Redistribution in the Open Economy: A Political Economy Approach

This paper develops a two-country model of international trade in which citizens who are heterogeneous with respect to their factor endowments vote over tariffs and income tax rates. In the politico-economic equilibrium, each country chooses its national policies by majority voting, taking the policy choice of the other country as given. By incorporating both income and trade taxes in a unified international-trade framework, we uncover the interplay between majority voting over these two instruments at the domestic level and strategic interdependencies between countries’ trade policies. Our main result is that greater inequality can be conducive to more redistribution via income taxation, more protectionist policies in capital-abundant countries, and less protectionist policies in labour-abundant countries. The model can accommodate the predictions of recent empirical studies on the relationship between inequality, protectionism, and redistribution.International trade, majority voting, inequality, income taxation, tariffs.

Laboratory Experiments in Political Economy

Most of the laboratory research in political science follows the style that was pioneered in experimental economics a half-century ago by Vernon Smith. The connection between this style of political science experimentation and economics experimentation parallels the connection between economic theory and formal political theory.

Top Monotonicity: A Common Root for Single Peakedness, Single Crossing and the Median Voter Result

When the members of a voting body exhibit single peaked preferences, majority winners exist. Moreover, the median(s) of the preferred alternatives of voters is (are) indeed the majority (Condorcet) winner(s). This important result of Duncan Black (1958) has been crucial in the development of public economics and political economy, even if it only provides a sufficient condition. Yet, there are many examples in the literature of environments where voting equilibria exist and alternative versions of the median voter results are satisfied while single peakedness does not hold. Some of them correspond to instances where other relevant conditions, apparently not connected with single eakedness, are satisfied. For example preferences may satisfy the single-crossing property (Mirrlees, 1971, Gans and Smart, 1996, and Milgrom and Shannon, 1994), intermediateness (Grandmont, 1978) or order restriction (Rothstein, 1990). Still other interesting cases of existence of voting equilibria do not fall in any of these categories. We present a new and weak domain restriction which encompasses all the above mentioned ones, llows for new cases, still guarantees the existence of Condorcet winners and preserves a version of the median voter result. We illustrate how this new condition, that we call top monotonicity, arises naturally in different economic contexts.Single peaked, single crossing and intermediate preferences, majority (Condorcet) winners

The Banks set and the Uncovered Set in budget allocation problems

We examine how a society chooses to divide a given budget among various regions, projects or individuals. In particular, we characterize the Banks set and the Uncovered Set in such problems. We show that the two sets can be proper subsets of the set of all alternatives, and at times are very pointed in their predictions. This contrasts with well-known "chaos theorems," which suggest that majority voting does not lead to any meaningful predictions when the policy space is multidimensional

Distributive Politics and the Benefits of Decentralization.

This paper integrates the distributive politics literature with the literature on decentralization by incorporating inter-regional project externalities into a standard model of distributive policy. A key finding is that the degree of uniformity (or "universalism") of the provision of regional projects is endogenous, and depends on the strength of the externality. The welfare benefits of decentralization, and the performance of "constitutional rules" (such as majority voting) which may be used to choose between decentralization and centralization, are then discussed in this framework.DECENTRALIZATION ; PUBLIC POLICY ; INCOME REDISTRIBUTION

National Politics and International Agreements

International agreements about transnational issues are difficult to reach, as the examples of the Copenhagen summit or the never-ending discussions of the future of the European Union make clear. In this paper, we relate this difficulty to the political process and the conflicts of interest attached to an agreement, both within and between national electorates, related to national income distributions. We set up a political economy model of a two-country world economy, where an international agreement on the financing of an international public good has to be negociated by two elected national delegates. We prove that any international agreement involves higher taxes in both countries than in the case of no-agreement. If reachable, an IA may generate losers in either country. If the political process involves a constraint on tax rates, an agreement may or may not be reached. Finally, when an agreement is reached, it may exhibit strategic delegation when the median voters are the Condorcet winners in both countries : this delegation is the outcome of the struggle by electorates to transfer the tax burden to the other country's taxpayers. In brief, the fate of an international agreements depends on national politics and distributive issues in the involved countries.International agreements, bargaining, delegation, voting.

Condorcet solutions in frugal models of budget allocation

We study a voting model with incomplete information in which the evaluation of social welfare must be based on information about agents’ top choices plus general qualitative background conditions on preferences. The former is elicited individually, while the latter is not. We apply this ‘frugal aggregation’ model to multi-dimensional budget allocation problems, relying on the specific assumptions of convexity and separability of preferences. We propose a solution concept of ex-ante Condorcet winners which is widely and flexibly applicable and naturally incorporates the epistemic assumptions of particular frugal aggregation models. We show that for the case of convex preferences, the ex-ante Condorcet approach naturally leads to a refinement of the Tukey median. By contrast, in the case of separably convex preferences, the same approach leads to different solution, the 1-median, i.e. the minimization of the sum of the L1-distances to the agents’ tops. An algorithmic characterization renders the latter solution analytically tractable and efficiently computable

A Social Choice Trade-off Between Alternative Fairness Concepts: Solidarity versus Flexibility

In this paper, we define simple measures of two properties that social choice functions may embody in different degrees in public goods environments. First, a measure of solidarity is proposed such that Thomson's (1990) replacement monotonicity property is a particular case in which the full amount of solidarity is required. Secondly, we introduce a measure of the degree of flexibility of a social choice function and prove that a trade-off in Campbell and Kelly's (1993) sense exists between both properties. More solidarity can only be achieved in exchange of less flexibility of the decision rule. When we restrict ourselves to the family of voting schemes called generalized Condorcet winner solutions, introduced by Moulin (1980), we find the exact trade-off and we can easily find the degrees of fulfillment of both properties, which amount to some generalization of the idea of ''qualified majority''.Single-peaked preferences, solidarity, welfare domination under preference replacement