The Usefulness of Corruptible Elections

The belief that elections reduce rent seeking by government officials is widely held, likewise the belief that rent seeking decreases as elections are less subject to corruption. In this paper we develop and test a model in which these beliefs are carefully examined. Our model indicates that, while elections may provide a disincentive for rent seeking, this disincentive (1) need not actually materialise, and (2), is not necessarily correlated with the integrity of the electoral protocol. We next consider the ability of village-level elections in rural China to reduce rent seeking, and the extent to which this ability varies as the elections are more or less corruptible. We find that in practice, even elections that appear quite corruptible provide a strong disincentive to rent seeking. Moreover, our results indicate which types of electoral reform lead to more effective popular oversight of leaders, and which do not.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39988/3/wp602.pd

Meetings with Costly Participation: An Empirical Analysis

Using data from the Mid-Atlantic surf clam and ocean quahog fishery, we find that firms with a preference for extreme, rather than moderate, policies are much more likely to participate in public meetings where regulation is determined. We also find that participation rates are higher for larger, closer, and more influential firms. These results; (1) improve our understanding of a very common institution for resource allocation, 'meetings with costly participation', (2) they refine our intuition about regulatory capture, (3) they provide broad confirmation of the recent theoretical literature predicting that polarization and bipartisanship should emerge under a variety of democratic institutions, and finally, (4) they may help to explain management problems in US fisheries.

Mobility Measurements Probe Conformational Changes in Membrane Proteins due to Tension

The function of membrane-embedded proteins such as ion channels depends crucially on their conformation. We demonstrate how conformational changes in asymmetric membrane proteins may be inferred from measurements of their diffusion. Such proteins cause local deformations in the membrane, which induce an extra hydrodynamic drag on the protein. Using membrane tension to control the magnitude of the deformations and hence the drag, measurements of diffusivity can be used to infer--- via an elastic model of the protein--- how conformation is changed by tension. Motivated by recent experimental results [Quemeneur et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 111 5083 (2014)] we focus on KvAP, a voltage-gated potassium channel. The conformation of KvAP is found to change considerably due to tension, with its `walls', where the protein meets the membrane, undergoing significant angular strains. The torsional stiffness is determined to be 26.8 kT at room temperature. This has implications for both the structure and function of such proteins in the environment of a tension-bearing membrane.Comment: Manuscript: 4 pages, 4 figures. Supplementary Material: 8 pages, 1 figur

The Value of Information in Public Decisions

This paper considers the problem of an imperfectly informed regulator constrained in his choice of environmental regulation by the political opposition of those affected by the policy. We compare the value of two types of information to the regulator: the social cost of pollution and the profitability of firms present in the economy. We find that in environments where small increases in the losses to regulated firms greatly affect the regulator's ability to implement the policy, it is most valuable to learn the types of firms, while it is most valuable to learn the social cost of pollution when small increases in losses are relatively ineffectual.Environmental Policy, Pollution, Optimal Taxation

Urban growth and transportation

We estimate the effects of major roads and public transit on the growth of major cities in the US between 1980 and 2000. We find that a 10% increase in a city’s stock of roads causes about a 2% increase in its population and employment and a small decrease in its share of poor households over this 20 year period. We also find that a 10% increase in a city’s stock of large buses causes about a 0.8% population increase and a small increase in the share of poor households over this period. To estimate these effects we rely on an instrumental variables estimation which uses a 1947 plan of the interstate highway system and an 1898 map of railroads as instruments for 1980 roads.urban growth, transportation, public transport, instrumental variables

Meetings with Costly Participation: An Empirical Investigation

Despite their importance in economic life, meetings with costly participation are little studied. This paper is an empirical analysis of participation at public meetings. We investigate basic and previously unaddressed questions about meetings with costly participation. Who goes? Does attendance vary with observable characteristics? Do meeting attendees represent the interested population? We find that (1), the opinions of participants do not represent the opinions of the entire regulated population, (2) that the opinions of participants are extreme relative to the whole population, (3) that private information does not affect participation decisions in an important way, and (4), that small changes to meeting protocols have the potential to manipulate the sample of participants. These results lay a foundation for the problem of tailoring meeting protocols to achieve particular welfare objectives.

Density regulation in strictly metric-free swarms

There is now experimental evidence that nearest-neighbour interactions in flocks of birds are metric free, i.e. they have no characteristic interaction length scale. However, models that involve interactions between neighbours that are assigned topologically are naturally invariant under spatial expansion, supporting a continuous reduction in density towards zero, unless additional cohesive interactions are introduced or the density is artificially controlled, e.g. via a finite system size. We propose a solution that involves a metric-free motional bias on those individuals that are topologically identified to be on an edge of the swarm. This model has only two primary control parameters, one controlling the relative strength of stochastic noise to the degree of co-alignment and another controlling the degree of the motional bias for those on the edge, relative to the tendency to co-align. We find a novel power-law scaling of the real-space density with the number of individuals N as well as a familiar order-to-disorder transition

Analysis of the unstable Tollmien--Schlichting mode on bodies with a rounded leading edge using the parabolized stability equation

The interaction between free-stream disturbances and the boundary layer on a body with a rounded leading edge is considered in this paper. A method which incorporates calculations using the parabolized stability equation in the Orr-Sommerfeld region, along with an upstream boundary condition derived from asymptotic theory in the vicinity of the leading edge, is generalized to bodies with an inviscid slip velocity which tends to a constant far downstream. We present results for the position of the lower branch neutral stability point and the magnitude of the unstable Tollmien-Schlichting (T-S) mode at this point for both a parabolic body and the Rankine body. For the Rankine body, which has an adverse pressure gradient along its surface far from the nose, we find a double maximum in the T-S wave amplitude for sufficiently large Reynolds numbers