995 to 2000 this relationship is an important indicator of the economic impact of new technology adoption we provide a comprehensive analysis of the literature on general purpose technologies as well as on the economic consequences of information and communications technology diffusion and develop a framework to empirically assess the impact of broadband deployment on the productivity our results find a positive relationship between broadband deployment and the carriers productivity and suggest that encouraging the deployment of broadband technologies in addition to the benefits to consumers and firms at the receiving end of the new technology create the potential for better technological efficiencies and increased productivity for the deploying firms the benefits can be enhanced as the firms studied operate in two sided markets where the network effects brought about by the multitude of interconnections can be substantial because of possible second order spillovers of productivity copyright 2010 the author 2009 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

is there an insider advantage in getting tenure at most universities there are two types of tenured economists those who began work at the school shortly after leaving graduate school and were later promoted and experienced economists who were hired with tenure conventional wisdom in academic circles suggests that it is easier to get tenure as an insider than it is to attract an offer as an outsider that is schools hold potential external senior hires to tougher standards then they do their own junior professors in this paper i take a first step toward showing that at least for academic economists there is an insider advantage i analyze the research records of economists with ten years experience and compare the productivity of those who changed employers recently suggesting they were hired with tenure to those who did not suggesting internal promotion i show that the productivity of outsiders is higher than the productivity of insiders at all but the top ten economics institutions in the world the economic significance of the estimates is substantial but the statistical precision suggests that more work is required to draw strong conclusions also i focus on average productivity of all available insiders and outsiders whereas an ideal dataset would allow a direct comparison of marginal insiders and outsiders that is those who barely met the standard the market and pre market for graduate students in economics

lobbying as legislative subsidy professional lobbyists are among the most experienced knowledgeable and strategic actors one can find in the everyday practice of politics nonetheless their behavioral patterns often appear anomalous when viewed in the light of existing theories we revisit these anomalies in search of an alternative theory we model lobbying not as exchange vote buying or persuasion informative signaling but as a form of legislative subsidy a matching grant of policy information political intelligence and legislative labor to the enterprises of strategically selected legislators the proximate political objective of this strategy is not to change legislators minds but to assist natural allies in achieving their own coincident objectives the theory is simple in form realistic in its principal assumptions and counterintuitive in its main implications empirically the model renders otherwise anomalous regularities comprehensible and predictable in a later section we briefly bring preferences back in examining the important but relatively uncommon conditions under which preference centered lobbying should occur

on the efficiency of equilibria in a legislative bargaining model with particularistic and collective goods this study analyzes the efficiency of equilibria in a multilateral bargaining game in which a legislature divides its budget among collective and particularistic goods in order to disentangle the causes of inefficiency we extend the model of volden and wiseman am polit sci rev 101 79 92 2007 by considering quasi linear utility functions and consensus requirements ranging from simple majority to unanimity although unanimous agreements can be reached under weaker consensus requirements we show that pareto inefficiency is associated with non unanimous consent we also study how i the endogenous selection of the legislature s size or ii a sequential choice of collective and particularistic spending eliminates or attenuates the inefficiency problem

political representation and public contracting evidence from municipal legislatures abstract this study examines how partisan representation in multiparty legislatures affects direct expenditures contract allocation design and selection of politically connected firms as suppliers in public procurement for identification i exploit quasi random variation in partisan electoral outcomes near the effective representation thresholds in czech proportional municipal elections my regression discontinuity estimates suggest that partisan representation matters for public procurement for instance if local level political parties barely enter legislatures at the expense of the national parties municipalities decrease their direct procurement spending and allocate fewer contracts to the corporate donors of the national parties fewer contracts are awarded especially in pre election years and in auctions restricting competition among procurement suppliers the results are not associated with higher government fragmentation or selection of more competent candidates but rather with reduced political power of the national parties

a model of endogenous government formation political parties bargain over the allocation of cabinet portfolios when forming coalition governments noncooperative theories of legislative bargaining typically predict that the formateur enjoys a disproportionate share of government ministry positions however empirical evidence indicates that parties receive shares of portfolios proportional to their share of legislative seats that a government party contributes to the government coalition in support of gamson s law of portfolio allocation this article examines government formation as a process in which both the government coalition and the formateur are determined endogenously in equilibrium if parties have similar preferences over cabinet portfolios the share of seats they are allocated is proportional to the parties sizes

information technology and its impact on productivity firm level evidence from government and private data sources 1977 1993 robert solow s quip that we see computers everywhere but in the productivity statistics has prompted a large and growing literature examining the information productivity paradox some aggregate and industry level studies have failed to detect a positive contribution to productivity growth from investments in computer technology more recent studies utilizing firm level data however have detected a significant contribution this paper confirms the results of these latter studies using u s firm level computer asset and financial data for nonagricultural firms during the period 1977 1993 from a variety of data sources including the u s census bureau s enterprise and auxiliary establishment surveys compustat and computer intelligence infocorp a market research firm our principal finding that computers especially personal computers do contribute positively to productivity growth suggests that the traditional information productivity paradox is largely a measurement problemn this is closely related to the more general problem of assessing service sector productivity because computers are used most intensively in the service sector and in the service functions of non service sector firms e g payroll and purchasing as zvi griliches 1994 noted these activities pose the greatest problems for output and productivity measurement moreover although we may see computers everywhere they represent only a tiny fraction of capital stock on about 2 of plant property and equipment so aggregate effects may be hard to detect oliner and sichel 1993 our data indicate that computers not only contributed to productivity growth during the period 1977 1993 but they yielded excess returns relative to other types of capital the data also suggest that computer productivity peaked around 1986 1987 3 that computers are complementary with skilled labour krueger 1993 and autor katz and krueger 1997 and that use of computers may permit reductions in inventory levels finally and perhaps most interesting the evidence

bargaining in legislatures bargaining in legislatures is conducted according to formal rules specifying who may make proposals and how they will be decided legislative outcomes depend on those rules and on the structure of the legislature although the social choice literature provides theories about voting equilibria it does not endogenize the formation of the agenda on which the voting is based and rarely takes into account the institutional structure found in legislatures in our theory members of the legislature act noncooperatively in choosing strategies to serve their own districts explicitly taking into account the strategies members adopt in response to the sequential nature of proposal making and voting the model permits the characterization of a legislative equilibrium reflecting the structure of the legislature and also allows consideration of the choice of elements of that structure in a context in which the standard institution free model of social choice theory yields no equilibrium

elections coalitions and legislative outcomes predictions of electoral behavior in a multiparty setting should be a function of the voters beliefs about how parties will perform following an election similarly party behavior in a legislature should be a function of electoral promises and rewards we develop a multistage game theoretic model of three party competition under proportional representation the final policy outcome of the game is generated by a noncooperative bargaining game between the parties in the elected legislature this game is essentially defined by the vote shares each party receives in the general election and the parties electoral policy positions at the electoral stage parties and voters are strategic in that they take account of the legislative implications of any electoral outcome we solve for equilibrium electoral positions by the parties and final policy outcomes

elections governments and parliaments in proportional representation systems this paper presents a theory of parliamentary systems with a proportional representation electoral system a formateur selected based on party representation in parliament and parties that cannot commit to the policies they will implement once in government government formation involves efficient proto coalition bargaining and elections yield unique strong nash equilibrium outcomes depending on the status quo minimal majority surplus or consensus governments can form if parties and voters are myopic and the status quo is subject to shocks consensus governments and centrist policies occur only in a crisis otherwise governments are minimal winning and policies reflect only the preferences of the government parties

the effect of literacy on immigrant earnings we examine the impact of literacy on immigrant earnings and the sources of lower returns to education and experience among immigrants we find that the native born literacy distribution dominates that for immigrants however the two groups obtain similar returns to literacy skills contrary to discrimination based explanations for immigrant native born earnings differentials among the university educated literacy differences account for about two thirds of the earnings gap however low returns to foreign experience have a larger impact on this differential among the less educated literacy differences and differences in the returns to experience have similar effects on the earnings differential

understanding speaking reading writing and earnings in the immigrant labor market an immigrant s ability to understand the spoken word is a preeminent english ability for labor market success on average reading writing and speaking ability are not significantly predictors of immigrant wages after considering ability to understand the spoken word the magnitude of the wage impact of understanding only is similar to that found in the literature on speaking only suggesting their kinship in an underlying construct of english proficiency and reinforcing the finding that language matters these findings indicate that hearing and comprehending are perhaps most fundamental in the immigrant labor market the findings also suggest that after having achieved a given level of understanding of the spoken word then improved skills in speaking reading and writing do matter to employers understanding is the key starting place to getting into the labor market and that subsequent incremental increases in productivity may require a greater array of english skills

policy specific information and informal agenda power in gilligan and krehbiel s models of procedural choice in legislatures a committee exerts costly effort to acquire private information about an unknown state of the world subsequent work on expertise delegation and lobbying has largely followed this approach in contrast we develop a model of information as policy valence we use our model to analyze a procedural choice game focusing on the effect of transferability i e the extent to which information acquired to implement one policy option can be used to implement a different policy option we find that when information is transferable as in gilligan and krehbiel s models closed rules can induce committee specialization however when information is policy specific open rules are actually superior for inducing specialization the reason for this surprising result is that a committee lacking formal agenda power has a greater incentive to exercise informal agenda power by exerting costly effort to generate high valence legislation

redistributing income under proportional representation although majoritarian decision rules are the norm in legislatures relatively few democracies use simple majority rule at the electoral stage adopting instead some form of multiparty proportional representation moreover aggregate data suggest that average income tax rates are higher and distributions of posttax income flatter in countries with proportional representation than in those with majority rule while there are other differences between these countries this paper explores how variations in the political system per se influence equilibrium redistributive tax rates and income distributions a three party proportional representation model is developed in which taxes are determined through legislative bargaining among successful electoral parties and the economic decision for individuals is occupational choice political economic equilibria for this model and for a two party winner take all majoritarian system are derived and compared

government turnover in parliamentary democracies in this paper we consider a dynamic model of government formation and termination in parliamentary democracies that accounts for the following phenomena 1 cabinet terminations due to replacement or early election 2 cabinet reshuf es 3 minority and surplus governments 4 the relative instability of minority governments

spatial models of legislative effectiveness spatial models of policymaking have evolved from the median voter theorem through the inclusion of institutional considerations such as political parties committees and various voting and amendment rules such models however implicitly assume that no policy is more effective than another at solving public policy problems and that all proposers are equally capable of advancing proposals we relax these assumptions by modeling proposal quality and the effort needed to make better proposals the resulting legislative effectiveness model lem offers three main benefits first it can better account for policy changes based on the effectiveness or popularity of the status quo changing our understanding of how to overcome gridlock in polarized legislatures second it generalizes canonical models of legislative politics such as median voter setter negative agenda setting and pivotal politics models all of which emerge as special cases within the lem third the lem offers significant new empirical predictions some of which we initially test and find support for within the u s congress

stable governments and the allocation of policy portfolios different members of coalition governments typically have responsibility for different aspects or dimensions of policy such responsibilities are allocated as portfolios to government members given a distribution of such portfolios final government policy is derived as the accumulation of individual members decisions in regard to their respective responsibilities we develop a portfolio allocation model of government formation and policy decision in multiparty legislatures in particular we focus on stable portfolio allocations where a stable allocation is one that yields a policy that no legislative coalition is willing or able to overturn several notions of stability are considered and related to the usual concept of the core among the results are that although stable allocations are not guaranteed such allocations can exist with minority governments and that final policy outcomes associated with stable governments need not be centrist

inefficiency in legislative policymaking a dynamic analysis this paper develops an infinite horizon model of public spending and taxation in which policy decisions are determined by legislative bargaining the policy space incorporates both productive and distributive public spending and distortionary taxation the productive spending is investing in a public good that benefits all citizens e g national defense and the distributive spending is district specific transfers e g pork barrel spending investment in the public good creates a dynamic linkage across policymaking periods the analysis explores the dynamics of legislative policy choices focusing on the efficiency of the steady state level of

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

the endogeneity between language and earnings international analyses this study is concerned with the determinants of dominant language fluency its effects on earnings and its endogeneity with earnings among immigrants dominant language fluency is hypothesized to

reputation and earnings the roles of quality and quantity in academe we examine the determinants of professional reputation does quantity of exposures raise reputation independent of quality does quality of the most important exposure have extra effects on reputation in a very large sample of academic economists there is little evidence that a scholar s most influential work provides any extra enhancement of reputation quality rankings matter more than absolute quality quantity has a zero or even negative effect on proxies for reputation data on salaries however show positive effects of quantity independent of quality we test explanations for the differences between the determinants of reputation and salary jel l14 j31

initial labor market conditions and long term outcomes for economists each year graduate students entering the academic job market worry that they will suffer due to uncontrollable macroeconomic risk given the importance of general human capital and the relative ease of publicly observing productivity in academia one might expect that long term labor market outcomes for students graduating in unfavorable climates will resemble long term outcomes for those graduating in favorable climates in this paper i analyze the relationship between macroeconomic conditions at graduation initial job placement and long term outcomes for ph d economists from seven programs using macroeconomic conditions as an instrument for initial placement i show that a quality and type of initial job have a causal effect on long term job characteristics i also show that better initial placement increases research productivity which helps to limit the set of economic models that can explain the effect of initial placement on long term jobs

demand commitment in legislative bargaining morelli 1999 provides a model of government formation in which the parties make payoff demands and the order of moves is chosen by the leading party morelli s main proposition states that the ex post distribution of payoffs inside the coalition that forms is proportional to the distribution of relative ex ante bargaining power we provide a counterexample in which the leading party is able to obtain the entire payoff furthermore there are coalitions for which proportional payoff division does not occur for any order of moves

the budget process and the size of the budget the new congressional budget process provides members of congress with a new set of institutional mechanisms for making budget decisions this article addresses the question of whether or under what conditions rigid application of the new budget process modeled as first selection of the size of the budget and second its division produces smaller budgets than a piecemeal appropriations process in which the size of the budget is determined residually the theoretical result is that the new process sometimes results in relatively large budgets a testable implication of the theory is that given a choice of how stringently the budget process is to be employed members of congress jointly consider preferences and the expected outcomes under available institutional arrangements and select the arrangement usually a rule that yields the most favorable outcome empirical results from the budget process in the house from 1980 to 1983 are generally supportive of the theoretically derived hypothesis of rational choice of institutional arrangements

the effect of language on economic behavior evidence from savings rates health behaviors and retirement assets languages dier widely in the ways they encode time i test the hypothesis that languages that grammatically associate the future and the present foster future oriented behavior this prediction arises naturally when well documented eects of language structure are merged with models of intertemporal choice empirically i nd that speakers of such languages save more retire with more wealth smoke less practice safer sex and are less obese this holds both across countries and within countries when comparing demographically similar native households the evidence does not support the most obvious forms of common causation i discuss implications for theories of intertemporal choice

e commerce trends and impacts across europe abstract this study investigates patterns in electronic commerce e commerce activities and their impact on labour productivity growth for a group of 14 european countries at hand for the exercise is a unique panel of micro aggregated firm level data spanning the years 2002 2010 the empirical approach involves two main elements a static specification and a dynamic panel data model the former is a difference specification estimated by ols and the latter model uses the system gmm estimator to account for endogeneity of e commerce activities for the impact analysis e commerce is defined specifically as e sales that is orders firms receive electronically through edi or websites descriptive statistics reveal that the proportion of firms engaging in e sales activities after starting from a low level is slowly growing over time the ols estimates which control for industry time and country effects show that the changes in e sales activities and labour productivity growth are significantly positively related specifically an increase in e sales by one percentage point raises labour productivity growth by 0 3 percentage points over a two year period service industries experience a larger impact than does manufacturing similar results are produced by the dynamic panel data estimations which show that the increase in e sales activities during the period studied accounts for 18 per cent of the total growth in labour productivity in addition the results demonstrate that smaller firms gain the most from increases in e sales overall the magnitude of the estimates differs less across methods than it does between industries or over time

language fluency and earnings estimation with misclassified language indicators we use panel data to analyze the determinants of speaking fluency and wages of immigrants our model takes account of two problems that may bias ols estimates of the impact of speaking fluency on earnings first subjective variables on an ordinal discrete scale such as self reported language ability can suffer from misclassification errors the model decomposes misclassification errors into a time persistent and a time varying component second the model accounts for correlated unobserved heterogeneity in language and earnings equation the main finding is that these two generalizations of the standard model both lead to substantial changes in the estimated effect of speaking fluency on earnings

revealed performances worldwide rankings of economists and economics departments 1990 2000 in this paper i study the production of academic research by economics departments and economists worldwide rankings are provided based on both citations and publications these rankings reveal a dominant position of the united states in the production of economics literature over time however the extent of this dominance is decreasing jel a10 a14

ict and productivity growth in the united kingdom this paper develops new estimates of investment in and output of information and communication technology ict these new estimates imply that gdp growth has been significantly understated particularly since 1994 a growth accounting approach is employed to measure the contribution of ict to the growth of both aggregate output and aggregate input on both counts the contribution of ict has been rising over time from 1989 to 1998 ict output contributed a fifth of overall gdp growth since 1989 55 per cent of capital deepening the growth of capital per hour worked has been contributed by ict capital since 1994 this proportion has risen to 90 per cent ict capital deepening accounts for 25 per cent of the growth of labour productivity over 1989 98 and 48 per cent over 1994 8 but even when output growth is adjusted for the new ict estimates both labour productivity and tfp growth are still found to slow down after 1994

the top 1 percent in international and historical perspective world top incomes database at http topincomes parisschoolofeconomics eu and has represented a challenge to the economics profession stories based on the and has represented a challenge to the economics profession stories based on the supply and demand for skills are not enough to explain the extreme top tail of supply and demand for skills are not enough to explain the extreme top tail of the earnings distribution nor is it enough to look only at earned incomes different the earnings distribution nor is it enough to look only at earned incomes different approaches are necessary to explain what has happened in the united states over approaches are necessary to explain what has happened in the united states over the past century and also to explain the differing experience in other high income the past century and also to explain the differing experience in other high income countries over recent decades we begin with the international comparison in the countries over recent decades we begin with the international comparison in the fi rst section and then turn to the causes and implications of the evolution of top fi rst section and then turn to the causes and implications of the evolution of top income shares income shares

english proficiency and labor market performance evidence from the economics profession this article investigates whether the global spread of the english language provides an inherent advantage to native english speakers this question is studied within the context of the economics profession where the impact of being a native english speaker on future publishing success is examined english speakers may have an advantage because they are writing in their native language the quality of writing is a crucial determinant of publishing success and all the top economics journals are published in english using a ranking of the world s top 2 5 of economists this article confirms that native english speakers are ranked 100 spots higher better than similar non native english speakers a variety of extensions examine and dispel many other potential explanations jel a11 j44 f66

elections with platform and valence competition abstract we study a game in which candidates first choose platforms and then invest in costly valences e g engage in campaign spending the marginal return to valence depends on platform polarization the closer platforms are the more valence affects the election outcome consequently candidates without policy preferences choose divergent platforms to soften valence competition moreover exogenous increases in incentives for valence accumulation lead to both increased valence and increased polarization the latter because candidates seek to avoid the costs of extra valence as a result the increase in valence is smaller than it would have been with exogenous platforms finally the model highlights the overlooked substantive importance of common modeling assumptions changing the source of uncertainty in our model from noise around the median voter s ideal point to a shock to one candidate s valence as is common in the literature leads to complete platform convergence for all parameter values

electoral rules strategic entry and polarization abstract how does electoral rule disproportionality affect the structure of the party system i e the number and the policy platforms of the competing parties by studying a model where both party entry and platform choice are endogenous we are able to provide a unified theory an increasing electoral rule disproportionality exhibits a a first order negative effect on platform polarization b a second order negative effect on the number of parties as polarization decreases centrist parties are squeezed between other contenders and prefer not to enter and c an additional third order negative effect on polarization via the reduction of the number of parties we then conduct a laboratory experiment and strongly confirm the theoretical predictions of the model

the slowdown of the economics publishing process over the last three decades there has been a dramatic slowdown of the publication process at top economics journals a substantial part is due to journals requiring more extensive revisions various explanations are considered democratization of the review process increases in the complexity of papers growth of the profession and cost and benefit arguments changes in the profession are examined using time series data connections between these changes and the slowdown are examined using paper level data there is evidence for some explanations but most of the slowdown remains unexplained changes may reflect evolving social norms

coalition theory and its applications a survey we survey some of the major advances in coalition theory in recent years we then look at the recent applications of the theory in the area of political economy and touch upon some important theoretical and applied open questions in the field

a model of candidate location when one candidate has a valence advantage that under some fairly weak assumptions for all levels of the valence advantage the advantaged candidate chooses a more moderate position than the disadvantaged candidate empirical studies of congressional elections by fiorina 1973 and ansolabehere snyder and stewart 2001 support this result d owns 1957 seminal work presents a puzzle for scholars of u s elections why do candidates not converge to the median voter one of the best explanations is that the candidates themselves have ideological preferences as calvert 1985 and wittman 1977 1983 have shown when candidates have such preferences and they are sufficiently uncertain about the preferences of the median voter then they do not converge although they may moderate their positions from their ideal point the basic version of the calvert wittman model however does not account for another basic fact of u s elections often one of the candidates has an advantage due to a nonpolicy factor such as incumbency greater campaign funds better name recognition superior charisma superior intelligence and so on stokes has dubbed such factors valence factors and he has noted their importance in u s elections stokes 1963 1992 1 in this article i extend the basic calvert wittman model by giving one candidate a valence advantage over the other i show that if the valence characteristics of the candidates are approximately equal then when a candidate s valence advantage increases this causes her to move toward the

quantifying the impact of ict capital on output growth a heterogeneous dynamic panel approach using industry data for the united states and the united kingdom we provide new evidence on the impact of information and communications technology ict capital on real output growth the traditional industry panel data analysis fails to find a positive contribution we argue that this is due to heterogeneity across industries particularly in the time dimension pooling the data for the two countries and using a dynamic panel data estimation method yield a positive and significant effect of ict on output growth individual country estimates suggest a strong impact in the united states while results are less conclusive in the united kingdom

top incomes in the long run of history a recent literature has constructed top income shares time series over the long run for more than twenty countries using income tax statistics top incomes represent a small share of the population but a very significant share of total income and total taxes paid hence aggregate economic growth per capita and gini inequality indexes are sensitive to excluding or including top incomes we discuss the estimation methods and issues that arise when constructing top income share series including income definition and comparability over time and across countries tax avoidance and tax evasion we provide a summary of the key empirical findings most countries experience a dramatic drop in top income shares in the first part of the twentieth century in general due to shocks to top capital incomes during the wars and depression shocks top income shares do not recover in the immediate postwar decades however over the last thirty years top income shares have increased substantially in english speaking countries and in india and china but not in continental european countries or japan this increase is due in part to an unprecedented surge in top wage incomes as a result wage income comprises a larger fraction of top incomes than in the past finally we discuss the theoretical and empirical models that have been proposed to account for the facts and the main questions that remain open

policy divergence in multicandidate probabilistic spatial voting existing models of multicandidate spatial competition with probabilistic voting typically predict a high degree of policy convergence yet in actual elections candidates advocate quite divergent sets of policies what accounts for this disparity between theory and empirical observation i introduce two variations on the basic probabilistic vote model which may account for candidate policy divergence 1 a model which incorporates candidate specific variables so that candidates may enjoy nonpolicy related electoral advantages or disadvantages 2 a model which allows nonzero correlations between the random terms associated with voters candidate utilities thereby capturing situations where voters view two or more candidates as similar on nonpolicy grounds i report candidate equilibrium analyses for each model which show far greater policy divergence than exists under the standard probabilistic vote model i then analyze the strategic logic which underlies these results

beyond the median voter preferences district heterogeneity and political representation despite the centrality of the median voter prediction in political economy models overwhelming empirical evidence shows that legislators regularly take positions that diverge significantly from the preferences of the median voter in their districts however all these empirical studies to date lack the necessary data to directly measure the preferences of the median voter we utilize a unique data set consisting of individual level voting data that allows us to construct direct measures of voter preferences we find that legislators are most constrained by the preferences of the median voter in homogeneous districts

logrolling under fragmented authoritarianism theory and evidence from china this paper provides a rigorous theoretical and empirical analysis of the effect of logrolling between interest groups on social welfare in a non democratic political system in particular we focus on china where bureaucratic interest groups are separate vertical organizations reaching down from beijing to the provinces and cities the key question in this paper is what are the effects of the logrolling of parochial interest groups on state policies and social welfare in autocracies we address this question both theoretically and empirically the theory predicts a specific distortion in resource allocation because of logrolling while the empirical results confirm the theoretical prediction we find policy outcomes under logrolling are characterized by excessive spending on all the interest groups preferred goods and insufficient spending on public goods we test the existence of logrolling between the ministry of civil affairs and ministry of health in china our result shows logrolling between the two ministries lead to inefficiencies in social security and health care policies

electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization despite common perception existing theoretical literature lacks a complete for mal argument regarding the relationship between the electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization in this paper we build a model that incorporates the disproportionality of the electoral system in a standard downsian electoral competition setup with mainly but not necessarily purely policy motivated parties we first show that in equilibrium platform polarization is decreasing in the level of the electoral rule disproportionality we then argue that the number of parties has a positive effect on platform polarization when polarization is measured by the distance between the two most distant platforms this effect does not hold when polarization is measured by the widely used dalton index constructing a dataset covering more than 300 elections our main theoretical findings are empirically supported pointing towards the electoral rule disproportionality as a major determinant of polarization

competitive policy development we present a model of policy development in which competing factions have different ideologies yet agree on certain common objectives policy developers can appeal to a decision maker by making productive investments to improve the quality of their proposals these investments are specific to a given proposal which means that policy developers can potentially obtain informal agenda power competition undermines this agenda power forcing policy developers to craft policies that are better for the decision maker this beneficial effect is strongest if policy developers have divergent ideological preferences because their intense desire to affect policy motivates them to develop higher quality proposals jel d72 d73 d78 e61 during the early years of the new deal president franklin delano roosevelt faced an enormous challenge he believed that dramatic policy innovation was urgently needed on a wide range of issues including agriculture trade banking employment and social insurance however although roosevelt was well versed in policy crafting workable proposals for such a far reaching agenda was well beyond his capacity or that of his immediate advisors instead the president had to rely on a broader array of politicians and bureaucrats to develop new policies although these individuals shared some common goals e g ending the great depression they also had deep seated ideological disagreements among themselves and with the president about what policies the federal government should pursue classic and contemporary theories of bureaucratic politics would suggest that this situation was ripe for exploitation and inefficiency weber 1991 famously argued that the typical ruler of a modern state is reduced to being a mere dilettante when dealing with institutionalized bureaucratic actors more recently scholars

does the new economy measure up to the great inventions of the past abstract during the four years 1995 99 u s productivity growth experienced a strong revival and achieved growth rates exceeding that of the golden age of 1913 72 accordingly many observers have declared the new economy to be an industrial revolution even more important than the second industrial revolution of 1860 1900 which made the golden age of productivity growth possible this paper dissects the recent productivity revival subtracts out a cyclical component and concludes that there is no revival of the productivity growth trend in the 88 percent of the private economy lying outside of the durables manufacturing sector the paper explains this surprising finding by pointing to limitations in computers and the internet in comparison with the great inventions of the past

electoral competition and agricultural support in oecd countries agricultural trade protectionism in developed countries remains a politically charged issue yet few studies have attempted to explain the political dynamics behind this important trade issue we consider agricultural subsidies as a type of distributive policy that targets the agricultural sector at the expense of consumers and taxpayers based on cox 1987 1990 and myerson 1993 we argue that electoral systems that encourage politicians to appeal to a narrow constituency tend to have a higher level of agricultural support we test this theoretical hypothesis using oecd agricultural support data disaggregated by commodity and country a cross classified multilevel model is employed to account for complex variation of agricultural support across countries commodities and time our empirical results show that electoral systems that encourage politicians to target narrow broad constituencies are associated with relatively high low levels of agricultural subsidies

is there a broader deeper trade off in international multilateral agreements it is commonly thought that there is a trade off between the breadth and depth of multilateral institutions that is multilaterals that are more inclusive in their memberships will necessarily be shallower in their level of cooperation using a multilateral bargaining model with self seeking rational actors i show that such a trade off does not exist for a broad class of multilateral cooperation problems the conclusion that there is a broader deeper trade off follows from the assumption that the members of the multilateral must set their policies at an identical level the multi lateral agreement modeled in this article allows states to set their policies at different levels once this change is made there is no broader deeper trade off a finding that has obvious empirical and policy implications it explains why some regimes are created with fairly large memberships at the outset and it calls into question the policy prescription of limiting membership of multilateral institutions to a small group of committed cooperators for the class of cooperation problems modeled in this article

comparing electoral systems a geometric analysis this paper constructs a game theoretic model of elections inalternative electoral systems with three or four candidates each electoral system specifies how the platforms of thecandidates and their scores give rise to an outcome whengeometrical analysis shows that two outcomes can competeagainst each other for victory a pivot probability isassociated to that pair each voter is rational and picks thecandidate that maximizes her expected utility which resultsfrom the balancing of her preferences and beliefs about thepivot probabilities candidate positioning is endogenous andthe result of a nash game the possible equilibria arecomputed for plurality and runoff majority systems

voting weights and formateur advantages in the formation of coalition governments over the last two decades a large and important literature has emerged that uses game theoretic models of bargaining to study legislative coalitions to test key predictions of these models we examine the composition of coalition governments from 1946 and 2001 these predictions are almost always expressed in terms of parties minimal integer voting weights we calculate such weights for all parliamentary parties in addition we develop a statistical model that nests the predictions of many of these models of the distribution of posts we find that for parties that join but did not form the government there is a linear relationship between their share of the voting weight in parliament and their share of cabinet posts the party that forms the government the formateur receives a substantial bonus relative to its voting weight the latter finding is more consistent with proposal based bargaining models of coalition formation and suggests that parties gain disproportionate power not because of their size but because of their proposal power

increasing returns labour utilization and externalities procyclical productivity in the united states and japan this paper investigates procyclical productivity and attempts to discriminate among several competing explanations the study focuses on the united states and japan since the different industrial relations in these two economies serve to cast a sharper light on the procyclical productivity debate labour hoarding evaluated through the introduction of a labour utilization proxy proves to be an important influence the interpretation of the role of external economies remains an open issue

party policy and campaign costs in a multi constituency model of electoral competition in this essay a multi constituency model of electoral competition was developed under the assumption that party candidates possessed no effective autonomy such a model describes the polar extreme opposite that of the more common single constituency framework in which candidates have complete autonomy the existence of a nash equilibrium to the multi constituency election game was established under the assumption that parties maximize the expected number of winning seats or behaved as pure independents under any other reasonable election goal e g maximize probability of winning a majority of constituencies this existence breaks down the nature of any equilibrium was investigated in some detail and the influence of campaign costs both statutory and non statutory on party behaviour analysed this was found to be qualitatively important in particular differingeconomic resources between parties is sufficient to prevent convergence inpolicy space

making the first move a two stage analysis of the role of formateurs in parliamentary government formation a standard conclusion of theorists who model bargaining as a non cooperative game is that the party designated to make the first move the formateur party will determine the bargaining outcome most empirical studies of parliamentary coalition formation have paid surprisingly little attention to the formation process in this paper we model government formation as a two stage unordered discrete choice problem that better reflects this process the first step involves the selection of a formateur party and the second involves the choice of partners by the predicted formateur we evaluate several hypotheses for the two stages using a data set of all cabinets formed in the western european countries from 1970 to 2006 in our analyses of formateur selection we find that party size is clearly the dominant feature in the second stage we show that when predicting government composition it is fruitful to add information drawn from a first stage analysis

legislators and interest groups how unorganized interests get represented this paper derives a supply price for public policy using a constrained maximization model in the model three sets of agents each have preferences over outcomes organized interest groups offer campaign contributions to improve their own wealth voters offer votes to obtain outcomes closer to their most preferred outcomes and legislators seek both campaign contributions and votes to obtain reelection a given legislator s supply price for policy is shown to depend on the productivity of his effort as determined by committee assignments priority and ability and by the preferences of his unorganized constituency in the home district two extreme assumptions about the effectiveness of campaign spending in eliciting votes are used to illustrate the comparative statics properties of the model the prediction of the model is that interest groups will in general seek out legislators whose voters are indifferent to the policy the interest group seeks thus voters who do have preferences over policy are in effect represented even though they are not organized

demographic diversity and district level party systems scholars of electoral politics have long argued that the size of a party system is jointly determined by social diversity and district magnitude however no clear consensus exists regarding the best operationalization of the diversity of a society furthermore the relationship between diversity and electoral rules on one hand and the effective number of parties on the other hand has never been tested at the level of the electoral district in a cross national comparative context this article aims to fill both holes and introduces the concept of cross district diversity i argue that the extent of cross district diversity in a country exerts a substantial qualifying impact on the relationship between district level diversity and the effective number of parties support for this finding emerges from a multilevel regression analysis that includes thousands of electoral districts in a diverse set of 29 democracies

shades of brown and green party effects in proportional election systems small parties play an important role in proportional election systems for exam ple the emergence and electoral success of environmental and anti immigration parties have constituted one of the central changes in the political landscape in europe over the last three decades but we do not know if this has actually had any implications for policy since no methods exist for credibly estimating the eect of legislative represen tation in proportional election systems because party representation is not randomly assigned both observable and unobservable factors in uence policy outcomes as well as party representation using a part of the legislative seat allocation that is as good as random i estimate the causal eect of party representation on immigration policy environmental policy and tax policy i use data swedish municipalities where key poli cies for each policy area are under direct jurisdiction of the municipal councils the results show that party representation has a large eect on the rst two policies but not on the tax policy

expectations and informal rules in coalition formation why do informal rules emerge alongside and at variance with the formal constitutional constraints that shape bargaining over coalition governments the presence of informal rules at odds with formal rules appears as an anomaly within both institution free and institution focused theories of coalitions the author argues that politicians create informal rules in order to alter formal institutions that do not function to their benefit the costs of a formal change in institutions offer incentives to politicians to invent informal rules as alternatives to such change and repeated interactions teach politicians what to expect and then invent the author s emphasis on the manipulability of rules echoes long standing themes in the study and practice of politics

dynamic linkages between diffusion of information communication technology and labour productivity in south asia at present diffusion of information communication technology ict is a significant area of concern for sustainable development and growth of a country regions with abundant labour such as south asia require significant improvements in the diffusion of ict to achieve higher productivity for their labour which in turn can increase the pace of economic growth in this context the objective of this study is to investigate whether ict could be used to improve labour productivity for countries in south asia this study first investigates the general status of diffusion of ict among south asian countries the initial results based on descriptive statistics indicate that there is a significant gap among the south asian countries with maldives having the highest ict facilities second using robust panel data methodologies this study concludes that south asia s drive for higher productivity of its abundant labour force can substantially be improved in the long run by increasing diffusion of ict in the prese

judicial power in domestic and international politics although scholars have made considerable progress on a number of important research questions by relaxing assumptions commonly used to divide polit ical science into subfields rigid boundaries remain in some contexts in this essay we suggest that the assumption that international politics is characterized by anarchy whereas domestic politics is characterized by hierarchy continues to divide research on the conditions under which governments are constrained by courts international or domestic we contend that we will learn more about the process by which courts constrain governments and do so more quickly if we relax the assumption and rec ognize the substantial similarities between domestic and international research on this topic we review four recent books that highlight contemporary theories of the extent to which domestic and international law binds states and discuss whether a rigid boundary between international and domestic scholarship can be sustained on either theoretical or empirical grounds