Journal of Government and Economics最新文献

Why does China have a vast number of unsold and unoccupied homes? This paper proposes a theory based on the incentives of local government officials to explain this puzzle. Specifically, I develop a dynamic, infinite-horizon model that incorporates cities’ economic growth, an evaluation scheme of city managers’ economic performance, as well as city managers’ decision-making of land supply to illustrate the mechanisms. I provide empirical evidence to support the theory and estimate the structural model using manager-city-year level data from 2003 and 2012. Using the parameter estimates from the model, I conduct counterfactual analyses to quantitatively evaluate the impacts of political incentives on the equilibrium land supply. Overall, city managers sell 7.4% more land between 2003 and 2012 relative to the counterfactual in which they have no economic growth incentives. This land oversupply is 12.5% in smaller cities and 3.7% in larger cities. Finally, converting land to housing construction, the estimated impacts explain 23.2% to 27.7% of unsold homes.

We present a model in which an imperfectly informed politician chooses between appointing an independent expert, whose advice is revealed to voters, and a loyal expert whose advice can be concealed from voters and who can therefore be blamed for a bad outcome. The politician is privately informed about which expert is more competent while Bayesian voters update beliefs about the expert's competence based on which expert is chosen and the outcome of the policy chosen by the politician. Voters are distributed such that some are biased toward a certain policy while others are not. We show that, under a majority voting rule, in equilibrium, the politician is unable to increase his chances of reelection by choosing the loyal expert and trying to shift the blame for a bad outcome on him.

This paper aims to explore the mediating role of governance in the relationship between per capita income and public debt in Sub-Saharan Africa. From a neoclassical production function and a dynamic panel threshold model, the paper estimates a model based on a sample of 39 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa over the period of 2002 to 2019. Our results indicate a non-linear relationship between per capita income and public debt, which is influenced by the quality of governance. In particular, the impact of public debt on per capita income depends on the level of governance quality. A governance threshold is identified, showing a minimum level of good quality of governance from which public debt has a positive effect on income. Moreover, the paper identified the most critical governance dimensions for optimizing the relationship between public debt and per capita income and provided policy suggestions.

The inefficiencies of common property fisheries are well-known to economists. To avoid over-exploitation, they propose multiple forms of government solution such as taxes, quotas and the enforcement of property rights regimes designed to avoid over-harvesting. But can efficient arrangements also exist under statelessness, or in the presence of weak states? One such example is the Gaspé Peninsula (in the Canadian province of Quebec) during the first half of the nineteenth century. There, a single firm (the Charles Robin Company) came to dominate the market and was able to restrict entry effectively. In this paper, we explain that it was able to do so by reducing the prices on imported goods that it would give to local fishermen in exchange for a part of their catch. This had the effect of deterring fishermen from contracting with other merchants as well as deterring other merchants from entering the market. It also made the region richer than most regions of Canada at the time, contrary to what historians have depicted. We take this as an example of the ability to deal with commons problems in the presence of weak states.

This paper aims to assess tax policy reforms that can sustain universal basic income programs and foster long-term growth and welfare in a currency union that faces fiscal rule constraints and inequality. To address this ongoing government and economics’ debate, we developed a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Model of universal basic income enriched with three fiscal policy strategies. Results demonstrate that the effectiveness of universal basic income on long-term growth, inequality, and welfare depends on the type of fiscal policy adopted by government to fund it, notably the trade-off between increasing the tax base or reducing public spending. First, under normal circumstances, universal basic income funded by completely eliminating oil subsidies appears to be the best policy for reducing inequality while increasing growth and welfare. Second, when the currency union faces a crisis, a universal basic income funded by increases in different taxes is more effective in combating stagflation and inequality than a universal basic income funded by total oil subsidy elimination. The welfare analysis confirms that, universal basic income funded by the increase in tax on capital gains and the increase in tax on corporate income is successful in reducing income inequality and consumption inequality and improving households’ living standards, its effects lead to higher welfare gains when the economy faces a crisis rather than the economy in normal times.

We solve an optimal land sale problem for a mayor who sells public land and uses the land sale revenue to finance infrastructure. Over an infinite horizon the mayor chooses land sale and infrastructure in each period to maximize the market value of the city net of the spending on infrastructure. The infrastructure spending is bounded by the land sale proceeds of the previous period. We show the optimization problem can be solved analytically. If it is profitable to sell land then it is profit-maximizing to sell it as early as the finance constraints permit. Finance constraints reduce the total size of land eventually sold.

The Unemployment Insurance (UI) system in the United States has played a decisive lifeline role in effectively mitigating the economic and social impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, which prompted the largest expansion of UI programs in history, one that is unprecedented in scope, scale and cost. However, the crisis has once again exposed some well-known challenges of the program, perhaps best epitomized by the steady decline since the 1980s of both the recipiency rate and the wage replacement rate, which is partly related to the UI system's funding structure. As a result, on the eve of the pandemic less than one in three unemployed workers used to collect UI benefits – of lower amounts and often for shorter periods of time than before – despite that the average duration of unemployment had almost doubled in the aftermath of the Great Recession. The pandemic has also laid bare additional shortcomings – most notably in the effectiveness of the UI delivery infrastructure to provide timely and accurate payments – which have prompted further calls for modernizing the UI system. The objective of this paper is threefold: first, after a brief description of the main structural characteristics of the UI system, it compares the role played by UI in mitigating the impact of the 2008–09 Great Recession and the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic; second, it reviews the empirical evidence from the pandemic on potential demand-side (countercyclical stabilization) and supply-side (job-search disincentives) effects of emergency extensions of UI programs. Finally, it discusses the main lessons that the expansion of UI programs to respond to the pandemic can offer to inform – and enrich – the debate on whether and how to reform the UI system. The experience with the UI system provides fundamental lessons that can usefully inform the debate on whether and how to introduce – for example in Europe – a common unemployment insurance scheme for macroeconomic stabilization.

In order to have an impact on the labor market, welfare states must implement active labor market policies (ALMPs). The effectiveness of ALMPs has only been the subject of a few numbers of studies, the majority of which only take into account the short-term effects of ALMPs and use aggregate data. We examine the impact of public spending on female and male unemployment rates by disaggregating data on unemployment for nine OECD countries and focusing on long-term effects of ALMPs, primarily to determine whether there is evidence of causation between the variables. Based on the bootstrap panel Granger causality test, the estimates account for cross-sectional dependence, slope heterogeneity, and structural breaks. Although the causality direction varies by country, our study demonstrates that ALMPs are helpful at lowering unemployment. It's interesting to notice that these policies appear to have the most positive effects for women. Policymakers must provide appropriate support for ALMPs in order to effectively lower unemployment.