STOP US BEFORE WE SPEND AGAIN: INSTITUTIONAL CONSTRAINTS ON GOVERNMENT SPENDING

A distributive politics model establishes that the presence of exogenously enforceable spending limits reduces spending and that the effect of executive veto authority is contingent on whether spending is capped and whether the chief executive is a liberal or conservative. Surprisingly, when spending limits are in place, governments with conservative executives spend more than those with more liberal chief executives. Limits are welfare improving, as is the executive veto when it leads to the building of override coalitions. Using 32 years of US state budget data, this paper also establishes empirically that strict balanced budget rules constrain spending and also lead to less pronounced short-term responses to fluctuations in a state's economy. Party variables like divided government and party control of state legislatures tend to have little or no direct effect, with political institutions and economic indicators explaining much of the variation in state spending.     

Partisanship and the effectiveness of oversight

We examine the welfare effects of partisanship in a model of checks and balances. An executive makes a policy proposal and an overseer then decides whether or not to veto the executive's proposal. Both the executive and the overseer have private information as to the correct policy to pursue, and both are motivated by the desire to appear competent. A partisan overseer is one who, in addition to seeking to promote her own reputation, cares how her decision will impact the executive's reputation. Our main result is that partisanship can improve the efficacy of an oversight regime, as the distortions caused by a partisan overseer's desire to affect the executive's reputation can offset the distortions caused by her desire to enhance her own. Our results provide a new rationale for divided government, as partisan considerations are often necessary to prevent the overseer from rubber stamping all executive proposals.     

The voter initiative and the power of the governor: evidence from campaign expenditures

Although a great deal of research examines the impact of the voter initiative process on the state legislature, the consequences for the state executive branch have been largely ignored. The voter initiative process provides the governor with a method to circumvent the legislature, which may increase the power of the governor in theory. However, it also provides citizens with a means to bypass the traditional lawmaking process and avoid the governor’s veto. This may reduce the power of the governor and lead to policies farther from the preferences of the governor. This study examines the impact of the voter initiative process on the power of the state governor by estimating total election cycle spending. Campaign expenditures are expected to reflect any sustained gain or loss in power due to the availability of the voter initiative process. The results indicate that gubernatorial campaign expenditures are significantly lower in states in which the voter initiative process is available. This finding suggests that state governors sustain a loss in political power when the voter initiative is available. Additionally, the findings imply that individuals may employ the voter initiative process as a substitute for gubernatorial support.     

Judicial Branch, Checks and Balances and Political Accountability

This paper attempts to combine the political economics models on separation of powers between the legislature and the executive with public choice theories on the behavior of the judicial branch. We obtain a model of political accountability and checks and balances with up to three government branches: the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. We conclude that an independent judiciary improves the political accountability of democratic systems relative to the political economics models with two government branches. An accommodating judiciary, however, changes the distribution of political rents without improving accountability.     

The Virtue of Installing Veto Players

This paper shows that the wisdom of many Founding Fathers of installing separate legislation powers to prevent each other from corrupt practices is at most only partially justified. Given the same culture, a political institution with veto players to counterbalance its multi-party legislature enables its legislative coalitions to extract larger amounts of bribes from interest groups than the one without such counterbalance veto players . This finding explains the rampant scandals of colossal bribes in regimes where an authoritarian president, prime minister, or party leader of the chronical dominant party, or a bicameral system is prevalent. Technically, this paper extends the weighted value allocation under a preset coalitional structure of the players to an apex game.     

Politics,partisanship and the power to veto: does gubernatorial line-item veto power affect state budgets?

How does line-item veto (LIV) power affect a governor’s ability to structure the state budget? Is LIV power only relevant as a partisan tool? Is it still relevant when the state legislature can override the veto? We use a rich disaggregated data set to test the effect of the gubernatorial LIV on state budgets, controlling for political factors such as party affiliation of the governor and legislature, minority status of the governor, and the legislature’s ability to override a LIV. Our results suggest that LIV power has very weak influence, if any, on governors’ ability to influence state budgets.     

Cooperation without Reputation: Experimental Evidence from Prisoner's Dilemma Games

This paper investigates cooperative play in prisoner's dilemma games by designing an experiment to evaluate the ability of two leading theories of observed cooperation: reputation building and altruism. We analyze both one-shot and finitely repeated games to gauge the importance of these theories. We conclude that neither altruism nor reputation building alone can explain our observations. The reputation model is inconsistent with play in both one-shots and finitely repeated games while the model with altruism is unable to explain observed play in the finitely repeated games.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C72, C92.     

垂直关系中产品信誉效应的博弈分析

当一家厂商的行为或活动对产品信誉造成正面或负面影响后,其他相关厂商也要同时承受正面或负面的后果。在垂直关系中,下游零售商提供劣质服务产生了有损于信誉的负面效应,会对制造商和其他零售商造成更大的损害。而一家零售商提供优质服务增进产品信誉时,他只能在承受全部成本的情况下获得较少的利益。本文的理论模型说明,市场竞争的结果可能会形成零售商只愿意提供劣质服务的态势。通过采取排他性经营区域、排他性交易和拒绝供应等机制安排能够有效地化解损害信誉的行为,既能够保护整个垂直关系相关的厂商,同时也能使消费者得到更多的服务,促进经济活动的效率。     

论人民法院对行政立法的审查

人民法院是中国的审判机关,同时也行使国家司法监督权。人民法院对行政权的监督主要是通过司法审查的形式来实现的。但目前在中国行政立法享有司法豁免权,这就使行政法治成为一句空话。从美国的司法实践来看,将中国的行政立法纳入司法审查的范围是十分必要的。要想真正实现行政法治,首先应在立法上明确规定人民法院对行政立法的司法审查权;其次要明确司法审查中人民的审查要件、审查对象及审查标准;最后要提高法院的在司法审查中的地位和司法上的独立性。     

Lobbying and discretion

When interest groups compete to influence legislators, the resulting legislation is often vague, and thus obliges the groups to continue their fight in the executive. On its face, this seems inefficient—at least from the point of view of the groups. We explore this intuition in a model of “nested lobbying” in which interest groups first compete to influence a legislative agenda setter, then compete to influence legislative votes over the resulting agenda. If the resulting legislation grants discretion to the executive, the final prize is allocated in yet one more contest in the bureaucracy. We find that when the status quo is non-discretionary, competition over the agenda never results in an agenda that includes discretion. Surprisingly, however, a discretionary status quo can stand with probability 1 if the preferences of the bureaucracy, the legislature, and the agenda setter are arranged in an “iron triangle”. Specifically, the bureaucracy and agenda setter must be biased in favor of one group, while the legislature is biased in favor of the other.     

Corruption and legislature size: Evidence from Brazil

This paper studies whether and how legislatures affect political corruption. Using a regression discontinuity design in the context of Brazilian municipalities, we find a positive causal impact of council size on corruption levels, as detected by random federal audits. This indicates that an extra councilor represents an additional political actor potentially interested in diverting public resources, which we define as a rent extraction effect. However, we find further evidence that, in some contexts, larger councils enhance the representation of opposition parties and effectively increase monitoring over the executive, attenuating the rent extraction effect. Namely, in municipalities where opposition parties are typically underrepresented, the additional seat in the council is absorbed by the opposition and corruption outcomes do not worsen. In addition, only in such context, mayors are more commonly sentenced for misconduct in office by judicial authorities, whose investigations anecdotally often originates from councilors denouncing mayors to local courts. Overall, our findings show that legislature size is detrimental to corruption outcomes but less so where the representation of opposition parties improves with the enlargement of the legislature.     

Influencing Agencies Through Pivotal Political Institutions

We draw on the positive political theory and campaign financeliteratures to examine how interest groups allocate influenceactivities (e.g., monetary donations, lobbying) across multiplegovernment institutions when seeking more favorable agency policydecisions. By modeling agency behavior in the context of legislativeoversight, we derive testable predictions about the politicalconditions under which an interest group will influence (1)only the agency, (2) the legislature and/or executive insteadof the agency, and (3) the legislature or executive in additionto the agency in order to induce a shift in regulatory policy.One implication of our conclusions relating to (2) and (3) isthat empirical studies seeking to identify a relationship betweenelectoral campaign contributions and public policy using dataon legislative votes are potentially misspecified.     

基于声誉理论的研发外包动态激励机制研究

基于声誉理论,本文建立了企业研发外包的动态激励机制模型,研究了承包方在同一个契约里长期激励与短期激励相结合的激励模式,得出了实现声誉有效激励的条件和提高声誉激励效应的途径。研究结果表明:考虑声誉机制时,承包方在第1期、第2期的努力水平比不考虑声誉机制时提高了,承包方从第1期、第2期产出里分享的剩余份额比不考虑声誉机制时提高了。因此,与没有引入声誉机制的契约模型相比,声誉激励机制和显性激励机制相结合的最优动态契约模型可以实现帕累托改进、提高激励强度,并能起到很好的约束作用。     

The Executive Veto: Purpose, Procedure, and Paradox

American governments, federal and state, leave a gap in legislative representation: global majorities are practically silent compared with local ones. An executive veto can right the balance. But prevailing procedural designs are fraught with paradox. I offer a simple new design that avoids paradox, can be instituted without constitutional amendment, and enhances both legislative and executive responsibility.     

Budget institutions and political insulation: why states adopt the item veto

Forty-three of the fifty states of the United States have granted item veto authority to their governors as part of state constitutions. In this paper, I test explanations of why and when a legislature would cede institutional power. Using data from 1865 to 1994, I show that these measures are most likely proposed by fiscal conservatives who fear the loss of power in the future; in order to protect their interests for those periods when they will be in the minority, they implement institutions such as the item veto which will limit future, liberal legislatures. The results therefore shed light on two important substantive areas. First, by showing how the choice of budgetary institutions is endogenous to the political process, it clarifies that political factors must be considered in addition to social efficiency to understand the adoption of budget institutions. Second, it provides evidence in support of theories that have posited that electorally weak groups will heavily ‘insulate’ policies in periods in which they momentarily hold power (e.g. [Moe, 1989] and [de Figueiredo, 2002]).     

When and how politicians take ‘scandalous’ decisions?

We study the decisions of a politician who maximizes his probability of being re-elected, which depends on the enactment of legislative instruments defined ‘scandalous’ because of their highly redistributive content. The agents are a politician and the voters; the legislative instruments available to the legislator are ordinary and executive laws, which differ according to their visibility. The theoretical model predicts that ‘scandalous’ legislation tends to be passed at the beginning of the legislature, while ‘non scandalous’, broader legislation, is approved mostly at the end of the legislation. Scandalous decisions, moreover, tend to be implemented by means of less visible executive legislation, while ordinary acts are mainly used to implement non scandalous decisions. This explanation of the genesis of legislation cycles is consistent with the findings of the empirical literature.     

Divided government and dominance solvability

This paper considers strategic voters who face an institutional structure in which there are two branches of the government: the executive, elected by plurality rule and the legislature, elected by proportional rule. Policy outcomes are described through a compromise between these two branches. I solve the game by relying only on purely non-cooperative behavior of individual voters. I prove the uniqueness of Nash equilibrium in the legislative subgame, where the election of the president is known. This equilibrium can be obtained by the process of iterated elimination of dominated strategies. I then solve the whole game by backward induction. The results suggest moderate behavior of voters, due to the desire to balance the plurality of a party in the presidential election by voting for the opposite party in the legislature. Similar results can be obtained in the case of reverse timing of the elections, as well as in the case where elections of the two branches of the government are simultaneous.     

Reputation,monitoring, and effort

This paper studies the impact of strategic monitoring on reputation building, focusing in particular on models of the principal-agent type. The main result is that the principal always will monitor risk-neutral agents more closely early in the game, while such agents may or may not work harder as the game progresses, depending on their initial reputation. If agents are sufficiently risk-averse, they will always work harder early in the game, whereas the principal may or may not monitor such agents more closely as the game progresses.     

Are electronic government innovations helpful to deter corruption? Evidence from across the world

Electronic government innovations have been a critical development in public administration in recent years. Many countries have implemented e-government policies to enhance efficiency and transparency and combat corruption. This paper examines the impact of e-government on corruption using longitudinal data for more than 170 countries from 2002 to 2020. The empirical results suggest that e-government serves as a deterrent to corrupt activities. We analyse which e-government domains affect corruption, which types of corruption are more affected by e-government and the circumstances under which e-government is more effective in reducing corruption. The empirical results suggest that online service completion and e-participation are important features of e-government as an anticorruption tool. Evidence suggests that e-participation reduces corrupt legislature activities, public sector theft, executive bribery, and corrupt exchanges. The potential of e-government to deter corruption is higher in countries where corruption is moderate or high and economic development is lower. Higher levels of GDP per capita, foreign direct investment, and political rights are also associated with lower levels of corruption.     

Delegation versus Veto in Organizational Games of Strategic Communication

In organizations, principals use decision rules to govern a more informed agent's behavior. We compare two such rules: delegation and veto. Recent work suggests that delegation dominates veto unless the divergence in preferences between the principal and the agent is so large that informative communication cannot take place. We show that this result does not hold in a reasonable model of veto versus delegation. In this model, veto dominates delegation for any feasible divergence in preferences, if it induces the agent to shut down low quality proposals that he would otherwise implement and if such projects have sufficient likelihood.