新农村发展中的乡村精英形成与精英关系格局实录——基于南冲村的个案研究

乡村精英是农村发展的重要推动力量。经济精英、政治精英和社会精英共同构成了乡村精英群体格局。它的形成不仅受到社会环境的影响,而且其自身能力更是一种决定因素,这种格局的形成对于构建和谐的农村社会关系产生了深远的影响。     

Women in Business in Late Nineteenth-Century Chile: Class,Marital Status,and Economic Autonomy

This article analyzes Chilean women’s entrepreneurial activity in the 1877–1908 period examining two official data sources representing different socioeconomic business niches – the national trademark registry, which represents the elite among business people, and the Santiago business license registry, which includes the non-elite. The analysis reveals an economy with women engaging increasingly in business in an expanding range of sectors. By the 1890s, women managed nearly a quarter of Santiago’s firms and 5 percent of elite firms nationally. Widows appeared overrepresented among elite businesses and underrepresented among those of the non-elite. These results suggest that institutions constraining entrepreneurship among married women were more strongly enforced among the elite than among other social classes. The evidence thus suggests that during late nineteenth century there was an increase in the economic autonomy exercised by unmarried women and widows of all socioeconomic strata, but also by married women among the non-elite.     

Populist policies in the transition to democracy

This paper develops a political economy model that provides an explanation as for why ruling elites in oligarchic societies may rely on income redistribution to the poor (the masses) in order to prevent them from attempting a revolution. We refer to this kind of redistribution as populist redistribution because, first it does not increase the poor's productive capacity (human capital), and second it seeks to “buy” political support (peace) to perpetuate the elite's control of political power. We examine the conditions under which ruling elites choose to deter the poor (by means of military repression and/or populist redistribution), to engage in a dispute with the poor for the control of political power, or, alternatively, to extend democracy. According to the results of the model populist redistribution (or military repression), if any, increases with initial wealth inequality and with the amount of redistribution that the poor can undertake under democracy, and decreases with the relative importance of a human capital externality in production. The model explains why in some cases the use of an apparently inefficient policy of populist redistribution turns out to be optimal for both groups (the ruling elite and the poor class) when the alternative is the use of military repression or default to conflict.     

Pacifying monogamy

This paper proposes a theory of institutionally imposed monogamy. In a society where many women are allocated to the elite, there are high returns for the non-elite men to rebel. Monogamy, or “constrained” polygyny, can pacify non-elite men, and thus serve the elite’s reproductive interests. The more unequal is the society, the stricter constraints the elite want to impose on themselves. This suggests how monogamy might have arisen in response to rising class cleavages, e.g., in the wake of the introduction of agriculture. Another result is that, if the elite can write a law that commits not only themselves but also any group that would come to replace them in a rebellion, then polygyny will be more constrained than if they cannot. We speculate that the Church in Europe may have facilitated the imposition of such binding constraints.     

The Corporate Elite Community Structure of Global Capitalism

A key debate on the merits and consequences of globalisation asks to what extent we have moved to a multipolar global political economy. Here we investigate this issue through the properties and topologies of corporate elite networks and ask: what is the community structure of the global corporate elite? In order to answer this question, we analyse how the largest one million firms in the world are interconnected at the level of corporate governance through interlocking directorates. Community detection through modularity maximisation reveals that regional clusters play a fundamental role in the network architecture of the global political economy. Transatlantic connections remain particularly strong: Europe and North America remain interconnected in a dense network of shared directors. A distinct Asian cluster stands apart as separate and oriented more towards itself. While it develops and gains economic and political power, Asia remains by and large outside the scope of the networks of the incumbent global (that is, North Atlantic) corporate elite. We see this as a sign of the rise of competing corporate elites. But the corporate elites from the traditional core countries still form a powerful opponent for any competing faction in the global corporate elite.     

Political structure as a legacy of indirect colonial rule: Bargaining between national governments and rural elites in Africa

Alliances between national governments and rural elites are observed in postcolonial Africa. Governments rely on rural elites to control rural regions, guaranteeing them a degree of authority and revenue in return. This paper provides a model to analyze the forging of such alliances. Without cooperation between the national government and rural elite, the power of the two competing authorities to compel farmers’ obedience determines the revenue of the government extracted from cash crop production. Hence, with a powerful rural elite, the national government has a weak bargaining position and agrees to a large transfer to the rural elite. Furthermore, the government’s capacity to compel rural residents’ obedience is endogenously determined by the level of cash crop production and the power of rural elites. Because indirect colonial rule is a significant source of the elite control over residents in rural areas, cross-regional variations in colonial policies lead to various forms of postcolonial alliances between African national governments and rural elites.     

Educated Bandits: Endogenous Property Rights and Intra‐Elite Distribution of Human Capital

This article presents a simple model of endogenous institutions linking property rights to the distribution of human capital between political and economic elite groups. In the absence of institutional constraints, the commitment problem of the political elites is intensified, because their human capital can turn out to be a double‐edged sword raising their efficiency in predation as well as in production. In general, the more human capital the political elites have, the stronger the institutional concessions they are ready to offer to attarct investment. Provided that predation depends sufficiently on human capital, the political elites can credibly commit to respect property rights by specializing in fields that are relevant for the priavte sector. Brain drain can undermine the transition to stable property rights even when the political elites are well‐educated. Comparative narratives from Malaysia and Zimbabwe are presented to motivate the theoretical discussion.     

Power sharing and electoral equilibrium

This paper considers a model of (consensual) democracy where political parties engage first in electoral competition, and they share policy-making power afterward according with the votes gathered in the election. The paper uncovers the difficulties to guarantee stability in this institutional setting; and it provides a condition of symmetry on parties’ political motivations that ensures the existence of pure strategy equilibrium under a broad family of power sharing rules, ranging from fully proportional to winner-take-all. The equilibrium analysis shows that power sharing and ideology exert a centrifugal force on policy platforms that increases party polarization, with the paradoxical result that consensual democracies can actually lead to more radical electoral campaigns than winner-take-all.     

Golden cages for showy birds: Optimal switching costs in labor contracts

Under what circumstances do workers sign contracts with high quitting penalties? Our answer points to market transparency. When the worker's performance is privately observed by the incumbent firm, alternative employers face an adverse selection problem. As a result, efficient separations can only take place through involuntary layoffs and there is no role for quitting fees. In contrast, when performance is public, quitting fees are useful devices to appropriate the surplus from workers’ reallocation. Separations are amicable and take the form of quitting after downwardly renegotiating the fees. Qualitative features of contracts are independent of the distribution of ex-post bargaining power. The impact of switching costs on total welfare and its distribution depends on the degree of market transparency and the ex-ante distribution of market power.     

Endogenous (in)formal institutions

The paper provides a formal framework identifying both the origins and interaction of a culture of cooperation and inclusive political institutions. When elite members and citizens try to cooperate in sharing consumption risk and joint investment, the elite enacts democracy to convince the citizens that a sufficient part of the investment return will be shared via public spending and thus, they should cooperate. In addition, cultural accumulation rises with the severity of consumption risk at its moderate values and then drops at its high values making cheating too appealing. Finally, the citizens may over-accumulate culture to credibly commit to cooperating in investment at its intermediate values threatening democracy. These predictions are consistent with novel data on 90 European historical regions spanning the 1000–1600 period. Reforms towards tighter constraints on the elite’s power were driven by the potential for Mediterranean trades. Moreover, the activity of both the Cistercians and the Franciscans, our proxy for the citizens’ culture, has an inverted U-shaped link with the temperature volatility. Finally, the shift of long-distance trades towards the Atlantic fostered the Franciscans’ spread in the Mediterranean, where they organized micro-credit activities reinforcing the citizenry-elite partnerships.     

Political intergenerational risk sharing

In a stochastic two-period OLG model, featuring an aggregate shock to the economy, ex-ante optimality requires intergenerational risk sharing. We compare the level of intergenerational risk sharing chosen by a benevolent government and by an office-seeking politician. In our political system, the transfer of resources across generations is determined as a Markov equilibrium of a probabilistic voting game. Low realized returns on the risky asset induce politicians to compensate the old through a PAYG system. This political system typically generates an intergenerational risk sharing scheme that is (i) larger, (ii) more persistent, and (iii) less responsive to the realization of the shock than the social optimum. This is because the current politician anticipates her transfers to the elderly to be compensated by future politicians through offsetting transfers, and hence overspends.     

The effect of power imbalances on incentives to make non-contractible investments

We use an experiment to study the effect of ex-post sharing rules on relationship-specific investments in an incomplete contracting context. We find that no power structure can induce first-best investments and that equally productive partners reach more efficient outcomes with a balanced power structure (i.e., equal sharing of returns) than with an asymmetric one. In addition, we find evidence for behavioural effects: partners make higher investments and reach higher efficiency levels than own-payoff maximisation would suggest. This behaviour is in line with a model where decision-makers care about social efficiency. It is not consistent with inequity-averse preferences.     

Information sharing and lending market competition with switching costs and poaching

We analyze information sharing with repeated banking competition. In the presence of switching costs we find that information sharing renders poaching more profitable in future rounds of competition, since the poaching activities can be targeted towards (more) creditworthy borrowers. We find that information sharing reduces relationship benefits, and, therefore relaxes competition for initial market shares. Information sharing introduces a welfare tradeoff by promoting equilibrium profits at the expense of talented entrepreneurs whenever market power persists in credit market, whereas it is a matter of indifference without market power. Thus information sharing may induce exclusion of creditworthy borrowers from credit markets.     

Dynamic enfranchisement

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 realizes that the agent to whom authority is delegated will face similar incentives to subsequently transfer power, and this effect tempers the extent to which the franchise is extended. We develop a recursive, infinite horizon model that generates the possibility of gradual franchise expansion. We show that, in equilibrium, expansion occurs if and only if the private decisions of the citizenry have a net positive spillover to the dynamic payoff of the current pivotal voter. The class of games we study can accommodate a number of proposed explanations for franchise extension, including the threat of insurrection, and ideological or class conflict within the elite.     

Why stare decisis?

All Courts rule ex-post, after most economic decisions are sunk. This can generate a time-inconsistency problem. From an ex-ante perspective, Courts will have the ex-post temptation to be excessively lenient. This observation is at the root of the rule of precedent, known as stare decisis.Stare decisis forces Courts to weigh the benefits of leniency towards the current parties against the beneficial effects that tougher decisions have on future ones.We study these dynamics and find that stare decisis guarantees that precedents evolve towards ex-ante efficient decisions, thus alleviating the Courts' time-inconsistency problem. However, the dynamics do not converge to full efficiency.     

Strategyproof sharing of submodular costs:budget balance versus efficiency

Summary. A service is produced for a set of agents. The service is binary, each agent either receives service or not, and the total cost of service is a submodular function of the set receiving service. We investigate strategyproof mechanisms that elicit individual willingness to pay, decide who is served, and then share the cost among them. If such a mechanism is budget balanced (covers cost exactly), it cannot be efficient (serve the surplus maximizing set of users) and vice-versa. We characterize the rich family of budget balanced and group strategyproof mechanisms and find that the mechanism associated with the Shapley value cost sharing formula is characterized by the property that its worst welfare loss is minimal. When we require efficiency rather than budget balance – the more common route in the literature – we find that there is a single Clarke-Groves mechanism that satisfies certain reasonable conditions: we call this the marginal cost pricing mechanism. We compare the size of the marginal cost pricing mechanism's worst budget surplus with the worst welfare loss of the Shapley value mechanism. Received: October 26, 1998; revised version: December 3, 1999     

Conflict prevention by Bayesian persuasion

Drawing upon the Bayesian persuasion literature, I show that a mediator can provide conflicting parties strategically with information to decrease the ex-ante war probability. In a conflict between two parties with private information about military strength, the mediator generates information about each conflicting party's strength and commits to sharing the obtained information with the respective opponent. The conflicting parties can be convinced not to fight each other. The conflicting parties benefit from mediation, as the ex-ante war probability is reduced. The benefit is taken up by weak conflicting parties. This benefit is larger when war is costlier and when the war probability absent mediation is higher.     

Political Dynasties

Political dynasties have long been present in democracies, raising concerns that inequality in the distribution of political power may reflect imperfections in democratic representation. However, the persistence of political elites may simply reflect differences in ability or political vocation across families and not their entrenchment in power. We show that dynastic prevalence in the Congress of the U.S. is high compared to that in other occupations and that political dynasties do not merely reflect permanent differences in family characteristics. On the contrary, using two instrumental variable techniques we find that political power is self-perpetuating: legislators who hold power for longer become more likely to have relatives entering Congress in the future. Thus, in politics, power begets power.     

Institutions and Development: The Interaction Between Trade Regime and Political System

This paper argues that an unequal distribution of political power, biased to landed elites and owners of natural resources, in combination with openness to trade is a major obstacle to development of natural resource- or land-abundant economies. We develop a two-sector general equilibrium model and show that in an oligarchic society public investments conducive to industrialization. schooling for example.are typically lower in an open than in a closed economy. Moreover, we find that, under openness to trade, development is faster in a democratic system. We also endogenize the trade regime and demonstrate that in a land-abundant economy the landed elite has an interest to support openness to trade. We present historical evidence for Southern economies in the Americas that is consistent with our theoretical results: Resistance of landed elites to mass education, comparative advantages in primary goods production in the 19th century globalization wave, and low primary school enrollment and literacy rates.     

Demand of direct democracy

The growing demand for referendum challenges the traditional model of representative democracy. In this paper we study under which conditions voters prefer a system of representative democracy to direct democracy. In direct democracies voters choose a policy among two alternatives, under uncertainty about which policy better fits the realized state of the world; in representative democracies voters select a candidate who, once elected, chooses a policy having observed which is the realized state of the world. Voters and politicians' payoffs depend on a common component which is positive only if the policy fits the state of the world, and on a private ideological bias towards one of the policies. In direct democracies voters are uncertain about the future state of the world, while in representative democracies they are uncertain about the degree of ideological bias of the candidates, even if they know towards which policy each candidate is biased. We show that representative democracy is preferred if (i) the majority of voters are pragmatic (the common component prevails), and (ii) society is ideologically polarized, meaning that the majority of voters are ideological (the private component prevails), but the median voter is pragmatic. Direct democracy is the preferred instrument for collective choices in societies in which the majority of voters and the median voter are ideological, implying that the majority of voters have the same ideological bias, as, for instance, it occurs when the populist rhetoric of people against the elite succeeds.