Incentives and the Sorting of Altruistic Agents into Street‐Level Bureaucracies*

Many street‐level bureaucrats have the dual task of helping some clients, while sanctioning others. We develop a model of a street‐level bureaucracy, and we study the implications of its personnel policy on the self‐selection and allocation decisions of agents who differ in altruism towards clients. When bureaucrats are paid flat wages, they do not sanction, and the most altruistic types sort into bureaucracy. Pay‐for‐performance induces some bureaucrats to sanction, but it necessitates an increase in compensation, which can result in sorting from the top and bottom of the altruism distribution. We also explain why street‐level bureaucrats often experience an overload of clients.     

财政支农的市场一体化效应及其政策

以增加农民收入从而支撑具有产业、区域特征的市场一体化为视角,对财政政策不同的支农方式和支农工具所产生的不同的农业市场一体化效应进行了分析,认为直接收入补贴明显好于价格支持;间接支农优于直接支农;而且不同的支农项目对市场一体化的促进作用差异显著。为此,提出了逐步减少价格支持,增加直接收入补贴,增加财政间接支农力度,引导农业生产要素多渠道利用,促进农业系统内外部合作,重视三农无形资产,建立适当监督机制等政策建议。     

Self-interest, sympathy and the origin of endowments

We explore whether the recent laboratory findings that suggest the origin of endowment matters in simple bargaining games are actually due to contextual shifts of relative effort and deservingness. Results support previous findings of endowment origin yielding more self-interested behavior.     

Tari–tax reforms and market access

Reducing taris and increasing consumption taxes is a standard IMF advice to countries that want to open up their economy without hurting government finances. Indeed, theoretical analysis of such a tari–tax reform shows an unambiguous increase in welfare and government revenues. The present paper examines whether the country that implements such a reform ends up opening up its markets to international trade, i.e. whether its market access improves. It is shown that this is not necessarily so. We also show that, comparing to the reform of only taris, the tari–tax reform is a less efficient proposal to follow both as far as it concerns market access and welfare.     

Information aggregation in financial markets with career concerns

What are the equilibrium features of a dynamic financial market in which traders care about their reputation for ability? We modify a standard sequential trading model to include traders with career concerns. We show that this market cannot be informationally efficient: there is no equilibrium in which prices converge to the true value, even after an infinite sequence of trades. We characterize the most revealing equilibrium of this game and show that an increase in the strength of the traders' reputational concerns has a negative effect on the extent of information that can be revealed in equilibrium but a positive effect on market liquidity.     

The sufficiency strategy: Would rich-world frugality lower environmental impact?

One alleged weapon against unsustainable environmental impact is for the wealthy to consume less. This sufficiency strategy is to complement the efficiency strategy of lowering ratios of resource inputs to economic outputs; the former would reduce the affluence factor in I = PAT, the latter the technology factor. That the latter strategy suffers from a consumption rebound is widely recognized. This paper identifies a similar rebound when the affluence factor is autonomously lowered: The lower initial demand lowers prices, which in turn stimulates new demand by others. The strategy moreover addresses only the rich, raising questions of its theoretical maximum efficacy. Its proponents usually conflate frugality with the North-South dichotomy and intragenerational with intergenerational equity. Moreover, there are difficulties with the supporting arguments that frugality is good for one’s own sake as well as for the environment, and that the rich should ‘lead the way’ to living more lightly. Personal behaviour change is furthermore not a substitute for international political efforts. Finally, since all changes in right-side factors of the I = PAT equation change other right-side factors, such indirect attacks on impact should be abandoned in favor of supply and emissions quotas.     

What constitutes a constitutional amendment culture?

Why are some constitutions amended frequently and others hardly at all? An obvious candidate determinant is constitutional rigidity, i.e., the size and number of procedural barriers to amendment. Given some demand for amendment, greater rigidity implies a smaller supply. However, measures of rigidity often do not correlate significantly (or even with the predicted sign) with amendment rates. Ginsburg and Melton (2015) argue that amendment culture – “shared attitudes about the desirability of amendment” – is a more important determinant of amendment rates. We study up to 128 constitutional episodes from 54 countries and estimate relationships between amendment rates and Hofstede cultural indices. Cultures that are more individualistic and less prone to uncertainty avoidance are associated with higher amendment rates. When cultural dimensions are controlled for, the lagged amendment rate (Ginsburg and Melton’s proxy for culture) is not a robust correlate.     

基于引力模型与0-1规划模型的省域经济区划——以江苏省为例

借助2008年统计数据,采用主成分法得到江苏各地级城市综合质量指数值;根据运输的时间成本与货币成本,计算江苏地级城市间经济距离;运用引力修正模型计算江苏地级城市间相互引力,并结合0-1规划模型划分经济区;依据经济区内县域间三次产业结构差异度与位置邻近性,划分经济亚区。研究表明：①江苏省可分为宁镇扬泰、苏锡常通、徐连宿、淮盐等4大经济区和15个经济亚区。②各城市连接的地区个数遵循Zipf定律,作为一、二级节点的南京和苏州统领全省经济空间网络,而南通、宿迁、盐城没有显著的联系对象。③江苏经济区空间分布逐渐由南北向格局转为南部呈东西向、北部呈南北向的格局。④各经济区内城市间的引力相差悬殊,南部较大,北部较小。省域尺度的经济区划,可为我国将来划分标准经济区奠定基础,也可为优化全省劳动地域分工格局提供依据。     

Opinion convergence in location: A spatial version of the Delphi method

This paper proposes a modified version of the Delphi method, starting from the assumption that in many situations the convergence of opinions can be considered in a spatial context. The Spatial Delphi we suggest is based, like the classical Delphi, on the judgments of experts, and it is useful in the consultations for decision and/or forecast purposes, provided that they concern matters of spatial location. The basis for the questionnaire is a map, on which each expert provides, as answer(s), one or more opinion-points, i.e., locations that, according to their opinion, are best for a specific purpose. We propose a method for narrowing the area of convergence along a multi-step procedure so that the final result of the consultation is a small portion of the initial territory with respect to the initial area considered. Besides a simulation study, we report also a prototype application with a panel of twelve experts.     

Does the Delphi process lead to increased accuracy in group-based judgmental forecasts or does it simply induce consensus amongst judgmental forecasters?

We investigate the relative impact of internal Delphi process factors - including panelists' degree of confidence, expertise, majority/minority positioning - and an external factor, richness of feedback - on opinion change and subsequent accuracy of judgmental forecasts. We found that panelists who had low confidence in their judgmental forecast and/or who were in a minority were more likely to change their opinion than those who were more confident and/or in a majority. The addition of rationales, or reasons, to the numeric feedback had little impact upon panelists' final forecasts, despite the quality of panelists' rationales being significantly positively correlated with accurate forecasts and thus of potential use to aid forecast improvement over Delphi rounds. Rather, the effect of rationales was similar to that of confidence: to pull panelists towards the majority opinion regardless of its correctness. We conclude that majority opinion is the strongest influence on panelists' opinion change in both the ‘standard’ Delphi, and Delphi-with-reasons. We make some suggestions for improved variants of the Delphi-with-reasons technique that should help reduce majority influence and thereby permit reasoned arguments to exert their proper pull on opinion change, resulting in forecast accuracy improvements over Delphi rounds.