Vote-Buying and Reciprocity

While vote-buying is common, little is known about how politicians determine who to target. We argue that vote-buying can be sustained by an internalized norm of reciprocity. Receiving money engenders feelings of obligation. Combining survey data on vote-buying with an experiment-based measure of reciprocity, we show that politicians target reciprocal individuals. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of social preferences in determining political behavior.vote-buying, reciprocity, redistributive politics, voting, social preferences

Local Electoral Incentives and Decentralized Program Performance

This paper analyzes how electoral incentives affected the performance of a major decentralized conditional cash transfer program intended on reducing school dropout rates among children of poor households in Brazil. We show that while this federal program successfully reduced school dropout by 8 percentage points, the program's impact was 36 percent larger in municipalities governed by mayors who faced reelection possibilities compared to those with lame-duck mayors. First term mayors with good program performance were much more likely to get re-elected. These mayors adopted program implementation practices that were not only more transparent but also associated with better program outcomes.decentralization, electoral incentives, conditional cash transfer, impact evaluation

Optimal Control of Large, Forward-Looking Models: Efficient Solutions and Vol

An optimal control tool is described that is particularly useful for computing rules of large-scale models where users might otherwise have difficulty determining the state vector a priori and where the inversion of large, sparse matrices can make working with matrix Ricatti equations numerically costly or infeasible. A small-scale demonstration is presented, as are data on performance with the Board of Governors ’ large-scale rational expectations macroeconometric model, FRB/US

Optimal control of large, forward-looking models efficient solutions and two examples

An optimal control tool is described that is particularly useful for computing rules of large-scale models where users might otherwise have difficulty determining the state vector a priori and where the inversion of large, sparse matrices is involved. A small-scale demonstration is presented, as are data on performance with the Board of Governors large-scale rational expectations macroeconometric model, FRB/US.Econometric models ; Macroeconomics