NY, Univ., Dep. of Economics, Diss.--Rochester, 2004. / Kopie, ersch. im Verl. UMI, Ann Arbor, Mich. - Enth. 3 Beitr.

Σκοπός της παρούσας διπλωματικής είναι να εξετάσει την επίδραση στην μακροοικονομική απόδοση της ανεξαρτησίας της Κεντρικής Τράπεζας. Αποτελεί ενδιαφέρον θέμα τόσο για τις νεοεισερχόμενες χώρες της Ευρωπαικής Ένωσης αλλά και για τις χώρες που εμφανίζουν ιδιαίτερα υψηλό πληθωρισμό. / The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the central bank independence on the macroeconomic performance.It is considered to be a very interesting topic not only for the 'newcomers'countries to the European Union but also for the countries with high inflation.

Scholars have proposed the idea that trust influences individuals’ choice to vote or abstain. However, there is uncertainty about the composition of trust and its effect on voter turnout. The aim of this study is to explore the relationship between interpersonal and institutional trust and voter turnout in South Africa. Examining presently unused data for South Africa from the World Values Survey 2006 through exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, the argument is advanced that trust is a multidimensional concept that may be modelled by multivariate measurements. A logistic factor score regression model shows that a one-unit increase of trust in public institutions on average increases the odds of voting by 9 % whereas trust in private institutions and interpersonal trust have no significant effects. The results imply that trust- strengthening actions may be of interest to South African public institutions to increase electoral participation and legitimise election outcomes.

The work focuses on the voting behavior of citizens Czech Canada. The work compares the different types of elections to identify factors that voting behavior of citizens the most affected.

Submitted by Rafael Terra (rflterra@yahoo.com.br) on 2012-05-07T03:21:38Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertation Final Rafael Terra de Menezes May 2012.pdf: 9750545 bytes, checksum: aa5ad52c395ae0a69a42c64b246ce7bf (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Gisele Isaura Hannickel (gisele.hannickel@fgv.br) on 2012-05-07T13:37:27Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertation Final Rafael Terra de Menezes May 2012.pdf: 9750545 bytes, checksum: aa5ad52c395ae0a69a42c64b246ce7bf (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2012-05-07T14:06:46Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertation Final Rafael Terra de Menezes May 2012.pdf: 9750545 bytes, checksum: aa5ad52c395ae0a69a42c64b246ce7bf (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-05-03 / Local provision of public services has the positive effect of increasing the efficiency because each locality has its idiosyncrasies that determine a particular demand for public services. This dissertation addresses different aspects of the local demand for public goods and services and their relationship with political incentives. The text is divided in three essays. The first essay aims to test the existence of yardstick competition in education spending using panel data from Brazilian municipalities. The essay estimates two-regime spatial Durbin models with time and spatial fixed effects using maximum likelihood, where the regimes represent different electoral and educational accountability institutional settings. First, it is investigated whether the lame duck incumbents tend to engage in less strategic interaction as a result of the impossibility of reelection, which lowers the incentives for them to signal their type (good or bad) to the voters by mimicking their neighbors’ expenditures. Additionally, it is evaluated whether the lack of electorate support faced by the minority governments causes the incumbents to mimic the neighbors’ spending to a greater extent to increase their odds of reelection. Next, the essay estimates the effects of the institutional change introduced by the disclosure on April 2007 of the Basic Education Development Index (known as IDEB) and its goals on the strategic interaction at the municipality level. This institutional change potentially increased the incentives for incumbents to follow the national best practices in an attempt to signal their type to voters, thus reducing the importance of local information spillover. The same model is also tested using school inputs that are believed to improve students’ performance in place of education spending. The results show evidence for yardstick competition in education spending. Spatial auto-correlation is lower among the lame ducks and higher among the incumbents with minority support (a smaller vote margin). In addition, the institutional change introduced by the IDEB reduced the spatial interaction in education spending and input-setting, thus diminishing the importance of local information spillover. The second essay investigates the role played by the geographic distance between the poor and non-poor in the local demand for income redistribution. In particular, the study provides an empirical test of the geographically limited altruism model proposed in Pauly (1973), incorporating the possibility of participation costs associated with the provision of transfers (Van de Wale, 1998). First, the discussion is motivated by allowing for an “iceberg cost” of participation in the programs for the poor individuals in Pauly’s original model. Next, using data from the 2000 Brazilian Census and a panel of municipalities based on the viii National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) from 2001 to 2007, all the distance-related explanatory variables indicate that an increased proximity between poor and non-poor is associated with better targeting of the programs (demand for redistribution). For instance, a 1- hour increase in the time spent commuting by the poor reduces the targeting by 3.158 percentage points. This result is similar to that of Ashworth, Heyndels and Smolders (2002) but is definitely not due to the program leakages. To empirically disentangle participation costs and spatially restricted altruism effects, an additional test is conducted using unique panel data based on the 2004 and 2006 PNAD, which assess the number of benefits and the average benefit value received by beneficiaries. The estimates suggest that both cost and altruism play important roles in targeting determination in Brazil, and thus, in the determination of the demand for redistribution. Lastly, the results indicate that ‘size matters’; i.e., the budget for redistribution has a positive impact on targeting. The third essay aims to empirically test the validity of the median voter model for the Brazilian case. Information on municipalities are obtained from the Population Census and the Brazilian Supreme Electoral Court for the year 2000. First, the median voter demand for local public services is estimated. The bundles of services offered by reelection candidates are identified as the expenditures realized during incumbents’ first term in office. The assumption of perfect information of candidates concerning the median demand is relaxed and a weaker hypothesis, of rational expectation, is imposed. Thus, incumbents make mistakes about the median demand that are referred to as misperception errors. Thus, at a given point in time, incumbents can provide a bundle (given by the amount of expenditures per capita) that differs from median voter’s demand for public services by a multiplicative error term, which is included in the residuals of the demand equation. Next, it is estimated the impact of the module of this misperception error on the electoral performance of incumbents using a selection models. The result suggests that the median voter model is valid for the case of Brazilian municipalities. / A provisão local de serviços públicos tem o efeito positivo de aumentar a eficiência, pois cada localidade tem as suas idiossincrasias que determinam uma demanda distinta por serviços públicos. Esta dissertação aborda diferentes aspectos da demanda local por bens e serviços públicos e sua relação com incentivos políticos O texto está dividido em três ensaios. O primeiro ensaio visa testar a existência de yardstick competition nos gastos em educação utilizando um painel de municípios brasileiros. O ensaio estima modelos espaciais de Durbin com dois regimes e efeitos fixos espaciais e temporais por meio de máxima verossimilhança, onde os regimes representam diferentes cenários institucionais de accountability eleitoral e educacional. Primeiro, é investigado se os prefeitos de segundo mandato tendem a interagir menos com os vizinhos como resultado da impossibilidade de reeleição, que reduz os incentivos para sinalizarem seus tipos (bons ou ruins) para os eleitores por meio da reprodução dos gastos de seus vizinhos. Além disso, é avaliado se prefeitos sem apoio político da maioria da câmara dos vereadores (que pode indicar uma falta de apoio dos eleitores) buscam reproduzir os gastos dos vizinhos em maior medida, a fim de aumentarem suas chances de reeleição. Em seguida, o ensaio calcula os efeitos da mudança institucional introduzida pela divulgação do Índice de Desenvolvimento da Educação Básica (IDEB) e de suas metas em abril de 2007 sobre a interação estratégica entre governos locais. Esta mudança institucional possivelmente aumentou os incentivos para os prefeitos seguirem as melhores práticas nacionais, na tentativa de sinalizarem aos eleitores que são competentes, reduzindo assim a importância de transbordamentos de informação local. O mesmo modelo é também testado usando insumos escolares que se acreditam aumentarem o desempenho dos alunos no lugar de gastos com educação. Os resultados mostram evidências de yardstick competition nos gastos em educação. A autocorrelação espacial é menor entre os prefeitos em segundo mandato e maior entre os prefeitos com o apoio da minoria (i.e., com uma margem menor de votos). Além disso, a mudança institucional introduzida pelo IDEB reduziu a interação espacial nos gastos educação e na definição dos insumos escolares, diminuindo assim a importância de transbordamentos de informação local. O segundo ensaio investiga o papel desempenhado pela distância geográfica entre os pobres e não pobres na determinação da demanda local por redistribuição de renda. Em particular, o estudo fornece um teste empírico do modelo de altruísmo delimitado geograficamente proposto em Pauly (1973), incorporando ainda a possibilidade de custos de x participação associados à provisão de transferências (Van de Wale, 1998). Primeiramente, a discussão é motivada permitindo que o modelo original Pauly incorpore um "custo iceberg" de participação nos programas para as pessoas pobres. Foram utilizados dados seccionais do Censo Demográfico de 2000 e um painel de municípios com base na Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios (PNAD) de 2001 a 2007. Todas as variáveis explicativas que constituem medidas de distância indicam que uma maior proximidade entre pobres e não pobres está associada a uma melhor cobertura dos programas (demanda por redistribuição). Por exemplo, um aumento de 1 hora no tempo gasto em deslocamento casa-trabalho pelos pobres reduz a cobertura em 3,158 pontos percentuais. Este resultado é semelhante ao de Ashworth, Heyndels e Smolders (2002), mas definitivamente não se deve à existência de vazamentos nos programas. Para diferenciar empiricamente os efeitos resultantes de custos de participação daqueles devido ao altruísmo geograficamente delimitado, um teste adicional é realizado com dados em painel obtidos junto as PNAD de 2004 e de 2006, que avaliam o número de benefícios e o valor do benefício médio recebido pelos beneficiários. As estimativas sugerem que tanto o custo quanto o altruísmo desempenham papéis importantes na determinação da cobertura/focalização de programas sociais no Brasil e, portanto, na determinação da demanda por transferências. Os resultados indicam também que o tamanho do orçamento para a redistribuição tem um impacto positivo na cobertura dos programas. O terceiro ensaio tem como objetivo testar empiricamente a validade do modelo do eleitor mediano para o caso brasileiro. As informações municipais são provenientes do Censo Demográfico e do Tribunal Supremo Eleitoral para o ano de 2000. Primeiramente, a demanda do eleitor mediano para os serviços públicos locais é estimada. As cestas ofertadas pelos candidatos à reeleição são identificadas como os gastos realizados durante o primeiro mandato. A suposição de informação perfeita dos candidatos sobre a demanda mediana é relaxada e uma hipótese mais fraca, de expectativas racionais, é imposta. Assim, os representantes podem se enganar quanto à demanda mediana ao que se denominou “erros de percepção”. Assim, em um determinado ponto no tempo, os representantes podem fornecer uma cesta (dada pelas despesas per capita), que difere por um termo de erro multiplicativo da demanda do eleitor mediano por serviços públicos, o qual está incluído nos resíduos da equação de demanda. Em seguida, calcula-se o impacto do módulo deste “erro de percepção” sobre o desempenho eleitoral dos prefeitos utilizando modelos de seleção. O resultado sugere que o modelo do eleitor mediano é válido para o caso dos municípios brasileiros.

A favorable condition for good governance is that elected presidents obtain the support of both the median voter and the median legislator. Several electoral rules are evaluated for their results in 111 presidential and 137 congressional elections in 18 Latin American countries during the current democratic periods. The frequency of median voter’s or Condorcet-winner presidents appears to be higher under rules with a second-round runoff than under simple plurality rule. The victory of Condorcet-loser or the most rejected candidate is discarded under majority runoff rule. More than half of democratic presidents have not belonged to the median voter’s party in the presidential or the congressional elections. Many of them have faced wide popular and political opposition and entered into inter-institutional conflict. / Una condición favorable para la gobernabilidad es que el presidente electo obtenga el apoyo tanto del elector mediano como del legislador mediano. Por ello, se evalúan las reglas y resul- tados electorales en 111 elecciones presidenciales y 137 elecciones parlamentarias en 18 países en América Latina durante el actual periodo democrático. La frecuencia de presidentes elegidos por los electores medianos o ganadores parece ser más alta cuando las reglas implican una segunda vuelta electoral. La victoria del perdedor de Condorcet, o el candidato con más anticuerpos en los votantes, queda descartada bajo el sistema de mayoría simple electoral. Más de la mitad de los presidentes electos no pertenecieron al partido del votante mediano en las elecciones presidenciales o congresales. Muchos de esos gobernantes se han enfrentado a una amplia oposiciónpolítica y popular y han ingresado a un conflicto interinstitucional.

Syftet med studien är att analysera förändringen i de svenska partiernas politiska program genom att tillämpa Public Choice skolans modeller. Med hjälp av medianväljarteoremet och Hotellingmodellen analyseras om modellerna är tillräckligt beskrivande för Sveriges partiförflyttningar. Vidare beräknas Herfindahl-Hirschman index för graden av maktkoncentration på den politiska ”marknaden”. Herfindahl-Hirschman indexet visar att koncentrationen på den politiska marknad blivit lägre över tid, viket indikerar på att konkurrensen mellan partierna blivit allt högre under perioden 1973-2014. För att analysera om det går att förklara förändringar i partiernas politik under perioden 1973-2014 tillämpas medianväljarteoremet. En diskussion kring testning av modellen görs samt en illustration hur medianväljarteoremet skulle kunna se ut för Sveriges partier. För att analysera om en endimensionell skala är beskrivande för de svenska partiernas förflyttningar har Hotellingmodellen tillämpats. Genom att illustrera dessa två modeller på Sveriges partier undersöks om modellerna ger en tillfredställande beskrivningar av förändringen i de svenska partiernas politiska program. Analysen ger vid handen att att Medianväljarmodellen inte förklarar förändringarna i partiernas politik på ett tillräckligt utförligt sätt. Hotellingmodellen kan bättre förklar både de svenska partiernas förflyttningar på vänster-högerskalan samt förändringar i partiernas politik. Utöver de nämnda modellerna konstateras att den enskilda faktor som är mest betydelsefull för hur partierna ändrat sina politiska program är partiernas beroende av väljarnas åsikter. / The aim of the study is to analyze changes in the Swedish political parties programs by applying the Public Choice approach. With help from the median voter theorem and the Harold Hotelling model, the paper analyzes if these models are sufficiently descriptive of Swedens political parties movements. A Herfindahl-Hirschman index is constructed which shows changes in concentration of political power over time. The Herfindahl-Hirschman index shows that the degree of concentration in the Swedish political “market” has become lower over time, which indicates that the party competition has increased during the period 1973-2014. In order to analyze whether it is possible to explain changes in the parties’ policies during the period 1973-2014 the median voter theorem is applied. A discussion about how this model can be tested is done as well as an illustration of how the median voter theorem could look like for the parties in Sweden. To analyze whether a one-dimensional scale is descriptive of the movements of the Swedish parties, the Harold Hotelling model is also applied. By illustrating these two models on Swedens parties, the paper investigates whether these models provide a satisfactory descriptions of the change in the Swedish parties political programs. The analysis concludes that the median voter theorem does not explain the changes in the parties politics in a sufficiently detailed manner. It is revealed that the Harold Hotelling model provides a better description for both the Swedish parties movements at the left-right scale and for the changes in the parties politics. In addition to the models mentioned the factor that that is most important for how the parties changed their political programs is the parties’ dependence of the voters opinions.

Participation in the European Parliament Election has steadily declined since the start in 1979. In 2004 less than half (47.8%) of the voting-age population of the European Union used their right to vote. This has actualized questions asking if the European Parliament is a good representation of the European citizens. The paradigm when it comes to explaining the electoral turnout in the European Parliament Election is the second-order theory. Though the theory explains the low voter participation, it does not explain why the European Parliament Election has become a second-order election. Thus, in this thesis will search for the underlying variable explaining why the European Parliament Election is a second-order election. Through our research we find that distances are important in the European Union, and they create centres and peripheries within the European Union. By looking at Rokkan and Urwin‟s horizontal and vertical types of peripheries, where the vertical type consists of Rokkan and Urwin‟s three domain of social life, our research concludes that centre-periphery structures within the European Union are the underlying variable, explaining why the European Parliament Election is a second-order election.

Collective decision making can be seen as a means of designing and understanding swarm robotics systems. While decision-making is generally conceived as the cognitive ability of individual agents to select a belief based only on their preferences and available information, collective decision making is a decentralized cognitive process, whereby an ensemble of agents gathers, shares, and processes information as a single organism and makes a choice that is not attributable to any of its individuals. A principled selection of the rules governing this cognitive process allows the designer to define, shape, and foresee the dynamics of the swarm.We begin this monograph by introducing the reader to the topic of collective decision making. We focus on artificial systems for discrete consensus achievement and review the literature of swarm robotics. In this endeavor, we formalize the best-of-n problem—a generalization of the logic underlying several cognitive problems—and define a taxonomy of its possible variants that are of interest for the design of robot swarms. By leveraging on this understanding, we identify the building-blocks that are essential to achieve a collective decision addressing the best-of-n problem: option exploration, opinion dissemination, modulation of positive feedback, and individual decision-making mechanism. We show how a modular perspective of a collective decision-making strategy allows for the systematic modeling of the resulting swarm performance. In doing so, we put forward a modular and model-driven design methodology that allows the designer to study the dynamics of a swarm at different level of abstractions. Successively, we employ the proposed design methodology to derive and to study different collective decision-making strategies for the best-of-n problem. We show how the designed strategies can be readily applied to different real-world scenarios by performing two series of robot experiments. In the first series, we use a swarm of 100 robots to tackle a site-selection scenario; in the second series, we show instead how the same strategies apply to a collective perception scenario. We conclude with a discussion of our research contributions and provide futuredirection of research. / Doctorat en Sciences de l'ingénieur et technologie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

States merge local governments to achieve economies of scale. Little is known to which extent mergers of county-sized local governments reduce expenditures, and influence political outcomes. I use the synthetic control method to identify the effect of mergers of large local governments in Germany (districts) on public expenditures. In 2008, the German state of Saxony reduced the number of districts from 22 to 10. Average district population increased substantially from 113,000 to 290,000 inhabitants. I construct a synthetic counterfactual from states that did not merge districts for years. The results do neither show reductions in total expenditures, nor in expenditures for administration, education, and social care. There seems to be no scale effects in jurisdictions of more than 100,000 inhabitants. By contrast, I find evidence that mergers decreased the number of candidates and voter turnout in district elections while vote shares for populist right-wing parties increased.