Suchergebnisse

The paper assesses the influence of electoral rules on vote choice and election outcomes using a quasi-experiment conducted during a recent Canadian provincial election. Respondents were invited to vote under three voting systems (first past the post, alternative voting and proportional representation) and to answer a short questionnaire. We examine how the distribution of votes and seats is affected, and we ascertain how much of the total difference is due to psychological and mechanical effects. We find that a PR system would have increased legislative fractionalization by the equivalent of one effective party and that the mechanical effect is much more important than the psychological effect. As for AV, its mechanical and psychological effects act in opposite directions. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

The paper assesses the influence of electoral rules on vote choice and election outcomes using a quasi-experiment conducted during a recent Canadian provincial election. Respondents were invited to vote under three voting systems (first past the post, alternative voting and proportional representation) and to answer a short questionnaire. We examine how the distribution of votes and seats is affected, and we ascertain how much of the total difference is due to psychological and mechanical effects. We find that a PR system would have increased legislative fractionalization by the equivalent of one effective party and that the mechanical effect is much more important than the psychological effect. As for AV, its mechanical and psychological effects act in opposite directions. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

Cybersecurity is a national priority in this big data era. Because of negative externalities and the resulting lack of economic incentives, companies often underinvest in security controls, despite government and industry recommendations. Although many existing studies on security have explored technical solutions, only a few have looked at the economic motivations. To fill the gap, we propose an approach to increase the incentives of organizations to address security problems. Specifically, we utilize and process existing security vulnerability data, derive explicit security performance information, and disclose the information as feedback to organizations and the public. We regularly release information on the organizations with the worst security behaviors, imposing reputation loss on them. The information is also used by organizations for self-evaluation in comparison to others. Therefore, additional incentives are solicited out of reputation concern and social comparison. To test the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted a field quasi-experiment for outgoing spam for 1,718 autonomous systems in eight countries and published SpamRankings.net, the website we created to release information. We found that the treatment group subject to information disclosure reduced outgoing spam approximately by 16%. We also found that the more observed outgoing spam from the top spammer, the less likely an organization would be to reduce its own outgoing spam, consistent with the prediction by social comparison theory. Our results suggest that social information and social comparison can be effectively leveraged to encourage desirable behavior. Our study contributes to both information architecture design and public policy by suggesting how information can be used as intervention to impose economic incentives.

We report empirical evidence from the first field experiments to be conducted in Germany with program and control groups between 1999 and 2002. The evaluated program called ?Targeted Negative Income Tax (TNIT)? is a time-restricted employee subsidy for means-tested welfare recipients. We focus on a unique data set on welfare recipients in Mannheim and estimate the treatment effect of TNIT on participation probability. The average treatment effect is significant and lies between 6.6 and 6.8 percentage points. Since January 1st, 2005, TNIT can be offered to all means-tested long-term unemployed people in Germany by public case managers.

This paper investigates tax-planning behaviour by means of inter-company finance and the effectiveness of government countermeasures via thin-capitalization rules. A simple theoretical model which considers the financing decision of a multinational company is used to obtain empirical implications. The empirical analysis, based on German inbound investment data from 1996 to 2004, confirms a significant impact of tax-rate differentials on the use of inter-company debt. The effectiveness of the German thin-capitalization rule is tested by using legal amendments as natural experiments. The results suggest that thin-capitalization rules induce significantly lower internal borrowing. Hence, tax planning via internal finance is effectively limited by thin-capitalization rules.

International audience ; This paper investigates tax-planning behaviour by means of inter-company finance and the effectiveness of government countermeasures via thin-capitalization rules. A simple theoretical model which considers the financing decision of a multinational company is used to obtain empirical implications. The empirical analysis, based on German inbound investment data from 1996 to 2004, confirms a significant impact of tax-rate differentials on the use of inter-company debt. The effectiveness of the German thin-capitalization rule is tested by using legal amendments as natural experiments. The results suggest that thin-capitalization rules induce significantly lower internal borrowing. Hence, tax planning via internal finance is effectively limited by thin-capitalization rules.