Framing Government Transparency in the Obama Administration

Government Information Transparency∗

This paper studies a model of announcements by a privately informed government about the future state of the economic activity in an economy subject to recurrent shocks and with distortions due to income taxation. Although transparent communication would ex ante be desirable, we find that even a benevolent government may ex-post be non-informative, in an attempt to countervail the tax distortio...

Government Transparency and Policymaking

This paper identifies conditions under which voters are better off not knowing the policy choices of incumbents: we show that government transparency can actually lower voter welfare. To do so, we analyze a model of political agency where voters face two forms of uncertainty: uncertainty about the incumbent’s policy preferences and uncertainty about the relationship between policies and outcome...

Health reform and the obama administration: reflections in mid-2010.

The reforms that finally emerged from the Obama administration's initiative were the result of a year of nasty, demagogic and misleading claims in the US public forum, coupled with the complexities of crafting legislation that stood a chance of passing both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The resulting "hybrid" approach to healthcare reform produced a conservative strategy that ign...

Policy Options: The Obama Administration and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict

What are the assets available to the incoming Obama administration for resolving or at least reducing the intensity of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? What liabilities and constraints will the next administration face and what opportunities might it attempt to exploit for this purpose? This document constitutes a first attempt by two experts— one Israeli, the other a Palestinian—to examine th...

Should the Obama Administration Implement a CO2 Tax?