a fundamental law relating stock and end of life flow in cyclic manufacturing abstract cyclic manufacturing cm emerges as a sine qua non for sustainability consumer product stocks of today are the end of life flows eolf of tomorrow in circular economy enacted legislation fosters reuse recycle of eol consumer products of chemicals raw materials and hazardous products and components batteries brake fluids printed circuit boards cellular phones computers but when is tomorrow and how much of the stock will appear as eolf efficient cm operations depend on cognizance of eolf and accumulating stock the pool from which eolf emanates consumer uncertainty personal income economic cycles advent of technology social and health reasons stricter eco standards and random early product losses during use render eolf and product stock uncertain and unobservable conventional identification methods based on regression sequential least squares or actuary science methods presuming specific residual life distributions may not provide reliable estimates under uncertainty and non stationarities an appealingly simple constitutive law is revealed relating the mean stock and eolf in terms of stock mean age and eolf mean age which are scaled readily and reliably monitored variables even from relatively small decentralized samples valid under random lifetime early losses the law encompasses any eol exit distribution enabling stock and eolf identification data consolidation and assessment being a linear algebraic expression between stock and eolf the law reduces computational burden and evades presumption of any survival or exit probability distribution or cognizance of early loss history or ex post fitting of stochastic parameters the results may prove useful in planning sizing eol facilities and recycling operations and in environmental policy or compliance assessment

the design of the university system abstract this paper compares the organisation of the university sector under unregulated private provision with the structure which would be chosen by a welfare maximising government it studies a general equilibrium model where students attend university to earn higher incomes in the labour market and universities teach them and carry out research each university chooses its tuition fee to maximise the amount of resources it can devote to research research bestows an externality on society government intervention needs to balance labour market efficiency considerations which would tend to equalise the number of students attending each university with considerations of efficiency on the production side which suggest that the most productive universities should teach more students and carry out more research we find that government concentrates research more that the private market would but less than it would like to do if it had perfect information about the productivity of universities it also allows fewer universities than would operate in a private system

sustainability in electrical and electronic equipment closed loop supply chains a system dynamics approach abstract in this paper we examine the impact of ecological motivation and technological innovations on the long term behavior of a closed loop supply chain with recycling activities ecological motivation manifests through legislation and green image factor whereas technological innovations manifest through design for environment we adopt system dynamics methodology applied to many environmental systems seeking long term gains the developed model is implemented to a real world supply chain of electrical equipment in greece numerical analysis illustrates the factors concerned like the delay of the legislation enforcement to achieve a sustainable future through non renewable resources and landfill preservation

the analytics of the pricing of higher education and other services in which the customers are inputs many services provide outputs that depend partially on the customers as inputs the presence of other customers often contributes to the output experienced by each purchaser higher education is the premier example others are legion we provide a simple model that addresses the questions of competitive pricing and allocative efficiency for these types of services prices that charge customers for what they get on net output minus input from the firm both are competitive and support efficient allocations these prices internalize the apparent external effects of customers on each other few examples of such prices exist in the real world

the political economy of higher education admission standards and participation gap we build a political economy model allowing us to shed light on the empirically observed simultaneous increase in university size and participation gap parents differ in income and in the ability of their unique child they vote over the minimum ability level required to attend public universities which are tuition free and financed by proportional income taxation parents can invest in private tutoring to help their child pass the admission test a university participation gap emerges endogenously with richer parents investing more in tutoring a unique majority voting equilibrium exists which can be either classical or ends against the middle in which case parents of both low and high ability children favor a smaller university four factors increase the university size larger skill premium enjoyed by university graduates smaller tutoring costs smaller university cost per student larger minimum ability of students but only the former two also increase the participation gap a more unequal parental income distribution also increases the participation gap but barely affects the university size

incentives and careers in academia theory and empirical analysis we study career concerns in italian academia we mould our empirical analysis on the standard model of contests formalised in the multi unit all pay auction the number of posts the number of app

the cost structure of american research universities 1597 this study estimates translog variable cost functions for 147 american doctorate granting universities accounting for three major products of these institutions undergraduate and graduate instruction and research explicit measures of research output and quality are employed evidence is found for considerable economies of scale for the average institution as well as economies of scope related to the joint production of undergraduate and graduate instruction the public or private ownership of an institution is not significant for the explanation of variable costs the intensity of state regulation in the public sector does not have a significant impact on production efficiency copyright 1991 by mit press

remedying education evidence from two randomized experiments in india this paper presents the results of a two year randomized evaluation of a large scale remedial education program conducted in mumbai and vadodara india the remedial education program hires young women from the community to teach basic literacy and numeracy skills to children who reach standard three or four without having mastered these competencies the program implemented by a ngo in collaboration with the government is extremely cheap it cost 5 dollars per child per year and is easily replicable it has been implemented in 20 indian cities and reached tens of thousands of children we find the program to be very effective on average it increased learning by 0 15 standard deviations in the first year and 0 25 in the second year the gains are the largest for children at the bottom of the distribution children in the bottom third gain 0 2 standard deviations in the first year and 0 32 in the second year in math they gain 0 51 standard deviation in the second year the results are similar in the two grade levels and in the two cities at the margin extending this program would be up to 12 16 times more cost effective than hiring new teachers authors

institutions of higher education as multi product firms economies of scale and scope a multiple output cost function is estimated for institutions of higher education in the united states employing data for 1981 82 the authors flexible fixed cost quadratic function includes three outputs undergraduate teaching graduate teaching and research grants and one input price average faculty salaries results indicate the existence of scope economies at least up to a point for both public and private institutions of higher education ray economies of scale are more pronounced in the private sector and product specific economies of scale are observed only in the public sector for research and graduate teaching copyright 1989 by mit press

regulating a monopolist with unknown costs we consider the problem of how to regulate a monopolistic firm whose costs are unknown to the regulator the regulator s objective is to maximize a linear social welfare function of the consumers surplus and the firm s profit in the optimal regulatory policy prices and subsidies are designed as functions of the firm s cost report so that expected social welfare is maximized subject to the constraints that the firm has nonnegative profit and has no incentive to misrepresent its costs we explicitly derive the optimal policy and analyze its properties in their classic papers dupuit 2 and hotelling 5 considered pricing policies for a bridge that had a fixed cost of construction and zero marginal cost they demonstrated that the pricing policy that maximizes consumer well being is to set price equal to marginal cost and to provide a subsidy to the supplier equal to the fixed cost so that a firm would be willing to provide the bridge this first best solution is based on a number of informational assumptions first the demand function is assumed to be known to both the regulator and to the firm while the assumption of complete information may be too strong the assumption that information about demand is as available to the regulator as it is to the firm does not seem unnatural a second informational assumption is that the regulator has complete information about the cost of the firm or at least has the same information about cost as does the firm this assumption is unlikely to be met in reality since the firm would be expected to have better information about costs than would the regulator as weitzman has stated an essential feature of the regulatory environment i am trying to describe is uncertainty about the exact specification of each firm s cost function in most cases even the managers and engineers most closely associated with production will be unable to precisely specify beforehand the cheapest way to generate various hypothetical output levels because they are yet removed from the production process the regulators are likely to be vaguer still about a firm s cost function 12 p 684 as this observation suggests it is natural to expect that a firm would have better information regarding its costs than would a regulator the purpose of this paper is to develop an optimal regulatory policy for the case in which the regulator does not know the costs of the firm one strategy that a regulator could use in the absence of full information about costs is to give the firm the title to the total social surplus and to delegate the pricing decision to the firm in pursuing its own interests which would then be to maximize the total social surplus the firm would adopt the same marginal cost pricing strategy that the regulator would have imposed if the regulator had

dynamic substance flow analysis the delaying mechanism of stocks with the case of pvc in sweden abstract today s stocks are tomorrow s emissions and waste flows as a result of the time lag introduced by the buffering function of the stock of materials and products in society environmental problem flows which seem to be under control can easily rebound in this paper an example is given of how signal processing can be used in dynamic substance flow analysis for estimating the future generation of waste and emissions from present societal stocks an approach is outlined to estimate the outflow of waste products from stocks on the basis of assumptions on the shape of the distribution describing the inflow of new products the average life span of the products and the life span distribution to exemplify the approach we used a theoretical case of pvc in sweden it was found that the delaying mechanisms of the stocks can make the outcome counterintuitive furthermore the chosen shape of the input distribution function has the most influence on the predicted outflows especially in the case of possible fashion type exponentially increasing markets the choice of the shape of the inflow distribution could therefore be based on qualitative knowledge of the market of the different products the life span distribution appears to have a more subtle influence on the height of the peaks and the time that they occur so far only a normal distribution has been considered more research is recommended into other types of distribution

education policies equity efficiency and voting equilibrium this paper investigates the effects of two specific forms of intelvention in the market for education an ability test for admission to university and a subsidy to tuition fees financed through general taxation both these measures enhance equality of opportunity but their equity and efficiency effects are ambiguous this ambiguity is reflected in the political economy equilibrium which would emerge as the result of voting on the level of the ability test and of the subsidy

the short run aggregate profit function and the capacity distribution the mapping between the capacity distribution of production activities and the short run aggregate profit function is analyzed with emphasis on the recovery of the former from the latter and the characterization of the profit function for the case of two inputs it is shown that the mapping is one to one it is also shown that the short run aggregate profit and hence the output supply and input demand functions can be approximated by polynomials in the reciprocals of normalized input prices properties of these functions are also presented copyright 1994 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

symposium on the slowdown in productivity growth tthe growth slowdown that began in the late 1960s or early 1970s is the most significant macroeconomic development of the last two decades table 1 presents the basic facts for the big seven members of the oecd the significance of the slowdown derives from the power of compound interest when per capita income is growing at 4 percent it doubles every 18 years when it grows at only 2 percent it doubles every 35 years the permanent income defined as the annuity value of expected income of a 25 year old german citizen basing her expectations of income growth on average performance in the period 1955 73 would be 80 percent above her current income that of a 25 year old basing her expectations on the growth rate of income in the 1973 1986 period would be only 22 percent above her current income equivalently taking a generation as 33 years children in italy who might have expected to start out with a standard of living nearly five times the level at which their parents began would on the basis of the lower output growth from 1973 to 1986 expect to start out at less than double the material standard at which their parents began the four papers in this symposium address the question of the causes of the growth slowdown and to a lesser extent what might be done about it the classic empirical result in this area for which among other results robert solow received the 1987 nobel prize in economic science is that technological progress accounts for about half the growth of per capita output correspondingly most of the growth

what matters most teaching or research empirical evidence on the remuneration of british academics this paper examines the impact of productivity on pay within academia drawing upon a detailed dataset of academics from five old established universities results outline the importance of publication grant receipt and teaching quality in the determination of pay a large financial penalty to time out of the profession is revealed which with productivity variables explains away the gender salary gap the relationship between teaching and research is investigated and we find some evidence in support of the hypothesis that productive researchers are successful teachers results on reservation salary suggest that the best academics are willing to stay within the profession

vintage capital investment and growth abstract we study the dynamics of growth and investment in a continuous time model with vintage capital vintage capital models may be characterized by non exponential rates of depreciation and technical change and can incorporate gestation lags as well as learning by using we investigate the effect of such features on the dynamics of investment and growth and show how they can contribute to explaining the volatile nature of investment time series

the governance and performance of universities evidence from europe and the us we test the hypothesis that universities are more productive when they are both more autonomous and face more competition using survey data we construct indices of university autonomy and competition for both europe and the united states we show that there are strong positive correlations between these indices and multiple measures of university output to obtain causal evidence we investigate exogenous shocks to us universities expenditures over three decades these shocks arise through the political appointment process which we use to generate instrumental variables we find that an exogenous increase in a university s expenditure generates more output measured by either patents or publications if the university is more autonomous and faces more competition exploiting variation over time in the stakes of competitions for us federal research grants we also find that universities generate more output for a given expenditure when research competitions are high stakes we draw lessons arguing that european universities could benefit from a combination of greater autonomy and greater accountability greater accountability might come through increased reliance on competitive grants enhanced competition for students and faculty promoted by reforms that increase mobility and yardstick competitions which often take the form of assessment exercises philippe aghion mathias dewatripont caroline hoxby andreu mas colell and andre sapir

trends in quality adjusted skill premia in the united states 1960 2000 this paper presents new evidence that increases in college enrollment lead to a decline in the average quality of college graduates between 1960 and 2000 resulting in a decrease of 8 percentage points in the college premium the standard demand and supply framework katz and murphy 1992 card and lemieux 2001 can qualitatively account for the trend in the college and age premia over this period but the quantitative adjustments that need to be made to account for changes in quality are substantial furthermore the standard interpretation of the supply effect can be misleading if the quality of college workers is not controlled for to illustrate the importance of these adjustments we reanalyze the problem studied in card and lemieux 2001 who observe that the rise in the college premium in the 1980s occurred mainly for young workers and attribute this to the differential behavior of the supply of skill between the young and the old our results show that changes in quality are as important as changes in prices to explain the phenomenon they document

using cost observation to regulate firms the paper emphasizes the use of accounting data in regulatory or procurement contracts when the supplier 1 has superior information about the cost of the project and 2 invests in cost reduction the main result states that under risk neutrality the supplier announces an expected cost and is given an incentive contract linear in cost overruns this optimal contract moves toward a fixed price contract as the announced cost decreases an investment choice is then introduced and the use of a rate of return regulation is studied

efficient tuition fees and examinations we assume that students observe only a private noisy signal of their ability and that universities can condition admission decisions on the results of noisy tests if the university observes a private signal of each student s ability which is soft information then asymmetries of information are two sided and the optimal admission policy involves a mix of pricing and pre entry selection based on the university s private information in contrast if all test results are public knowledge then there is no sorting on the basis of test scores tuition alone does the job of implementing an optimal degree of student self selection these results do not depend on the existence of peer effects the optimal tuition follows a classic marginal social cost pricing rule jel d82 h42 i22 j24

real time identification of mean retention time and end of life rate in cyclic manufacturing used in predicting demand and new orders for shelf stock replacement and in inventory planning the mean retention time mrt of consumer products is long established as a key production and marketing parameter higher mrts are also associated with enhanced sustainability favoring longer production consumption cycles waste prevention and resource preservation the mrt or the corresponding product stock level and the end of life eol outflow to be collected for disassembly and recycling are useful for planning efficient cyclic operations determination of stock and eol level for cyclic products is challenging however due to random stock losses and to the volatile and distributed nature of returns and eol exit actuary science methods presume specific residual life distributions usually fitted ex post which may become inaccurate when applied to real production consumption cycles anchored on a recent constitutive law in cyclic manufacturing a method is presented for real time mrt and eol identification the law related mean stock and eol levels under random losses and random distributed eol exit via a simple equation without involving residual life or eol distributions or early loss history one degree of freedom still remained for both stock and eol are random and unobservable the work herein ties the remaining degree of freedom it enables sequential identification of stock and eol level using reliable and readily acquired data in a key equation obtained for the production consumption cycle adapting to varying early loss consumer take back and discard volatility it may be useful in proactive policy sizing of disassembly and recycle lines and return inventory control towards cleaner production consumption cycles

cyclic manufacturing necessary and sufficient conditions and minimum rate policy for environmental enhancement under growth uncertainty abstract economic development and rising consumption increase pressure on the environment sustainable production and consumption face the challenge of mitigating impacts under uncertainty in economic growth trade raw material availability and prices variable consumer behavior and technological innovation necessary and sufficient conditions and a minimum rate policy for environmental enhancement under uncertainty are presented they take into account variability in sales consumption in net product and material trade and in manufacturing technology and associated impacts three main criteria are considered k1 reduced final wastes k2 reduced extraction of virgin raw materials k3 reduced impacts from manufacturing the conditions are expressed in terms of the cycle rate which is the generalization of the recycle rate and of readily monitored product flows e g overall sales key advantages of the method are discussed a simplicity and flexibility to simulate different growth conditions b a readily determined standardized rate policy leading to reduced impacts in k1 k2 and k3 it is quantitatively established that for lower wastes uncertainty in growth compels increase of the cycle rate larger than a threshold related to sales for lower virgin material extraction the threshold includes net product material trade as well reduction of manufacturing impacts requires intensification of cleaner processes with adequately lower marginal impacts in periods of economic austerity the policy may be relaxed enhancement is achieved via lower rate targets it is concluded that cleaner production becomes all the more important as reuse recycle flows increase and that such innovation may avert environmental degradation from manufacturing even under significant growth

productivity slowdown due to scarcity of capital to scrap in a putty clay model abstract the conditions for a productivity slowdown to take place simultaneously with accelerated technical change are investigated in a simple putty clay macro model of the johansen type a capacity distribution such that the resulting supply curve is concave at the scrapping margin means a high likelihood of a reversed relation the relation between growth rates of wages and output is crucially dependent on the tail elasticity of the capacity distribution the need in a putty clay economy to scrap in order to transfer labor to new investment is the key mechanism the model emphasizes the decisive role of past investment in shaping the current relation between technical change and productivity growth

the environmental and economic consequences of product lifetime extension empirical analysis for automobile use abstract the present paper develops the product lifetime impact model to estimate the effects of both product lifetime shifts and related consumption pattern shifts on the environment and domestic economy the empirical analysis focused on car lifetime extension reveals that the consumption shifts scenario representing the case in which household consumption patterns shift from the waste intensive car to waste extensive services due to a 1 0 year car lifetime extension contributed to a gdp growth that amounted to approximately 2 billion yen and consequently compensated for the economic loss from a decline in car production the transition from the manufacturing products intensive society to the service intensive society caused by the 1 0 year car average lifetime extension led to a 200 thousand ton decrease in the waste landfill including the car shredder residuals during the five years of the study period 1990 1995

academic admissions standards implications for output distribution and mobility we examine the trade offs implicit in academic admissions standards when students are charged cost based tuition and offered loans that remove liquidity constraints lowering entry requirements while holding graduation requirements fixed increases aggregate output and promotes a more equal distribution of wages but reduces relative income mobility and diminishes the scope for affirmative action lowering admissions standards while raising graduation requirements so that the number of graduates remains constant has little direct effect on output distribution or mobility but again reduces the scope for affirmative action income based affirmative action offers a better trade off between output and relative mobility than income neutral admissions jel d31 h42 i23 i28 j24

hospital profits the effects of reimbursement policies this paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the effect of cost based reimbursement cbr on hospital costs and charges it takes issue with previous analyses which have treated cbr as paying economic costs plus a mark up and have concluded that the mark up is too small to significantly distort hospital decision making the basic thesis here is that if reimbursement is based on costs accounting costs become a price to cost paying patients and will be optimized to maximize revenue a hospital serving both cost and charge paying private patients can set two price schedules accounting profits ratio of charges to costs are not a measure of economic profit but of relative prices to these two groups of patients in the absence of constraints from regulation or patient co payment the optimum level of accounting costs would be infinite in practice the medicare reimbursement formula links allowable costs to charges received from charge paying patients this formula creates incentives for the hospital to raise charges above the single price profit maximizing monopoly level this inflationary effect of the medicare formula does not presuppose that medicare pays less than full cost the empirical analysis of hospital laboratory costs and charges generally supports the predictions for other departments the conclusions are consistent but more tentative because of data limitations overall evidence suggests minimal cross subsidy between cost and charge paying patients comparisons of cost and charge levels in for profit voluntary non profit and government hospitals are presented but it is emphasized that inferences about relative efficiency and profitability cannot be drawn from accounting data given the incentives created by cbr

admission tuition and financial aid policies in the market for higher education we present an equilibrium model of the market for higher education our model simultaneously predicts student selection into institutions of higher education financial aid educational expenditures and educational outcomes we show that the model gives rise to a strict hierarchy of colleges that differ by the educational quality provided to the students we also develop a new estimation procedure that exploits the observed variation in prices within colleges identification is based on variation in endowments and technology it does not rely on observed variation in potentially endogenous characteristics of colleges such as peer quality measures and expenditures we estimate the structural parameters using data collected by the national center for education statistics and aggregate data from peterson s and the national science foundation

participation and study decisions in a public system of higher education we analyze the decision whether to participate and where and what to study in a public system of higher education based on a unique dataset of all eligible high school pupils in an essentially closed region flanders we find that pupils perceive the available institutions and programs as close substitutes relative to the outside option this implies an ambiguous role for travel costs they hardly affect the participation decision but have a strong impact on the decision where and what to study to illustrate how our empirical results can inform the debate on reforming public systems we assess the effects of tuition fee increases uniform cost based tuition fee increases achieve most of the welfare gains the additional gains from fee differentiation are relatively limited these welfare gains are quite large under conservative assumptions on the social cost of public funds and there is a substantial redistribution from students to outsiders copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd

the political economy of intergenerational income mobility the intergenerational elasticity of income is considered one of the best measures of the degree to which a society gives equal opportunity to its members while much research has been devoted to measuring this reduced form parameter less is known about its underlying structural determinants using a model with exogenous talent endowments endogenous parental investment in children and endogenous redistributive institutions we identify the structural parameters that govern the intergenerational elasticity of income the model clarifies how the interaction between private and collective decisions determines the equilibrium level of social mobility two societies with similar economic and biological fundamentals may have vastly different degrees of intergenerational mobility depending on their political institutions we offer empirical evidence in line with the predictions of the model we conclude that international comparisons of intergenerational elasticity of income are not particularly informative about fairness without taking into account differences in politico economic institutions jel e24 j62 j68 p16