Iowa Law Enforcement Academy, Agency Performance Plan, 2007

Annual Report

Iowa Department of Management Agency Performance Plan, 2007

Agency Performance Plan

Iowa Natural Resources, Agency Performance Plan, 2007

Annual Report, Agency performance plan

Governor’s Office of Drug Control Policy Agency Performance Reporting, 2007

The Agency Performance Report for the Governor’s Office of Drug Control Policy is published in accordance with the Accountable Government Act. The information provided within this report is to aid in decision-making and to illustrate accountability to stakeholders and citizens. The report is indicative of the agency’s progress in meeting performance targets and achieving goals consistent with the enterprise strategic plan, the agency strategic plan and agency performance plan.

Iowa Department of Public Health Agency Performance Plan, 2007

Agency Performance Plan

Iowa Department of Public Safety Agency Performance Plan, 2007

Agency Performance Plan

Iowa Department of Revenue & Finance, Agency Performance Plan, 2007

Annual Report, Agency Performance Plan

Civil conflict and human capital accumulation: The long-term effects of political violence in Perú

This paper provides empirical evidence of the persistent effect of exposure to political violence on humancapital accumulation. I exploit the variation in conflict location and birth cohorts to identify the longandshort-term effects of the civil war on educational attainment. Conditional on being exposed toviolence, the average person accumulates 0.31 less years of education as an adult. In the short-term,the effects are stronger than in the long-run; these results hold when comparing children within thesame household. Further, exposure to violence during early childhood leads to permanent losses. I alsoexplore the potential causal mechanisms.

The political cost of reforms

This paper formalizes in a fully-rational model the popular idea that politiciansperceive an electoral cost in adopting costly reforms with future benefits and reconciles it with the evidence that reformist governments are not punished by voters.To do so, it proposes a model of elections where political ability is ex-ante unknownand investment in reforms is unobservable. On the one hand, elections improve accountability and allow to keep well-performing incumbents. On the other, politiciansmake too little reforms in an attempt to signal high ability and increase their reappointment probability. Although in a rational expectation equilibrium voters cannotbe fooled and hence reelection does not depend on reforms, the strategy of underinvesting in reforms is nonetheless sustained by out-of-equilibrium beliefs. Contrary tothe conventional wisdom, uncertainty makes reforms more politically viable and may,under some conditions, increase social welfare. The model is then used to study howpolitical rewards can be set so as to maximize social welfare and the desirability of imposing a one-term limit to governments. The predictions of this theory are consistentwith a number of empirical regularities on the determinants of reforms and reelection.They are also consistent with a new stylized fact documented in this paper: economicuncertainty is associated to more reforms in a panel of 20 OECD countries.

Turnout, political preferences and information: Experimental evidence from Perú

Electoral institutions that encourage citizens to vote are widely used around the world. Yet littleis known about the effects of such institutions on voter participation and the composition of the electorate.In this paper, I combine a field experiment with a change in Peruvian voting laws to identify theeffect of monetary (dis-)incentives on voting. Using the random variation in the fine for abstention andan objective measure of turnout at the individual level, I estimate the elasticity of voting with respectto cost to be -0.21. Consistent with the theoretical model presented, the reduction in turnout inducedby the reduction in the fine is driven by voters who (i) are in the center of the political spectrum, (ii)are less interested in politics, and (iii) hold less political information. However, voters who respondto changes in the cost of abstention do not have different preferences for policies than those who voteregardless of the cost. Further, involvement in politics, as measured by the decision to acquire politicalinformation, seems to be independent of the level of the fine. Additional results indicate that thereduction in the fine does not affect the incidence of vote buying, but increases the price paid for avote.

Audit report on the South Dallas County Landfill Agency for the year ended June 30, 2007

Audit report on the South Dallas County Landfill Agency for the year ended June 30, 2007

Inflation, political instability and stockmarket volatility in interwar Germany

What determined the volatility of asset prices in Germany between thewars? This paper argues that the influence of political factors has beenoverstated. The majority of events increasing political uncertainty hadlittle or no effect on the value of German assets and the volatility ofreturns on them. Instead, it was inflation (and the fear of it) that islargely responsible for most of the variability in asset returns.

The 'new political economy': Two recent books

This paper reviews two recent books on Political Economy by Allan Drazen and Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini. It discusses some problems of the recent Political Economy literature.