The Size and Composition of Government Expenditure

This paper tests several leading hypotheses on determinants of government expenditure. The purpose is to avoid omitted variables bias by testing the prominent theories in a comprehensive specification, to identify persistent puzzles for the current set of theories, and to explore those puzzles in greater depth by looking at the composition of government expenditure and the level of government at which it takes place as well as its magnitude. Using Global Financial Statistics data from the IMF covering over 100 countries from 1970-2000, I look at cross-sectional and inter-temporal variation in government expenditure and both individual categories of expenditure (such as defense, education, health care) and different levels of government (central, state, and local). Among other results, I find a new explanation for Wagner's Law, widespread evidence that preference heterogeneity leads to decentralization rather than outright decreases in expenditures, that a great deal of the expenditure associated with increased trade openness is not in categories that explicitly insure for risk, and evidence that both political access and income inequality affect the extent of social insurance.government expenditure, Wagner's Law

The Aging Population and the Size of the Welfare State: Is There a Puzzle?

Razin, Sadka, and Swagel (2002) unveil a puzzling fact: the welfare state appears to be shrinking even as the dependency ratio rises. While they formulate an elegant political economy model to explain the coexistence of an aging population and declining transfers, the resolution of the puzzle turns out to be much simpler. Labor tax rates and per capita transfers are negatively correlated with the dependency ratio in advanced economies only because this measure includes children as well as retirees. Both labor tax rates and per capita transfers in advanced economies are, in fact, historically positively correlated with the ratio of retirees to the working-age population and negatively correlated with the ratio of children to the working-age population. Increasing the number of retirees shifts preferences toward higher taxes and transfers by increasing the fraction of the population that receives transfers. In contrast, workers with more children prefer to spend more of their lifetime income while raising dependents, so they prefer smaller public pension systems. These results suggest that fiscal leakage from workers to retirees is not required to explain the broad trends in the transfer policies of advanced economies.dependency ratio, welfare state

The Information Content of Elections and Varieties of the Partisan Political Business Cycle

This event study uses economic forecasts and opinion polls to measure the response of expectations to election surprise. Use of forecast data complements older work on partisan cycles by allowing a tighter link between election and response thereby mitigating concerns of endogeneity and omitted variables. I fin that forecasters respond swiftly and significantly to election surprise. I further argue that the response ought to vary across countries with different institutional foundations. In support, I find that there exist three distinct patterns in forecasters' responses to partisan surprise corresponding to Hall and Soskice's three varieties of capitalism. In liberal market economies, forecasters expect the left to achieve jobless growth with virtually no cost to inflation. In Mediterranean market economies, forecasters expect the left to achieve deliver both higher output growth and lower unemployment but with higher inflation. And in coordinated market economies, forecasters expect the left to deliver lower growth, higher unemployment, and higher inflation.political business cycle, varieties of capitalism, forecast data, opinion polls

The vicious cycle: fundraising and perceived visibility in US presidential primaries

Scholars of presidential primaries have long posited a dynamic positive feedback loop between fundraising and electoral success. Yet existing work on both directions of this feedback remains inconclusive and is often explicitly cross-sectional, ignoring the dynamic aspect of the hypothesis. Pairing high-frequency FEC data on contributions and expenditures with Iowa Electronic Markets data on perceived probability of victory, we examine the bidirectional feedback between contributions and viability. We find robust, significant positive feedback in both directions. This might suggest multiple equilibria: a candidate initially anointed as the front-runner able to sustain such status solely by the fundraising advantage conferred despite possessing no advantage in quality. However, simulations suggest the feedback loop cannot, by itself, sustain advantage. Given the observed durability of front-runners, it would thus seem there is either some other feedback at work and/or the process by which the initial front-runner is identified is informative of candidate quality

Challenging Pre-Service Students\u27 Teaching Perspectives in an Inquiry-Focused Program

Inquiry teaching based on constructivist learning theory has been an emphasis in pre-service education for over a decade. In general, a developmental teaching perspective supports inquiry-based instruction where teachers view learners as constructors of knowledge and teaching as providing questions, problems, and challenges that form a bridge from the learners\u27 prior knowledge to a new, more sophisticated form of reasoning. Since teaching perspectives influence student learning, teacher effectiveness, and teacher attrition, challenging pre-service teachers to overcome experience-based convictions of a transmission perspective is necessary in teacher education. In this study, we examined the teaching perspectives of secondary, pre-service methods students at the midpoint of an inquiry-focused program. Our findings suggest that, despite being introduced to a variety of teaching perspectives, overcoming preconceptions of good teaching and considering a perspective counter to one\u27s disciplinary major presents a dilemma for pre-service teachers

Results of the 1997 Illinois Deer Hunter Survey

Administrative ReportReport issued on: July 17, 200

A space-time neural network

Introduced here is a novel technique which adds the dimension of time to the well known back propagation neural network algorithm. Cited here are several reasons why the inclusion of automated spatial and temporal associations are crucial to effective systems modeling. An overview of other works which also model spatiotemporal dynamics is furnished. A detailed description is given of the processes necessary to implement the space-time network algorithm. Several demonstrations that illustrate the capabilities and performance of this new architecture are given

Elections and Political Risk: New Evidence from Political Prediction Markets in Taiwan

We examine the effects of party platforms on the economic opportunities of firms using a unique data set from a political prediction market in Taiwan, a country with two dominant parties whose political cleavage derives mainly from a single issue: the “One China Principle”. We find that during the 2008 Presidential campaign, the share price of Taiwanese firms with investments in the mainland responded strongly and positively to a positive electoral outlook for the KMT, the party which advocates lifting caps on cross-strait investment in mainland China. The response is strongest for those firms who have already hit their caps.Partisan Effects, Taiwan

Importance of van der Waals interactions for ab initio studies of topological insulators

We investigate the lattice and electronic structures of the bulk and surface of the prototypical layered topological insulators Bi$_2$Se$_3$ and Bi$_2$Te$_3$ using ab initio density functional methods, and systematically compare the results of different methods of including van der Waals (vdW) interactions. We show that the methods utilizing semi-empirical energy corrections yield accurate descriptions of these materials, with the most precise results obtained by properly accounting for the long-range tail of the vdW interactions. The bulk lattice constants, distances between quintuple layers and the Dirac velocity of the topological surface states (TSS) are all in excellent agreement with experiment. In Bi$_2$Te$_3$, hexagonal warping of the energy dispersion leads to complex spin textures of the TSS at moderate energies, while in Bi$_2$Se$_3$ these states remain almost perfectly helical away from the Dirac point, showing appreciable signs of hexagonal warping at much higher energies, above the minimum of the bulk conduction band. Our results establish a framework for unified and systematic self-consistent first principles calculations of topological insulators in bulk, slab and interface geometries, and provides the necessary first step towards ab initio modeling of topological heterostructures.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figures. This is the Accepted Manuscript version of an article accepted for publication in Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter. IOP Publishing Ltd is not responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or any version derived from it. The Version of Record is available online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1361-648X/abbdb