Strategic Voting and the Case for the "Political Race to the Top"
2013/07/02
研討會日期 : 2013-07-02
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Yukihiro Nishimura
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Yukihiro Nishimura received his Ph.D. in Economics from Queen’s University in 2002. He is currently Associate Professor of Economics at Osaka University. His research fields are optimal taxation, relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth (theory and empirics), and voluntary participation and efficient provision of public goods (theory and experiment).
演講摘要 : This paper explores the outcome of non-cooperative decision making by elected politicians under transnational externalities. In the context of environmental problems, we re-examine the extent of a voter's incentives for supporting politicians who are less green than the median voter, a phenomenon called ``political race to the bottom.'' Our model introduces the complementarity between each country's environmental investments as inputs for global public goods while previous studies supposed perfect substitution. In the symmetric equilibrium, the extent of ``political race to the bottom'' diminishes as public inputs become more complementary. If its degree exceeds a certain point, ``political race to the top'' emerges. For sufficiently high degrees of substitution, however, equilibrium is asymmetric. When public inputs become perfectly substitutable, one of the elected politicians pays no attention to the environment, but the median voter becomes the elected politician in the other country.
