RIEB Seminar
| Date&Time | Wednesday, July 23, 2014, 3:30pm- |
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| Place | Meeting Room at RIEB (Annex, 2nd Floor) |
| Intended Audience | Faculties, Graduate Students, and People with Equivalent Knowledge |
| Language | English |
| Note | Copies of the paper are available at Office of Promoting Research Collaboration. |
3:30pm-
| Speaker | Eric WEESE |
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| Affiliation | Department of Economics, Yale University / Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University |
| Topic | Inefficiency and Self-Determination: Counterfactual Evidence for Meiji Japan |
| Abstract | Does the exercise of the right of self-determination lead to inefficiency? This paper considers a set of centrally planned municipal mergers during the Meiji period, with data from Gifu prefecture. Quantitative and qualitative evidence suggests that the observed merger pattern can be explained as a social optimum based on a very simple individual utility function. If individual villages had been allowed to choose their merger partners, counterfactual simulations show that the core is always non-empty, but core partitions contain about 80% more (post-merger) municipalities than the social optimum. Substantial inefficiency occurs only due to a combination of vertical and horizontal heterogeneity, and efficiencies of scale and congestion in the provision of public services. |