Koleman S. Strumpf's research while affiliated with Wake Forest University and other places

Publications (27)

Article
We study the geographic distribution of military supply contracts during World War II. This is a unique case, where $3 trillion current day dollars was spent. We find robust evidence consistent with the hypothesis that economic factors dominated the allocation of supply contracts, and that political factors—or at least winning the 1944 presidential...
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Full-text available
Many public health policies are rooted in findings from medical and epidemiological studies that fail to consider behavioral influences. Using nearly 50 years of data from Framingham Heart Study male participants, we evaluate the longevity consequences of different lifetime smoking patterns by jointly estimating smoking behavior and health outcomes...
Article
Even as we approach the twentieth anniversary of widespread file sharing, its impact on the sale of copyrighted material remains in dispute. We contributed to this debate with an early study, “The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis,” that was published in the Journal of Political Economy in 2007. Perhaps surprisingly, we...
Article
The advent of file sharing has considerably weakened effective copyright protection. Today, more than 60% of Internet traffic consists of consumers sharing music, movies, books, and games. Yet, despite the popularity of the new technology, file sharing has not undermined the incentives of authors to produce new works. We argue that the effect of fi...
Article
Political future markets, in which investors bet on election outcomes, are often thought a recent invention. Such markets in fact have a long history in many Western countries. This paper traces the operation of political futures markets back to 16th Century Italy, 18th Century Britain, and 19th Century United States. In the United States, election...
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Full-text available
We develop a demand model for goods that are subject to habit formation. We show that consumption plans of forward-looking individuals depend on preferences, current period prices, and individual beliefs about the evolution of future prices. Moreover, an increase in price uncertainty reduces consumption along the optimal path. With smoking as our a...
Article
For industries ranging from software to pharmaceuticals and entertainment, there is an intense debate about the appropriate level of protection for intellectual property. The Internet provides a natural crucible to assess the implications of reduced protection because it drastically lowers the cost of copying information. In this paper, we analyze...
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Full-text available
Individual smoking behavior persists over time, but is this repeated behavior attributed to past use or individual heterogeneity? Using longitudinal data on teens from all 50 United States from 1988 to 1992, we find a significant causal role for endogenous past cigarette consumption even after controlling extensively for observed and unobserved het...
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Full-text available
While many developing countries have devolved health care responsibilities to local governments in recent years, no study has examined whether decentralisation actually leads to greater health sector allocative efficiency. This paper approaches this question by modeling local government budgeting decisions under decentralisation. The model leads to...
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This paper analyzes the large and often well-organized markets for betting on U.S. presidential elections that operated between 1868 and 1940. Four main points are addressed. First, we show that the market did a remarkable job forecasting elections in an era before scientific polling. Second, the market was fairly efficient, despite the limited inf...
Article
The market for sports gambling is structured very differently than the typical financial market.
Article
This paper argues that long-run trends in geographic segregation are inconsistent with models where residential choice depends solely on local public goods (the Tiebout hypothesis). We develop an extension of the Tiebout model that predicts as mobility costs fall, the heterogeneity across communities of individual public good preferences and of pub...
Article
This paper studies a sequential election contest, such as the American presidential primary, in which several elections occur one at a time until a single winner emerges. The conventional wisdom is such a system benefits a candidate favored in the initial elections because of momentum. This paper uncovers a potentially opposing force if participati...
Article
The economic theory of federalism is largely built around the premise that more heterogeneous preferences result in more decentralized policy making. Despite its prominence and importance, this central tenet of economic federalism has never been empirically evaluated. This paper presents the first formal test of the link between preference heteroge...
Article
The conventional wisdom is that government decentralization promotes policy innovation because it allows for several simultaneous experiments by local governments. However, this ignores a learning externality: successful policy experiments provide useful information for all governments. Local governments will ignore this externality, but a central...
Article
This paper provides an economic analysis of illegal sports bookmaking using detailed records from six bookmakers who operated in the 1990s. These operations are struc- tured like standard firms and utilize incentive contracts to induce appropriate employee behavior. The bookmakers oer prices which closely follow the geographically sepa- rated legal...
Article
This paper considers the decision of Pennsylvania communities whether to levy a 1% wage tax. While a simple political economy model suggests this tax should be enacted when many residents are exempted from the tax, the opposite pattern seems to hold. One explanation is that residents may mistrust their government and fear that the new tax monies wi...
Article
The conventional wisdom is that government decentralization promotes policy innovation because it allows for several simultaneous experiments by local governments. However, this ignores a learning externality: successful policy experiments provide useful information for all governments. Local governments will ignore this externality, but a central...
Article
This work considers the state liquor policy over the period 1934 to 1970 as a case study of decentralization. While historical analyses of liquor control have tended to focus on the Prohibition period (Miron and Zweibel 1991), the period following re-legalization in 1933 remains largely unexplored. The 21st Amendment explicitly assigns to states th...
Article
The Tiebout hypothesis, which states that individuals will costlessly sort themselves across local communities according to their public good preferences, is the workhorse of the local public finance literature. This paper develops a test of the Tiebout hypothesis using historical variation in mobility costs. Our extension of the Tiebout model to i...
Article
Explaining the outcome of presidential elections is central to any model of American government. Previous researchers have found that economic conditions explain a substantial portion of the variation in vote outcomes. We make two contributions to this literature. First, we show that state partisan predisposition is the most important explanatory v...
Article
Economists have long recognized that lags in property reassessment benefit infrequent movers because it reduces their property taxes. But in addition reassessment lags can influence the level of property taxes selected under majority rule. I show that short delays in community-wide reassessment increase property tax collections because it reduces t...
Article
It is well established that lump-sum public grants boost local government spending more than an equivalent increase in private income, the flypaper effect. One shortcoming of the related literature is that it presumes all communities have an identical propensity to consume from an intergovernmental grant. This paper is one attempt to allow for a he...

Citations

... However, it has, to the best of our knowledge, remained unexamined to what extent democracies have established themselves as sporting superpowers in the era following the Cold War. (Baime, 2014;Rhode et al., 2018). It helped, and were deliberately initiated, to outpace the war production of Germany, Italy and Japan (the Axis Alliance) and assisted the Alliesamong whom were the Big Three: the United Kingdom, the US and the Soviet Unionin winning the war. ...
... Although the prevalence of U.S. adult smokers has decreased from 20.9% in 2005 to 12.5% in 2020, roughly 30.8 million adults still smoke (CDC, 2022). Multiple studies have shown that smokers experience a reduced life expectancy-at least 5 to 10 years shorter on average-compared with the general population (Darden et al., 2018;Mamun et al., 2004;Sakata et al., 2012). Overall mortality among U.S. smokers is about three times higher than among those who do not smoke cigarettes (Carter et al., 2015). ...
... In recent years, companies have begun to invest in reaching potential customers via this medium (Craig, Flynn & Holody 2017). Simultaneously, the music industry has struggled to stabilize its revenue since the advent of digital streaming (Ruth 2019a;Wlömert & Papies 2016), compounded by losses resulting from the file-sharing era (Oberholzer-Gee & Strumpf 2016). In response to this, both management companies and musicians themselves have begun to explore novel strategies to increase their revenue (Gloor 2014;Haynes & Marshall 2018). ...
... But Bin et al. acknowledge that the two charging strategies can alleviate the conflict between the two channels (Xu et al., 2014). Third is a study of the impact of piracy on manufacturer profits: In terms of empirical research, Papies et al. studied the effect of piracy on the sales of music CDs and estimated that the loss caused by piracy in the music industry was about 6.6% (Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf, 2007). Zentner found that the emergence of online piracy caused the sales of music products to drop by 30% (Zentner, 2006). ...
... Our measure of county status with respect to prohibition draws data from two separate studies that examined this question. Strumpf and Oberholzer-Gee (1999) presented maps of county liquor status over the period 1935-70 (a corrected version of the maps is available in the online version of their paper (Strumpf and Oberholzer-Gee, 2003), 3 while Frendreis and Tatalovich (2010) identified 262 "dry" counties in 2008. To assess change over time, the data for 2008 have to be comparable to the 1970 mapping of "dry" and "wet" counties. ...
... However, findings on political issues have revealed a positive relationship with voting intention (see, Bauer, 2010). Improving on political issues of a country may mean the incumbent government is efficient and effective in improving the standard of living and welfare of the citizens (Elimder, 2010;Strumpf & Phillippe, 1999), which may subsequently lead to positive voting intention. Additionally, it has been found that political issues "may unequivocally create positive voting intention" Fiona, 1981). ...
... At the same time, despite the COVID pandemic's effect on movie theater attendance, the movie industry is faring better than ever before in history (McClintock, 2021). This success is in part because of the industry's embrace of streaming content, a technology that seemed to threaten the industry a decade ago (Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf, 2010). People are buying more books than ever before, with print books still accounting for 76 percent of sales revenues in 2021. ...
... does not play a part in bookmaking". (18) Similarly, the six New Jersey bookmaking businesses investigated by Strumpf (10) in the late 1990s appeared not to be involved in any crime beyond of course that of offering an illegal service to bettors. Typically, these bookmakers were former successful bettors. ...
... Salah satu argumen dasar dari desentralisasi adalah bahwa desentralisasi mampu meningkatkan inovasi kebijakan (Rosen, 1999). Demikian pula para peneliti lainnya, seperti Koleman (2002) yang melihat desentralisasi mendorong tumbuh dan berkembangnya inovasi kebijakan karena memberikan ruang bagi pemerintah daerah untuk menginisiasi cara-cara baru dalam proses bisnis maupun pelayanan publik yang diselenggarakannya. Louis D. Brandeis (1932, dalam Koleman 2002 menyatakan bahwa pemerintah daerah sering dianggap sebagai "laboratorium demokrasi" dimana masing-masing pemerintah daerah berwenang untuk melakukan eksperimen kebijakan yang berbeda. ...
... Despite the obvious risk in the financial markets and the speculative nature of trading, the question of whether the financial market possesses any meaningful similarities to the gambling market has largely been neglected from a research perspective [for a perspective on individual behavior, see Fong (2014); for an analysis of the underlying pricing mechanisms, see Levitt (2004); for a cultural studies perspective, see Nicoll (2013)]. On a conceptual and empirical level, Arthur et al. (2016) have shown that differentiation between investment activities, speculation and gambling can provide valuable new insights. ...