Showing 1 - 10 of 449
Rational voters update their subjective beliefs about candidates' attributes with the arrival of information, and subsequently base their votes on these beliefs. Information accrual is, however, endogenous to voters' types and difficult to identify in observational studies. In a large scale...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012459676
This study examines how the economic effects of elections in rural China depend on voter heterogeneity, for which we proxy with religious fractionalization. We first document religious composition and the introduction of village-level elections for a nearly nationally representative sample of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012460027
Elections between black and white candidates tend to involve close margins and high turnout. Using a novel dataset of municipal vote returns during the rise of black mayors in U.S. cities, this paper establishes new facts about turnout and competition in close interracial elections. In the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012460343
Staggered difference-in-differences designs are pervasive in policy evaluations but little is known about the mechanisms of policy diffusion: How and why do such policies spread across jurisdictions? In this study, we highlight the role of elections in policy diffusion in settings where...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014322828
A classic problem in public finance is the over-expenditure of local governments in expectation of a bailout from higher-level administrations. While monitoring could mitigate agency problems, it can itself be rendered ineffective if auditors are corruptible. I evaluate whether limiting...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013462692
Using data on U.S. state and federal taxes and transfers over a quarter century, we estimate a regression model that yields the marginal effect of any shift of market income share from one quintile to another on the entire post tax, post-transfer income distribution. We identify exogenous income...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014544770
This paper rethinks the design of the income tax by assuming that the objective of the tax is not to redistribute from rich to poor but instead to provide some insurance to individuals against the uncertainties they face in their future earnings, a motivation for the tax proposed in Buchanan...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014421180
response. In this paper, we explore the effect that competition for residents induced by fiscal decentralization has on 'waste … an additional advantage of fiscal decentralization …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012470537
between the federal and state governments in such a scheme of partial decentralization. Our model suggests that the …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012465415
Standard models of fiscal federalism suggest many benefits of decentralization in developing economies, and there has … been a recent push toward decentralization around the world. However, developing countries presently still have less … decentralization, particularly on the revenue side, than both developed countries today and the United States and Europe historically …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012459259