Drought‐Reliefs and Partisanship Boffa, Federico; Cavalcanti, Francisco; Fons‐Rosen, Christian ...
Oxford bulletin of economics and statistics,
April 2024, Volume:
86, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We combine a model of symmetric information with selfish and office‐motivated politicians and a Regression Discontinuity Design analysis based on close municipal elections to study partisan bias in ...the allocation of drought aid relief in Brazil. We identify a novel pattern of distributive politics whereby partisan bias materialises only before municipal elections, while it disappears before presidential elections. Furthermore, before mayoral elections, it fades for extreme (high or low) aridity levels while persisting for moderate levels. Our empirical results show that in this case alignment increases the probability of receiving aid relief by a factor of two (equivalent to 18.1 percentage points).
Abstract
If large firms employ relatively more educated workers, will an increase in market concentration increase income inequality by raising the relative demand for skill? I use Swedish ...employer–employee data from 1997–2016 and find a strong correlation between firm size and the share of college‐educated (‘skilled’) workers. An increase in a sector's market concentration is correlated with a higher skilled wage premium and higher relative employment of skilled workers. This is due mainly to the reallocation of workers across firms. I demonstrate how these findings can be explained by a model of heterogeneous firms where productivity and skill intensity are positively correlated.
This paper is part of the Economica 100 Series. Economica, the LSE “house journal” is now 100 years old. To commemorate this achievement, we are publishing 100 papers by former students, as well as current and former faculty. Anders Akerman completed his BSc and MSc at the LSE.
China's population ageing and expansion of social spending following decades of rapid economic growth will undoubtedly lead to future increases in public expenditure. This article presents scenarios ...for future government expenditure in the main components of the social sector—education, health care and pensions. Scenario results reveal that if China gradually increases per-beneficiary spending in these areas by 2030 to the average level of OECD countries in 2009—an assumption that is in line with China's aspiration to be a high-income society—the combined spending in these three areas as a share of GDP could double, from 10 percent in 2014 to 20 percent in 2030, and triple to over 30 percent by 2050. The trends documented here face Chinese policy makers with hard choices and, absent substantial increase in government revenues as a share of GDP, they portend far-reaching economic, social, and political implications.
The world of work in the United Kingdom has for many years been characterised by major inequalities. Despite hosting some of the world’s highest executive salaries, basic employment and welfare ...standards tend to be relatively low. Moreover, a series of qualitative shifts in the labour market, in worker protections and in the nature of work have tended both to reproduce and to feed off workers’ unequal socio-economic position. A key causal factor is the ‘perforated’ industrial relations model caused by two generations of trade union decline. This has facilitated a specific mode of labour market flexibility, which is strongly biased towards employer short-term interests and militates against both longer-term employer security needs (for example, to underpin skill investment) and the kinds of flexibilities that might meet worker needs (for example, flexible careers and working time). This chapter investigates the relationship between inequalities and industrial relations and explores positive and negative outcomes via two case studies.
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