Political Resource Allocation: Benefits and Costs of Voter Initiatives

This article explores the benefits and costs of the voter initiative,a direct democracy device that allows policy decisions to bemade by voters rather than their elected representatives. Previousresearch suggests that by introducing "competition" into theproposal process, the initiative leads to policies that arecloser to the median voter's ideal point. In our model, in contrast,the effect of the initiative is conditional on the severityof representative agency problems and uncertainty about voterpreferences. The initiative always makes the voter better offwhen representatives are faithful agents, but when voter preferencesare uncertain, initiatives can cause "shirking" representativesto choose policies farther from the voter's ideal point. Ourevidence shows that initiatives are more common in states withheterogeneous populations, and initiatives reduce state spendingwhen Democrats control the government and when citizens havediverse preferences.     

SOME WELFARE IMPLICATIONS OF OPTIMAL STABILISATION POLICY IN AN ECONOMY WITH CAPITAL AND STICKY PRICES

In this paper we review and extend some of the key lessons that seem to be emerging from the Ramsey‐inspired theory of dynamic optimal monetary and fiscal policies. We construct measures of the key distortions in our economy; we label these ‘dynamic wedges’. Inflation, actual or anticipated, distorts these wedges in the present period, shrinks the tax base and increases the deadweight loss. We show that, if possible, labour as well as capital ought to be subsidised in steady state. We point to a number of extensions to the Ramsey literature that may help in the formulation of actual policy.     

Bringing archaeology into the information age: entropy,noise, channel capacity,and information potential in archaeological significance assessments

Quality & Quantity - Most archaeology today is conducted by private cultural resources management (CRM) firms in compliance with preservation legislation. Industry archaeologists make decisions...     

You’re Fired!: The Impact of Race on the Firing of Black Head Coaches in Major College Football

It is well known that the hiring rate of black head coaches in major college football is not representative of the number of student-athletes that are black. However, less obvious is the fact that black head coaches may be treated unfairly when decision-makers decide whether to retain or fire their institution’s current head coach. In this paper, I use a rich dataset of National Collegiate Athletic Associate football coaches from 1990 to 2012, containing measures of coaching performance and school expectations, as well as information on each coach’s race and whether he was fired or retained in each season. Using this data, I estimate a discrete-time hazard model of the probability that a head coach is fired, allowing the hazard rate of black head coaches and white head coaches to differ, and find that black head coaches are 5.28 percentage points more likely to be fired than their white counterparts. Additionally, I find that black head coaches are more likely to be fired in the initial 3 years of tenure, and again in their seventh and eighth years, but that the difference in the probability of release between black and white head coaches in the fourth through sixth years of tenure is small and statistically insignificant.     

What’s next for the Renewable Energy Target – resolving Australia’s integration of energy and climate change policy?*

Australian climate change policy and its integration with Australia’s electricity markets have been fraught for at least two decades. The only enduring policy has been the Commonwealth Renewable Energy Target (RET). Despite the relative success of the RET in driving investment and reducing emissions, state governments have now pivoted towards contracts-for-difference (Cfds). In this article, we outline the issues associated with policy discontinuity and the large-scale RET and review its effectiveness as an emissions reduction tool and driver of electricity sector abatement. We find that the RET has been relatively successful across the key criteria of cost and emissions reductions and is a better policy instrument than contracts-for-difference, which are increasingly being adopted by state governments. Building on the work of Nelson et al. (2020), we propose a new approach, which would allow for continued use of Cfds but utilising the RET’s policy architecture.     

GDP Per Capita Versus Median Household Income: What Gives Rise to the Divergence Over Time and how does this Vary Across OECD Countries?

Divergence between the evolution of GDP per capita and the income of a “typical” household as measured in household surveys is giving rise to a range of serious concerns, especially in the USA. This paper investigates the extent of that divergence and the factors that contribute to it across 27 OECD countries, using data from OECD National Accounts and the Luxembourg Income Study. While GDP per capita has risen faster than median household income in most of these countries over the period these data cover, the size of that divergence varied very substantially, with the USA a clear outlier. The paper distinguishes a number of factors contributing to such a divergence, and finds wide variation across countries in the impact of the various factors. Further, both the extent of that divergence and the role of the various contributory factors vary widely over time for most of the countries studied. These findings have serious implications for the monitoring and assessment of changes in household incomes and living standards over time.     

Budget or target: the choice between input and output strategies

In many competitive environments, players need to commit either to a specific goal they will achieve (an output target) or to the resources they are willing to expend in pursuit of that goal (an input budget). We model this situation as a two‐stage game where players may compete either by setting input and letting their output follow from the environment (“leading input”), or by setting output and letting the input levels required to support the output targets follow (“leading output”). We show that when each player's output is increasing (decreasing) in his rival's input, leading input (output) dominates leading output (input).