When the light shines too much: Rational inattention and pandering

Should voters always pay attention to politics? I explore the role of endogenous costly attention allocation in politics, combining insights from the growing literature on rational inattention with a standard model of political agency. I show that when attention to the action of the politician is endogenous, voters may choose to pay too much attention in equilibrium, and this induces too much political pandering. Moreover when attention to the action and to the state of the world are both endogenous, voters may not pay enough attention the state with respect to the ex ante optimum. A reduction in the total cost of attention does not correct this inefficiency and can even reduce welfare. This model can be a demand‐driven explanation of the under‐provision of analytical contents by news channels.     

EFFECTS OF FEDERAL CONSTITUTIONAL GRANTS IN BRAZILIAN MUNICIPALITIES

The objective of the present study is to verify the flypaper effect of 476 Brazilian municipalities from 2005 to 2012, considering the new variables as instruments of grants. Political alignment, alignment of the party, and coalition of the mayor with the federal president and of the state governor were considered as instruments of grants. A municipal tax autonomy index was considered as a control variable, which represents the percentage of local taxes in the municipal total revenues. The results allow concluding that the flypaper effect exists in Brazilian municipalities and is intensified by the alignment of the representatives in the same way of theoretical literature (Hamilton 1983; Hines & Thaler 1995; Inman 2008) and previous empirical studies in Brazil. Moreover, evidences of higher flypaper effect were found in municipalities with low tax autonomy.     

The effect of corruption on bidding behavior in first-price auctions

When the owner of an object sells it through an auction run by an agent of hers, corruption may appear. In a first-price auction, corruption can make honest bidders more or less aggressive, or their behavior can remain unchanged. We identify sufficient conditions for each of the three possibilities. We analyze the effects of corruption on efficiency, bidders’ welfare and expected revenue. Our results apply as well to the situation—unrelated to corruption—where one of the bidders is granted a right of first refusal.     

Counting combinatorial choice rules

I count the number of combinatorial choice rules that satisfy certain properties: Kelso–Crawford substitutability, and independence of irrelevant alternatives. The results are important for two-sided matching theory, where agents are modeled by combinatorial choice rules with these properties. The rules are a small, and asymptotically vanishing, fraction of all choice rules. But they are still exponentially more than the preference relations over individual agents—which has positive implications for the Gale–Shapley algorithm of matching theory.     

Outward FDI and Local Employment Growth in Italy

Using several data sources, we assess the impact of Italy’s outward foreign direct investment (FDI) on local employment growth between 1996 and 2001 for 12 manufacturing industries and 103 administrative provinces. Our main result is that, controlling for the local industrial structure and area fixed effects, FDI is associated with faster local employment growth, relatively to the national industry average. We also find that employment in small plants is not negatively influenced by higher levels of FDI. Our findings do not support therefore the idea that FDI is detrimental to local employment growth in the home country. JEL no.  C21, F21, F23     

Can PIGLOG preferences identify equivalence scales?

This paper clarifies the conditions under which PIGLOG and extended PIGLOG preferences can identify household equivalence scales. The results are of interest to practitioners who have to elect preferences suitable for welfare analysis. It also shows that independent of the base utility equivalence scales are the same whether the budget shares of the demand systems are linear or quadratic in log income. (JEL: D11, D13) The author is grateful to an anonymous referee for several helpful suggestions.