American Economic Review · 2022 · Matilde Bombardini、Bingjing Li、Francesco Trebbi
中文摘要
政治人物的信息集、预期和偏好是其政策选择的基本决定因素，但这些因素未被观测到。利用美国众议院在跨越中国加入世界贸易组织（WTO）这一时间点的二十年间，就中国正常贸易关系（NTR）地位进行的多次投票，我们采用一种矩不等式方法，旨在仅对国会议员的信息集作出较弱信息假设的条件下获得一致估计。该方法为检验政治人物在决策时掌握何种信息的相关假设，以及估计选区选民、意识形态和其他因素在政策制定和投票中的权重，提供了一种稳健的途径。（JEL D72, D78, D83, D84, F14, P33）
Abstract
Information sets, expectations, and preferences of politicians are fundamental, but unobserved determinants of their policy choices. Employing repeated votes in the US House of Representatives on China’s normal trade relations (NTR) status during the two decades straddling China’s World Trade Organization (WTO) accession, we apply a moment inequality approach designed to deliver consistent estimates under weak informational assumptions on the information sets of members of Congress. This methodology offers a robust way to test hypotheses about what information politicians have at the time of their decision and to estimate the weight that constituents, ideology, and other factors have in policy making and voting. (JEL D72, D78, D83, D84, F14, P33)