Mathiness in the Theory of Economic Growth

By Paul M. Romer

American Economic Review, May 2015

Mathiness lets academic politics masquerade as science. Like mathematical theory, mathiness uses a mixture of words and symbols, but instead of making tight links, it leaves ample room for slippage between statements in the languages of words as opposed t...

Measuring Vote-Selling: Field Evidence from the Philippines

By Allen Hicken, Stephen Leider, Nico Ravanilla, and Dean Yang

American Economic Review, May 2015

Using data from an anti-vote-buying field experiment we conducted in the Philippines, we report and validate a proxy measure for vote-selling. We demonstrate that our proxy measure, vote-switching, changes as expected with voter preferences and monetary o...

The Impact of Economic Freedom on the Black/White Income Gap

By Gary A. Hoover, Ryan A. Compton, and Daniel C. Giedeman

American Economic Review, May 2015

Using state-level data from 1980-2010 we examine whether economic freedom, as measured by the Economic Freedom of North America Index, has had any impact in increasing or decreasing the ratio of median income for black households to the median income of w...

Income Inequality, Capitalism, and Ethno-linguistic Fractionalization

By Jan-Egbert Sturm and Jakob De Haan

American Economic Review, May 2015

We examine the relationship between capitalism and income inequality for a large sample of countries using an adjusted economic freedom index as proxy for capitalism. Our results suggest that there is no robust relationship between economic freedom and Gi...

Government Policy with Time Inconsistent Voters

By Alberto Bisin, Alessandro Lizzeri, and Leeat Yariv

American Economic Review, June 2015

Behavioral economics presents a "paternalistic" rationale for benevolent government intervention. This paper presents a model of public debt where voters have self-control problems and attempt to commit using illiquid assets. In equilibrium, government ac...

Trafficking Networks and the Mexican Drug War

By Melissa Dell

American Economic Review, June 2015

Drug trade-related violence has escalated dramatically in Mexico since 2007, and recent years have also witnessed large-scale efforts to combat trafficking, spearheaded by Mexico's conservative PAN party. This study examines the direct and spillover effec...

Clientelism in Indian Villages

By Siwan Anderson, Patrick Francois, and Ashok Kotwal

American Economic Review, June 2015

We study the operation of local governments (Panchayats) in rural Maharashtra, India, using a survey that we designed for this end. Elections are freely contested, fairly tallied, highly participatory, non-coerced, and lead to appointment of representativ...

The Value of Democracy: Evidence from Road Building in Kenya

By Robin Burgess, Remi Jedwab, Edward Miguel, Ameet Morjaria, and Gerard Padró i Miquel

American Economic Review, June 2015

Ethnic favoritism is seen as antithetical to development. This paper provides credible quantification of the extent of ethnic favoritism using data on road building in Kenyan districts across the 1963-2011 period. Guided by a model, it then examines wheth...

Development from Representation? A Study of Quotas for the Scheduled Castes in India

By Francesca Refsum Jensenius

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2015

This paper estimates the constituency-level development effects of quotas for the Scheduled Castes (SCs) in India, using a unique dataset of development indicators for more than 3,100 state assembly constituencies in 15 Indian states in 1971 and 2001. Mat...

Team Contests with Multiple Pairwise Battles

By Qiang Fu, Jingfeng Lu, and Yue Pan

American Economic Review, July 2015

We consider a multi-battle team contest in which players from two rival teams form pairwise matches to fight in distinct component battles, which are carried out sequentially or (partially) simultaneously. A team wins if and only if its players win a majo...

When Is It Optimal to Delegate: The Theory of Fast-Track Authority

By Levent Celik, Bilgehan Karabay, and John McLaren

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

With fast-track authority (FTA), the US Congress delegates trade policy authority to the president by committing not to amend a trade agreement. Why would it cede such power? We suggest an interpretation in which Congress uses FTA to forestall destructive...

The Microeconomic Dimensions of the Eurozone Crisis and Why European Politics Cannot Solve Them

By Christian Thimann

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2015

The academic and policy debate about the crisis in Europe's single currency area is usually dominated by macroeconomic and public sector considerations. The microeconomic dimensions of the crisis and the private sector issues typically get much less att...

Editorial Note: Correction to Jeffrey B. Liebman's "Understanding the Increase in Disability Insurance Benefit Receipt in the United States"

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2015

Crossing Party Lines: The Effects of Information on Redistributive Politics

By Katherine Casey

American Economic Review, August 2015

Many lament that weak accountability and poor governance impede economic development in Africa. Politicians rely on ethnic allegiances that deliver the vote irrespective of performance, dampening electoral incentives. Giving voters information about candi...

Learning from Failure: A Review of Peter Schuck's Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better

By David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2015

Peter Schuck catalogs an overwhelming list of US government failures. He points to both structural problems (culture and institutions) and incentives. Despairing of cultural change, Schuck focuses on incentives. He relies on Charles Wolf's theory of nonma...

The Judge, the Politician, and the Press: Newspaper Coverage and Criminal Sentencing across Electoral Systems

By Claire S. H. Lim, James M. Snyder Jr., and David Strömberg

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2015

We study how media environments interact with political institutions that structure the accountability of public officials. Specifically, we quantify media influence on the behavior of US state court judges. We analyze around 1.5 million criminal sente...

Political Parties and Labor-Market Outcomes: Evidence from US States

By Louis-Philippe Beland

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2015

This paper estimates the causal impact of the party allegiance (Republican or Democratic) of US governors on labor-market outcomes. I match gubernatorial elections with March Current Population Survey (CPS) data for income years 1977 to 2008. Using a regr...

Collective Dynamic Choice: The Necessity of Time Inconsistency

By Matthew O. Jackson and Leeat Yariv

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2015

We study collective decisions by time-discounting individuals choosing a common consumption stream. We show that with any heterogeneity in time preferences, every Pareto efficient and non-dictatorial method of aggregating utility functions must be time-in...

Majority Rule and Utilitarian Welfare

By Vijay Krishna and John Morgan

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2015

We study the welfare properties of majority and supermajority rules when voting is costly and values, costs, and electorate sizes are all random. Unlike previous work, where the electorate size was either fixed or Poisson distributed, and exhibited no lim...

Water Pollution Progress at Borders: The Role of Changes in China's Political Promotion Incentives

By Matthew E. Kahn, Pei Li, and Daxuan Zhao

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2015

At political boundaries, local leaders have weak incentives to reduce polluting activity because the social costs are borne by downstream neighbors. This paper exploits a natural experiment set in China in which the central government changed the local po...