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Marc F. Bellemare Posts

Published September 20, 2011

Vote Buying and Reciprocity

That’s the title of a new working paper by Fred Finan and Laura Schechter:

While vote-buying is common, little is known about how politicians determine who to target. We argue that vote-buying can be sustained by an internalized norm of reciprocity. Receiving money engenders feelings of obligation. Combining survey data on vote-buying with an experiment-based measure of reciprocity, we show that politicians target reciprocal individuals. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of social preferences in determining political behavior.

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Published September 19, 2011

2012 Centre for the Study of African Economies “Economic Development in Africa” Conference

I received the following call for papers last week from the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford:

CSAE Conference 2012 on Economic Development in Africa

St Catherine’s College, Oxford, 18-20 March 2012

Papers addressing economic analysis of the broad issues relevant for economic development in Africa are invited for the CSAE 2012 conference. Papers on countries other than those in Africa are welcome, providing they deal with issues central to African development.

If you are interested in presenting a paper, please submit an abstract online by Thursday 1 December 2011, 17:00hrs GMT. If accepted for the conference, all authors will need to submit completed papers by 24 February 2012 for inclusion in the final programme.

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Published September 16, 2011

Friday Afternoon Musical Interlude

“The Devil’s Orchard,” by Opeth:

 

Their new album, titled “Heritage,” will be out in the US on September 20. Having listened to it once, I thought that it pays homage to progressive rock bands of the 1970s such as Yes and King Crimson.