U.S. State Government Economic and Social Performance: Unified vs. Divided and Democrat vs. Republican Controlled State Governments

This paper is looking for an empirical answer to the questions: Is a unified government’s performance superior to a divided government’s performance and is the performance of a unified government controlled by the Democratic Party superior to or inferior to the performance of a unified government under the control of the Republican Party? The evaluation of the performance of the government was done using two groups of variables, three economic variables, and three social variables. The empirical analyses of data from the contiguous U.S. states (1990-2014) suggest that the economic performance of states with a unified government is inferior to the performance of states with a divided government. On the other hand, unified governments perform better in the social area as compared to divided governments. There are important differences in performance between the Democratic and Republican Parties. Unified governments under the Democratic Party are more successful in lowering unemployment rate and increasing the number of jobs compared to Republican Party unified government. Unified governments controlled by the Democratic Party lower the poverty rate and the crime rate and have no effect on the GINI coefficient while Republican Party unified governments increase the GINI coefficient

National and regional repercussions of regional reallocations of federal expenditures and public services

This paper considers the problem of regional allocation of government funds in a two-region, two-good economy in which production of each good requires labor, capital, and a local public good. Changes in regional allocation of federal expenditures and public services are found to significantly impact the national economy in addition to the regional economies. For example, output of both regions and the national economy may decrease (or increase) as a result of such reallocation. This is because, output of a region directly depends on the fraction of federal funds spent in that region, and indirectly on output of the other region. Thus even if the proportion of government funds increases for a region, its output may actually decline if the fall in the fraction of government resources for the other region significantly decreases production there. Our results demonstrate that in addition to the amount of government expenditures and public services, an economy's capital accumulation, production, and factor returns are significantly influenced by how these government expenditures and public services are regionally allocated.

The Sales Tax Puzzle – Has the law of demand been repealed?

TRA86 removed the deductibility of state and local sales taxes from U.S. personal income taxes. This effectively increased the price to state governments of sales tax revenue relative to income tax revenues. This implies that state reliance on income taxes relative to sales taxes should have increased after TRA86 was implemented. Leading public finance economists investigated this in the period shortly following the reform and invariably found that the predicted substitution of income for sales taxes did not take place. In fact, several studies noted that state dependence on the sales tax increased relative to income taxes – hence the Sales Tax Puzzle. Several experts tried to rationalize their non-findings. These rationalizations are unconvincing. This paper asserts that the puzzle may be resolved in two different ways. The first, seemingly trivial, is that the analysis must incorporate sufficient time so as to allow for relatively complex adjustments. Our contributions here are to anchor this “obvious” point with a theoretical model related to earlier work of the authors, and an explicit empirical examination of the lag structures of individual states’ reactions to the comprehensive tax reform. The second demonstrates that the analysis must take into account regional shifts that were taking place in the U.S. during this period. When such compositional shifts involving political and deductibility patterns are explicitly introduced into the model, the paradoxical findings are resolved both in the long and in the short run. Our contribution here is a demonstration that the use of detailed state-level data, unlike any of the earlier work in this area, allows for the inclusion in the analysis of inter-regional shifts in various parameters. An additional contribution is the explicit use and emphasis of the propensity to itemize as an independent variable. The use of this variable ties this area of analysis of post tax reform behavior into a hitherto untapped strand of public-finance literature. The variable is both theoretically interesting, and proves to have experienced compositional shift patterns which help resolve the sales-tax puzzle paradox. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2003H71,

The effect of industrial diversity on state unemployment rate and per capita income

This paper examines the effect of industrial diversification on state unemployment and per capita income. Diversification may provide a form of employment insurance to states during cyclic downturns. Thus well diversified states should experience lower unemployment. To the extent that specialization confers economic benefit, however, more concentrated states should have higher per capita personal income. We use two sets of panel data for seventeen states spanning a thirty-eight year period to test these hypotheses. When state heterogeneity is controlled for properly, our results show that a strong link exists between industrial diversity and reduced unemployment. The evidence that per capita personal income is associated with industrial concentration is much weaker. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003JEL classification: R23, J6,

Genomic characterization of viruses associated with the parasitoid Anagyrus vladimiri (Hymenoptera: Encyrtidae)

International audienceKnowledge on symbiotic microorganisms of insects has increased dramatically in recent years, yet relatively little data are available regarding non-pathogenic viruses. Here we studied the virome of the parasitoid wasp Anagyrus vladimiri Triapitsyn (Hymenoptera: Encyrtidae), a biocontrol agent of mealybugs. By high-throughput sequencing of viral nucleic acids, we revealed three novel viruses, belonging to the families Reoviridae [provisionally termed AnvRV (Anagyrus vladimiri reovirus)], Iflaviridae (AnvIFV) and Dicistroviridae (AnvDV). Phylogenetic analysis further classified AnvRV in the genus Idnoreovirus , and AnvDV in the genus Triatovirus . The genome of AnvRV comprises 10 distinct genomic segments ranging in length from 1.5 to 4.2 kb, but only two out of the 10 ORFs have a known function. AnvIFV and AnvDV each have one polypeptide ORF, which is typical of iflaviruses but very un-common among dicistroviruses. Five conserved domains were found along both the ORFs of those two viruses. AnvRV was found to be fixed in an A. vladimiri population that was obtained from a mass rearing facility, whereas its prevalence in field-collected A. vladimiri was ~15 %. Similarly, the prevalence of AnvIFV and AnvDV was much higher in the mass rearing population than in the field population. The presence of AnvDV was positively correlated with the presence of Wolbachia in the same individuals. Transmission electron micrographs of females’ ovaries revealed clusters and viroplasms of reovirus-like particles in follicle cells, suggesting that AnvRV is vertically transmitted from mother to offspring. AnvRV was not detected in the mealybugs, supporting the assumption that this virus is truly associated with the wasps. The possible effects of these viruses on A. vladimiri ’s biology, and on biocontrol agents in general, are discussed. Our findings identify RNA viruses as potentially involved in the multitrophic system of mealybugs, their parasitoids and other members of the holobiont