Turnover,Trust, and Transfers: An Examination of Local Government Budget Execution

Abstract

Studies of budget execution focus either on the procedural aspects of internal controls and adjustments or the necessity of the changes made in the original budget. Adjustments made on an ongoing basis without undermining the integrity of the budget has been generally seen as a necessary means of creating flexibility while maintaining appropriate controls. In this context, our article addresses one aspect of the local government budget—whether turnover in key leadership and professional position affects the amount of transfer and reprogramming made during the execution process. Based on surveys of municipal budget offices in the Greater Cincinnati area, we report that turnover in some leadership positions does affect budget transfers. This finding also supports the proposition that the stability of key budget roles is an important factor in the budget execution process.     

Outside and inside competition for international organizations—from analysis to innovations

The analysis of the competitive environment of international organizations has been neglected in scholarly research. Both the external and the internal type of competition in international organizations are rather weak and their performance is far from ideal. To strengthen both types of competition, several tentative proposals are advanced. They range from the introduction of an international competition agency, competition rules, a monitoring institute, voucher systems, matching contributions, popular participation rights by citizens to the use of prediction markets and institutionalized devil’s advocates. These proposals are put forward to stimulate discussion and to advance new ideas about the design of international organizations.

试论会计人员选择立场

会计人员在进行会计选择时,要受到多个因素的影响,特别是企业的多个利害关系的人的影响.谁在企业组织这个契约中占绝对优势,谁就会在博弈中得到最大利益,会计人员选择立场也就偏向谁.会计人员虽然不能完全站在某一方的角度进行会计选择,但会计人员的会计选择立场可以主要从某一或几方出发.要想改变会计人员的选择立场必须要从改变企业组织的委托代理关系入手,建立起相应的法人治理结构环境.     

Principal-agent problems in international organizations

The paper provides a framework for analysing control problems in international organisations and reviews the disparate evidence from a public-choice perspective. Most examples concern the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the International Labour Organisation. International organisations suffer from principal-agent problems more than other public or private organisations do because the chain of delegation is more extended. As survey evidence demonstrates, the actors in international organisations do not share the preferences of the citizens because they have vested interests, and the citizens believe that they have least influence at the international level. The paper argues that national and international parliaments, the national governments and international supervisory boards or courts cannot solve the principal-agent problem due to severe information cost and weak or distorted incentives. JEL codes H79 · H11     

证券投资基金模式演变的几个理论解释

一百多年来,证券投资基金不断得到发展,基金形式也从早期单一的封闭式基金演变成为开放式基金占主导.本文试从科斯的交易成本理论、委托代理理论和契约理论来对这种演变进行解释.     

Incentives, criminal defence lawyers and plea bargaining

Plea bargaining has become a central feature of criminal procedure in Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions. This paper explores an area seldom discussed in the economic literature on plea bargaining: the influence of the defence lawyer's fee contract on the terms of the bargain. In particular, it uses data from one jurisdiction of the impact on case trajectories of changes in publicly funded defence lawyers’ contracts to test the proposition that the nature of the lawyer's contract influences how cases are managed. An event study methodology on a pooled time-series cross-section data set of case trajectories before and after the change in the nature of the contract is used to examine whether the new payment regime significantly changed the trajectories of cases through the summary criminal justice system. Overall the results seem to suggest that the behaviour of defence lawyers may be influenced by financial incentives. This implies that the terms of plea bargains reached between prosecution and defence lawyers may be affected by the defence lawyer's remuneration contract. Consequently, the authors conclude that the role of defence lawyers has been under-researched in the literature on the economics of plea bargaining.     

Bring the party back in: Institutional design for ‘smart election fraud’

Autocrats face a dilemma. Continue with fraudulent electoral practices and risk revolt, or reduce fraud and risk losing elections. One solution is to structure electoral governance such that it allows for independence and professionalism at the center, lending credibility to the electoral process, and partisan local-level administration, enabling fraud at the micro level. Partisan poll workers can help deliver the vote by the use of ‘smart fraud’ – fraud that minimizes the risk of being caught and is used only when needed. In Armenia, the ruling party's vote share, as a proportion of all registered voters, increases with 2.5 percentage points in polling stations where the chairperson was randomly assigned to the ruling party. Fraud forensics suggests that one of the mechanisms behind this was falsification of the results protocol during the count. I conjecture that fraud is only used in high-stakes elections and that election observers are unable to detect it.     

Delegating divisible sovereignty: Sweeping a conceptual minefield

Delegating sovereignty to international organizations (IOs) is both increasingly common and controversial. I address the sources of current controversies in three claims. First, although alleged otherwise, sovereignty is eminently divisible. From practice, indivisibility should not be a barrier to delegating to IOs. Second, it is intuitive that longer chains of delegation will be more likely to fail. Yet, it is not the length of the chain per se that matters as whether identifiable conditions for successful delegation are satisfied. Third, although “delegation” is often used to refer to both, delegating and pooling sovereignty are distinct activities. Much of the concern with IOs is really about pooling rather than delegating sovereignty.

Reimbursement schemes for hospitals, malpractice liability, and intrinsic motivation

We develop a simple multi-task principal-agent model to analyze the interplay between optimal reimbursement schemes for hospitals and liability rules (basic model). We then extend our model and assume that the hospital is intrinsically motivated to exert positive effort for quality and cost reduction. This effort, however, is biased towards quality. Moreover, the intrinsic motivation may be crowded out by monetary incentives. In such a setting, we find that a pure prospective payment system (PPS) that has become widespread in recent years can only be optimal in the unlikely case where malpractice liability holds hospitals fully responsible for expected harm. For other cases, we confirm the prejudice that PPS may lead to inefficiently low quality. Then, the traditional fee-for-service (FFS) system is superior if the intrinsic motivation is high and relatively little biased towards quality, whereas mixed systems should be chosen otherwise. Our model sheds light on why countries like the USA with a tough liability system haven been less reluctant to switch from FFS to PPS than Germany, for instance.     

参与式预算与政治生态环境的重构——新河公共预算改革的过程和逻辑

新河的参与式预算为我们提供了一份从体制外自发生长到体制内有机融洽为过程,以民主理财,完善委托代理机制为主要内容,以公众参与为基础,以激活人大机制为目的,以重构政治生态环境为指归的独特的文本.通过对其的解读,试图回答公共预算改革为什么会发生在新河;如何使政府的目标函数与公众的偏好相符合;通过什么样的路径缩短委托代理链;新河预算改革的实际意义和应用价值何在;今后的指归是什么.新河的参与式预算是一个基于公众与政府之间和谐理念而设计出来的制度创新,是对传统公众与政府之间关系的一种变革.通过这样的创新和变革,树立了凡是与公众有关的事情都应让公众知道的思想,提高了预算编制的透明度和参与度,践行了治国的根本.这是一次人大与政府互动关系的良好发端,通过激活人大而对政府实行真正的制衡,是政治生态环境的重构过程,是新河参与式预算的实际意义所在.新河的阳光试验,正在为我国的公共预算改革探路,并为之积累经验,它将成为我国民主政治建设的一个新的起点.