the poverty gap in school spending following the introduction of title i abstract title i of the 1965 elementary and secondary education act explicitly directed more federal aid for k 12 education to poorer areas for the first time in us history with a goal of promoting regional convergence in school spending using newly collected data we find some evidence that title i narrowed the gap in per pupil school spending between richer and poorer states in the short to medium run however the program was small relative to then existing poverty gaps in school spending even in the absence of crowd out by local or state governments the program could have reduced the gap by only 15 percent

human capital accumulation in a federation abstract more than half of the variation across u s school districts in real k 12 education expenditures per student is due to differences between rather than within states i study the welfare implications of redistribution of education expenditures by the federal government using an analytically tractable model of human capital accumulation with heterogeneous agents and endogenous state policies the net welfare effect of federal redistribution depends on a trade off between the positive effect of redistributing resources toward poorer states and the negative effect resulting from misallocation of population across states federal redistribution increases welfare in a calibrated version of the model

co development ventures optimal time of entry and profit sharing we find the optimal time for entering a joint venture by two firms and the optimal linear contract for sharing the profits we consider risk sharing timing incentive and asymmetric decisions contract designs if the firms are risk neutral and the cash payments are allowed all three designs are equivalent with risk aversion the optimal contract parameters may vary significantly across the three designs and across varying levels of risk aversion we also analyze a dataset of joint biomedical ventures in which in agreement with our theoretical predictions both royalty and cash payments are mostly increasing in the smaller firm s experience and the time of entry happens sooner for more experienced small firms

after the paris agreement measuring the global decarbonization wedges from national energy scenarios the new bottom up approach of the paris agreement calls for a better understanding of the domestic dimension of development pathways and of the implications for global emissions trajectory to this end it is of strategic importance to provide a common framework that makes it possible to identify the key decarbonization wedges at the national level and to highlight the potential benefits of international cooperation the article proposes an advanced index decomposition analysis methodology based on sectoral energy service indicators and on a specific decomposition in the power sector for quantifying the contribution of different mitigation strategies it is applied to national deep decarbonization pathways elaborated in the deep decarbonization pathway project ddpp by the sixteen largest ghg emitting countries in a global perspective the results reveal the key role of energy efficiency and decarbonization of energy carriers in the industry sector deployment of renewables in the power sector and to a lesser extent coal gas substitution and efficiency and energy decarbonization in the transport sector the analysis also calls for a deeper understanding of the role a reduction in energy service demand can play in mitigation scenarios and of the respective contribution for industry of energy efficiency and structural change

fiscal shenanigans targeted federal health care funds and patient mortality we explore the effectiveness of matching grants when lower levels of government can expropriate some of the funds for other uses using data on the medicaid disproportionate share program we identify states that were most able to expropriate funds payments to public hospitals in these states were systematically diverted and had no significant impact on patient mortality payments that were not expropriated were associated with significant declines in patient mortality overall subsidies were an effective mechanism for improving outcomes for the poor but the impact was limited by the ability of state and local governments to divert the targeted funds

is the investment uncertainty relationship nonlinear an empirical analysis for the netherlands we examine the investment uncertainty relationship for a panel of dutch non financial firms the system generalized method of moments gmm estimates suggest that the effect of uncertainty on investment is nonlinear for low levels of uncertainty an increase in uncertainty has a positive effect on investment while for high levels of uncertainty an increase in uncertainty lowers investment this result is in line with a number of theoretical studies but has never been documented empirically

uncertain dynamics correlation effects and robust investment decisions abstract we analyze a firm s investment problem when the dynamics of project value and investment cost are uncertain we provide an explicit solution using a robust method for an ambiguity averse firm taking this into account ambiguity aversion regarding a common risk factor impacts differently than ambiguity aversion regarding investment cost residual risk correlation between project value and investment cost matters ambiguity aversion regarding common risk can decrease the investment probability only if correlation is positive ambiguity aversion regarding residual risk always increases the investment probability when only project value is risky volatility can monotonically decrease the investment threshold this does not hold with the multiple prior method

uncertainty and growth of the firm using data from a survey of 1 097 small and medium sized non listed dutch firms we investigate the relation between growth of the firm and uncertainty we focus on the impact of sales uncertainty on various types of investment we find that sales uncertainty measured by the conditional variance has a mixed impact on various investment decisions we include an analysis of the relevance of financial structure and firm size on the growth uncertainty relation

endogenous federal grants and crowd out of state government spending theory and evidence from the federal highway aid program contrary to simple theoretical predictions existing evidence suggests that federal grants do not crowd out state government spending a legislative bargaining model with endogenous grants documents a positive correlation between grant receipts and preferences for public goods this correlation has likely biased existing work against measuring crowd out to correct for such endogeneity the model motivates instruments based on the political power of state congressional delegations exploiting this exogenous variation in grants the instrumental variables estimator reports crowd out that is statistically and economically significant this endogeneity may explain the flypaper effect a nonequivalence between grant receipts and private income jel d70 h40 h77

active labour market policies and the efficiency of the european social fund in spanish regions abstractactive labour market policies and the efficiency of the european social fund in spanish regions regional studies this paper estimates the determinants of public expenditure on active labour market policies almps at the regional level using panel data from a sample of the 17 spanish regions 1989 2010 the estimations take into account endogeneity dynamics and spatial dependence among regions estimations outcome is interpreted with the help of a simple theoretical model of intergovernmental grants results reveal that the european social fund is not effective in its aim of promoting almp expenditure and show that rent seeking when regions compete to attract funds from a common pool provokes the opposite effect which is exacerbated in the presence of imitation

relying on the private sector the income distribution and public investments in the poor abstract what drives governments with similar revenues to provide very different amounts of goods with private sector substitutes education is a prime example i use exogenous shocks to brazilian municipalities revenue during 1995 2008 generated by non linearities in federal transfer laws to demonstrate two things first municipalities with higher income inequality or higher median income allocate less of a revenue shock to education and are less likely to expand public school enrollment they are more likely to invest in public infrastructure that is broadly enjoyed like parks and roads or to save the shock second i find no evidence that the quality of public education suffers as a result if anything unequal and high income areas are more likely to improve public school inputs and test scores following a revenue shock given their heavy use of private education i further provide evidence that an increase in public sector revenue lowers private school enrollment

the empirics of the municipal fiscal adjustment we summarize the literature that uses the vector error correction model approach to analyze the dynamics of the municipal fiscal adjustment the international comparison between samples collected from entire countries and specific regions reveals interesting similarities but also remarkable differences the main similarities are the fulfillment of the intertemporal budget constraint the volatility of the budgetary components and the importance of the intergovernmental transfers as an adjustment instrument the most remarkable difference is the preponderant role of the own revenues in the usa probably reflecting the larger fiscal autonomy of us municipalities in most cases the large municipalities seem to be more dependent on grants than their small counterparts although this pattern is broken in japan finally partial evidence supporting the existence of moral hazard problems and the flypaper effect is provided

unsticking the flypaper effect in an uncertain world abstract we provide a novel explanation for the flypaper effect based on insurance arguments in our model the flypaper effect arises due to the differential response of precautionary savings to private income or fiscal transfers shocks in an uncertain world with incomplete markets the model generates two testable implications i the flypaper effect is a decreasing function of the correlation between fiscal transfers and private income and ii such relationship is stronger the higher is the volatility of fiscal transfers and or private income an empirical analysis of argentinean provinces for the period 1963 2006 finds strong support for the model s implications

the rise of the states u s fiscal decentralization in the postwar period article i nfo article history one of the most dramatic changes in the fiscal federalism landscape during the postwar period has been the rapid growth in state budgets which almost tripled as a share of gdp and doubled as a share of government spending between 1952 and 2006 we argue that the greater role of states cannot be easily explained by changes in tiebout forces of fiscal competition such as mobility and voting patterns and are not accounted for by demographic or income trends rather we demonstrate that much of the growth in state budgets has been driven by changes in intergovernmental interactions restricted federal grants to states have increased and federal policy and legal constraints have also mandated or heavily incentivized state own source spending particularly in the areas of education health and public welfare these outside pressures moderate the forces of fiscal competition and must be taken into account when assessing the implications of observed revenue and spending patterns

the flypaper effect what happens to a state s spending when it receives an unconditional grant from the federal government the standard theoretical analysis predicts that the increase in spending will be the same as that generated by an equivalent increase in local incomes or roughly 5 10 percent for most states in contrast numerous empirical analyses have found that spending increases by much more with some estimates near 100 percent this result is known as the flypaper effect since the money appears to stick where it hits the authors review this evidence as well as other studies that find similar behavior in firms

business cycles and research investment this paper examines the impact of uncertainty and the business cycle on us high tech manufacturing firms research investment although the reliance on internal financing suggests firms will consider uncertainty and the business cycle when determining their research budget little is known about how the business cycle and uncertainty influence research investment using firm level data on sales cash flow and industry level indicators of the business cycle this paper finds that the firm s response to the business depends on the firm s industry and the industry s current location in the business cycle the data also shows that the business cycle also depresses the firm s reaction to changes in sales and cash flow uncertainty clearly reduces research efforts although non linearly

the hotspots reference routes and research trends of marginal abatement costs a systematic review abstract as one of the most effective means of evaluating environmental policies marginal abatement costs macs have been adopted in a growing body of research this study characterizes the mac related literature from 1993 to 2018 on web of science based on a systematic review bibliometric analysis and mind mapping the results classify the research hotspots into influential factors methods and empirical applications the three most frequently mentioned influential factors are technical change discount rates and energy prices compared with top down models bottom up models including engineering model and expert based method are the most widely used improvements in the former focus on strengthening market behavior effect while those in the latter aim to overcome the weaknesses of negative costs and lack of interaction across measures mac applications focus on environmental policies with two new research areas recently emerging co benefits and sectoral abatement costs furthermore a reference route is proposed by summarizing the applicability of methods and matching relationships among influential factors methods and empirical problems finally potential research directions are summarized based on the identified research hotspots and a similar co word analysis in marginal cost field such as considering the effects of both multiple influential factors and the interaction among factors on maccs

real options with constant relative risk aversion real options problems have recently attracted much attention worldwide one such problem is how to deal with claims on non traded assets often there is another traded asset which is correlated to the non traded asset and this traded asset is used as a proxy for hedging purposes we introduce a second non traded log brownian asset into the well known merton investment model with power law utility the investor has a claim on units of the non traded asset and the question is how to price and hedge this random payoff the presence of the second brownian motion means that we are in the situation of incomplete markets we propose an approximation to the solution for the optimal reservation price and hedge which is accurate when the position is small in comparison to wealth the resulting loss when a suboptimal proxy strategy is followed is shown to be approximately quadratic in 1

the synthesis of bottom up and top down approaches to climate policy modeling electric power technology detail in a social accounting framework abstract hybrid climate policy simulations have sought to bridge the gap between bottom up engineering and top down macroeconomic models by integrating the former s energy technology detail into the latter s macroeconomic framework construction of hybrid models is complicated by the need to numerically calibrate them to multiple incommensurate sources of economic and engineering data i develop a solution to this problem following howitt s howitt r e 1995 positive mathematical programming american journal of agricultural economics 77 329 342 positive mathematical programming approach using data for the u s i illustrate how the inputs to the electricity sector in a social accounting matrix may be allocated among discrete types of generation so as to be consistent with both technologies input shares from engineering cost estimates and the zero profit and market clearance conditions of the sector s macroeconomic production structure

real options delay vs pre emption do industrial characteristics matter this paper presents an empirical study of the channels of influence from uncertainty to fixed investment suggested by real options theory using panel data from the confederation of british industry cbi industrial trends survey we report ols estimates of the impact of uncertainty on investment where the regressors are augmented by cross sectional averages of the dependent variable and of the individual specific regressors as recently suggested by pesaran pesaran m h 2006 estimation and inference in large heterogeneous panels with a multifactor error structure econometrica 74 967 1012 the cross industry pattern of results is checked for consistency with the pattern predicted by real options theory using a specially constructed data set of industrial characteristics we find that irreversibility is able to predict the pattern detected but only when combined with a measure of the information advantage of delay there is also evidence for expansion options effects industries with high r d and advertising intensities tend to have positive uncertainty effects

a real option model for renewable energy policy evaluation with application to solar pv power generation in china abstract this study proposes a policy evaluation model from the perspective of government and investors the proposed model which integrates american option method and two factor learning curve method can be used to evaluate the unit decision value and save path rate for renewable energy development and examine the existence of balance point of interest several uncertain factors including non renewable energy cost carbon price renewable energy cost and price subsidy are all considered in this model the model has been applied to evaluate the solar photovoltaic pv power generation in china our empirical results show that real option analysis roa is more effective than net present value analysis npv when handling uncertainty under current level of subsidy the government would suffer loss and the investors could benefit so that it is difficult to achieve the balance of interest during the planning period with the reduction of subsidy rate they can achieve the balance of interest

finders keepers forfeiture laws policing and local budgets to encourage anti drug policing the federal government and many state governments have enacted laws that allow police agencies to keep a substantial fraction of the assets that they seize in drug arrests we use rich new data on police seizures and local spending to explore the reactions of both governments and police to the incentives created by these policies we find that local governments offset police seizures by reducing their other allocations to police partially undermining the incentives laid out in statute and diverting the earmarked funds to other purposes police in turn respond to the real net incentives for seizures once local offsets are taken into account by increasing the drug arrest rate heroin prices also increase suggesting that the increased emphasis on anti drug policing raises the supply costs of illicit drugs these findings highlight both the promise and pitfalls of using financial incentives to solve agency problems in a federal system both local agents and intervening governments have sophisticated responses to financial incentives and these responses must be taken into account in both designing effective policies and evaluating their consequences 2007 elsevier b v all rights reserved

using a discontinuous grant rule to identify the effect of grants on local taxes and spending when investigating the effects of federal grants on the behavior of lower level governments it is hard to defend the handling of grants as an exogenous factor federal governments often set grants based on characteristics and performance of decentralized governments in this paper we make use of a discontinuity in the swedish grant system in order to estimate the causal effects of general intergovernmental grants on local spending and local tax rates the formula for the distribution of funds is used as an exclusion restriction in an iv estimation we find evidence of crowding in where federal grants are shifted to more local spending but not to reduced local tax rates

representing induced technological change in models for climate policy analysis induced technological change itc whereby the relative price effects of reducing greenhouse gas emissions stimulate innovation that mitigates the cost of abatement is both tantalizing to decision makers and challenging to represent in the computational economic and engineering models used to analyze climate change policy this overview reconciles the divergent views of technology and technological change within different types of models elucidates the theoretical underpinnings of itc introduces the reader to the techniques of their practical implementation and evaluates the implications for models results

tax mix corners and other kinks abstractthis paper models the local tax mix determination process in the presence of statewide fiscal limitations the decentralized government finance archetype and shows how excess sensitivity of local public spending to grants the conventionally and somewhat misleadingly termed flypaper effect arises in the constrained tax mix irrespective of whether lower or upper limits bind and how it cannot in general be taken as a symptom of local government overspending an empirical application to italian province panel data provides consistent evidence of the role of corner solutions produced by two sided tax limits in explaining the sensitivity of local public expenditures to grants

irreversible abatement investment under cost uncertainties tradable emission permits and emissions charges abstract a major concern with tradable emission permits is that stochastic permit prices may reduce a firm s incentive to invest in abatement capital or technologies relative to other policies such as a fixed emissions charge however under efficient permit trading the permit price uncertainty is caused by abatement cost uncertainties which affect investment under both permit and charge policies we develop a rational expectations general equilibrium model of permit trading and irreversible abatement investment to show how cost uncertainties affect investment under permits we compare the resulting investment incentive with that under charges after controlling for the assumption that random shocks affect the abatement cost linearly we find that firms investment incentive decreases in cost uncertainties but more so under emissions charges than under permits therefore tradable permits in fact may help maintain firms investment incentive under uncertainty

the effect of uncertainty on investment timing in a real options model abstract this paper examines the effect of uncertainty on investment timing in a canonical real options model we show that the critical value of a project that triggers the exercise of the investment option exhibits a u shaped pattern against the volatility of the project this is due to the two countervailing risk and return factors in effect we further show that such a u shaped pattern is inherited by the expected time to exercise the investment option thus for relatively safe projects greater uncertainty shortens the expected exercise time and thus enhances investment this is in sharp contrast to the negative investment uncertainty relationship commonly found in the extant literature finally we show that the positive investment uncertainty relationship is more likely for high growth projects than for low growth projects

on the investment uncertainty relationship in a real options model abstract it appears to be widely accepted in the real options literature that an increase in uncertainty should have an inhibiting effect on investment our article demonstrates that the notion of a negative uncertainty investment relationship is not always correct we show that in certain situations an increase in uncertainty can actually increase the probability of investing and thereby have a positive impact on investment

the lmdi approach to decomposition analysis a practical guide in a recent study ang energy policy 32 2004 compared various index decomposition analysis methods and concluded that the logarithmic mean divisia index method is the preferred method since the literature on the method tends to be either too technical or specific for most potential users this paper provides a practical guide that includes the general formulation process summary tables for easy reference and examples

government decision making and the incidence of federal mandates abstract this paper analyzes the effects of federally mandated program changes on state spending and revenues incorporating and evaluating the predictive value of several common theories of the state decision making process using several sources of exogenous increases in public medical spending i estimate that the entire state portion of the burden of mandated spending is borne by decreases in other public welfare spending while federal mandates may influence the composition of benefits at the state level it is much more difficult for them to change the total level of state transfers comparison of state reactions to different shocks suggests that these reductions are due in part to the substitutability of programs in the voter utility function but also in part to the stickiness of spending within budget categories states with greater racial differences between recipients and voters and states with less generous neighbors reduce other public welfare spending by even more alleviating the burden the medical expansions imposed on their taxpayers mandates may thus serve only to increase inequality across states

investment under alternative return assumptions comparing random walks and mean reversion abstract many recent theoretical papers have come under attack for modeling prices as geometric brownian motion this process can diverge over time implying that firms facing this price process can earn infinite profits we explore the significance of this attack and contrast investment under geometric brownian motion with investment assuming mean reversion while analytically more complex mean reversion in many cases is a more plausible assumption allowing for supply responses to increasing prices we show that cumulative investment is generally unaffected by the use of a mean reversion process rather than geometric brownian motion and provide an explanation for this result

heterogeneity in the dynamic effects of uncertainty on investment how does aggregate profit uncertainty influence investment activity at the firm level we propose a parsimonious adaptation of a factor autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model to exploit information in a subindustry sales panel for an efficient and tractable estimation of aggregate volatility

special interest groups and the allocation of public funds i propose a fully rational model of government contracting that explains differences in local government spending from grants and other income in this model violations of fungibility arise from dynamic interactions between politicians and interest groups with the ability to raise funds for the local government the predictions of the model are tested by exploiting unique features of windfalls received by states under a settlement with the tobacco industry although windfalls are legally unrestricted the median state increased spending on tobacco control programs from zero to 2 30 per capita upon receipt of funds the marginal propensity to spend on such programs is 0 20 from settlement revenue and zero from overall income states which were not involved in the settlement lawsuits spend less these results cannot be explained by existing models in the literature

a real options game of alliance timing decisions in biopharmaceutical research and development abstract in this article we examine the alliance timing trade off facing both pharmaceutical and biotech firms in a stochastic and competitive environment specifically we introduce a real options game rog where a pharmaceutical company can choose between two competing biotech firms by sequentially offering a licensing deal early or late in the new drug development process we find that when the alliance raises the drug market value significantly the agreement is signed late in the drug development process this suggests that the postponement effect implied by the use of real options prevails over the biotech firms competition effect which would instead play in favor of an early agreement for pre emption reasons when the alliance does not raise the drug market value significantly the optimal timing depends on the level of royalties retained by the pharmaceutical company in particular an early agreement is signed in the presence of a low level of royalties in this case indeed the competition effect becomes predominant because the pharmaceutical company can substantially reduce the upfront payment and thus the potential loss incurred if the biotech partner does not exercise her option to continue the new drug development process we also show that the alliance timing outcomes of our real options game considerably differ from those obtained when both parties use the net present value npv to assess their payoffs

hospital ownership and public medical spending the hospital market is served by firms that are private for profit private not for profit and government owned and operated i use a plausibly exogenous change in hospital financing that was intended to improve medical care for the poor to test three theories of organizational behavior i find that the critical difference between the three types of hospitals is caused by the soft budget constraint of government owned institutions the decision makers in private not for profit hospitals are just as responsive to financial incentives and are no more altruistic than their counterparts in profit maximizing facilities my final set of results suggests that the significant increase in public medical spending examined in this paper has not improved health outcomes for the indigent i introduction the hospital market is served by firms that are private for profit private not for profit and publicly owned and operated in this paper i examine how a hospital s type of ownership influences its response to profitable opportunities that are created by changes in government policy the policy change that i exploit was designed to improve the quality of medical care for lowincome individuals by significantly increasing hospitals financial incentives to treat them this program also substantially increased the revenues of those hospitals that had been serving a disproportionate share of the indigent i use this plausibly exogenous change in government policy to test three different theories of organizational behavior and then to assess the impact of hospital behavioral responses on health outcomes the response of organizations to changes in government policy will have an important impact on the consequences of these policies this is likely to be especially true in the medical sector in which the federal state and local governments contract directly

does partisan affiliation impact the distribution of spending evidence from state governments expenditures on education abstract how and why does partisan affiliation impact policy using a regression discontinuity strategy and focusing on state education spending we find that democratic and republican governors allocate spending differently in particular school districts with higher shares of minority students receive larger state transfers than other districts under democratic governors a similar pattern occurs in state transfers to higher education institutions this is true regardless of whether the governor is eligible for reelection we find no evidence that democrat governors are simply sending money to areas with a larger share of democrats these results suggest that the observed policy divergence is driven by differences in preferences of elected candidates

a model for irreversible investment with construction and revenue uncertainty this paper presents a model of investment in projects that are characterized by uncertainty over both the construction costs and revenues both processes are modeled as spectrally negative levy jump diffusions the optimal stopping problem that determines the value of the project is solved under fairly general assumptions it is found that the current value of the benefit to cost ratio bcr decreases in the frequency of negative shocks to the construction process this implies that the cost overruns that can be expected if one ignores such shocks are increasing in their frequency based on calibrated data the model is applied to the proposed construction of high speed rail in the uk and it is found that its economic case cannot currently be made and is unlikely to be met at any time in the next decade in addition it is found that ignoring construction uncertainty leads to a substantial probability of an erroneous decision being taken

capabilities as real options strategy research consists of a balance between positive and normative theory normative theories suggest particular heuristics or cognitive representations to find appropriate solutions heuristics permit faster solutions to real time problems they also suffer from the potential of negative transfer to inappropriate applications the theory of real options provides the appropriate heuristic framing of competencies and exploratory search a real options approach marries the theory of financial options to foundational ideas in strategy organizational theory and complex systems we join these approaches to identify three pairs of concepts scarce factor and the underlying asset in option theory inertia and irreversibility and the ruggedness of landscape and option values strategic theories of resources largely define a core competence as unique and nonimmutable in doing so this definition has wrongly forgotten barney s initial insight into scarce factor markets as determining the valuation of a competitive asset financial theory of real options derives its heuristics of investing in exploratory search by inferring future value of today s investments from market prices we apply the three conceptual pairs to the evaluation of capabilities as real options through a formal descriptive model the valuation of core capabilities is derived from observing the price dynamics of correlated strategic factors in the market because of inertia managers cannot easily adjust the wrong set of organizational capabilities to the emergence of market opportunities however firms that have made investments in capabilities appropriate to these opportunities are able to respond from this description we define core competence as the choice of capabilities that permits the firm to make the best response to market opportunities the heuristic framing of capabilities as real options guides the normative evaluation of the balance between exploitation and exploration

technology transfer under asymmetric information licensing contracts for newly patented innovations are observed to vary along several dimensions including the form and size of the payment to the inventor fixedfee versus some output based royalty the degree of exclusivity and the division of rents in this article we show that theform of the contract can be explained by two problems in technology exchange the superiority of a licensor s precontractual information about the economic value of the innovation and thefact that sharing this information with the licensee mayfacilitate imitation we show that a licensor signals her technology type with an output based payment or royalty and may leave some of the rents with the licensee conditions under which exclusive license contracts linear and nonlinear and nonexclusive linear contracts are used to transfer technology are identified

the value of school facility investments evidence from a dynamic regression discontinuity design author s cellini stephanie riegg ferreira fernando rothstein jesse abstract despite extensive public infrastructure spending surprisingly little is known about its economic return in this paper we estimate the value of school facility investments using housing markets standard models of local public goods imply that school districts should spend up to the point where marginal increases would have zero effect on local housing prices our research design isolates exogenous variation in investments by comparing school districts where referenda on bond issues targeted to fund capital expenditures passed and failed by narrow margins we extend this traditional regression discontinuity approach to identify the dynamic treatment effects of bond authorization on local housing prices student achievement and district composition our results indicate that california school districts underinvest in school facilities passing a referendum causes immediate sizable increases in home prices implying a willingness to pay on the part of marginal homebuyers of 1 50 or more for each 1 of capital spending these effects do not appear to be driven by changes in the income or racial composition of homeowners and the impact on test scores appears to explain only a small portion of the total housing price effect c 2010 by the president and fellows of harvard college and the massachusetts institute of technology

mental accounting of public funds the flypaper effect in the lab abstract we report evidence from a series of laboratory experiments that focus on mental accounting of public funds groups of three players decide upon how much to redistribute within the group we measure the preference to redistribute when transfers are made either out of individual accounts the players own money or out of a common account the group s money since the common account is dissolved after each round and paid out to individuals its size should not affect the decision to redistribute the experiment is designed to control for anchoring as a potential confounding effect we find that the size of the common account significantly affects redistribution behavior specifically the transfer increases in the size of the common account this effect is significantly more pronounced when the transfer is paid out of the common account instead of the individual account we interpret these findings as evidence for a flypaper effect due to mental accounting

uncertainty and the trade off between scale and flexibility in investment abstract this paper analyzes the behavior of a firm that chooses both the scale and timing of its investment sensitivity analysis shows that greater demand volatility is associated with the firm investing in larger increments less frequently this is in contrast to the conventional wisdom which is that greater volatility leads to investment in smaller increments more frequently overall the reduced frequency dominates the greater scale so that the long run average rate of investment is a decreasing function of demand volatility the timing and scale of investment are most sensitive to volatility when there are substantial investment economies of scale

incomplete markets ambiguity and irreversible investment abstract the problem of irreversible investment with idiosyncratic risk is studied by interpreting market incompleteness as a source of ambiguity over the appropriate no arbitrage discount factor the maxmin utility over multiple priors framework is used to model and solve the irreversible investment problem multiple priors are modeled using the notion of ignorance this set up is used to analyze finitely lived options for infinitely lived options the notion of constant ignorance is introduced for these sets of density generators the corresponding optimal stopping problem is solved for general in finite horizon optimal stopping problems driven by geometric brownian motion it is argued that an increase in the set of priors delays investment whereas an increase in the degree of market completeness can have a non monotonic effect on investment

finite project life and uncertainty effects on investment abstract this paper revisits the important result of the real options approach to investment under uncertainty which states that increased uncertainty raises the value of waiting and thus decelerates investment typically in this literature projects are assumed to be perpetual however in today s economy firms face a fast changing technology environment implying that investment projects are usually considered to have a finite life the present paper studies investment projects with finite project life and we find that in contrast with the existing theory investments may be accelerated by increased uncertainty it is shown that this particularly happens at low levels of uncertainty and when project life is short

optimal exercise of jointly held real options a nash bargaining approach with value diversion this paper provides a two stage decision framework in which two or more parties exercise a jointly held real option we show that a single party s timing decision is always socially efficient if it precedes bargaining on the terms of sharing however if the sharing rule is agreed before the exercise timing decision is made then socially optimal timing is attained only if there is a cash payment element in the division of surplus if the party that chooses the exercise timing can divert value from the project then the first best outcome may not be possible at all and the second best outcome may be implemented using a contract that is generally not optimal in the former cases our framework contributes to the understanding of a range of empirical regularities in corporate and entrepreneurial finance

irreversible investment under interest rate variability some generalizations we study the impact of interest rate and revenue variability on the decision to carry out irreversible investment we provide a mathematical characterization of the two dimensional optimal stopping problem and show that interest rate variability has a decelerating or accelerating impact on investment depending on whether the current interest rate is below or above the long run steady state allowing for interest rate volatility decelerates investment by raising both the required exercise premium of the investment opportunity and the value of waiting finally increased revenue volatility is shown to strengthen the negative impact of interest rate volatility and vice versa

real options and preemption under incomplete information abstract this paper introduces incomplete information and preemption into an equilibrium model of firms facing real investment decisions the optimal investment strategy may lie anywhere between the zero npv trigger level and the optimal strategy of a monopolist depending on the distribution of competitors costs and the implied fear of preemption our model implies that the equity returns of firms which hold real options and are subject to preemption will contain jumps and positive skewness

on the sign of the investment uncertainty relationship understanding the effects of uncertainty over any decision variable has fascinated economists for a long time risk aversion and incomplete markets are likely to make the investment uncertainty relationship negative e g roger craine 1989 joseph zeira 1989 what happens in the absence of risk aversion and incomplete markets is however ambiguous richard hartman 1972 and andrew b abel 1983 1984 1985 found that in the presence of symmetric convex costs of adjustment mean preserving increases in price uncertainty raise investment of a competitive firm as long as the profit function is convex in prices on the other hand the recent literature on irreversible investment e g robert s pindyck 1988 giuseppe bertola 1988 has shown that increases in uncertainty lower investment all these results have been derived under either risk neutrality or complete markets intuition suggests that the explanation for such a difference lies with the asymmetric nature of adjustment costs in the irreversible investment case as compared with the symmetry of the adjustment cost mechanisms proposed by abel and hartman although this intuition is confirmed in this paper asymmetric adjustment costs are shown not to be sufficient to explain why the results differ in fact a more hidden but at least as important difference between these two literatures is that the former assumes perfect competition and constant returns to scale whereas the latter assumes either imperfect competition or decreasing returns to scale or both 2 the purpose of this paper is to highlight the role of the decreasing marginal return to capital assumption due to either imperfect competition or decreasing returns to scale or both in determining the effects of adjustment cost asymmetries on the sign of the response of investment to changes in uncertainty under risk neutrality for this the paper develops a simple model with a cost of adjustment mechanism general enough to consider both symmetric convexity and irreversibility as special cases one of the most important findings is the lack of robustness of the negative relationship between investment and uncertainty under asymmetric adjustment costs3 to changes in the degree of competition in fact when firms are nearly competitive the conclusion of hartman and of abel holds no matter how asymmetric adjustment costs are studying adjustment cost mechanisms has a central role in understanding the dynamics of investment and its business cycle implications but conclusive results about the sign of the instantaneous relationship between uncertainty and investment should not be department of economics columbia university new york ny 10027 i am grateful to giuseppe bertola prajit dutta glen hubbard anil kashyap richard lyons and the referees for their useful comments 1the financial literature on investment has considered risk aversion through a premium in the discount rate determined by the capm capital asset pricing model intertemporal capm or consumption capm however often this discount rate is left unchanged when studying the response of investment to uncertainty changes e g pindyck 1988 pp 974 5 thereby omitting the effect of changes in uncertainty on investment due to risk aversion and incomplete markets 2in the typical version of the irreversible investment problem there is no cost of upward adjustments thus imperfect competition and or decreasing returns to scale are required to bound the size of the firm 3in this paper asymmetric adjustment cost refers to the case in which it is more expensive to adjust downward than upward certainly the opposite case is a trivial extension of the case studied in this paper

optimal oil production and the world supply of oil abstract we study the optimal oil extraction strategy and the value of an oil field using a multiple real option approach the numerical method is flexible enough to solve a model with several state variables to discuss the effect of risk aversion and to take into account uncertainty in the size of reserves optimal extraction in the baseline model is found to be volatile if the oil producer is risk averse production is more stable but spare capacity is much higher than what is typically observed we show that decisions are very sensitive to expectations on the equilibrium oil price using a mean reverting model of the oil price where the equilibrium price is also a random variable oil production was cut during the 2008 2009 crisis and we find that the cut in production was larger for opec members for countries facing a lower discount rate and for countries whose governments finances are less dependent on oil revenues however the net present value of a country s oil reserves would be increased significantly by 100 in the most extreme case if production was cut completely when prices fall below the country s threshold price if several producers were to adopt such strategies world oil prices would be higher but more stable

devaluating projects and the investment uncertainty relationship abstract sarkar 2000 on the investment uncertainty relationship in a real options model journal of economic dynamics and control 24 219 225 analyzes the investment uncertainty relationship in a real options model demonstrating that the widely accepted conclusion that uncertainty harms investment can be reversed wong 2006 the effect of uncertainty on investment timing in a real options model journal of economic dynamics and control forthcoming confirms this point showing that more uncertainty can reduce the expected time to exercise the investment option this paper deals with such an issue and attempts to integrate both sarkar s and wong s analysis for risk neutral investors we show that uncertainty can favor investment only if projects devaluate over time this conclusion does not hold in a capm framework where we demonstrate that the relationship uncertainty investment can be positive a even when the investment threshold increases with uncertainty and b in the case of projects negatively correlated with the market portfolio

milestone payments or royalties contract design for r d licensing we study how innovators can optimally design licensing contracts when there is incomplete information on the licensee s valuation of the innovation and limited control over the licensee s development efforts a licensing contract typically contains an up front payment milestone payments at successful completion of a project phase and royalties on sales we use principal agent models to formulate the licensor s contracting problem and we find that under adverse selection the optimal contract structure changes with the licensee s valuation of the innovation as the licensee s valuation increases the licensor s optimal level of involvement in the development directly or through royalties should decrease only a risk averse licensor should include both up front and milestone payments moral hazard alone is not detrimental to the licensor s value but may create an additional value loss when combined with adverse selection our results inform managerial practice about the advantages and disadvantages of the different terms included in licensing contracts and recommend the optimal composition of the contract

the synthesis of bottom up and top down approaches to climate policy modeling electric power technologies and the cost of limiting us co2 emissions abstract in the us the bulk of co 2 abatement induced by carbon taxes comes from electric power this paper incorporates technology detail into the electricity sector of a computable general equilibrium model of the us economy to characterize electric power s technological margins of adjustment to carbon taxes and to elucidate their general equilibrium effects compared to the top down production function representation of the electricity sector the technology rich hybrid specification produces less abatement at a higher welfare cost suggesting that bottom up models do not necessarily generate lower costs of abatement than top down models this result is shown to be sensitive to the elasticity with which technologies generating capacities adjust to relative prices

optimal r d investment for a risk averse entrepreneur abstract entrepreneurs investing in r d projects face technical uncertainty associated with the cost to completion of the project which is idiosyncratic and inherently unhedgeable we extend existing real options models of r d investment to incorporate the cost of bearing this unhedgeable risk and find it decreases risk averse entrepreneurs valuations of r d projects and increases the minimum npvs required for continued investment in r d threshold npvs relative to unpriced risk values and threshold npvs as in the unpriced risk case for less risk averse entrepreneurs with small r d projects threshold npvs remain negative and decrease with technical uncertainty however for sufficiently risk averse entrepreneurs with sufficiently large r d projects threshold npvs can become positive and increase with technical uncertainty

governance and uncertainty the trade off between administrative control and commitment this study elaborates upon the motives for initiating equity based collaborations vs acquisition of another firm already having a desired technology we characterize both minority direct investments and joint ventures as options to defer either internal development or acquisition of a target firm in domains where learning about growth opportunities dominates investment activity this incremental mode of governance economizes on the cost of committing resources to a technology with an uncertain value using a sample of 402 transactions in the biotechnology industry we find strong support for the theoretical model the findings suggest that the cost of commitment in the face of technological uncertainty may offset the administrative benefits of hierarchical governance 1998 john wiley sons ltd

beyond incentives do schools use accountability rewards productively we use a regression discontinuity design to analyze an understudied aspect of school accountability systems how schools use financial rewards for two years california s accountability system financially rewarded schools based on a deterministic function of test scores qualifying schools received per pupil awards amounting to about 1 of statewide per pupil spending corroborating anecdotal evidence that awards were paid out as teacher bonuses we find no evidence that winning schools purchased more instructional material increased teacher hiring or changed the subject specific composition of their teaching staff most importantly we find no evidence that student achievement increased in winning schools supplemental materials for this article are available online

do federal grants boost school spending evidence from title i abstract one of the federal government s main elementary and secondary education programs is title i which allocates money for compensatory education to school districts based on child poverty i use sharp changes in per pupil grant amounts surrounding the release of decennial census data to identify effects of title i on state and local education revenue and how much the program ultimately increases spending by recipient school districts i find that state and local revenue efforts initially are unaffected by title i changes but that local governments substantially and significantly crowd out changes in title i within in a 3 year period

dynamic investment and capital structure under manager shareholder conflict abstract this paper investigates the interactions between the investment and financing decisions of a firm under manager shareholder conflicts arising from asymmetric information in particular we extend the manager shareholder conflict problem in a real options model by incorporating debt financing we show that manager shareholder conflicts over investment policy increase not only the investment and default triggers but also coupon payments which lead to a decrease in the equity value moreover given the presence of manager shareholder conflicts debt financing increases investment and decreases total social welfare as a result there is a trade off between the efficiency of investment and total social welfare with debt financing these results fit well with the findings of previous empirical work in this area

real exchange rate uncertainty private investment in ldcs this paper examines empirically the link between real exchange rate uncertainty and private investment in developing countries using a large cross country time series data set the paper builds a garch based measure of real exchange rate volatility and finds that it has a strong negative effect on investment after controlling for other standard investment determinants and taking into account their potential endogeneity the effect of uncertainty is not uniform however there is some evidence of threshold effects so that uncertainty only matters when it exceeds some critical level in addition the negative effect of real exchange rate uncertainty on investment is significantly larger in economies that are highly open and in those with less developed financial systems

comparing model results to national climate policy goals results from the asia modeling exercise abstract while the world has yet to adopt a single unified policy to limit climate change many countries and regions have adopted energy and climate policies that have implications for global emissions in this paper we discuss a few key policies and how they are included in a set of 23 energy and integrated assessment models that participated in the asia modeling exercise we also compare results from these models for a small set of stylized scenarios to the pledges made as part of the copenhagen accord and the goals stated by the major economies forum we find that the targets outlined by the united states the european union japan and korea require significant policy action in most of the models analyzed for most of the models in the study however the goals outlined by india are met without any climate policy the stringency of climate policy required to meet china s copenhagen pledges varies across models and accounting methodologies

a real options based model and its application to china s overseas oil investment decisions abstract this paper applies real options theory to overseas oil investment by adding an investment environment factor to oil resource valuation a real options model is developed to illustrate how an investor country or oil company can evaluate and compare the critical value of oil resource investment in different countries under oil price exchange rate and investment environment uncertainties the aim is to establish a broad model that can be used by every oil investor country to value overseas oil resources the model developed here can match three key elements 1 deal with overseas investment the effects of investment environment and exchange rates 2 deal with oil investment oil price production decline rate and development cost etc 3 the comparability of the results from different countries different countries oil investment situation can be compared by using the option value index ovi china s overseas oil investment is taken as an example to explain the model by calculating each oil investee country s critical value per unit of oil reserves and examining the effect of different factors on the critical value the results show that the model developed here can provide useful advice for china s overseas oil investment program the research would probably also be helpful to other investor countries looking to invest in overseas oil resources

risky business political instability and greenfield foreign direct investment in the arab world which foreign direct investments are most affected by political instability analysis of quarterly greenfield investment flows into countries in the middle east and north africa during the period from 2003 to 2012 shows that adverse political shocks are associated with significantly reduced investment inflows in the non resource tradable sectors by contrast investments in natural resource sectors and non tradable activities appear insensitive to such shocks political instability is thus associated with increased reliance on non tradables and aggravated resource dependence

finders keepers forfeiture laws policing incentives and local budgets to encourage anti drug policing the federal government and many state governments have enacted laws that allowpoliceagencies tokeepasubstantial fractionofthe assets thattheyseizeindrugarrests weuserich new data on police seizures and local spending to explore the reactions of both governments and police to the incentives created by these policies we find that local governments offset police seizures by reducing their other allocations to police partially undermining the incentives laid out in statute and diverting the earmarked funds to other purposes police in turn respond to the real net incentives for seizures once local offsets are takenintoaccount byincreasingthedrugarrestrate heroinpricesalsoincrease suggestingthattheincreased emphasis on anti drug policing raises the supply costs of illicit drugs these findings highlight both the promise and pitfalls of using financial incentives to solve agency problems in a federal system both local agents and intervening governments have sophisticated responses to financial incentives and these responses must be taken into account in both designing effective policies and evaluating their consequences 2007 elsevier b v all rights reserved

an evaluation of eu regional policy do structural actions crowd out public spending motivated by the lack of success of previous studies trying to estimate the impact of the european cohesion policy this paper brings an unexplored issue to light transfers that are intended to finance public investment in key areas for growth might be crowded out by subsidized governments to alternative uses in fact using annual data from fifteen member countries 1993 2005 we conclude that public investment in the member countries makes up around 60 of the increase in eu funds the limited role of the european commission in the allocation of the funds could partially explain this result

investment under uncertainty the case of replacement investment decisions we analyze the determinants of replacement investment decisions in a contingent claims model with maintenance and operation cost uncertainty we find that the optimal time between replacements is increasing in the volatility of cost the purchase price of a new asset and the corporate tax rate and is decreasing in the systematic risk of cost the salvage value of the asset and the investment tax credit the optimal time between replacements can either increase or decrease with an increase in the depreciation rate extensions of the model to examine the effects of technological and tax policy uncertainty on replacement investment decisions give intuitive but striking results uncertainty about the arrival of a technological innovation that would decrease maintenance and operation cost results in a significant decrease in replacement investment uncertainty in a tax law change that would encourage investment decreases current investment and uncertainty in a tax law change that would discourage investment increases current investment

decomposing the impact of alternative technology sets on future carbon emissions growth abstract what are the drivers of future global carbon dioxide co 2 emissions growth and how would the availability of key energy supply technologies change their relative importance in this paper we apply a novel index number decomposition technique to the results of a multi region multi sector computable general equilibrium model to quantify the influence of five factors on the growth of future carbon emissions 1 growth in global economic activity 2 shifts in the regional composition of gross world product 3 shifts in the sectoral composition of regions gdp 4 changes in sectors energy output ratios and 5 changes in the co 2 intensity of energy sources we elucidate how the relative importance of these factors changes in response to the imposition of a global carbon tax and alternative assumptions about the future availability of key energy supply technologies rising global economic activity and shifts in regional composition put upward pressure on emissions while changes in energy and emission intensity and the sectoral output mix have attenuating effects a global emission tax that increases over time slows economic expansion and shifts the fuel mix with the most pronounced impacts on china india and russia limited availability of carbon capture and storage nuclear and hydroelectric generation all lead to upward shifts in the long run marginal abatement cost curve causing some countries to choose to pay the tax rather than abate

unraveling the process of creative destruction complementary assets and incumbent survival in the typesetter industry when radical technological change transforms an industry established firms sometimes fail drastically and are displaced by new entrants yet other times survive and prosper drawing upon an unusually rich data set that covers the technological and competitive history of the typesetter industry from 1886 to 1990 this paper uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis to unravel this process of creative destruction it argues that the ultimate commercial performance of incumbents vs new entrants is driven by the balance and interaction of three factors investment technical capabilities and appropriability through specialized complementary assets in this industry specialized complementary assets played a crucial role in buffering incumbents from the effects of competence destruction and an analysis that examined investment or technical capabilities in isolation would have led to misleading results this work thus highlights the importance of considering multiple perspectives when examining the competitive implications of technological change 1997 by john wiley sons ltd

the effect of state education finance reform on total local resources abstract both the federal government and the states use intergovernmental grants to try to change the composition of local spending across different programs as well as the distribution of resources across localities many states are now under court order to use state education grants to reduce local disparities in education spending while a substantial body of literature suggests that these court orders increase the level and progressivity of state education spending there is little evidence on their broader effects on the total resources available not just for schools in low income districts but for other programs across all localities we find that states finance the required increase in education spending in part by reducing their aid to localities for other programs particularly for wealthier areas thus while court ordered school finance equalizations do increase total state aid to localities for education they do so at the expense of drawing state intergovernmental aid away from programs like public welfare health hospitals and general services these findings provide insight into the effectiveness of using earmarked funds to achieve redistribution

school district operational spending and student outcomes evidence from tax elections in seven states abstract we use close tax elections to estimate the impact of school district funding increases on operational spending and student outcomes across seven states districts with passing levies directed new revenue toward support services and instructor salaries but did not increase teacher staffing levels these districts eventually realized gains in student achievement and attainment our preferred estimates imply that increasing operational spending by 1000 per pupil increased test scores by approximately 0 15 of a standard deviation and graduation rates by approximately 9 percentage points there is some evidence of diminishing returns as these effects are driven by districts below the median in spending per pupil based on research linking academic outcomes to earnings we conclude that these spending increases were likely cost effective

entrepreneurial ability venture investments and risk sharing a number of issues that relate to the desirability and implications of new venture financing are examined within a principal agent framework that captures the essence of the relationship between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists the model suggests 1 as long as the skill levels of entrepreneurs are common knowledge all will choose to involve venture capital investors since the risk sharing provided by outside participation dominates the agency relationship that is created 2 the less able entrepreneurs will choose to involve venture capitalists whereas the more profitable ventures will be developed without external participation because of the adverse selection problem associated with asymmetric information 3 if a costly signal is available that conveys the entrepreneur s ability some entrepreneurs will invest in such a signal and then sell to investors these entrepreneurs however need not be the more able ones the implications for new venture financing of these and other findings are discussed and illustrated by example

investment timing asymmetric information and audit structure a real options framework abstract this paper examines investment timing by the manager in a decentralized firm in the presence of asymmetric information in particular we incorporate an audit technology in the agency model developed by grenadier and wang 2005 investment timing agency and information journal of financial economics 75 493 533 the implied investment trigger in the agency problem with auditing is larger than in the full information problem and smaller than in the agency problem without auditing nevertheless the audit technology does not necessarily reduce inefficiency in the total social welfare

more cops less crime abstract i exploit a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of police on crime the american recovery and reinvestment act increased funding for the community oriented policing services cops hiring grant program from less than 20 million over 2005 2008 to 1 billion in 2009 hiring grants distributed in 2009 were allocated according to an application score cutoff rule and i leverage quasi random variation in grant receipt by comparing the change over time in police and crimes for cities above and below the threshold in a difference in differences framework relative to low scoring cities those above the cutoff experience increases in police of about 3 2 and declines in victimization cost weighted crime of about 3 5 following the distribution of hiring grants the effects are driven by large and statistically significant effects of police on robbery larceny and auto theft with suggestive evidence that police reduce murders as well crime reductions associated with additional police were more pronounced in areas most affected by the great recession the results highlight that fiscal support to local governments for crime prevention may offer large returns especially during bad macroeconomic times

understanding the relation between accruals and volatility a real options based investment approach abstract accruals are fundamental to financial reporting and are the underlying innovation of accounting despite this accounting research has provided little understanding of how economic forces affect a firm s level of accruals and limited guidance for forming expectations of accruals based on ex ante firm characteristics we consider accruals as a form of investment and examine whether theoretical predictions from a real options based investment framework provide insight into the relation between accruals and the ex ante expected volatility faced by the firm specifically the theory predicts that higher volatility dampens investment because firms prefer to wait and see instead of investing immediately consistent with this theory we document a robust negative relation between year ahead net working capital accruals and expected volatility we also predict and find that the negative association between year ahead net working capital accruals and expected volatility is less pronounced for distressed firms and more pronounced for firms with a longer operating cycle and that current asset accruals are more sensitive to volatility than current liability accruals finally we find that the residuals from an investment based expected accrual model outperform those from the widely used performance adjusted modified jones model in identifying companies that just meet or beat analysts earnings forecasts collectively our findings suggest that the investment perspective of accruals and in particular the real options based investment framework provide useful insights for forming expectations of accruals