International organized crime

He has served as a consultant to the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the National Security Council, and related agencies of the U.S. government. He has written, coauthored, or edited over sixteen books on intelligence and national security.     

The politics and economics of pork barrel spending: The case of federal financing of water resources development

This paper empirically investigates the economic and political factors that have influenced annual Corps of Engineers water resource spending. Despite the common view that “pork barrel” spending is economically unjustified and purely politically motivated, economic factors have been important in determining water resource spending. From 1865–1920, economic development and industrialization increase spending, and from 1921–1988, spending appears to be counter-cyclical. There is also evidence that majority parties control spending levels in the post-Civil war period, while in recent times, legislators act under a norm of “constrained universalism” and are influenced by the costs to their constituents of increased spending.     

PREDICTING STATE ABORTION LEGISLATION FROM U.S. SENATE VOTES: THE EFFECTS OF APPARENT IDEOLOGICAL SHIRKING

The recent Supreme Court decision in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services giving more discretion to states to regulate abortion has led to speculation concerning which states might move to limit abortions. Medoff (1989) attempts to predict how state legislatures might vote on state-level abortion legislation by examining the 1983 Senate vote on the Hatch/Eagleton Amendment. We expand upon Medoff's analysis by incor- porating recent developments in agency theory as it applies to the political agents (i.e., Senators) in the empirical model. The results demonstrate that accounting for Senatorial "shirking" and state ideology substantially im- proves the predictive ability of the model for the Senate abortion vote. The predicted votes of the state's Senators, after eliminating the effects of apparent Senatorial shirking, are used to infer the likelihood of state-level legislation substantially restricting abortion. We compare these results to a base model that ignores the issue of shirking and find increased predict- ability and several differing results.     

On the Design of Equalizing Grants

This article considers the design of grants to offset fiscaldisparities. We define a fiscal disparity as a condition inwhich towns must levy a different tax rate in order to providethe same level of public services. We consider ways of measuringdisparities, as well as ways of allocating grants to alleviatedisparities. In order to focus the presentation, we concentrateon lump-sum grants for unrestricted use from a state governmentto general purpose local governments within that state. We concludeby presenting an example of a grants formula for the state ofNew Jersey which meets our specifications.     

Chicago political economy: A public choice perspective

George J. Stigler (Ed.), Chicago studies in political economy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Pages xviii + 641.     

Disposable income,unemployment, inflation and state spending in a dynamic political-economic model

This paper formulates a medium-term macroeconomic model of disposable income, unemployment, inflation and state spending, proposes a theory of qualitative choice to explain electoral popularity in terms of these variables and develops three approaches to the formulation of political-economic policy. The first approach is static, sets the tax rate to reconcile the interests of various pressure groups and yields a political trade-off between the private and public sector. The second approach relies on maximizing the probability of winning the next election and gives rise to a political business cycle unless the electorate votes strategically. The implications of crowding out of private investment under alternative monetary rules, autonomous behaviour of the state bureaucracy and tax-indexation for the political business cycle are also examined. The third approach analyzes the objective of maximizing the uninterrupted length in office. It yields a short-run political cycle superimposed on a longer cycle.