Recent changes in state civil services may cause politicians to favor spending more at the state level and less through local governments

In the modern U.S., most state civil service bureaucracies are organized to be professional and independent of political influence. But have these civil service reforms, such as merit based apolitical recruitment, affected the behavior of elected politicians? In a study of states that have adopted these merit systems throughout the 20th century, Gergely Ujhelyi finds that these changes have led to the decentralization of state government spending towards local governments. He argues that as politicians lost their ability to influence policy implementation, they began to redistribute public funding towards friendly local governments. With the current trend towards a less politically insulated and more flexible civil service, state politicians may now have an incentive to centralize spending at the state level once again

A köztisztviselői törvények hatása a kormányzati kiadásokra

Fontos-e, hogy a bürokrácia független legyen a politikától? Milyen hatással járnak azok a törvények, amelyek a politikusok és a bürokrácia kapcsolatát szorosabbá teszik vagy lazítják? Ezek alapvető kérdések a modern államok szervezésével kapcsolatban, mégis viszonylag keveset tudunk róluk. Ebben a cikkben a témakör egy szeletével foglalkozom: a köztisztviselői törvények hatásaival. Összefoglalok néhány közelmúltbeli elméleti és empirikus eredményt, és rövid áttekintést nyújtok az idevágó közgazdasági és politikatudományi irodalomról.* Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) kód: D72, D73, E62, H11, H7

Regulating Misinformation

The government has responded to misleading advertising by banning it, engaging in counter-advertising and taxing the product. In this paper, we consider the social welfare effects of those different responses to misinformation. While misinformation lowers consumer surplus, its effect on social welfare is ambiguous. Misleading advertising leads to overconsumption but that may be offsetting the under-consumption associated with monopoly prices. If all advertising is misinformation then a tax or quantity restriction on advertising maximizes social welfare. Other policy interventions are inferior and cannot improve on a pure advertising tax. If it is impossible to tax misleading information without also taxing utility increasing advertising, then combining taxes or bans on advertising with other policies can increase welfare.

Primate social cognition: uniquely primate, uniquely social, or just unique?

Primates undoubtedly have impressive abilities in perceiving, recognising, understanding and interpreting other individuals, their ranks and relationships; they learn rapidly in social situations, employ both deceptive and cooperative tactics to manipulate companions, and distinguish others’ knowledge from ignorance. Some evidence suggests that great apes recognize the cognitive basis of manipulative tactics and have a deeper appreciation of intention and cooperation than monkeys; and only great apes among primates show any understanding of the concept of self. None of these abilities is unique to primates, however. We distinguish (1) a package of quantitative advantages in social sophistication, evident in several broad mammalian taxa, in which neocortical enlargement is associated with social group size; from (2) a qualitative difference in understanding found in several distantly related but large-brained species, including great apes, some corvids, and perhaps elephants, dolphins, and domestic dogs. Convergence of similar abilities in widely divergent taxa should enable their cognitive basis and evolutionary origins to be determined. Cortical enlargement seems to have been evolutionarily selected by social challenges, although it confers intellectual benefits in other domains also; most likely the mechanism is more efficient memory. The taxonomic distribution of qualitatively special social skills does not point to an evolutionary origin in social challenges, and may be more closely linked to a need to acquire novel ways of dealing with the physical world; but at present research on this question remains in its infancy. In the case of great apes, their ability to learn new manual routines by parsing action components may also account for their qualitatively different social skills, suggesting that any strict partition of physical and social cognition is likely to be misleading

The Causes and Consequences of CivilService Reform in U.S. States

Understanding the causes and consequences of civil service reform is relevant for the fields of economics, political science and public administration, however, there is little theoretically motivated, rigorous empirical research on the topic. This project will study civil service regulations both empirically and theoretically in order to reach conclusions relevant for several fields in social science and inform policy experiments currently under way in many U.S. states and countries around the world. It collects a unique new dataset on civil service regulations in U.S. states since the beginning of the merit reforms in the early 20th century up to the present. This dataset, to be made freely available for subsequent research, will help establish a knowledge-base on civil service reforms upon which economists, political scientists, and public personnel administration scholars can build

Campaign finance regulation with competing interest groups

Regulatory caps on contributions to political campaigns are the cornerstones of campaign finance legislation in many established democracies, and their introduction is considered by most emerging ones. Are these regulations desirable? This paper studies contribution caps in a menu auction lobbying model with limited budgets and costly entry. In the absence of entry, contribution caps improve welfare by "leveling the political playing field". With entry, however, a competition effect and a bargaining effect may arise, resulting in inefficient entry and exit decisions. In particular, a cap may lead to worse policies than the status quo; and even if better policies are chosen, the resulting gain in welfare may be more than offset by the entry costs. Regulation can also lead to the simultaneous entry of competing groups, creating costly rent-seeking on issues previously unaffected by lobbying.Campaign finance regulation Common agency Budget constraints Lobby formation

Choice and Happiness in South Africa

Abstract To study the usefulness of subjective well-being measures as a proxy for utility, Here respondents almost always choose what makes them feel happy. In addition, they perceive little con ‡ict between own happiness and other relevant determinants of choice such as sense of purpose and family happiness. We thank Dan Benjamin, Costas Meghir (the editor) and an anonymous referee for useful comments and suggestions