Is Japan Special? Monetary Linkages and Price Stability

Empirical studies of central bank independence and inflation identify Japan as an outlier. By standard measures, the Bank of Japan is one of the least independent central banks in the world, and yet Japan enjoys some of the lowest inflation rates. This paper develops a model of monetary link; ages with implications for the institutional course stability. The model explains why price stability in the "old" Japan-- with its powerful bureaucracy and single-party rule--did not necessarily rely on monetary institutions. It predicts that the "new" Japan, in which power is shifting from the bureaucracy to elected politicians who compete with each other in the political marketplace, must make use of monetary institutions to achieve price stability.

Electoral Incentives, Informational Asymmetries, and the Policy Bias Toward Special Interests

Political decisions are often biased in favor of special interests at the expense of the general public, and they are frequently inefficient in the sense that the losses incurred by the majority exceed the gains enjoyed by the minority. This paper provides an explanation based on informational asymmetries and the free rider problem: (i) incumbents increase their chances of re-election by biasing policy toward groups that are better able to monitor their activities; and (ii) smaller groups are better able to overcome the free rider problem of costly monitoring so that policy will be biased in their favor. A welfare analysis examines the effect of asymmetric monitoring on voter welfare. The inefficiencies created by the policy bias are offset by a positively-valued selection bias: incumbents of above-average quality are more likely to survive voter scrutiny than are low-quality types

Delegation and the Regulation of Risk

Political principals typically use low-cost "fire-alarm" signals transmitted by the media, interest groups, and disaffected constituents to monitor the activities of regulatory agencies. We argue that regulatory decision-making is biased and inconsistent if the instruments of political oversight are simple and the information flows to the principal are coarse relative to the complexity of the regulatory environment

Delegation and the Regulation of Risk

Political principals typically use low-cost “fire-alarm” signals transmitted by the media, interest groups, and disaffected constituents to monitor the activities of regulatory agencies. We argue that regulatory decision making is biased and inconsistent if the instruments of political oversight are simple and the information flows to the principal are coarse relative to the complexity of the regulatory environment

Vorstellungen über soziale Ungleichheit. Interviews mit zwei Erwerbslosen

Zahlreiche wirtschaftswissenschaftliche, aber auch sozial- und kulturwissenschaftliche Studien dokumentieren eine stetige Zunahme ökonomischer und sozialer Ungleichheit in der Gesellschaft. Ausgehend von dieser Entwicklung gehe ich der Frage nach, welche subjektiven Erklärungsansätze für eine zunehmende Spaltung der Gesellschaft herangezogen werden. Dabei spielen besonders die persönliche Einschätzung der eigenen sozialen Lage (Selbstbild) sowie der Lage anderer (Fremdbilder) und die relationale Positionierung innerhalb der Gesellschaft eine zentrale Rolle

Vorstellungen über soziale Ungleichheit. Interviews mit zwei Erwerbslosen

Zahlreiche wirtschaftswissenschaftliche, aber auch sozial- und kulturwissenschaftliche Studien dokumentieren eine stetige Zunahme ökonomischer und sozialer Ungleichheit in der Gesellschaft. Ausgehend von dieser Entwicklung gehe ich der Frage nach, welche subjektiven Erklärungsansätze für eine zunehmende Spaltung der Gesellschaft herangezogen werden. Dabei spielen besonders die persönliche Einschätzung der eigenen sozialen Lage (Selbstbild) sowie der Lage anderer (Fremdbilder) und die relationale Positionierung innerhalb der Gesellschaft eine zentrale Rolle

Linkage Politics

I extend the basic repeated Prisoners' Dilemma to allow for the linkage of punishment strategies across issues (issue linkage) as well as decentralized third-party enforcement (player linkage). I then synthesize the concepts of issue and player linkage to develop the notion of domestic-international linkage, which allows for the linkage of trigger strategy punishments across games played over different issues by different sets of players. In a two-level game, domestic and international cooperation may be reinforced by a punishment linkage: a defection in the domestic game may trigger a breakdown of international cooperation, and vice versa. I also examine the conditions under which the incentives to cooperate are stronger at the domestic level than at the international level, and vice versa. In this case domestic-international linkage allows for the credibility surplus to spill over to the level with the credibility deficit. Finally, I provide conditions under which governments are better off delinking domestic and international issues