Iraq and Public Choice

This paper uses the European Working Conditions Surveys to examine the intensity of work for male and female employees. The first section gives an overview of the usefulness of the survey for examining European Union (EU) working conditions and shows how women's intensity of work has been increasing faster than that of men, so that by the year 2000 there was little gender difference in the speed of work. Section two demonstrates that the intensity of work has a negative effect on health and work-life balance, and this effect is stronger for women than for men.Public choice

"Why the Ex-Communist Countries Should Take the 'Middle Way' to the Market"

The ex-communist countries of Europe as well as Soviet Union want to find a way out of the command economy to a market system. The common advice (e.g., Lipton and Sachs, Kornai) has been to go quickly "all the way" to a fully capitalist economy. The difficulties of this policy are now becoming clear. This paper argues that a "middle way" with many socialist elements is an attractive path for these countries, for both the transition and as a long-term goal. Economic reform of ex-communist countries must be based on two core elements. First, the primacy of law and stable private property rights must be assured. Second, free markets must be the basis of economic relations. How could reform then be a middle way? First, firms must be independent entities owned by shareholders and responsible for making a profit, but the owners can include local, provincial (republic) and national governments, workers, and social institutions providing pensions and insurance. Government ownership has not made Volkswagen, Lufthansa or Japan Air Lines economic failures. Second, market are institutions that must be developed. It is particularly important for a society without accepted norms and laws regarding market behavior to develop them, and to evolve efficient private contracts. Government legal codes can help. Finally, regulation can provide some of the security of socialist systems and Western welfare states. The economic case for a middle way is supported by its widespread success, including Austria, Germany's "social market" economy, Sweden, Canada and Japan. The cultural case is based on an economy's need to be reasonably consistent with its society's customs and norms. It is less of a shock for an ex-communist society to move to the "middle way" than to a purely capitalist society.

Iraq and Law and Economics

Decisions by the Bush administration and others, in choosing whether to invade Iraq, deciding on how to invade Iraq, and thinking about the chances for "rule of law" there, can be analyzed using law and economics. The results are mixed, suggesting that other factors were used by the Bush administration, and also that the public's understanding of "rule of law" is different from that used by scholars.Law

Foreign banks in Bulgaria, 1875-2002

We use the analogy of ecological succession as our conceptual framework. We apply this analogy to the history of foreign banks in Bulgaria and argue that the current predominance of foreign banks is unlikely to be permanent, even without government action. Foreign banks have entered Bulgaria several times—before World War I, again after that war, and after the fall of Communism in the early 1990s. The same source countries and even some of the same banks that were present before World War II or even World War I, reappear in the 1990s. Government concern with retaining control over credit limited the foreigners’ role in the banking system. However, since 1997 the government has privatized almost all the major banks with the result that foreign banks now control over 80 per cent of the banking system’s assets.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39922/3/wp537.pd

Foreign banks in Bulgaria, 1875-2002

We use the analogy of ecological succession as our conceptual framework. We apply this analogy to the history of foreign banks in Bulgaria and argue that the current predominance of foreign banks is unlikely to be permanent, even without government action. Foreign banks have entered Bulgaria several times—before World War I, again after that war, and after the fall of Communism in the early 1990s. The same source countries and even some of the same banks that were present before World War II or even World War I, reappear in the 1990s. Government concern with retaining control over credit limited the foreigners’ role in the banking system. However, since 1997 the government has privatized almost all the major banks with the result that foreign banks now control over 80 per cent of the banking system’s assets.International-banking, Bulgaria, Foreign-Banks, transition, succession

"Macroeconomic Market Incentive Plans: History and Theoretical Rationale"

This paper explores the contemporary debate among economists on the means to move the economy toward high employment without inflation-beyond the traditional instruments of monetary and fiscal policy. The authors pay particular attention to the Market Anti-Inflation Plan (MAP), submitted by Lerner and Colander in 1980. The reasons economists have searched for alternative measures relate to the problems associated with wage and price controls. MAP is an anti-inflation plan that allows relative prices to adjust: The scheme increases costs to firms that raise prices, and contains an added incentive to lower prices. Since MAP is designed to fight macroeconomic inflation by changing the incentives of individual price setters, the relationship between microeconomic behavior and macroeconomic outcomes must be addressed. The theoretical justification for MAP is that there is a macroeconomic externality, and MAP can mitigate the ramifications of the externality. However, efforts to more clearly define the nature of this externality require a better understanding of transaction costs. Consequently, there will be the need for a mechanism to integrate such costs into microeconomic and macroeconomic models.

Problems of Bank Lending in Bulgaria: Information Asymmetry and Institutional Learning

Why are there such severe problems in lending in the transition countries? This research took a microeconomic and institutional look at part of the problem. We conducted interviews in Bulgaria and Hungary and sought answers to two questions. First, how do banks making "normal" loans insure that they were making "good" loans? Second, how do banks get their money back on loans that have turned bad? Clearly, weaknesses at either stage could explain both past loan failures and present reluctance to lend. The bankers we spoke to reported significant difficulties at both stages of the credit process. First, the bankers reported difficulties in accumulating the information to evaluate borrowers and their projects. The bankers also reported problems with encouraging borrowers to repay and difficulties with seizing collateral, and using legal action in collecting bad debts. Although many of the problems are universal problems of bank lending, many seemed specific to transition economies in general and Bulgaria in particular. We identified specific problems with obtaining and using the evidence about borrowers that might have been available. Bulgarian bankers were often less than fully effective in collecting all available information, or in considering later how they could improve their methods of evaluating clients. One method that more banks might usefully adopt is systematic review of loan losses and the incorporation of lessons learned into the training of new loan officers. In addition, there were serious difficulties in sharing information about borrowers among bankers and between bankers and other firms. Some relaxation of bank secrecy would be appropriate. We also identified policy areas where improvement appears appropriate. Reputation can be effective in ensuring that borrowers fulfill their contracts. However, there is a general lack of credit reporting institutions to share information about credit-worthiness; this need to be remedied. The heavy reliance on collateral imposes high costs on borrowers and lenders. For collateral to work properly, banks must be able to perfect the collateral and to dispose of it quickly. Finally, fraud against banks was common, but typically went unpunished; prosecutors were apparently not interested in such cases. Bankers and prosecutors must make the prosecution of bank fraud a priority. We base our findings on the 24 banking interviews we conducted in Bulgaria. We also conducted 12 interviews in Hungary. Bankers were surprisingly candid in describing most of their problems.

Review of \u3ci\u3e Ecology and Conservation of Great Plains Vertebrates\u3c/i\u3e Edited by Fritz L. Knopf and Fred B. Samson

Focusing on the plight of natural ecosystems in the Great Plains, Fritz Knopf and Fred Samson give prominent coverage to the region\u27s “charismatic megafauna and provide an excellent overview of the ecology and conservation of most vertebrate taxa. The editors granted their individual authors considerable leeway, resulting in contributions that are authoritative but unintegrated with each other. For example, in the Preface and most of the chapters, the Great Plains includes the tall grass prairie as well as the short and mixed grass prairie traditionally associated with the Great Plains region. In chapters on wetlands and fishes, tall grass prairie is explicitly excluded, and the latter chapter confines itself to the Central and Southern Plains

Different Preferences, Different Politics: A Demand-and-Structure Explanation

Different types of legislative politics are explained in this paper by the distribution of legislators' demands. Demands are legislators' willingness to pay for victory on a bill, with votes on other issues, effort, or work. Different demand distributions require different institutions and "politics" for the legislators to obtain the results they want. The types of politics can be largely identified with Lowi's typology of interest-group interaction. Distributive politics combines many individual projects, each with a small intensely favorable minority and a large, slightly opposed majority. Since no one project could pass on its own, compound bills are created that benefit all legislators (Weingast 1979). Redistributive issues have two large intensely opposed groups. Their politics are conflict, mobilizations of one's partisans, and efforts to obtain the votes of the few indifferents (Schneider 1979). Regulative politics have two forms. Simple regulative issues have small intense groups for and against the bill, and a vast majority of indifferents. Each side appeals to the indifferents, creating a natural arena for vote-trading. Complex regulative issues allow the distribution of demand to change as the bill proposal is modified. They often involve novel legislation, whose consequences are not clear. Those dominating the agenda control the nature of the bill to maximize their gains and assure a majority for passage (Shepsle and Weingast 1984). Vote-trading also occurs, since most legislators are indifferent

Testing Theories of Legislative Voting: Dimensions, Ideology and Structure

While dimensional studies of legislative voting find a single ideological dimension (Schneider 1979, Poole and Rosenthal 1985b), regression estimates find constituency and party dominant (Kau and Rubin 1979, Peltzman 1984), and ideology secondary (Kalt and Zupan 1984). This paper rescales the dimensional findings to show their improved classification success over the null hypothesis that votes are not unidimensional. With the rescaling, most votes are not explained by one dimension, and several dimensions are important Nevertheless, fewer dimensions are found than constituents' preferences suggest. Thus a model is developed where transactions costs of building coalitions reduce the number of dimensions. When legislative parties build internal coalitions to pass and defeat bills, voting on randomly drawn bills has a single party-oriented dimension. And natural ideological dimensions are reinforced if parties write bills and logroll along natural lines of cohesion