Constitutional moments in Eastern Europe and subjectivist political economy

This article provides epistemic foundations for traditional rational-choice political science, to explain when and how ideas matter. Operational codes, epistemic communities and the structural patterns of ideas demonstrates the constitutional moments that occur during crises, and how ideas can underpin and direct the formation of interest groups. The implications for policy reform are discussed, along with an application to the Constitutional Moments during the transition of Central and Eastern Europe.

The determinants of individual attitudes towards immigration

The paper formulates hypotheses and reports on individual attitudes towards immigration based on data for 24 countries on socioeconomic position, sociodemographic characteristics and political attitudes. The results are consistent with the predictions of factor proportions trade theory, but also suggest that a range of other economic and cultural factors influence attitudes towards immigration.     

Constitutional coordination in unstable party systems: the Brazilian constitution of 1988

Constitutional assemblies are a common feature of many democratic transitions. However, the goal of coordinating constitutional choice would seem nearly impossible when assemblies are comprised of highly fragmented and volatile political parties. Building on Knight’s bargaining model, this article argues that the main challenge to coordination in unstable party systems is the procedural disequilibrium that results from incomplete information over breakdown payoffs. The likelihood of compromise in such circumstances is a function of the ideologies that frame constitutional choice and inform coalition-building. Thus, unstable party systems are not chaotic, although they may be deeply conflict-laden. These issues are illustrated empirically via the Brazilian Constitution of 1988, which demonstrates the possibilities for a stable constitutional order emerging from a fragmented and volatile party system.

Assessment of the immigration effect and choice of development pattern for scenic areas： a case study of Wuyi Mountain, China

Mountainous regions face a series of Conflicts betWeen the natural resources conservation and the economic development, especially in protected areas, where are the home to some of the poorest people in＇the world In China, the Protected Areas Authorities （such as Protected Areas Authorities of Wuyi Mountain） transferred the mountainous people out of the protected areas. We found that it is not a good approach of immigration project, as fal economic and ecological effect is concerned. Although remote and majestic, beauty attracted many tourists, mass tourism is not a good approach to soh,e the development problem in mountainous areas because it can not provide enough opportunites to make local people live a comfortable life, and the high volume of tourists indicates that the resources, face significant threats. Because many fandscapes,are run by Private enterprises, local residents and government only get limited benefits. Alihough ecotourism principles expatiate on economic development and resource, onservation, local people income and tourists feelings, it has discordance between the theory and the praciice Therefore. the term of ＂integrated ecotourism ＂ was coined in the paper.based on the ecotourism theory, Integrated ecotourism means a broadly tourism resources and pendulum spatial pattern which will come into being with the movement of local,people and tourists from protected areas io the nearby town or city： and it also tries to solve the property right conflict of mountain land between the local people and the private enterprises according to property right theory.     

Risk preference,immigration policy and illegal immigration

The paper analyzes the effects of government policy upon illegal immigration. The model used as a vehicle for this analysis is an extension of Ethier's one-small-country model of illegal immigration to a two-country context. We distinguish between the cases of capital immobility and free capital mobility, and consider illegal immigration when there are border patrols by the government and when there are internal enforcement procedures in effect. Unlike previous researchers who have assumed risk neutrality, we examine the impacts of government policy when prospective illegal immigrants exhibit risk averse and risk loving behavior. The relaxation of the risk neutrality assumption leads to the possibility of multiple and unstable equilibria. Moreover, attitudes to risk and the probability of detection are shown to have implications for some equilibrium responses to tighter surveillance.     

Legislative output and the Constitutional Court in Italy

This paper considers the impact of the Constitutional Court on legislative output in Italy. Following Tsebelis’ ((2002) Veto Players: Foundations of Institutional Analysis. Princeton: Princeton University Press) veto players model and the stylised facts as regards the Italian Constitutional Court’s activity, this paper presents a multi-stage game in the spirit of Gely and Spiller ((1990). A rational choice theory of supreme court statutory decisions with applications to the state farm and grove city cases. Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 6, 263–300). In the first stage, the legislative veto players, namely the parties in government, choose whether to change or not the policy status quo by enacting new legislation. In the second stage, the Court makes a constitutional interpretation: it decides whether to alter or not the outcome of the first stage through a sentence of constitutional illegitimacy. The Court has both the power of annulling laws and a limited power of creating new legally binding norms. Moreover, in the third stage, a constitutional law voted by a parliamentary qualified majority can overturn the Court’s decisions. The model predicts that the presence of the Court lowers legislative policy change and tests this prediction with 1956–2001 annual time series data for Italy.

Capital–skill complementarity and the immigration surplus

We build a neoclassical growth model with overlapping dynasties and capital–skill complementarities to evaluate changes in immigration policy. Calibrating the model using US data, we quantify the differential effects of skilled and unskilled immigration on factor returns and on the welfare of different sectors of the population. An influx of high-skilled immigrants lowers the wages of skilled workers, raises the wages of unskilled workers, and because of the relative complementarity between capital and skilled labor, substantially raises the rate of return to native-owned capital. By contrast, an influx of unskilled immigrants produces an opposite effect on wages, and has only a negligible effect on the return to capital. Because of capital–skill complementarity, an increase in the number of skilled immigrants generates an immigration surplus—the overall welfare benefit accruing to the native population—that is approximately ten times larger than the immigration surplus generated by an identical increase in the number of unskilled immigrants. This differential welfare effect is far higher than can be accounted for by the disparity between the productivities of each type of worker.     

宪政经济学与中国经济改革的宪政问题

宪政经济学是现代西方经济学研究的重要分支，是经济学回归为“政治的经济学”的重要研究成果。它是对约束经济行为者和政治行为者的选择与活动的不同法津——制度——宪法规则的运转性质做出相关解释的经济学。而按照马克思主义经济学的理论。经济决定政治，经济发展从来也不能脱离制度的约束。从这个意义上讲，中国的经济改革本身并不是一个单纯的经济问题，更是一个以经济为核心、以宪法制度为框架约束的公共选择过程，理应以宪政的思维去理解和推进这项改革。     

Constitutional Interpretation: Burke and Buchanan and their 18th Century Intellectual Roots

There is a respectable tradition of Burkean constitutional interpretation in legal scholarship whereas Edmund Burke is a relatively neglected figure in constitutional political economy. A comparison of the constitutional interpretations of constitutional political economy and Burkean legal scholarship provides a potentially fruitful outcome for both. This is particularly so given the 18th century intellectual roots of each. An examination of the Burkean tradition demonstrates why it is methodologically inductive, evolutionary and pessimistic, compared to the deductive, individualistic and optimistic approach of the Smithian tradition of constitutional political economy. Interestingly, these sharp distinctions in method produce similar results.

中国上市公司会计政策选择研究

中国上市公司会计政策选择存在很多问题,主要有：选择权的失衡及存在机会主义倾向选择的随意性大且形式单一,未实现整体利益的最大化。由于诸多因素的存在,会计政策的选择行为是必然存在的,如果不采取措施加以防范,上市公司利用会计政策进行盈余管理在所难免。对于会计政策,关键是防止过度滥用,尽量减少诱发滥用的动机,规范其选择行为。     

Taxonomy: racism versus fiscal conservatism in voting on segregationist provisions in Alabama’s constitution

On Election Day 2004, a razor-thin majority of Alabama’s voters rejected a proposed amendment to remove overtly segregationist language from the state constitution. Opponents had contended that approval would have opened the legislative door to significantly higher taxes. We employ the results from two earlier special elections to analyze the outcome. In 2000, voters supported repealing a constitutional provision prohibiting interracial marriages. Three years later, Alabamians were asked to reveal their preferences with respect to additional taxation. The evidence suggests that opposition to higher taxes rather than bigotry was decisive in the rejection of Amendment 2 in 2004.

The labor market impact of immigration in Western Germany in the 1990s

In this article we estimate the wage and employment effects of recent immigration in Western Germany. Using administrative data for the period 1987-2001 and a labor-market equilibrium model, we find that the substantial immigration of the 1990s had very little adverse effects on native wages and on their employment levels. Instead, it had a sizeable adverse employment effect on previous immigrants as well as a small adverse effect on their wages. These asymmetric results are partly driven by a higher degree of substitution between old and new immigrants in the labor market and in part by the rigidity of wages in less than flexible labor markets. In a simple counter-factual experiment we show that in a world of perfect wage flexibility and no unemployment insurance the wage-bill loss of old immigrants would be much smaller.     

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.     

America’s neglected debt to the Dutch,an institutional perspective

America’s early constitutional development owes a good deal to the experience and policies of the Dutch republic. Many of the parallels are direct: In the late 16th century, the Dutch fought a successful war to secede from a major empire. They wrote a declaration of independence and adopted a federal model of Republican governance almost exactly two hundred years before the Americans. Somewhat later, the Dutch republic and its political institutions subsequently inspired and protected enlightenment scholars. Its leading political family and army played a crucial role in curtailing English absolutism in England and in England’s American colonies, and its federal template provided a model for early American institutions.

Constitutional Implications of Radical Subjectivism

This paper examines the role that creative choice, as stressed by Shackle, plays in the generation of economic value. In particular, we evaluate the relationships between creative choice, economic value and the institutional structure of an economy.     

Consumer choice and information : New experimental evidence

Many laws and regulations aimed at safeguarding consumers deal with the amount and kind of product information that consumers receive. Implicit in these regulations is the belief that consumers can make use of the appropriate information, provided only that it is made available. Recently a number of authors have argued that consumer decisionmaking is subject to consistent biases, suggesting poor purchase decisions may result even with access to the relevant information. Indeed some critics have argued that consumers may be subject to information overload so that they may make worse decisions with extra information than without it. The experimental results presented in this paper address some of these issues. The results suggest that untrained people can use simplifying strategies in quite complicated decision problems. Also, while information overload clearly can occur, the subjects in our experiments appeared able to ignore unnecessary or unwanted information.     

Some notes on trichotomous choice discrete valuation

For some respondents, the bid offered by the dichotomous choice format used in the discrete choice technique can in fact be the true optimum. In this case the correct answer is neither yes or no, but indifferent. We shall show results from a trichotomous choice format and analyse whether it produces welfare measures with narrower confidence intervals than the dichotomous technique. Another well known problem in contingent valuation (CV) studies is that the volume of the good to be purchased from hypothetical markets is not, in many cases, defined in precise terms. We show how the trichotomous choice technique can be used to test for possible vagueness in the volume of the project to be valued.     

Non-dictatorial extensive social choice

Summary. Different social planners may have different opinions on the well-being of individuals under different social options (Roberts, 1980). If utilities are translation- or ratio-scale measurable, or if the social ranking might be incomplete, or if interplanner comparability is allowed; then there exist non-dictatorial aggregation rules. We propose extensions, intersections, and mixtures of the Pareto, utilitarian, leximin, Kolm-Pollak, and iso-elastic rules.Received: 16 May 2001, Revised: 18 November 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: D63, D71. Correspondence to: Erwin OogheErwin Ooghe, Luc Lauwers: We are extremely grateful to the referee who was willing to review this paper many times. Her/his extensive and in-depth comments had a strong impact. Further thanks are due to Bart Capéau, Marc Fleurbaey, Maurice Salles, Erik Schokkaert, and Alain Trannoy. The first author gratefully acknowledges the financial support by the TMR network Living Standards, Inequality and Taxation (ERBFMRXCT 980248) of the European Communities.     

Procedural choice

Summary. In this paper, we attempt to combine the concept of a choice function with a procedural aspect. We examine an individuals choices over alternatives when the available options are linked either to the procedure by which these alternatives came into existence or to the degree of availability of other options. The procedural aspect behind availability may prompt an individual to refuse to choose so that the choice set becomes empty. This particular aspect is used to study different cases that are characterized axiomatically. We relate our conditions to well-known consistency conditions from standard choice theory.Received: 2 December 2002, Revised: 18 August 2003JEL Classification Numbers: D62, D63, D71.Correspondence to: Wulf GaertnerThe first author would like to thank Volkswagen-Stiftung for generous financial support. For helpful comments and suggestions we are grateful to Fuad Aleskerov, Nick Baigent, Nancy Cartwright, Kotaro Suzumura as well as to seminar participants at various universities and audiences at several conferences.     

Environmental regulation and firm location choice in China

How may environmental regulation affect firm location choice? While this question has generated great research interest from high-standard, industrial economies, in this article we turn the spotlight to low-standard, developing countries and use China’s Census of Manufactures data during 2003–2008 to explore how firms with different ownership, during different policy regimes as well as from different industries may respond to environmental regulations in different ways. Results show environmental stringency has a positive effect on state-owned enterprises’ location choice during 2003–2005, but the effect becomes insignificant during 2006–2008. Private-owned enterprises, foreign-owned enterprises and collective-owned enterprises are more likely to enter areas with less stringent environmental regulations during 2003–2005. However, this pattern is reversed for the period of 2006–2008. Furthermore, the above relationships are more pronounced for firms in polluting industries.