1,723,262 research outputs found
Bureaucrats or politicians? Part II: Multiple policy tasks
No full textPolicies are typically chosen by politicians and bureaucrats. This paper investigates first the normative criteria with which to allocate policy tasks to elected policymakers (politicians) or non-elected bureaucrats. Politicians are preferable if there is uncertainty about social preferences and flexibility is valuable, or if policy complementarities and compensation of losers is important. Bureaucrats are preferable if time inconsistency and short-termism is an issue, or if vested interests have large stakes in the policy outcome. We then compare this normative benchmark with the case in which politicians choose when to delegate and show that the two generally differ
Regulation Versus Taxation
Full text linkWe study which policy tool and at what level a majority chooses in order to reduce activities with negativeexternalities. We consider three instruments: a rule, that sets an upper limit to the activity which produces thenegative externality, a quota that forces a proportional reduction of the activity, and a proportional tax on it.For all instruments the majority chooses levels which are too restrictive when the activity is performed mainlyby a small fraction of the population, and when costs for reducing activities or paying taxes are sufficientlyconvex. Also a majority may prefer an instrument different than what a social planner would choose; for instance a rule when the social planner would choose a tax.[...
Immigration and Redistribution
No full textDoes immigration change support for redistribution? We design and conduct large-scale surveys and experiments in six countries to investigate how people perceive immigrants and how these perceptions influence their support for redistribution. We find striking misperceptions about the number and characteristics of immigrants. In all countries, respondents greatly overestimate the total number of immigrants, think immigrants are culturally and religiously more distant from them, and economically weaker—less educated, more unemployed, and more reliant on and favoured by government transfers— than they actually are. In the experimental part of our article, we show that simply making respondents think about immigration before asking questions about redistribution makes them support less redistribution, including actual donations to charities. The perception that immigrants are economically weaker and more likely to take advantage of the welfare system is strongly correlated with lower support for redistribution, much more so than the perceived cultural distance or the perceived share of immigrants. These findings are confirmed by further experimental evidence. Information about the true shares and origins of immigrants does not change support for redistribution. An anecdote about a “hard-working” immigrant has somewhat stronger effects but is unable to counteract the negative priming effect of making people think about immigration. Our results further suggest that narratives shape people’s views on immigration more deeply than hard facts
The Polarization of Reality
Full text linkAmericans are polarized not only in their views on policy issues and attitudes toward government and society but also in their perceptions of the same factual reality. We conceptualize how to think about the "polarization of reality" and review recent papers that show that Republicans and Democrats view the same reality through a different lens. Perhaps as a result, they hold different views about policies and what should be done to address economic and social issues. We also show that providing information leads to different reassessments of reality and different responses along the policy support margin, depending on one's political leaning
Reply to Blankart and Koester's Political Economics vs Public Choice-Two views of political economy in competition
No full textIn an article in this issue of Kyklos, CharlesBlankart and Gerrit Koester discuss public choice and political economics as two separate and competing research paradigms. We do not agree with this premise: public choice and political economics are not in competition. To us, public choice and political economics
aremore labels than competing paradigms, and the research under these labels study similar problems with similar approaches. A major difference is that public choice started much earlier on, when the analytical methods of economics were different and, many would say, less advanced. Political
economics largely continues the tradition of public choice, taking advantage of the progress achieved by economics over the last 25 years in the precision of theoretical modeling and empirical inference.
Blankart and Koester also claim that we do not give credit where credit is due, and that we overlooked earlier research on representative democracy by scholars such as Downs, Tullock, Riker, Ordeshook and others. We strongly reject this claim, and we wonder whether Blankart and Koester ever closely
looked at the book on political economics by Persson and Tabellini (2000).
Chapters 2 and 3 of that book are almost entirely devoted to reviewing early contributions on representative democracy
Technology and Labor Regulations: Theory and Evidence
No full textThis paper shows that different labor market policies can lead to differences in technology across sectors in a model of labor saving technologies. Labor market regulations reduce the skill premium and as a result, if technologies are labor saving, countries with more stringent labor regulation, which bind more for low skilled workers, become less technolog- ically advanced in their high skill sectors, but more technologically advanced in their low skill sectors. We then present data on capital-output ratios, on estimated productivity levels and on patent creation, which tend to support the predictions of our model
Bureaucrats or politicians? part i: A single policy task
No full textThis paper investigates the normative criteria that guide the allocation of a policy task to an elected politician vs an indepen-dent bureaucrat. The bureaucrat is preferable for technical tasks for which ability is more important than effort, or if there is large uncertainty about whether the policymaker has the required abil-ities. The optimal allocation of redistributive tasks is ambiguous, and depends on how the bureaucrat can be instructed. But ir-respective of the normative conclusion, the politician prefers not to delegate redistributive policies
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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