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作者：Pettersson-Lidbom, Per
作者单位：Stockholm University
摘要：This paper makes use of regression discontinuity designs to estimate the effect of the number of legislators on the size of government. The results indicate a negative effect, i.e., the larger the size of the legislature the smaller is the size of government. This runs counter to conventional wisdom. One potential explanation is that more legislators can better control a budget maximizing bureaucracy. I present evidence that is consistent with the proposed mechanism. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All...
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作者：Gilpin, Gregory; Kaganovich, Michael
作者单位：Indiana University System; Indiana University Bloomington; Montana State University System; Montana State University Bozeman
摘要：The paper addresses the two-fold rise in teacher-student ratio in the American K-12 school system in the post-World War II period accompanied by the evidence of a decline in the relative quality of teachers. We develop a dynamic general equilibrium framework for analyzing the teacher quantity-quality trade-off and offer an explanation to the observed trends. Our OLG model features two stages of education: basic and advanced (college), the latter required of teachers. The cost of hiring teacher...
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作者：Esteve-Volart, Berta; Bagues, Manuel
作者单位：York University - Canada
摘要：This paper investigates the reasons behind the low representation of women among legislators. Using data from Spain, we find that parties tend to nominate female candidates to poorer positions on the ballot. We examine whether this is due to voter bias or party bias, and find two pieces of evidence supporting the latter: female candidates attract more votes, and political competition improves the quality of positions to which female candidates are assigned. Moreover, gender quotas fail to erod...
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作者：Truyts, Tom
作者单位：KU Leuven; Universite Catholique Louvain
摘要：Commodities communicate. We investigate optimal indirect taxation when both the intrinsic qualities of goods and signaling motivate consumption choices. Optimal indirect taxes are introduced into a monotonic signaling game. We provide sufficient conditions for the uniqueness of the D1 sequential equilibrium strategies. In the case of pure costly signaling, signaling goods can in equilibrium be taxed without burden. When commodities serve both intrinsic consumption and signaling, optimal taxes ...
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作者：Epple, Dennis; Romano, Richard; Sieg, Holger
作者单位：State University System of Florida; University of Florida; Carnegie Mellon University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Pennsylvania
摘要：We study the intergenerational conflict over the provision of public education. This conflict arises because older households without children have weaker incentives to support the provision of high quality educational services in a community than younger households with school-age children. We develop an overlapping generations model for households in a system of multiple jurisdictions. This model captures the differences in preferred policies over the life-cycle. We show that the observed in...
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作者：McAfee, R. Preston; Miller, Alan D.
作者单位：University of Haifa; University of Haifa; Yahoo! Inc
摘要：We develop a model of scarce, renewable resources to study the commons problem. We show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, property rights can often be less efficient than a commons. In particular, we study two effects: (1) waste which arises when individuals expend resources to use a resource unavailable due to congestion and (2) the risk of underutilization of the resource. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for each effect to dominate the other when the cost of determining t...
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作者：Cotton, Christopher
作者单位：University of Miami
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作者：Dolls, Mathias; Fuest, Clemens; Peichl, Andreas
作者单位：University of Oxford; University of Cologne
摘要：This paper analyzes the effectiveness of the tax and transfer systems in the EU and the US to provide income insurance through automatic stabilization in the recent economic crisis. We find that automatic stabilizers absorb 38% of a proportional income shock in the EU, compared to 32% in the US. In the case of an unemployment shock 47% of the shock is absorbed in the EU, compared to 34% in the US. This cushioning of disposable income leads to a demand stabilization of up to 30% in the EU and u...
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作者：Hummel, Patrick
作者单位：Yahoo! Inc
摘要：I analyze strategic voting incentives in large elections with three candidates when voting takes place sequentially. Voters have perfect information about their private preferences but do not know the distribution from which other voters' preferences are drawn. If a candidate finishes last in an early voting round, voters deduce that this candidate is likely to be less popular amongst the remaining voters, and the remaining voters almost always have an incentive to stop voting for this candida...
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作者：Campolieti, Michele; Riddell, Chris
作者单位：Cornell University; University of Toronto
摘要：This paper examines the effect of changes in two key parameters in disability policy: a) the earnings that disability insurance beneficiaries are allowed to earn without losing their disability benefits; and b) automatic reinstatement where beneficiaries can have benefits reinstated without re-application, and re-testing for disability determination. We examine the effects of these policy changes on the probability of employment for disability beneficiaries as well as the flows onto and off th...
