Suchergebnisse

Trabajo publicado como artículo en Journal of the European Economic Association 9(3): 496-521 (2011).-- http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1542-4774.2010.01016.x ; We present a model of conflict, in which discriminatory government policy or social intolerance is responsive to various forms of ethnic activism, including violence. It is this perceived responsiveness -captured by the probability that the government gives in and accepts a proponed change in ethnic policy- that induces individuals to mobilize in support for their cause. Yet, mobilization is costly and demonstrators have to be compensated accordingly. Individuals have to weigh their ethnic radicalism with their material well-being to determine the size of their money contribution to the cause. Our main results are: (i) a one-sided increase in radicalism or in population size increases conflict; (ii) a one-sided increase in income has ambiguous effects depending on the elasticity of contributions to income; (iii) an increase in within-group inequality increases conflict; and (iv) an increase in the correlation between ethnic radicalism and inequality also increases conflict. ; Esteban is a member of Barcelona Economics and is grateful for support from the Generalitat de Catalunya and the CICYT (SEC-2003-1961). This research is part of the Polarization and Conflict research project CIT2-CT-2004-506084 funded by the European Commission-DG Research Sixth Framework Programme

A recent upsurge of empirical studies on the causes of conflict attempts to connect various features of the distribution of the relevant characteristic (typically ethnicity or religion) to conflict. The distributional indices differ (polarization, fractionalization or Lorenz-domination) and so do the various specifications of "conflict" (onset, incidence or intensity). Overall, the results are far from clear, and combined with the mixture of alternative indices and notions of "conflict" it is not surprising that the reader may come away thoroughly perplexed. The aim of this paper is to provide a theoretical framework that permits us to distinguish between the occurrence of conflict and its severity and that clarifies the role of polarization and fractionalization in each of these cases. Our analysis brings together strands from three of our previous contributions: on polarization (Esteban and Ray, 1994, and Duclos, Esteban and Ray, 2004), on conflict and distribution (Esteban and Ray, 1999) and on the viability of political systems (Esteban and Ray, 2001). ; Esteban gratefully acknowledges support from the Instituto de Estudios Fiscales, the Polarization and Conflict project CIT-2-CT-2004-506084 funded by the European Commission-DG Research Sixth Framework Programme, Barcelona Economics (XREA) and the CICYT grant no. SEC2003-01961.

This paper describes how wealth inequality may distort public resource allocation. A government seeks to allocate limited resources to productive sectors, but sectoral productivity is privately known by agents with vested interests in those sectors. They lobby the government for preferential treatment. The government—even if it honestly seeks to maximize economic efficiency—may be confounded by the possibility that both high wealth and true economic desirability create loud lobbies. Broadly speaking, both poorer economies and unequal economies display greater public misallocation. The paper warns against the conventional wisdom that this is so because such governments are more "corrupt."

This paper describes how wealth inequality may distort public resource allocation. A government seeks to allocate limited resources to productive sectors, but sectoral productivity is privately known by agents with vested interests in those sectors. They lobby the government for preferential treatment. The government - even if it honestly seeks to maximize economic efficiency - may be confounded by the possibility that both high wealth and true economic desirability create loud lobbies. Broadly speaking, both poorer economies and unequal economies display greater public misallocation. The paper warns against the conventional wisdom that this is so because such governments are more >corrupt.>. ; This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant 0241070 (Ray), MCYT Research Grant SEC-2003-1961 (Esteban), and the Polarization and Conflict Project CIT-2-CT-2004-506084 funded by the European Commission–DG Research Sixth Framework Programme. ; Peer Reviewed

According to the Olson paradox, larger groups may be less successful than smaller groups in furthering their interests. We address the issue in a model with three distinctive features: explicit intergroup interaction, collective prizes with a varying mix of public and private characteristics, and nonlinear lobbying costs. The interplay of these features leads to new results. When the cost of lobbying has the elasticity of a quadratic function, or higher, larger groups are more effective no matter how private the prize. With smaller elasticities, a threshold degree of publicness is enough to overturn the Olson argument, and this threshold tends to zero as the elasticity approaches the value for a quadratic function. We also demonstrate that these results are true, irrespective of whether we examine group sizes over the cross-section in some given equilibrium or changes in the size of a given group over different equilibria.

According to the Olson paradox, larger groups may be less successful than smaller groups in furthering their interests. We address the issue in a model with three distinctive features: explicit intergroup interaction, collective prizes with a varying mix of public & private characteristics, & nonlinear lobbying costs. The interplay of these features leads to new results. When the cost of lobbying has the elasticity of a quadratic function, or higher, larger groups are more effective no matter how private the prize. With smaller elasticities, a threshold degree of publicness is enough to overturn the Olson argument, & this threshold tends to zero as the elasticity approaches the value for a quadratic function. We also demonstrate that these results are true, irrespective of whether we examine group sizes over the cross-section in some given equilibrium or changes in the size of a given group over different equalibria. 1 Figure, 15 References. Adapted from the source document.

In this paper we study the effect of religiosity on the political choices over redistribution and over the legal restrictions on personal liberties. Religious teachings generally restrict individual behavior on issues such as consumption of some goods, sexual orientation, divorce, abortion, gay marriage, contraception and so on. We assume that the more religious an individual is, (i) the less he enjoys the use of liberties prohibited by his religion; and (ii) the higher the negative externality experienced when others in society practice those liberties beyond what he deems adequate. The first assumption implies that, when the law allows for the use of liberties, secular individuals have a higher incentive to work than religious ones. As a result, the political choice of legal restrictions on liberties has an impact on income inequality. The second implies that religious individuals may prefer to repress liberties in society. As repression of liberties reduces income inequality, poor religious individuals may still prefer low taxes compared with richer and less religious ones. We also analyze the choice of redistribution and the legal cap on liberties as the majoritarian outcome in a citizen-candidate model. We obtain that when the majority of the population is religious and the religious cleavage in society is large, high intolerance due to negative externalities leads to a political outcome consisting of repression of liberties and relatively low income taxes. ; Joan Esteban and Laura Mayoral gratefully acknowledge financial support ´ from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness Grant, through the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in RD (SEV-2015-0563) and grant number ECO2015 − 66883−P, Generalitat de Catalunya project number 2017SGR1359, and the National Science Foundation grant SES-1629370 ; Peer reviewed

We provide a model of conflict and mass killing decisions to identify the key variables and situations that make mass killings more likely to occur. We predict that mass killings are most likely in countries with large amounts of natural resource rents, polarization, institutional constraints regarding rent sharing, and low productivity of labor. The role of resources such as oil, gas, and diamonds and other key determinants of mass killings is confirmed by our empirical results based on countrylevel as well as ethnic group–level analysis ; Joan Esteban gratefully acknowledges financial support from the AXA Research Fund and from the Spanish Government Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología project ECO2011-25293. Massimo Morelli gratefully acknowledges financial support by the Program for Economic Research at Columbia University. Dominic Rohner is grateful for the financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (ggrant 100014-122636) ; Peer Reviewed

A previous version circulated under the title "Government Information Transparency" ; In this paper, we investigate how government transparency depends on economic distortions. We first consider an abstract class of economies in which a benevolent policy maker is privately informed about the exogenous state of the economy and contemplates whether to release this information. Our key result is that distortions limit communication: even if transparency is ex ante Pareto superior to opaqueness, it cannot constitute an equilibrium when distortions are sufficiently high. We next confirm this broad insight in two applied contexts, in which monopoly power and income taxes are the specific sources of distortions. © 2014 by the European Economic Association. ; Albornoz is grateful for support from the ESRC (RES-062-23-1360), Esteban for support from the Generalitat de Catalunya and the CICYT (SEJ2006-00369) and from the Instituto de Estudios Fiscales, and Vanin for support from the University of Padua (CPDA071899) ; Peer Reviewed

Presentado el 22 de mayo de 2014 en la Conference on Axioms, Results and Methods in Normative Economics, celebrada del 22 al 24 de mayo de 2014 en Granada (España). Presentado el 9 de junio de 2014 en el International Economic Association 17th World Congress, celebrado del 6 al 10 de juni de 2014 en el Dead Sea (Jordania). Presentado como conferencia en el Department of Economics, Università di Bologna. Presentado como conferencia en el Departamento de Fundamentos de Análisis Económico de la Universidad de Alicante el 31 de octubre de 2014. Presentado como conferencia el 2 de diciembre de 2015 en el Economics & Political Science (EPS) Seminars de INSEAD, The Business School for the World. ; In this paper we study the role of religiosity in political choices such as redistribution and individual liberties. To a standard model with consumption and effort, we add a third good: civil liberties with a cap established by law. More liberties, like divorce, abortion, gender parity, or gay marriage, may be considered good by the secular and detrimental by the religious individuals. With standard assumptions on individual preferences, one obtains that wider liberties increase the marginal utility of consumption to seculars, and decrease it to religious individuals. Labor supply and income are therefore lower for religious individuals in the presence of liberties. This implies a higher share of religious agents among the poor consistent with evidence that the poor care more about "moral values". We analyze the preferences of individuals over taxation and the legal cap over liberties. We show that restriction of liberties can arise as an equilibrium outcome of a simple political process when society is sufficiently religious. Moreover, if economic polarisation is lower than religious polarisation, restriction of liberties results in lower taxation. Thus more religious societies will impose lower taxation both because (i) their productivity is lower, (ii) repression of liberties is more likely to arise and result in lower taxes ; Joan Esteban and Laura Mayoral gratefully acknowledge financial support from the AXA Research Fund, the Generalitat de Catalunya, and the CICYT (ECO2011-25293) ; Peer Reviewed