scholarly journals Effect of holding office on the behavior of politicians

2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (48) ◽  
pp. 13690-13695 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Enemark ◽  
Clark C. Gibson ◽  
Mathew D. McCubbins ◽  
Brigitte Seim

Reciprocity is central to our understanding of politics. Most political exchanges—whether they involve legislative vote trading, interbranch bargaining, constituent service, or even the corrupt exchange of public resources for private wealth—require reciprocity. But how does reciprocity arise? Do government officials learn reciprocity while holding office, or do recruitment and selection practices favor those who already adhere to a norm of reciprocity? We recruit Zambian politicians who narrowly won or lost a previous election to play behavioral games that provide a measure of reciprocity. This combination of regression discontinuity and experimental designs allows us to estimate the effect of holding office on behavior. We find that holding office increases adherence to the norm of reciprocity. This study identifies causal effects of holding office on politicians’ behavior.

2015 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter M. Steiner ◽  
Yongnam Kim ◽  
Courtney E. Hall ◽  
Dan Su

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and quasi-experimental designs like regression discontinuity (RD) designs, instrumental variable (IV) designs, and matching and propensity score (PS) designs are frequently used for inferring causal effects. It is well known that the features of these designs facilitate the identification of a causal estimand and, thus, warrant a causal interpretation of the estimated effect. In this article, we discuss and compare the identifying assumptions of quasi-experiments using causal graphs. The increasing complexity of the causal graphs as one switches from an RCT to RD, IV, or PS designs reveals that the assumptions become stronger as the researcher’s control over treatment selection diminishes. We introduce limiting graphs for the RD design and conditional graphs for the latent subgroups of compliers, always takers, and never takers of the IV design, and argue that the PS is a collider that offsets confounding bias via collider bias.


2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 493-514 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew B. Hall ◽  
James M. Snyder

This paper uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate the degree to which incumbents scare off challengers with previous officeholder experience. The estimates indicate a surprisingly small amount of scare-off, at least in cases where the previous election was nearly tied. As Lee and others have shown (and as we confirm for our samples) the estimated party incumbency advantage in these same cases is quite large—in fact, it is about as large as the average incumbency advantage for all races found using other approaches. Drawing from previous estimates of the electoral value of officeholder experience, we thus calculate that scare-off in these cases accounts for only about 5–7 percent of the party incumbency advantage. We show that these patterns are similar in elections for US House seats, statewide offices and US senate seats, and state legislative seats.


2022 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gaowen Kong

PurposeThe authors emphasize the information role of earnings management and how it may be used to “mislead some stakeholders about the underlying economic performance of the company or to influence contractual outcomes that depend on reported accounting numbers.” Specifically, the authors examine the causal effect of tax incentives on private firms' earnings management based on a corporate tax reform in China.Design/methodology/approachIn December 2001, China implemented a tax collection reform which moved the collection of corporate income taxes from the local tax bureau to the state tax bureau. This reform results in exogenous variations in the effective tax rate among similar firms established before and after 2002. The authors apply a regression discontinuity design and use the generated variation in the effective tax rate to investigate the impact of taxes on firm earnings management.FindingsThe authors find that tax reduction substantially increases private firms' incentives to manage earnings information, and such effect is particularly pronounced when tax collection intensity and government interventions are low. Further evidence shows that lower tax rates stimulate firms' investment, inventory turnover and recruitment of skilled human capital. A plausible mechanism is that private firms signal a promising outlook by managing earnings to attain greater financing and improve investment/operation levels when financial constraints are removed.Originality/valueFirst, the authors present the causal effects of tax incentives on private firm's earnings management, which deepens the authors’ understanding on the determinants of firm's earnings information production. Second, this study also contributes to the literature on tax-induced earnings management. Third, the authors believe that this topic offers clear policy implications and would be of particular interest to regulators.


Author(s):  
Khamis Said Nasser Al Muniri

This paper looks at the academic staff selection practices at the Colleges of Technology in Oman. An inductive reasoning or bottom up approach was used in this research project. The main method of data collection used was semi-structured interviews conducted with selected government officials whose position and experience would enable them to provide useful data on the issues being explore. Some of the main findings of the research was that the interviewers predominantly conducted unstructured interviews and the interviewers had not received any training on how to conduct interviews and carryout the selection process. In addition, the interviewers did not have any standard selection criteria when recruiting academic staff to the college of technology. The research findings will help administrators in Oman to improve the recruitment and selection process of academic Staff.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 839-870 ◽  
Author(s):  
François Gerard ◽  
Miikka Rokkanen ◽  
Christoph Rothe

The key assumption in regression discontinuity analysis is that the distribution of potential outcomes varies smoothly with the running variable around the cutoff. In many empirical contexts, however, this assumption is not credible; and the running variable is said to be manipulated in this case. In this paper, we show that while causal effects are not point identified under manipulation, one can derive sharp bounds under a general model that covers a wide range of empirical patterns. The extent of manipulation, which determines the width of the bounds, is inferred from the data in our setup. Our approach therefore does not require making a binary decision regarding whether manipulation occurs or not, and can be used to deliver manipulation‐robust inference in settings where manipulation is conceivable, but not obvious from the data. We use our methods to study the disincentive effect of unemployment insurance on (formal) reemployment in Brazil, and show that our bounds remain informative, despite the fact that manipulation has a sizable effect on our estimates of causal parameters.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-47
Author(s):  
Utteeyo Dasgupta ◽  
Subha Mani ◽  
Smriti Sharma ◽  
Saurabh Singhal

We exploit the variation in admission cutoffs across colleges at a leading Indian university to estimate the causal effects of enrolling in a selective college on cognitive attainment, economic preferences, and Big Five personality traits. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that enrolling in a selective college improves university exam scores of the marginally admitted females, and makes them less overconfident and less risk averse, while males in selective colleges experience a decline in extraversion and conscientiousness. We find differences in peer quality and rank concerns to be driving our findings.


2015 ◽  
Vol 105 (5) ◽  
pp. 502-507 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Angrist ◽  
David Autor ◽  
Sally Hudson ◽  
Amanda Pallais

In an ongoing evaluation of post-secondary financial aid, we use random assignment to assess the causal effects of large privately-funded aid awards. Here, we compare the unbiased causal effect estimates from our RCT with two types of non-experimental econometric estimates. The first applies a selection-on-observables assumption in data from an earlier, nonrandomized cohort; the second uses a regression discontinuity design. Selection-on-observables methods generate estimates well below the experimental benchmark. Regression discontinuity estimates are similar to experimental estimates for students near the cutoff, but sensitive to controlling for the running variable, which is unusually coarse.


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