Federal Budget Concepts—Bright Lines or Black Holes?

This article reviews a range of issues that are central to the organizing principles of the federal budget—the guidelines that determine whether a transaction belongs in or outside of the budget; and, if it belongs in the budget, how it should be recorded. The article starts by discussing the nature of the federal budget, the powers and responsibilities of the federal government, and related issues, and then discusses four broad sets of budget concepts issues: (I) Budgeting for Earmarked Taxes and Spending; (II) Budgeting for Capital Investment; (III) Classification Categories Within the Budget; and (IV) Evasions of Budgetary Coverage.     

Budget Redirection in Georgia State Government

Budget redirection in Georgia state government represents a change from the expectation of continuous budget growth to an expectation that budget expansion will be accompanied by compensating budget reductions through an ongoing process of priority assessment. Its essential features are: the requirement that state agencies identify a minimum of 5 percent of their current year's budget which becomes the primary means for funding new programs and services in the coming fiscal year; and a limit, based upon revenue projections, on the amount an agency may request above the current year's budget. Like budget reforms in any era, it emanated from a combination of fiscal, managerial, and political objectives.     

Some talk: Money in politics. A (partial) review of the literature

The financing of political campaigns is an area of active scholarly study. I review some of the recent literature and discuss important methodological issues that arise in empirical research on campaign expenditures and campaign contributions. The effects of campaign expenditures and advertising on candidate and ballot-measure elections are summarized, as are the impacts of contributions on contributors’ welfare. Many states have changed their campaign finance laws in the past few years, and I describe work that exploits variations in these laws. A discussion of the strategies used by interest groups to allocate their campaign contributions provides insights into contributors’ motives.     

Zur statistischen Analyse von Vollerhebungen

When analyzing superpopulation data, inferential statistical methods should be used. Empirical tests of hypotheses are subject to a variety of stochastic processes, or “errors”, even if the data involved in those tests are not the product of random sampling. Assumptions about the nature of these processes have to be an explicit part of the analysis and need to be justified. Using several examples of published research, we make transparent that all substantive conclusions are conditional on the assumptions about the nature of the stochastic processes that are at work in generating superpopulation data.     

Political Trust, Ideology, and Public Support for Government Spending

This article analyzes the relationship between political trust, ideology, and public support for government spending. We argue that the political trust heuristic is activated when individuals are asked to sacrifice ideological as well as material interests. Aggregate- and individual-level analysis shows that the effects of political trust on support for government spending are moderated by ideology. Consistent with the unbalanced ideological costs imposed by requests for increased government spending, we find that the effects of political trust are significantly more pronounced among conservatives than among liberals. The analysis further demonstrates that ideology conditions the effects of political trust on attitudes toward both distributive and redistributive spending. Our findings suggest that political trust has policy consequences across a much broader range of policy issues than previously thought.     

Risk management for targeting customs controls in developing countries: a risky venture for revenue performance?

Customs authorities in developing countries are often reluctant to forget systematic inspections for fear of risking revenue loss. Such physical inspections however, impede rather than facilitate trade. Control selectivity is therefore a key issue in customs administration reform. This paper shows how a sophisticated risk management method can facilitate trade by automatically and rationally selecting transactions, with the end result of actually enhancing revenue performance. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Money,Mortgages, and the Conquest of America

In colonial America, land acquired new liquidity when it became liable for debts. Though English property law maintained a firm distinction between land and chattel for centuries, in the American colonies, the boundary between the categories of real and personal property began to disintegrate. There, the novelty of easy foreclosure and consequent easy alienation of land made it possible for colonists to obtain credit, using land as a security. However, scholars have neglected the first instances in which a newly unconstrained practice of mortgage foreclosure appeared—the transactions through which colonists acquired land from indigenous people in the first place. In this article, I explore these early transactions for land, which took place across fundamental differences between colonists’ and native communities’ conceptions of money, land, and exchange itself. I describe how difference and dependence propelled the growth of the early American contact economy to make land into real estate, or the fungible commodity on the speculative market that it remains today.