budget processes and commitment to fiscal discipline abstract we present a framework of investigation into the political economy of the budget process our model suggests that institutional rules governing the budget process can be found to limit the importance of fiscal illusion empirical evidence supports that proposition the choice of rules depends on the political environment as well as the dominant source of uncertainty in the budget process

what explains collective action in the commons theory and evidence from the philippines summary i examine the factors that influence collective action in the commons using econometric analyses on a data set of 1958 irrigation associations in the philippines i find that collective action is associated with water scarcity proximity to markets group size farm size and governance structure water scarcity has a curvilinear effect on collective action and is mediated by the governance structure the results suggest the need for a diagnostic approach in the analysis of institutional arrangements in diverse socio ecological settings these also suggest that collective action in the commons is more complex than is conventionally assumed in the decentralization literature

macroeconomic policies and performance in latin america abstract this paper provides new evidence on macroeconomic policies and results in latin america and the caribbean results are i credibility allows adoption of counter cyclical macroeconomic policies ii accuracy in meeting inflation targets depends on central bank independence and country risk iii intermediate exchange rate er regimes have become less persistent iv er regimes matter for inflation and growth v real er trends are not explained by productivity growth and supply reforms do not resolve real er misalignments vi financial integration has increased significantly vii foreign shocks are a major growth determinant and viii composition of foreign capital inflows matters for growth

biased signaling and yardstick comparisons in a sovereign debt market abstract this paper develops a sovereign debt model in which governments are privately informed about their likelihood of default but can themselves have a biased perception of this likelihood i show that in this setup government borrowing acts as a signal that is only partially informative about fundamental default probabilities and bond prices do not necessarily reflect true credit risk i also show that in a two country version of the model correlations between the two countries induces yardstick comparisons and the borrowing decision of one government affects the bond price received by the other whether the information spillover increases or decreases the distortion created by the bias depends on the extent to which borrowing signals reinforce each other

appropriation and concern for resource scarcity in the commons an experimental study abstract we use an experimental linear design and a logit probabilistic choice function to model and estimate agents concern for resource scarcity although full appropriation is the dominant strategy of the basic game whatever the resource size we expect that if agents exploiting a common pool resource feel any concern for resource scarcity they would be more likely to alter their appropriation strategy the scarcer the resource stock our results show that this expectation holds and appropriation is restrained when resources are scarce further as this result could be attributed to both agents concern for resource scarcity and calculation errors in the determination of the appropriation strategies we estimate the relevance of both

exogenous degradation in the commons field experimental evidence abstract this article presents the results from framed field economic experiments in rural colombia that aim to explore the behavioral responses of resource users to exogenous changes in the availability of a common pool resource in the first 10 rounds of the experiment all subjects played at a baseline with the same initial resource availability in the subsequent rounds the experimenters exogenously changed the resource size including mild and strong reductions in the resource size and rebounds to original size results show that subjects react to strong reductions in resource availability by increasing appropriation from the resource this behavior holds for intense and persistent as well as for progressive reductions in resource availability in addition subjects that experience a reduction in the resource availability followed by a rebound to the initial resource size appropriate more than those subjects who did not experience any change in the resource availability

economic determinants of land invasions this study estimates the effect of economic conditions on redistributive conflict we examine land invasions in brazil using a panel data set with over 50 000 municipality year observations adverse eco nomic shocks instrumented by rainfall cause the rural poor to invade and occupy large landholdings this effect exhibits substantial heterogeneity by land inequality and land tenure systems but not by other observable variables in highly unequal municipalities negative income shocks cause twice as many land invasions as in municipalities with average land inequality cross sectional estimates using fine within region variation also suggest the importance of land inequality in explaining redistributive conflict i introduction c onflict over land is endemic to many rural econo mies in environments marked by a highly skewed distribution of property incomplete land and credit markets poorly or unevenly enforced property rights and weak political institutions agents often resort to extralegal means to improve their economic positions the poor frequently invade private properties and occupy them until either forcibly expelled or granted official titles land conflict which is prevalent in many countries such as brazil south africa uganda and venezuela may distort the allocation of resources in the agricultural sector away from productive uses and thereby contribute to the persistence of rural poverty how do economic conditions affect this redistrib utive conflict this paper explores this question using a rich municipal level data set of 5 299 land invasions from 1988 to 2004 in brazil we follow miguel satyanath and sergenti 2004 by using rainfall as a source of exogenous variation to study the relationship between income and conflict and we find that adverse economic shocks cause the rural poor to invade large landholdings this effect exhibits considerable het erogeneity by land inequality and land tenure systems in highly unequal municipalities negative income shocks cause twice as many land invasions as in municipalities with average land inequality the effect of income shocks is even stronger in highly polarized municipalities as measured by the degree of bimodality in the land distribution cross sectional estimates using fine within region variation also suggest the importance of land inequality in explaining redistributive conflict we also find that income shocks cause significantly more land invasions in municipalities with a greater proportion of land under fixed rent contracts by contrast we find no evidence of heterogeneity on a range of other political and socioeconomic variables including political competition sharecropping police expenditures and social welfare spending recent microeconometric studies have examined two

tax base variability and procyclical fiscal policy in developing countries abstract based on a sample of 56 countries we show that fiscal policy in the g7 countries appears to be acyclical while fiscal policy in developing countries is procyclical i e fiscal policy is expansionary in good times and contractionary in bad times to explain this puzzle we develop an optimal fiscal policy model in which running budget surpluses is costly because they create pressures to increase public spending given this distortion a government that faces large fluctuations in the tax base as is the case for developing countries will find it optimal to run a procyclical fiscal policy

transforming traditional university structures for the knowledge economy through multidisciplinary institutes within the uk considerable policy support has been provided to create multidisciplinary institutes that encourage academics to develop new knowledge for industry and societal problems we consider four large traditional uk universities that have gained significant funding for such activities we examine the changes in institutional structures necessary to enable universities to transform from single discipline based schools to multidisciplinary institutes new incentives for working across schools the cross subsidy transfer of industry funded research and teaching income and senior role models are observed to enable the development of a multidisciplinary research capability yet this capability is not easily sustained it appears that for institutes to survive beyond the initial funding round they regress towards traditional school activities of peer reviewed research and teaching we conclude that to transform academic behaviour a fundamental shift in promotion procedures which remain heavily weighted towards peer reviewed journal publication within single disciplines is required copyright the author 2012 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

common property institutions and sustainable governance of resources abstract the literature on common property based resource management comprises many important studies that seek to specify the conditions under which groups of users will self organize and sustainably govern resources upon which they depend using three of the more comprehensive such studies and with an extensive review of writings on the commons this paper demonstrates that the enterprise of generating lists of conditions under which commons are governed sustainably is a flawed and impossibly costly research task for a way out the paper examines the relative merits of statistical comparative and case study approaches to studying the commons it ends with a plea for careful research design and sample selection construction of causal mechanisms and a shift toward comparative and statistical rather than single case analyses such steps are necessary for a coherent empirically relevant theory of the commons

the rise fall and rise again of industrial location theory m ccann p and sheppard s 2003 the rise fall and rise again of industrial location theory reg studies 37 649 663 in this paper we will argue that new academic fashions new international institutional arrangements new communications technology and new developments in data availability have all renewed the need for a redevelopment of analytical industrial location theory our paper will argue that the microeconomic foundations of industrial location theory must now be reconsidered in particular the methodological basis of traditional industrial location models needs to be reconciled with recent models of clustering the new economic geography literature and also more aggregate systemic levels of analysis we will argue that in order to do this it is necessary first to specify the transactions cost assumptions underlying these various approaches second to adopt broader definitions of spatial transactions costs and third to incorporate environmental characteristics within an orthodox loca

environmental versus human induced scarcity in the commons do they trigger the same response we study appropriation strategies in common pool resources where extinction is a credible threat here we present an experimental study of the appropriation of common pool resources in a dynamic setting where resource availability depends on the initial environmental characteristics of the common resource and on human induced resource depletion due to users appropriation patterns our results show that initial resource scarcity limits appropriation by inducing an initial caution among users that persists throughout of the game additionally we find that subjects restrain their appropriation strategies when scarcity increases however this concern for resource scarcity is not enough to prevent resource depletion agents do not counteract the previous rounds appropriation strategies but follow the appropriation trend high appropriation levels are followed by higher appropriation strategies thus promoting the well known tragedy of the commons often concern for resource preservation is not great enough to limit appropriation

constitutional rules and fiscal policy outcomes we investigate the effect of electoral rules and forms of government on fiscal policy outcomes in a large sample of democracies we rely on different estimation methods to address prospective problems of statistical inference due to non random selection of these constitutional rules the findings are consistent with our theoretical priors presidential regimes induce smaller governments than parliamentary democracies while majoritarian elections lead to smaller governments and smaller welfare programs than proportional elections

fiscal policy and monetary integration in europe fiscal policy economists policy makers and the media often argue that the maastricht treaty and the stability and growth pact make it difficult for governments of emu countries to stabilize their economies with appropriate fiscal policy and to provide adequate public investment our empirical analysis offers little support to this view discretionary budget deficits have actually become more counter cyclical in emu countries after the maastricht treaty as well as in the other eu and non eu industrialized countries we study and while public investment has declined recently in emu countries a similar tendency is apparent in other countries and started well before the maastricht treaty was signed jordi gali and roberto perotti

planning to cheat eu fiscal policy in real time using real time data from europe s stability and convergence programs we explore how fiscal plans and their implementation in the eu are determined we find that 1 implemented budgetary adjustment falls systematically short of planned adjustment and this shortfall increases with the projection horizon 2 variability in the eventual fiscal outcomes is dominated by the implementation errors 3 there is a limited role for traditional political variables 4 stock flow adjustments are more important when plans are more ambitious and 5 most importantly both the ambition in fiscal plans and their implementation benefit from stronger national fiscal institutions we emphasize also the importance of credible plans for the eventual fiscal outcomes roel beetsma massimo giuliodori and peter wierts

resource scarcity and antisocial behavior abstract this paper examines whether exposure to persistent resource scarcity on the commons affects pastoralists readiness to engage in antisocial behavior towards their fellow commons users the region under study is divided into two areas according to exogenous variations in biomass production stemming from geological peculiarities we conducted a joy of destruction game with pastoralists from both areas and provide evidence for a positive relationship between antisocial behavior and long term exposure to scarcity antisocial behavior among villagers occurs twice as often in an area where resources are scarcer and competitive pressure is higher our results remain robust to the inclusion of various controls including beliefs socio demographics absolute and relative income and within group inequality if one interprets decreasing another participant s payoff below one s own as a tendency towards conflict behavior our results suggest a higher risk of conflict among resource users in areas of greater scarcity

an economic approach to social capital a standard optimal investment model can be used to analyse an individual s decision to accumulate social capital we analyse six facts that support the predictions of this individual based approach 1 social capital first rises and then falls with age 2 social capital declines with expected mobility 3 social capital rises in occupations with greater returns to social skills 4 social capital is higher among homeowners 5 social connections fall sharply with physical distance 6 people who invest in human capital also invest in social capital we fail to find robust evidence that social capital investments fall with the value of time or that geographic religious groups generate social capital complementarities

regional social capital why it matters malecki e j regional social capital why it matters regional studies social capital refers to a culture of interaction among people with productive economic outcomes social capital promotes regional learning both within a region and beyond as it reinforces openness to the ideas of others regional cultures vary in the degree to which people individually and within their organizations trust and interact with one another which is why regional outcomes vary innovation learning and entrepreneurship key processes of regional development take place largely within and among people as members of companies and territorial organizations innovative milieus industrial districts and knowledge economies are among the regions with extraordinary pools of social capital malecki e j

the voracity effect abstract we analyze an economy that lacks a strong legal political institutional infrastructure and is populated by multiple powerful groups powerful groups dynamically interact via a fiscal process that effectively allows open access to the aggregate capital stock in equilibrium this leads to slow economic growth and a voracity effect by which a shock such as a terms of trade windfall perversely generates a more than proportionate increase in fiscal redistribution and reduces growth we also show that a dilution in the concentration of power leads to faster growth and a less procyclical response to shocks jel f43 o10 o23 o40

over optimism in forecasts by official budget agencies and its implications the paper studies forecasts of real growth rates and budget balances made by official government agencies among 33 countries in general the forecasts are found i to have a positive average bias ii to be more biased in booms and iii to be even more biased at the 3 year horizon than at shorter horizons this over optimism in official forecasts can help explain excessive budget deficits especially the failure to run surpluses during periods of high output if a boom is forecasted to last indefinitely retrenchment is treated as unnecessary many believe that better fiscal policy can be obtained by means of rules such as ceilings for the deficit or better yet the structural deficit but we also find iv countries subject to a budget rule in the form of euroland s stability and growth pact sgp make official forecasts of growth and budget deficits that are even more biased and more correlated with booms than do other countries this effect may help explain frequent violations of the sgp the question becomes how to overcome governments tendency to satisfy fiscal targets by wishful thinking rather than by action chile in 2000 created structural budget institutions that may have solved the problem independent expert panels insulated from political pressures are responsible for estimating the long run trends that determine whether a given deficit is deemed structural or cyclical the result is that chile s official forecasts of growth and the budget have not been overly optimistic even in booms unlike many countries in the north chile took advantage of the 2002 7 expansion to run budget surpluses and so was able to ease in the 2008 9 recession

a positive theory of fiscal deficits and government debt this paper considers an economy in which policymakers with different preferences alternate in office as a result of elections government debt is used strategically by each policymaker to influence the choices of his successors if different policymakers disagree about the desired composition of government spending between two public goods the economy exhibits a deficits bias that is debt accumulation is higher than it would be with a social planner the equilibrium level of debt is larger the larger is the degree of polarization between alternating governments and the less likely it is that the current government will be re elected

why is fiscal policy often procyclical many countries especially developing ones follow procyclical fiscal policies namely spending goes up taxes go down in booms and spending goes down taxes go up in recessions we provide an explanation for this suboptimal fiscal policy based upon political distortions and incentives for less than benevolent government to appropriate rents voters have incentives similar to the starving the leviathan classic argument and demand more public goods or fewer taxes to prevent governments from appropriating rents when the economy is doing well we test this argument against more traditional explanations based purely on borrowing constraints with a reasonable amount of success

fiscal forecasts and political systems a legislative budgeting perspective which are the institutional and constitutional settings that best reduce the tendency to manipulate fiscal forecasts this paper addresses the question by examining the quality of fiscal forecasts at different stages of the budget process in 13 european union countries by using annual forecast vintages 1999 2013 from stability and convergence programmes both the role of political structures and the balance of power between the executive and the legislature are assessed as determinants of systematic forecasting errors the findings suggest that the forecasting bias is more effectively countered in presidential and semi presidential systems in parliamentary systems with strong bicameralism and when executive legislature relations are constrained by checks and balances confirmation of these results is also provided by linking our approach to the fiscal institutionalist approach based on the form of fiscal governance and the stringency of fiscal rules in terms of institutional capacity if fiscal rules and legislative organizational and research capacity counter the executive s monopoly of fiscal forecasting strengthening the legislature s formal powers negatively influences the fiscal forecast accuracy indeed strategic considerations may induce the executive to anticipate the legislature s amendment or rejection of the tabled budget by means of more favourable economic and fiscal assumptions the crisis and its urgencies crisis seem to have weakened the effect of institutional executive legislature relations on fiscal forecast accuracy

evolution roots and influence of the literature on national systems of innovation a bibliometric account the literature on the national systems of innovation nsi is a relatively new field of research that has spread remarkably in the past 20 years this article offers a complementary quantitative description of the state of the art of the literature based on bibliometric methods by explicitly addressing the roots evolution and influence of nsi literature the exercise shows that over time the rate of published articles was quite irregular and that contributions on nsi have not yet converged to an integrated analytical framework although historically detailed descriptions on nsi showed a noticeable increase in the more recent period 2006 2010 analyses using more formal and diversified quantitative methodologies for assessing the performance of nsi remained lacking reflecting its persisting methodological weaknesses the roots of the nsi literature can be found at the core of innovation studies by certain well known scholars in the area of economics of innovation and science policy research even though publications on nsi are falling in relative importance and are highly concentrated on a small set of countries united kingdom denmark and the united states their influence is global they are cited by authors affiliated in organisations around the world notably in latin america and asia such an influence goes far beyond the area of innovation studies and has resonated in fields such as economic geography environmental studies international business and managerial sciences this demonstrates that the nsi literature is not self referential

fiscal forecasts at the fomc evidence from the greenbooks abstract this paper examines fiscal policy forecasts prepared for the federal open market committee and its influence on u s monetary policy the forecasts contain useful information beyond that i

the cyclical behaviour of fiscal policy evidence from the oecd this paper addresses the topic of cyclicality in scal policy in particular we show that the level of cyclicality varies across spending categories and across oecd countries in line with leading theories of scal cyclicality we show that countries with volatile output and dispersed political power are the most likely to run procyclical scal policies wage government consumption is highlighted as the most important channel by which these variables affect scal cyclicality

socio ecological explanations for crowding out effects from economic field experiments in southern africa abstract economic and psychological literature mentions three conditions under which the crowding out effect of pro social behaviour is likely to occur and to crowd out citizens moral obligations to behave co operatively i use a framed field experiment on joint extraction from a common pool resource cpr where the crowding out effect has already been reported before in combination with the trust game carried out in farming communities of namibia and south africa to replicate these conditions the research design and the cross cultural setting enable to explicitly control for these effects the results of the experiments support that the crowding out effect depends on the nature of the external intervention controlling vs supportive external intervention the degree of participants self determination high vs low self determination in the group a society s norms of trust and reciprocity high vs low trust within the society the results imply that outside regulations aiming to conserve natural resources risk worsening the situation when neglecting democratic legitimization as well as local community norms

the evolution and performance of biotechnology regional systems of innovation the paper maintains that biotechnology regions develop as complex systems they start with star scientists in research universities generating knowledge spillovers then move progressively towards regional technology markets in the process they attract venture capital or modify the behaviour of existing venture capital firms with the addition of biotechnology portfolios the routines of universities are also modified with the addition of intellectual property and technology transfer offices intervening as sellers in the newly created knowledge markets the paper also considers whether companies located in regional agglomerations grow faster than isolated ones and whether companies spun off from universities have a better performance than start ups the study is based on about 90 canadian based publicly quoted biotechnology companies

improving fiscal policy in the eu the case for independent forecasts are official output forecasts biased we point out that official forecasts of output dynamics are crucial to the assessment of cyclically adjusted budget balances and provide evidence that in some euro area countries biased forecasts have played a thus far neglected role in generating excessive deficits we suggest that the forecast bias may be politically motivated and that forecasts produced by an independent authority would be better than in house ministry of finance forecasts for the purpose of monitoring budget formation and budget outcomes lars jonung and martin larch

fiscal discipline and the budget process the critical economic policy issue for many oecd countries developing countries and transition economies currently is fiscal consolidation and the maintenance of long run fiscal balance two related components underlie this general goal first several countries face the issue of deficit reduction particularly those countries with high debt gdp ratios second it is becoming increasingly apparent that major reforms of the welfare system and specifically of social security systems are critical ingredients of a long lasting fiscal consolidation see alesina and perotti 1995a in the case of monetary policy a constructive discussion has generated a widespread consensus about the benefits of different monetary institutions relatively few economists dispute the benefits of a certain amount of central bank independence even though different commentators and policymakers may disagree on the optimal degree of independence also a contracting approach has highlighted the benefit of inflation targeting and of certain institutional relationships contracts between the executive and the central bank a similar theoretical and empirical discussion on the role of budget procedures and budget institutions is just beginning in this paper we ask the following two questions i do budget procedures matter for the determination of the budget balance and its composition ii are there certain institutional reforms that one should feel comfortable in recommending based on the relatively scarce empirical evidence available we tentatively answer yes to the first question budget procedures matter on the second question we suggest that the two critical areas of reform are first more transparency second a strengthening of the roles of the executive branch vis a vis the legislature and of the treasury minister vis a vis the rest of the executive branch in order to achieve a centralized and top bottom approach to the budget process

critical survey the new geographical turn in economics some critical reflections over the past few years a new geographical economics has emerged focused on the spatial agglomeration of industry and the long run convergence of regional incomes several leading names are associated with this geographical turn including paul krugman michael porter robert barro and w brian arthur this new economic geography it is argued here is neither that new nor is it geography instead it is a reworking or re invention using recent developments in formal mathematical mainstream economics of traditional location theory and regional science as such it is quite opposed to and difficult to reconcile with the work on regional development and industrial agglomeration being carried out in economic geography proper

economic targets and loss aversion in international environmental cooperation in the standard emission problem each countryi s ruling party decides on an optimal level of emissions by analyzing the cost and benefit to the country however such policy decisions are often influenced by political partiesi incentives to be elected voters tend to give higher priority to economic issues than they do to environmental ones as a result political parties have additional incentives to reach a critical economic benefit level at a cost of higher emission level in order to satisfy votersi expectations in economic issues therefore this study explores the implications of political parties being averse to insufficient economic performance relative to a critical economic target level on sustaining an international environmental agreement on emission levels in doing so we allow countries to have asymmetric concerns about economic targets as well as asymmetric technology levels we find that stronger concerns about economic targets deter the most cooperative emission levels countries could jointly sustain furthermore technological asymmetry could either deepen or offset this impact these results suggest that efforts on achieving substantial international environmental agreements should be supported at the citizen level to eliminate the adverse effects

centralized and decentralized management of local common pool resources in the developing world experimental evidence from fishing communities in colombia this paper uses experimental data to test for a complementary relationship between formal regulations imposed on a community to conserve a local natural resource and nonbinding verbal agreements to do the same our experiments were conducted in the field in three regions of colombia each group of five subjects played 10 rounds of an open access common pool resource game and 10 additional rounds under one of five institutions communication alone two external regulations that differed by the level of enforcement and communication combined with each of the two regulations our results suggest that the hypothesis of a complementary relationship between communication and external regulation is supported for some combinations of regions and regulations but cannot be supported in general we therefore conclude that the determination of whether formal regulations and informal communication are complementary must be made on a community by community basis

economic targets and loss aversion in international environmental cooperation economic targets in environmental coopeartion in the standard emission problem each country s ruling party decides on an optimal level of emissions by analyzing the cost and benefit to the country however such policy decisions are often influenced by political parties incentives to be elected voters tend to give higher priority to economic issues than they do to environmental ones as a result political parties have additional incentives to reach a critical economic benefit level at a cost of higher emission level in order to satisfy voters expectations in economic issues therefore this study explores the implications of political parties being averse to insufficient economic performance relative to a critical economic target level on sustaining an international environmental agreement on emission levels in doing so we allow countries to have asymmetric concerns about economic targets as well as asymmetric technology levels we find that stronger concerns about economic targets deter the most cooperative emission levels countries could jointly sustain furthermore technological asymmetry could either deepen or offset this impact these results suggest that efforts on achieving substantial international environmental agreements should be supported at the citizen level to eliminate the adverse effects

observational equivalence regional studies and regional science mccann p 2007 observational equivalence regional studies and regional science regional studies 41 1209 1221 this paper considers the methodological and empirical issues raised by the adoption of stylized constructs in the development of regional policy public policies invariably require funding and the greater levels of public data availability and press scrutiny nowadays have led to increasing requirements for policy transparency driven by evidence based policy design implementation monitoring and evaluation at the same time however many current urban and regional policy frameworks are increasingly being based on constructs that do not lend themselves to empirical evaluation therefore there appears to be something of a mismatch this paper discusses these problems and argues that instead of being seen as contradictory one can regard certain aspects of regional analysis as raising topical questions and issues to be examined while other methodological approaches are always required in ord

towards a competence theory of the region this paper argues the case for extending the competence theory of the firm or more generally the competence perspective to analysis of the region the relevance of the perspective follows from the characterisation of productive systems such as firms and regions as ensembles of competences that emerge from but are not reducible to social interaction attention is drawn to an identifiable although unacknowledged convergence of ideas in the recent regional literature arguing that these ideas are best re conceptualised in terms of regional competences the cluster of hightechnology firms in the cambridge region of the uk is briefly referred to in order to illustrate the main ideas of the paper

co managing common pool resources do formal rules have to be adapted to traditional ecological norms abstract we examine the effectiveness of three democratically chosen rules that alleviate the coordination and cooperation problems inherent in collectively managed common pool resources in particular we investigate how rule effectiveness and rule compliance depend on the prevailing local norms and ecological values held by resource users for this purpose we employ a framed field experiment that is based on a rangeland model for semi arid regions and carried out with communal farmers in namibia and south africa participants could vote for three best practice management rules found in many places around the world that are discussed for implementation in the study area temporary private property rights rotational grazing or limitation of livestock numbers all rules were designed in a way that facilitated cooperation or coordination of actions the focus of this study lies on the interactions between these rules and prevalent ecological norms exhibited in the rounds prior to rule implementation in contrast to previous lab experimental studies we find that democratic voting of rules is not sufficient for high rule compliance and an overall enhancement in cooperation rules turned out to be inefficient if they were in conflict with the prevalent ecological norm

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

what motivates common pool resource users experimental evidence from the field this paper develops and tests several models of pure nash strategies of individuals who extract from a common pool resource when they are motivated by a combination of self interest and other motivations such as altruism reciprocity inequity aversion and conformism we test whether an econometric summary of subjects strategies is consistent with one of these motivations using data from a series of common pool resource experiments conducted in three regions of colombia as expected average extraction levels are less than that predicted by a model of pure self interest but are nevertheless sub optimal moreover we find that a model of conformism with monotonically increasing best response functions best describes average strategies our empirical results are inconsistent with models of altruism reciprocity and inequity aversion

political and monetary institutions and public financial policies in the industrial countries institutions and policies vittorio grilli donato masciandaro and guido tabellini why do countries as similar as the industrialized oecd countries go through such different experience in terms of public deficits and debts or in terms of inflation the answer cannot come from macroeconomic policy responses to different disturbances nor from the principles of optimal taxation but rather from politics this article focuses on the role that particular institutions exert in providing constraints and incentives which shape the actions of policymakers the electoral process and political traditions affect the ability of governments to deal with deficits and mounting debts what seems to matter most it is found is the effect of the durability of governments governments with short horizons act myopically and never quite tackle the hard choices such governments typically exist in countries with an electoral system favouring many small political parties central bank independence promotes low inflation with no apparent costs in terms of real economic performance irrespective of the political institutions in fact there is no link between monetary and fiscal discipline these findings carry powerful implications for countries facing high indebtedness or stubborn inflation but also for the construction of the european economic and monetary union

the rationality of usda forecasts under multivariate asymmetric loss a large number of previous studies suggest that many usda forecasts are biased and or inefficient these findings however may be the result of the assumed loss function of usda forecasters we test the rationality of the usda net cash income forecasts and the wasde production and price forecasts between 1988 and 2018 using a flexible multivariate loss function that allows for asymmetric loss and non separable forecast errors our results provide robust evidence that usda forecasters are rational expected loss minimizers yet demonstrate a tendency to place a greater weight on under or overprediction as a result this study provides an alternate interpretation of previous findings of forecast irrationality

political biases despite external expert participation an empirical analysis of tax revenue forecasts in germany this paper explores whether and how political biases arise in an institutional setting where revenue forecasting is delegated to a body that includes experts from institutions neither part of nor controlled by the government the empirical analysis focuses on the performance of german federal tax revenue forecasts in the preparation of which the advice of external experts has a long tradition as an institutional safeguard while on average revenue forecasts turn out to be unbiased the results show that the government exerts an influence in particular optimism pessimism in the government s gdp forecast helps to explain why the revenue forecast turns out too optimistic pessimistic in addition governmental estimates of the revenue effects of tax law changes are found to contribute to forecast errors