US federal transfers to individuals are large, countercyclical, vary geographically, and often credited with helping stabilize regional economies. This paper estimates the short-run effects of these using plausibly exogenous variation in temporary stimulus payments permanent Social Security benefit increases. States that received larger tended grow faster contemporaneously, a multiplier around ...

For decades, rapid urban expansion has led to concerns over the loss of cultivated land in rural China. Less well known is the fact that development of newly cultivated land has in fact consistently exceeded land conversion from 1999-2006. This paper provides an analytical model that makes sense of this observation, featuring fiscal decentralization, local governments as custodians of land use ...

We study the effects on accountability in government service delivery of decentralizing administration of an antipoverty program. While governments at both central and local levels are vulnerable to antipoor policy biases owing to political capture, centralized delivery systems are additionally prone to bureaucratic corruption, owing to problems in monitoring bureaucratic performance. Decentral...

This paper considers collective bargaining in a public sector institutional setting. The model demonstrates how budget constraints and hierarchical structure affect the bargaining outcome. A trade union bargains over wage and employment either with an output-maximizing bureau or the bureau’s sponsoring institution. The slope of the contract curve depends on the bargaining level because the budg...

Contrary to simple theoretical predictions, existing evidence suggests that federal grants do not crowd out state government spending. A legislative bargaining model with endogenous grants documents a positive correlation between grant receipts and preferences for public goods; this correlation has likely biased existing work against measuring crowd-out. To correct for such endogeneity, the mod...

In a Regression Kink (RK) design with a finite sample, a confounding smooth nonlinear relationship between an assignment variable and an outcome variable around a threshold can be spuriously picked up as a kink and result in a biased estimate. In order to investigate how well RK designs handle such confounding nonlinearity, I firstly implement Monte Carlo simulations and then study the effect o...

A genome-wide linkage scan was performed for genes affecting submaximal exercise cardiac output (Q) and stroke volume (SV) in the sedentary state and their responses to a standardized 20-wk endurance training program. A total of 509 polymorphic markers were used, and 328 pairs of siblings from 99 white nuclear families and 102 sibling pairs from 105 black family units were available. Q and SV w...

We suggest moment estimators for the parameters of a continuous time GARCH(1,1) process based on equally spaced observations. Using the fact that the increments of the COGARCH(1,1) process are ergodic, the resulting estimators are consistent. We investigate the quality of our estimators in a simulation study based on the compound Poisson driven COGARCH model. The estimated volatility with corre...

In this paper, we examine the specification tests which have been proposed for fixed effects in binary panel data model, using several different data generating processes to evaluate the performance of the specification test in different situations. By simulations, we find the specification test based on moment conditions is able to outperform the Lagrange multiplier test proposed by Gurmu (199...