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The CNN exit polls after the 2004 election rated 'moral values' the most important issue; next came 'jobs and the economy.' Eighty percent of the voters who rated moral values the most important issue voted for Bush while eighty percent of the voters who rated jobs and the economy the most important voted for Kerry. We study the extent to which the distribution of voter opinion on moral values influences the positions that parties take on the economic issue, which we take to be the size of the public sector, through political competition. There are at least two distinct ways this influence might occur. First, because the Republican Party is identified with a traditionalist stance on moral values, some voters who desire a large public sector may nevertheless vote Republican because traditionalist morality is important for them. This we call the policy bundle effect. Second, it may be the case that those who subscribe to a traditionalist morality take economic conservatism to be part of that view, in the sense that they view the state as, for instance, usurping the role of the individual and/or family. We call this effect the moral Puritanism effect. Thus economic conservatism in the US may be politically strengthened by moral traditionalism because the Republican Party links the two issues (policy bundle) or because moral traditionalists in the US are anti-statist (in the Puritan sense). Our analysis will enable us to predict how equilibrium policies proposed by Democratic and Republican Parties would change if all voters had the same view on the moral-values issue, and we will decompose these changes into the aforementioned two effects. JEL Categories: D3, D7, H2

Several of the recently negotiated regional trade agreements contain significantly fewer concessions by the large countries to smaller countries than vice versa. In this paper, we compute post‐retaliation Nash tariffs by region under various regional trade arrangements using a calibrated numerical general equilibrium model of world trade. Regional agreements constrain strategic behaviour within each trading area, and (in the Customs Union case) enhance it outside the bloc. Results confirm the intuition that without side payments large‐small country regional agreements (such as the Canada‐U.S. agreement) would not have occurred. Le nouveau régionalisme: libéralisation du commerce ou assurance? Dans plusieurs des accords de libre échange régionaux négociés récemment, les grands pays accordent beaucoup moins de concessions aux petits pays que les petits aux grands. Dans cet article, les auteurs mesurent, à l'aide d'un modèle numérisé d'´equilibre général du commerce mondial, les droits de douane à la Nash après ajustements réciproques. Il semble que les accords régionaux contraignent les comportements stratégiques dans chaque bloc, et (dans le cas de l'union douanière) renforcent les comportements stratégiques hors du bloc. Ces résultats confirment l'intuition qui suggère que, sans ces arrangements parallèles, les accords entre grands et petits pays (comme l'accord U.S.A.‐Canada) ne se matérialiseraient pas.

"The hectic front of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science hides an unseen back of the museum that is also bustling. Less than 1 percent of the museum's collections arc on display at any given time, and the Department of Anthropology alone cares for more than 50,000 objects from every corner of the globe not normally available to the public. This lavishly illustrated book presents and celebrates rarely seen baskets, jewelry, sculptures, clothing, and other highlights from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science's exceptional anthropology collections." "The book presents 123 full-color images to highlight the Museum's cultural treasures. Selected for their individual beauty, historic value, and cultural meaning, these objects connect different places, times, and people. From the mammoth hunters of the Plains to the first American pioneer settlers to the flourishing Hispanic and Asian diasporas in downtown Denver, the Rocky Mountain region has been home to a breathtaking array of cultures. Many objects tell this story of the Rocky Mountains' fascinating and complex past, whereas others serve to bring enigmatic corners of the globe to modern-day Denver. Crossroads of Culture serves as a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum's anthropology collections." "All the royalties from this publication will benefit the collections of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science's Department of Anthropology."--Jacket

The apparent ubiquity of progressive taxation in advanced democracies has animated research by political economists in the past decade, but little progress has been made in modeling political equilibria over tax policy when labor supply is elastic with respect to taxation. Here, we postulate an economy with two worker types (wage capacities), in which the unskilled are more numerous than the skilled. Preferences are quasi-linear in income and leisure. One political party represents each worker type. A tax policy is any feasible incentive-compatible menu of pre- and posttax incomes from which each worker must choose. This policy space is three-dimensional. Workers vote stochastically. The equilibrium concept for political competition is party-unanimity Nash equilibrium (PUNE)thus, parties are both vote-seeking and representative. The set of political equilibria is characterized.We prove that, if the class of unskilled workers is not too large (but greater than one-half), then there always exist equilibria in which a regressive tax policy wins. If, however, that class is sufficiently numerous, or inequality is sufficiently great, then the victory of a progressive policy is guaranteed in all equilibria.

"John Rawls is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work has permanently shaped the nature and terms of moral and political philosophy, deploying a robust and specialized vocabulary that reaches beyond philosophy to political science, economics, sociology, and law. This volume is a complete and accessible guide to Rawls's vocabulary, with over 200 alphabetical encyclopaedic entries written by the world's leading Rawls scholars. From "basic structure" to "burdened society," from "Sidgwick" to "strains of commitment," and from "Nash point" to "natural duties," the volume covers the entirety of Rawls's central ideas and terminology, with illuminating detail and careful cross-referencing. It will be an essential resource for students and scholars of Rawls, as well as for other readers in political philosophy, ethics, political science, sociology, international relations and law"--

In conflict-prone situations, access to markets is necessary to restore economic growth and generate the preconditions for peace and reconstruction. Hence, the rehabilitation of damaged transport infrastructure has emerged as an overarching investment priority among donors and governments. This paper brings together two distinct strands of literature on the effects of conflict on welfare and on the economic impact of transport infrastructure. The theoretical model explores how transport infrastructure affects conflict incidence and welfare when selection into rebel groups is endogenous. The implications of the model are tested with data from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The analysis addresses the problems of the endogeneity of transport costs and conflict using a novel set of instrumental variables. For transport costs, a new instrument is developed, the natural-historical path, which measures the most efficient travel route to a market, taking into account topography, land cover, and historical caravan routes. Recognizing the imprecision in measuring the geographic impacts of conflict, the analysis develops a spatial kernel density function to proxy for the incidence of conflict. To account for its endogeneity, it is instrumented with ethnic fractionalization and distance to the eastern border. A variety of indicators of well-being are used: a wealth index, a poverty index, and local gross domestic product. The results suggest that, in most situations, reducing transport costs has the expected beneficial impacts on all the measures of welfare. However, when there is intense conflict, improvements in infrastructure may not have the anticipated benefits. The results suggest the need for more nuanced strategies that take into account varying circumstances and consider actions that jointly target governance with construction activities.

Imagine a society of fisherfolk, who, in the state of nature, fish on a lake of finite size. Fishing on the lake is characterized by decreasing returns to scale in labor, because the lake's finite size (and finite fish stock) imply that each successive hour of fishing labor is less effective than the previous one, as the remaining fish become less dense in the lake. In the state of nature, the lake is commonly owned: each fishes as much as he pleases, and, we might suppose, calculates his fishing plan by taking the labor of the others as given, as he sees it. Each knows that the distribution of fish will be proportional to labor expended among the fisherfolk: if I fish twice as long as you, I will end up with twice as much fish as you. This is not due to some kind of concern with equity (or the labor theory of value) among the fisherfolk; it is a technological fact, implied by the assumption that fishing labor is homogeneous, and all are equally likely to catch a fish in a unit of time. An equilibrium under common ownership can be thought of as a Nash equilibrium of the game where each computes his optimal fishing plan, given the labor of the others and knowing what the consequent distribution of fish would be. (A Nash equilibrium is an allocation of labor and fish to each fisherman, with the property that no one can increase his utility by deviating in his choice of labor, given what the others are doing.)

It is argued that the fundamental problem of game theory is to determine what rational expectations intelligent players (P's) can consistently entertain about each other's behavior. In the case of the 2-person 0-sum game (& in some other special cases) it is sufficient to assume that the P's not only act rationally themselves by maximizing their expected utilities, but also expect each other to act rationally. These assumptions then imply that the P's will necessarily arrive at the von Neumann-Morgenstern solution of the game. But in the case of most other games, including bargaining games & more generally all cooperative games, we need more specific assumptions as to what rational expectations the P's can hold about each other's strategies. First, we need a symmetry postulate saying essentially that a rational P cannot expect a rational opponent to follow a less intelligent bargaining strategy than he himself would follow in his place, & in particular cannot expect his opponent to make concessions in situations where he himself would refuse such concessions. We also need a restriction-of-variables postulate, stating that a rational P cannot expect a rational opponent to let his behavior be governed by variables completely irrelevant for rational choice & for utility maximization. These postulates are defended against objections by Thomas C. Schilling. It is pointed out that any theory of bargaining behavior would have to use a symmetry postulate in some form, because it would have to assume the same basic rationality criteria (or the same basic psychol'al laws) for both P's. It is shown that the postulates proposed entail the Nash-Zeuthen solution for cooperative games. Schelling's attempt to build a theory of bargaining games (in which there is a partial conflict of interest between the 2 P's) on an assumed analogy with the theory of pure coordination games (in which there is a complete identity of interests between the 2 P's) is criticized. It is shown on various examples that a bargaining problem has a very diff logical structure from a coordination problem. Bargaining theories based on rationality postulates, like the Nash-Zeuthen theory, serve 3 main analytical purposes: (1) prediction & explanation of the actual outcome in bargaining situations, (2) conceptual clarification of the meaning of `rational behavior' in bargaining contexts, & (3) definition of a `bargaining equilibrium point', representing the outcome corresponding to the theoretical balance of power between the parties. For these purposes the Nash-Zeuthen theory has the great advantage of being based on a clear & specific concept of rational behavior & therefore yielding a unique determinate solution for each particular bargaining situation--a solution in very good agreement with our commonsense evaluation of the parties' relative bargaining power. AA.