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"We experimentally study the effect of alternative campaign finance systems - as characterized by different information structure about donors - on donations, election outcomes, political candidates' policy choices, and welfare. Three alternative campaign finance systems are considered: a full anonymity (FA) system in which neither the politicians nor the voters are informed about the donors' ideal policies or levels of donations; a partial anonymity (PA) system in which only the politicians, but not the voters, are informed about the donors' ideal policies and donations; and finally a no anonymity (NA) system in which both the politicians and the voters are informed about the donors' ideal policies and donations. We find that donors contribute less in the FA system than in the PA and NA system, and candidates are less likely to deviate from their ideal policies under FA than under the PA and NA systems. The effect of donations on the candidate's policy deviations differs in FA from that in PA and NA. Specifically, in the FA system larger donations lead to smaller deviations from the candidate's ideal policy; but in the NA and PA systems, larger donations lead to larger deviations. As a result we observe that the donations lead to a centrist bias in the candidate's policy choices, i.e., donations are more likely to make extreme candidate move to the center than to make centrist candidate move to the right. This centrist bias is present more robustly in FA treatments. Finally, we find that donors greatly benefit from the possibility of donations regardless of the finance system. Voter welfare remains virtually unchanged under the PA and NA systems, especially when there is competition among the donors. Our findings provide the first experimental evidence supportive of Ayres and Ackerman's (2002) campaign finance reform proposal"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

"This paper studies the optimal provision mechanism for multiple excludable public goods when agents' valuations are private information. For a parametric class of problems with binary valuations, we demonstrate that the optimal mechanism involves bundling if a regularity condition, akin to a hazard rate condition, on the distribution of valuations is satisfied. Bundling alleviates the free riding problem in large economies in two ways: first, it may increase the asymptotic provision probability of socially efficient public goods from zero to one; second, it decreases the extent of use exclusions. If the regularity condition is violated, then the optimal solution replicates the separate provision outcome"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

"This paper shows that public provision of private goods may be justified on pure efficiency grounds in an environment where individuals consume both public and private goods. The government's involvement in the provision of private goods provides it with information about individuals' private good purchases that facilitates more efficient revenue extraction for the provision of public goods. We show that public provision of the private good improves economic efficiency under a condition that is always fulfilled under stochastic independence and satisfied for an open set of joint distributions. Our model is an example where there is efficiency loss from separating revenue and expenditure problems in public finance, and is therefore of more general interest for the study of optimal taxation"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is far-reaching. In this paper, we selectively review the rapidly growing literature with a focus on (1) the impact of COVID-19 on the labor market, both in terms of overall employment and in terms of work-from-home arrangements; (2) how COVID-19 may impact the re-organization of the global supply chain; (3) how COVID-19 accelerated the digitization of the economy, and how this impacts the small and medium-sized businesses; and (4) government policy responses.

Using simulations based on a new economic model, this brief empirically examines the pivotal mechanisms of the Affordable Care Act, such as the individual mandate, employer mandate, and premium subsidies, to inform the debate over repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. The research suggests that the ACA, if left intact, in the long run significantly reduces the uninsured rate. The simulations also suggest that the employer mandate is not a crucial pillar for the success of the ACA. The analysis indicates it is the premium subsidy, rather than the employer mandate or the individual mandate, that is crucial for the success of the ACA, in terms of expanded coverage. The brief concludes with a look at the key elements of the main legislative proposals Congressional Republicans have offered to replace the ACA, including the American Health Care Act. ; https://repository.upenn.edu/pennwhartonppi/1045/thumbnail.jpg

I first provide a complete characterization of the unique equilibrium of the lottery game by n lobbyists with asymmetric valuations, & then compare the lottery & the all-pay auction models of lobbying. I show that the exclusion principle discovered by Baye, Kovenock, & de Vries (1993) for all-pay auction does not apply to lottery. I also show that the perverse effect that an exogenous cap may increase the total lobbying expenditure in a two-bidder all-pay auction discovered by Che & Gale (1998) does not apply to lottery. 13 References. Adapted from the source document.

The connection between obtaining higher paying jobs and undertaking some seemingly irrelevant activity is interpreted as "social culture." In the context of a society trying to adopt a new technology, I show that by allowing the firms to give preferential treatment to workers based on some "cultural activity," the society can partially overcome an informational free-riding problem. Therefore, social culture may affect the economic performance by altering the effective production technology of the economy. (JEL P17, Z13)