IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/esi/evopap/2002-02.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Yesterday's Games: Contingency Learning and the Growth of Public Spending

Author

Listed:
  • L. Dudley
  • U. Witt

Abstract

Between 1890 and 1938, the public share of total spending rose to unprecedented peacetime levels in many Western countries. This development has been explained by either (i) a shift in the demand for public goods or (ii) a restructuring of the state to transfer income. However, neither explanation has been shown to be compatible with individual incentives. Here, we model the rise of public spending as a contingency-learning phenomenon within Schelling’s Multi- Person Dilemma. Tests of the resulting propositions with national time series reveal no unit root but a break in trend, a result shown to favor explanation (ii) over (i).

Suggested Citation

  • L. Dudley & U. Witt, 2002. "Yesterday's Games: Contingency Learning and the Growth of Public Spending," Papers on Economics and Evolution 2002-02, Philipps University Marburg, Department of Geography.
    • Handle: RePEc:esi:evopap:2002-02
    Note: The paper will be emailed on request. Please contact evopapers@econ.mpg.de
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Winer, Stanley L. & Ferris, J. Stephen, 2008. "Searching for Keynesianism," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 24(2), pages 294-316, June.
    2. Stanley L. Winer & J Stephen Ferris, 2003. "Searching for Keynes: An Essay on the Political Economy of Fiscal Policy, with Application to Canada, 1870-2000 - revised version," CESifo Working Paper Series 1016, CESifo.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Government expenditures; public goods; transfer payments; game theory; time series;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H5 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:esi:evopap:2002-02. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christoph Mengs (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vamarde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.