Public Choice最新文献

We investigate the impact of the number of local governments in a metropolitan area on housing values within the United States. We find that metropolitan areas with one standard deviation more counties have housing values that are almost 11% higher. This difference may be driven by the fact that we also find higher wages (accounting for worker characteristics) in areas with more local governments. Moreover, we find that areas with more local governments have more business-friendly policies, such as freer labor markets, but similar levels of taxation and spending. The number of local governments does not seem to significantly impact environmental quality, educational outcomes, or crime.

This paper revisits a long-standing discussion surrounding the efficacy of the common law versus government intervention in addressing large-scale environmental externalities. Drawing on a conceptual framework developed by James M. Buchanan, we challenge the prevailing economic orthodoxy which holds that so-called “large-number” externalities inherently necessitate government policy intervention. Instead, we argue that the common law offers a viable means of addressing both small- and large-scale environmental pollution problems. Using riparian and nuisance cases from the nineteenth and early twentieth-century as a case study, we demonstrate how common law has historically managed to resolve water pollution disputes, even in cases involving many parties. The paper expands the discussion on externalities by integrating insights from environmental and institutional economics, highlighting the role played by transaction costs, collective action, and institutional reform in the preservation of environmental resources. Our findings suggest that a more polycentric system of rules, relying more heavily on decentralized legal institutions, could offer more efficient and adaptable solutions to contemporary environmental challenges.

This paper empirically links the efficiency and performance assessment of the general government, proxied by efficiency scores, to the trust in government. Government spending efficiency scores are first computed via data envelopment analysis (DEA). Then, relying on panel data and instrumental variable approaches, we estimate the effect of public sector efficiency on citizens trust on national governments. The sample covers 36 OECD countries between 2007 and 2019. We find that the more efficient countries in terms of government spending are Australia, Chile, Ireland, New Zealand, South Korea, Switzerland. Secondly, our main finding is that better public sector spending efficiency is positively associated with citizens’ higher trust in governments. In general, political economy variables and the existence of fiscal rules do not seem to significantly affect our measure of trust. The results hold using alternative proxies for public sector efficiency, alternative measures for trust, specifications with different control variables and different empirical approaches (instrumental variables).

We compare equal treatment and affirmative action policies in Tullock contests. Equal treatment means that agents who exert equal effort have an equal probability of success. In affirmative action, agents who incur an equal cost of effort have an equal probability of success. Finite player contests with non-linearities in impact and cost functions cannot be solved in closed form. Instead, we approximate them with large population contests with measure zero agents. Affirmative action reduces aggregate effort in such contests, which can be solved. However, it ensures equality without any significant loss of aggregate welfare. We verify these findings for finite player contests through numerical simulations. For a sufficiently large number of players, the numerical simulations support the results of the large population analysis.

Do voters react to shocks that are beyond the control of politicians? We consider the case of the assassination of a senior politician in India, in the middle of an election. We find that Congress(I), the party of the assassinated leader, gained significantly from this event through increased vote shares and improved likelihood of victory. Sympathy towards Congress(I) and changed perceptions about governing abilities of the contesting parties in the post-assassination environment played crucial roles in determining the final outcomes of the election. Our results imply that even in environments where voters are expected to make their decisions based on prior performance of parties, an unanticipated, random, exogenous event can affect voting behaviour.

This study examines the effect of the allocation of centralised funding on electoral support for the incumbent by utilising the introduction of the “Towns Fund” in England in 2019 as a natural experiment. For causal identification, I leverage a difference-in-difference design to examine the electoral effect of this fund. My findings suggest that providing funding to constituencies significantly increased the vote share of the Conservative Party in the General Election in 2019. However, in a subset of constituencies in which the Labour Party constitutes the incumbent, the findings can not be replicated for all specifications and robustness checks. Furthermore, I do not find consistent support that the effect is stronger in economically deprived constituencies. Similarly, the results suggest that the voting outcome depends on the total amount of funding being received, however, this finding does not reach statistical significance. These results complement the literature by providing empirical evidence for pork barrel as a functioning means for vote buying for the Conservative government in 2019 in England. Furthermore, this paper emphasises that partisanship should be considered as a mediating variable when analysing the political effect of providing place-based funding.

I argue that much current thinking on externalities—at least among “lay political economists” (but even, on occasion, among professional economists)—is saddled with two analytical errors. The first is what I call coextensivism: the conflation of public goods and externalities. The second error is what I call externality profligacy: the conflation of economic and “social” externalities. The principal dangers presented by these two “dogmas on externalities” are that, while in their grips, we are under-disposed to seek negotiated, market-based solutions (of a broadly Coasean nature) to challenges posed by economic externalities, and over-disposed to seek coercive, state-based solutions (of a broadly Pigouvian nature) to challenges posed by social externalities.

Although parties are documented to invest significant amounts of resources towards strengthening their hold on local governments, whether mayors benefit their parties in national elections remains an open question. More specifically, it is unclear if mayors are electorally valuable in periods when party-affiliated central governments do not support them via politically discriminatory policies. We address this gap by studying “reverse coattails” in a unique setting: under a technocratic central government instituted following an unexpected, exogenous tragic event that forced the previous government’s resignation. Investigating close mayoral races in Romania in a regression discontinuity analysis, we find that local incumbency generated meaningful vote share premiums in the 2016 parliamentary elections. Exploring the underlying mechanism, we retrieve evidence for prospective voting, suggesting that the reverse coattails we document are partially driven by voters’ expectations of future preferential resource allocations by the central government. We show that preferential central policies were implemented after, but not before the national elections, and find that reverse coattails were stronger in constituencies where funds received from the center are an important component of local revenues.

This special issue examines empirical and computational approaches to collective choice, the aggregation of individual preferences to form a public or social choice via some aggregation rule. Some of the aggregation rules considered herein include Borda rule, rank sum aggregation, and majority rule. Arrow (1951) demonstrated that axiomatic rationality at the individual level cannot assure freedom from aggregation paradoxes in collective choice, and this special issue considers several novel data sets and computational and experimental methods to assess the robustness of contemporary aggregation rules and settings. The collected papers provide much-needed evidence in a field that has traditionally presented empirical challenges.

The concept of unequal representation is commonly understood through the lenses of disproportionality and malapportionment, pertaining to inter-party and inter-district aspects, respectively. Popular indices used to measure such features are analyzed separately despite being mathematically identical. District-level wasted votes are not measured in terms of unequal representation, even though they can be conceptualized as intra-district unequal representation. A new component, intra-party unequal representation, which measures unequal representation across districts for voters who support each party, has not been considered to contribute to unequal representation. We propose a unified approach for measuring these components—disproportionality, malapportionment, wasted votes, and intra-party unequal representation—by using ({alpha })-divergence. We show mathematically that the total of disproportionality and intra-party unequal representation equals that of malapportionment and wasted votes. We apply this approach to the Japanese political system and demonstrate the role of intra-party unequal representation in sustaining disproportionality in favor of the Liberal Democratic Party.