When is Growth Not Growth? The Curious Case of Mental Health Budgeting in New York

This article argues that the adverse impact of Medicaid on state budgets alleged in various public debates has been overstated, in some measure because of the inaccurate and misleading manner in which Medicaid expenditures are appropriated in state budgeting systems. Data on Medicaid and mental health spending in the state of New York is used for analysis. The first section provides a Medicaid spending and budgeting background. The second section discusses Medicaid and mental health in New York. The third section describes actual budgeted spending for mental health in New York, and the final section provides a discussion and concluding comments.     

If people vote because they like to, then why do so many of them lie?

Of those eligible, about 40% do not vote in presidential elections. When asked, about a quarter of those nonvoters will lie to the survey takers and claim that they did. Increases in education are associated with higher voting rates and lower rates of lying overall, but with increased rates of lying conditional on not voting. This paper proposes a model of voter turnout in which people who claim to vote get praise from other citizens. Those who lie must bear the cost of lying. The model has a stable equilibrium with positive rates of voting, honest non-voting, and lying. Reasonable parameter changes produce changes in these proportions in the same direction as the changes actually observed across education levels. I argue that a model where people vote because they want to be known as voters provides a better explanation for observed voting behavior than does a model where people vote because they want to vote.     

Efficient local charity with self-selection

How is charitable giving within a city influenced by the prospect of donor and recipient migration? The theoretical literature on charitable contributions in a closed economy has mainly argued that the market level of private giving will tend to be lower than optimal, wherever there exists a local fiscal externality between donors and recipients. Interjurisdictional models of voluntary redistribution, on the other hand, abstract from altruism to explore the interjurisdictional fiscal externality resulting from the failure of one community to account for the migration impacts of its actions on other communities. This paper integrates and extends both literatures by allowing for local altruism among the mobile residents of a system of local economies. Within a single community, mobility thus introduces adverse selection considerations for each donor via the migration of both recipients and other donors. Moreover, any change in the local transfer level influences both equilibrium wages and donor behavior system-wide. The analysis demonstrates that the market level of local charitable giving will be lower than is either ‘locally’ or ‘globally’ optimal in some cases and plausibly higher than optimal in others, depending on the effect of migration and expectations on wages. The self-selection nature of donor decision making does eliminate the usual interjurisdictional fiscal externality, though it leaves a role for government intervention via subsidies to altruistic behavior.     

Party attachments and political fragmentation in Europe

Abstract. Values and ideologies seem to be changing rapidly in many countries of Western Europe. These developments imply a shift among the adherents of political parties. On the one hand, we expect to see a process of deideologization weakening the traditional ties between parties and their adherents. On the other hand, increasing pluralization is suggested by the ongoing process of individualization. In this study we analyze the orientations of the adherents of the main political parties in 12 Western European countries in the last two decades. We expect to find clear traces of ongoing deideologization as well as pluralization, but this expectation proves to be inaccurate. Neither deideologization nor pluralization can be accepted as a common feature of party adherents in advanced industrial societies. On the contrary. Each of these processes seems to follow a different path of development in distinct countries and in distinct party families. A general 'decline-of-the-party' or an 'end-of-ideology' is not to be found among the adherents of the main parties in Western Europe in the last decades. The processes appear to be more complicated, with divergent developments in different countries.     

Market incentives to encourage household waste recycling: Paying for what you throw away

This article investigates the use of market incentives to encourage household waste recycling by pricing waste-disposal services according to the quantity of waste generated. We use a natural experiment from an upstate New York county to examine how quantity-based pricing of waste disposal affects reported household recycling behavior, when used by itself or in conjunction with curbside pickup of recyclables or mandatory recycling laws. Curbside pickup was found to have the greatest effect on reported recycling behavior, although higher waste-disposal prices might alter these conclusions. Other concerns about quantity-based pricing of solid waste—distributional effects, public acceptance, and adverse incentives—are also examined.     

Market-based incentives and residential municipal solid waste

Coalitions of free-marketeers, politicians, and environmentalists increasingly are turning to the use of market-based incentives in formulating environmental policy. One promising application of market-based incentives is in the management of residential municipal solid waste. This article focuses on unit-based pricing programs established in conjunction with community recycling programs. Using data gathered through telephone and mail surveys of 21 cities, we demonstrate the strong potential for unit pricing to improve the efficiency of residential solid waste management.     

Explaining differences in productive efficiency: An application to Belgian municipalities

The purpose of this paper is to measure and explain variations in productive efficiency of municipal governments in Belgium. Technical efficiency is evaluated using a non-parametric method based on the Free Disposal Hull (FDH) reference technology. We first calculate input, output, and graph Farrell efficiency measures for a cross-section of all 589 Belgian municipalities. In a second stage of the analysis we explain the calculated differences in efficiency in terms of variables related to the structural characteristics of municipalities and to the institutional environment.