a dynamic tiebout theory of voluntary vs involuntary provision of public goods this paper considers a dynamic model of tiebout like migration between communities that utilize distinct allocation procedures for public goods at issue is whether voluntary or compulsory procedures are more likely to prevail over time we model infinitely lived individuals who make repeated sequential location decisions over one of two communities each community uses a distinct mechanism for allocating public goods the first is one in which contributions are given voluntarily by the citizenry of the community the second is a compulsory scheme by which individuals are taxed proportionately to wealth with the tax determined by a majority vote opportunities to accumulate wealth exist via accumulation of public capital the markov perfect equilibria of the dynamic game are studied our main result shows that when accumulated wealth converges to a steady state individuals locational choices eventually select the involuntary provision mechanism this holds despite the fact that unanimous location in the voluntary provision community may in many cases remain as a nash equilibrium of the static game each period we also describe conditions under which voluntary provision survives these conditions require that accumulation of capital fails to decrease wealth dispersion over time the results are shown to be consistent with findings relating inequality to school choice

preserving religious identity through education economic analysis and evidence from the us abstract this paper models the decision of religious parents to send their children to private religious schools as reflecting their desire to shield their children from external influences and thus preserve their religious identity it follows that when the share of the minority in the local population grows and outside influences become less threatening the demand for separate religious schooling among the members of the religious group decreases this pattern implies concavity in the relationship between enrollment in private and religious schooling and the share of the religious group in the population we present empirical evidence from united states county data on catholic and private school enrollment that strongly supports our theory the paper contributes to a better understanding of the demand for religious education

non zero sum stochastic differential reinsurance and investment games with default risk this paper investigates the implications of strategic interaction i e competition between two cara insurers on their reinsurance investment policies the two insurers are concerned about their terminal wealth and the relative performance measured by the difference in their terminal wealth the problem of finding optimal policies for both insurers is modelled as a non zero sum stochastic differential game the reinsurance premium is calculated using the variance premium principle and the insurers can invest in a risk free asset a risky asset with heston s stochastic volatility and a defaultable corporate bond we derive the nash equilibrium reinsurance policy and investment policy explicitly for the game and prove the corresponding verification theorem the equilibrium strategy indicates that the best response of each insurer to the competition is to mimic the strategy of its opponent consequently either the reinsurance strategy or the investment strategy of an insurer with the relative performance concern is riskier than that without the concern numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the findings of this study

empirical evaluation of bureaucratic models of inefficiency two separate but related strands of literature exist regarding the efficiency of public sector service provision the theoretical base developed in the bureaucratic models of supply and the methodological base developed in the operations research and economic literatures most analyses focus exclusively on either the measurement or causes of inefficiency this paper seeks to empirically test bureaucratic models of supply by drawing on the measurement literature in anticipation of the results it is found that there does exist empirical evidence supporting some of the implications of these models

why do different countries choose a different public private mix of educational services we observe a wide range across countries in the percentage of total enrollments that attend private rather than public schools this paper seeks to explain 1 the systematically higher proportion of private enrollments pvt in developing as compared with developed countries at the secondary level and 2 the seemingly random variation across countries within a given level of education and stage of development i argue that the latter is due to differentiated demand and nonprofit supply both of which stem from cultural heterogeneity especially religious heterogeneity in contrast the large pvt at the secondary level in developing countries is hypothesized to stem from limited public spending which creates an excess demand from people who would prefer to use the public schools but are involuntarily excluded and pushed into the private sector the limited public spending on secondary education in turn is modelled as a collective decision which is strongly influenced by the

do limits matter evidence on the effects of tax limitations on student performance abstract the goal of this research is to determine if limits on the revenue raising ability of school districts translate into constraints on the ability of these districts to affect student performance we use the recent imposition of property tax limitations on school districts in the chicago metropolitan area to determine if these limits have translated into slower growth in student performance we find only limited evidence that student performance in districts subject to the tax limitations has fallen relative to student performance in districts not subject to the limitations

immigration public education spending and private schooling this article examines the impact of immigration on private school enrollment through the mechanism of public education spending it finds that the immigrant share of population raises private school enrollment across countries by leading to a decrease in the share of public education spending the decrease is driven by responses to immigrants from culturally similar and developed countries this suggests that the role of public schools in promoting social cohesion among diverse populations is weighted against other concerns in education funding decisions in places with immigrant populations the endogeneity of immigrant share is accounted for by using an instrument constructed from gravity model estimates

budget constrained frontier measures of fiscal equality and efficiency in schooling equality and efficiency are key issues in educational reform here the authors analyze the efficiency and equality consequences of various school finance reforms using a cost indirect output distance function this function readily models multiple output production under conditions of budgetary constraint and provides a natural measure of performance that is closely related to farrell type measures of efficiency the analysis suggests that despite school district inefficiency finance reforms can affect student achievement however any potential gains in output from redistribution are dwarfed by the potential gains from increased efficiency more strikingly the analysis demonstrates that budgetary reforms designed to equalize expenditures could actually increase the inequality of student achievement

the spatial effect of fiscal decentralization and factor market segmentation on environmental pollution abstract externality is a form of market failure and also a starting point for government intervention environmental quality as local public goods has a characteristic of regional spillover thus the intervention of government is crucial fiscal policy is widely seen as an effective tool for environmental management the existing literature about fiscal decentralization s effect on environmental pollution did not consider about spatial correlation in factor market segmentation to explore such decentralized effect through factor distortions we develop a two sector model on the constraint of pollution emissions and market segmentations and conduct an empirical estimation using chinese provincial panel data from 15 years the results show that there is a big difference between expenditure and revenue decentralization on pollution furthermore market segmentation exacerbated the environmental effects of fiscal decentralization and its positive role on environmental pollution is statistically more significant therefore a better way out of pollution for policy making viewpoint is to adjust the decentralization structure and to break the productive factor market segmentation

immigration redistribution and universal suffrage the effect of immigration on redistribution has been widely debated this paper contributes to this debate by testing two explanations which are that i immigration tends to reduce redistribution due to people s higher levels of xenophobia and that ii immigration affects redistribution because immigrants do not have the right to vote since the demand for redistribution depends on the expected gap between median voter income and mean income immigrants affect the demand for redistribution because as non citizens they do not change the median voter s income but as economic stakeholders they do affect the mean income four empirical consequences of i and ii are tested at the individual level evidence from the european values survey in 45 countries confirms ii showing that immigrants expected competitiveness on the labor market affects preferences for redistribution and that it is amplified when the perceived number of immigrants is high in contrast i is globally rejected since the impact of the citizens declared level of solidarity with immigrants tends to be weak and depends on the type of measurement or specification used

how responsive is higher education the linkages between higher education and the labour market higher education is considered vital for developing a productive and dynamic labour force to meet the demands of the global economy how effectively does the us higher education sector respond to labour market signals we match us postsecondary degree completions from 1984 to 2008 with occupational employment statistics and employ an instrumental variable iv strategy to examine the supply response to changes in occupation specific demand the supply of educated workers appears weakly responsive to short term wage signals and moderately responsive to long term employment conditions analysis reveals a sizeable degree of heterogeneity and lag in the responsiveness across specific occupation degree pairings failure to respond rapidly to changes in labour demand may be one factor driving inequality in wages across occupations and in the aggregate economy we suggest some simple policy measures to help increase the responsiveness of the higher education sector both in terms of the output of specific degree

caveat emptor cross country data on education and the labor force abstract cross country data on education and the labor force frequently are used to describe important dimensions of development and to estimate models of economic growth and growth determinants the impact of education and related phenomena this investigation finds 1 there are serious intertemporal and inter country comparability problems with these data that may importantly affect inferences about labor force size trends and productivity and schooling investments and impact 2 data gaps are systematically related to levels of development and literacy and 3 conclusions about the determinants or consequences of development based on constructed data that have been made available to fill data gaps can be seriously misleading

intergovernmental fiscal transfers international lessons for developing countries abstract this paper reviews the central issues that arise in designing intergovernmental transfers and surveys the approaches adopted in a number of countries with special emphasis on developing countries since circumstances and objectives differ from country to country no simple uniform pattern of transfers is universally appropriate but experience around the world makes it clear that if services are to be efficiently provided transfers must be designed so that those receiving them have a clear mandate adequate resources sufficient flexibility to make decisions and are accountable for results

ecological public functions and fiscal equalisation at the local level in germany abstract the concept of sustainability requires the acknowledgement and appropriate financing of ecological economic and social public functions at all levels of government whereas the significance of socio economic functions has a comparably long tradition in federal systems the respective consideration of ecological functions is still waiting to be fully realised the aim of this article is to analyse the roles fiscal federalism and fiscal instruments can play in addressing ecological public functions assigned to decentralised jurisdictions in federal systems for this purpose an investigation of intergovernmental fiscal relations and their significance for the local level is carried out by way of example for the federal republic of germany based on a status quo analysis of the various german fiscal equalisation laws at the local level the article presents options for systematically integrating neglected ecological functions and indicators into the existing legal framework the empirical analysis shows that end of the pipe and infrastructure related ecological functions are already strongly integrated by way of conditional grants however precautionary functions such as nature and resource conservation issues are still largely absent therefore a comprehensive consideration of ecological public functions in germany calls for the integration of nature conservation issues and respective indicators into the system of intergovernmental fiscal relations

designing payments for environmental services in theory and practice an overview of the issues abstract payments for environmental services pes have attracted increasing interest as a mechanism to translate external non market values of the environment into real financial incentives for local actors to provide environmental services es in this introductory paper we set the stage for the rest of this special issue of ecological economics by reviewing the main issues arising in pes design and implementation and discussing these in the light of environmental economics we start with a discussion of pes definition and scope we proceed to review some of the principal dimensions and design characteristics of pes programs and then analyze how pes compares to alternative policy instruments finally we examine in detail two important aspects of pes programs their effectiveness and their distributional implications pes is not a silver bullet that can be used to address any environmental problem but a tool tailored to address a specific set of problems those in which ecosystems are mismanaged because many of their benefits are externalities from the perspective of ecosystem managers pes is based on the beneficiary pays rather than the polluter pays principle and as such is attractive in settings where es providers are poor marginalized landholders or powerful groups of actors an important distinction within pes is between user financed pes in which the buyers are the users of the es and government financed pes in which the buyers are others typically the government acting on behalf of es users in practice pes programs differ in the type and scale of es demand the payment source the type of activity paid for the performance measure used as well as the payment mode and amount the effectiveness and efficiency of pes depends crucially on program design

measuring the distribution of material well being u s trends abstract economists with a few exceptions have automatically assumed that the important measure of well being is income in contrast economic historians have broadened the measure of well being with particular interest in mortality morbidity nutrition education and leisure when one takes this broader view of the standard of living there appears to be a strong trend toward more equality in the distribution of well being since the industrial revolution gini coefficients calculated for the distributions of lifespan and educational attainment have declined dramatically since the mid nineteenth century for the united states mortality and educational differentials have also declined inequality of leisure time and consumption though not as consistently measured also show trends toward equality over the twentieth century these trends toward equality in well being as measured by indicators other than income and wealth seem to be generated by provision of public goods natural boundaries to lifespan educational attainment and leisure and by the growth in mean per capita income the divergent trends in the distributions of income and the other measures of well being caution against reliance on the distribution of income to interpret trends in inequality

an economic model of teaching effectiveness the literature on the determinants of good teaching performance has been largely devoted to empirical measurement a complete review of the publications in this area would require at least an entire issue the size of this journal yet it is virtually impossible to discover attempts to derive hypotheses about the determinants of good teaching from explicit models of behavior this has led researchers into the trap of exploring only the empirical determinants of good teaching performance typically the results of student evaluations are correlated with affective personality traits of the teachers with peer evaluations of psychological compositions or even with the results of various psychological tests examples are the works of robert isaacson et al frank costin et al and wilbert mckeachie et al in most of these studies no substantive conclusions are reached regarding the determinants of effective teaching in the few studies which do contain significant findings the independent variable in question is difficult to explain as a direct determinant of teaching effectiveness for example isaacson et al find that virtually the only statistically significant determinant of effective teaching is the personality characteristic which they label culture this may imply that simply wearing a tweed jacket and taking up pipesmoking is sufficient to improve teaching this paper takes a somewhat different approach to the analysis of teaching assume that the individual in question wishes to maximize teaching effectiveness clearly there are constraints on this maximization process one must necessarily be the time budget constraint a second constraint however adds a good deal of interest to the model this constraint is best described as the bundle of characteristics available to the individual these characteristics could be termed the components of the individual s personality such attributes include physical appearance psychological makeup speaking ability and a myriad of other variables thus this model bears a resemblance to the standard economic models of monopolistic competition see a michael spence before proceeding to a formal statement of the problem a philosophical issue must be addressed what is meant by teaching effectiveness generally this is interpreted as maximizing student evaluations of teachers however this is clearly not always equivalent to maximizing student learning unfortunately the latter variable is difficult but not impossible to measure preand posttesting with standardized tests is becoming increasingly accepted for example the meaning of teaching effectiveness in this paper must unfortunately remain ambiguous some teachers concerned perhaps with obtaining tenure will interpret good teaching as obtaining good evaluations the criterion by which they are judged others may take a more eclectic viewpoint since the problem below is an individual maximization problem the precise definition of effective teaching may simply vary from individual to individual see w r allen formally this problem is exactly analogous to one first addressed by kelvin lancaster he assumes that the consumer attempts to maximize satisfaction through purchase of bundles of attributes each commodity is possessed of certain of these characteristics by consuming various combinations of these commodities the consumer is assistant professor department of economics and director center for economic education california state university hayward i would like to thank alex cassuto nancy sanders and an anonymous referee for helpful discussion in a previously unreported experiment in the department of economics california state universitybakersfield faculty members were required to wear coats and ties in classes it was subsequently observed that teaching evaluations improved unfortunately no detailed statistical results of this experiment are available for analysis

municipal government approaches to service delivery an analysis from a transactions cost perspective municipal governments are less likely to contract out for service delivery if citizen preferences for the service are heterogeneous this conclusion is based on an analysis that extends to the public sector the empirical industrial organization literature on transaction costs and the make or buy decision faced by private firms service delivery practices for sixty three municipal services are examined the findings are consistent with the proposition that the cost for writing and monitoring contracts may be an important consideration in municipal service delivery approach and that bureaucratic supply may not be as inefficient as some previous studies indicate

production and innovation when techniques are tacit the case of education abstract the central theme of this paper is that the conventional economic theory of production does not hold even approximately in a field like education after examining the result of input output studies in education and the effect of government attempts to enhance education effectiveness we provide a sketch of a new production theory for sectors where techniques are poorly articulated and idiosyncratic

modeling multiple outputs in educational production functions for some time now economists have conceptualized learning as a production process most educational production functions specify only one output usually a measure of cognitive achievement some recent studies have recognized the multidimensional aspects of schooling specifying outputs in both the cognitive and affective domains introducing multiple outputs into the production function raises interesting theoretical and empirical issues one issue is the manner in which various outputs are interrelated how one models output interactions in educational production functions may be important are the outputs multiple products if so are they independently or simultaneously produced or are the outputs joint products answers to these questions may affect empirical estimates of the educational production function s this paper briefly describes how one might approach this problem we argue on conceptual grounds that modeling outputs in the cognitive and affective domains as joint products is preferable in addition we compare the three approaches empirically to evaluate the sensitivity of educational production function parameter estimates to output specification

protected areas local governments and strategic interactions the case of the icms ecologico in the brazilian state of parana various conservation initiatives have been implemented in developing countries with increasing involvement on the part of local governments a concern in entrusting decisions to local governments is that the effectiveness of the conservation instrument can be threatened by interactions among these local governments we examine this concern with respect to an ecological fiscal transfer mechanism the icms ecologico implemented in brazil in the early 1990 s in order to reduce biodiversity loss the mechanism enables states to reward municipalities for the creation and management of protected areas we describe this mechanism present a conceptual framework aimed at understanding the potential sources and consequences of interactions among local governments on the effectiveness of a decentralized mechanism aimed at promoting the creation of protected areas and propose an empirical application using a bayesian spatial tobit model our empirical investigation on the creation of protected areas in the state of parana between 2000 and 2010 reveals strategic substitutability in municipalities conservation decisions this finding also leads us to discuss the issue of identification of a negative spatial lag coefficient when there is a positive spatial error correlation

partial fiscal decentralization reforms and educational outcomes a difference in differences analysis for spain abstract several arguments derived from fiscal federalism theory suggest that decentralization may improve the provision of public goods and services however theory remains inconclusive regarding these effects under partial decentralization the aim of this study is to examine this hypothesis by evaluating the effects on educational outcomes of the partial fiscal decentralization reform that took place in spain during the 1980s since education competences were devolved to the regions at different points in time we can consistently estimate the effects of this reform by applying the differences in differences method and by using the non decentralized regions as the comparison group we find that the reform had a sizeable impact on the percentage of students dropping out early from school the effects are much stronger for regions with a high level of revenues we also find that the effects are concentrated in the high school program and that the reform was not able to improve educational outcomes in the vocational program we interpret these results as evidence that decentralization improved the match between education policy and population preferences

private schools in a global world globalization is a popular term that to economists describes the effects of diminished costs to trade around the world the technological revolution of the past two decades lowered barriers to trade in the financial sector as well as in the goods and services sectors as a result we routinely consume products from china india or latin america and these and other countries likewise consume goods and services from us many argue that a by product of the technological revolution is the loss of country and regional cultural identity we find mcdonald s and starbucks in seattle washington beijing china and small towns around the globe others argue that this simply implies wider choice of goods and of cultural identities as economists think about globalization we attribute these changes to efficiency in the marketplace the technological advances have enabled countries to export those goods and services for which they have a comparative advantage and the gains from trade have resulted in increased economic growth worldwide while we see the benefits from the enhanced flow of goods and services across markets economists have paid less attention to the nonmarket aspects of globalization the increased flow of information and people across national boundaries implies increased competition across all sectors of the economy similar to the market for goods and services the political institutions that survive the competitive race in the long run presumably will be those that enhance efficiency this is not to intimate that political systems will replicate the efficiency of the marketplace but to suggest that competitive forces tend to lead to more efficient structures and ultimately toward more efficient outcomes as these public administrative institutions become more competitive politics should play a diminished role and economic efficiency should play an even greater role in future structures if globalization ultimately leads to more efficient institutions the value of examining current international differences in institutional structures is immense through understanding past and current differences we gain insight into our future today i want to examine one specific institution within this context private provision of elementary and secondary schooling i want to examine private schooling by exploring the institutions that govern the provision of private schooling the role of politics and economics in the evolution of these institutions and finally the efficiency implications of the various institutional arrangements at each step in this examination i shall be assessing the role that globalization has played and is expected to play in the delivery of schooling around the world 1 private provision around the worldeconomists have studied education since the days of adam smith we have estimated the demand for schooling provided normative assessments of the role of the state in education examined the effects of public expenditures for education on housing markets estimated the returns to schooling and estimated the relationship between public schooling and economic development but most of all economists have estimated education production functions that relate public sector inputs such as per pupil expenditures pupil teacher ratios or teacher salaries to educational achievement and as last year s southern economic association distinguished guest lecturer so eloquently demonstrated economists policymakers and the public have been sorely perplexed by the lack of positive association between these inputs and the achievement of public school students hoxby 2004 the private side of schooling has received increasing attention from economists as data have become more available james 1993 private schooling occupies a significantly smaller sector of the economy in the united states than does public schooling according to unesco 2000 data approximately 12 of students enrolled in primary schools in this country attend private schools

schools and housing markets an examination of school segregation and performance in connecticut this paper estimates a dynamic model of price level school performance and school racial and ethnic composition in the state of connecticut the paper finds that increasing minority representation in a labor market area reinforces the existing pattern of school segregation changes in segregation appear to be influenced by demographic trends in urban areas and by the labour market factors that determine those trends there is no evidence however to suggest that this process affects housing prices rather the housing market appears to adjust relatively quickly

schooling and economic well being the role of nonmarket effects standard estimates of the economic value of additional schooling based on earnings differences associated with differences in the level of schooling attained cover only a portion of the total effects of education that are valued by citizens we first identify a catalog of nonmarketed effects many of which have been recently studied by economists and then propose a procedure for estimating a willingness to pay value for these effects using empirical estimates of the magnitude of a selection of these effects found in the literature we calculate willingness to pay values using our proposed procedure these illustrative calculations suggest that standard estimates of the benefit of incremental schooling substantially understate the full value of such investments

productive government expenditures and long run growth the purpose of this paper is to review some of the recent developments in endogenous growth models specifically our focus is on the growth effects of productive government spending in dynamic general equilibrium models we use a simple overlapping generations model as our basic framework and illustrate the role of taxes and spending we then examine several related issues nonrivalry in publicly provided goods existence and uniqueness of competitive equilibrium endogenous public policy ways of financing public expenditures composition of publicly provided goods and services and private alternatives finally we review some empirical results related to output elasticity of public capital and educational expenditures

teacher training teacher quality and student achievement abstract we study the effects of various types of education and training on the productivity of teachers in promoting student achievement previous studies on the subject have been hampered by inadequate measures of teacher training and difficulties in addressing the non random selection of teachers to students and of teachers to training we address these issues by estimating models that include detailed measures of pre service and in service training a rich set of time varying covariates and student teacher and school fixed effects we find that elementary and middle school teacher productivity increases with experience informal on the job training the largest gains from experience occur in the first few years but we find continuing gains beyond the first five years of a teacher s career in contrast we do not find a consistent relationship between formal professional development training and teacher productivity however this may be partly driven by estimation issues as we find more significant positive effects of formal training in the subject grade combination where estimates should be most precise middle school math there is no evidence that teachers pre service undergraduate training or college entrance exam scores are related to productivity

anticipating the consequences of school reform a new use of dea we use dea type linear programming techniques to simulate a basic component of educational reform eliminating restrictions on the allocation of school personnel our technique allows us to identify potential output gains or equivalently potential cost savings from reform we can also identify which personnel groups are likely to gain and lose under this reform when we apply our model to a sample of texas school districts we find evidence that the educational establishment has substantial economic rents to protect from school reform and that the primary beneficiaries of reform are likely to be affluent school districts with few minority students the technique which relies on the relationship between the direct and indirect distance functions can be easily generalized to measure the potential gains from removing other input restrictions such as union work rules environmental regulations or deed restrictions

self interest and public funding of education abstract the objective of this paper is to study whether publicly funded education can emerge as a political and economic equilibrium in an overlapping generations economy in which selfish agents vote for public funding of education the presence of complementarities between capital and labor in the production function implies that by improving the skills of next period s workers public funding of education increases the return on capital as a result savers will support a publicly financed education system in order to enhance their future income a version of the model calibrated using u s data generates large shares of gnp allocated to education hence the non altruistic incentive to support public education is quantitatively important

chance constrained optimization for pension fund portfolios in the presence of default risk abstract in this paper we consider the portfolio optimization problem for a pension fund consisting of various government and corporate bonds the aim of the problem is to maximize the fund s cash position at the end of the time horizon while allowing for the possibility of bond defaults we model this problem as a stochastic discrete time optimal control problem with a chance constraint that ensures all future outgoing commitments can be met with sufficiently high probability we then introduce a corresponding deterministic formulation that is a conservative approximation of the original stochastic optimal control problem this approximate problem can be solved using gradient based optimization techniques we conclude the paper with a simulation study

causal effects in education abstract in recent years a wave of new studies on the effects of educational interventions on student performance has emerged the realization that inputs in the education process are endogenous is important for the validity of traditional findings because of ignoring endogeneity bias all traditional estimates might be wrong recent studies exploit exogenous variation in interventions in education produced by controlled or natural experiments results generated by this methodological innovation differ substantially from the traditional findings this article reviews this new literature illustrates new methods for identifying causal effects of interventions in education and compares the findings with the traditional literature

nonparametric analysis of educational costs abstract traditional economic analyses of the public sector that assume cost minimization are not consistent with political models of bureaucracy if costs are not minimized then estimated cost functions will be biased the purpose of this paper is to provide a flexible nonparametric technique based on farrell type efficiency measures to estimate public sector costs standard indices need to be modified to fit the special nature of public sector service provision which is characterized by an influence of exogenous variables on cost a useful by product is an index of environmental harshness faced by local governments for illustrative purposes this technique is applied to a sample of new york state school districts it is found that nearly 64 of districts are cost inefficient spending on average 1200 per pupil above the cost minimizing level in addition it is estimated that the average school district faces environmental cost of over 1700 per pupil

the economics of schooling production and efficiency in public schools n recent years public and professional interest in schools has been heightened by a spate of reports many of them critical of current school policy these policy documents have added to persistent and long standing concerns about the cost effectiveness and fairness of the current school structure and have made schooling once again a serious public issue as in the past however any renewed interest in education is likely to be short lived doomed to dissipate as frustration over the inability of policy to improve school practice sets in this frustration about school policy relates directly to knowledge about the educational production process and in turn to underlying research on schools although the educational process has been extensively researched clear policy prescriptions flowing from this research have been difficult to derive 2 there exists however a consistency to the research findings that does have an immediate application to school policy schools differ dramatically in quality

school decentralization helping the good get better but leaving the poor behind abstract the decentralization of public services is a major feature of institutional innovation the main argument in support of decentralization is that it brings decisions closer to the people thereby alleviating information asymmetries and improving accountability however decentralization can also degrade service provision in poor communities that lack the ability to voice and defend their preferences in this paper we analyze the average and distributional effects of school decentralization on educational quality in argentina we find that decentralization had an overall positive impact on student test scores the decentralization gains however did not reach the poor thus although bringing decisions closer to the people may help the good get better the already disadvantaged may not receive these benefits

multiperiod portfolio optimization models in stochastic markets using the mean variance approach we consider several multiperiod portfolio optimization models where the market consists of a riskless asset and several risky assets the returns in any period are random with a mean vector and a covariance matrix that depend on the prevailing economic conditions in the market during that period an important feature of our model is that the stochastic evolution of the market is described by a markov chain with perfectly observable states various models involving the safety first approach coefficient of variation and quadratic utility functions are considered where the objective functions depend only on the mean and the variance of the final wealth an auxiliary problem that generates the same efficient frontier as our formulations is solved using dynamic programming to identify optimal portfolio management policies for each problem illustrative cases are presented to demonstrate the solution procedure with an interpretation of the optimal policies

environmental taxation and the double dividend in decentralized jurisdictions this research explores the implications for jurisdictional welfare of sharing environmental rents between private and public consumption an integrated model is developed from research literatures on jurisdictional competition the double dividend and on the design of tax refund instruments this model shows that jurisdictional welfare increases as environmental rents are initially allocated towards public consumption yielding a double dividend but that this dividend may or may not continue as all rents are shifted to public finance when the double dividend occurs the rent allocation both improves the efficiency of the tax system and reduces the private public consumption distortion that decentralized jurisdictional decision making creates in some parameter configurations there is an optimal rental allocation between the private sector and the local government at this optimum environmental and fiscal policies are set at their first best levels and decentralized jurisdictional decision making is globally efficient if less rents are allocated to public finance than this optimum fiscal and environmental policies will be suboptimal whereas if too much rent is allocated for public consumption fiscal and environmental policies will be set at levels above the global efficiency standard these results illustrate the crucial importance of environmental rent sharing for the efficiency of jurisdictional decision making

hara frontiers of optimal portfolios in stochastic markets abstract in this paper we consider the optimal portfolio selection problem in continuous time settings where the investor maximizes the expected utility of the terminal wealth in a stochastic market the utility function has the structure of the hara family and the market states change according to a markov process the states of the market describe the prevailing economic financial social and other conditions that affect the deterministic and probabilistic parameters of the model this includes the distributions of the random asset returns as well as the utility function we analyzed black scholes type continuous time models where the market parameters are driven by markov processes the markov process that affects the state of the market is independent of the underlying brownian motion that drives the stock prices the problem of maximizing the expected utility of the terminal wealth is investigated and solved by stochastic optimal control methods for exponential logarithmic and power utility functions we found explicit solutions for optimal policy and the associated value functions we also constructed the optimal wealth process explicitly and discussed some of its properties in particular it is shown that the optimal policy provides linear frontiers

tax limits and the qualifications of new teachers abstract this paper examines the impact of local tax limits on new teacher quality using data from the national center for education statistics we find that tax limits systematically reduce the average quality of education majors as well as new public school teachers in states that have passed these limits the average relative test scores of education majors in tax limit states declined by ten percent as compared to the relative test scores of education majors in states that did not pass limits this relationship is strengthened if we control for school finance equalization reforms or examine tax limits passed in two different periods

the state socialization and private schooling when will governments support alternative producers abstractunderstanding the institutional features that can improve learning outcomes and reduce inequality is a top priority for international and development organisations around the world economists appear to have a good case for support to non governmental alternatives as suppliers of schooling however unlike other policy domains freer international trade or privatisation economists have been remarkably unsuccessful in promoting the adoption of this idea we develop a general positive model of why governments typically produce schooling which introduces the key notion of the lack of verifiability of socialisation and instruction of beliefs which makes third party contracting for socialisation problematic we use the model to explain variations around the world in levels of private schooling we also predict the circumstances in which efforts to promote the different alternatives to government production like charter voucher and scholarship are likely to be successful

allocating scarce financial resources across regions for environmental management in queensland australia abstract regional governance agencies such as catchment or watershed management committees are playing a significant role in the management of natural resources these agencies often depend on central governance agencies for their revenue in australia this has created a policy dilemma for federal and state governments how should limited funds be allocated to regional groups this question is being encountered by central governance agencies worldwide based on a study from queensland australia this paper shows how multiple criteria analysis mca was used to inform fiscal equalisation of environmental funds worth a 146 6 million across 14 regions fiscal equalisation aims to equalise the ability of each region to address its natural resource management problems the mca approach allows decision makers to weight criteria and define a needs index which forms the basis for allocating funds

dollars and performance treating alcohol misuse in maine abstract if public funds are allocated efficiently then an increase in funding should improve the performance of substance abuse treatment programs in the data used in this paper performance measured as abstinence rates and expenditures per patient are not positively correlated one explanation is that funding is endogeneous i e programs treating more difficult patients receive more funding the data comes from all maine s outpatient drug free programs that received public funding between 1991 and 1994 after controlling for endogeneity this paper concludes that the marginal impact of expenditures per patient on abstinence rates is small and statistically insignificantly different from zero

assessing school efficiency in portugal using fdh and bootstrapping this study explores a new data set that contains information both on inputs and outputs for a sample of portuguese secondary schools an fdh reference technology is used to determine radial technical efficiency scores and slacks although it is known that there is no reason to assume convexity in the study of education efficiency frontiers this is the first study ever to use fdh at the school level effectively relaxing the convexity assumption a two stage approach is used whereby the significant environmental variables that explain fdh efficiency scores and slacks are identified for the purpose of statistical inference the first application of the bootstrapping algorithms suggested by simar and wilson 2003 is conducted the study concludes that the unemployment rate access to health care services adult education and living infrastructures are determinants of school efficiency the differences between the coast and the interior of portugal seem to be more relevant as far as school efficiency is

decentralization effects in ecological fiscal transfers a bayesian structural time series analysis for portugal portugal has a unitary system in which the central government transfers funds to lower government levels for their public functions in 2007 portugal introduced ecological fiscal transfers eft where municipalities receive transfers for hosting protected areas pa we study whether introducing eft in portugal incentivized municipalities to designate pa and has led to a decentralization of conservation decisions we employ a bayesian structural time series approach to estimate the effect of introducing eft in comparison to a simulated counterfactual time series quantitative results show a significant increase in the ratio of municipal and national pa designations following portugal s eft introduction which we infer to be a causal consequence the analysis furthermore places emphasis on the importance of relevant municipal conservation competencies for the functioning of the instrument results have important implications for conservation policy making in terms of allocating budgets and competencies in multi level governments

the effect on black white wage differences of differences in the quantity and quality of education using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth for the years 1979 88 the author examines the extent to which black white differences in educational attainment educational quality and unmeasured individual ability can explain black white wage differences an analysis that corrects for both selectivity and ability biases inherent in estimating the education wage relationship shows that the main source of the black white wage differential is the racial difference in the quality rather than quantity of schooling in fact the author concludes closing the racial gap in the basic skills learned in school could reduce the wage differential by two thirds

intergenerational transfers production and income distribution abstract we consider an overlapping generations economy where the aggregative production process uses physical capital and human capital intergenerational transfers from parents to their children are motivated by altruism we distinguish between two types of transfers investment of parents in the education of their offspring and capital transfer the gift bequest motive we show that the intensity of each type of altruism and hence the composition of the two types of transfers affect significantly the equilibrium output and the intragenerational income distributions comparing competitive equilibria from the same initial distributions of capital transfers and human capital we derive a the economy with the higher education inclined altruism attains lower output and more equal intragenerational income distributions if either the production function s elasticity of substitution is not large or the altruism is weak b for more bequest inclined altruism the effects are usually reversed c under public provision of education higher bequest inclined altruism results in lower output and less equal distribution of income in all dates

to segregate or to integrate education politics and democracy how is the quality of public education affected by the presence of private schools for the rich theory and evidence suggest that the link depends crucially on the political system we develop a theory that integrates private education and fertility decisions with voting on public schooling expenditures we find that the presence of a large private education sector benefits public schools in a broad based democracy where politicians are responsive to low income families but crowds out public education spending in a society that is politically dominated by the rich the main predictions of the theory are consistent with state level data and micro data from the u s as well as cross country evidence from the programme for international student assessment study

an explanation for public provision of schooling the importance of indoctrination this article was completed while i was a national fellow at the hoover institution and represents the unpublished theory and cross country empirical sections from my 1984 university of california los angeles dissertation armen alchian harold demsetz gertrud fremling david friedman robert hansen ben klein ed lazear russell roberts finis welch e g west an unusually helpful anonymous referee from this journal and the participants in seminars at auburn university the university of california at los angeles and at davis california state university at hayward and northridge the hoover institution george mason university the university of houston southern methodist university the u s department of education texas a m university and the 1987 public choice meetings in tucson arizona provided valuable discussions i would like to thank maury pearl for very helpful research assistance any remaining errors are of course my responsibility

pricing derivatives on financial securities subject to credit risk this article provides a new methodology for pricing and hedging derivative securities involving credit risk two types of credit risks are considered the first is where the asset underlying the derivative security may default the second is where the writer of the derivative security may default we apply the foreign currency analogy of jarrow and turnbull 1991 to decompose the dollar payoff from a risky security into a certain payoff and a spot exchange rate arbitrage free valuation techniques are then employed this methodology can be applied to corporate debt and over the counter derivatives such as swaps and caps the purpose of this article is to provide a new theory for pricing and hedging derivative securities involving credit risk two sources of credit risk are identified and analyzed the first is where the asset underlying the derivative security may default paying off less than promised this is the case for example with imbedded options on corporate debt the second is the credit risk introduced by the writer of the derivative security who may also default examples include over the counter writers of options on eurodollar futures swaps and swaptions for pricing derivative securities involving credit risk there are currently two approaches the first views these derivatives as contingent claims not on the financial securities themselves but as compound options on the assets underlying the financial securities this is the case for example with the pricing of imbedded options on corporate debt see merton 1974 1977 black and cox 1976 ho and singer 1982 chance 1990 and kim ramaswamy and sundaresan 1993 or the pricing of vulnerable options see johnson and stulz 1987 in practice however this valuation methodology is difficult to use first the assets underlying the financial security are often not tradeable and therefore their values are not observable this makes application of the theory and estimation of the relevant parameters problematic second as in the case of corporate debt all of the other liabilities of the firm senior to the corporate debt must first and simultaneously be valued this generates significant computational difficulties as a result this approach has not

schools and housing values this study combines historical and quantitative methods to determine the market response to a major nineteenth century american urban architectural form the speculatively built row house the paper estimates a hedonic price index which decomposes the

ethnic diversity public spending and individual support for the welfare state a review of the empirical literature we review the empirical literature that studies the effect of ethnic diversity on public spending and on individual support for the welfare state the survey puts a particular focus on the fast growing literature that uses experiments to study the effects of ethnic diversity many of these studies have appeared since the pioneering survey by alesina and la ferrara and have not been covered by a survey before

the impact of educational standards on the level and distribution of earnings the goal of this paper is to present the following finding an egalitarian policy maker might prefer higher standards than would a policy maker whose goal was to maximize the sum of earnings the result is based on the observation that if workers are differentiated with respect to ability an increase in educational standards will increase the earnings of both the most able and the least able workers the only workers whose earnings fall are those workers who after the increase fail to continue meeting the standard

do schools matter for high math achievement evidence from the american mathematics competitions this paper uses data from the american mathematics competitions to examine the rates at which different high schools produce high achieving math students there are large differences in the frequency with which students from seemingly similar schools reach high achievement levels the distribution of unexplained school effects includes a thick tail of schools that produce many more high achieving students than is typical several additional analyses suggest that the differences are not primarily due to unobserved differences in student characteristics the differences are persistent across time suggesting that differences in the effectiveness of educational programs are not primarily due to direct peer effects

financing sustainable development country undertakings and rights for environmental sustainability cures abstract we propose a global mechanism to finance sustainable development sd that offers a number of advantages over the current global environmental facility gef the mechanism would be multinational provide incentives for rich and poor countries to promote sd incorporate the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and link incentives and funding for sd to structural benchmarks and performance targets it would operate as a large fund into which rich countries would pay based on their level of population per capita income and change in a measure of environmental sustainability receipts from the funds called country undertakings and rights for environmental sustainability cures would be made to poor countries based on their population per capita income and absolute level of environmental sustainability this approach differentiates payments and receipts on the basis of income while rewarding improvements in environmental performance in rich countries and making greater payments to countries with greater environmental problems to promote flexibility recipient countries would be able to trade bank or borrow their assigned cures provided that the trade resulted in a verifiable improvement in environmental sustainability in the purchasing country a reformed gef that adopted the desirable features of cures if widely adopted and funded at a sufficiently high level would offer a significant boost to global sd and would greatly assist poor countries to address the twin challenges of poverty and environmental degradation

beggar thy neighbor testing for free riding in state level endangered species expenditures an important public policy question that remains unresolved iswhether devolution will enhance sensible policy making byexploiting informational asymmetries or instead trigger a beggar thy neighbor response and stimulate free ridingamongst localities we analyze this question within theframework of u s environmental policymaking by scrutinizing aunique panel data set on state level endangered speciesexpenditure patterns our empirical estimates are consistentwith the notion that states free ride which may lead to anexpenditure equilibrium that is not pareto efficient

the determinants of donative revenue flows from alumni of higher education an empirical inquiry institutions of higher education are increasingly relying upon alumni giving and endowment earnings as sources of funding this paper utilizes a new database on average alumni donations at the institutional level and institutional characteristics to explore the role that lagged institutional characteristics and policy have on subsequent donations to the institution our results confirm the noncontemporaneous effects of variations in the average scholastic achievement of matriculated students a proxy for both student quality and student socioeconomic status on subsequent donative revenue flows and indirectly address some of the open questions left by previous theoretical inquiries

on the contract curve a test of alternative models of collective bargaining the traditional model of collective bargaining confines unions to settlements constrained by the employer s labor demand curve but an alternative model places wage employment outcomes on a contract curve that extends beyond the labor demand curve this paper derives a multidimensional hedonic contract curve model in which employment security provisions are used to maintain efficient bargains outside the employer s demand curve and distinguishes empirically between the contract curve and demand constraint models using data for public school teachers in new york state estimates clearly support the contract curve model over the demand constraint model by linking the gap between compensation and the value of the marginal product to the strength of employment security provisions

human capital vs signalling explanations of wages increases wages by directly increasing the worker s productivity this learning explanation is usually associated with human capital theory however it seems unlikely that learning explains all the wage differences associated with schooling and work history better educated workers are not a random sample of workers they have lower propensities to quit or to be absent are less likely to smoke drink or use illicit drugs and are generally healthier it is unlikely that employers make full use of differences in propensities to quit or to be absent or sick when hiring workers these characteristics are often not directly observed and the americans with disabilities act precludes firms from using either poor health or the likelihood of future sickness as a hiring criterion unless it is directly related to job performance however if low levels of education are associated with these unfavorable employee characteristics and employers are allowed to take education into account when hiring workers we would expect employers to favor better educated workers as a means of reducing their costs of sickness and job turnover in turn students will take these hiring criteria into account when deciding how long to stay in school students will choose a length of schooling to signal their ability to employers and employers will demand a minimum level of schooling

global mechanisms for sustaining and enhancing pes schemes article i nfo an international payment for ecosystem service ipes schemes may be one of the only mechanisms available to stimulate the provision of vital non marketed ecosystem services at the global level as those nations that benefit from global ecosystem services ges cannot readily force other sovereign nations to provide them currently international trade offers trillions of dollars in incentives for countries to convert natural capital into marketable goods and services and few payments to entice countries to conserve natural capital in order to sustain critical non marketed ecosystem services we examine the biophysical characteristics of climate change and biodiversity to understand the obstacles to developing effective ipes schemes we find that none of the existing schemes for providing ges are adequate given the scale of the problem a cap and auction scheme for co2 emissions among wealthy nations could fund ipes and simultaneously deter carbon emissions to disburse funds we should adapt brazil s icms ecologico and apportion available funds to targeted countries in proportion to how well they meet specific criteria designed to measure the provision of ges individual countries can then develop their own policies for increasing provision of these services ensured of compensation if they do so indirect ipes should include funding for freely available technologies that protect or provide ges such as the low carbon energy alternatives that will be essential for curbing climate change markets rely on the price mechanism to generate profits which rations technology to those who can afford it reducing adoption rates innovation and total value

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

human capital social capital and public schooling abstract public education contributes to growth not only by building human capital but also by instilling common norms that increase social cohesion this is modeled in the context of a political economy framework in which social cohesion reduces wasteful rent seeking and thus strengthens incentives for investment in human captial the political decisions that determine whether different social groups retain separate schooling systems or adopt an integrated system weigh these material advantages against the psychic cost to parents of alienating their children from traditional values this aspect of public education helps explain why commonly education is publicly administered as well as publicly financed

the quality of schooling quantity alone is misleading although much research discusses the quantity of schooling as an effective impact on productivity and earnings most such research leaves out the idea of the quality of schooling which may cause biases in the estimated returns to schooling this paper consequently attempts to extend the standard mincerian approach to incorporate school quality as well as quantity it demonstrates how exclusion of quality in the standard procedure may cause biases in the estimated returns to years of schooling probably in the upward direction the paper explores the implications of this extension of the standard model for the case of young brazilian males it shows that the estimate of the private return to years of schooling using the preferred quality inclusive specification is only one half the estimate using the standard procedure indicating substantial upward bias in the standard estimates it further outlines a method for estimating a social return to quality and finds that it exceeds substantially the social return to quantity the paper then shows why this in turn suggests there may be an equity productivity trade off in schooling investments

location and education in south african cities under and after apartheid we model a south african city during apartheid in which both schooling and mobility are restricted on the basis of race and after apartheid in which no restrictions are imposed we first show that the inequality between blacks and whites decreases when apartheid laws are removed indeed blacks are better off because of human capital externalities due to the possibility of mixing with white students whereas whites are worse off due to negative human capital externalities and intensified land market competition after apartheid we also show that reducing the commuting costs of black children always increases the utility of black families and may even increase that of whites

educational systems growth and income distribution a quantitative study this study sets out to develop a dynamic model within an economy characterized by the coexistence of public and private schools under imperfect credit market conditions in an attempt to provide a clearer understanding of the evolution of economic growth and income inequality we find that any government wishing to reduce income inequality should adopt policies aimed at increasing the enrollment rate in public schools however whilst high enrollment rates can be sustained in private schools and thus create enhanced economic growth this can only occur if accompanied by the liberalization of the credit markets

compensation for environmental services and intergovernmental fiscal transfers the case of india this paper studies mechanisms to compensate local government for the public provision of environmental services using the theory of optimal fiscal transfers in india especially we analyzed the role of intergovernmental fiscal transfers in achieving the environmental goal simply assigning the functions at appropriate levels does not ensure optimal provision of environmental services optimality in resource allocation could be achieved by combining the assignment system with an appropriate compensation mechanism intergovernmental fiscal transfers would be a suitable mechanism for compensating the local governments and help in internalizing the spillover effects of providing environmental public goods illustrations are also provided for india