Suchergebnisse

Public good provision has always been a central role of government, but it is also an important element in political competition. The recent financial difficulties of public authorities have undermined their capacity to invest in public goods, requiring politicians to search for new ways to finance those investments. A solution widely adopted is the Public-Private Partnership, an instrument designed to provide more valuable public goods thanks to efficiency gains coming from bundling building and operating phases in a single contract, but that has often resulted in resounding failures. The most common explanation for this lack of results is that PPP are often adopted not for efficiency purposes but to avoid financial constraints. We build a model to analyze the incentives for politicians to use PPP for pork barrel politics in presence of a binding budget constraint, when they have a better ability to look forward than their voters, and are limited in their possibility to stay in charge. We then release the assumption of homogeneous income among voters, and analyze how this modifies politician's incentives to pander.

Abstract
We investigate the extent to which a real-effort effect and an inequality effect impact individuals' prosocial behavior in the multilevel public goods game. We explore two symmetrical treatments: one where everyone participates in a preliminary task to obtain their initial endowment, and another where no one does, to assess the real-effort effect. Additionally, we examine two asymmetrical treatments where only individuals from one local group engage in the preliminary task to study the inequality effect. We find evidence that the contribution to the local public good is stable across all treatments, while the contribution to the global public good is significantly lower when both groups perform the preliminary task.

The concept of a just low-carbon transition is gaining academic and political traction. However, the question of how can a just transition be achieved and which policy tools are important remains to be addressed in a comprehensive way in the ecological macroeconomics literature. We aim to close this gap by scrutinizing the path towards a just transition and the role a wide range of potential policies play therein. We do so by applying an extended scenario discovery approach to a revised version of the EUROGREEN model (D'Alessandro et al., 2020), using random forest algorithms to identify the most relevant single policies. Our results underline a trade-off between emissions and inequality, via growth, implying a somewhat narrow path towards a just transition. However, certain policy mixes are able to inhibit this trade-off allowing for a just transition featuring limited growth. Here, the expansion of renewable energy supply and policies directly addressing the income distribution are particularly prevalent. In general, there is little common ground between policies aimed at emissions and inequality, calling for a wide range of coherent policies when stirring the economy towards a just transition. ; For a full description of the first version of the EUROGREEN model see: D'Alessandro, S., Cieplinski, A., Distefano, T., & Dittmer, K. (2020). Feasible alternatives to green growth. Nature Sustainability, 3(4), 329-335, DOI:10.5281/zenodo.3624944. Other Grants not in Open-AIRE: 1) financial support from P. Lamberts (member of the Greens|EFA group in the European Parliament). 2) funding from the Ecoesione project from the Italian Ministry for Ecological Transition, as part of the National Sustainable Development Strategy; 3) support of a fellowship from La Caixa Foundation (ID 100010434); the fellowship code is LCF/BQ/DI20/11780024.