Cecilia Mo was quoted in POLITICO:
There’s almost nothing politicians from both parties can agree on these days, except that giving themselves more money is a very bad idea. Which is why a 2.6 percent cost-of-living adjustment on salaries for House members, who currently make $174,000 a year, withered into oblivion over the summer. The optics of the issue are the same elsewhere; in New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was praised last year for turning down a $9,000 increase on a base salary of $300,000 and freezing Parliament’s wages as well…
Renee Bowen, an economist at Stanford, and Cecilia Mo, a political scientist who is now at the University of California, Berkeley, released a paper in 2016 finding that in states where governors earn more money, the minimum wage tends to be higher and corporations tend to contribute a higher share of overall state tax revenue. The data was limited though—the paper, “The Voter’s Blunt Tool,” was mostly theoretical. (Bowen and Mo used game theory to argue that when representatives are paid more, they’re more invested in keeping their jobs by pursuing citizen-friendly policies.) In a 2004 paper comparing the pay of U.S. governors, LSE academic Timothy Besley concluded that there simply hasn’t been enough research on what goes into the making of a political class. It is, Besley writes, “weakly encouraging to the view that pay rates of politicians affect behavior,” but “the efficacy of monetary incentives in political settings is far from clear.”
The full article is available here.
