the economic organization of legislatures and how it affects congressional voting congress confronts two major organizational problems that affect the behavior of legislators party leaders and groups doing business with congressional committees the costly nature of monitoring and the absence of explicit mechanisms for upholding agreements the problem of monitoring implies that party leaders will have a difficult time influencing decisions made in decision making arenas where the actions of legislators are less visible as in congressional committees while legislators can evade leadership monitoring of their actions within committees once an issue leaves a committee the costs of monitoring decline and leadership influence increases the absence of mechanisms for assuring that legislators keep their bargains means that groups will place an emphasis on dealing with reliable legislators those who can be counted upon to uphold their end of a bargain thus party leaders are more effective in influencing floor voting because of their better ability to monitor legislator behavior however obligations to important interest groups will be more immune to leadership influence because of the incentives for committee members to adhere to their bargains

on the mis measurement of legislator ideology and shirking in this paper we show that current statistical measures of legislator s shirking are implicitly based on the electoral concept of a unique majority rule equilibrium point in the policy space where elections are contested we note that such equilibria do not exist generically and present statistical results showing that cross sectional regressions where legislators voting indices are predicted by district average demograhic and economic data are mis specified we also discuss a weaker equilibrium construct the uncovered set and present statistical evidence showing that differences in voting behavior between senators from the same state are positively related to the heterogeneity of the electorate we argue that current evidence alleged to show shirking by senators is equally consistent with senators who perfectly represent an idiosyncratic constituency that cannot be represented by district average data

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

heterogeneity and the evaluation of efficiency the case of italian universities a random parameters stochastic frontier model is applied to italian data in order to evaluate the cost function and efficiency of higher education institutions the method yields useful information about inter institutional variation in cost structure and technical efficiency returns to scale and scope are evaluated for the typical university and it is found that these returns are almost ubiquitously decreasing a finding with clear policy implications

the use of the scaling property in a frontier analysis of a system of equations this article presents a one stage efficiency frontier analysis based on the scaling property this type of analysis is a not very often applied in empirical work in spite of its nice features due

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

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

academic earmarks and the returns to lobbying abstract in this paper we estimate the returns to lobbying by universities to motivate our empirical work we develop a simple theoretical model of university lobbying for academic earmarks our statistical analysis shows that universities represented by a house appropriations committee hac or senate appropriations committee sac member spend less money on lobbying than those that are not represented in addition using instrumental variables estimations we show that universities without hac or sac representation may receive some benefit to lobbying for earmarks although in many estimations this benefit is not statistically different from zero however for universities with hac or sac representation a 10 percent increase in lobbying yields an additional 2 8 percent or 3 5 percent increase in earmarks respectively this suggests that there are large returns to lobbying for academic earmarks if a university is represented by a member of one the hac or sac but little or no return if not

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

management of bureaucrats and public service delivery evidence from the nigerian civil service we study how the management practices bureaucrats operate under relate to the quantity and quality of public services delivered we do so exploiting data from the nigerian civil service for 4700 public sector projects we have hand coded independent engineering assessments of project completion rates and delivered quality we supplement this with a survey eliciting management practices for bureaucrats in the 63 civil service organizations responsible for these projects building on bloom and van reenen 2007 management practices matter a one standard deviation increase in bureaucrat s autonomy signi cantly increases project completion rates by 18 a one standard deviation increase in practices related to incentives monitoring of bureaucrats signi cantly lowers project completion rates by 14 we show the negative impacts of incentive provision monitoring arise because bureaucrats multi task and incentives are poorly targeted and because these management practices capture elements of subjective performance evaluation that leave scope for dysfunctional responses from bureaucrats to support a causal interpretation of our ndings we document the determinants of management practices and examine channels through which organizations might endogenously adjust management practices our results provide novel insights into how changes in how bureaucrats are managed can have potentially large impacts on public service delivery in a developing country context jel classi cation j33 j38 o20

job choice in academia the asymmetric international mobility of talented scientists is well documented yet there is little evidence about the reasons why scientists choose particular jobs building on an extended human capital model of science we unify a dispersed literature relevant for job choice to formulate hypotheses which we test in a unique international quasi experiment among more than 10 000 researchers we find that attractive jobs satisfy researchers taste for science and increase their expected scientific productivity responding to both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations in particular while salaries research funding and working with stimulating peers matter we provide unique estimates of the importance of organisational and institutional factors early stage researchers are willing to trade off a substantial amount of salary for early independence and tenure perspectives later stage researchers favour jobs which make it easy to take up new lines of research research only positions are considered as less attractive than jobs with a moderate amount of teaching our findings have important implications for the organisational design of research universities and the competitiveness of european science in light of the brain drain of highly talented scientists towards the u s

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

sorting and agglomeration economies in french economics departments abstract are agglomeration and peer effects at stake in academic research to tackle this question we study how departments characteristics affect the quantity and quality of academics publications in economics in france controlling for individual time varying characteristics and individual fixed effects department characteristics have an explanatory power at least equal to a quarter of that of individual characteristics and possibly as high as theirs the quantity and quality of an academic s publications in a field increase with the presence of other academics specialised in that field and with the share of the department s publications output in that field in contrast department size proximity to other large departments homogeneity in terms of publication performance presence of colleagues with connections abroad and composition in terms of positions and age matter for some publication measures but only if not controlling for individual fixed effects

the structure of technical efficiency it is common practice to decompose measures of efficiency into component measures of technical and allocative efficiency in this paper we show how and why to decompose a general measure of technical efficiency into component measures of purely technical efficiency congestion and scale efficiency and we investigate the properties of each measure we do so for a multiple output technology which satisfies a weak axiom system that does not include either constant returns to scale or strong input disposability

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

an evaluation and explanation of in efficiency in higher education institutions in europe and the u s with the application of two stage semi parametric dea in this study the technical efficiency of number of public european and american heis is assessed over a decade efficiency scores are determined using nonparametric dea with different input output sets and considering different frontiers global frontier all heis pooled together regional frontier europe and the u s having their own frontiers and country specific ones the external factors affecting the degree of hei inefficiency are also investigated e g institutional settings size and department composition location and funding structure specifically the results indicate a positive association between both regional gdp per capita and number of departments and an institution s efficiency for both the european and u s samples on average older european heis are more efficient but this is not confirmed for american ones finally government funding seems to have a negative effect on the efficiency of universities in europe which again is not confirmed for the u s however some country heterogeneity at the european level is found through intensive sensitivity analysis

boom bust cycles and ricardian rent north american agriculture has been characterized by many as a boom bust industry for example between 1973 and 1983 prairie farmers experienced the most prosperous period of grain farming ever known in western canada had the golden age finally arrived for prairie agriculture prosperity came to a grinding halt in the mid 1980s and in the late 1980s prairie grain farmers entered into one of the worst economic situ

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

commodity price stabilization the price uncertainty case in this paper the waugh oi massell approach to analysing the welfare effects of price stabilization is extended to consider the case of price uncertainty not just price instability it is shown that when producers cannot postpone production until prices are revealed as is the case in agriculture results opposite to those obtained under the waugh oi massell productionmode assumption occur in addition it is shown that a price stabilization scheme may be pareto optimal empirical estimates of the difference between the welfare measures under the two assumptions are also provided la stabilisation du prix des denrees quand les prix sont incertains dans ce m6moire les auteurs utilisent l approche waugh oi massell pour analyser les effets de bien etre de mecanismes de stabilisation des prix mais en proposent l extension au cas otu les prix sont incertains et non seulement instables on montre que dans le cas oiu les producteurs ne peuvent pas reporter la d6cision de produire jusqu a ce que les prix soient connus ainsi que c est le cas en agriculture on obtient des r6sultats contraires a ceux obtenus par waugh oi massell a partir de leurs postulats on montre aussi qu un m6canisme de stabilisation des prix peut etre optimal au sens de pareto des 6valuations empiriques de la difference entre les mesures de bien etre dans les deux cas sont fournies

evaluating the productive performance of uk universities as cost constrained revenue maximizers an empirical analysis the study presents an empirical analysis of the relative revenue efficiency of uk universities in providing teaching and research with government policies pressurizing the largely public funded universities to secure efficiency in both input usage and output revenue university producers are modelled as cost constrained revenue maximizers taking explicit account of the quality of research output the methodology uses linear programming techniques to construct nonparametric cost indirect production frontiers and to compute revenue efficiency relative to these frontiers revenue efficiency is then decomposed into its output allocative and technical components further analysis investigates the sources of allocative and technical inefficiencies

severing the electoral connection shirking in the contemporary congress studies of representation focusing on legislative shirking tend to offer an interesting tension when the opportunity presents itself it seems that exiting members do not change their votinq behavior ideological shirking but do reduce their effort level by voting less participatory shirking our analysis avoids the pitfalls of prior studies by defining a simple quasi experimental research design contrasting those certain that they are seeking reelection with those sure that they are departing the house for the102nd 103rd and 104th congresses 1991 1996 we measure changes in ideology and participation using all roll call votes in the last six months of election years controlling for possible member selection effects and short term influences and show that legislators are disposed toward ideological and participatory shirking while selection effects are unimportant thus we reconcile results seemingly at odds and suggest that policies affecting member turnover such as term limits can interfere with representation a fundamental issue concerning political representation is the extent to which the necessity of reelection constrains officeholders if incumbents plan to retire thus freeing themselves of their electoral shackles or if they pursue higher office and face a distinct constituency will they behave differently or do members continue to behave in the same manner even in the absence of an electoral connection to the districts they represent answers to such questions have important implications for how we understand and model the representative process additionally they have ramifications for the likely impact of public policy choices that affect member turnover rates such as the imposition of term limits on the political system a primary means of drawing inferences regarding shirking which we simply define as legislator behavior that differs from what would be observed given perfect monitoring and effective punishment by constituents is to determine if politicians change their behavior when electoral discipline is removed most notably scholars examine members actions during their last period in office on the grounds that those voluntarily departing can behave according to a distinct set of preferences even if they run afoul of their districts or of their electoral coalitions empirical results on final period behavior are voluminous and sometimes contradictory bender and lott 1996 nevertheless two general inferences seem to have gathered support first there is little evidence for shirking in terms of vote choice ideological shirking while as we will discuss shortly there are a variety of potential explanations for such nonfindings one intuitive and frequently offered reason is that they reflect member specific selection effects this implies that

competition and diversification in public and private higher education the development of mass higher education and growing competition between higher education institutions has given increasing visibility to the issue of diversification this article analyses the issue of programme diversification using a panel of 181 portuguese higher education institutions over the period 1995 to 2007 by comparing the behaviour of public and private institutions the results show that the legal status of institutions is the major determinant of programme diversification as private institutions are far more specialized than their public counterparts the study also evaluates the role of other institutional variables such as the institution s size age location institutional mission and research intensity to explain differences in the diversification behaviour of higher education institutions the results provide important insights as competition has been thought to improve the performance of higher education institutions

can mentoring help female assistant professors interim results from a randomized trial while much has been written about the potential benefits of mentoring in academia very little research documents its effectiveness we present data from a randomized controlled trial of a mentoring program for female economists organized by the committee for the status of women in the economics profession and sponsored by the national science foundation and the american economics association to our knowledge this is the first randomized trial of a mentoring program in academia we evaluate the performance of three cohorts of participants and randomly assigned controls from 2004 2006 and 2008 this paper presents an interim assessment of the program s effects our results suggest that mentoring works after five years the 2004 treatment group averaged 4 more nsf or nih grants and 3 additional publications and were 25 percentage points more likely to have a top tier publication there are significant but smaller effects at three years post treatment for the 2004 and 2006 cohorts combined while it is too early to assess the ultimate effects of mentoring on the academic careers of program participants the results suggest that this type of mentoring may be one way to help women advance in the economics profession and by extension in other male dominated academic fields this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the effects of logrolling on congressional voting the theoretical public choice literature suggests that vote trading is an important determinant of congressional voting behavior yet empirical voting models do not allow for vote trading these models recognize that observed ideology may influence legislative behavior but do not correct for unobserved ideology this study devises new tests for logrolling and ideology the empirical model controls for logroll agreements and unobserved ideological interest via the correlation of unobserved variables the results reflect the presence of vote trading coalitions on some votes but not on others the results cast doubt on the importance of personal ideological interests of legislators copyright 1992 by american economic association

does external funding of academic research crowd out institutional support abstract nonprofit organizations receive revenues from a variety of sources the amount of support provided by each source is often dependent on the level supplied by the other s empirical evidence regarding crowding out among alternative sources of revenue in nonprofit organizations is mixed but most studies find that an increase in funding from one of the sources tends to decrease contributions from the other s this paper investigates the relationship between internal and external funding of academic research i find evidence that there is not crowding out in this case instead additional funding from each of these sources enhances the amount provided by the other over time this is consistent with the hypothesis that external sponsors wish to allocate funding to those universities that do the highest quality research and that funding from either source provides information about quality the results of this study also imply that a one time change in funding from one source has a multiplier effect on subsequent levels of both sources the potential for feedback effects is usually ignored in studies of this type meaning that the total impact of funding changes may often be understated this suggests that relatively small decreases in academic research funding can have a larger than anticipated effect that may persist for many years the presence of feedback effects also indicates that existing models of nonprofit behavior which are primarily static need to be modified to incorporate a dynamic structure

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

distributive politics and the allocation of federal grants understanding the dynamics of policy distribution requires an appreciation of federal grant programs that have achieved a prominent place in nearly all areas of domestic policy the theoretical literature on distributive politics however focuses almost exclusively on a centralized top down view of policy distribution by examining the role of presidents legislators and bureaucrats scholars have ignored participants who have become key actors in the distribution of federal expenditures the recipient jurisdictions this analysis of the allocation patterns under six federal programs shows that local governments exert important influences on the distribution of federal grants and that the distributional patterns and their determinants vary over time the analysis also points out the importance of disaggregation by focusing on programs and recipient jurisdictions as opposed to total federal expenditures and regions states or congressional districts

women in economics moving up or falling off the academic career ladder copyright 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 by the american economic association

recognition for group work gender differences in academia abstract how is credit for group work allocated when individual contributions are not observed i use data on academics publication records to test whether demographic traits like gender influence how credit is allocated under such uncertainty while solo authored papers send a clear signal about ability coauthored papers are noisy providing no specific information about each contributor s skills i find that men are tenured at roughly the same rate regardless of coauthoring choices women however are less likely to receive tenure the more they coauthor the result is much less pronounced among women who coauthor with other women

gender economics an assessment concerns about gender equality have jumped to the forefront of public debate in recent years and gender economics is slowly affirming its place as a major field of study this assessment examines where we are in terms of gender equality it reviews the theoretical foundations that can explain existing inequalities and documents the empirical findings supported by the theories identifying avenues for future research and providing a fruitful framework to think about the effectiveness of policies and interventions targeting gender inequality in doing so i provide the foundations against which the contributions in this issue can be placed

the effects of congressional appropriation committee membership on the distribution of federal research funding to universities i introduction in 1994 members of the republican party pledged to seek legislation to impose term limits on members of congress this pledge stemmed from the popular belief that senior members of congress tend to promote personal interests or are more influenced by lobbying efforts that may not be representative of their constituents today term limits continue to be discussed but have not been enacted instead many members have focused their energies toward minimizing the time spent on any particular committee of congress believing that tenure on a committee is a more serious concern than simple tenure in congress implicit in these concerns is the issue whether as incumbent politicians plan to retire they will behave differently and if so whether tenure on a congressional committee exacerbates this behavior this article explores the role of membership on the appropriations committee on the distribution of federal research funding to universities specifically it explores whether funding is diverted to these universities because politicians use their position on a committee to promote personal or constituent interests previous research on shirking compares the voting records of politicians on certain issues with demographic and economic characteristics of the politicians constituents this article explores the issue of shirking differently i explore how membership on congressional appropriations committees affects the distribution of federal research funding to universities i look at two types of relationships between the members and the universities first i consider the relationship between members and the universities that are located in the members districts states in the case of senators second i examine the relationship between members and their undergraduate alma mater i use district representa tion to proxy favoritism that reflects a politician s constituents given that in most instances an alma mater affiliation is not the same as district representation i use alma mater affiliation to proxy favoritism that reflects the politician s personal interests federal research funding accounts for more than 60 of research funding received by research universities previous research has shown a positive impact of federal funding on research outcomes see adams and griliches 1998 arora and gambardella 1997 connolly 1997 payne and siow 2002 and payne 2001 except for payne and siow 2002 however these articles do not consider that political diversion of funds may promote or detract from research productivity as with any other federal program this article concentrates on the impact of membership on the house and senate appropriations committees because they wield the greatest power in the allocation of funding 1 using a panel data set spanning 26 years i explore how changes in the composition of the appropriations committees affects the distribution of research funding after controlling for the heterogeneity that exists across different universities the results suggest that both district representation and alma mater affiliation matter thus there is evidence of shirking for personal interests and evidence of members representing their constituents with respect to the representation of one s constituents the strongest results suggest that public universities benefit from representation on both the senate and house committees private universities however only benefit from representation in the senate with respect to alma mater affiliations the results suggest again that public universities benefit from representation on both the senate and house committees private universities also benefit from representation on both the senate and house committees the results also suggest that the tenure of the member on the committee matters as does whether the member is a part of the majority party in power in the congressional chamber

initial labor market conditions and long term outcomes for economists each year graduate students entering the academic job market worry that they will suffer due to uncontrollable macroeconomic risk given the importance of general human capital and the relative ease of publicly observing productivity in academia one might expect that long term labor market outcomes for students graduating in unfavorable climates will resemble long term outcomes for those graduating in favorable climates in this paper i analyze the relationship between macroeconomic conditions at graduation initial job placement and long term outcomes for ph d economists from seven programs using macroeconomic conditions as an instrument for initial placement i show that a quality and type of initial job have a causal effect on long term job characteristics i also show that better initial placement increases research productivity which helps to limit the set of economic models that can explain the effect of initial placement on long term jobs

herding cats management and university performance using a tried and tested measure of management practices that has been shown to predict firm performance we survey nearly 250 departments across 100 uk universities we find large differences in management scores across universities and that departments in older research intensive universities score higher than departments in newer more teaching oriented universities we also find that management matters in universities the scores particularly with respect to provision of incentives for staff recruitment retention and promotion are correlated with both teaching and research performance conditional on resources and past performance moreover this relationship holds for all universities not just research intensive ones

cities workers and wages a structural analysis of the urban wage premium workers earn higher wages in cities vs rural areas this gap could arise because cities make workers more productive or it could be the result of a non random selection of workers into cities based on their ability and their endogenous history of career choices to untangle these issues this paper estimates a dynamic programming model which embeds the choice of residing in a city or rural area within a model of career choices over time after controlling for all the sources of selection and endogeneity the estimates indicate that a given worker does earn more in the city for white collar work but not for blue collar work in addition city work experience is found to be worth more than rural work experience in the rural area for white collar work but not for blue collar work these results support the interpretation that cities make white collar workers more productive and suggest that workers may consider moving to the city not only in terms of locational choice but also as a form of human capital investment copyright 2007 wiley blackwell

the intraday effects of central bank intervention on exchange rate spreads abstract we investigate the intraday effects of intra marginal intervention in a horizontal band on the exchange rate spread official intraday data on danish intervention transactions in the erm ii the exchange rate mechanism of the european union facilitates our analysis we show that intervention purchases and sales both exert a significant influence on the exchange rate spread but in opposite directions intervention purchases of the small currency on average narrow the spread while intervention sales of the small currency on average widen the spread this is a novel finding that differs from those of existing studies that find intervention always widens the exchange rate spread and increases market uncertainty

bureaucrats legislators and the size of government some recent theories have blamed the growth of government on budget maximizing bureaucrats who are assumedly capable of imposing their most preferred budget output combination on legislatures subject to cost and demand constraints however theoretical examination of the range of bargaining outcomes that might occur between bureau and legislature shows that budget maximizing behavior does not necessarily lead to super optimal levels of production nor do the suggested reforms of competition and privatization necessarily improve the situation in this bargaining model the central determinants of governmental growth are not budget maximizing bureaucrats but the legislature s decisions regarding mode of oversight and form of internal organization

the budget process and the size of the budget the new congressional budget process provides members of congress with a new set of institutional mechanisms for making budget decisions this article addresses the question of whether or under what conditions rigid application of the new budget process modeled as first selection of the size of the budget and second its division produces smaller budgets than a piecemeal appropriations process in which the size of the budget is determined residually the theoretical result is that the new process sometimes results in relatively large budgets a testable implication of the theory is that given a choice of how stringently the budget process is to be employed members of congress jointly consider preferences and the expected outcomes under available institutional arrangements and select the arrangement usually a rule that yields the most favorable outcome empirical results from the budget process in the house from 1980 to 1983 are generally supportive of the theoretically derived hypothesis of rational choice of institutional arrangements

educational policies in a long run perspective in this paper we study the effects of educational reforms on school attainment we construct a dataset of relevant reforms that occurred at the national level over the last century and match individual information from 24 european countries to the most likely set up faced when individual educational choices were undertaken our identification strategy relies on temporal and geographical variations in the institutional arrangements controlling for time country fixed effects as well as for country specific time trend by characterizing each group of reforms for their impact on mean years of education educational inequality and intergenerational persistence we show an ideal policy menu which has been available to policymakers we distinguish between groups of policies that are either inclusive or selective depending on their diminishing or augmenting impact on inequality and persistence finally we correlate these reform measures to political coalitions prevailing in parliament finding support for the idea that left wing parties support reforms that are inclusive while right wing parties prefer selective ones michela braga daniele checchi and elena meschi

the impact of tenure on the flow of federal benefits to smsa s the seniority system in congress insures that committee assignments and chairmanships are distributed on the basis of house members tenure this system supposedly means that congressional influence increases with the number of times a member of congress is reelected however research on the impact of tenure on the distribution of federal aid across states has not produced convincing proof that a positive relationship between tenure and aid exists crain and tollison 1977 undertook the first study of the impact of tenure and they concluded that tenure has a positive effect on the share of total federal aid going to states indeed crain and tollison found evidence of diminishing returns to additional years of house service however green and munley 1981 quickly disputed the crain tollison findings suggesting that after adjusting for state population which affects

the gender salary gap in british academia this paper considers salary determination and the gender salary gap in the academic labour market utilizing a particularly detailed data set of academics from five old established universities results reveal an aggregate gender salary differential for academic staff of 15 most of this differential can however be explained by our model evidence suggests a limited opportunity for female academics to combine career and family despite the flexibility of an academic job and emphasizes the importance of mobility to the male career publication record is found to be an important determinant of salary

the efficiency of german universities some evidence from non parametric and parametric methods due to tight public budget constraints the efficiency of publicly financed universities in germany is receiving increasing attention in the academic as well as in the public discourse against this background we analyse the efficiency of 72 public german universities for the years 1998 2003 applying data envelopment and stochastic frontier analysis contrary to earlier studies we account for the faculty composition of universities which proves to be an essential element in the efficiency of higher education our main finding is that east german universities have performed better in total factor productivity change compared to those in west germany however when looking at mean efficiency scores over the sample period west german universities still appear at the top end of relative efficiency outcomes

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

does management matter in schools we collect data on management practices in over 1 800 high schools in eight countries we show that higher management quality is strongly associated with better educational outcomes the uk sweden canada and the us obtain the highest management scores followed by germany with a gap before italy brazil and india we also show that autonomous government schools government funded but with substantial independence like uk academies and us charters have higher management scores than regular government or private schools almost half of the difference between the management scores of autonomous and regular government schools is accounted for principal leadership and governance there are major disparities in the quality of education within and between countries oecd 2012 school managerial practices may be an important reason for such differences unfortunately understanding the role of management in schools within and across countries has been held back by a lack of robust and comparable instruments to systematically measure management practices and thus a lack of good data the key purpose of this article is to develop an international management index for schools and present descriptive evidence on management quality and education outcomes across schools of different types within and across countries we used double blind telephone interviews with school principals to collect information on management practices for over 1 800 schools across eight countries to construct our management index we average across 20 basic management practice measures in four areas of management operations monitoring target setting and people each question is evaluated against a scoring grid that ranges from one worst practice to five best practice our management index for each school represents the average of these scores we also constructed measures of school level pupil outcomes for these schools when data were available from examination results across regions and countries creating a matched management pupil outcome international data set at the school level these data allow us to document some stylised facts first we show that the adoption of basic managerial practices varies significantly across and within countries the uk sweden canada and the us obtain the highest average scores followed by germany italy and brazil while india has the lowest scores about half of the variance in school management is at the country level this share is larger in education than we have

on the link between the us economic policy uncertainty and exchange rates employing dynamic conditional correlation garch dcc garch model this paper analyzes spillover effects of the us economic policy uncertainty shock on real effective exchange rates with the data from january 2000 to december 2014 we find that the correlations between the us epu and the returns of the high yielding currencies are consistently negative throughout the sample period while the correlation between the us epu and the returns of japanese yen is consistently positive moreover we find that the correlations tend to be intensified during two post 2000 recession episodes

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

human capital committee power and legislative outcomes this paper presents a model in which legislators use informational asymmetries to engage in rent seeking behavior previous work in the informational and distributive traditions could not explain deviations from the median preference without reference to committee power integration of these forces demonstrated that legislative outcomes need not correspond to the median preference regardless of the extent to which committee power is present in a legislature while deviations from the median preference are consistent with committee power recent empirical evidence suggests that observed deviations in congress are in fact caused by human capital differentials rather than committee power

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

allocative efficiency in public research funding can bibliometrics help abstract the use of outcome control modes of research evaluation exercises is ever more frequent they are conceived as tools to stimulate increased levels of research productivity and to guide choices in allocating components of government research budgets for publicly funded institutions there are several contributions in the literature that compare the different methodological approaches that policy makers could adopt for these exercises however the comparisons are limited to only a few disciplines this work examining the case of the whole of the hard sciences of the italian academic system makes a comparison between results obtained from peer review type of evaluations as adopted by the ministry of universities and research and those possible from a bibliometric approach as developed by the authors the aim is to understand to what extent bibliometric methodology which is noted as relatively inexpensive time saving and exhaustive can complement and integrate peer review methodology in research evaluation

outside offers and the gender pay gap empirical evidence from the uk academic labour market using a unique data source on academic economist labour market experiences we explore gender pay and promotions in addition to earnings and productivity measures we have information on outside offers and perceptions of discrimination we find both a gender promotions gap and a within rank gender pay gap a driving factor may be outside offers men receive more outside offers than women of comparable characteristics and gain higher pay increases in response this may arise due to discrimination we find that perceptions of discrimination and also outside job applications correlate with an individual receiving earnings below that expected given their characteristics

the economics of storing a non storable commodity commodity stabilization under a buffer stock and under a buffer fund are compared in the case where a good cannot be physically stored stability brought about by a buffer fund scheme cannot result in a net welfare improvement for society when instability is due only to demand variability there are no gainers or losers when insta bility is due to supply variability a buffer fund does not result in a welfare loss to society but there is a transfer of income from taxpayers to producers hence producer arguments for a buffer fund are a desire for a redistribution of income in their favour

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

evaluating the performance of higher education institutions in europe a nonparametric efficiency analysis of 944 institutions abstractalthough a long tradition exists of studying the economics of education performance comparisons of different kinds have traditionally been difficult to undertake an important impediment has been the lack of comparable data to a large extent this study remedies the shortcomings of earlier studies our contribution is twofold first the current higher education policy of contraction and economizing common to most european countries make knowledge of potential efficiency gains crucial second a unique database allows us to study a broad diversity of organizations as well as organizations located in a number of different european countries the study suggests evaluating higher education institution hei performance in a production theory context applying the well known data envelopment analysis dea method to a cross section of 944 heis in 17 european countries the dea approach is particularly suitable in this context where little is known about production technologies and economic behavio

bicameral sequence theory and state legislative evidence theory voting sequence is a strategic variable between bicameral chambers decisions by chambers to acquire costly information affect the payoffs chambers receive from sequencing choices thus it is also a strategic variable between bicameral chambers hypotheses 1 because of incentives to take advantage of one chamber s informational expertise when chambers share relatively homogeneous policy preferences house chambers in legislatures dominated by a single party will initiate adopted legislation in greater proportion relative to legislatures that are not dominated by a single party 2 a cost advantage in acquiring information grows with an increasing disparity in the number of legislators between bicameral chambers lower information acquisition costs in the larger bicameral chamber account for a persistent first mover advantage for that chamber methods hypotheses are derived from a game theoretic model in which informational endowments are endogenously chosen by bicameral chambers and in which voting sequence is endogenously determined implications of the model are tested with an original data set developed from the session laws of thirty three state legislatures results under specified conditions bicameral chambers sequence themselves to take advantage of one chamber s informational expertise under other conditions bicameral chambers will not take advantage of a chamber s informational expertise the main theoretical results conclude 1 that one party legislatures take greater advantage of informational expertise relative to divided party legislatures 2 that senators have an incentive to specialize in more risky policy environments relative to house members and 3 that there is an informational basis for house chambers to initiate more adopted legislation than senate chambers the empirical results are consistent with hypothesis 1 the results are consistent with hypothesis 2 although an alternative noncontradictory theory might also account for the result

efficiency in the provision of university teaching and research an empirical analysis of uk universities summary a flexible three output two input cost function model is used to examine the cost efficiency of uk universities as producers of teaching and research outputs unlike previous studies a comprehensive peer review of research quality is incorporated overall product specific and input specific economies of scale global and product specific economies of scope marginal costs and cost complementarities are estimated overall and product specific scale results indicate considerable increasing returns while the scope results generally suggest neither economies nor diseconomies sensitivity analysis is used to simulate the impact of current government policy regarding the expansion of undergraduate teaching output on these results

legislative voting and the economic theory of politics empirical studies of legislative voting have multiplied since the mid 1970s early work 13 distinguished two modes of representation delegates who vote as voters want and trustees who use their own judgment more recently researchers have considered only delegates claiming that legislators who use their own ideology are shirking following principal agent theory representatives are conceived as conduits through which citizens transmit and express interests empirical work on this question however has found that the legislator s ideology explains more variation in vote choices than is explained by measures of constituent interest the seeming contradiction has led some 9 10 17 to reject the economic theory of legislator behavior as erroneous the truth is that no such theory has ever been fairly stated much less tested estimating equations have been ad hoc and the usual approach to measuring ideology has imposed correlation between the equation error and an explanatory variable 8 in both cases the result is

competition and incentives with motivated agents a unifying theme in the literature on organizations such as public bureaucracies and private nonprofits is the importance of mission as opposed to profit as an organizational goal such mission oriented organizations are frequently staffed by motivated agents who subscribe to the mission this paper studies incentives in such contexts and emphasizes the role of matching the mission preferences of principals and agents in increasing organizational efficiency matching economizes on the need for high powered incentives it can also however entrench bureaucratic conservatism and resistance to innovations the framework developed in this paper is applied to school competition incentives in the public sector and in private nonprofits and the interdependence of incentives and productivity between the private for profit sector and the mission oriented sector through occupational choice jel d23 d73 h41 l31 the late twentieth century witnessed a historic high in the march of market capitalism with unbridled optimism in the role of the profit motive in promoting welfare in the production of private goods moreover this generated a broad consensus on the optimal organization of private good production through privately owned competitive firms when it comes to the provision of collective goods no such consensus has emerged debates about the relative merits of public and private provision still dominate this paper suggests a contracting approach to the provision of collective goods it focuses on two key issues how to structure incentives and the role of competition between providers at its heart is the idea that organizations that provide collective goods cohere around a mission 2 thus production of collective goods can be viewed as mission oriented

equal but inequitable who benefits from gender neutral tenure clock stopping policies many skilled professional occupations are characterized by an early period of intensive skill accumulation and career establishment examples include law firm associates surgical residents and untenured faculty at research intensive universities high female exit rates are sometimes blamed on the inability of new mothers to survive the sustained negative productivity shock associated with childbearing and early childrearing in these environments gender neutral family policies have been adopted in some professions in an attempt to level the playing field the gender neutral tenure clock stopping policies adopted by the majority of research intensive universities in the united states in recent decades are an excellent example but to date there is no empirical evidence showing that these policies help women using a unique data set on the universe of assistant professor hires at top 50 economics departments from 1985 2004 we show that the adoption of gender neutral tenure clock stopping policies substantially reduced female tenure rates while substantially increasing male tenure rates

gender biases in student evaluations of teaching abstract this article uses data from a french university to analyze gender biases in student evaluations of teaching sets the results of fixed effects and generalized ordered logit regression analyses show that male students express a bias in favor of male professors also the different teaching dimensions that students value in male and female professors tend to match gender stereotypes men are perceived by both male and female students as being more knowledgeable and having stronger class leadership skills which are stereotypically associated with males despite the fact that students appear to learn as much from women as from men

bombs brains and science the role of human and physical capital for the creation of scientific knowledge i examine the role of human and physical capital for the creation of scientific knowledge i address the endogeneity of human and physical capital with two exogenous shocks the dismissal of scientists in nazi germany and world war ii bombings a 10 shock to human capital reduced output by 0 2 sd in the short run and the reduction persisted in the long run a 10 shock to physical capital reduced output by 0 05 sd in the short run and the reduction did not persist the dismissal of star scientists caused much larger reductions in output because they are key for attracting other successful scientists

congressional committees and the political economy of federal outlays the literature on the organization of the united states congress has been dominated by distributive and informational theory one important source of disagreement between these two theories is their characterization of whether individual legislators can engage in pork barrel activities here we provide evidence which indicates that the pork barrel is alive and well in the contemporary united states congress we focus on whether members of power and constituency committees can direct disproportionate federal expenditures to their districts finding strong and systematic evidence of pork barrel activities by committee members provides empirical support for distributive theories of legislative organization

investigating asymmetric determinants of the cny cnh exchange rate spreads the role of economic policy uncertainty abstract this study investigates the asymmetric effects of economic policy uncertainty epu and other possible determinants on the cny cnh spreads by utilizing the nonlinear ardl model for this purpose we construct a novel epu index based on the epu indices of china and the g7 countries by using principal component analysis the results show substantial asymmetric effects of the concerned determinants on the spreads moreover the composite epu significantly affects the spreads with positive shocks to the composite epu inducing widening cny cnh spreads

gender and promotions evidence from academic economists in france the promotion system for french academic economists provides an interesting environment to examine the promotion gap between men and women promotions occur through national competitions for which we have information both on candidates and on those eligible to be candidates thus we can examine the two stages of the process application and success women are less likely to seek promotion and this accounts for up to 76 percent of the promotion gap being a woman also reduces the probability of promotion conditional on applying although the gender difference is not statistically significant our results highlight the importance of the decision to apply

a theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence this paper presents a theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence political equilibrium depends on the efficiency of each group in producing pressure the effect of additional pressure on their influence the number of persons in different groups and the deadweight cost of taxes and subsidies an increase in deadweight costs discourages pressure by subsidized groups and encourages pressure by taxpayers this analysis unifies the view that governments correct market failures with the view that they favor the politically powerful both are produced by the competition for political favors

baby steps the gender division of childcare during the covid 19 pandemic the nature and scale of the shocks to the demand for and the supply of home childcare during the covid 19 pandemic provide a unique opportunity to increase our understanding of the division of home labour and the determinants of specialization within the household we collected real time data on daily lives to document the impact of measures to control covid 19 on uk families with children under the age of 12 we document that these families have been doing the equivalent of a working week in childcare with mothers bearing most of the burden the additional hours of childcare done by women are less sensitive to their employment than they are for men leaving many women juggling work and a lot more childcare with likely adverse effects on their mental health and future careers however some households those in which men have not been working have taken greater steps towards an equal allocation offering the prospect of sharing the burden of childcare more equally in the future

peer effects in science evidence from the dismissal of scientists in nazi germany this paper analyses peer effects among university scientists specifically it investigates whether the quality and the number of peers affect the productivity of researchers in physics chemistry and mathematics the usual endogeneity problems related to estimating peer effects are addressed by using the dismissal of scientists by the nazi government in 1933 as a source of exogenous variation in the peer group of scientists staying in germany to investigate localized peer effects i construct a new panel data set covering the universe of scientists at the german universities from 1925 to 1938 from historical sources i find no evidence for peer effects at the local level even very high quality scientists do not affect the productivity of their local peers

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

impact of input substitution and output transformation on data envelopment analysis decisions abstractdata envelopment analysis dea can aid managerial decision making because it offers an opportunity to measure organizational performance in a holistic manner aggregating data from partial indicators into a single comprehensive measure however there are some methodological hazards associated with the use of dea that are especially relevant to managerial decisions but which have been largely ignored in the literature herein we identify and show the impact of a ubiquitous methodological hazard in dea modelling the economic assumptions regarding input substitutions and output transformations

economic efficiency and frontier techniques abstract most of the literature related to the measurement of economic efficiency has based its analysis either on parametric or on non parametric frontier methods the choice of estimation method has been an issue of debate with some researchers preferring the parametric and others the non parametric approach the aim of this paper is to provide a critical and detailed review of both core frontier methods in our opinion no approach is strictly preferable to any other moreover a careful consideration of their main advantages and disadvantages of the data set utilized and of the intrinsic characteristics of the framework under analysis will help us in the correct implementation of these techniques recent developments in frontier techniques and economic efficiency measurement such as bayesian techniques bootstrapping duality theory and the analysis of sampling asymptotic properties are also considered in this paper

gender differences in accepting and receiving requests for tasks with low promotability abstract gender differences in task allocations may sustain vertical gender segregation in labor markets we examine the allocation of a task that everyone prefers be completed by someone else writing a report serving on a committee etc and find evidence that women more than men volunteer are asked to volunteer and accept requests to volunteer for such tasks beliefs that women more than men say yes to tasks with low promotability appear as an important driver of these differences if women hold tasks that are less promotable than those held by men then women will progress more slowly in organizations jel i23 j16 j44 j71 m12 m51

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

the impact of federal spending on house election outcomes while it is widely believed by academics politicians and the popular press that incumbent members of congress are rewarded by the electorate for bringing federal dollars to their district the empirical evidence supporting that claim is extremely weak one explanation for the failure to uncover the expected relationship between federal spending and election outcomes is that incumbents who expect to have difficulty being reelected are likely to exert greater effort in obtaining federal outlays since it is generally impossible to adequately measure this effort the estimated impact of spending is biased downward because of an omitted variable bias we address this estimation problem using instrumental variables for each house district we use spending outside the district but inside the state containing the district as an instrument for spending in the district federal spending is affected by a large number of actors e g governors senators mayors and other house members in the state delegation

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

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

time series evidence on shirking in the u s house of representatives this paper presents time series evidence on the voting behavior of members of the u s house of representatives from 1975 to 1990 the empirical results indicate that voting behavior of individual congressmen is remarkably stable over time we find no evidence of economically significant last term effects on voting behavior nor are there important effects of legislative tenure on voting patterns the most significant deviations in voting behavior occur for congressmen who failed to win their reelection bid suggesting that sizable deviations from previous policy positions may result in swift retribution by constituents in the district