Tax Competition between Unitary and Federal Countries

We analyse taxation of capital in a two-country model, where one country is unitary while the other one is federal, consisting of two identical regions. Both national and regional governments levy a tax on capital. The countries play a noncooperative game between them, with the government of the federal country acting as a Stackelberg leader with respect to its regional governments. We show under what circumstances, at equilibrium, the federal country sets its tax rate inefficiently low, while the unitary country sets it inefficiently high.We are deeply grateful to three anonymous referees for their comments, and especially to one of them for extremely helpful suggestions. We also wish to thank participants at ESEM 2004 for fruitful discussions     

Centralized versus decentralized decision-making in a county government setting

During the November 1988 election cycle, the residents of Mississippi's 82 counties were allowed to choose whether or not to switch to an alternative system for governing the construction and repair of county roads. Under the system then used statewide – the so-called beat system – each of a county's five elected supervisors determined spending priorities and allocated funds within the boundaries of his or her own district. Under the alternative system – the so-called unit system – such choices were to be made by the supervisors collectively and then executed by a hired professional road manager. This paper models the decision of voters to retain the beat system (38 counties) or to switch to the unit system (44 counties). Theory and evidence suggest that the choice between centralized versus decentralized governance depends on the perceived costs and benefits of the alternatives to voters and their elected representatives. Received: February 24, 2000; Accepted: September 20, 2001     

A Note on Ad Valorem and Per Unit Taxation in an Oligopoly Model

This note shows that per unit taxation welfare dominates ad valorem taxation in an oligopoly model, when the number of consumers is sufficiently high compared to the number of oligopolists. It aims to provide an alternative perspective to existing literature arguing instead the dominance of ad valorem over per unit taxation in oligopoly frameworks. Our result is obtained in a simple example which uses a strategic market game formulation to study strategic behavior at a general equilibrium level.     

Addressing Heterogeneous Preferences Using Parametric Extended Spike Models

Some public programs simultaneously provide a mix of non-rejectable public goods and public bads. Consequently, some individuals would pay for the program, while others might instead need to becompensated. In this paper we estimate twoparametric extended spike models that accountfor positive and negative preferences as wellas indifference for the public good. Weillustrate the models using data on valuationof prescribed burning of underbrush in forests,which reduces the risk of catastrophicwildfires but also produces smoke emissions(the public bad). We compare the two empiricalapproaches to estimate willingness to pay (WTP)for the program and contrast these results withthose obtained from modeling specificationsthat only account for non-negative preferences.Substantial differences in public net benefitswere found between the most flexible parametricextended spike model and the simple spike modelwhere negative responses were coded as zero anda standard binary logit of only positivebidders. The results from the extended spikemodels demonstrated that accounting forindifference and negative values towards thepublic good resulted in substantially lowerwillingness to pay estimates.     

Trust, trustworthiness, and risk in rural Paraguay

This dissertation looks at the relationship between trust, trustworthiness, and risk aversion in a rural Paraguayan setting. The first chapter of this dissertation looks at theft between farmers. Rural areas of developing countries often lack effective legal enforcement. However, villagers who know each other well and interact repeatedly may use implicit contracts to minimize crime. I construct a dynamic limited-commitment model in which a thief cannot credibly commit to forego stealing from his fellow villagers but may be induced to limit his stealing by the promise of future gifts from his potential victim. Using a unique survey from rural Paraguay which combines traditional data on production with information on theft, gifts, and trust, as well as with experiments measuring trust and trustworthiness, I test whether the data is consistent with predictions from the dynamic model. The results provide evidence that, in contrast with predictions from a one-period model with an anonymous thief, farmers do implicitly contract with one another to limit theft. Farmers who have more close family members in their village give fewer gifts, and farmers with plots which are more difficult to steal from give fewer gifts, experience less theft, and trust more. Gift-giving increases when trust is lower and the threat of theft is greater, turning the social capital literature on its head. The second chapter of this dissertation looks at a different linkage between trust, trustworthiness, and risk. Trusting behavior in general and play in the traditional trust experiment specifically depend both on trust beliefs and on levels of risk aversion. I ran two experiments with a diverse set of subjects in fifteen villages of rural Paraguay, the traditional trust experiment and a new experiment measuring only risk aversion. I find that risk attitudes are highly predictive of play in the trust game. In addition, omitting risk aversion as a regressor in trust regressions significantly changes the coefficients of important explanatory variables such as gender and wealth. The chair of this dissertation committee was Ethan Ligon and the other committee members were George Akerlof and Elisabeth Sadoulet.     

Congestion allocation for distributed networks: an experimental study

This paper reports an experimental study of two prominent congestion and cost allocation mechanisms for distributed networks. We study the fair queuing (or serial) and the FIFO (or average cost pricing) mechanisms under two different treatments: a complete information treatment and a limited information treatment designed to simulate distributed networks. Experimental results show that the fair queuing mechanism performs significantly better than FIFO in all treatments in terms of efficiency, predictability measured as frequency of equilibrium play, and the speed of convergence to equilibrium. We thank Simon Anderson, Narine Badasyan, Catherine Eckel, Peter Katuscak, Edna Lohman, seminar participants at Caltech, Michigan, Vanderbilt, Virginia, Virginia Tech, ESA 2001 (Tucson, AZ) and Public Choice Society meetings (2002) for helpful comments. We are grateful to David Cooper and an anonymous referee for their constructive and insightful suggestions which significantly improved the paper. We thank Jing Deng, Belal Sabki, Pragya Sen, Brian Chan and Lisa Robinson for excellent research assistance, and Jim Leady for programming for the experiment. The research support provided by NSF grant SES-0079001 to Chen, SES-9973731 to Razzolini, and a grant from the Office of Naval Research to Razzolini are gratefully acknowledged.     

Transferability of migration licences and the distribution of potential rents

This paper compares the effects of migration restrictions under transferability and non-transferability of licenses. There is reason to expect that a policy of making licenses non-transferable will not only affect production efficiency, but also allow producers to capture more of the potential migration rents.     

Generating the efficient frontier of a class of bicriteria generalized fractional programming

In this paper, a particular class of bicriteria maximization problems over a compact polyhedron is considered. The first component of the objective function is the ratio of powers of affine functions and the second one is linear. Several theoretical properties are provided, such as the pseudoconcavity of the first criterium of the objective function, the connectedness and compactness of both the efficient frontier and the set of efficient points. The obtained results allow us to propose a new simplex-like solution method for generating the whole efficient frontier; to better clarify the use of the suggested algorithm, several examples are described and the results of a computational test are presented.     

Reducing Organizational Politics in Performance Appraisal: The Role of Coaching Leaders for Age‐Diverse Employees

We examined whether a supervisor's coaching leadership style predicts the perception of organizational politics in performance appraisal (OPPA) reported by the collaborators. Additionally, we drew on social cognition and motivational life‐span development theories to hypothesize age‐related differences in perceived OPPA and its link with the coaching leadership style. Using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) on a sample of 576 employees and 112 leaders, we found that coaching leaders are perceived as less manipulative in their performance ratings, especially by older employees. This article includes a discussion of the implications these results have for performance management of an age‐diverse workforce. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

‘Brexit’ and International Insolvency Beyond the Realm of Mutual Trust

The outcome of the referendum held in the UK in June 2016 is of far‐reaching and unpredictable consequences. This article focuses on the particular field of international insolvency with a view to identifying some of them, all arising out of the fact that the UK will be leaving the EU area of justice and the strong cooperation based on mutual trust between member states. This will make UK–EU insolvency cases clearly less efficient and effective. The consequences of Brexit could be mitigated by the already existing coordination among the international instruments dealing with these matters, in particular the European Insolvency Regulation and the UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross‐Border Insolvency. However, not all EU member states have in place rules dealing with these issues as regards to third states. In order to lessen the impact of Brexit in this sensitive area of law, the implementation of the Model Law in order to deal with extra‐EU cross‐border insolvency could be of avail. Copyright © 2017 INSOL International and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd