Economic Journal最新文献

This article develops a formal approach to evaluating freedom in interactive settings based on the literatures on preference for flexibility and measurement of diversity. The approach posits that the value of freedom has an instrumental component – grounded in preferences – and an intrinsic component. The philosophical justification of the approach is considered and potential conflicts between freedom and efficiency are explored. On a technical level, the article extends the notion of a diversity measure to menus of lotteries, which is what is needed to evaluate freedom when many agents seek flexibility simultaneously.

Institutional rules create difficulties for the allocation of moral responsibility. One problem is the existence of responsibility voids, i.e. situations in which an outcome results from individual interactions but for which no one is responsible. Another is that responsibility can be fragmented in the sense that responsibility-bearing individuals may be responsible for different features of the outcome. This study examines both problems together. We show that for a large class of situations the two problems are logically dependent. More precisely, non-dictatorial decision procedures can only ensure the absence of voids if they allow for the fragmentation of responsibility.

This article incorporates into modern optimal tax theory the classical logic of benefit-based taxation in which an individual's benefit from the activities of the state is tied to his or her income-earning ability. First-best optimal policy is characterised analytically as depending on a few potentially estimable statistics. Constrained optimal policy, with a Pareto-efficient objective that trades off this principle and conventional utilitarianism, is simulated using conventional constraints and methods. A wide range of optimal policy outcomes can result, including those that match well several features of existing policies. This analysis thereby contributes to the theory of positive optimal taxation.

I exploit a reform that required Italian municipalities to disclose their balance sheets before elections to study whether having more informed voters affects the political budget cycle. Municipal investment in the year before elections is 28.5% higher than in electoral years, and the reform reduced this pre-electoral spending increase by one third. I then study the role of local newspapers in disseminating municipal financial information to voters and find that the effect of the reform is twice as large in areas with relatively many newspaper readers, suggesting that mayors react to more informed voters by reducing spending manipulation.

Laboratory experiments provide insights into the drivers of cheating behaviour, but it is unclear to what extent cheating in the laboratory generalises to the field. We conducted an experiment with middle and high school students to test whether a common laboratory measure of cheating predicts three types of school misconduct: (i) disruptiveness in class; (ii) homework non-completion; and (iii) absenteeism. We find that students who cheat in the experimental task are more likely to misbehave at school, suggesting that experimental measures of cheating generalise to rule violating behaviour in naturally occurring environments.

This article estimates the effect of the oldest sister's education on child human capital development. In many developing countries, the oldest sisters share significant childcare responsibilities in the household and can influence younger siblings' learning. I propose a model that predicts competing effects of increasing the oldest sister's schooling on younger sibling human capital. Using an identification strategy that exploits the gender segregation of schools in Pakistan, I find that the oldest sister's schooling significantly improves younger brothers' literacy, numeracy and schooling. These results indicate that evaluations of programmes targeting girls' education that ignore these spillovers on younger siblings systematically underestimate total benefits.

We exploit within-state variation across time in both the existence and length of statutory delays – both explicit wait periods and delays created by licensing requirements – between the purchase and delivery of a firearm to examine the effect of purchase delays on homicides and suicides. We find that the existence of a purchase delay reduces firearm-related suicides by between 2% and 5% with no statistically significant increase in non-firearm suicides. Purchase delays are not associated with statistically significant changes in homicide rates.

This article investigates the effect of prospective secessions on economic integration and growth by examining the break-up of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Firstly, I show theoretically how regional elites had an incentive to restrict domestic trade once secession from the Union became possible. Secondly, I show empirically that the increased likelihood of secessions by the Union's member republics strongly cut domestic trade. Thirdly, I show how this explains the severity of the Soviet output fall. These patterns persist once I instrument for prospective secessions with nationalist agendas that are exogenous to trade or growth.

We investigate the impact of conflicts of interests on randomised controlled trials in a game-theoretic framework. A researcher seeks to persuade an evaluator that the causal effect of a treatment outweighs its cost, to justify acceptance. The researcher can use private information to manipulate the experiment in three alternative ways: (i) sampling subjects based on their treatment effect, (ii) assigning subjects to treatment based on their baseline outcome, or (iii) selectively reporting experimental outcomes. The resulting biases have different welfare implications: for sufficiently high acceptance cost, in our binary illustration the evaluator loses in cases (i) and (iii) but benefits in case (ii).

We study the economic effects of public investments in historic amenities by looking at their impact on house prices. We distinguish between direct and indirect effects of investments. A nationwide housing transaction is used as well as data on investments in cultural heritage. A 1 million euro per square kilometre increase in investments in cultural heritage leads to a price increase of 1.5–3.0% of non-targeted buildings. We do not find evidence that the maintenance state of non-eligible properties is improved, suggesting that any price effect due to investments in cultural heritage is a direct effect of investments.