Suchergebnisse

Cet article porte sur l'analyse de « moments critiques » ( critical junctures ) dans la transition politique libyenne, afin de mettre en évidence les processus de reconfigurations élitaires, tant dans leurs statuts que dans leurs stratégies ou leurs pratiques. Ces moments structurent l'accélération des mécanismes de compétition entre acteurs et illustrent particulièrement la recomposition d'anciennes pratiques d'État rentier en nouvelles logiques néopatrimoniales. Prenant place dans un contexte spécifique et discontinu qui est celui de la guerre civile, tout en étant, aussi, marqués par les stigmates du passé, ces processus permettent ainsi de questionner la réalité d'une transition politique libyenne. Classification JEL : D72, D74, D78, N47, Q34

Abstract
Using independently collected individual-level data, this study examines the influence of learning in a female teacher homeroom class in elementary school on pupils' future voting behavior. Furthermore, it evaluates the female teacher's effect on their preference for women's participation in the workplace in adulthood. We find that having a female teacher in the first year of school makes individuals more likely to vote for female candidates and prefer female labor participation policies in adulthood. However, this effect is only observed among male pupils. These findings offer new evidence for the female socialization hypothesis. (JEL codes: D72, D78, J16, and I21)

Can research findings change political leaders' beliefs and policies? We use experiments with 2,150 Brazilian municipalities to measure mayors' demand for and response to research information. In one experiment, we find that mayors are willing to pay to learn the results of evaluation studies, and update their beliefs when informed of the findings. They value larger-sample studies more, while not distinguishing between studies in rich and poor countries. In a second experiment, we find that informing mayors about research on a simple and effective policy, taxpayer reminder letters, increases the probability the policy is implemented by 10 percentage points. (JEL D72, D78, D83, O17, O18)

Although the goal of licensing is to ensure the quality of services, it can also induce firms to operate informally or exit altogether. This paper examines licensing in the rental housing market by developing a model that indicates licensing's impact on the size of the underground rental market, the number of vacancies, and homelessness are ambiguous. As a result, we calibrate the model using a unique dataset from Baltimore, which allows us to directly observe underground rentals and vacancies. Our calibrations show that licensing may have a modest impact on rents, while increasing quality more substantially. (JEL L15, K42, D78, E26, O17)

I study a dynamic model of strategic reform decisions that potentially affect the stochastic evolution of a publicly observed economic variable. Policy makers maximize their evaluation by a boundedly rational public. Specifically, the public follows a rule that attributes recent changes to the most recent intervention. I analyze subgame perfect equilibrium in this model when the economic variable follows a linear growth trend with noise. Equilibrium is essentially unique and stationary, bearing a subtle formal relation to optimal search models. Policy makers tend to act during crises, display risk aversion conditional on acting, and prefer interventions that induce permanent noise. (JEL D78, D83)

Since the end of the 1990s, local governments in Japan have enacted Information Disclosure Ordinances, which require the disclosure of official government information. This article uses Japanese prefecture‐level data for the period 1998–2004 to examine how this enactment affected the rate of government construction expenditure. The Dynamic Panel model is used to control for unobserved prefecture‐specific effects and endogenous bias. The major finding is that disclosure of government information reduces the rate of government construction expenditure. This implies that information disclosure reduces losses from rent‐seeking activity, which is consistent with public choice theory. (JELD73, D78, H79)

The author analyzes the welfare effects of privatization in a mixed duopoly model in which the wage rate for the privatized firm is determined by Nash bargaining beforehand. The evaluations are based on three‐stage privatization frameworks respectively under two regimes: Cournot competition and a public firm acting as a Stackelberg leader. The author finds that the optimal degrees of privatization from the viewpoint of social welfare may be different for various types of competition. The article also shows that even optimal privatization set by a welfare‐maximization government may not guarantee welfare improvement, owing to the interference of wage bargaining. (JEL D60, D78, L32, L33)

In dem Wissen, dass viele Bürger Diätenerhöhungen kritisch sehen, liegt es nahe, dass Abgeordnete ihre Diäten besser direkt nach Wahlen erhöhen als unmittelbar vor den Wahlen. In einer neuen Studie des ifo Instituts wurde anhand von Daten für 15 deutsche Bundesländer im Zeitraum 1980–2014 untersucht, ob es einen solchen Wahlzyklus bei Diätenerhöhungen deutscher Landtagsabgeordneter gab. Die Ergebnisse deuten nicht auf einen Wahlzyklus hin. Zu vermuten ist, dass die Wähler Politiker aller Parteien und nicht nur die Regierungsparteien für Diätenerhöhungen verantwortlich machen.

The understanding of the economic effect of formal institutional rules has progressed substantially in recent decades. These formal analyses have tended to take for granted that institutional arenas such as Congress are the places where decision-making takes place. That is a good approximation in some cases (such as many developed countries today) but not in others. If countries differ in how institutionalized their policymaking is, it is possible that the impact of formal political rules on policy outcomes might depend on that. This paper explores that hypothesis and finds that some important claims regarding the impact of constitutions on policy outcomes do not hold for countries in which institutionalization is low. The findings suggest the need to develop a broader class of policymaking models in which the degree to which decision-making follows 'the rules' is also endogenized.

This paper contributes to an agenda that views the effects of policies and institutional reforms as dependent on the structure of political incentives for national and subnational political actors. The paper studies political incentive structures at the subnational level and the mechanisms whereby they affect national-level politics and policymaking at the national level in Argentina, a highly decentralized middle-income democracy, Argentina. The Argentine political system makes subnational political power structures very influential in national politics. Moreover, most Argentine provinces are local bastions of power dominated by entrenched elites, characterized by scarce political competition, weak division of powers, and clientelistic political linkages. Political dominance in the provinces and political importance at the national level reinforce each other, dragging the Argentine political and policymaking system towards the practices and features of its most politically backward regions.

A main focus in economics is how to design optimal policies in second-best situations, which often requires a trade-off between giving some individuals more than they deserve, false positives, and others less than they deserve, false negatives. This paper provides novel evidence on people's second-best fairness preferences from large-scale experimental studies in the United States and Norway. The majority of people are more concerned with false negatives than with false positives, but we document substantial heterogeneity in second-best fairness preferences between the countries and across the political spectrum. The findings shed light on the political economy of social insurance and redistribution. (JEL D63, D72, D78, H23, I38)

La procédure centralisée du SIGEM est en charge de l'affectation des candidats reçus aux concours des grandes écoles de management en France. Elle est basée sur l'utilisation d'un algorithme connu qui correspond à la version « écoles » de l'algorithme de Gale et Shapley [1962]. Les résultats théoriques des modèles d'appariement, liés à cet algorithme, permettent d'identifier des propriétés fondamentales satisfaites par la procédure. Certains particularismes de l'environnement du SIGEM qui génèrent des comportements stratégiques de la part des participants sont étudiés. Nous montrons comment le résultat de la procédure est finalement utilisé pour générer un classement des écoles. Les implications de cette hiérarchisation commune des écoles, propre au SIGEM, sont également évaluées. Classification JEL : C78, D78, I23.

Information sets, expectations, and preferences of politicians are fundamental, but unobserved determinants of their policy choices. Employing repeated votes in the US House of Representatives on China's normal trade relations (NTR) status during the two decades straddling China's World Trade Organization (WTO) accession, we apply a moment inequality approach designed to deliver consistent estimates under weak informational assumptions on the information sets of members of Congress. This methodology offers a robust way to test hypotheses about what information politicians have at the time of their decision and to estimate the weight that constituents, ideology, and other factors have in policy making and voting. (JEL D72, D78, D83, D84, F14, P33)

Behavioral economics presents a "paternalistic" rationale for benevolent government intervention. This paper presents a model of public debt where voters have self-control problems and attempt to commit using illiquid assets. In equilibrium, government accumulates debt to respond to individuals' desire to undo their commitments, which leads individuals to rebalance their portfolio, in turn feeding into a demand for further debt accumulation. As a consequence, (i) large (and distortionary) government debt accumulation occurs, and (ii) banning illiquid assets could improve individuals' welfare. These results offer a new rationale for balanced budget rules in constitutions to restrain governments' responses to voters' self-control problems.(JEL D2, D72, D78, H62, H63)

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)