financial markets and growth the last five years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in the relationship between financial intermediation and economic growth this issue had been extensively studied nearly two decades earlier by goldsmith 1969 mckinnon 1973 shaw 1973 and others who produced considerable evidence that financial development correlates with growth but their work though insightful lacked analytical foundations in traditional growth theory financial intermediation could be related to the level of the capital stock per worker or to the level of productivity but not to their respective growth rates the latter were ascribed to exogenous technical progress the recent revival of interest in the link between financial development and growth stems mainly from the insights and techniques of endogenous growth models which have shown that there can be self sustaining growth without exogenous technical progress and that the growth rate can be related to preferences technology income distribution and institutional arrangements this provides the theoretical underpinning that early contributors lacked tinancial intermediation can be shown to have not only level effects but also growth effects the resulting models have offered important insights into the effect of financial development on growth and vice versa they have also provided new impetus to empirical research on these issues this paper reviews the ground covered so far on the theoretical and empirical front and points to some still unresolved issues

real interest rates and endogenous growth in a monetary economy abstract in endogenous growth models where the engine of growth is human capital acquired via formal education inflation taxes may raise or lower real interest rates depending upon whether or not physical and or human capital are liquidity constrained cases are examined

a growth model of inflation tax evasion and financial repression abstract this paper studies the relation between policies of financial repression inflation rates and long term growth we set up a model which shows that governments might want to express the financial sector because this sector is an easy source of resources for the public budget the inflation tax to the extent that the financial sector increases the efficiency of the allocation of savings to productive investment the choice of the degree of financial development will have real effects on the growth rate of the economy in countries where tax evasion is large the government will optimally choose to repress the financial sector in order to increase seigniorage taxation this policy will then reduce the efficiency of the financial sector increase the costs of intermediation reduce the amount of investment and reduce the growth rate of the economy financial repression will therefore be associated with high tax evasion low growth and high inflation

when is stabilization expansionary evidence from high inflation countries which stabilize from high inflation here defined as an annual rate above 40 usually have output expansions in the first and subsequent years of stabilization these expansions occur in both exchange rate based and money based stabilizations the paper reaches these conclusions after examining a sample of all 28 episodes in the international data that meet a pre defined criterion for stabilization from high inflation the results do not change with alternative growth and stabilization definitions the paper documents similar expansionary stabilizations in historical data and in the recent experience of the former communist economies expansionary stabilizations may be an indirect confirmation of recent theories of political economy that predict that stabilization will not occur until the gains are very large william easterly

inflation uncertainty and growth in a cash in advance economy abstract this paper analyzes the effects of inflation variability on economic growth in a model where money is introduced via a cash in advance constraint in this setting we find that inflation adversely affects long run growth even when the cash in advance constraint applies only to consumption at the same time we find that inflation and growth are positively related in the short run furthermore variability increases average growth through a precautionary savings motive since inflation and inflation variability tend to be highly correlated the presence of uncertainty attenuates the negative long run relationship between inflation and real growth it also provides a partial rationale for the apparent lack of robustness in cross country regressions of growth and inflation

the proper scope of government theory and an application to prisons when should a government provide a service in house and when should it contract out provision we develop a model in which the provider can invest in improving the quality of service or reducing cost if contracts are incomplete the private provider has a stronger incentive to engage in both quality improvement and cost reduction than a government employee has however the private contractor s incentive to engage in cost reduction is typically too strong because he ignores the adverse effect on noncontractible quality the model is applied to understanding the costs and benefits of prison privatization

using maimonides rule to estimate the effect of class size on scholastic achievement the twelfth century rabbinic scholar maimonides proposed a maximum class size of 40 this same maximum induces a nonlinear and nonmonotonic relationship between grade enrollment and class size in israeli public schools today maimonides rule of 40 is used here to construct instrumental variables estimates of effects of class size on test scores the resulting identiecation strategy can be viewed as an application of donald campbell s regression discontinuity design to the class size question the estimates show that reducing class size induces a signiecant and substantial increase in test scores for fourth and efth graders although not for third graders when asked about their views on class size in surveys parents and teachers generally report that they prefer smaller classes this may be because those involved with teaching believe that smaller classes promote student learning or simply because smaller classes offer a more pleasant environment for the pupils and teachers who are in them mueller chase and walden 1988 social scientists and school administrators also have a longstanding interest in the class size question class size is often thought to be easier to manipulate than other school inputs and it is a variable at the heart of policy debates on school quality and the allocation of school resources in many countries see e g robinson 1990 for the united states ofsted 1995 for the united kingdom and moshel ravid 1995 for israel this broad interest in the consequences of changing class size

anticipated policy and endogenous growth in a small open monetary economy abstract this paper analyzes the effects of a preannounced change in the growth rate of credit in a small open economy the model based on an endogenous growth model introduces the adjustment costs for investment and the role of money in the production function and highlights the dynamic behavior of an open economy we show that an increase in the rate of anticipated credit growth lowers the steady growth rate of capital real money balances and real output we also find that the rate of depreciation of the domestic currency will rise steadily toward its stationary level the anticipated domestic credit growth hence exhibits monetary nonsuperneutrality in both the rate and the level of output in the intermediate and the long run

recruiting smarter teachers in recent years many states have raised teacher salaries to attract more capable teachers since teacher labor markets are typically in a state of excess supply success of such policies is contingent on containing perverse feedbacks which arise among exit decisions vacancy rates and the willingness of prospective teachers to invest in occupation specific human capital using sat scores as a measure of ability we find that an across the board raise produces modest improvements in the work force at best indeed under plausible parameter values it is possible for mean ability to decline

how vouchers could change the market for education small probability that vouchers will in the foreseeable future be adopted on a large scale in any school district or state at the moment only three states have adopted publicly funded voucher programs and all of these programs are limited in scale nonetheless in recent years over 40 state legislatures have considered proposals to provide some type of voucher program or tuition tax credit for at least some families in a given state or school district and the children s scholarship fund see http www scholarshipfund org has helped create or expand privately funded voucher programs in numerous cities as vouchers become a more significant part of education policy debates the time is right to consider what we know and do not know about the likely effects of adopting various voucher schemes in the balance of this paper i describe both empirical and theoretical work on education that speaks to this topic i argue that we cannot confidently predict the outcomes that would result from various voucher schemes and i also stress that debates over vouchers per se are not informative details concerning funding targeting and discretion in the use of vouchers should greatly affect the outcomes associated with any particular voucher program still empirical evidence on the performance of public versus private schools as well as numerical results from existing simulation models suggest that policymakers should be able to design voucher programs that would be helpful to minority students in large cities public schools in large cities often perform poorly in minority neighborhoods and this is especially true in economically disadvantaged areas

the effect of salaries and opportunity costs on duration in teaching evidence from michigan this paper demonstrates that salaries and opportunity costs have important influences on how long teachers stay in teaching the empirical work is based on a new longitudinal dataset providing information on the careers of 7800 michigan public school teachers the generalized least squares estimation technique accommodates censored observations time varying covariates and fixed effects one implication of the result is that predictions from the current generation of teacher supply and demand models are likely to be misleading copyright 1989 by mit press

competition between private and public schools vouchers and peer group effects a theoretical and computational model with tax financed tuition free public schools and competitive tuition financed private schools is developed students differ by ability and income achievement depends on own ability and on peers abilities equilibrium has a strict hierarchy of school qualities and two dimensional student sorting with stratification by ability and income in private schools high ability low income students receive tuition discounts while low ability high income students pay tuition premia tuition vouchers increase the relative size of the private sector and the extent of student sorting and benefit high ability students relative to low ability students

investment tax credit in an open economy abstract this paper contrasts the effects of a permanent and temporary investment tax credit itc in an open economy in both cases an itc will initially stimulate investment while reducing employment and output and generating a current account deficit if the itc is permanent the accumulation of capital leads to a higher equilibrium capital stock higher employment and output and a reduction in the economy s stock of net credit if the itc is temporary after its removal the economy eventually moves to a new steady state equilibrium having a lower permanent capital stock and employment together with a higher stock of net credit

a dynamic analysis of a demand curve based capacity market proposal the pjm reliability pricing model because of high generation adequacy standards in the power industry some peaking capacity operates for a limited time during the year and may not receive sufficient energy revenues to meet its fixed costs this is particularly true when energy prices are capped in order to mitigate market power the northeastern u s independent system operators isos have responded to this issue by establishing capacity obligations for loads and markets for installed capacity thus providing a capacity revenue stream to generators the installed capacity icap markets in the northeastern u s markets are a response to this need for additional incentives to construct generation the federal energy regulatory commission ferc has accepted the pjm interconnection s pjm proposal to replace the present fixed icap requirement that is placed upon load serving entities lses with a demand curve based system in which the iso would be responsible for acquiring residual capacity on behalf of lses the demand curve approach pays more when reserve margins are smaller and provides a reduced incentive for investment when installed reserves are above the target another goal is to make revenues more predictable for generators making investment less costly and ultimately lowering prices for consumers a dynamic representative agent model is presented for projecting effects upon reserve margins generator profitability and consumer costs and is applied to alternative demand curves proposed for the pjm market the consumer costs resulting from a sloped demand curve are robustly lower compared to the present fixed requirement under a wide range of assumptions concerning behavior of generation owners including risk attitudes bidding behavior and willingness to build capacity as a function of forecast profit the cost savings arise from lower capital costs to generators due to reduced risk and risk premiums also average installed capacity is less for the same level of reliability because of reduced fluctuations in installed reserves

capital income taxation and long run growth new perspectives abstract we study the effects of capital income taxation on long run growth in an endogenous growth framework with two distinguishing features endogenous population and international capital mobility endogenizing population growth introduces a new channel for taxes to affect economic growth and enables us to discriminate the effects of taxes on total versus per capita income growth allowing for capital mobility in the open economy we show how the effects of taxes on population growth and income growth across countries will vary in specific ways depending on the international income tax regimes and the relative preference bias of people towards the quantity and quality of their children the numerical results based on our calibrated model for the g 7 nations also indicate that although the effects of liberalizing capital flows on long run growth may not be very sizable the growth effects of changes in capital income tax rates can be tremendously magnified by cross border capital flows and cross border spillovers of policy effects

real money balances as a productive input abstract using a translog production function and data from the united states private sector over the period 1929 1972 this paper clarifies the theoretical debate which has occured on whether real money balances are an original factor input or a catalyst with a role similar to technological innovation real money balances are found to be an important factor input that cannot be treated as separable from the primary factor inputs capital and labor furthermore the results indicate that real money balances are substitutes for capital but complements with labor while capital and labor are in a relative sense complements

measuring investment in education historic debates about the measurement of capital are even more complicated in the case of education and human capital as extensive research demonstrates education resources are not consistently related to student performance in existing elementary and secondary schools this inefficiency in public schools implies that spending and resource measures do not accurately capture variations in school quality this finding then has clear implications for both education policy and economic research because school inputs are poor policy instruments an alternative policy focus that appears much more productive is performance incentives related to student achievement

domestic and foreign disturbances in an optimizing model of exchange rate determination abstract this paper analyzes the effects of various disturbances of domestic and foreign origin in a small open economy under imperfect capital mobility in which the behavioral relationships are divided from optimization by the private sector in this model the domestic economy jumps instantaneously to its new equilibrium following a change in either the domestic monetary growth rate or domestic fiscal policy in response to a disturbance in either the foreign interest rate or inflation rate the economy undergoes an initial partial jump towards its new equilibrium which it thereafter approaches gradually the implications of these results for exchange rate adjustments and the insulation properties of flexible exchange rates are discussed

money and endogenous growth the ramsey romer model of endogenous growth is extended to allow for holdings of real money balances and government debt as well as capital and for non interconnected generations of households tax financed increases in government consumption and debt depress growth prospects and boost inflation as long as a positive birth rate ensures that future taxes are shouldered by future yet unborn generations debt financed increases in government consumption depress growth and boost inflation even more money financed increases in government consumption depress growth less but increase inflation by more giving subsidies through an increase in monetary growth is non neutral since this increases real growth and thus inflation increases by a lesser amount than monetary growth bond financed increases in monetary growth lead to a larger increase in real growth and a smaller increase in inflation if there are cost adjustment for investment cuts in monetary growth and increases in government debt and government consumption induce an increase in the real interest rate copyright 1994 by ohio state university press

a contribution to the theory of business cycles an economy consisting of identical perfectly competitive firms with real liquidity costs and a one period production lag has a locally unstable stationary equilibrium with complex eigenvalues for a wide range of parameters monetary policy aimed at stabilizing real balances can support nonstationary equilibrium paths that converge to a limit cycle which has keynesian features the first welfare theorem does not hold because the price level appears in the production function through liquidity costs so that production has a positive externality

who benefits when the government pays more pass through in the medicare advantage program abstract governments contract with private firms to provide a wide range of services while a large body of previous work has estimated the effects of that contracting surprisingly little has investigated how those effects vary with the generosity of the contract in this paper we examine this issue in the medicare advantage ma program through which the federal government contracts with private insurers to coordinate and finance health care for 17 million medicare recipients to do this we exploit a substantial policy induced increase in ma reimbursement in metropolitan areas with a population of 250 000 or more relative to msas below this threshold our results demonstrate that the additional reimbursement leads more private firms to enter this market and to an increase in the share of medicare recipients enrolled in ma plans our findings also reveal that about one eighth of the additional reimbursement is passed through to consumers in the form of better coverage a somewhat larger share accrues to private insurers in the form of higher profits and we find suggestive evidence of a large impact on advertising expenditures our results have implications for a key feature of the affordable care act that will reduce reimbursement to ma plans by 156 billion from 2013 to 2022

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

the religious factor in private education abstract we quantify the religious factor in private education in the united states by calibrating a political economy model of school choice among public private nonsectarian and subsidized religious schools in which parents differ in their incomes and in their preferences for religious education this shows strong latent demand for religious schooling conditioned on current subsidized tuition levels in parochial schools which is suppressed by the need to pay twice for private education applying the results of the calibration to gauge the effect of means tested school voucher programs on religious and nonsectarian private enrollment we find that when the amount of the voucher is relatively small including subsidized religious schools in such programs is necessary for providing low income families effective access to private education

does school choice lead to sorting evidence from tiebout variation a question commonly raised about school choice is whether it would result in sorting or stratification previous research has asked this with respect to inter district or tiebout choice but has generated no consensus in part because areas district concentrations may be endogenous this paper addresses this by exploiting the fact that some metropolitan areas mas have different numbers of districts operating at the primary and the secondary level the resulting within ma between educational level variation in district concentration suggests that increases in district availability do affect children s district and school level peer groups and that they lower private enrollment jel h1 h7 i2

stabilization and growth in transition economies the early experience this paper analyzes the growth and stabilization experience in 26 transition economies in eastern europe the former soviet union and mongolia for the period 1989 1994 inflation rates have declined significantly in most countries following an inflation stabilization program growth resumes after stabilization occurs typically with a lag of about two years reducing inflation thus appears to be a precondition for growth an econometric analysis of the short run determinants of inflation and growth illustrates the key roles of fixed exchange rates improved fiscal balances and structural reforms in spurring growth and lowering inflation and confirms that inflation stabilization programs have been beneficial for growth even after controlling for structural reforms

selection on observed and unobserved variables assessing the effectiveness of catholic schools in this paper we measure the effect of catholic high school attendance on educational attainment and test scores because we do not have a good instrumental variable for catholic school attendance we develop new estimation methods based on the idea that the amount of selection on the observed explanatory variables in a model provides a guide to the amount of selection on the unobservables we also propose an informal way to assess selectivity bias based on measuring the ratio of selection on unobservables to selection on observables that would be required if one is to attribute the entire effect of catholic school attendance to selection bias we use our methods to estimate the effect of attending a catholic high school on a variety of outcomes our main conclusion is that catholic high schools substantially increase the probability of graduating from high school and more tentatively attending college we find little evidence of an effect on test scores

understanding the twentieth century growth in u s school spending persistent increases in spending on elementary and secondary schools have gone virtually undocumented real expenditure per student increased 3 percent per year over the period 1890 1990 decomposition of the spending growth shows that it resulted from a combination of falling pupil staff ratios increasing real wages to teachers and rising expenditure outside of the classroom although the expansion of education for the handicapped has had a disproportionate effect on spending most of the growth in expenditure during the 1980s came from other sources significant teacher salary increases particularly for females have failed to keep up with wages in other occupations

mobility targeting and private school vouchers simulations are derived from a three district model of low middle and highincome school districts calibrated to new york data with housing stocks that vary within and across districts in this model it is demonstrated that school district targeted vouchers are similar in their impact to nontargeted vouchers but vastly different from vouchers targeted to low income households furthermore strong migration effects are shown to significantly improve the likely equity consequences of voucher programs jel 122 128 h73 persistent frustration with the perceived low quality of public education exacerbated by concerns over the inherently unequal levels of public school quality across school districts has caused policy makers courts and researchers to investigate modifications and alternatives to the current public school system one idea that has received increasing academic and public attention is that of private school vouchers with proponents arguing that the competitive pressures of voucher programs would cause improvements in the efficiency of the publicschool system while at the same time addressing equity concerns if vouchers can be targeted to low income households or low income school districts but aside from a few limited experiments in some u s cities our experience with vouchers in the united states remains virtually nonexistent this limits the amount of information researchers can derive from standard empirical analysis in that it forces them to rely on only current nonvoucher induced differences in competition despite important suggestive results such work may not anticipate all the impacts from a large scale policy such as the voucher policies currently under discussion at the same time theoretical models of school finance are also limited in that they often either focus on only one particular aspect of the general equilibrium school finance problem or they are too rich and complex to yield crisp predictions

teacher quality in public and private schools under a voucher system the case of chile chile is unusual in having long term experience with nationwide school vouchers a key criticism of school voucher systems is that they make it easier for private schools to attract better teachers to the detriment of public schools this paper uses longitudinal data from chile to estimate a discrete choice dynamic programming dcdp model of teacher and nonteacher labor supply decisions and to explore how wage policies affect the composition of the teacher labor force in public and private schools in the model individuals first decide whether to get a teaching degree and then choose annually from among five work home sector alternatives empirical results show that private voucher schools attract better teachers than public schools however the existence of the private voucher sector also draws higher productivity individuals into the teaching profession

experimentally estimated impacts of school vouchers on college enrollment and degree attainment abstract we provide the first experimental estimates of the long term impacts of a voucher to attend private school by linking data from a privately sponsored voucher initiative in new york city which awarded the scholarships by lottery to low income families to administrative records on college enrollment and degree attainment we find no significant effects on college enrollment or four year degree attainment of the offer of a voucher however we find substantial marginally significant impacts for minority students and large significant impacts for the children of women born in the united states negative point estimates for the children of non minority and foreign born mothers are not statistically significant at conventional levels the information needed to match students to administrative data on postsecondary outcomes was available for 99 of the sample we find evidence of substantial bias due to attrition in the original evaluation which relied on data collected at follow up sessions

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

experimental estimates of education production functions this paper analyzes data on 11 600 students and their teachers who were randomly assigned to different size classes from kindergarten through third grade statistical methods are used to adjust for nonrandom attrition and transitions between classes the main conclusions are 1 on average performance on standardized tests increases by four percentile points the first year students attend small classes 2 the test score advantage of students in small classes expands by about one percentile point per year in subsequent years 3 teacher aides and measured teacher characteristics have little effect 4 class size has a larger effect for minority students and those on free lunch 5 hawthorne effects were unlikely

de jure interstate banking why only now this paper tackles three tasks it reviews the history of restrictions on interstate banking it summarizes the provisions of the interstate banking and branching efficiency act of 1994 underscoring the opt in and opt out lobbying pressure this act assigns to state legislatures finally the paper develops a lobbying pressure model designed to explain statutory changes in the framework of financial regulation the model implies that de facto liberalization of a regulatory regime precedes its de jure liberalization once adopted statutory restrictions on banks remain in place until technology and competitive regulatory enforcement have fashioned loopholes wide enough to reverse the statute sponsoring balance of lobbying pressure copyright 1996 by ohio state university press

the effects of generalized school choice on achievement and stratification evidence from chile s voucher program in 1981 chile introduced nationwide school choice by providing vouchers to any student wishing to attend private school as a result more than 1000 private schools entered the market and the private enrollment rate increased by 20 percentage points with greater impacts in larger more urban and wealthier communities we use this differential impact to measure the effects of unrestricted choice on educational outcomes using panel data for about 150 municipalities we find no evidence that choice improved average educational outcomes as measured by test scores repetition rates and years of schooling however we find evidence that the voucher program led to increased sorting as the bbestq public school students left for the private sector d 2005 elsevier b v all rights reserved

school vouchers a survey of the economics literature we review the theoretical computational and empirical research on school vouchers with a focus on the latter our assessment is that the evidence to date is not sufficient to warrant recommending that vouchers be adopted on a widespread basis however multiple positive findings support continued exploration specifically the empirical research on small scale programs does not suggest that awarding students a voucher is a systematically reliable way to improve educational outcomes and some detrimental effects have been found nevertheless in some settings or for some subgroups or outcomes vouchers can have a substantial positive effect on those who use them studies of large scale voucher programs find student sorting as a result of their implementation although of varying magnitude evidence on both small scale and large scale programs suggests that competition induced by vouchers leads public schools to improve moreover research is making progress on understanding how vouchers may be designed to limit adverse effects from sorting while preserving positive effects related to competition finally our sense is that work originating in a single case e g a given country or in a single research approach e g experimental designs will not provide a full understanding of voucher effects fairly wide ranging empirical and theoretical work will be necessary to make progress

financial development growth and the distribution of income a paradigm is presented in which both the extent of financial intermediation and the rate of economic growth are endogenously determined financial intermediation promotes growth because it allows a higher rate of return to be earned on capital and growth in turn provides the means to implement costly financial structures thus financial intermediation and economic growth are inextricably linked in accord with the goldsmith mckinnon shaw view on economic development the model also generates a development cycle reminiscent of the kuznet hypothesis in particular in the transition from a primitive slow growing economy to a developed fast growing one a nation passes through a stage in which the distribution of wealth across the rich and poor widens

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

the role of energy efficiency spending in maryland s implementation of the regional greenhouse gas initiative what are the economic consequences of increased state spending on electricity consumption efficiency the state of maryland faces this question in deciding how much of its co2 allowances auction proceeds under the regional greenhouse gas initiative to devote to such programs starting at a base of 25 of the proceeds we consider the energy savings emissions reductions employment and other impacts of increasing that percentage to 50 and 100 a series of models haiku jhu outec and implan are used for the analysis we conclude that increasing the state s expenditures on energy efficiency programs would result in a decline in electricity consumption in the state and a corresponding decline in expenditures on electricity program implementation would lead to net positive growth in statewide economic activity and include growth in both jobs and wages

capitalization and the voucher an analysis of precinct returns from california s proposition 174 abstract in 1993 californians voted on a school voucher initiative we hypothesize that homeowners in good school districts understood the voucher to be a threat to their property values and thus voted against it precinct returns from los angeles county confirm this hypothesis we also examine an alternative hypothesis explaining the relationship between school quality and precinct returns according to the alternative voters perceived the initiative to be a referendum on public school quality to distinguish between the two hypotheses we compare the voting patterns of homeowners and renters the comparison does not favor one hypothesis over the other

every catholic child in a catholic school historical resistance to state schooling contemporary private competition and student achievement across countries nineteenth century catholic doctrine strongly opposed state schooling we show that countries with larger shares of catholics in 1900 but without a catholic state religion tend to have larger shares of privately operated schools even today we use this historical pattern as a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of contemporary private competition on student achievement in cross country student level analyses our results show that larger shares of privately operated schools lead to better student achievement in mathematics science and reading and to lower total education spending even after controlling for current catholic shares

monetary policy overlapping generations and patterns of growth this paper investigates the role of monetary policy in economic growth using an infinitely lived overlapping generations model with a simple convex technology that can yield endo genous growth we show that money supply behaviour of the government may have significant effects on the long run economic growth in addition to the effect on the long term growth rate of the economy the policy may determine whether the economy stays in the exogenous growth process restricted by the growth rate of labour supply or realizes the endogenous growth that sustains continuous growth of pep capita income and consumption effect of inflation on capital accumulation has been one of the central topics in macroeconomics using an ad hoc model tobin shows that a rise in the rate of inflation deepens capital formation whereas sidrauski presents an opti mizing model in which money is superneutral that is inflation has no effect on capital formation in the long run these studies have been extended by a number of studies such as dornbusch and frenkel 1973 and wang and yip 1992 however the concern of these studies is restricted to the analysis of the level effect of inflation on capital accumulation recent developments in endogenous growth theory present a useful analytical framework for re examin ing the effect of inflation on capital accumulation and economic growth in contrast to the strong emphasis on the importance of fiscal policy for long run economic growth seen in mino 1989 barro 1990 and king and rebelo 1990 the role of monetary policy has been mostly ignored in the endogenous growth literature recalling that the effect of money growth on capital formation has been the central issue in money and growth literature it is rather curious that recent studies on endogenous economic growth focus exclusively on the real side of the economy there is however a small number of authors investigating the role of money in endogenously growing economies marquis and reffet 1991 and mino 1991 introduce money into two sector models involving human capital accumulation via a cash in advance constraint they conclude that an increase in the rate of nominal money supply generally depresses the long term economic growth as long as the cash in advance con straint applies to investment demand for either physical or human capital wang and yip 1991 extend the uzawa lucas model of endogenous growth by assuming that households allocate their available time between production transaction and human capital formation the transaction time is assumed to be a decreasing function of real money balances and therefore a reduction in real balances arising from an increase in the monetary expansion rate increases c the london school of economics and political science 1995

returns to seniority among public school teachers returns to seniority account for a substantial share of public k 12 expenditures over the first ten to 15 years of a career public school teachers enjoy average wage growth at least equivalent to that of other white collar workers explanations for this structure in terms of human capital or costly monitoring lack theoretical and empirical support a steeper wage tenure profile reduces turnover but it is doubtful that the costs of turnover are high enough to make this an optimal use of school resources we conclude that the structure of teacher pay in public education is more consistent with rent seeking than efficient contracting

an oligopolistic power market model with tradable no sub x permits models formulated as complementarity problems have been applied previously to assess the potential for market power in transmission constrained electricity markets here we use the complementarity approach to simulate the interaction of pollution permit markets with electricity markets considering forward contracts and the operating reserve market because some power producers are relatively large consumers of permits there could be interaction between market power in the permits and energy markets market power in the energy market is modeled using a cournot game while a conjectured price response model is used in the permits market an illustrative application is made to pennsylvania new jersey maryland interconnection pjm which we represent by a 14 node dc load flow model and the usepa ozone transport commission no sub x budget program the results show that forward contracts effectively mitigate market power in pjm energy market and both simulated solutions of perfect and cournot oligopoly competition are a good approximation to actual prices in 2000 except that the cournot model yielded higher peak prices the no sub x market influences the cournot energy market in several ways one is that cournot competition lowers the price of no sub x permits which in turn affects on low and high emission producers differently in general because pollution permits are an important cost high concentration in the market for such permits can exacerbate the effects of market power in energy markets

money and growth revisited abstract conventional wisdom is that if public policy can affect the growth rate of the economy the welfare implications of alternative policies will be large in this paper a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous growth and money is examined in this setting inflation lowers growth through its effect on the return to work however the welfare costs of higher inflation are modest the endogenous labor supply is important in producing this result

money in the aggregate production function reexamination and further evidence money has traditionally been studied within the framework of utility theory rather than production theory recently attempts have been made to study money within the neoclassical production theory and in fact allow the demand for money to be obtained in the same way as the demand for labor and capital e g see dennis and smith 1978 nadiri 1969 the elrst empirical study to examine money in the u s aggregate production function was that of sinai and stokes 1972 they estimated a cobb douglas production function with capital labor and various deelnitions of real money balances using u s data over the period 1929 67 their conclusion was that money was a signielcant input and that its contribution to output was mistakenly attributed to technical change i e the time trend coefelcient lost its significance when money was added to the production function most of the later studies e g khan and kouri 1979 short 1979 that lent further support to the sinai stokes paper have also used u s data over the period 1929 67 the purpose of this paper is to reexamine previous evidence as well as to provide further results on the role of money in the aggregate production function the results obtained in this paper cast doubts on the previous conclusion that money should be included as an input along with capital and labor in the aggregate production function a brief discussion of the theoretical and empirical literature dealing with

capital income taxation in a growing open economy abstract the paper studies the dynamic macroeconomic effects of various forms of capital income taxation in a model of a small open economy with perfect mobility of financial capital and intertemporal optimization on the part of households and firms one of the noteworthy results is that the introduction of a low corporate income tax will not affect consumption in the long run but will simply lead to a replacement of shares by foreign financial assets in household portfolios it is also found that an anticipated investment tax credit can have and that an anticipated dividend tax will have contractionary effects on investment before they are introduced moreover it is shown that while an unanticipated dividend tax is neutral with respect to investment it will have real effects on consumption and net foreign assets in a growing economy

a dynamic model of teacher labor supply the labor supply decisions of certified elementary and high school teachers are examined using data from a general longitudinal survey a significant decrease in the teaching participation rate tak

the dynamics of teacher quality abstract an extensive literature finds that while teachers vary considerably in initial quality there are limited teacher quality dynamics except for the first few years of teaching teacher quality does not improve over the course of a teacher s career this study evaluates the importance of various modeling restrictions to the key findings of this literature using data covering all 5th grade public school teachers from the state of north carolina i replicate the findings of the previous literature using their restrictive experience assumptions however using an unrestricted experience model i find that for mathematics achievement there are high returns to later career teaching experience about twice as much dispersion in initial teacher quality as previously estimated and a pattern of negative selection where high quality teachers are more likely to exit

interest rate rules and transitional dynamics in an endogenously growing open economy abstract this paper sets up an endogenous growth model of an open economy in which the monetary authority implements a gradualist interest rate rule with targets for both inflation and economic growth we show that under a passive rule a monetary equilibrium exists and is unique moreover the equilibrium is locally determinate by contrast an active rule implies either two equilibria one high growth and one low growth or none in the case of two equilibria the high growth equilibrium is locally determinate while the low growth equilibrium is a source besides the stabilization and growth effects of alternative target policies are also explored in this study moreover in departing from the existing literature we turn to focus on the analysis of transition with a particular emphasis on the case of imperfect credibility

recruiting and retaining teachers in the uk an analysis of graduate occupation choice from the 1960s to the 1990s this paper examines the market for teachers in the uk from 1960 to 2002 using six graduate cohort data sets we find that while there is no strong evidence that teachers are underpaid the relative wages in teaching compared with alternative professions have a significant impact on the likelihood of graduates choosing to teach this wage effect is strongest at times of low relative teachers wages or following a period of decline in those wages it is also strongest for those individuals who have more recently graduated and for men

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

school choice money race and congressional voting on vouchers milton friedman has suggested that the political power of the americanfederation of teachers and the national education association the twomajor teachers unions has been instrumental in defeating the adoption ofeducational vouchers we test this hypothesis we find that a campaign contribution to a memberof the u s house of representatives by either unionreduces the probability that also a representative will vote for apro school choice amendment to the no child left behind act of2001 also a representative whose districthas a large african american population or who is republicanis more likely to vote for vouchers

inflation and growth in an open economy this paper examines the relationship between growth and inflation in an open economy where private agents can transfer resources abroad to obtain endogenous growth we assume that the international credit market is imperfect we show that when the governments behave rationally the growth and inflation rates should not be correlated and that the optimal inflation rate can be found by setting the interest rate elasticity of money holdings equal to the tax rate elasticity of the tax base

the effects of class size on student achievement new evidence from population variation abstract i identify the effects of class size on student achievement using longitudinal variation in the population associated with each grade in 649 elementary schools i use variation in class size driven by idiosyncratic variation in the population i also use discrete jumps in class size that occur when a small change in enrollment triggers a maximum or minimum class size rule the estimates indicate that class size does not have a statistically significant effect on student achievement i rule out even modest effects 2 to 4 percent of a standard deviation in scores for a 10 percent reduction in class size

the melting pot and school choice abstract in the united states parents are offered free public education in the mainstream culture but must pay the full cost of tuition if they educate their children privately this creates strong economic incentives for remaining within the public system which promotes the assimilation of minorities a pareto improvement can be achieved by subsidizing private education in exchange for modifying its social content so as to reduce polarization popular opposition to voucher programs that facilitate school choice without regulating cultural content may partly reflect voters concerns that such programs threaten to erode the common ground created by public education

an intertemporal model of saving and investment this paper characterizes a market economy with infinitely long lived consumers and value maximizing firms which face costs of adjustment for capital the temporary equilibrium of this economy is similar to the short run equilibrium of standard macroeconomic models consumption is a function of wealth investment is related to the value of firms equilibrium between aggregate demand and aggregate supply is achieved by the endogenous adjustment of the sequence of current and future interest rates the dynamic behavior of output consumption and investment in this economy is the same as in an optimal growth model with adjustment costs the paper shows this equivalence and then uses it together with the equivalence of taxes to technological shocks to study the dynamic effects of fiscal policy

do public schools hire the best applicants despite a surplus of candidates for most teaching jobs a strong academic record does little for an applicants job prospects this does not appear to result from lukewarm interest on the part of such applicants or choosiness about the positions they accept administrators lack of interest in these candidates may reflect the weakness of competitive pressures in public education policies intended to improve teacher quality need to consider incentives on both the demand and supply sides of the market

finishing high school and starting college do catholic schools make a difference in this paper we consider two measures of the relative effectiveness of public and catholic schools finishing high school and starting college these measures are potentially more important indicators of school quality than standardized test scores in light of the economic consequences of obtaining more education single equation estimates suggest that for the typical student attending a catholic high school raises the probability of finishing high school or entering a four year college by thirteen percentage points in bivariate probit models we find almost no evidence that our single equation estimates are subject to selection bias

macroeconomic policy exchange rate dynamics and optimal asset accumulation the paper develops a model of exchange rate and current account determination for a small economy peopled by infinitely lived utility maximizing households in this setting a central bank purchase of foreign exchange has no real effects when central bank foreign reserves earn interest at the world rate and proceeds are returned to the public in contrast an increase in the monetary growth rate does have real effects even in the long run the model developed here implies that an increase in government spending may lead to a surplus on current account the external adjustment process predicted by the model is one in which consumption real balances and external assets all rise or fall simultaneously

dynamic analysis of an endogenous growth model with public capital this paper develops an endogenous growth model with productive public capital along with private capital in a spirit similar to that of r j barro 1990 since the authors model includes two stock variables it has transitional dynamics unlike most of the previous studies on endogenous growth including barro s where concerns are restricted to the steady state analysis first they show that the transitional path is unique and stable second the character of the transitional path is explored third the authors show that the optimal tax rate is smaller than the rate that maximizes the national growth rate with a log linear utility function copyright 1993 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

natural resources and economic growth the role of investment is it possible that excessive reliance on natural resources affects saving and investment in a way that retards economic growth and thus in the long run the level of output per capita this paper reviews the literature explores the data and compares and contrasts the explanatory power and interplay of natural resources and civil liberties our proxy for institutional variables currently under scrutiny in the literature we propose that natural resource dependence may be viewed as an exogenous factor that impedes economic growth and investment as well as institutions even if we stress that natural resource abundance may be good for growth

effect of secondary school fees on educational attainment in this study the heterogeneity of the fee abolition process in west german secondary schools is used to identify the effect of school fees on educational attainment and to obtain an estimate of the price elasticity of upper secondary education the analysis is based on representative individual level data from three annual surveys of the german mikrozensus while coefficients cannot be estimated precisely the results suggest that on average upper secondary school attainment increased by at least 8 percent in response to the fee abolition the educational attainment of females appears to be more price sensitive than that of males