information school choice and academic achievement evidence from two experiments we examine a natural experiment and a field experiment that provided direct information on school test scores to lower income families in a public school choice plan receiving information significantly increases the fraction of parents choosing higher performing schools parents with high scoring alternatives nearby were more likely to choose nonguaranteed schools with higher test scores using random variation from each experiment we find that attending a higher scoring school increases student test scores the results imply that school choice will most effectively increase academic achievement for disadvantaged students when parents have easy access to test score information and good options from which to choose

arbitrary values good causes and premature verdicts abstract this paper offers an alternative interpretation of the conclusions kahneman and knetsch propose based on two contingent valuation cvm surveys the evaluation argues that while framing is important to cvm estimates the design implementation and empirical findings reported from these surveys do not support their judgments moreover with the exception of temporal embedding conventional economic descriptions of individual behavior can explain the response patterns that they suggest are at variance with standard value theory

preferences for environmental quality under uncertainty abstract although the expected effects of environmental policies and interventions are rarely known with certainty stated preference surveys rarely elicit preferences over uncertain environmental outcomes this article presents empirical results challenging the view that ignoring such uncertainty during preference elicitation is of no consequence so long as people only care about final environmental states we show that measured preferences for final environmental states water quality in this case depend on whether people choose between final states or between lotteries over final states in contrast to the typical finding for monetary lotteries we find significant under weighting of low probability events related to water quality

precision of dichotomous choice contingent valuation welfare measures some simulation results the purpose of this research is to examine the roles of individuals heterogeneous economic factors and model misspecification in dichotomous choice contingent valuation welfare measurement willingness to pay for an improvement of environmental quality is studied simulation results indicate that the precision of welfare estimates increases with individuals income levels and decreases with the price of the quality related good the dependence of the consumption of the quality related good on the environmental quality also affects the reliability of welfare estimates

monte carlo benchmarks for discrete response valuation methods this paper argues that the belief that discrete contingent valuation cv questions yield substantially larger estimates of the mean and the median willingness to pay wtp for nonmarket resources in comparison to open ended cv questions is unfounded monte carlo experiments estimate the factors influencing the performance of wtp estimates based on discrete response models most of the error arises from the specification errors common to the empirical models in the literature these experiments suggest models where wtp is dominated by nonuse or passive use values are likely to have smaller errors than where large use values influence these decisions

firm size and the nature of innovation within industries the case of process and product r d the effect of firm size on the allocation of r d effort between process and product innovation is examined it is hypothesized that relative to product innovations process innovations are less saleable in disembodied form and spawn less growth this implies that the returns to process r d will depend more on the firm s output at the time it conducts its r d than the returns to product r d incorporating this distinction in a simple model the authors derive and test predictions about how the fraction of r d devoted to process innovation varies with firm size within industries

farsighted coalitional stability abstract i define the largest consistent set a solution concept which applies to situations in which coalitions freely form but cannot make binding contracts act publicly and are fully farsighted in that a coalition considers the possibility that once it acts another coalition might react a third coalition might in turn react and so on without limit i establish weak nonemptiness conditions and apply it to strategic and coalitional form games and majority rule voting i argue that it improves on the von neumann morgenstern stable set as it is usually defined but is consistent with a generalization of the stable set as in the theory of social situations journal of economic literature classification numbers c70 c71

estimating recreation demand using the properties of the implied consumer surplus consumer surplus estimates are random variables while they are generally recognized as stochastic little attention was given to their properties prior to bockstael and strand s 1987 evaluation of conventional practices for using recreation demand models in benefit measurement their paper as well as all the research it stimulated adopted a similar strategy namely to judge the methods for estimating demand or random utility models based on the properties of their respective consumer surplus estimates this paper proposes a different strategy to define estimators based on the properties of their implied consumer surplus estimates this type of argument is not new and usually is associated with the rationale offered for bayesian estimators 2 however the motivation for the estimator proposed here can be based on minimizing the mean squared error of the consumer surplus estimates moreover it can be constructed from the statistics usually reported with ordinary least squares ols estimates

coalition stability in public goods provision testing an optimal allocation rule we test the canonical model of international environmental agreements ieas in a laboratory setting with asymmetric agents iea participation represents coalition formation and public good provision where there are gains to cooperation but an incentive to free ride we test four competing methods of dividing the coalition s worth a recently proposed optimal rule which accounts for subjects payoffs as a single free rider the shapley value the nash bargaining solution and an equal split each treatment generates the theoretically predicted coalition size more often than not the shares of the potential gains to cooperation achieved by each rule are 51 36 40 and 13 respectively these results highlight the importance of using an optimal rule to improve ieas and more broadly for voluntary public good provision

risk self protection and ex ante economic value abstract we develop three propositions about the ex ante value of reduced risk if there is a continuous outcome distribution and if self protection influences outcome probability and severity then 1 unobservable utility terms cannot be eliminated from the ex ante value expressions 2 knowledge of the convexity or the nonconvexity of dose response functions is insufficient to sign changes in these expressions and 3 self protection expenditures need not be a lower bound measure of these expressions therefore many restrictions applied in recent empirical work on the economic value of risk changes are not immediately transferable to settings where endogenous risks prevail

quality over quantity reexamining the link between entrepreneurship and job creation although much has been written about the quantity of jobs created by entrepreneurs scholars have yet to examine the quality of these jobs in this article the authors begin to address this important issue by examining nearly 5 000 businesses that began operations in 2004 they investigate the extent to which nascent employers provide what many think of as quality jobs those offering health care coverage and a retirement plan the authors find that because of small scale constrained resources and protection from institutional pressures start up companies do not provide their employees with either of these proxies for job quality and their likelihood of offering health or retirement benefits increases only marginally over their first six years of operation the finding that entrepreneurs impressive record of job creation is not matched by a similarly impressive outcome with respect to job quality challenges policymakers to ensure that entrepreneurs are encouraged to create quality employment opportunities in the course of creating new businesses abstract from author

the demand for site specific recreational activities a characteristics approach abstract a model of constrained utility maximizing behavior is developed to explain how a representative individual allocates his ski days among alternative sites the physical characteristics of the ski areas and the individual s skiing ability are explicit arguments in the utility function the budget allocation is given along with the parametric costs to ski including travel costs entrance fees equipment costs and the opportunity cost of his time shares a site s share being the proportion of ski days that the individual spends at that site are derived and assumed multinomially distributed a stochastic specification which maintains the inherent properties of the shares maximum likelihood estimation confirms the basic hypothesis that costs ability and characteristics all are important determinants of the sites shares the model explains a large proportion of the skier s allocation of ski days a multinomial logit model of skier behavior is also developed and maximum likelihood estimates of its parameters are obtained examination of the summary statistics from my model and the logit model indicates that my model predicts the skier s choice of sites better than the logit model

welfare estimation using aggregate and individual observation models a comparison using monte carlo techniques due to the weak behavioral foundations of aggregate demand models zonal travel cost models have been largely abandoned in favor of models based on individual observations however sample selection difficulties in individual observation models often require the use of distribution sensitive limited dependent variables estimators in this paper i use monte carlo simulations to investigate whether the bias from aggregation is worse than possible bias from these narrowly specified estimators somewhat surprisingly the results indicate that zonal models often outperform the individual observation models especially when using an aggregate model that incorporates intrazonal variance of the explanatory variables

evaluating education programs that have lotteried admission and selective attrition we study the effectiveness of magnet programs in an urban district that ration excess demand by admission lotteries differential attrition arises since students who lose the lottery are more likely to pursue options outside the school district than students who win the lottery when students leave the district important outcome variables are often not observed the treatment effects are not point identified we exploit known quantiles of the outcome distribution to construct informative bounds on treatment effects we find that magnet programs improve behavioral outcomes but have no significant effect on achievement

hiring molecules not atoms comobility and wages what role do social connections play in the labor market a vast influential literature has detailed the ways in which ties facilitate the flow of information about job opportunities to workers as well as endorsements or referrals of workers to firms we propose that this role is not constrained to an informational one alone rather relationships between workers can enable a collective job matching process that facilitates the transfer of shared human capital from one organization to another yet comobility has been studied only occasionally and among elite workers in particular industries this study delivers both fieldwork as well as large sample analysis among all nongovernmental workers in denmark finding a 5 5 wage premium for those who move jointly instead of independently both in the full sample as well as when applying strict matching or fixed effects for workers or firms co movers whose skills are related but not identical capture a higher premium and the wage gains associated with comob

the effect of school choice on participants evidence from randomized lotteries school choice has become an increasingly prominent strategy for enhancing academic achievement to evaluate the impact on participants we exploit randomized lotteries that determine high school admission in the chicago public schools compared to those students who lose lotteries students who win attend high schools that are better in a number of dimensions including peer achievement and attainment levels nonetheless we find little evidence that winning a lottery provides any systematic benefit across a wide variety of traditional academic measures lottery winners do however experience improvements on a subset of nontraditional outcome measures such as self reported disciplinary incidents and arrest rates

measurement error in recreation demand models the joint estimation of participation site choice and site characteristics abstract in the demand for recreational fishing sites an important explanatory variable differentiating sites is the unobserved expected catch rate since the observed catch rate is subject to sampling variability using the average of a site s observed catch rates causes the parameter estimator on catch to be biased downward we develop and demonstrate a solution to this errors in variables problem when there are repeated measurements on the catch rate consistent and efficient estimates of both the demand parameters and the expected catch rates are obtained by simultaneously estimating them by maximum likelihood an empirical example demonstrates the importance of simultaneous estimation

welfare effects of changes in environmental quality under individual uncertainty about use we adapt the theoretical state preference model to value nonmarket public goods under individual uncertainty about use illustrating with an assessment of willingness to pay to prevent acid rain lake damage in the northeast united states individual usage uncertainty is modelled via probabilities of participation in trout fishing changes in environmental quality are valued using a random utility model to explain yes no responses to a contingent valuation question we produce quantitative welfare measures individual fitted and simulated passiveand active use values individual expected consumer surplus option price option value and complete individual willingness topay loci

does competition among public schools benefit students and taxpayers tiebout choice among districts is the most powerful market force in american public education naive estimates of its effects are biased by endogenous district formation i derive instruments from the natural boundaries in a metropolitan area my results suggest that metropolitan areas with greater tiebout choice have more productive public schools and less private schooling little of the effect of tiebout choice works through its effect on household sorting this finding may be explained by another finding students are equally segregated by school in metropolitan areas with greater and lesser degrees of tiebout choice among districts

estimating social welfare using count data models an application to long run recreation demand under conditions of endogenous stratification and truncation this paper develops a negative binomial model of recreation demand that corrects for both truncation and endogenous stratification this approach recovers the demand associated with the general population not just the users of the site this model demonstrates the importance of the joint nature of the population s latent demand for trips and the consumer surplus associated with those trips the empirical results provide an estimate of the willingness to pay by washington state residents for hiking opportunities in the cascade mountain range these results are used to forecast total trips and willingness to pay over the next forty years copyright 1995 by mit press

dynamic effects on the stability of international environmental agreements abstract in terms of the number of signatories one observes both large and small international environmental agreements the theoretical literature based on game theory discusses different concepts and mechanisms regarding stability of coalitions the conclusion has been reached that in all circumstances under farsightedness both large and small stable coalitions can occur this theory is based on behavioural reaction patterns but does not take account of the interaction with the dynamics of emission adjustments this paper shows that when these two dynamical processes are integrated large and small stable coalitions can still occur but only if the costs of emissions are relatively unimportant as compared with the costs of abatement

the travel cost model for lake recreation a comparison of two methods for incorporating site quality and substitution effects this paper empirically illustrates how different assumptions regarding recreationists decision making behavior affect the predicted changes in recreational activity given a water quality improvement a multinomial logit model which reallocates visits away from other sites to the improved site predicts a smaller outward shift of the recreationist s demand curve than the more traditional travel cost model which does not assume any reallocation of visits among sites

what floats your boat preference revelation from lotteries over complex goods abstract we examine a type of lottery used to distribute some publicly held resource access rights the lottery provides participants with the opportunity to choose among a set of simple gambles over multi attribute goods participant choices result in an endogenous distribution of success rates over gambles that reflects tradeoffs between the relative desirability of the available goods and the probability of winning when lottery winnings are multi attribute goods lottery outcomes provide sufficient information to estimate hedonic prices marginal utility and marginal rates of substitution among attributes we develop a model for characterizing preferences from this information set we apply our model to idaho s four rivers whitewater recreation lottery which allows applicants to apply for one permit among a large set of alternative river day combinations that provide varying river and weather characteristics this lottery structure shows promise as a foundation for economic experiments for preference revelation

valuing non marketed goods the case of elk permit lotteries abstract permit allocation methods offer a way of estimating the value of non marketed elk hunting applicants compete for elk hunting permits in colorado by acquiring preference points that have a monetary cost and by distributing themselves among hunts until their marginal values are equalized we infer the marginal value of permits from the opportunity costs incurred to acquire these permits and use a hedonic regression analysis to estimate the impact of various hunt characteristics on permit value

farsightedness changing stock location and the stability of international fisheries agreements changes in stock location may affect the stability of international fisheries agreements this paper offers a theoretical analysis of the stability of regional fisheries management organisations rfmos in a non cooperative coalition formation game based on the classic gordon schaefer model we employ a new stability concept which modifies farsighted stability chwe j econ theory 63 299 325 1994 we call this concept farsighted downwards stability fds we also employ the internal stability is concept for comparison analytical results regarding fds for symmetric players without changing stock location show stable grand coalitions for n le 4 player games and the possibility for partial cooperation sensitivity analysis deals with changing stock location and cost asymmetry stability decreases in n increases when costs are asymmetric and increases when fds is employed farsighted conjectures on behalf of rfmo members can thus help to maintain cooperation as stock location changes however fds is more sensitive to changes in stock location than is

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

the impact of school choice on student outcomes an analysis of the chicago public schools we explore the impact of school choice on student outcomes in the context of open enrollment within the chicago public schools cps roughly half of the students opt out of their assigned high school to attend a different cps school and these students are much more likely than those who remain in their assigned schools to graduate to determine the source of this apparent benefit we compare outcomes across i similar students with differential access to schooling options and ii travelers and non travelers within the same school the results suggest that other than for students who select career academies the observed cross sectional benefits are likely spurious

disagreements spinoffs and the evolution of detroit as the capital of the u s automobile industry the agglomeration of the automobile industry around detroit michigan is explained using a theory in which disagreements lead employees of incumbent firms to found spinoffs in the same industry predictions of the theory concerning entry and firm survival are tested using data on the origin location and years of production of every entrant into the industry from 1895 to 1966 the geographic concentration of the industry is attributed to four early successful entrants and the many successful spinoffs they spawned in the detroit area and not to conventional agglomeration economies benefiting co located firms as featured in modern theories of agglomeration implications of the findings regarding firm strategy are discussed

experience and entrepreneurship a career transition perspective the authors cast entrepreneurship as one of three career choices remaining with one s employer changing employers or engaging in entrepreneurship and theorize how the likelihood of entrepreneursh

option prices for groundwater protection abstract this paper reports results from a contingent valuation study of households willingness to pay pay to prevent uncertain future nitrate contamination of a potable supply of groundwater the functional form of the corresponding logit model is derived from utility maximization theory probability of future demand change in the probability of future supply and an attitudinal score for interests in the well being of future generations are significant positive determinants of option prices several implications of these results for aquifer management policy are highlighted

discussion of morey and waldman s measurement error in recreation demand models abstract morey and waldman have proposed a method for handling measurement error in site attributes such as catch rates in models of anglers choice of fishing sites we discuss the properties of this method and compare these properties with those of the standard estimation procedure we show that i both methods are biased and ii the standard procedure is consistent whenever morey and waldman s procedure is consistent as well as under more general conditions in particular morey and waldman s procedure is inconsistent if any site attributes are omitted from the model whereas the standard procedure is consistent in the presence of omitted site attributes as long as the impact of these attributes on the dependent variable is uncorrelated with included variables a condition shared by all regression models

designing random allocation mechanisms theory and applications randomization is commonplace in everyday resource allocation we generalize the theory of randomized assignment to accommodate multi unit allocations and various real world constraints such as group specific quotas controlled choice in school choice and house allocation and scheduling and curriculum constraints in course allocation we develop new mechanisms that are ex ante efficient and fair in these environments and that incorporate certain non additive substitutable preferences we also develop a utility guarantee technique that limits ex post unfairness in random allocations supplementing the ex ante fairness promoted by randomization this can be applied to multi unit assignment problems and certain two sided matching problems jel c78 d82

what is a peer the role of network definitions in estimation of endogenous peer effects we employ a standard identification strategy from the peer effects literature to investigate the importance of network definitions in estimation of endogenous peer effects we use detailed information on friends in the national longitudinal study of adolescent health survey add health to construct two network definitions that are less ad hoc than the school grade cohorts commonly used in the educational peer effects literature we demonstrate that accurate definitions of the network seriously impact estimation of peer effects in particular we show that peer effects estimates on educational achievement smoking and drinking are substantially larger with our more detailed measures than with the school grade cohorts these results highlight the need to further understand how friendships form in order to fully understand implications for policy that alters the peer group mix at the classroom or cohort level

market and non market mechanisms for the optimal allocation of scarce resources a number of identical objects is allocated to a set of privately informed agents agents have linear utility in money the designer wants to assign objects to agents that possess specific traits but the allocation can only be conditioned on the willingness to pay and on observable characteristics i solve for the optimal mechanism the choice between market or non market mechanisms depends on the statistical linkage between characteristics valued by the designer and willingness to pay

joint estimation of catch and other travel cost parameters some further thoughts abstract e r morey and d m waldman propose and use an estimator that jointly estimates catch rates and the parameter on those catch rates it is designed for situations where there is limited catch data for some of the sites in the choice set and takes advantage of the fact that trip patterns reflect variations in catch rates anglers do not like to fish at sites with few fish k train d mcfadden and r johnson note that this estimator is particularly sensitive to omitted variable bias and suggest an alternative estimator but their estimator effectively eliminates poor sites from the choice set

revisiting the small firm effect on entrepreneurship evidence from firm dissolutions afrequent claim in the entrepreneurship literature is that employees learn to become entrepreneurs during paid employment we revisit this mechanism in the context of the well established finding that smaller firms generate higher rates of entrepreneurship we propose a novel mechanism responsible for higher rates of entrepreneurship emanating from smaller firms large firms might have a advantage over small firms in providing internal opportunities to retain entrepreneurial talent we test this claim in a setting where firm dissolution extinguishes internal opportunities using a new hand collected data set of career histories in the automatic speech recognition asr industry for nondefunct firms we replicate the small firm effect however the small firm effect no longer holds within the subsample of defunct firms entrepreneurship rates among individuals present at firm dissolution are in fact higher for larger firms additional analyses indicate that this effect is unlikely to be driven by the ea

comparing welfare estimates of environmental quality changes from recreation demand models abstract this paper presents a procedure for examining the reliability of welfare estimates resulting from the estimation of multiple site recreation demand models a simulation approach is suggested where a utility function is combined with observations on individual and site characteristics to generate simulated data sets welfare measures associated with an improvement in site quality are calculated recreation demand models are estimated using the simulated data sets estimated welfare measures resulting from the recreation demand models are then compared to the true welfare measures calculated from the simulated data the procedure is demonstrated using two commonly employed recreation demand models

a fourier analysis of the us dairy industry measurement of economies of scale and scope is particularly important for predicting growth and product diversification however estimates are useful only to the extent the underlying production technology is modelled accurately this study measures economies of scale and scope in the rapidly changing us dairy industry with a fourier flexible cost function which provides a global approximation of the unknown function we use the high quality national agricultural and resource management survey arms survey data we find economies of scale at most firm sizes and persistent economies of scope across firm sizes in this industry which is counter to estimates from two diewert flexible functional forms

farsightedness in a coalitional great fish war we explore the implications of the farsightedness assumption on the conjectures of players in a coalitional great fish war model with symmetric players derived from the seminal model of levhari and mirman bell j econ 11 649 661 1980 the farsightedness assumption for players in a coalitional game acknowledges the fact that a deviation from a single player will lead to the formation of a new coalition structure as the result of possibly successive moves of her rivals in order to improve their payoffs it departs from mainstream game theory in that it relies on the so called rational conjectures as opposed to the traditional nash conjectures formed by players on the behavior of their rivals for values of the biological parameter and the discount factor more plausible than the ones used in the current literature the farsightedness assumption predicts a wide scope for cooperation in non trivial coalitions sustained by credible threats of successive deviations that defeat the shortsighted payoff of any prospective deviator compliance or deterrence of deviations may also be addressed by acknowledging that information on the fish stock or on the catch policies actually implemented may be available only with a delay dynamic farsightedness in that case the requirements are stronger and the sizes and number of possible farsighted stable coalitions are different in the sequential move version which could mimic some characteristics of fishery models the results are not less appealing even if the dominant player or dominant coalition with first move advantage assumption provides a case for cooperation with the traditional nash conjectures

does the market value value added evidence from housing prices after a public release of school and teacher value added value added data are an increasingly common evaluation tool for schools and teachers many school districts have adopted these methods and released the results publicly in this paper we study the release of value added data in los angeles by the los angeles times newspaper to identify how measured value added is capitalized into housing prices this analysis is the first in the us school valuation literature to examine property value responses to a value added information shock which is of interest as this measure is less correlated with demographics than typical school quality measures unique to this setting as well is the release of both school and teacher level value added data which allows us to examine how property values respond to both types of information using a difference indifferences methodology surrounding the release we find that neither school nor teacher value added scores are capitalized into home prices our results suggest that despite the contentiousness following these data releases homeowners do not consider value added models as currently constructed to be a relevant school quality measure on the margin

lottery rationed public access under alternative tariff arrangements changes in quality quantity and expected utility abstract a recent phenomenon is the emergence of quotas restricting individual access to public resources as regulators commonly ration access opportunities by lottery this paper extends the traditional open access destination choice framework for non market demand and welfare analysis conceptual results for one and two part tariff lotteries indicate that individuals may sustain welfare losses from improvements in quality or increases in the quota if aggregate demand is sufficiently responsive relative to individual utility nested random expected utility models reums are estimated with a panel dataset of individual choices of lottery rationed harvest rights for wild game empirical results indicate that the types and timing of tariff payments affect participation choices over rationed and open access alternatives and the benefits derived from changes in the quality and quantity of the lottery rationed access opportunities

rational expectations in games a player i s actions in a game are determined by her beliefs about other players these depend on the game s real life context not only its formal description define a game situation as a game together with such beliefs call the beliefs and i s resulting expectation rational if there is common knowledge of rationality and a common prior in two person zero sum games i s only rational expectation is the game s value in an arbitrary game g we characterize i s rational expectations in terms of the correlated equilibria of the doubled game 2g in which each of i s strategies in g appears twice

developments in non expected utility theory the hunt for a descriptive theory of choice under risk this article reviews recent developments in the economic theory of individual decision making under risk since the 1950s it has been known that individual choices violate the standard model of expected utility in predictable ways considerable research effort has now been devoted to the project of developing a superior descriptive model following an overview of non expected utility theories which distinguishes between conventional and non conventional approaches the paper seeks to assess these alternative models in terms of empirical success using laboratory and field data and theoretical usefulness the closing sections reflect on some new directions emerging in this literature

allocation of goods by lottery i introduction many goods such as hunting permits oil drilling leases cellular telephone licenses and rights to fishing berths as well as some buds such as the military draft jury duty and who is to be thrown overboard on a sinking life raft are or have been allocated by lotteries in neo classical welfare economics the random distribution of property rights does not affect allocative efficiency as long as transferability is allowed and the transactions costs are non prohibitive lottery allocations however are generally not transferable thus lottery allocations are inefficient since the goods are not ultimately allocated to the users who value them the most a number of authors such as aubert 1959 fienberg 1971 eckhoff 1989 and elster 1989 36 122 have argued that lotteries are chosen as the allocative instrument because it represents a fair or just means of allocating the goods rawls 1971 374 and eckhoff 1989 have noted that where it is impractical to divide the goods equally among those who desire them a lottery serves to satisfy both the requirement that the process be fair and that the allocation problem be resolved relatively costlessly elster 1989 113 however notes that lotteries are not the only fair allocation mechanism for example he points out that in jewish ethics the problem of allocating an indivisible good such as life saving resources is resolved by denying it to everyone even economists would probably prefer a lottery to this resolution the fairness hypothesis has a rich history in the old testament lotteries are deemed a fair way of allocating goods such as the inheritance of land numbers 33 54 lotteries are also used to allocate bads in perhaps the most famous biblical example of use of lots jonah was chosen by lot to be sacrificed to appease god who had brought a storm that threatened to wreck the ship the story goes that the lot selected jonah because he was shirking his duties elsewhere and should not have even been on the vessel jonah 1 6 1 notice that fair here is taken to mean just given this theological foundation it is not surprising that the lottery has seen frequent use in legal history as well one of the most interesting cases occurred in swedish and finnish trials in the 17th and 18th centuries in cases where a man was murdered by a mob lotteries were used to allocate punishment since the law required an eye for an eye no more and no less eckhoff says that if it was impossible to ascertain which of them had dealt the mortal blow the courts determined that one of the responsible parties be sentenced to death and that the person be selected by lottery 1989 19 a similar use of lotteries occurs in military history to deal with cases of mass desertion in roman armies every tenth man was executed decimated and the remainder pardoned in more modern times the lottery has been used in u s law 2 first of course is the use of a lottery to decide who shall sit on a jury a connection between fairness and lotteries however has also appeared in the common law in an 1842 case u s v holmes which has been discussed by fienberg 1971 eckhoff 1989 and elster 1989 a ship sank in a heavy storm and the lone surviving life raft was in grave danger of sinking the crew threw overboard fourteen male passengers in an effort to save the rest when back in port after being rescued a crewman named holmes the only crew member who had not disappeared upon arrival to port was brought to trial for the deaths of the passengers the court ruled that the non essential members of the crew should have been thrown overboard before any passengers and if that was not sufficient then passengers should have been selected by lot which is the fairest mode elster 1989 65 the fact that a human life presumably a large cost was at stake ex post did not affect the decision 3 the environmental economics literature contains a number of references to the social preferences for and benefits of lottery allocations

valuing a fishing day an application of a systematic varying parameter model deciding how to allocate forage among animals is a fundamentally important process in range management the wisdom of these decisions can be enhanced by estimating the marginal value of forage needed by competing species we present a method for

risk preferences over simple and compound public lotteries abstract lottery choice experiments with monetary payoffs have a long tradition for eliciting risk preferences this note demonstrates how risk preferences over multi attribute public lotteries may be estimated consistent with experimental findings results from simple and compound lottery choice models indicate significant differences in the degree of risk aversion between male and female applicants

disruption versus tiebout improvement the costs and benefits of switching schools most students change schools at some point in their academic careers but some change very frequently and some schools experience a great deal of turnover while many argue that mobility harms students economists tend to emphasize tiebout type moves to procure better school quality sq this paper disentangles the disruption effects of moves from changes in sq importantly it identifies the negative externality movers impose on other students student turnover is shown to entail a substantial cost for movers and non movers alike this cost appears to be larger for lower income and minority students who typically attend much higher turnover schools

a theoretical foundation for count data models the paper develops a theoretical foundation for using count data models in travel cost analysis two micro models are developed a restricted choice model and a repeated discrete choice model we show that both models lead to identical welfare measures

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

neighborhood effects on crime for female and male youth evidence from a randomized housing voucher experiment the moving to opportunity mto demonstration assigned housing vouchers via random lottery to public housing residents in five cities we use the exogenous variation in residential locations generated by mto to estimate neighborhood effects on youth crime and delinquency the offer to relocate to lower poverty areas reduces arrests among female youth for violent and property crimes relative to a control group for males the offer to relocate reduces arrests for violent crime at least in the short run but increases problem behaviors and property crime arrests the gender difference in treatment effects seems to reflect differences in how male and female youths from disadvantaged backgrounds adapt and respond to similar new neighborhood environments

a revealed preference approach to the measurement of congestion in travel cost models abstract travel cost models are regularly used to determine the value of recreational sites or particular site characteristics yet congestion a key site attribute is often excluded from such analyses one reason for this omission is that congestion is determined in equilibrium by the process of individuals sorting across sites and thus presents significant endogeneity problems this paper illustrates this source of endogeneity describes how previous research has dealt with it using stated preference techniques and describes an instrumental variables approach to address it in a revealed preference context we demonstrate that failing to address the endogeneity of congestion leads one to dramatically understate its costs we apply our technique to the valuation of a large recreational fishing site in wisconsin lake winnebago which if eliminated would induce significant re sorting of anglers amongst remaining sites ignoring congestion leads to an understatement of the lake s value by more than 50

the amenity value of woodland in great britain a comparison of economic estimates forests produce benefits over and above the revenue yielded from timber and other wood based products most important among these may be the recreational benefits for visitors which have been examined in several studies total benefits for residents are perhaps more accurately captured in property values since ceteris paribus the price of a house reflects willingness to pay to live near an environmental amenity such as a forest to gain access to it and also the amenity non use value of the forest in so far as it creates a pleasant landscape however the total non priced value of forestry is not the sum of hpm and itcm benefit estimates recreational benefits will typically be less and will be subsumed in the hpm estimates since the hedonic price is partly induced by the value of recreational access

are there environmental limits to cost benefit analysis this paper considers the problem areas found in applying cost benefit analysis cba to projects involving environmental costs or benefits this is particularly relevant given recent moves by the uk government to include environmental valuations in cba exercises and in other related appraisal activities following the publication of the pearce report the paper argues that a major problem lies in placing monetary values on non market goods the paper also addresses the problems of i differences between citizen and consumer values ii complexity of ecosystems iii irreversibility and uniqueness and iv intergenerational equity and discounting the extent to which cba is an institution open to capture is also discussed

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

stability and success of regional fisheries management organizations according to international law straddling fish stocks should be managed cooperatively through regional fisheries management organizations rfmos this paper analyzes the stability and success of these organizations through a game in partition function form based on the classical gordon schaefer bioeconomic model results show that the larger the number of fishing states that compete for the fish stock the higher are the relative gains from full cooperation but the lower is the likelihood of large rfmos being stable it is also shown that new entrants increase the incentives of rfmo members to leave and decrease the incentives of non members to join it moreover the success of coalition formation is positively correlated with the degree of cost asymmetry among fishing states and negatively with the overall level of efficiency

rationed access and welfare case of public resource lotteries pressures on public lands and waterways are resulting increasingly in the rationing of public access by lottery upon accounting for the uncertainties of random rationing discrete choice models lend themselves to analyzing participation in public resource lotteries and estimating welfare changes key to valuing lotteryrationed rights is accounting for changes in access probabilities that result from policy changes the empirical application models the discrete choices of more than 18 000 participants in a new mexico lottery system for elk harvest rights welfare estimates are obtained from simulated policy changes that affect individually and jointly the access probability and indirect utility