The zero-rent society: Evidence from hydropower and petroleum windfalls in Norwegian local governments
中文摘要
经济理论与证据表明，政治领导人会利用政府收入的意外收益——特别是来自自然资源开采的意外收益——来中饱私囊。我们结合挪威地方政府巨额水电与石油收入的信息，以及有关市长个人收入与财富的五十年的登记数据，重新审视了这一假说。我们发现，尽管资源扩张大幅增加了地方政府收入与支出，但没有证据表明市长利用这些意外收益中饱私囊。我们将这一精确估计的零结果归因于挪威制度与信息环境的特征。首先，我们表明收入的意外收益促使公民寻求政治信息并提高其选举参与率。其次，在地方报纸更为重要的样本早期，市长的工资响应与报纸覆盖率负相关。总而言之，我们的结果表明，选民信息是一种关键的约束性问责机制，这可能解释了我们的零租结果。
Abstract
Economic theory and evidence suggest that political leaders take advantage of government revenue windfalls – particularly from natural resource exploitation – to enrich themselves. We revisit this hypothesis by combining information on massive local government hydropower and petroleum revenues in Norway with five decades of registry data on individual mayors’ earnings and wealth. We find that, while the resource expansions massively boost local government revenues and spending, there is no evidence that mayors exploit the windfalls to enrich themselves. We attribute our precisely estimated zero-finding to characteristics of the Norwegian institutional and informational environment. First, we show that the revenue windfalls induce citizens to seek political information and raise their rates of electoral participation. Second, in the early sample period when local newspapers were more important, mayors’ wage responses were negatively related to newspaper coverage. In sum, our results suggest that voter information is a key disciplining accountability mechanism, potentially explaining our zero-rent result.