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State Legislature (state + legislature)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting55%
Law and Criminology22%

Selected Abstracts

ESTIMATING INCUMBENCY EFFECTS IN U.S. STATE LEGISLATURES: A QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

ECONOMICS & POLITICS, Issue 2 2010
YOGESH UPPAL
This paper estimates the incumbency effects in elections to the House of Representatives of 45 states in the United States using a quasi-experimental research method, regression discontinuity design (RDD). This design isolates the causal effect of incumbency from other contemporaneous factors, such as candidate quality, by comparing incumbents and non-incumbents in close contests. I find that incumbents in state legislative elections have a significant advantage, and this advantage serves as a strong barrier to re-entry of challengers who had previously been defeated. However, the incumbency advantage estimated using the RDD is much smaller than are the estimates using existing methods, implying a significant selection bias in the latter. [source]

Th e Decision to Contract Out: A Study of Contracting for E-Government Services in State Governments

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW, Issue 3 2007
Anna Ya Ni
Government contracting, especially for information technology products and services, has accelerated in recent years in the United States. Drawing on the insights of privatization studies, the authors examine the economic and political rationales underpinning government decisions to contract out e-government services. This article tests the extent to which economic and political rationality influence governments' contracting decisions using data from multiple sources: a survey conducted by National Association of State Chief Information Officers, a survey by the National Association of State Procurement Officers, the Council of State Legislatures, and macro-level state data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Important factors affecting the state-level contracting decision are population size, market size, the competitiveness of the bidding process, the professional management of contracts, the partisan composition of legislatures, and political competition. Political rationales appear to play a major role in state contracting decisions. Some arguments associated with markets and economic rationality are clearly politically motivated. [source]

SPERM DONOR OR THWARTED FATHER?

FAMILY COURT REVIEW, Issue 2 2009
HOW WRITTEN AGREEMENT STATUTES ARE CHANGING THE WAY COURTS RESOLVE LEGAL PARENTAGE ISSUES IN ASSISTED REPRODUCTION CASES
In recent years, the use of assisted reproduction has risen dramatically in the United States, allowing individuals who face various reproductive challenges, including infertility or absence of a heterosexual partner, to conceive biological children. While assisted reproduction has expanded to meet the needs of these parents, the legal system remains years behind, often leading to complicated child custody disputes between the parties. State legislatures have responded to the call for increased regulation of legal parentage in assisted reproduction in varying ways, although one popular statutory approach requires a known sperm provider to preserve his intention to parent in a written agreement with the woman. This article will argue that written agreement statutes are an effective means for resolving parentage disputes because of their ability to protect pre-insemination intent and encourage private ordering of conflicts among the parties. These issues will be explored through the lens of a recent case decided by the Kansas Supreme Court, In Re K.M.H., where the court enforced a written agreement statute against a sperm provider despite his equal protection and due process challenges. [source]

Political Restraints and Bureaucratic Discretion: The Case of State Government Rule Making

POLITICS & POLICY, Issue 4 2002
Dennis O. Grady
State government agencies have increased their role and responsibilities in recent years under the national policy of devolution, and as these agencies have produced more rules and regulations to carry out these expanded duties, elected leaders across the states have increased the restraints placed on them. The typical means for doing so is through the State Administrative Procedure Act. This research examines the means by which states provide access channels to groups and individuals during the rulemaking process and the formal controls in place in the mid 1990s to restrict the discretion of state administrative entities during rulemaking. The work relies on information provided by the actors involved in rules review and oversight across the country during that time. After developing indices that compare the states on citizen access and institutional control, we attempt to explain why some states were more restrictive than others over rulemaking. The primary finding is that the shift of partisan control of at least one chamber in the state legislature following the 1994 elections best explains increased restrictiveness across the states. [source]

Cities, Tax Revenues, and a State's Fiscal Future: The Value of Major Urban Centers

PUBLIC BUDGETING AND FINANCE, Issue 1 2006
WILLIAM M. BOWEN
Competition among core cities or urban centers and suburban and rural areas besets numerous states. The competition often occurs amid a political environment in which suburban and rural areas enjoy a political majority in the state legislature, a majority that directs state investments to their areas. With Ohio as a case study, the issues that have created the urban,suburban,rural trichotomy are reviewed and an analysis of the tax returns, by area, to state investments is presented. The findings illustrate that urban centers produce more tax dollars per dollar of state investment than other areas, implying that state underinvestment in urban areas harms overall state tax revenues. [source]

The Common Law Power of the Legislature: Insurer Conversions and Charitable Funds

THE MILBANK QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2005
JILL R. HORWITZ
New York's Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield conversion from nonprofit to for-profit form has considerable legal significance. Three aspects of the conversion make the case unique: the role of the state legislature in directing the disposition of the conversion assets, the fact that it made itself the primary beneficiary of those assets, and the actions of the state attorney general defending the state rather than the public interest in the charitable assets. Drawing on several centuries of common law rejecting the legislative power to direct the disposition of charitable funds, this article argues that the legislature lacked power to control the conversion and direct the disposition of its proceeds and that its actions not only undermined the nonprofit form but also raised constitutional concerns. [source]

STOP US BEFORE WE SPEND AGAIN: INSTITUTIONAL CONSTRAINTS ON GOVERNMENT SPENDING

ECONOMICS & POLITICS, Issue 3 2006
DAVID M. PRIMO
A distributive politics model establishes that the presence of exogenously enforceable spending limits reduces spending and that the effect of executive veto authority is contingent on whether spending is capped and whether the chief executive is a liberal or conservative. Surprisingly, when spending limits are in place, governments with conservative executives spend more than those with more liberal chief executives. Limits are welfare improving, as is the executive veto when it leads to the building of override coalitions. Using 32 years of US state budget data, this paper also establishes empirically that strict balanced budget rules constrain spending and also lead to less pronounced short-term responses to fluctuations in a state's economy. Party variables like divided government and party control of state legislatures tend to have little or no direct effect, with political institutions and economic indicators explaining much of the variation in state spending. [source]

Guaranteeing Defined Contribution Pensions: The Option to Buy Back a Defined Benefit Promise

JOURNAL OF RISK AND INSURANCE, Issue 1 2003
Marie-Eve Lachance
After a long commitment to defined benefit (DB) pension plans for U.S. public sector employees, many state legislatures have introduced defined contribution (DC) plans for their public employees. In this process, investment risk that was previously borne by state DB plans has now devolved to employees covered by the new DC plans. In light of this trend, some states have introduced a guarantee mechanism to help protect DC plan participants. One such guarantee takes the form of an option permitting DC plan participants to buy back their DB benefit for a price. This article develops a theoretical framework to analyze the option design and illustrate how employee characteristics influence the option's cost. We illustrate the potential impact of a buy-back option in a pension reform enacted recently by the State of Florida for its public employees. If employees were to exercise the buy-back option optimally, the market value of this option could represent up to 100 percent of the DC contributions over their work life. [source]

Youth Transfer Decisions: Exploring County Variations

JUVENILE AND FAMILY COURT JOURNAL, Issue 1 2003
NANCY RODRIGUEZ PH.D.
ABSTRACT In an effort to control violent and chronic juvenile offenders, many state legislatures have created statutes that give exclusive jurisdiction to adult criminal courts for certain violent offenses. Much research has been conducted on juvenile transfers, but relatively few studies rely on official and self-report data to evaluate this process. By using data from four counties within Washington State, this study examines how legal, extra-legal, and organizational variables impact waiver decisions. In cases where youths were selected for transfer proceedings, data from official records are used to compare transfers within and between counties. In addition, interview data with juvenile court personnel (e.g., juvenile court judges, probation officers, legal advisors) are used to assess the factors associated with transfer decisions. Policy implications are presented along with recommendations for future research. [source]