Corruption in Cities: Graft and Politics in American Cities at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

The essay is an exploration of corruption as practiced by city politicians in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Corruption is generally considered to be bad for the performance of governments and for the growth and development of economies, but American cities grew rapidly and were, as far as tangible evidence suggests, relatively well governed. I propose the answer to this conundrum lies in the exact types of graft which were possible. Skimming from city contracts and manipulating local real estate markets encouraged politicians to pursue growth enhancing policies. Many of the most damaging forms of government interference - closing borders and pursuing input-substituting policies - are not possible in cities. Patronage politics made corruption more likely by insulating politicians from (some) voter wrath, but the ability of the tax base to depart the city provided some constraints on rent-extraction. The city Boss did not want to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs. The analysis of urban graft is based on contemporary reports, especially the very detailed reports in Shame of the Cities' by Lincoln Steffens. The analysis also answers other important questions raised by the experience of Progressive Era cities: Why did businessmen back reform? And why did machine politics rise, and fall, between 1890 and 1930?

Interactions Between Charged Rods Near Salty Surfaces

Using both theoretical modeling and computer simulations we study a model system for DNA interactions in the vicinity of charged membranes. We focus on the polarization of the mobile charges in the membranes due to the nearby charged rods (DNA) and the resulting screening of their fields and inter-rod interactions. We find, both within a Debye-Huckel model and in Brownian dynamics simulations, that the confinement of the mobile charges to the surface leads to a qualitative reduction in their ability to screen the charged rods to the degree that the fields and resulting interactions are not finite-ranged as in systems including a bulk salt concentration, but rather decay algebraically and the screening effect is more like an effective increase in the multipole moment of the charged rod

WOMEN EMPOWERMENT IN THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF NAGA CITY

Penelitian deskriptif-evaluatif ini melihat sejauh mana kontribusi perempuan pengusaha dalam pembangunan ekonomi di Naga City. Kemampuan dalam hal planning, organizing, capability building, fi nancial management dan monitoring menjadi tolok ukur pemberdayaan dalam operasi bisnis yang mereka lakukan . Hasil temuan menunjukkan bahwa pencapaian tujuan bisnis dipengaruhi oleh kepribadian dan kebijakan operasional yang mereka lakukan. Tugas yang sulit bagi mereka adalah membuat kegiatan dan anggaran yang terinci. Ada perbedaan antusiasme dan sikap inovasi dari pengusaha perempuan dari area non komersial dan area komersial. Pengusaha di daerah komersial merasa lebih yakin bahwa mereka akan bertahan di kompetisi yang ketat sehingga membuat mereka kurang peduli dengan aspek manajemen bisnis yang berbeda. Wanita mengalami kesulitan dalam menyesuaikan diri dengan lingkungan yang terus kerubah karena perubahan membawa konwensi pada perubahan biaya, tenaga kerja dan menggeser produk untuk memenuhi tuntutan perubahan

The Effect of Patronage Politics on City Government in American Cities, 1900-1910

In this paper I explore the effect of patronage or machine' politics on government performance in American cities during the Progressive era. I use game theoretic models and an empirical analysis of spending and public goods provision during the first decade of the twentieth century in a cross section of American cities with and without governments dominated by political machines. The ability to buy votes relaxes the electoral constraints on the government. Taxes, budgets, municipal wages, and (unobserved) corruption are all predicted to rise under a patronage based regime. But in a city, patronage politics does not relax the incentives to provide public goods. A politician who buys his way into office will still be motivated to provide optimal levels of government goods and services because he can capture the resulting locational rents in higher taxes and graft. Empirically, city governments dominated by political machines paid city government employees more and had larger budgets but provided high levels of public goods.