Corporate taxation, incumbency advantage and entry

It is the purpose of this paper to show that corporation tax may affect industrial structure. Analyzing the effects of corporation tax, we demonstrate that it tends to favour incumbents over entrants. We further show that the effect of this advantage on an incumbent's output depends on his profit or loss history. An incumbent with a past profit is likely to produce a greater output, thereby partially or fully crowding out an entrant's output. In contrast, an incumbent with a past loss is more likely to produce a smaller output, making entry easier.     

Political budget cycles,incumbency advantage,and propaganda

This paper combines incumbency advantage and political budget cycle theory. An opportunistic politician is given two instruments: deficit‐financed transfers and propaganda. Unlike earlier analytical models, but in accordance with the empirical literature, government manipulations do actually improve re‐election chances. However, the optimal level of government manipulation depends on country characteristics, in particular the competence dispersion among potential candidates. This may explain why it is easier to detect political budget cycles in, for instance, developing countries or new democracies. Results are robust to alternative competence distribution and propaganda cost assumptions.     

Political salaries,electoral selection and the incumbency advantage: Evidence from a wage reform

Incumbents tend to gain solid electoral advantage in many voting systems. In this study, we examine the relationship between salaries prescribed to politicians and the incumbency advantage by exploiting a political wage reform and data from close elections in a proportional semi-open list system in the Czech Republic. We show that higher salaries reduce the average incumbency advantage, as they increase the probability to run again for previously non-elected candidates much more than for incumbents. Still, we find that higher wages improve candidate selection, especially by encouraging repeated candidacy from university-educated incumbents. Higher wages also improve relative positions of re-running incumbents on candidate lists compared to previously non-elected re-running candidates. Our results overall suggest that incumbency per se changes the relationship between political wages and candidate selection.     

Remittances and incumbency: Theory and evidence

By raising household income, remittances lower the marginal utility of targeted electoral transfers, thus weakening the efficacy of vote buying. Yet, remittances make individuals wealthier and believe the national economy is performing well, which is positively attributed to the incumbent. Building on these insights, I show that the confluence of these divergent channels generate a surprising result that at increasingly higher levels of dissatisfaction with the incumbent, a remittance recipient is more likely to vote for the incumbent than a non‐remittance recipient. These predictions and their underlying mechanisms are substantiated across 18 Latin American countries.     

Candidate reputations and the ‘incumbency effect’

A major shortcoming of the classical median voter model is that its central prediction — convergence of platforms to the median voter's ideal — is seldom observed. One reason is that the classical model neglects the importance of voter expectations as a determinant of votes. Here we associate voters' expectations about candidates with past as well as current candidate pronouncements, and assume that incumbents whose actions are consistent with their ‘reputations’ are perceived as less risky than challengers. In equilibrium candidates choose distinct platforms. Typically neither adopts the median voter's ideal point. Either candidate may win depending on how well the incumbent's reputation reflects current voter tastes and how relatively ‘risky’ the electorate perceives the challenger to be.     

Inefficient Credit Booms

This paper studies the welfare properties of competitive equilibria in an economy with financial frictions hit by aggregate shocks. In particular, it shows that competitive financial contracts can result in excessive borrowing ex ante and excessive volatility ex post . Even though from a first-best perspective the equilibrium always displays under-borrowing, from a second-best point of view excessive borrowing can arise. The inefficiency is due to the combination of limited commitment in financial contracts and the fact that asset prices are determined in a spot market. This generates a pecuniary externality that is not internalized in private contracts. The model provides a framework to evaluate preventive policies, which can be used during a credit boom to reduce the expected costs of a financial crisis.     

内生无效制度——对进入壁垒和贸易保护的思考

本文构建一个模型来考察为什么垄断、进入壁垒和贸易保护在许多国家长期存在。政治精英对中间产品索取高价的偏好导致了支持垄断和贸易保护的无效经济制度和政治制度。价格操纵机制表明,政治精英偏好于通过提高中间产品价格来增加垄断利润。提高税率虽然会增加政治精英的税收收入,但会降低对中间产品的需求,从而减少垄断利润。因此,价格操纵情况下的最优税率低于收入摄取情况下的最优税率,这与Acemoglu(2006)的结论相反。     

Inefficient predation and political transitions

This paper presents a theory of endogenous economic institutions in non-democracies, where political accountability is enforced through the threat of revolution. We consider a dynamic game between an elite ruling class and a disenfranchised working class, in which workers have imperfect information about the economy's productive possibilities. We characterize the conditions under which (i) the elite implement an inefficient rent-creating economic institution at the risk of provoking a revolution based on institutional grievances, (ii) information shocks can catalyze revolutionary movements that may be contagious among similar countries, and (iii) democratic transitions can be consolidated following revolutionary liberalizations.     

Inefficient lobbying,populism and oligarchy

This paper analyzes the efficiency consequences of lobbying in a production economy with imperfect commitment. We first show that the Pareto efficiency result found for truthful equilibria of common agency games in static exchange economies no longer holds under these more general conditions. We construct a model of pressure groups where the set of efficient truthful common agency equilibria has measure zero. Second, we show that, under fairly general assumptions, the equilibrium will be biased against the group with the highest productivity of private capital, reflecting the fact that, on the margin, less productive groups find lobbying relatively more rewarding. Finally, as an application, if lobbies representing the “poor” and the “rich” have identical organizational capacities, we show that the equilibrium is biased towards the poor, who have a comparative advantage in politics, rather than in production. If the pressure groups differ in their organizational capacity, both pro-rich (oligarchic) and pro-poor (populist) equilibria may arise, all of which are inefficient with respect to the constrained optimum.     

产权约束、投资低效与通货紧缩

本文从产权逻辑来诠释 2 0 0 3年以来的投资膨胀。文章认为 ,在土地转让权含糊不清和银行产权约束不力的背景下 ,土地和信贷市场的价格机制无法给出市场定价 ,客观造成了巨大套利空间的存在。当经济景气时 ,一些地方政府、企业和银行三方共谋土地和贷款这两种最关键的生产要素 ,从而导致投资的非理性膨胀 ,并通过金融加速器效应带来宏观经济的大幅波动。从根源上讲 ,过度投资和投资低效的本质是产权约束和地方政府政绩观导向的问题。因而 ,本文提出的相应政策含义是 ,在短期内主要以经济杠杆来控制总量 ;在中长期应转变政府职能 ,推进产权改革。     

The Penalties of Inefficient Infrastructure

In most developing countries, irrigation, road, and power networks are not in good condition. In Latin America, for example, the effectiveness of such public infrastructure is only about 74% of that of industrialized countries. Low effectiveness imposes a cost on these countries in terms of forgone output. This paper develops a general–equilibrium model to study the long–run consequences of ineffective infrastructure. The model is solved numerically using parameters from seven Latin American countries. Results show that the long run penalty of ineffective infrastructure is about 40% of steady–state real GDP per capita. Raising effectiveness is shown to have sizable positive effects on income per capita, private investment, consumption, and welfare. Nevertheless, policymakers instead usually emphasize building new infrastructure. If effectiveness is low in the existing infrastructure network, new infrastructure investments can negatively affect per–capita income, private investment, consumption, and welfare.     

Higher turnout increases incumbency advantages: Evidence from mayoral elections

We analyze the effect of electoral turnout on incumbency advantages by exploring mayoral elections in the German state of Bavaria. Mayors are elected by majority rule in two-round (runoff) elections. Between the first and second ballot of the mayoral election in March 2020, the state government announced an official state of emergency. In the second ballot, voting in person was prohibited and only postal voting was possible. To construct an instrument for electoral turnout, we use a difference-in-differences strategy by contrasting turnout in the first and second ballot in 2020 with the first and second ballots from previous elections. We use this instrument to analyze the causal effect of turnout on incumbent vote shares. A 10-percentage point increase in turnout leads to a statistically robust 3.4 percentage point higher vote share for incumbent mayors highlighting the relevance of turnout-related incumbency advantages.     

Inefficient ex-post equilibria in efficient auctions

Summary. I consider a single-object English auction with two asymmetric bidders and show that it has a continuum of inefficient undominated ex-post equilibria. The result extends for the generalized VCG mechanism, Dasgupta-Maskin auction and, generally, for every auction that has an efficient ex-post equilibrium. Received: November 5, 2001; revised version: June 10, 2002 RID="*" ID="*"I am grateful to Vijay Krishna, Sergei Izmalkov and anonymous referee for many important comments.     

A Simple Model of Inefficient Institutions

This paper develops a simple model of economic and political institutions that lead to poor aggregate economic performance. In the model economy, groups with political power, the elite, choose policies to increase their income and to directly or indirectly transfer resources from the rest of society to themselves. The resulting equilibrium is generally inefficient because of three distinct mechanisms: (1) revenue extraction, (2) factor price manipulation and (3) political consolidation. In particular, the elite may pursue inefficient policies to extract revenue from other groups. They may do so to reduce the demand for factors coming from other groups in the economy, thus indirectly benefiting from changes in factor prices. Finally, they may try to impoverish other groups competing for political power. The elite's preferences over inefficient policies translate into inefficient economic institutions. The notable exception to this general picture emerges when long‐term investments are important, thus creating a commitment (holdup) problem, whereby equilibrium taxes and regulations are worse than the elite would like them to be from an ex ante point of view. In this case, economic institutions that provide additional security of property rights to other groups can be useful.     

Inefficient arbitrage in inter-regional electricity transmission

This paper analyzes the efficiency of an explicit ex ante auction for network access to facilitating trade between two separate, but linked, electricity wholesale markets. It is generally assumed that greater regional interconnection will mitigate the exercise of local market power by dominant generators, but we show analytically that when a dominant player has access to a more competitive neighboring market, and is also the lowest cost producer, the exercise of market power becomes attractive and can have negative consumer welfare implications. For an empirical analysis, we use a unique data set of daily company-level flow nominations on the Anglo-French Interconnector (IFA). This provides a clear case study, “free of loop flows” (with the IFA being the only link between the UK and France). We are able to identify evident inefficiencies in the market behavior, for which several explanations, including market power, may contribute.     

Inefficient Local Regulation of Local Externalities

The consequences of commitment failure have been missing from debates about the decentralized regulation of automobile emissions and other sources of local consumption externalities. Even when the direct external effects of such products are limited to a single jurisdiction, the presence of increasing returns‐to‐scale production causes one jurisdiction's choice of regulatory standard to affect the prices and availability of goods elsewhere. Decentralized regulatory equilibria may be inefficient as a result. Because of a commitment failure, production may be split between standards—and consumers denied the full range of products—when it is efficient to have standards that allow products to be consumed everywhere. Coordination failures may cause similar inefficiencies. The results question the usefulness of the principle of subsidiarity as commonly employed.     

Inefficient Markov perfect equilibria in multilateral bargaining

We study a complete-information alternating-offer bargaining game in which one “active” player bargains with each of a number of other “passive” players one at a time. In contrast to most existing models, the order of reaching agreements is endogenously determined, hence the active player can “play off” some passive players against others by m oving back and forth bargaining with the passive players. We show that this model has a finite number of Markov Perfect Equilibria, some of which exhibiting wasteful delays. Moreover, the maximum number of delay periods that can be supported in Markov Perfect Equilibria increases in the order of the square of the number of players. We also show that these results are robust to a relaxing of the Markov requirements and to more general surplus functions. Received: November 19, 2001; revised version: August 20, 2002 RID="*" ID="*"This paper grew out of my dissertation submitted to Stanford University. I am deeply indebted to my advisor, Paul Milgrom, for his insights and guidance. I would also like to thank Douglas Bernheim, Sushil Bikhchandani, Harold Demsetz, Bryan Ellickson, Avner Greif, Peter Hammond, David Levine, Bentley Macleod, Joe Ostroy, John Pencavel, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, David Starrett, Robert Wilson, Bill Zame and especially John Riley and Jeff Zwiebel for their helpful comments. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for extremely constructive suggestions.     

股权制度安排、信息不对称与企业非效率投资行为

本文针对股权分置和股权全流通的制度安排,在不同信息状态下研究了企业的投资行为.研究表明,信息对称时,股权全流通制度下企业投资行为达到最优,股权分置制度下国有资产的高折算溢价使得企业存在投资过度行为;信息不对称时,股权分置制度下低质量企业表现出更多投资过度行为,高质量企业表现出更多投资不足行为.证券监管部门近期应该促使股权全流通,远期应该重视规范企业信息披露,从而提高企业投资决策的效率.     

Inefficient or Not,Hospitals Are Overcharging

International Advances in Economic Research - A sizable literature related to the efficiency of the U.S. hospital sector has been produced over the past 30 years. Much of this research is...     

治理低水平盲目投资建设的税收对策

我国经济运行中出现了投资规模过大、投资结构不合理、货币信贷增长过快、某些行业和地区盲目投资等问题,而低水平盲目投资建设是经济运行中诸多问题的主要表现形式.分析税收与投资规模及其结构的关系,研究提出治理低水平盲目投资建设的税收对策,是我国加强宏观经济调控,完善社会主义市场经济体制,保持国民经济持续、快速、协调、健康发展的迫切要求.