On local indeterminacy and endogenous cycles in Ramsey models with heterogeneous households

It is well-known that endogenous cycles can occur in Ramsey models with heterogeneous households and borrowing constraints. In this note, we address the issue of robustness in the more general case of endogenous labor supply and we explain the occurrence of local indeterminacy under progressive taxation.

Local television,citizen knowledge and U.S. senators' roll-call voting

I study the effect of access to local television on citizens' political knowledge. I do so by utilizing the mismatch between U.S. television markets and state borders, causing some citizens to receive local television which primarily covers neighboring state politics. I find that access to relevant local television causes citizens to be more informed about their senators' roll-call votes, and more likely to hold opinions about these senators. I also find that citizens with access to relevant local television are more likely to assess their senators based on how well the senators' roll-call votes align with the citizens' policy preferences. These results suggest that passively acquired information through television can help individuals evaluate their elected representatives.     

Are voters rational?

We test whether a voter's decision to cast a vote depends on its probability of affecting the election outcome. Using exogenous variation arising at population cutoffs determining council sizes in Finnish municipal elections, we show that larger council size increases both pivotal probabilities and turnout. These effects are statistically significant, fairly large and robust. Finally, we use a novel instrumental variables design to show that the jumps in the pivotal probabilities are the likely candidate for explaining the increase in turnout, rather than the other observed simultaneous jumps at the council size cutoffs. Moreover, our results indicate that turnout responds only to within-party pivotal probabilities, perhaps because they are more salient to the voters than the between-party ones.     

The electoral migration cycle

This paper proposes a new test of Tiebout sorting that relies on the exogenous time structure of recurrent local elections. The test is based on the idea that competitive elections represent periodic perturbations to the Tiebout equilibrium of local public good provision and allocation of households to communities, so that their schedule should affect the timing of households' sorting decisions. On the other hand, internal migration flows that have nothing to do with the demand for public goods over which localities vote recurrently ought to be orthogonal to the timing of elections in a reduced-form migration equation. I exploit the staggered schedule of mayoral elections in Italy to analyze migration, elections, and public budget data across several thousands of municipalities, and find evidence of a systematic influence of the electoral calendar on the timing of sorting decisions.     

Fiscal rules to tame the political budget cycle: Evidence from Italian municipalities

The paper provides evidence that fiscal rules can limit the political budget cycle. It uses data on Italian municipalities during the 2000s and shows that: 1) municipalities are subject to political budget cycles in capital spending; 2) the Italian sub-national fiscal rule (Domestic Stability Pact, DSP) introduced in 1999 has been enforced by the central government; 3) municipalities subject to the fiscal rule show more limited political budget cycles than municipalities not subject to the rule. In order to identify the effect, we rely on the fact that the domestic fiscal rule does not apply to municipalities below 5000 inhabitants. We find that the political budget cycle increases real capital spending by about 10–20 percent on average in the years prior to municipal elections and that municipalities subject to the DSP show a pre-electoral increase in capital spending which is only a quarter of the one of municipalities not subject to the rule.     

开征累进物业税的战略构想

地价过快上涨和投机需求旺盛是造成房价不合理上涨的两个重要原因。在城乡同时开征累进物业税可以解决上述问题。累进物业税的开征对象包括城市住宅、城市已出让土地及农村住宅。在城乡共同开征物业税的基础上,将物业税归为地方税种,在中央和地方之间重新分配土地出让金,弱化地方抬高地价的内在冲动。     

地方产业集群升级的两维性分析

发展中国家大多数地方产业集群处于低端市场竞争的低端路线,迫切需要产业升级。通过论述全球价值链背景下的集群创新与升级的互动关系,提出了产业集群升级的两维性机理及其实现要素：既要提升集群区位的“内生性要素”对创新活动的影响,包括生产要素升级、区域品牌升级、社会资本升级、区域创新系统升级;也需要借助全球网络联系对获取知识等资源的杠杆利用,提升市场、技术能力。这样,建立在持续性创新的基础上,才能保证嵌入全球价值链的地方产业集群创造、保持和捕捉更多的价值。     

地方政府支出与农村居民消费需求变动——以我国省级面板数据为例

本文在理论诠释地方政府支出对农村居民消费需求的传导机制下,通过建立地方政府支出与农村居民消费支出之间的个体固定效应变截距模型,运用我国31个省(市、自治区)1998～2007年的经验数据进行实证检验.结果表明:地方政府财政支农支出对农村居民消费具有显著的挤入效应,而转移性支出与农村居民消费的相关程度并不明显.     

Transfer payments from the central government to the local governments and the local governments' efforts on taxation: taking China as an example

The influence of the transfer payments from the central government to the local governments on the local governments' efforts on taxation must be taken into consideration by every country for the design of the transfer payments. Based on the theoretical analysis on the influence of the transfer payments from the central government to the local governments on the local governments'payments, this paper indicates that the local governments'efforts on taxation depends on the demand elasticity of the district for public goods. It increases with the increase of the elasticityλ.Judge the degree of the local government's efforts on taxation by measureλ. After an empirical analysis on the transfer payments from the central government to the local governments from 2000 to 2004, thins paper gets the conclusion that the local governments'efforts on taxation abates with the increase of supporting payments or with the increase of the ratio of transfer payments to local willing public payments. Under specific circumstances, the higher the ratio of transfer payments to the local fiscal expenditure is, the smaller the local governments' efforts on taxation is under the central payments, whereas the higher the local income is, the higher the efforts is under the eentral payments. Based on this. this paper gives the meanmg of its corresponding policies.     

Unemployment durations and local labour market conditions

ABSTRACT

Unemployment durations vary across local authority districts in the UK. We explore the extent to which this variation is explained by differences in local labour demand as opposed to composition, business cycle and regional effects. We use seventeen waves of the British Household Panel Survey to identify the determinants of the duration of unemployment spells. Once we adjust for individual-level, business cycle and regional controls, we do not find evidence that living in a local authority district with relatively high unemployment is associated with longer spells of unemployment. This indicates that differences in labour demand operate at larger geographic scales, such as between large regions. Our findings have implications for the design of policies to help high unemployment districts.