Date:
Location:
Today's Speaker
Allan Drazen (University of Maryland), "Kosher Pork" (w/ Ethan Ilzetzki) (Link to paper)
Abstract
There are two common views of pork barrel spending. One is that pork barrel spending benefits special interests at the expense of social welfare, hence antithetical to responsible policymaking, especially in times of crisis. An alternative is that pork “greases the legislative wheels” making possible the enactment of socially beneficial legislation that would otherwise not pass. In this paper we reexamine both arguments and show that hey depend on the nature of heterogeneity of interests across legislators. Under full information, but with heterogeneous ideology across legislators, policy compromise may be su¢ cient to pass beneficial legislation, with pork only lowering social welfare. In contrast, when agents are heterogeneous in both their ideology and in their information, allocation of pork may be crucial to passage of legislation appropriate to the situation. However, it does so not simply by bribing legislators to accept legislation they view as harmful, but also by conveying information about the necessity of policy change, where it may be impossible to convey such information in the absence of pork. Moreover, pork will be observed when the public good is most valuable precisely because it is valuable and the informed agenda setter wants to convey this information.
Co-sponsored by FAS and IQSS, the Alberto Alesina Seminar on Political Economy supports research-related activities that integrate the study of economics and politics, whether by studying economic behavior in the political process or political behavior in the marketplace. In general, positive political economy is concerned with showing how observed differences among institutions affect political and economic outcomes in various social, economic, and political systems and how the institutions themselves change and develop in response to individual and collective beliefs, preferences, and strategies.
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All interested faculty and students are invited to attend.