The Dollars and Sense of Ballot Propositions: Estimating Willingness to Pay for Public Goods Using Aggregate Voting Data
本文利用加州一系列公投的投票数据，提出估计公共物品支付意愿的新方法，发现成功提案的年支付意愿从儿童医院的3.47美元到交通基础设施的94.48美元不等，并分析了价格、收入和意识形态对支持率的影响。
This paper develops a new approach for estimating willingness to pay (WTP) for public goods using referendum voting data, and we demonstrate the approach by applying it to a series of referenda in California spanning a wide array of public goods. We find a range of annual WTP values for successful propositions from $3.47 per person for children’s hospitals to $94.48 per person for transportation infrastructure and management. We also impute the per capita cost of each proposition. Comparing these imputed costs to our WTP measure allows us to infer the upper bound on prices that would still ensure passage of a successful measure. Conversely, this comparison provides an estimate of the decrease in prices that would have been necessary to ensure passage of unsuccessful propositions. In addition, we estimate the relative effects of prices, income, and ideology on the support for public goods. We show that both ideology and economic costs have significant impacts, which stands in contrast to previous work that contends that voting patterns are driven purely by fiscal costs.