CV

Contact Information
Graduate School of Business
4th Floor - PhD Office
518 Memorial Way
Stanford, CA 94305

Phone: (650) 269-2838
E-mail: ahirsch@stanford.edu

• "Learning and Teaching in a Model of Policy Choice and Implementation," - Job Market Paper
      Additional Proofs

  Abstract: Political actors often disagree about which policies or strategies will most effectively achieve shared goals. In this paper I analyze a game of repeated policy choice and implementation between a principal and an agent whose policy disagreement is motivated solely by beliefs. I show that even in the presence of disagreement, principals who are responsive to outcomes - in the sense of staying with successful policies and abandoning failed ones - better motivate agents than those who "stay the course'' after failures. I also show that disagreement and learning create a novel rationale for deference; a principal sometimes allows an agent to implement his desired policy only to persuade him through failure that the policy is ineffective. The model provides insight into personnel management and institutional choice in a variety of political organizations with intrinsically motivated members, including public bureaucracies, NGOs, and political campaigns.

• "Theory Driven Bias in Ideal Point Estimates - A Monte Carlo Study," - Invited to Revise and Resubmit at Political Analysis
      Matlab Programs

  Abstract: I analyze the use of ideal point estimates for testing pivot theories of lawmaking, such as Krehbiel's pivotal politics and Cox and McCubbins's party cartel model. Pivot theories predict a gridlock interval of the policy space within which no status quo policy can be dislodged. Clinton (2008) argues that one prediction of pivot theories is that the preferences of legislators located within gridlock intervals will be statistically indistinguishable. I show that Clinton's prediction only holds in small sample when voting is near perfect, and demonstrate with Monte Carlo simulations that the problem is unlikely to be consequential with US Congressional voting data. My analysis suggests that the distribution governing the underlying agenda is alone unlikely to significantly affect ideal points estimates, which is broadly encouraging for their use in theory testing.

• "Policy-Specific Information and Informal Agenda Power," joint with Kenneth W. Shotts, Invited to Revise and Resubmit at the American Journal of Political Science
      Winner of the CQ Press Award for best paper presented in legislative studies at the 2008 APSA Annual Meeting
  

  Abstract: In Gilligan and Krehbiel's (1987) model of procedural choice in legislatures, a committee exerts costly effort to acquire private information about an unknown state of the world, and partial delegation through a restrictive rule is shown to encourage specialization. We instead develop a model of committee specialization as the production of policy valence, i.e., a committee can invest to make a specific bill higher quality to all legislators regardless of their ideology. In contrast to the canonical result, we show that a restrictive rule always discourages specialization, because it gives free agenda power to a committee who would otherwise attempt to exercise informal agenda power by producing a higher quality bill. Our finding applies broadly to models of expertise and delegation in political institutions, which almost uniformly model specialization similarly to Gilligan and Krehbiel.

• "Common Agency Lobbying over Coalitions and Policy," joint with David P. Baron, Under review

  Abstract: This paper presents a theory of common agency lobbying in which policy-interested lobbies can first influence the choice of a governing coalition, and then influence the legislative bargaining over policies. Equilibria can involve active lobbying at both stages of the governing process. Contributions can also be made to defeat a policy proposal, and although those contributions are never successful they can influence coalition choice. The equilibrium policy in the legislative bargaining stage is efficient given the coalition selected, but the equilibrium coalition need not be efficient. Lobbying can also lead to the preservation of the status quo and lobby-induced gridlock. An example is presented to identify the multiplicity of equilibria and provide a full characterization of an equilibrium.