This paper investigates whether popular initiatives signed by a larger share of the population have higher acceptance rates at the subsequent vote. The main analysis is based on all Swiss federal initiatives voted between 1978 and 2000 with a panel of aggregate voting data at cantonal level.
The results suggest that petition signing is positively and significantly related to acceptance rates at ballot. I address potential omitted variable bias from underlying preferences which might be driving both signatures and acceptance rates in three ways. First, the panel structure of the data allows to control for time-constant preferences via fixed effects. Second, results are robust to various proxies for voter preferences. Third, using the doubling of the signature requirement in 1978 as an instrumental variable confirms the above result. The findings imply that petition signing can serve as an effective partisan campaigning tool.
In this paper, I challenge the notion that women prefer larger governments than men, which is why extending the franchise to women has led to an increase in government spending in many industrialized countries. I estimate the average treatment effect of being female on support for government spending, by analyzing the voting outcomes of two similar Swiss referendum votes concerning the federal government's authorization to levy income, capital and turnover taxes. The first ballot took place shortly before the extension of suffrage to women in February 1971, and the other one directly thereafter. Based on municipal voting data, I relate the increase in the electorate to the difference in acceptance rates for the two propositions. Surprisingly, I find that approval for government spending is higher among the male population.
By conducting a mediation analysis based on post-ballot surveys after comparable votes in 1981, 1991, and 1993, I disentangle the direct gender effect on government spending preferences from the indirect gender effect which runs through important socioeconomic mediators like employment status or education. The intrinsic direct effect of being female proves to be the driving force behind the results while mediators turn out to play a weaker role. My results suggest rethinking the notion that female suffrage caused public spending to increase.
Crises of confidence turn booms into busts. Bloated household balance sheets and high debt offer the right ingredients for a confidence-driven housing bust. This column develops an analytic framework that accommodates the potential role of confidence fluctuations as a source of uncertainty in the economy. Current debt levels are shown to determine the exposure to crises of confidence. The results point to a clear role for macroprudential policy in the prevention of such crises.
We use all available waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances to document the evolution of the wealth distribution in the US since the 1980s. Relying on the shape of this distribution we then estimate a life-cycle incomplete markets model. We find that considering a wide range of net worth percentiles for prime-age consumers between ages 26 and 55 delivers very precise estimates of the structural parameters, impatience and risk aversion. The estimated model captures how average net worth increases with age while the dispersion of net worth falls with age. The model also predicts some of the evolution of the net worth distribution since the 1980s. Feeding the observed higher labor income risk into the model increases precautionary savings while the higher experience premium of labor earnings reduces wealth accumulation. Quantitatively, these two forces imply that the model reproduces the stable average net worth for young consumers since the 1980s and the increasing dispersion of net worth for all prime-age consumers, while the model does not predict the observed increase of average net worth for older consumers between ages 46 and 55.
We show how the method of endogenous gridpoints can be extended to solve models with occasionally binding constraints among endogenous variables very efficiently. We present the method for a consumer problem with occasionally binding collateral constraints and non-separable utility in durable and non-durable consumption. This problem allows for a joint analysis of durable and non-durable consumption in models with uninsurable income risk which is important to understand patterns of consumption, saving and collateralized debt. We illustrate the algorithm and its efficiency by calibrating the model to US data.
We show that the size of collateralized household debt determines an economy's vulnerability
to crises of confidence. The house price feeds back on itself by contributing to a liquidity
effect, which operates through the value of housing in a collateral constraint. Over a specific
range of debt levels this liquidity feedback effect is strong enough to give rise to multiplicity
of house prices. In a dynamic setup, we conceptualize confidence as a realization of rationally
entertainable belief-weightings of multiple future prices. This delivers debt-level-dependent
bounds on the extent to which confidence may drive house prices and aggregate consumption.
We document the widespread existence of antisocial punishment, that is, the sanctioning of people who behave prosocially. Our evidence comes from public goods experiments that we conducted in 16 comparable participant pools around the world. However, there is a huge cross-societal variation. Some participant pools punished the high contributors as much as they punished the low contributors, whereas in others people only punished low contributors. In some participant pools, antisocial punishment was strong enough to remove the cooperation-enhancing effect of punishment. We also show that weak norms of civic cooperation and the weakness of the rule of law in a country are significant predictors of antisocial punishment. Our results show that punishment opportunities are socially beneficial only if complemented by strong social norms of cooperation
We replicate the strategy-method experiment by Fischbacher et al. (Econ. Lett. 71:397-404, 2001) developed to measure attitudes towards cooperation in a one-shot public goods game. We collected data from 160 students at four different universities across urban and rural Russia. Using the classification proposed by Fischbacher et al. (2001) we find that the distribution of types is very similar across the four locations. The share of conditional cooperators in our Russian subject pools is comparable to the one found by Fischbacher et al. in a Swiss subject pool. However, the distribution of the other types differs from the one found in Switzerland
Dass es sich bei Wirtschaftskriminalität um ein bedeutendes Begleitphänomen wirtschaftlicher Aktivität handelt, vvird nicht zuletzt durch eine nicht abreissende Folge von Skandalen und prominenten Einzelfällen eindrucksvoll belegt. Umso überraschender ist es, dass wenig über die Relevanz und Charakteristik einzelner Deliktstypen bekannt ist. Diesem Defizit begegnet die hier vorgestellte Untersuchung, eine gross angelegte Befragung interner Revisoren in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz. Die Ergebnisse erlauben eine detaillierte Analyse von Handlungsmustern, situativen Kontexten und Täterprofilen zu den fünf wesentlichen Deliktstypen Korruption, Untreue/Betrug, Diebstahl, Wettbewerbsdelikte und Geldwäsche.
