Kenneth V. Greene

Religiosity, Economics and Life Satisfaction

This paper uses a large individual data set from the Euro Barometer Survey (ICPSR 1993) to estimate the influence of religious phenomena on self-perceived satisfaction of an individual, controlling for macroeconomic conditions, effects of his political stance, and other socio-economic variables. Our estimated ordered logit model results show that an individuals life satisfaction is positively related to measures of strong religious attachment in the sense of being willing to commit to attending religious services frequently. Our other findings include that no strong evidence exists for the hypothesis that leftists suffer more from income inequality.

Fiscal illusion, the nature of public goods and equation specification

In a recent article Richard Wagner (1976) has developed the hypothesis that the structure with which governments raise revenues can affect the level of public expenditures. In addition to providing the theoretical basis for this argument, Wagner empirically tested his hypothesis. The results of this test were supportive. The purpose of this note is to re-examine the empirical test employed by Wagner in light of a criticism of his original econometric specification. The first section briefly reviews Wagners discussion. The second section presents additional empirical evidence. The final section presents some concluding remarks.

Voter Participation and the Redistributive State

The redistributive theory of the state implies that voter participation rates should be highest among those who have the most to gain or lose or a V-shaped relationship between income and voting participation should exist. We use a data set that contains nearly 21,000 observations on individual survey responses about voting behavior in the U.S. between 1972 and 1993 to show that the participation rate generally rises monotonically with income, perhaps except at very high income levels. It does report other findings consistent with an economic theory of voting based on returns to association and with the hypothesis that public employees vote more.

Is the median voter a clear-cut winner?: Comparing the median voter theory and competing theories in explaining local government spending

This paper attempts to test the power of the median model againstthe respective strength of other alternate models based onredistributive, political-institutional and interest group theoriesin explaining the demand for public spending in New York statecounties during 1990, 1980 and 1970. To execute the comparison ofthe performance of median voter model with that of each of thenonmedian voter ones, various nonnested tests such as J and JAtests, N-tilde, W and encompassing tests have been employed.Results of the study show that although the median voter model hasa marginal edge over the rival models based on the alternativetheories, it may not be relied upon solely when many otherinstitutional, redistributive and interest group factors are alsorelevant for explaining public spending. The results of this studydiffer from those in Congleton and Bennett (1995). We do not findthat interest group models are substantially weaker than the medianvoter model.

A Political Economic Analysis of Congressional Voting Patterns on NAFTA

This paper delves into the question of the determinants of Congressional voting on NAFTA. It uses a logit model to examine both House and Senate votes and is able to use district specific estimates in the former. It finds only very limited support for the thesis that narrowly defined employment gainers and losers were important determinants of Congressional voting patterns, though some substantial support that districts that were highly agricultural or already possessed a substantial Hispanic population and skilled labor force and had the most to gain from the general effects of NAFTA lead to a positive effect on the probability that a member of the House would vote affirmatively. Contributions from labor unions lowered the likelihood of affirmative votes. Political partisanship and ideological positions apparently had little effect on the votes. A Representatives political capital had a marginally significant effect on the probability on an affirmative vote, but it performed positively in the Senate and negatively in the House.

The Effects of Monitoring and Competition on Public Education Outputs: A Stochastic Frontier Approach

An extensive data set on upstate New York school district inputs and outputs is used to measure the technical efficiency of public school districts and to test whether certain institutional arrangements, including more public and private competition, can enhance various measures of high school outputs. The technique used involves stochastic frontier production functions. Whereas increased public school competition enhances output, the effect of private schools is sensitive to the output measure.

The public choice of non-resident college tuition levels

This paper uses a public choice framework to analyze the choice of tuition levels charged by public institutions to non-resident students. It finds that a states relative strength in attracting both population and students lead to higher tuitions and that large numbers of private colleges and perhaps lack of job openings lead to higher tuition for non-residents as do small fiscal gains from high income newcomers. No support is found for the hypotheses that high enrollment growth or costs lead to relatively poor treatment of out-of-staters.

Signaling Goodness: Social Rules and Public Choice

Political, intellectual, and academic discourse in the United States has been awash in political correctness, which has itself been berated and defended -- yet little understood. As a corrective, Nelson and Greene look at a more general process: adopting political positions to enhance ones reputation for trustworthiness both to others and to oneself.Phillip Nelson and Kenneth Greene are Professors of Economics in the Department of Economics at the State University of New York, Binghamton.

If extremists vote how do they express themselves? An empirical test of an expressive theory of voting

The expressive theory of voting needs more specification of the motives for expression if it is not merely to be a theory of non-instrumental voting. Brennan and Hamlin provide such a specification. Unfortunately, using individual U.S. data from the General Social Surveys we find their predictions are contradicted. Nor if other evidence in the literature purported to be evidence of expressive voting actually implied by it. We believe that this is because the reason people express themselves in voting is to signal others.

A Comparative Analysis of Tax Progressivity in the United States

The proliferating array of measures of tax progressivity is applied to the state-local tax structures in the United States in 1977. An attempt is made to classify state structures into most or least progressive and it is shown that there is a great deal of inconsistency among recently proposed alternative measures.