The political economy of fixed regional investment shares with an illustration for Belgian railway investments.

Many local public goods are allocated by federal governments using fixed regional shares: every region is entitled a fixed share of the total budget for a particular type of public good. This paper compares this fixed regional sharing rule with two alternative allocation rules: first best and common pool allocation. We find that the fixed regional sharing rule performs relatively well if the regional shares are reasonable. Legislative bargaining theory is used to study the determination of the fixed regional shares.

The political economy of fixed regional investment shares with an illustration for Belgian Railway investments

Many local public goods are allocated by federal governments using fixed regional shares: every region is entitled a fixed share of the total budget for a particular type of public good. This paper compares this fixed regional sharing rule with two alternative allocation rules: first best and common pool allocation. We find that the fixed regional sharing rule performs relatively well if the regional shares are reasonable. Legislative bargaining theory is used to study the determination of the fixed regional shares.local public goods, political economy, railways

Legislative lobbying under political uncertainty

In this paper we develop a duopolistic model of legislative lobbying. Two lobbies compete to influence the votes of a group of legislators who have a concern for both social welfare and campaign contributions. The type of a legislator is the relative weight he/she places on social welfare as compared to money. We study the equilibria of this lobbying game under political certainty and uncertainty and examine the circumstances under which the policy is socially efficient, and the amount of money that has been invested in the political process. Special attention is paid to three primitives of the environment: the intensity of the competition between the lobbies, the internal organisation of the legislature and the proportion of bad and good legislators in the political area

A Note on Lobbying a Legislature

We study a simple in?uence game, in which a lobby tries to manipulate the decision of a legislature via monetary offers to one or more members. We compute the minimum budget needed for the lobby to pass the bill and the distribution of this budget between the legislators. We also show the connection of the problem to the combinatorial optimization

Power Distribution in French River Basin Committees

I study the distribution of voting power between different decision-makers in French river basin committees over the period 1987-2007. To do so, in the first part of the paper, I apply different power measures traditionally used in the literature as well as some other ones lesser known in this context. I compare then the predictions of several indices for the relative power of different decision-makers in different voting situations. In the second part, I describe the methodology to design an optimal decision rule. A simple computational exercise based on this methodology suggests that the residential water users in Adour-Garonne river basin were under represented in the river basin committee during 1989-2006