Suchergebnisse

We use Italian municipality data on education and voter participation in national elections to estimate the effect of schooling on voter turnout. By adopting a fixed effect instrumental variable identification strategy, we find that education reduces voter turnout, more so in municipalities with higher income, lower social capital, which experienced political misconduct in the past and have low institutional quality. Analysis with individual data confirms these results. We discuss several mechanisms to rationalize our findings ranging from the opportunity cost of time to disaffection and civic protest.

Nondemocratic governments under the rule of weak institutions use repression against the opposition to remain in power. Repression both muffles the opposition's voice and strengthens the government's supporters. Nevertheless, when repression becomes strong enough, it becomes intolerable to its victims who revolt and initiate a civil war. The government is aware of the mechanism and determines the level of repression accordingly. This paper studies the circumstances in which the ruler's best alternative is to intensify repression to the point of provoking civil war. Although the model is abstract, its implications are discussed using the recent civil war in the Ivory Coast as a case study. Adapted from the source document.

We show that, when school quality is measured by the educational standard and attaining the standard requires costly effort, secondary education needs not be a hierarchy with private schools offering better quality than public schools, as in Epple and Romano, 1998. An alternative configuration, with public schools offering a higher educational standard than private schools, is also possible, in spite of the fact that tuition levied by private schools is strictly positive. In our model, private schools can offer a lower educational standard at a positive price because they attract students with a relatively high cost of effort, who would find the high standards of the public school excessively demanding. With the key parameters calibrated on the available micro-econometric evidence from the US, our model predicts that majority voting in the US supports a system with high quality private schools and low quality public schools, as assumed by Epple and Romano, 1998. This system, however, is not the one that would be selected by the social planner, who prefers high quality public schools combined with low quality private schools.