Measuring international business cycles by saving for a rainy day

Macroeconomics inevitably begins with a trend‐cycle decomposition of a nation's output. We propose a decomposition in which consumption is the trend component and savings is the cycle component. Using data from the G‐7 plus Australia, we show that this decomposition identifies international business cycles that are: (i) more volatile, (ii) of longer mean duration and (iii) less correlated across countries than the cycle component from the Hodrick‐Prescott filter. We argue that this difference stems from the fact that our method imposes a basic theoretical restriction arising from the permanent income hypothesis similar to the restriction used in Cochrane's ( 1994 ) decomposition.     

Political Support for Tax Decentralization

We present a spatial model of a city with two unequally productive jurisdictions. City residents bear a commuting cost to work in either of the two jurisdictions. Each jurisdiction must finance a public budget with a wage and a head tax. We compare the first best optimum to tax decentralization. From the total welfare viewpoint, tax competition is always inefficient. However, majoritarian local governments may prefer the inefficient tax decentralization to the first best.     

Political incentives for rent creation

Rent-seeking is often depicted as a contest in which rent-seekers compete for a prize—the rent. In the process of rent-seeking, much or perhaps all of the rent is dissipated through the costs the contestants incur to compete. Rent dissipation is inconsistent with the incentives of both the rent-seekers and those who create the rents. Policymakers have an incentive to create rents only if they gain from the process, and their gain comes from sharing any surplus that goes to those who obtain the rents. A surplus can be created through a barrier to entry into rent-seeking. When institutions that generate barriers to entry into rent-seeking break down, rent-seeking competitions can occur in which all rents are dissipated, but this should be a special case rather than the general rule in rent-seeking.     

Political risk analysis for Canada and Mexico

A new methodology for political risk analysis was developed and applied to Canada and Mexico. The ideas of an interdisciplinary team of corporate and country experts were obtained in mid-1982 via a two-round Delphi inquiry on socioeconomic change and a survey on business contingencies in Canada and Mexico. The information provided by the panelists was used to describe possible future conditions in Canada and Mexico in the context of alternative U.S. and international conditions.     

Political entrepreneurship and bidding for political monopoly

An analytical framework for dealing with political entrepreneurship and reform is proposed which is based on some new combinations of Schumpeterian political economy, an extended version of Tullock's model of democracy as franchise-bidding for natural monopoly and some basic elements of New Institutional Economics. It is shown that problems of insufficient award criteria and incomplete contracts which may arise in economic bidding schemes, also – and even more so – characterise political competition. At the same time, these conditions create leeway for Schumpeterian political entrepreneurship. The same is true for various barriers to entry in politics. These barriers affect a trade-off between political stability and political contestability which will be discussed with special emphasis on incentives and opportunities for political entrepreneurship in the sense of risking long-term investments in basic political reforms.     

Systematic Political Grass–Root Support for Tariffs

The leading political–economy–of–trade models are virtually silent on two fundamental questions raised by Rodrik in 1995. Why are trade policies systematically biased against trade? And why are tariffs rather than more efficient production subsidies adopted to redistribute income? This paper shows that systematic political grass–root support for trade–restricting and inefficient tariffs emerges when the government has a revenue goal and collecting taxes is costly. Even if no tax instrument enjoys an advantage with respect to collection costs and the factor ownership distribution is unbiased, more people support tariffs than import or production subsidies. More generally, the presence of tax–collection costs creates a grass–root support bias for taxes over subsidies as instruments to redistribute income.     

Political Dynasties

Political dynasties have long been present in democracies, raising concerns that inequality in the distribution of political power may reflect imperfections in democratic representation. However, the persistence of political elites may simply reflect differences in ability or political vocation across families and not their entrenchment in power. We show that dynastic prevalence in the Congress of the U.S. is high compared to that in other occupations and that political dynasties do not merely reflect permanent differences in family characteristics. On the contrary, using two instrumental variable techniques we find that political power is self-perpetuating: legislators who hold power for longer become more likely to have relatives entering Congress in the future. Thus, in politics, power begets power.     

Political Motivations

Are politicians motivated by policy outcomes or by the perks of office? To shed light on this important question, I develop a simple model of two candidate electoral competitions in which candidates may be either office or policy motivated . In a second departure from standard formulations, the model incorporates both campaign and post-election behaviour of candidates. In this environment, I find that office-motivated candidates are favoured in electoral competition but that their advantage is limited by the electoral mechanism itself and policy-motivated candidates win a significant fraction of elections. More importantly, I show that the competitive interaction among candidates of different motivations affects the incentives of all candidates—both office and policy motivated—and that this competition affects policy outcomes. I also extend the model to explore the decision of citizens to enter politics and show that in all equilibria policy-motivated citizens compose a majority of the candidate pool.     

试论人民政协和“政治和谐”——兼论加强新区政协工作

十六届六中全会作出了构建社会主义和谐社会的决定,这是一个大命题、大战略.在我国经济社会发展过程中,把构建社会主义和谐社会作为建设中国特色社会主义的重要目标和任务提出来,并专门作出决定,这既是党中央的一项重大的战略决策,也是理论上和实践上的一次新的突破.     

三伏天和三九天采用隔附子饼灸治疗四肢逆冷症的临床疗效

目的探讨三伏天和三九天采用隔附子饼灸治疗四肢逆冷症的临床疗效。方法选取我院于2012年7月至2013年1月收治的四肢逆冷症患者54例,将其随机分为三伏组与三九组,均采用隔附子饼灸,治疗1个疗程后进行疗效评定。结果两组患者总有效率分别为92.6%、85.2%,差异无统计学意义(P>0.05);治愈率分别为59.3%、29.6%,两组比较差异有统计学意义(P<0.05)。结论在三伏天和三九天施行隔附子饼灸均能有效改善四肢逆冷症,且与节气、气温关系密切,在三伏天施灸为最佳时期,符合春夏养阳的理论。     

新时期下对开放型经济内涵的认识

发展开放型经济已成为主流选择,新时期下要正确深入认识其内涵.十七大报告用"内外联动、互利共赢、安全高效"精辟地阐述了开放型经济体系.开放型经济既要求对外开放,更要求对内开放;开放型经济致力于互利双赢目标并在实施过程中要注重防范国际经济风险.     

Political support for trade policy in the European Union

We adopt the Stigler–Peltzman model of policy-making as developed by Hillman for application to the politics of international trade, in which the government is represented by a political support function trading-off the industry rents stemming from protection against the losses accruing to the general population. As a starting point, we examine the economic impact of actual government action as revealed by the structure of protection, backing out the weights implied by the marginal welfare effects of the set of EU import tariffs across sectors. We build on Tyers' application of methods to international trade employing a numerical general equilibrium model of the EU. This captures direct marginal effects of sector-level protection on protected industries, indirect effects on upstream and downstream industries, and the effect on overall welfare. We then deconstruct the revealed weighting pattern along the lines of industry nationality and related industry characteristics.     

Political Measures for Strategic Environmental Policy with External Effects

This paper investigates an environmental policy designed to reduce the emission of pollutants under uncertainty, with the agent problem as an optimal stopping problem. We first analyze the two cases in which there are one agent and two competing agents by following Ohyama and Tsujimura (2005). When we consider a model of strategic agents, we need to analyze the external economic effect that is peculiar to an agent’s environmental policy implementation. Then, to improve and resolve these external effects, we examine three alternative political measures, comprising an environmental subsidy, an environmental tax and an emission trading system. The results of the analysis indicate that the environmental subsidy and environmental tax promote environmental policy. However, they do not create an incentive to be the leader. On the other hand, an emissions trading system not only promotes environmental policy but also creates an incentive for leadership.This paper was previously circulated under the title “Political Measures for Strategic Environmental Policy with Induced Effects”. The authors would like to thank Masaaki Kijima for helpful comments. The authors would also like to thank Alistair Munro and two anonymous referees providing detailed comments and suggestions. This research was partially supported by Daiwa Securities Group Inc. The second-named author was partially supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) (2), 16310118.     

父亲政治身份、政治关系和子女收入

本文使用CGSS2005年的数据,考察拥有党员身份的父亲的退休对子女收入的影响.结果表明,父亲在职和党员的交互项对子女收入有较为显著的影响.退休可以认为是一个与父母能力、子女能力和社会资本几乎无关的外生事件,这反映了政治关系特别是权力的寻租效应的存在.文章还通过除年龄平均后的回归试图更加有效地解决父亲年龄和子女年龄相关的问题,以及通过父亲教育和退休交互项对子女收入的影响,进行了侧面的证明.     

The Legislator as Political Entrepreneur: Investment in Political Capital

This paper applies the standard Austrian theory of capital investment to the standard interest group model of legislator behavior. Distinguishing between reputational capital and representative capital as interdependent forms of political capital, I argue that legislator behavior (specifically roll call voting) can be explained as entrepreneurial investment in political capital under uncertainty. I discuss several examples in which this approach can potentially add predictive power regarding legislative voting.