Groundwater extraction for irrigation purposes: The case of asymmetric players.
with Julia de Frutos Cachorro & Jesus Marín-Solano
Published in Water Economics and Policy, 2450004 (2024).
In this paper, we address the problem of groundwater exploitation by heterogeneous farmers for irrigation purposes. In particular, we study the possible inefficiencies that can arise in this type of common resource problem by considering the dynamic and strategic interactions between groundwater users. To this end, we build a two-player differential game in which two representative types of farmers display different characteristics related to their agricultural activity. More precisely, they can have different water demand functions, extraction costs, crop productivity, land types and time-preferences. Conditions are studied for the existence and uniqueness of the cooperative and non-cooperative solutions asymptotically converging to a steady state. The model is then applied to the case study of the Western La Mancha aquifer. Effects of the different heterogeneities on the degree of inefficiency of non-cooperative solutions with respect to cooperative solutions are analyzed. Numerical results show that cooperation is always beneficial for the environment and for the agents: It results in higher levels of groundwater stock and total welfare. Moreover, considering heterogeneous time preferences is crucial for reducing the inefficiency of non-cooperation with respect to cooperation, regardless of the other asymmetries between farmers.
Unpacking welfare chauvinism in the UK: How fairness preferences affect willingness to exclude newcomers from welfare beneficiaries
with Linda Dezső
Welfare chauvinism—the restriction of immigrants' access to social benefits relative to natives—poses a central challenge to the sustainability of redistributive social policy in increasingly diverse European welfare states. This research examines whether variation in the restrictiveness of individual welfare-chauvinistic attitudes is more strongly associated with general distributive preferences or with immigrant-targeted beliefs and attitudes. Using a pre-registered survey of 1,822 UK residents, we focus on Universal Credit (UC), the UK's primary means-tested benefit. We document that 91% of respondents apply stricter eligibility criteria to immigrants than to equally needy natives, most commonly conditioning access on prior contributions or legal integration (i.e., settled status or citizenship). Using dominance analysis, we show that immigrant-specific beliefs—such as perceptions of welfare abuse, attributions of responsibility for poverty, and anti-foreigner attitudes—account for substantially more variation in welfare chauvinism than do general redistributive preferences. In contrast, experimentally elicited fairness preferences are not robustly associated with the restrictiveness of immigrants' access to benefits. Our findings suggest that welfare chauvinism is driven primarily by group-specific deservingness judgments rather than by general views about redistribution.
Polarization and turnout: How participation uncertainty drives policy divergence and suppresses votes
with Christoph Kuzmics
How does polarization and electoral uncertainty affect voter mobilization? Does one party’s goal to increase voter turnout cause polarization? To answer these questions, we set up a two-stage model of political competition that comprises primaries and a general election. We assume that there is electoral uncertainty (noise) and that voters act as rule-utilitarians (i.e. ethically) in the general election. We find that, fixing the policy positions, higher political polarization leads to higher turnout, and its marginal influence on the turnout depends on the voters' utility function. At the same time, higher electoral uncertainty has two opposite effects on the turnout: direct negative and indirect positive (through polarization). Moreover, despite its direct negative effect on the turnout, small uncertainty allows the turnout to stay high when policies of both parties are converging to the median of the electorate.