the strategy proof provision of public goods under congestion and crowding preferences we examine the strategy proof provision of excludable public goods when agents care not only about the level of provision of a public good but also the number of consumers we show that on such domains strategy proof and efficient social choice functions satisfying an outsider independence condition must be rigid in that they must always assign a fixed number of consumers regardless of individual desires to participate the fixed number depends on the attitudes of agents regarding group size being small when congestion effects dominate individuals prefer to have fewer other consumers and large when cost sharing effects dominate agents prefer to have more consumers a hierarchical rule selects which consumers participate and a variation of a generalized median rule to selects the level of the public good under heterogeneity in agents views on the optimal number of consumers strategy proof efficient and outsider independent social choice functions are much more limited and in an important case must be dictatorial

the real effects of liquidity during the financial crisis evidence from automobiles illiquidity in short term credit markets during the financial crisis might have severely curtailed the supply of nonbank consumer credit using a new data set linking every car sold in the united states to the credit supplier involved in each transaction we find that the collapse of the asset backed commercial paper market reduced the financing capacity of such nonbank lenders as captive leasing companies in the automobile industry as a result car sales in counties that traditionally depended on nonbank lenders declined sharply although other lenders increased their supply of credit the net aggregate effect of illiquidity on car sales is large and negative we conclude that the decline in auto sales during the financial crisis was caused in part by a credit supply shock driven by the illiquidity of the most important providers of consumer finance in the auto loan market these results also imply that interventions aimed at arresting illiquidity in short term credit markets might have helped contain the real effects of the crisis

equilibrium in a finite local public goods economy abstract this paper examines the existence of a noncooperative equilibrium in a finite local public goods economy where consumers have quasi linear preferences jurisdictions consist of consumers who chose the same public project and finance the cost of production of public goods through either a proportional income tax or a poll tax we show that under a proportional income tax scheme a nash equilibria may fail to exist under a poll tax scheme an equilibrium always exists but in general nash equilibria violate a very weak efficiency condition we conclude by commenting on the stabilizing effect of zoning policies journal of economic literatureclassification number c71

efficiency and consistency for locating multiple public facilities abstract in the problem of locating multiple public facilities studied by barbera and bevia self selection consistent functions j econ theory 105 2002 263 277 locating public facilities by majority stability consistency and group formation games econ behav 56 2006 185 200 we offer simple necessary and sufficient conditions for efficiency decentralizability of efficient decisions in a game of community division and local public goods provision and a constructive algorithm for efficient and consistent decisions

universities and fundamental research reflections on the growth of university industry partnerships the recent rise in university industry partnerships has stimulated an important public policy debate regarding how these relationships affect fundamental research in this paper we examine the antecedents and consequences of policies to promote university industry alliances although the preliminary evidence appears to suggest that these partnerships have not had a deleterious effect on the quantity and quality of basic research some legitimate concerns have been raised about these activities that require additional analysis we conclude that additional research is needed to provide a more accurate assessment of the optimal level of commercialisation

a theoretical analysis of the role of social networks in entrepreneurship entrepreneurship involves innovation and uncertainty we outline a theory of entrepreneurship which highlights the importance of social networks in promoting innovation and reducing uncertainty our findings suggest that this social aspect of entrepreneurship increases the probability of entrepreneurial success the results also lend credence to theories of entrepreneurship that suggest that entrepreneurial opportunities are formed endogenously by the entrepreneurs who create them we also consider the public policy implications of our findings

equilibrium with product differentiation tive consumer formulations is used to examine the properties of single and multiple price equilibria conditions under which decreases in the intensity of consumer preferences reduce price are given it is shown that with certain types of demand curves entry can eliminate price cost markups even given product differentiation if competition is localized it is demonstrated that entry does not affect the markup finally the effect of spurious product differentiation on price is examined

does corporate lending by banks and finance companies differ evidence on specialization in private debt contracting this paper establishes empirically the existence of specialization in private market corporate lending adding a new dimension to the public versus private debt distinctions now common in the literature comparing corporate loans made by banks and by finance companies we find that the two types of intermediaries are equally likely to finance information problematic firms however finance companies tend to serve observably riskier borrowers particularly more leveraged borrowers evidence supports both regulatory and reputation based explanations for this specialization in passing we shed light on various theories of debt contracting and intermediation and present facts about finance companies

emergence of captive finance companies and risk segmentation in loan markets theory and evidence this paper presents a theoretical model and empirical evidence of risk segmentation of the secured consumer installment loan market by two different types of lending institutions independent lending institutions and captive finance companies a consumer installment loan is a credit arrangement repaid through periodic installment payments over a specific length of time in general consumer installment loans are used for financing the purchase of expensive durable

an empirical analysis of personal bankruptcy and delinquency this article uses a new dataset of credit card accounts to analyze credit card delinquency personal bankruptcy and the stability of credit risk models we estimate duration models for default and assess the relative importance of different variables in predicting default we investigate how the propensity to default has changed over time disentangling the two leading explanations for the recent increase in default rates a deterioration in the risk composition of borrowers versus an increase in borrowers willingness to default due to declines in default costs even after controlling for risk composition and economic fundamentals the propensity to default significantly increased between 1995 and 1997 standard default models missed an important time varying default factor consistent with a decline in default costs debt issued by consumers is an understudied asset class there has been particularly little academic study of recent trends in default on this debt between 1994 and 1997 the number of personal bankruptcy filings in the united states rose by about 75 the 1 35 million filings in 1997 represented well over 1 of u s households delinquency rates on credit cards rose almost as sharply federal reserve bank of cleveland 1998 the resulting losses to lenders amounted to a sizable fraction of the interest payments they collect potentially raising the average cost of credit these trends in default both in bankruptcy and delinquency are especially surprising in light of the strong economy over the period they provide an unusually rich source of variation to test the stability of models that forecast personal default and of credit risk models more generally there are two leading explanations for these trends first the risk composition of borrowers might have worsened under the risk effect less

on the sources and significance of interindustry differences in technological opportunities abstract the set of technological opportunities in a given industry is one of the fundamental determinants of technical advance in that line of business we examine the concept of technological opportunity and discuss three categories of sources of those opportunities advances in scientific understanding and technique technological advances originating in other industries and in other private and governmental institutions and feedbacks from an industry s own technological advances data from the yale survey on industrial research and development are used to measure the strength of various sources of technological opportunity and to discern interindustry differences in the importance of these sources we find that interindustry differences in the strength and sources of technological opportunities contribute importantly to explanations of cross industry variation in r d intensity and technological advance

resources capabilities risk capital and the creation of university spin out companies abstract the commercialization of university research has become an increasingly important issue given concerns regarding licensing and the university s desire to maximize the returns to intellectual property ip in this paper we assess the impact of university resources and routines capabilities on the creation of spin out companies we find that both the number of spin out companies created and the number of spin out companies created with equity investment are significantly positively associated with expenditure on intellectual property protection the business development capabilities of technology transfer offices and the royalty regime of the university these results highlight the importance not just of resource stocks but also of developing appropriate capabilities of technology transfer officers in spinning out companies the results suggest that universities and policy makers need to devote attention to the training and recruitment of technology officers with the broad base of commercial skills

mid range universities linkages with industry knowledge types and the role of intermediaries we analyze how mid range universities can contribute to industrial change through the transfer of tacit and codified knowledge in the areas of spin offs licensing and patents contract research consultancy and reach out and graduate and researcher mobility we use archival survey and interview data relating to mid range universities in mid range environments in the uk belgium germany and sweden our findings suggest that mid range universities primarily need to focus on generating world class research and critical mass in areas of expertise as well as developing different types of intermediaries mid range universities may need to develop a portfolio of university industry linkages in terms of the scope of activities and the types of firms with which they interact we also show that different intermediaries have important roles to play in developing university industry linkages for mid range universities

locating public facilities by majority stability consistency and group formation abstract we consider the following allocation problem a fixed number of public facilities must be located on a line society is composed of n agents who must be allocated to one and only one of these facilities agents have single peaked preferences over the possible location of the facilities they are assigned to and do not care about the location of the rest of facilities there is no congestion we show that there exist social choice correspondences that choose locations and assign agents to them in such a way that 1 these decisions are condorcet winners whenever one exists 2 the majority of the users of each facility supports the choice of its location and 3 no agent wishes to become a user of another facility even if that could induce a change of its present location by majority voting

collateral and rationing sorting equilibria in monopolistic and competitive credit markets the authors examine how market structure affects credit allocation under universal risk neutrality and asymmetric information about borrowers they consider both monopolistic and perf ectly competitive banks and examine the role of collateral in each ca se when a bank is a monopolist on the loan side they find collatera l is never used and asymmetric information results in reduced bank le nding under perfect competition collateral has a useful sorting rol e moreover rationing is possible even with collateral availability and perfectly elastic deposit supply in this setting the authors sh ow co signers are valuable social welfare properties of the monopoly and competitive equilibria are also compared copyright 1987 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

conceptualising the heterogeneity of research based spin offs a multi dimensional taxonomy abstract research based spin offs rbsos have become an important aspect of the technology transfer process emanating from what is conventionally a non commercial environment rbsos pose major challenges if they are to realise their potential to meet the objectives of their founders and the parent research organisations pros from which they emerge an important issue is to understand the heterogeneity of rbsos this paper reviews the literature on rbso typologies to develop a taxonomy of rbsos we identify common themes in relation to these typologies in relation to 1 spin off creation and 2 spin off development the dimensions that differentiate between firms are the type of resources the business model and the institutional link we identify gaps in current typologies in order to propose avenues for future conceptual and empirical research

technology transfer offices and commercialization of university intellectual property performance and policy implications the recent increase in the rate of commercialization of intellectual property at us and european universities has important performance and policy implications we review recent studies of the antecedents and consequences of these activities and then draw some lessons learned for policy makers a key conclusion is that universities and regions must formulate and implement coherent and feasible technology transfer commercialization strategies

on the number and size of nations this paper studies the equilibrium determination of the number of countries in different political regimes and in different economic environments with more or less economic integration we focus on the trade off between the benefits of large jurisdictions and the costs of heterogeneity of large and diverse populations our model implies that i democratization leads to secessions ii in equilibrium one generally observes an inefficiently large number of countries iii the equilibrium number of countries is increasing in the amount of economic integration

self selection consistent functions abstract this paper studies collective choice rules whose outcomes consist of a collection of simultaneous decisions each one of which is the only concern of some group of individuals in society the need for such rules arises in different contexts including the establishment of jurisdictions the location of multiple public facilities or the election of representative committees we define a notion of allocation consistency requiring that each partial aspect of the global decision taken by society as a whole should be ratified by the group of agents who are directly concerned with this particular aspect we investigate the possibility of designing efficient allocation consistent rules we also explore whether such rules may in addition respect the condorcet criterion journal of economic literature classification numbers d7 d71

stable coalition structures with a unidimensional set of alternatives abstract we identify a class of economic and political environments that admit an s equilibrium where both free mobility and free entry are allowed we further study the relationship between the set of s equilibria and the sets of strong and coalition proof nash equilibria in the noncooperative coalition formation game which is closely related to the one originally studied by j von neumann and o morgenstern theory of games and economic behaviour princeton univ press princeton nj 1944 we also show that the set of s equilibria induces a proper subset of the coalition structure core of the corresponding characteristic function form journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 c72

predation and cross subsidization in the value maximizing multiproduct firm predation occurs when a firm engages in the temporary strategy of setting prices below production costs to damage or destroy existing competitors one form of predation occurs when a multiproduct or conglomerate firm obtains revenues in excess of production costs on goods sold in monopolized markets and uses these rents to subsidize the production of goods sold in competitive markets indeed the fact that cross subsidization is precluded in long run competitive equilibrium and is thus synonymous with predation has frequently been demonstrated in the literature previous analyses of the relationship between cross subsidization as defined by the difference in the additional or incremental costs and revenues of producing a specific group of commodities and predation have been conducted under the behavioral postulate of profit maximization the purpose of this paper is to reexamine this relationship given the alternative assumption of value maximization the assumption of value maximization leads to different results 2 specifically it is shown that for a multiproduct firm producing goods with different risk characteristics e g cyclical and counter cyclical stochastic demand cross subsidization can be both a value maximizing strategy and a characteristic of long run competitive equilibrium thus a multiproduct firm may give the appearance of engaging in cross subsidization for the purpose of predatory pricing without ever having considered the effects of its decisions on actual or potential competition the remainder of this paper is organized as follows section ii presents the assumptions and model of the analysis the main features of this model are the assumption of

information costs and the organization of credit markets a theory of indirect lending this paper explains indirect lending as a strategy for reducing a bank s cost of screening borrowers commercial banks appear to ration credit by rejecting some direct loan applicants although they accept higher risk borrowers who apply for loans indirectly through retailers however the more thorough credit check on direct loans causes applicants to sort themselves according to risk indirect applicants signal their higher risk through their choice of financing since banks gather more accurate information on direct applicants the two types of contracts should differ in predictable ways these implications are tested with federal reserve data on 5 000 automobile loans

multiple public goods lexicographic preferences and single plateaued preference rules abstract we study the problem of providing a menu of identical public goods for a group of agents with single peaked preferences over 0 1 a decision rule selects for each preference profile and for each public good a location in miyagawa 1998a phd dissertation an agent consumes of each menu without rivalry only his most preferred public good we extend preferences from 0 1 to the set of alternatives lexicographically we identify a certain agent who might leave and require population monotonicity only if he leaves the entire population when we provide two public goods we characterize the class of single plateaued preference rules by pareto optimality anonymity and population monotonicity