Public choice and tort reform

The common law originally was thought to be immune to rent seeking. More recently, scholars have recognized that attorneys are engaged in exactly that activity. Rent seeking by the legal profession has greatly expanded the scope of US tort law, and generated efforts to reverse its expansion. Organized groups (attorneys, businesses and doctors) are active on both sides of the issue and the partisans have numerous tools available for advancing their agendas, such as litigating, lobbying for favorable rules and attempting to elect sympathetic legislators and judges. All of this creates an ideal setting for public choice analysis.     

Participation in a national,means‐tested school voucher program

We use data from a sample of applicants to a national means‐tested school voucher program and a national sample of the population eligible for the program to evaluate the factors leading families to use school vouchers. Our analysis divides the process of voucher usage into two distinct stages: initial application and subsequent take‐up. Using a nested logit model, we find that some factors, like religious affiliation and religious service attendance, affect both stages. Others, like mother's education, affect only one (application). Still others, like ethnicity, have opposite effects at the two stages. Compared to Whites, minorities are more likely to apply for vouchers, but less likely to take them when given the opportunity. © 2005 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Territory, Contiguity, and International Conflict: Assessing a New Joint Explanation

Beginning with two prominent explanations of international conflict—one based on contiguity and the other on territory—I develop a new joint account that provides two important advancements over the prior explanations. I then test the expectations of this joint account on dispute and war onset for all dyad years from 1919 to 1995. I find strong support for its predictions at the dispute stage and partial support at the war stage, including marked evidence of contingency between contiguity and territory. The results also show territory to be a more consistent engine of conflict than contiguity, especially at the war onset stage. Further, the findings provide insights into the effects of contiguity among nonterritorial disagreements, as well as the effects of territorial strife among noncontiguous pairs. Thus, this investigation clarifies the relative importance of both territory and contiguity within any geography-based explanation of conflict behavior, and therefore has broadly interesting implications.     

Party Identification and Core Political Values

Party identification and core political values are central elements in the political belief systems of ordinary citizens. Are these predispositions related to one another? Does party identification influence core political values or are partisan identities grounded in such values? This article draws upon theoretical works on partisan information processing and value‐based reasoning to derive competing hypotheses about whether partisanship shapes political values or political values shape partisanship. The hypotheses are tested by using structural equation modeling techniques to estimate dynamic models of attitude stability and constraint with data from the 1992–94–96 National Election Study panel survey. The analyses reveal that partisan identities are more stable than the principles of equal opportunity, limited government, traditional family values, and moral tolerance; party identification constrains equal opportunity, limited government, and moral tolerance; and these political values do not constrain party identification.     

社会性别特征与领导风格性别差异实证研究

本文采用实证的方法探讨了男女两性管理者在个性特征、领导风格方面是否存在差异以及它们之间的相关关系。研究结果表明:在男性化特征上,男性表现的更为明显,但在女性化特征上,男女管理者并不存在显著的差异;在领导风格方面,男性更注重以任务为导向,但在以关心为导向方面,两性管理者不存在显著差异;男性化特征与以任务为导向的领导风格存在正相关关系,而女性化特征与以关心为导向的领导风格存在正相关关系。本文的研究可以为组织挑选合适的管理者提供一定参考。     

The issue of instability in a simple policy game between the central bank and a representative union

In the recent economic literature the independence of the central bank is often considered to be one of the most effective guarantees to achieve price stability. A strong theoretical basis for this proposition is that the monetary policy delegation given to an independent central bank is an optimal instrument to avoid the time inconsistency problem of monetary policy. This paper investigates the stability properties of this solution in a simple game in which the private sector (i.e. the trade unions) and the public sector (i.e. the central bank) simultaneously interact. A representative monopoly union is considered, and – in line with the recent economic debate – two types of unions are investigated: (i) the standard micro-founded trade union; (ii) the inflation-averse trade union. In both cases, we find that the requirement for the Nash equilibrium to be stable imposes a limit to the conservativeness of the central bank. Instability of the Nash equilibrium reveals a strategic co-ordination failure between the public and the private sector.