This study examines the impact of research published in the two core public choice journals – Public Choice and the Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice – during the five-year period from 2010 through 2014. Scholars representing almost 400 universities contributed impactful research to these journals over this period, allowing us to rank institutions on the basis of citations to this published research. Our work indicates that public choice scholarship emanating from non-US colleges and universities has surged, with the University of Göttingen, University of Linz, Heidelburg University, University of Oxford, University of Konstanz, Aarhus University, University of Groningen, Paderborn University, University of Minho and University of Cambridge occupying ten of the top 15 positions in our worldwide ranking. Even so, US-based institutions still maintain a lofty presence, with Georgetown University, Emory University, the University of Illinois and George Mason University each holding positions among the top five institutions worldwide.
Is social capital likely to be underproduced without state action? Where previous analysts have typically argued that social capital is a public good and, therefore, needs government action to be produced at an optimal level, we argue that social capital is not a public good because though often non-rivalrous, it is almost always excludable. As such, social capital is more appropriately conceived of as a club good. Further, we argue that governments are not likely to be in a position to improve a society’s social capital due to epistemic limits and the complexity of social capital. Finally, we argue that rather than a state solution, solutions to social capital-related problems are best solved through a bottom-up process. As we demonstrate throughout, this has implications for how we understand community resilience in the wake of disasters. The key role that social capital plays in facilitating community rebound after disasters has been widely acknowledged. If social capital is a public good, then policymakers could be justified in focusing on cultivating social capital as a strategy for promoting community resilience. If social capital is a club good and there are limits to top-down strategies for creating social capital, however, then social capital creation is not an available policy lever.
This article re-examines political budget cycles in sub-Saharan Africa. It first examines the effect of elections on fiscal policy according to the rational opportunistic hypothesis. The study then analyses the strength of these effects. Ordinary least squares, fixed effects, random effects and generalised method of moment in system are applied on a sample of 41 countries from 1990 to 2015. Our results suggest that the lead-up to and holding of elections in sub-Saharan Africa lead to increasing government spending, declining tax revenues and worsening fiscal deficits. We also find that democracy and fighting corruption significantly reduce the strength of political budget cycles, while ethnic fragmentation has reverse effects. We recommend improving the quality of institutions that control public action in order to tame political budget cycles in sub-Saharan Africa.
This article provides a quantitative examination of the link between political institutions and deaths during the first 100 days of the COVID-19 pandemic. We demonstrate that countries with more democratic political institutions experienced deaths on a larger per capita scale than less democratic countries. The result is robust to the inclusion of many relevant controls, a battery of estimation techniques and estimation with instrumental variables for the institutional measures. Additionally, we examine the extent to which COVID-19 deaths were impacted heterogeneously by policy responses across types of political institutions. Policy responses in democracies were less effective in reducing deaths in the early stages of the crisis. The results imply that democratic political institutions may have a disadvantage in responding quickly to pandemics.
This study explores the link between regular grandparental childcare and SARS-CoV-2 infection rates at the level of German counties. In our analysis, we suggest that a region’s infection rates are shaped by region-, household- and individual-specific parameters. We extensively draw on the latter, exploring the intra- and extra-familial mechanisms fuelling individual contact frequency to test the potential role of regular grandparental childcare in explaining overall infection rates. We combine aggregate survey data with local administrative data for German counties and find a positive correlation between the frequency of regular grandparental childcare and local SARS-CoV-2 infection rates. However, the statistical significance of this relationship breaks down as soon as potentially confounding factors, in particular, the local Catholic population share, are controlled for. Our findings do not provide valid support for a significant role of grandparental childcare in driving SARS-CoV-2 infections, but rather suggest that the frequency of extra-familial contacts driven by religious communities might be a more relevant channel in this context. Our results cast doubt on simplistic narratives postulating a link between intergenerational contacts and infection rates.
Algorithmic management is a core concept to analyse labour control on online labour platforms. It runs the risk, however, of oversimplifying the existing variety and complexity of control forms. In order to provide a basis for further research, this article develops a typology of labour control forms within crowdwork and discusses how they influence perceptions of working conditions. It identifies the two most relevant forms of labour control in crowdwork: direct control mainly takes the form of automated output control, while indirect control aiming at creating motivation and commitment is mainly exerted through ranking and reputation systems (gamification). The article shows that these forms of control and their combination are linked with very different ways of how platform workers perceive working conditions on platforms. In addition, the analysis shows significant differences regarding the perception of working conditions between those who work on platforms in addition to a regular employment as opposed to those who are self-employed and rely more strongly, if not fully, on their income from platform work. The analysis is based on qualitative and quantitative research on crowdwork platforms. In particular, it builds on an online survey conducted with 1,131 crowdworkers active on different types of platforms.
Technological determinism is a recurrent feature in debates concerning changes in economy and work and has resurfaced sharply in the discourse around the ‘fourth industrial revolution’. While a number of authors have, in recent years, critiqued the trend, this article is distinctive in arguing that foundational labour process analysis provides the most effective source of an alternative understanding of the relations between political economy, science, technology and work relations. The article refines and reframes this analysis, through an engagement with critical commentary and research, developing the idea of a political materialist approach that can reveal the various influences on, sources of contestation and levels of strategic choices that are open to economic actors. A distinction is made between ‘first order’ choices, often about adoption at aggregate level and ‘second order’ choices mainly concerned with complex issues of deployment. This framework is then applied to the analysis of case studies of the call centre labour process and digital labour platform, functioning as illustrative scenarios. It is argued that the nature of techno-economic systems in the ‘digital era’ open up greater opportunities for contestation.
I explore the impact of public defender and prosecutor elections using caseload data from Florida. While most states within the US use popular elections to select and retain prosecutors, public defenders are typically appointed positions. Florida is novel in that for both positions, popular, partisan elections are used to select the office’s leader. I first document important distortions in pre-trial case handling. A public defender re-election is associated with an increase in the proportion of cases resolved via plea bargaining, while prosecutor re-elections are associated with less plea bargaining. At the trial phase, I present evidence that public defender re-elections are associated with a decrease in the proportion of jury trials that result in a conviction, while a prosecutor re-election coincides with an increase in the conviction rate. The results are consistent with voters holding both elected officials accountable for doing their job. Public defenders obtain plea bargains at a higher rate and secure acquittals for their clients when up for re-election. Prosecutors do not plea bargain as much and win at trial when up for re-election.
This article aims to evaluate the impact of budget forecast manipulations on election results using a sample that covers all 308 Portuguese municipalities over the period running from 1998 to 2017. The results reveal that incumbent mayors overestimate revenues and expenditures. Overstating the budget more on the revenue side, they end up with a deficit. We check if this opportunistic behaviour is electorally beneficial. The results provide little or no evidence that election-year manipulations of revenue forecasts affect the vote shares of the party of the incumbent mayor. On the other hand, the opportunistic management of total and capital expenditure forecasts pays off, which is consistent with previous results for Portugal indicating that increased total and, mainly, capital expenditures lead to higher vote shares.
This article examines the response of work effort to changes in wage and/or tax rates when (1) no part of the taxes returns back to taxpaying workers, but when a part goes back (2) through the provision of a pure public good or (3) through transfer payments. The work-effort ratio is found to be higher in a Leviathan state, but the comparison between the two other tax-use regimes is uncertain. The response of the effort ratio to a change in the wage ratio follows the same pattern, while this response is weakened by a change in the current tax rate and strengthened by a change in the future tax rate, regardless not only of the use of tax revenue, but also of its change over time. In the case of change, the comparison of effort ratios is clear only when the change prompts them to move in the same direction. Corollaries related to tax evasion point to the irrelevance of tax benefits for labour supply decisions.
