题目：Does the Fiscal Decentralization Promote Public Safety? Evidence from United States

时间：2013年11月27日 星期三 12:00 – 14:00

地点：明德主楼610

报告人：雷敬华

Abstract: This paper empirically investigates the effect of fiscal decentralization on public safety, which is widely taken as an important issue in evaluating the performance of public service. In addition, we provide evidence to the transmission channels of the decentralization effect. In a decentralized setting, the fiscal competition between jurisdictions motivates local governments to provide better crime control service, but as illustrated in this paper, the coordination failure due to cross-border crime offsets the beneficial effect of jurisdictional competition. To explore the impact of coordination failure, we propose a best generalized two stages least squares (B2SLS) method to estimate a newly developed spatial autoregressive model with varying spatial effects. Moreover, a new measure of fiscal decentralization, government density, is employed to overcome the problem of endogeneity. Using county level data of the United States, we find strong evidence to our hypotheses, and the results are robust to various crime classifications, measures of fiscal decentralization and model specifications.

报告人简介：雷敬华，荷兰蒂尔堡大学博士研究生，专业为计量经济学。2008年人大本科毕业，获得经济学-数学双学位。主要研究方向为Spatial Econometrics，Applied Econometrics.