renewable natural resource management and use without markets natural resources by their nature are not readily bent to the status of private property efficient resource use is complicated by jurisdictional externalities public goods non use values and beneficiaries spatially separated from the location of resources the task is made more challenging by ecological complexity that obscures cause benefits and effects costs and dramatic time lags between individual actions and subsequent social consequences that together with substantial uncertainty introduce the chance of irreversibilities resource economists have played a major role in the literature on externalities the development of individual transferable quotas non market valuation techniques and common property management

better schools less crime i estimate the impact of attending a first choice middle or high school on adult crime using data from public school choice lotteries in charlotte mecklenburg school district cms seven years after random assignment lottery winners had been arrested for fewer serious crimes and had spent fewer days incarcerated the gain in school quality as measured by peer and teacher inputs was equivalent to moving from one of the lowest ranked schools to one at the district average the reduction in crime comes largely from years after enrollment in the preferred school is complete the impacts are concentrated among high risk youth who commit about 50 less crime across several different outcome measures and scalings of crime by severity i find suggestive evidence that school quality explains more of the impact in high school whereas peer effects are more important in middle school copyright 2011 oxford university press

50th anniversary article option pricing valuation models and applications this paper surveys the literature on option pricing from its origins to the present an extensive review of valuation methods for european and american style claims is provided applications to complex securities and numerical methods are surveyed emphasis is placed on recent trends and developments in methodology and modeling

do better schools matter parental valuation of elementary education the evaluation of numerous school reforms requires an understanding of the value of better schools given the difficulty of calculating the relationship between school quality and student outcomes i turn to another method and use house prices to infer the value parents place on school quality i look within school districts at houses located on attendance district boundaries houses then differ only by the elementary school the child attends i thereby effectively remove the variation in neighborhoods taxes and school spending i find that parents are willing to pay 2 5 percent more for a 5 percent increase in test scores this finding is robust to a number of sensitivity checks

renewable resource economists and policy what differences have we made abstract this paper surveys developments in fisheries economics and fisheries policy over the past half century early work clarified the nature of the economic issues associated with open access laying the groundwork for changes in policies after coastal nations expanded their jurisdictions in 1976 perhaps the most important point made by economists is that property rights matter and that open access conditions create economic as well as biological problems the policy process has begun to create property rights systems although many of the world s fisheries still operate under mixed systems of regulations and open access incentives

effects of free choice among public schools in this paper i investigate the impact of a programme in tel aviv israel that terminated an existing inter district busing integration programme and allowed students free choice among public schools the identification is based on difference in differences and regression discontinuity designs that yield various alternative comparison groups drawn from untreated tangent neighbourhoods and adjacent cities across identification methods and comparison groups the results consistently suggest that choice significantly reduces the drop out rate and increases the cognitive achievements of high school students it also improves behavioural outcomes such as teacher student relationships and students social acclimation and satisfaction at school and reduces the level of violence and classroom disruption

school choice school quality and postsecondary attainment we study the impact of a public school choice lottery in charlotte mecklenburg schools on college enrollment and degree completion we find a significant overall increase in college attainment among lottery winners who attend their first choice school using rich administrative data on peers teachers course offerings and other inputs we show that the impacts of choice are strongly predicted by gains on several measures of school quality gains in attainment are concentrated among girls girls respond to attending a better school with higher grades and increases in college preparatory course taking while boys do not

the analytic valuation of american options no analytic solutions exists for the valuation of american options written on futures contracts and foreign currencies for which early exercise may be optimal this article formulates the american option valuation problem in economically and mathematically meaningful ways this enables us to derive valuation formulas for american options the properties associated with the optimal exercise boundary are examined and a numerical technique to implement the valuation formulas is presented article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

the effect of school choice on participants evidence from randomized lotteries school choice has become an increasingly prominent strategy for enhancing academic achievement to evaluate the impact on participants we exploit randomized lotteries that determine high school admission in the chicago public schools compared to those students who lose lotteries students who win attend high schools that are better in a number of dimensions including peer achievement and attainment levels nonetheless we find little evidence that winning a lottery provides any systematic benefit across a wide variety of traditional academic measures lottery winners do however experience improvements on a subset of nontraditional outcome measures such as self reported disciplinary incidents and arrest rates

private property and economic efficiency a study of a common pool resource abstract the british columbia halibut fishery provides a natural experiment of the effects of privatizing the commons using firm level data from the fishery 2 years before private harvesting rights were introduced the year they were implemented and 3 years afterward a stochastic frontier is estimated to test for changes in technical allocative and economic efficiency the study indicates that 1 the short run efficiency gains from privatization may take several years to materialize and can be compromised by restrictions on transferability duration and divisibility of the property right 2 substantial long run gains in efficiency can be jeopardized by preexisting regulations and the bundling of the property right to the capital stock and 3 the gains from privatization are not just in terms of cost efficiency but include important benefits in revenue and product form

good principals or good peers parental valuation of school characteristics tiebout equilibrium and the incentive effects of competition among jurisdictions good principals or good peers parental valuation of school characteristics tiebout equilibrium and the incentive effects of competition among jurisdictions by j esse m r othstein school choice policies may by aligning admin istrators incentives with parental demand yield improved efficiency in educational production milton friedman 1962 john e chubb and terry m moe 1990 but eric a hanushek 1981 cautions if the efficiency of our school systems is due to poor incentives for teachers and admin istrators coupled with poor decision making by consumers it would be unwise to expect much from programs that seek to strengthen market forces in the selection of schools p 35 empha sis added poor decision making is not required parents may rationally choose schools with pleasant surroundings athletic facilities cultural advantages ibid p 34 over those that most efficiently pursue academic performance they may prefer poorly run schools with good peer groups over those that are more effective but en roll worse students j douglas willms and frank h echols 1992 1993 or they may simply be unable to identify effective schools thomas j kane and douglas o staiger 2002 any factor that leads parents to choose any but the most effective available schools will tend to dilute the incentives for efficient management that choice might otherwise create this study examines the distribution of stu dent outcomes across schools within metropol itan housing markets for evidence on parental demand economists have long noted that par ents choices among residential locations are potentially informative about how more com plete choice systems may operate charles m tiebout 1956 melvin v borland and roy m howsen 1992 caroline m hoxby 2000 rothstein 2005 1 i ask whether school effec tiveness plays a sufficiently important role in these decisions to create meaningful incentives for more productive school management i adopt a specific understanding of effective ness appropriate to the question at hand a substantial portion of between school differ ences in student performance can be attributed to differences in student body composition this portion includes the effects of individual stu dent characteristics on their own test scores any direct peer group effects and any indirect ef fects of a school s composition on the quality of its instruction if wealthy schools attract better teachers joseph r antos and sherwin rosen 1975 or more parental involvement this is for my purposes a peer effect it depends on the quality of the school s administration only via school composition a school administrator cannot attract demand by offering a school with wealthy students as these can be offered only if wealthy families demand the school in the first place only the remaining portion of a school s contribution to test scores is effectiveness 2 department of economics and woodrow wilson school princeton university wallace hall 3 rd floor princeton nj 08544 e mail jrothst princeton edu i thank alan auerbach tom davidoff caroline hoxby jus tin mccrary rob mcmillan john quigley cecilia rouse emmanuel saez till von wachter four anonymous refer ees editor robert moffitt seminar participants at several institutions and especially david card for helpful sugges tions i am grateful to the college board for essential data and to a national science foundation graduate research fellowship and the fisher center for real estate and urban economics at uc berkeley for funding see cecilia elena rouse 1998 julie b cullen et al 2005 william g howell et al 2002 and alan b krueger and pei zhu 2004 for analyses of several existing nonresidential choice programs though none focuses on the particular issue studied here this definition avoids the need to find observable de terminants of effectiveness which have proved elusive hanushek 1986 my definition however ignores a school s contribution to nontest outcomes e g sports or music if such outcomes motivate parental choices i will conclude that parents do not demand effective schools of

does competition among public schools benefit students and taxpayers tiebout choice among districts is the most powerful market force in american public education naive estimates of its effects are biased by endogenous district formation i derive instruments from the natural boundaries in a metropolitan area my results suggest that metropolitan areas with greater tiebout choice have more productive public schools and less private schooling little of the effect of tiebout choice works through its effect on household sorting this finding may be explained by another finding students are equally segregated by school in metropolitan areas with greater and lesser degrees of tiebout choice among districts

limited entry licensing insights from a duration model limited entry is used to manage many fisheries effectiveness depends on a program s ability to control aggregate fishing power which fleet size and composition both affect this article analyzes fleet composition and attrition in a limited entry fishery the california red sea urchin fishery it explores the dynamics of heterogeneity in catch and revenue and applies duration analysis to study individual fisherman attrition using both individual level and time varying covariates the results show that the fleet is becoming more homogenous but also more potent and spatially mobile regulations such as size limits and season restrictions tend to increase attrition

teachers pay for performance in the long run the dynamic pattern of treatment effects on students educational and labour market outcomes in adulthood this paper examines the dynamic effects of a teachers pay for performance experiment on long term outcomes at adulthood the program led to a gradual increase in university education of the treated high school students reaching an increase of 0 25 years of schooling by age 28 30 the effects on employment and earnings were initially negative coinciding with a higher rate of enrollment in university but became positive and significant with time these gains are largely mediated by the positive effect of the program on several high school outcomes including quantitative and qualitative gains in the high stakes matriculation exams

impacts of disability on poverty quasi experimental evidence from landmine amputees in cambodia abstract this paper examines the impacts of disability on poverty in rural cambodia i combine a natural experiment and spatial blocking first i focus on amputation among adults due to landmines which is free from measurement errors and the onset of which is an exogenous shock second i conduct an original survey stratified by disability status within villages where people have shared the same local vulnerability to landmine accidents this research design enables matching analysis within small geographic areas treating demographic factors such as household formation and fertility as endogenous this quasi experimental study finds that amputation greatly reduces consumption and income but not subjective well being i e adaptation increasing poverty and augmenting its magnitude disability triggers a vicious circle of reduced work low earnings and limited accumulation of productive assets and social capital this work cum asset channel leads to adverse intergenerational effects on child schooling and child labor

pricing and hedging path dependent options under the cev process much of the work on path dependent options assumes that the underlying asset price follows geometric brownian motion with constant volatility this paper uses a more general assumption for the asset price process that provides a better fit to the empirical observations we use the so called constant elasticity of variance cev diffusion model where the volatility is a function of the underlying asset price we derive analytical formulae for the prices of important types of path dependent options under this assumption we demonstrate that the prices of options which depend on extrema such as barrier and lookback options can be much more sensitive to the specification of the underlying price process than standard call and put options and show that a financial institution that uses the standard geometric brownian motion assumption is exposed to significant pricing and hedging errors when dealing in path dependent options

the aggregate effect of school choice evidence from a two stage experiment in india we present experimental evidence on the impact of a school choice program in the indian state of andhra pradesh that provided students with a voucher to finance attending a private school of their choice the study design featured a unique two stage lottery based allocation of vouchers that created both student level and market level experiments which allows us to study the individual and the aggregate effects of school choice including spillovers after two and four years of the program we find no difference between test scores of lottery winners and losers on telugu native language math english and science social studies suggesting that the large cross sectional differences in test scores across public and private schools mostly reflect omitted variables however private schools also teach hindi which is not taught by the public schools and lottery winners have much higher test scores in hindi furthermore the mean cost per student in the private schools in our sample was less than a third of the cost in public schools thus private schools in this setting deliver slightly better test score gains than their public counterparts better on hindi and same in other subjects and do so at a substantially lower cost per student finally we find no evidence of spillovers on public school students who do not apply for the voucher or on private school students suggesting that the positive effects on voucher winners did not come at the expense of other students jel codes c93 h44 h52 i21 o15

choice competition and pupil achievement choice and competition in education have recently found growing support from both policy makers and academics yet evidence on the actual benefits of market orientated reforms is at best mixed moreover although the economic rationale for choice and competition is clear in existing work there is rarely an attempt to distinguish between the two concepts in this paper we study whether pupils in primary schools in england with a wider range of school choices achieve better academic outcomes than those whose choice is more limited and whether primary schools facing more competition perform better than those in a more monopolistic situation in simple least squares regression models we find little evidence of a link between choice and achievement but uncover a small positive association between competition and school performance yet this could be related to endogenous school location or pupil sorting in fact an instrumental variable strategy based on discontinuities generated by admissions district boundaries suggests that the performance gains from greater school competition are limited only when we restrict our attention to voluntary aided schools which have more freedom in managing their governance and admission practices do we find some evidence of a positive causal link between competition and pupil achievement jel i20 h70 r5

the effect of temporal closures and individual quotas on fishing trip duration a hazard function analysis in this article we assess the effect that two different fishery management regimes have on the duration of the fishing trip a basic theoretical model predicts that trip duration should increase with temporal closures and decrease with an individual quota system therefore we propose and apply an empirical trip duration model estimations are based on data for the pelagic fleet in central southern chile conforming to the theoretical predictions the results indicate that temporal closures tend to increase trip duration whereas individual quotas reduce it moreover the regulatory regimes also affect the magnitude of the impact that other determinants have on trip duration the results are consistent with increased efficiency in fleet operation under an individual quota system

pde methods for pricing barrier options abstract this paper presents an implicit method for solving pde models of contingent claims prices with general algebraic constraints on the solution examples of constraints include barriers and early exercise features in this unified framework barrier options with or without american style features can be handled in the same way either continuously or discretely monitored barriers can be accommodated as can time varying barriers the underlying asset may pay out either a constant dividend yield or a discrete dollar dividend the use of the implicit method leads to convergence in fewer time steps compared to explicit schemes this paper also discusses extending the basic methodology to the valuation of two asset barrier options and the incorporation of automatic time stepping

private school vouchers and student achievement an evaluation of the milwaukee parental choice program in 1990 wisconsin began providing vouchers to a small number of low income students to attend nonsectarian private schools controlling for individual fixed effects i compare the test scores of students selected to attend a participating private school with those of unsuccessful applicants and other students from the milwaukee public schools i find that students in the milwaukee parental choice program had faster math score gains than but similar reading score gains to the comparison groups the results appear robust to data imputations and sample attrition although these deficiencies of the data should be kept in mind when interpreting the results

the impact of school choice on student outcomes an analysis of the chicago public schools we explore the impact of school choice on student outcomes in the context of open enrollment within the chicago public schools cps roughly half of the students opt out of their assigned high school to attend a different cps school and these students are much more likely than those who remain in their assigned schools to graduate to determine the source of this apparent benefit we compare outcomes across i similar students with differential access to schooling options and ii travelers and non travelers within the same school the results suggest that other than for students who select career academies the observed cross sectional benefits are likely spurious

pricing options on scalar diffusions an eigenfunction expansion approach this paper develops an eigenfunction expansion approach to pricing options on scalar diffusion processes all contingent claims are unbundled into portfolios of primitive securities calledeigensecurities eigensecurities are eigenvectors eigenfunctions of the pricing operator present value operator all computational work is at the stage of finding eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the pricing operator the pricing is then immediate by the linearity of the pricing operator and the eigenvector property of eigensecurities to illustrate the computational power of the method we develop two applications pricing vanilla single and double barrier options under the constant elasticity of variance cev process and interest rate knock out options in the cox ingersoll ross cir term structure model

private aquaculture and commercial fisheries bioeconomics of salmon ranching abstract this paper shows that common property problems associated with open access salmon ranching in the absence of a commercial fishery result in inefficiency characterized by overstocking the presence of an open access fishery presents additional common property problems which will inhibit the development of fish ranching at prices where salmon ranching does occur the open access commercial fishery will tend to overexploit the natural fish stock to a greater extent than if there were no salmon ranching it is shown that there exists a range of prices where both fish stocks can coexist with open access however there is a limit price above which the natural stock will be driven to extinction through overfishing stimulated by stock from salmon ranchers the range of prices under which both species can coexist can be increased through either restrictions of fishery effort or reducing the catchability of aquacultured stock cooperative management of both aquaculture and commercial fishing results in profits from both activities and will not cause extinction of the natural fish stock

competition in public service provision the role of not for profit providers abstract with public services such as health and education it is not straightforward for consumers to assess the quality of provision many such services are provided by monopoly not for profit providers and there is concern that for profit providers may increase profit at the expense of quality this paper explores the implications of entry by for profit providers when there is unobserved quality the model generates three key policy relevant insights first by developing a novel approach to competition between different organizational forms it frames the relevant trade offs precisely second it shows the value of keeping an incumbent not for profit as an active provider third it characterizes the optimal payment or voucher value to an entrant for each consumer who switches in a way that can be applied empirically

water for life the impact of the privatization of water services on child mortality while most countries are committed to increasing access to safe water and thereby reducing child mortality there is little consensus on how to actually improve water services one important proposal under discussion is whether to privatize water provision in the 1990s argentina embarked on one of the largest privatization campaigns in the world including the privatization of local water companies covering approximately 30 percent of the country s municipalities using the variation in ownership of water provision across time and space generated by the privatization process we find that child mortality fell 8 percent in the areas that privatized their water services and that the effect was largest 26 percent in the poorest areas we check the robustness of these estimates using cause specific mortality while privatization is associated with significant reductions in deaths from infectious and parasitic diseases it is uncorrelated with deaths from causes unrelated to water conditions

performance pay and teachers effort productivity and grading ethics this paper presents evidence about the effect of individual monetary incentives on english and math teachers in israel teachers were rewarded with cash bonuses for improving their students performance in high school matriculation exams the main identification strategy is based on measurement error in the assignment to treatment variable that produced a randomized treatment sample the incentives led to significant improvements in test taking rates conditional pass rates and mean test scores improvements were mediated through changes in teaching methods enhanced after school teaching and increased responsiveness to students needs no evidence was found of manipulation of test scores by teachers

identification of treatment effects under imperfect matching with an application to chinese elite schools abstract this paper extends the treatment effect framework for causal inference to contexts in which the instrument appears in a data set that can only be linked imperfectly to the treatment and outcome variables contained in another data set to overcome this problem i form all pairwise links between information on the instrument and information on the treatment and outcome matched by the commonly recorded personal characteristics in both data sets i show how these imperfect conditional matches can be used to identify both the average and distributional treatment effects for compliers of the common units of the two data sets this multiple data source approach is then applied to analyze the effect of attending an elite middle school in a chinese city where schools admissions lottery records can only be linked imperfectly to the administrative student records

american capped call options on dividend paying assets this article addresses the problem of valuing american call options with caps on dividendpaying assets since early exercise is allowed the valuation problem requires the determination of optimal exercise policies options with two types of caps are analyzed constant caps and caps with a constant growth rate for constant caps it is optimal to exercise at the first time at which the underlying asset s price equals or exceeds the minimum of the cap and the optimal exercise boundary for the corresponding uncapped option for caps that grow at a constant rate the optimal exercise strategy can be

the valuation of american barrier options using the decomposition technique in this paper we propose an alternative approach for pricing and hedging american barrier options speci cally we obtain an analytic representation for the value and hedge parameters of barrier options using the decomposition technique of separating the european option value from the early exercise premium this allows us to identify some new put call symmetry relations and the homogeneity in price parameters of the optimal exercise boundary these properties can be utilized to increase the computational e ciency of our method in pricing and hedging american options our implementation of the obtained solution indicates that the proposed approach is both e cient and accurate in computing option values and option hedge parameters our numerical results also demonstrate that the approach dominates the existing lattice methods in both accuracy and e ciency in particular the method is free of the di culty that existing

a model of regulated open access resource use abstract this paper develops a model of regulated open access resource exploitation the regulatory model assumes that regulators are goal oriented choosing target harvest levels according to a safe stock concept these harvest quotas are implemented by setting season lengths conditioned on the industry fishing capacity the industry enters until rents are dissipated conditioned on season length regulations harvest levels fishing capacity season length and biomass are determined jointly using parameter estimates from the long regulated north pacific halibut fishery predictions of these variables from the regulated open access model are compared to predictions that arise from the gordon model

long term educational consequences of secondary school vouchers evidence from administrative records in colombia colombia s paces program provided over 125 000 poor children with vouchers that covered the cost of private secondary school the vouchers were renewable annually conditional on adequate academic progress since many vouchers were assigned by lottery program effects can reliably be assessed by comparing lottery winners and losers estimates using administrative records suggest the paces program increases secondary school completion rates by 15 to 20 percent correcting for the greater percentage of lottery winners taking college admissions tests the program increased test scores by two tenths of a standard deviation in the distribution of potential test scores jel i21 j12 i28

independent schools and long run educational outcomes evidence from sweden s large scale voucher reform this paper evaluates average educational performance effects of an expanding independentschool sector at the compulsory level by assessing a radical voucher reform that was implemented in sweden in 1992 starting from a situation where all public schools were essentially local monopolists the degree of independent schools has developed very differently across municipalities over time as a result of this reform we regress the change in educational performance outcomes on the increase in the share of independent school students between swedish municipalities we find that an increase in the share of independent school students improves average performance at the end of compulsory school as well as long run educational outcomes we show that these effects are very robust with respect to a number of potential issues such as grade inflation and pre reform trends however for most outcomes we do not detect positive and statistically significant effects until approximately a decade after the reform this is notable but not surprising given that it took time for independent schools to become more than a marginal phenomenon in sweden we do not find positive effects on school expenditures hence the educational performance effects are interpretable as positive effects on school productivity we further find that the average effects primarily are due to external effects e g school competition and not that independent school students gain significantly more than public school students

on the origins of gender gaps in human capital short and long term consequences of teachers biases abstract we estimate the effect of primary school teachers gender biases on boys and girls academic achievements during middle and high school and on the choice of advanced level courses in math and sciences during high school in tel aviv israel we measure bias using class gender differences in scores between school exams graded by teachers and national exams graded blindly by external examiners for identification we rely on the random assignment of teachers and students to classes in primary schools our results suggest that assignment to a teacher with a greater bias in favor of girls boys has positive effects on girls boys achievements such gender biases have also positive impact on girls boys enrollment in advanced level math courses in high school these results suggest that teachers biased behavior at early stages of schooling has long run implications for occupational choices and earnings at adulthood because enrollment in advanced courses in math and science in high school is a prerequisite for post secondary schooling in engineering computer science and so on

the effect of competition on the efficiency of secondary schools in england abstract in this paper we calculate the technical efficiencies based upon multiple outputs school exam performance and attendance rates of all secondary schools in england over the period 1993 1998 we then estimate models to examine the determinants of efficiency in a particular year and the determinants of the change in efficiency over the period our results suggest that the greater the degree of competition between schools the more efficient they are the strength of this effect has also increased over time which is consistent with the evolution of the quasi market in secondary education competition is also found to be an important determinant of the change in efficiency over time there is however some evidence of conditional convergence between schools

stochastic bycatch informational asymmetry and discarding abstract the existing literature i examines bycatch and discard behavior in a static framework and ii treats bycatch as a deterministic process uniform across vessels using a dynamic representative agent model in a two stock resource this paper explores strategic interactions between a social planner and two groups of harvesters one of which imposes a stochastic technological externality bycatch on the other in addition to limitations on entry and the number of trips taken in each industry three bycatch control instruments are compared to the unconstrained case taxes trip limits and value based quotas implementation and enforcement costs aside taxes dominate both types of quota and value limits outperform trip limits by eliminating one type of discarding in simulations relative performance depends upon variance in the bycatch process differences in the ex vessel prices of stocks relative efficiency of the harvester types and fixed costs on the trip and industry margins

production and investment in natural resource industries there has been a recent tendency for economists to view natural resource scarcity as a diminishing threat to man s existence and his ability to produce an abundant supply of worldly goods see john v krutilla this change in view has emanated from the world s experience of the last few decades with technological development and the absence of any evidence that this rapid accumulation of technical knowledge will cease in some respects one might think that modern technology has removed the need for an economic theory of conservation temporal allocation of natural resources on the other hand conservation of natural resources can now be looked upon with less emotion since the dire consequences of too rapid exploitation are no longer a threat the question of conservation is thus a cold economic problem removed from many of its older value connotations there is indeed considerable effort taking place in the economics profession to fill this need for a quantitative economic theory of conservation however with one exception vernon smith focus has been limited to specific resources earlier works by lewis c gray and harold hotelling concerning the theory of the mine have recently been extended in numerous papers see r cummings and 0 burt richard l gordon anthony scott 1967 problems associated with petroleum production are considered in paul davidson and the fishery is considered in j a crutchfield and arnold zellner h scott gordon james quirk and vernon smith anthony scott 1955 and ralph turvey an extensive literature exists on the temporal allocation of groundwater two recent contributions are gardner brown and charles b mcguire and burt a logical problem has been encountered however in efforts to examine the optimum allocation of a natural resource over time without explicitly considering the rate of investment associated with resource use this difficulty stems from the long life of many capital items used in the process of exploiting the natural resource earlier studies have either tacitly or explicitly amortized costs of investment associated with resource use and proceeded as though all costs of production were essentially variable smith was the first to explicitly bring capital investment into a production model for natural resources and his work was followed by the authors where only exhaustible resources were considered more recently quirk and smith have introduced a dynamic model of the fishery in which capital investment is treated explicitly it seems then that there is a need for a comprehensive model for simultaneously optimizing the rate of resource use and investment in natural resource industries

the compleat fish wars biological and dynamic interactions abstract in this article we study an example of a fishery in which there are two agents each harvesting two species of fish there are two externalities in the model the dynamic externality studied in levhari and mirman 1980 and the biological externality examined in fischer and mirman 1992 this model allows us to study the interactions between agents in a model in which the species of fish interact we find the unique closed loop nash equilibrium in the context of a differential game and we compare the resulting catch ratios to the results of the earlier papers which allow for only one externality we also study the efficiency of the solution

applying regression discontinuity designs to american political development students of american political development apd have long been interested in questions related to the development of state capacity in the united states the apparent macro level nature of those questions may appear to discourage the pursuit of micro level causal inferences yet attention to causal inference is not necessarily incompatible with inquiry into macro level phenomena this article explores the application of a specific causal inference strategy namely regression discontinuity design rdd to three questions of interest to apd scholars of state capacity first the article illustrates the use of a geographic rdd to estimate the causal impacts of a reconstruction era federal civil rights statute during the period prior to the development of significant federal state capacity second it explores the possible causes of the late 19th century decline in the use of monetary rewards to motivate civil servants by using a population based rdd to estimate the causal impacts of financial incentives on law enforcement effort and civilian compliance third it illustrates an opportunity to test claims about the impacts of the growth of the carceral state by applying a resource constraint rdd to estimate the causal impacts of law enforcement effort on a variety of outcomes

priorities in school choice the case of the boston mechanism in barcelona abstract the boston mechanism is a school allocation procedure that is widely used around the world and has been criticized for its incentive problems in order to resolve overdemands for a given school most often priority is given to families living in the neighborhood of the school using a very rich data set on school applications for the case of the boston mechanism in barcelona we exploit an unexpected change in the definition of neighborhood this change allows us to identify that a large fraction of families systematically ranks first high priority schools neighborhood schools in this case additional data on school enrollment decisions and census data shows that some seemingly unsophisticated parents are high income families that can rank hard to get schools because they can afford the outside option of a private school in case they do not get in this sheds light on important inequalities beyond parents lack of sophistication found in the literature

an analysis of the efficient production frontier in the fishery implications for enhanced fisheries management the transformation relationship between factor inputs and outputs the efficient production frontier epf contains important information for fisheries managers a directional technology distance function model of the harvesting technology is used to measure changes in the epf over time frontier shifts are summarized with input and output based frontier indicators that are interpreted as measures of bioeconomic productivity change the model is applied to the mid atlantic surf clam and ocean quahog fishery

schooling and labor market consequences of school construction in indonesia evidence from an unusual policy experiment between 1973 and 1978 the indonesian government engaged in one of the largest school construction programs on record combining differences across regions in the number of schools constructed with differences across cohorts induced by the timing of the program suggests that each primary school constructed per 1 000 children led to an average increase of 0 12 to 0 19 years of education as well as a 1 5 to 2 7 percent increase in wages this implies estimates of economic returns to education ranging from 6 8 to 10 6 percent

vouchers for private schooling in colombia evidence from a randomized natural experiment colombia used lotteries to distribute vouchers which partially covered the cost of private secondary school for students who maintained satisfactory academic progress three years after the lotteries winners were about 10 percentage points more likely to have finished 8th grade primarily because they were less likely to repeat grades and scored 0 2 standard deviations higher on achievement tests there is some evidence that winners worked less than losers and were less likely to marry or cohabit as teenagers benefits to participants likely exceeded the 24 per winner additional cost to the government of supplying vouchers instead of public school places

structural estimation of a model of school choices the boston mechanism vs its alternatives we model household choice of schools under the boston mechanism bm and develop a new method applicable to a broad class of mechanisms to fully solve the choice problem even if it is infeasible

how responsive is investment in schooling to changes in redistributive policies and in returns this paper uses an unusual pay reform to test the responsiveness of investment in schooling to changes in redistribution schemes that increase the rate of return to education we exploit an episode where different israeli kibbutzim shifted from equal sharing to productivity based wages in different years and find that students in kibbutzim that reformed earlier invested more in high school education and in the long run also in post secondary schooling we further show that the effect is mainly driven by students in kibbutzim that reformed to a larger degree our findings support the prediction that education is highly responsive to changes in the redistribution policy

discrete modelling of supply response under uncertainty the case of the fishery abstract in the absence of complete control in a regulated industry effective management requires prediction of firms behavioral responses to public policy this paper develops a discrete choice model of supply response under uncertainty and applies it to fishery choice problems of new england fishing firms while fishermen demonstrate a bias towards remaining within the same fishery sufficient incentives in terms of changes in expected returns and risk are shown to elicit response due to extreme uncertainty concerning population dynamics of fish stocks a satisficing approach to management facilitated by this type of modelling may be more appropriate than bioeconomic optimization

the valuation of american options for a class of diffusion processes we present an integral equation approach for the valuation of american style derivatives when the underlying asset price follows a general diffusion process and the interest rate is stochastic our contribution is fourfold first we show that the exercise region is determined by a single exercise boundary under very general conditions on the interest rate and the dividend yield second based on this result we derive a recursive integral equation for the exercise boundary and provide a parametric representation of the american option price third we apply the results to models with stochastic volatility or stochastic interest rate and to american bond options in one factor models for the cases studied explicit parametric valuation formulas are obtained finally we extend results on american capped options to general diffusion prices numerical schemes based on approximations of the optimal stopping time such as approximations based on a lower bound or on a combination of lower and upper bounds are shown to be valid in this context