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作者：Bennedsen, M; Feldmann, SE
作者单位：Northwestern University; Copenhagen Business School
摘要：Interest groups can potentially influence political decision-makers by offering contributions and by providing relevant information that sways the decision in the group's favor. What mix of these two instruments should an interest group choose, and how does the use of one instrument affect the effectiveness of the other? In this paper we identify an information externality that raises the cost of offering contributions and show that this indirect search cost reduces the group's incentive to ga...
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作者：Diamond, P
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
摘要：Tax-favored contributions for financing some public goods may be a useful part of optimal nonlinear income tax and expenditure policy. There are two sides to the potential gain from subsidized donations. First, for a given level of public good provision, higher private donations from high earners than low earners eases the incentive compatibility constraint for donors and so can raise social welfare. This follows since considering a lower-paid job includes a perception of a drop in public good...
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作者：Fearon, G; Busch, LA
作者单位：York University - Canada; University of Waterloo
摘要：This paper investigates the impact of a ministry's budget size on the choice between auditing a (Niskanen)bureau and employing competitive bidding in the provision of a publicly funded good. The ministry's marginal expected payoff increases fastest with budget size for auctioning as opposed to auditing. However, the ministry is shown to switch from a purely public provision to a competitive provision as the budget size increases even if expected fixed costs favor the audit. The study contribut...
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作者：Petrucci, A
作者单位：University of Molise; Luiss Guido Carli University
摘要：This paper analyzes the effects of a land rent tax on capital fort-nation and foreign investment in a life-cycle small open economy with endogenous labor-leisure choices. The consequences of land taxation critically depend on how the tax proceeds are used by the government. A land tax depresses capital formation, crowds out foreign investment and increases national wealth and consumption when the land tax revenues are distributed as lump-sum payments. If the proceeds from land taxation are use...
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作者：Reed, WR
作者单位：University of Oklahoma System; University of Oklahoma - Norman
摘要：I estimate the influence of political parties on state Tax Burdens over a 40-year period (19602000). Holding constant a large number of state and voter characteristic variables, I find that: (i) Tax Burdens are higher when Democrats control the state legislature compared to when Republicans are in control. (ii) The political party of the governor has little effect after controlling for partisan influences in the state legislature. I explain how both findings are consistent with median voter th...
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作者：Anesi, V
作者单位：Universite de Toulouse; Universite Toulouse 1 Capitole
摘要：Although tax earmarking constitutes a voluntary constraint for government's policymaking, it is widely used in the real world. This paper investigates the electoral dimension of earmarking in a model of political competition with ideological parties. Its main contribution is to derive new insights on the relationship between earmarking and parties' probability of winning the elections. We find that the electoral pressure may favor the existence of tax-earmarking equilibria, but that it sometim...
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作者：Brito, DL; Hamilton, JH; Intriligator, MD; Sheshinski, E; Slutsky, SM
作者单位：State University System of Florida; University of Florida; Rice University; University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas A.C. (CIDE)
摘要：Most of the debate about Coasian bargaining in the presence of externalities relates to the First Welfare Theorem: is the outcome under bargaining efficient? This debate has involved the definition and importance of transaction costs, the significance of private information, and the effect of entry. There has been little analysis of how Coasian bargaining relates to the Second Welfare Theorem: even if the bargaining outcome is efficient, does the process limit the set of Pareto optimal allocat...
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作者：Jack, W; Lagunoff, R
作者单位：Georgetown University
摘要：Why would an enfranchised elite voluntarily dilute its power by expanding the franchise? The central intuition behind our analysis is that the dilution of power by an enfranchised elite is equivalent to the delegation of power by one member of the elite-a pivotal voter-to another citizen, who in turn becomes the pivotal voter in the new (expanded) elite. Such delegation might be useful if it allows the current pivotal voter to credibly commit to future policy choices. The current pivotal voter...
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作者：Polinsky, AM
作者单位：Stanford University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：This article studies the optimal use of fines and imprisonment when an offender's level of wealth cannot be observed by the enforcement authority. I employ a model in which there are two types of offenders-a low-wealth type and a high-wealth type. The consequence of the unobservability of wealth depends on whether the enforcement authority would employ fines alone, or would also impose imprisonment sentences, if wealth were observable. In the former case, the inability to observe wealth lowers...
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作者：Bisin, A; Rampini, AA
作者单位：New York University; Northwestern University
摘要：We study the role of anonymous markets in which trades cannot be monitored by the government. We adopt a Mirrlees approach to analyze economies in which agents have private information and a benevolent government controls optimal redistributive tax policy. While unrestricted access to anonymous markets reduces the set of policy instruments available to the government, it also limits the scope of inefficient redistributive policies when the government lacks commitment. Indeed, the restrictions ...
