candidate reputations and the incumbency effect abstract a major shortcoming of the classical median voter model is that its central prediction convergence of platforms to the median voter s ideal is seldom observed one reason is that the classical model neglects the importance of voter expectations as a determinant of votes here we associate voters expectations about candidates with past as well as current candidate pronouncements and assume that incumbents whose actions are consistent with their reputations are perceived as less risky than challengers in equilibrium candidates choose distinct platforms typically neither adopts the median voter s ideal point either candidate may win depending on how well the incumbent s reputation reflects current voter tastes and how relatively risky the electorate perceives the challenger to be

why democracies produce efficient results by applying the standard tools of microeconomic analysis i argue that democratic markets work as well as economic markets in particular i show that previous work has greatly exaggerated the existence of principal agent and informational problems in electoral markets and has drawn incorrect conclusions

macroeconomic policy in a two party system as a repeated game this paper considers the interaction of two parties with different objectives concerning inflation and unemployment and rational and forward looking wage setters if discretionary policies are followed an economic cycle related to the political cycle results in equilibrium this cycle is significantly different from the traditional political business cycle reputational mechanisms due to the repeated interaction of the two parties and the public or commitments to a common policy rule can improve upon the discretionary outcome by reducing or eliminating the magnitude of the economic fluctuations

on the feasibility of unpopular policies under re election concerns 1 introduction a common concern about political decision making is that re election motives lead incumbent politicians to select policies that although popular among the electorate are inferior to available less popular alternatives this concern reflected in the notions such as demagogy and mob rule implies that politicians may be penalized for choosing policies that they believe to be the best but ironically are rewarded for choosing popular policies that they do not necessarily believe to be the best in this paper i study this common concern through a series of models 1 for the main model that i will study politicians differ only in utility from holding office the main result is that strong re election motives on the part of the incumbent politicians in general do not render efficient and unpopular policies infeasible in fact i will show that under very general conditions voters voting decisions do not depend on whether the incumbents have chosen popular policy options nor are incumbents policy decisions responsive to policy popularity we may call this result the irrelevance or neutrality of policy popularity note that voters only have limited information and there is a possibility that the unpopular policy may be superior to its alternatives voters would take their policy opinions as tentative and be willing to revise them upon the arrival of new information then an incumbent s re election chances will not deteriorate simply because of her choice of unpopular policies foreseeing this incumbents with even strong re election motives will not find it beneficial to choose popular but inefficient polices 2 to convey the above ideas i will examine an infinite horizon political agency model along the line pioneered by barro 1973 there are two important ingredients in this model first politicians are of two types strong and weak both types of politicians are concerned about both social welfare and the utility gained from holding office whereas the strong type puts a smaller weight on the latter each politician s type is the politician s private information if the politicians were homogeneous the choice between different incumbents would be inconsequential if their heterogeneity were public information voters would not need the politicians past records to infer their preferred future policies in either case the question of policy manipulation would no longer exist in section 6 i will introduce a third type of politicians the second ingredient is a proper modelling of a policy that could be unpopular but potentially superior a policy is popular when more voters think that the policy will yield a welfare greater than those of its alternatives such a policy s popularity reflects its ex ante efficiency as perceived by the electorate the incumbent politician nevertheless observes an additional imperfect information signal about the likely efficacy of the policy 3 therefore a popular policy might be interim inefficient whereas an unpopular policy might be interim efficient one crucial assumption for the policy popularity irrelevance result is that the only difference among politicians is their utility derived from holding office this suggests that for policy popularity to be relevant other sorts of heterogeneity among politicians are needed suppose for instance that the public believes with some probability that the incumbent is ignorant in the sense that she knows about different policy options even less than the public does then a choice of an unpopular policy might signal the incumbent s ignorance an incumbent who is informed but with a strong re election motive might then reject the unpopular policy even if it is interim efficient the rest of the paper is organized as follows section 2 introduces the model section 3 prepares preliminaries for later sections section 4 establishes the efficient perfect bayesian equilibrium under the assumption that voters vote for the candidate who has a greater probability of being strong

assessing the case for social experiments rs ecent academic debates pit two alternative approaches to policy evaluation against one another the first is the experimental approach based on the random assignment of accepted program applicants to a recipient or treatment group and a non recipient or control group the second is the nonexperimental or econometric approach that uses a variety of microdata sources statistical methods and behavioral models to compare the outcomes of participants in social programs with those of nonparticipants the central question addressed in this paper is whether or not randomized social experiments aid in securing answers to basic questions about the evaluation of social programs there are many distinct and complementary approaches to the study of the impact of public policy including full general equilibrium analysis of policy impacts tinbergen 1956 auerbach and kotlikoff 1987 shoven and whalley 1992 kydland and prescott 1991 and less ambitious partial equilibrium microeconomic structural research programs such as those designed to estimate the impact of taxes on labor supply both approaches offer answers to many interesting counterfactual policy questions but their credibility rests critically on the quality of the empirical input used to generate their answers

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

new hampshire s tax base limits an example of the leviathan model this study views the lack of an income tax on wages and salaries and a general sales tax in new hampshire as tax base limits i use the leviathan model to analyze the differences between the fiscal system in new hampshire and the fiscal systems in vermont maine and massachusetts vermont maine and massachusetts do not have the tax base limits that new hampshire has from 1957 to 1989 new hampshire had lower state and local government tax and expenditure levels than the other three states more rapid population growth lower welfare expenditures but comparable levels of expenditures for several of the major public services and a more competitive structure of state and local government

corporate chartering an exploration in the economics of legal change the corporate form of business organization characterized principally by limited liability share transferability and perpetual life existed far in advance of its official recognition by government in the early nineteenth century and before the unincorporated joint stock company offered through private contracts many of the advantages typically thought to reside exclusively in the corporation 1 despite these deep historical roots however the legal framework surrounding the corporation as we know it today is a relatively recent phenomenon permission to incorporate was long granted sparingly by the state and when granted was accompanied by restrictions on the amount of authorized capital on the scope of operations and on the length of the corporate franchise permission to incorporate for any lawful purpose was not common until 1875 2 thus while corporateness flourished early regulation delayed the beginning of the chartered corporation s rise to prominence until not much more than a century ago

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

making the most out of programme evaluations and social experiments accounting for heterogeneity in programme impacts the conventional approach to social programme evaluation focuses on estimating mean impacts of programmes yet many interesting questions regarding the political economy of programmes the distribution of programme benefits and the option values conferred on programme participants require knowledge of the distribution of impacts or features of it this paper presents evidence that heterogeneity in response to programmes is empirically important and that classical probability inequalities are not very informative in producing estimates or bounds on the distribution of programme impacts we explore two methods for supplementing the information in these inequalities based on assumptions about participant decision making processes and about the strength in dependence between outcomes in the participation and non participation states dependence is produced as a consequence of rational choice by participants we test for stochastic rationality among programme participants and present and implement methods for estimating the option values of social programmes

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

the displacement effect in the growth of governments we analyze the displacement effect within a multivariaterevenue expenditure model of government growth based on along historical dataset for italy our long run analysisshows a permanent influence of domestic product on the growthof governments supporting wagner s law the short rundynamics are more complex and provide some evidence for thedisplacement effect in terms of a lower resistance againsttax financing of government spending in the post war inaddition government spending adjusts faster when deviationsfrom its equilibrium get larger

the power to tax analytical foundations of a fiscal constitution preface 1 taxation in constitutional perspective 2 natural government a model of leviathan 3 constraints on base and rate structure 4 the taxation of commodities 5 taxation through time income taxes capital taxes and public debt 6 money creation and taxation 7 the disposition of public revenues 8 the domain of politics 9 open economy federalism and taxing authority 10 toward authentic tax reform prospects and prescriptions epilogue notes selected bibliography index

sensitivity to exogeneity assumptions in program evaluation in many empirical studies of the effect of social programs researchers assume that conditional on a set of observed covariates assignment to the treatment is exogenous or unconfounded aka selection on observables often this assumption is not realistic and researchers are concerned about the robustness of their results to departures from it one approach e g charles manski 1990 is to entirely drop the exogeneity assumption and investigate what can be learned about treatment effects without it with unbounded outcomes and in the absence of alternative identifying assumptions there are no restrictions on the set of possible values for average treatment effects this does not mean however that all evaluations are equally sensitive to departures from the exogeneity assumption in this paper i explore an alternative approach developed by paul rosenbaum and donald rubin 1983 where the assumption of exogeneity is explicitly relaxed by allowing for a limited amount of correlation between treatment and unobserved components of the outcomes the starting point of the sensitivity analysis is the assumption that the exogeneity assumption is satisfied only conditional on an additional unobserved covariate making assumptions about the effect of the unobserved covariate on the outcome and its correlation with the treatment i trace out the set of possible values for the treatment effect of interest by considering a sufficiently large set of possible correlations with outcomes and treatment one can recover the bounds on the treatment effect derived by manski 1990 the approach here in the spirit of rosenbaum and rubin 1983 and rosenbaum 1995 is to allow only a limited amount of correlation and to judge the sensitivity of average treatment effect estimates to such correlations there are two novel features of the proposed analysis first rather than formulate the sensitivity in terms of coefficients on the unobserved covariate the sensitivity results are presented in terms of partial r values which may be easier to interpret second the partial r values of the unobserved covariates are compared to those for the observed covariates in order to facilitate judgments regarding the plausibility of values necessary to substantially change results obtained under exogeneity the proposed sensitivity analysis is conceptually related to the practice of assessing sensitivity of estimates by comparisons with results obtained by discarding one or more observed covariates james heckman and v joseph hotz 1989 rajeev dehejia and sadek wahba 1999 jeffrey smith and petra todd 2001 the attraction of the sensitivity analysis is that it is more directly relevant one is not interested in what would have happened in the absence of covariates actually observed but in biases that are the result from not observing all relevant covariates

property tax revaluation and tax levy growth abstract jurisdiction wide property revaluation like many administrative reforms may have unintended consequences this paper examines one such potential consequence by pooling 18 year time series for each of 39 massachusetts cities 17 of which revalued and 270 massachusetts towns 202 of which revalued we examine the hypothesis that politicians take advantage of the confusion generated by revaluation and raise property taxes by more than they otherwise would have we observe such a response in cities but not in towns and attribute this difference to differences in their governmental structures

the mixing problem in programme evaluation a common concern of evaluation studies is to learn the distribution of outcomes when a specified treatment policy or assignment rule determines the treatment received by each member of a specified population recent studies have emphasized evaluation of policies providing the same treatment to all members of the population in particular experiments with randomized treatments have this objective policies mandating homogenous treatment of the population are of interest but so are ones that permit treatment to vary across the population this paper examines the use of empirical evidence on programs with homogenous treatments to infer the outcomes that would occur if treatment were to vary across the population experimental evidence from the perry preschool project is used to illustrate the inferential problem and the main findings of the analysis

the effect of state and local taxes on economic growth a time series cross section approach results based on pooled time series and cross section data are presented which indicate that state and local tax increases significantly retard economic growth when the revenue is used to fund transfer payments however when the revenue is used instead to finance improved public services such as education highways and public health and safety the favorable impact on location and production decisions provided by the enhanced services may more than counterbalance the disincentive effects of the associated taxes these findings underscore the importance of considering the incentives provided by a state s expenditures as well as by its taxes i n the past several years a number of states have implemented limitations on taxes or expenditures while others have raised tax rates in response to the revenue shortfalls of the early 1980s although much of the ongoing debate over state fiscal structures revolves around expressed preferences over tax expenditure combinations per se the question of how state and local taxes may affect economic growth is often central to the discussion nonetheless the empirical evidence remains sparse previous studies can be divided into two broad categories assessments of the magnitudes of tax costs and statistical analyses of the relationship between tax rates and growth cost studies have tended to minimize the role of taxes in business location decisions either because state and local taxes are a relatively small component of total costs for most businesses or because interstate tax differences are small relative to other cost differences between states although these results suggest that the role played by taxes is a minor one describing how large the tax disparities may be is not the same as ascertaining their economic effect of the statistical studies many including bloom 1955 thompson and mattila 1959 and carlton 1979 1983 find no relationship between taxes and growth however kleine 1977 grieson 1980 and generally grieson et al 1977 report negative correlations romans and subrahmanyam 1979 find growth to be negatively related to the fraction of revenues devoted to transfer payments and a variable which they claim measures personal tax progressivity but positively related to business taxes with the exception of carlton who estimates models of the birth and size of firms within metropolitan areas and the grieson et al 1977 and grieson 1980 studies which consider taxes in new york city and philadelphia these authors use data from a single cross section of states more recently newman 1983 and plaut and pluta 1983 both use cross sectional data from two time periods the former finding negative effects of corporate tax rates and the latter yielding mixed results in this study we utilize a time series from 1965 through 1979 of cross sections of 48 states exploiting the richness of this data set we are able to allow for otherwise unexplained differences between states which could be expected to bias results based on a single cross section moreover this much larger sample provides the statistical power necessary to disentangle the separate effects of different categories of taxes public expenditures and transfer payments a distinguishing feature of this paper is that we explicitly recognize the government budget constraint linking these fiscal variables and the deficit or surplus in addition we have taken account of the effects of labor force characteristics by including variables for wage rates unionization and population density our results indicate that tax increases significantly retard economic growth when the revenue is used to fund transfer payments as a result programs of income redistribution are more effectively undertaken at the federal than at the state and local level on the other hand when the revenue is received for publication april 30 1984 revision accepted for publication january 22 1985 university of california davis i am indebted to the institute of governmental affairs at the university of california davis for financial support to adrienne kandel for invaluable research assistance and to two referees for their helpful comments 1 see williams 1967 morgan and brownlee 1974 vasquez and deseve 1977 and the advisory commission on intergovernmental relations 1981 see also due 1961 for a survey of the early literature including a discussion of the findings and limitations of survey results on this topic 574 1 copyright 1985 this content downloaded from 157 55 39 35 on mon 29 aug 2016 04 45 38 utc all use subject to http about jstor org terms state and local taxes and economic growth 575 used instead to finance enhanced public services such as highways education and public health and safety the favorable impact on location and production decisions provided by the improved services may more than counterbalance the disincentive effects of the concomitant taxes these findings underscore the importance of considering the incentives provided by a state s expenditures as well as by its taxes we begin by sketching a model which provides the basis for the analysis and discussing appropriate estimation techniques then in section ii we describe the data used and our hypotheses the econometric results are presented in section iii followed by brief concluding remarks in the final

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

using experiments to evaluate performance standards what do welfare to work demonstrations reveal to welfare reformers this paper examines how experimental demonstrations can be used to inform planners about the efficacy of social programs in light of a performance standard the problem is illustrated by considering the situation faced by state governments attempting to design programs to meet the new federal welfare to work standards data from experimental evaluations alone allow only limited inferences about the labor market outcomes of welfare recipients combined with prior information on the selection process however these data are informative suggesting either that the long run federal requirements cannot be met or that these standards will only be met under special circumstances