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on Collective Decision-Making |
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Issue of 2008‒09‒05
five papers chosen by |
| By: | Alberto Alesina; Richard Holden |
| Date: | 2008–08–29 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cla:levrem:122247000000002358&r=cdm |
| By: | Davide Debortoli; Ricardo Nunes |
| Abstract: | We analyze how public debt evolves when successive policymakers have different policy goals and cannot make credible commitments about their future policies. We consider several cases to be able to disentangle and quantify the respective effects of imperfect commitment and political disagreement. Absent political turnover, imperfect commitment drives the long-run level of debt to zero. With political disagreement, debt is a sizeable fraction of GDP and increasing in the degree of polarization among parties, no matter the degree of commitment. The frequency of political turnover does not produce quantitatively relevant effects. These results are consistent with much of the existing empirical evidence. Finally, we find that in the presence of political disagreement the welfare gains of building commitment are lower. |
| Date: | 2008 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedgif:938&r=cdm |
| By: | Alan J. Auerbach |
| Abstract: | Like many other developed economies, the United States has imposed fiscal rules in attempting to impose a degree of fiscal discipline on the political process of budget determination. The federal government has operated under a series of budget control regimes that have been complex in nature and of debatable impact. Much of the complexity of these federal budget regimes relates to the structure of the U.S. federal government. The controversy over the impact of different regimes relates to the fact that the rules have no constitutional standing, leading to the question of whether they do more than clarify a government's intended policies. In this paper, I review US federal budget rules and present some evidence on their possible effects. From an analysis of how components of the federal budget behaved under the different budget regimes, it appears that the rules did have some effects, rather than simply being statements of policy intentions. The rules may also have had some success at deficit control, although such conclusions are highly tentative given the many other factors at work during the different periods. Even less certain is the extent to which the various rules achieved whatever objectives underlay their introduction. |
| JEL: | D78 H62 J11 |
| Date: | 2008–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14288&r=cdm |
| By: | Björn Bartling; Urs Fischbacher |
| Abstract: | To fully understand the motives for delegating a decision right, it is important to study responsibility attributions for outcomes of delegated decisions. We conducted an experiment in which subjects were able to delegate the choice between a fair or unfair allocation, and used a punishment option to elicit responsibility attributions. Our results show that, first, responsibility attribution can be effectively shifted and, second, this constitutes a powerful motive for the delegation of a decision right. Furthermore, we propose a formal measure of responsibility and show that this measure outperforms measures based on outcome or intention in predicting punishment behavior. |
| Keywords: | Delegation, decision rights, moral responsibility, blame shifting |
| JEL: | C91 D63 |
| Date: | 2008–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zur:iewwpx:380&r=cdm |
| By: | Peter Michaelis (University of Augsburg, Department of Economics); Thomas Ziesemer (University of Augsburg, Department of Economics) |
| Abstract: | Policy diffusion refers to the process by which a political innovation – like the introduction of a novel emission tax – disseminates over time among countries. In order to analyze this issue from an economic point of view we develop a simple two-country-model of the taxation of emissions in presence of (possible) policy diffusion. Contrary to the usual Nash setting of simultaneous decision making we consider a Stackelberg game: In the first step the domestic government introduces an emission tax td thus acting as Stackelberg-leader, in the second step the foreign government decides whether or not to introduce an emission tax tf and in the third step the firms decide on their output quantities to be sold on a third country’s market. For the case of an exogenous given probability of policy diffusion we show that the optimal domestic tax rate is c.p. the higher, the higher the probability of policy diffusion is. Moreover, we explore under which conditions first-mover behaviour by the domestic government leads to a higher tax rate compared to the Nash solution In the next step we introduce an endogenous probability of policy diffusion by combining our model with a strategic lobbying approach. As a result, the probability of policy diffusion is c.p. the smaller, the higher domestic tax rate td is. Consequently, in fixing the optimal tax rate the domestic government has to account for the foreign firm’s lobbying activities otherwise it will choose a tax rate too high. |
| Keywords: | emission taxes, first-mover behaviour, strategic environmental policy, policy diffusion |
| JEL: | F18 Q55 Q58 |
| Date: | 2008–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aug:augsbe:0302&r=cdm |