发达国家科技政策中的趋同模式解读及其经验借鉴

发达国家的科技和经济能够始终走在世界前列，与它本身的科技政策有着密切的关系。科技政策的激励和引导作用使发达国家的创新机制稳步形成并发挥着决定性作用。本文通过分析发达国家科技政策中的共同做法．从中找出具有借鉴意义的模式．以促进我国创新型国家战略的实施和建设。     

Constitutional Design for a Rent Seeking Society: The Voting Rule Choice Revisited

Buchanan and Tullock's original trade-off model of constitutional design is used to analyze how constitutional design affects post-constitutional rent seeking, and, in turn, how the anticipation of post-constitution rent seeking should lead to modification of constitutional design — specifically with respect to imposing and maintaining effective (composite) supermajority decision rules.     

一致性原则的修正及其协调

<企业会计准则--基本准则>中规定的一致性原则认为,所有会计处理方法的变更都会影响财务会计报告信息的可比性.会计处理方法包括会计确认、计量、核算、估计等方法,分析得出,只有会计要素、会计科目分类方法、成本计算方法和会计估计方法的变更才会影响财务会计报告信息的可比性.一致性原则应将会计处理方法变更的前提明确为"客观环境发生变化或提供更加有用的信息".一致性原则与其他原则矛盾协调的简单思路是判断各原则的相对重要性,即会计准则要明确在各项准则出现矛盾时应优先考虑的原则.     

The equivalence between costly and probabilistic voting models

In costly voting models, voters abstain when a stochastic cost of voting exceeds the benefit from voting. In probabilistic voting models, they always vote for a candidate who generates the highest utility, which is subject to random shocks. We prove an equivalence result: In two-candidate elections, given any costly voting model, there exists a probabilistic voting model that generates winning probabilities identical to those in the former model for any policy announcements, and vice versa. Thus many predictions of interest established in one of the models hold in the other as well, providing robustness of the conclusions to model specifications.     

The Political Economy of Social Security

We consider a two-period overlapping generations model in which individual voters differ by age and by productivity. In such a setting, a redistributive pay-as-you-go system is politically sustainable, even when the interest rate is higher than the rate of population growth. The workers with medium wages (not those with the lowest wages) and the retirees form a majority which votes for a positive level of social security. This level depends on the difference between the rates of population growth and interest as well as on the redistributiveness of the benefit rule.     

Political Learning: The Neglected Precondition of Constitutional Reform

This paper analyses the claim of constitutional economics that liberal economic policy requires far-reaching constitutional reform. The paper starts with a restatement of this claim and reinforces the rationale of the currently most influential variants of constitutional economics as represented by contractarian constitutional economics (Brennan, Buchanan), on the one hand, and Hayek s evolutionary theory, on the other. However, these constitutional proposals have shortcomings because the institutional preconditions of constitutional reform are not sufficiently reflected. Instead, I argue that, in face of economic crisis, a revision of in-period politics requires no more collective rationality than constitutional reform does. As a consequence, the introduction of new constitutional rules depends on political learning. The article concludes that constitutional rules in the sense of CPE can stabilise political learning but they cannot replace it.     

Promises,policies and pocketbook voting

Do voters respond to political parties׳ promises or to their past actions? We use a suitable sequence of events in Swedish politics to provide the first answer to this question. In the 1994 election campaign the Social Democrats proposed major cuts in transfers to parents with young children, whereas in the 1998 campaign they promised to increase transfers. The Social Democrats won both elections and delivered on both promises. Using voting among parents with slightly older children as counterfactual, we find that voters with young children responded markedly to economic promises rather than to implemented policies.     

The Process of Government Centralization: A Constitutional View

Government centralization is not a law of nature. It can be explained on the one hand by the endeavor of locally elected representatives of national assemblies to form tax and expenditure cartels, on the other hand by the constitutional power of the federal government to take over state tax legislation and to act as a cartel enforcer. A case study provides empirical evidence and moreover shows that such cartels generate a higher tax level and perform badly in interregional equalization of per capita income. The relevance of constitutional power for explaining centralization seems to be confirmed in various countries.     

An institutional analysis of voter turnout: the role of primary type and the expressive and instrumental voting hypotheses

Recent events highlight primary type as an institutional variable that merits further examination in the economics literature on voter turnout. Using panel data for U.S. gubernatorial elections and treating primary type as a proxy for candidate deviation from the median voter, we test whether primary type changes voter turnout and whether that change is dominated by instrumental or expressive voting. The results show that states with more open primaries tend to have greater voter turnout in general elections, and that this increase reflects the effect of open primaries on expressive voting.

公司治理投票机制优化设计初探

借鉴一般性政治投票机制,并结合公司治理目的及其利益主体特性,提出两种改进公司治理投票机制的方案——可转移的累积投票和贮存式投票,并对这两种改进方案的积极意义进行评估和分析。最后,对公司治理投票机制优化设计的后续研究问题进行了展望。     

The politics of progressive income taxation with incentive effects

This paper studies majority voting over quadratic taxation and investigates under which conditions marginal progressivity emerges as a voting outcome. In our model with endogenous income, there is no majority (Condorcet) winning tax schedule. We then investigate less demanding political equilibrium concepts in order to see under which conditions the set of equilibria is composed only of progressive tax functions. We follow three strategies: (i) reduction of the policy space to the tax functions that are ideal for some voter; (ii) elimination of weakly dominated strategies and the use of mixed strategies in a standard Downsian two-party competition game; (iii) assumption that political parties interact repeatedly and care about the size of their majority. Although each approach captures a different aspect of political behavior, they point to the same (simulation-based) conclusion that progressivity is more likely to emerge for most distributions of abilities and that it is actually the only possible voting outcome if the distribution is sufficiently concentrated at the middle.     

The Powers of The Central Governments and the Problems of Enlarging and Deepening the European Union: An Essay of Constitutional Political Economy

In this paper we present an adaptation of Buchanan and Tullock’s model in order to apply it to the constitutional choices regarding the assigning of powers to a supranational authority. The outcome of the economic-political model developed in this paper demonstrates that there are constraints in the supply of integration, suggesting that the enlargement and deepening of the European Union will have to be based on federalist conceptions. The authors should like to thanks seminar participants at European Public Choice conference (Belgirate 2002) and ECSA-C conference (Toronto 2002) where earlier versions of the paper have benefited from constructive suggestions. The authors assume the sole responsibility for any errors remaining in this version.     

The political economy of Brexit: explaining the vote

The UK’s closely contested Brexit vote to leave the EU is expected to have a significant impact on the UK and EU. While calculating the impact of Brexit is difficult since the UK is still formally a member of the EU, understanding the vote is possible. Leading up to the referendum, public opinion was divided along demographic and economic lines. This article uses referendum results at the local government level to test whether national, racial, religious and economic factors actually influenced the vote. Results indicate that demographic variables played a role while economic variables did not.     

Feminist economics as a Postmodern Moment

Wicksell saw economics as a way to effect social change. In addition to academic writings, he produced a steady stream of pamphlets, newspaper editorials, and public lectures that brought theoretical economics to bear on social policy. In this paper, consideration is given to this wider variety of Wicksell's writings, and his unanimity rule for public goods decision making is examined within the context of his social philosophy. We argue that the unanimity rule, rather than being narrowly focused on efficiency concerns, operated as a practical mechanism to achieve Wicksell's larger goal of social justice. This stands in contrast to the interpretation of Wicksell commonly presented in the public choice literature.     

Majority voting with stochastic preferences: The whims of a committee are smaller than the whims of its members

This note studies the volatility of the policy chosen by a committee whose members’ preferences are volatile, due to common and individual preferences shocks. It is shown that majority voting mitigates the latter but not the former. The volatility of the policy is smaller the smaller the volatility of members’ preferences, smaller the larger the size of the committee, and smaller than if it was chosen by a single member. The results hold in a context of uncertainty and with multidimensional issues.

Determinants of County-Level Voting Patterns In the 2012 and 2016 Presidential Elections

ABSTRACT

County-level data are used to estimate the incumbent-party share of the two-party vote in the 2012 and the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections. Using a ‘seemingly unrelated estimation’ procedure the regression results for the two elections show that there were some clear differences in the size of marginal effects for several key covariates. For example, income inequality, the size of the black male and black female populations, the size of the Hispanic male population and percent of the population with a college degree all had significantly larger coefficients in 2016 than in 2012, producing a larger marginal effect in favour of the Democratic candidate’s vote share. On the other hand, counties with increased poverty rates and counties located on the periphery of urban centres had a significantly larger marginal effect favouring the Republican’s vote share in 2016 compared to 2012. Finally, the regression results show that the effects of third-party vote shares, though not statistically different across the two elections, had a positive impact on the Democratic vote share in both elections.     

Electoral competition with policy-motivated candidates

In the multi-dimensional spatial model of elections with two policy-motivated candidates, we prove that the candidates must adopt the same policy platform in equilibrium. Moreover, when the number of voters is odd, if the gradients of the candidates' utility functions point in different directions, then they must locate at some voter's ideal point and a strong symmetry condition must be satisfied: in particular, it must be possible to pair some voters so that their gradients point in exactly opposite directions. If the number of dimensions is more than two, then our condition is knife-edge. When the number of voters is even, the situation is worse: such equilibria never exist, regardless of the dimensionality of the policy space.     

The geometry of voting power: Weighted voting and hyper-ellipsoids

Suppose legislators represent districts of varying population, and their assembly's voting rule is intended to implement the principle of one person, one vote. How should legislators' voting weights appropriately reflect these population differences? An analysis requires an understanding of the relationship between voting weight and some measure of the influence that each legislator has over collective decisions. We provide three new characterizations of weighted voting that embody this relationship. Each is based on the intuition that winning coalitions should be close to one another. The locally minimal and tightly packed characterizations use a weighted Hamming metric. Ellipsoidal separability employs the Euclidean metric: a separating hyper-ellipsoid contains all winning coalitions, and omits losing ones. The ellipsoid's proportions, and the Hamming weights, reflect the ratio of voting weight to influence, measured as Penrose–Banzhaf voting power. In particular, the spherically separable rules are those for which voting powers can serve as voting weights.     

A note on Heckman-type corrections in models for zero expenditures

In Heien and Wessells (1990), a two-step estimation procedure, that makes use of Heckman-type corrections, is proposed to estimate consumption on household budget surveys. It is shown that this approach, which draws from switching regressions models, leads to inconsistent estimates.     

The Costs of Implementing the Majority Principle: The Golden Voting Rule

In a context of constitutional choice of a voting rule, this paper presents an economic analysis of scoring rules that identifies the golden voting rule under the impartial culture assumption. This golden rule depends on the weights β and (1−β) assigned to two types of costs: the cost of majority decisiveness (‘tyranny’) and the cost of the ‘erosion’ in the majority principle. Our first main result establishes that in voting contexts where the number of voters n is typically considerably larger than the number of candidates k, the golden voting rule is the inverse plurality rule for almost any positive β. Irrespective of n and k, the golden voting rule is the inverse plurality rule if β ≥ 1/2 .. This hitherto almost unnoticed rule outperforms any other scoring rule in eliminating majority decisiveness. The golden voting rule is, however, the plurality rule, the most widely used voting rule that does not allow even the slightest ‘erosion’ in the majority principle, when β=0. Our second main result establishes that for sufficiently “small size” voting bodies, the set of potential golden rules consists at most of just three rules: the plurality rule, the Borda rule and the inverse plurality rule. On the one hand, this finding provides a new rationalization to the central role the former two rules play in practice and in the voting theory literature. On the other hand, it provides further support to the inverse plurality rule; not only that it is the golden rule in voting contexts, it also belongs, together with the plurality rule and the Borda method of counts, to the “exclusive” set of potential golden voting rules in small committees. We are indebted to Jim Buchanan, Amichai Glazer, Noa Nitzan, Ken Shepsle, and an anonymous referee for their useful comments.