Improper Selection of High-Cost Producers in the Rent-Seeking Contest

The resources two rival businesses spend to raise their own chance of getting a unique monopoly license are a cost of rent-seeking. When those businesses differ in the costs of producing the monopoly good there is an additional cost of rent-seeking that has not been studied in the literature. If the high cost producer wins the license, the difference between his cost and the costs of his more efficient rival is a social loss from improper selection of producers by the political process. The loss becomes more severe when the ability to lobby of the inefficient producer outstrips that of the efficient producer. This may help to explain why specialized lobbying evolved. Specialized lobbying reduces the social cost from improper selection of firms by allowing efficient producers to hire expert rent-seekers and so to raise their chances of gaining monopoly concessions.Rent-seeking, political efficiency, deadweight loss

Campaign Finance: An Introduction to the Field

This is a review of the economics and politics of campaign finance regulation and of the econometrics of the effect of campaign spending on election outcomes.Campaign finance; incumbent advantage; industrial organisation of election campaigns

Fiscal Churning and Political Efficiency

This paper proposes churned transfers as a measure of political inefficiency. A transfer is churned when at least the same level of voter satisfaction could have been achieved by lowering the voter's tax burden by the amount of the transfer. Previous measures of political efficiency---Pommerehne and Schneider (1983)---depend on the researcher’s assumptions about voter preferences. Churned transfers avoid this problem, but depend on the researcher’s assumptions about government tax and spending incidence. This paper suggests fiscal churning as a supplement to measures of political efficiency that rely on assumptions about the preferences of the median voter. Churning measures promise to throw light on the Chicago-Virginia controversy over the efficiency of political systems.Political efficiency, tax incidence, spending incidence, fiscal churning

Why Do Voters Demand Universal Government Benefits?

Universal social benefits seem to contradict important notions in economics. They are poorly targeted and must be paid for by what seem to be high taxes. This paper describes the costs of universality and then proposes two competing explanations for why an electorate might wish to pay these costs. It may be harder to identify the poor through targeted social programs than to simply give everyone social benefits and withdraw part of these benefits through the tax system. Or, universality may be a form of political insurance that protects any one group of voters from being exploited by others. Each conjecture leads to different predictions about the manner in which government benefits will vary with the incomes of the recipients. I use a model of tax and spending incidence for Canada in 1990 to see which conjecture helps best to understand the data. I find mixed evidence in favor of the notion that universality is a form of political insurance.fiscal churning, political efficiency, transfers, Canada

Pain

Painkilling drugs produce a good called relief which reduces the fixed level of bad (pain) the individual is endowed with. These drugs have the side-effect of reducing the utility the individual gets from consuming goods. This means that the shadow price of relief counts not only the cost of drugs and their ability to reduce pain, but also the undesired reduction in pleasure from consuming goods. The tradeoff between goods and relief is non-linear and convex even for painkilling drugs that have a linear effect on pain. Small increases in pain may push the individual to a corner where painkilling drugs dominate his life. This seeming dependence on the drug has nothing to do with addiction or habit formation, but is a consequence of how consumption of these drugs changes the shadow prices of goods and relief.Pain, addiction, drugs, household production

The Economics of Election Campaign Spending Limits

Spending limits are an important rule in the electoral game. Critics of limits claim that incumbents write these rules to keep down promising challengers. Their arguments are seductive but do not stand on a firm empirical base. The data seem quite eager to support or reject the critics' view, given the proper massaging. This paper suggests that if incumbents profit from spending limits, they will take their profit in a way that leaves no trace in the data. Profit does not come in the form of higher votes for the incumbent, but as richer government spoils for their close supporters. This explanation goes against the traditional view of how limits help incumbents. The explanation also helps to explain why there may never be a winner in the empirical debate on whether incumbents or challengers profit from limits.Campaign spending spending limits, election finance regulation, economics of information

Interest Groups: An Introduction

This paper reviews public choice theories of interest groups.Interest groups; rent-seeking

A New Look at the Laffer Curve and the Displacement Loss from Tax Evasion

The two most prominent deadweight losses in public finance are the triangle loss from taxation and the rectangle loss from rent-seeking. This paper suggests that a third type of deadweight loss can rival these two in size and deserves detailed exploration. In the presence of the underground economy taxes give rise to a deadweight loss from displacement of efficient producers by inefficient producers. I consider an economy in which a producer faces two types of costs: the cost of production, and taxes. If good evaders are inefficient producers, tax evasion turns a flat tax into a tax based on ability to pay with the result that maximum government revenues possible under tax evasion may be larger than when no one evades taxes. Displacement deadweight loss is a subset of a larger class of losses that arise when productive and counterproductive features are bundled into the same economic agent and when that agent has no incentive or opportunity to specialize wholly in one or the other pursuit.underground economy, tax evasion, deadweight loss, taxation

Quality of Government Services and the Civic Duty to Pay Taxes in the Czech and Slovak Republics, and other Transition Countries

A 2002 survey of 1089 Czechs and 501 Slovaks, as well as a more limited survey of Hungary, and Poland, indicates that an individual may evade taxes in part if he believes he is receiving substandard government services. We suggest that an individual’s evaluation of the quality of government services is not influenced by his need to justify his evasion. Self-reported measures of morality show no correlation with evasion. This suggests that perceptions of government services are not shaped by an individual’s need to justify his evasion. This gives weight to our finding that the perceived quality of government services influences evasion. The less quality of government services an individual reports, the more likely he is to evade taxes. A 20% increase in the perception that government services are of quality would lead to a 5% decrease in the number of frequent tax evaders and a 12% increase in the number who never evade. Governments in transition countries who suffer from weak tax collection apparatus may wish to transmit clear information on the quality of their services in order to cut down on evasion.Tax evasion; quality of government services; transition; Czech Republic; Slovak Republic; Hungary; Poland

Mission Implausible III: Measuring the Informal Sector in a Transition Economy using Macro Methods1

An easy and popular method for measuring the size of the underground economy is to use macro-data such as money demand or electricity demand to infer what the legitimate economy needs, and then to attribute the remaining consumption to the underground economy. Such inferences rely on the stability of parameters of the money demand and electricity demand equations, or at the very least on knowledge of how these parameters are changing. We argue that the pace of change of these parameters (such as velocity) is too variable in transition economies for the above methods of estimating the size of the underground economy to be applicable. We make our point by using the Czech Republic and other transition country data from the financial and electricity sectors.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40069/3/wp683.pd