does the public sector over provide club goods a general result abstract with nondistortionary user charges the first best and second best of a single club exogenous income economy with identical individuals coincide they differ if incomes differ overprovision of a superior club good then occurs in the second best

the determinants of homeownership affordability among the sandwich class empirical findings from guangzhou china the sandwich class is an east asian term referring to the lower middle class using a large and unique micro dataset collected in guangzhou this paper examines empirically the potential determin

pigou meets mirrlees on the irrelevance of tax distortions for the second best pigouvian tax this paper extends the mirrlees 1971 model of optimal income redistribution with optimal corrective taxes to internalize consumption externalities using general utility structures and exploring both linear and non linear taxes it is demonstrated that the optimal second best tax on an externality generating good should not be corrected for the marginal cost of public funds since it equals one in the optimal tax system in the optimum distortions of income taxes are equal to marginal redistributional gains if the government does not have access to a non distortionary marginal source of finance the marginal cost of public funds can be either larger or smaller than one depending on subjective preferences for income redistribution the optimal second best corrective tax is then either higher or lower than the pigouvian level the findings in this paper generalize and amend prior results based on representative agent models shedding new light on the weak double dividend hypothesis and on the welfare gains of recycling revenue from environmental taxes

distortionary taxes and the provision of public goods economists have long been concerned with finding an efficient level of public expenditure the classic statement of the problem was given by paul samuelson 1954 an optimal level of expenditure is where the sum of the marginal rates of substitution between the public good and a reference good equals the marginal rate of transformation between the public good and the reference good mrs mrt however samuelson s formula assumes that all of the revenue needed to finance public goods can be raised with lump sum taxes since this is not generally possible the formula must be modified to account for the distortionary effects of the tax system an appropriate modification is to multiply the cost side of the equation by a term that is commonly called the marginal cost of public funds mcf in the case of samuelson s formula where government is entirely financed with lump sum taxes the mcf would be exactly 1 0 in the traditional view of economists distortionary taxes cause the mcf to be greater than one thus raising the cost of providing public goods in this paper we discuss some cases where the mcf may be less than one we will illustrate this possibility using numerical examples for labor taxes

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

let s not throw the baby out with the bath water the role of urban villages in housing rural migrants in china in the era of china s economic growth and urbanisation providing adequate and affordable housing for rural urban migrants in urban areas is crucial for the success of china s multifaceted reforms

altruism and the demand for environmental quality this paper asks whether individuals consider the value that future generations will receive from environmental quality when deciding what level of environmental protection to provide using data on life expectancy i develop two tests for altruism towards future generations one a test for strong altruism asks whether individual motives are purely altruistic when deciding to provide environmental quality the second a test for weak altruism combines an individual s concern for both self interest and the interest of future generations using data from a washington post survey on environmental attitudes to implement the test i find evidence of weak altruism

property rights redistribution entitlement failure and the impoverishment of landless farmers in china within the process of urban expansion through land requisition in china farmers de facto rights to collective land including farmland and housing plots zhaijidi are forcibly acquired by the state and thereafter redistributed to private developers to facilitate urban based economic growth deprived of a secure livelihood some landless farmers become trapped in poverty others find that the property rights restructuring in urbanised villages gives them an opportunity to earn rental income however the opportunities are not equally distributed and the processes are in general stacked against the interests of villagers this paper analyses the impoverishment of farmers caught up in china s relentless urban expansion programme using the perspectives of property rights and entitlements it presents case studies of two villages in xi an to illustrate how farmers entitlement sets and vulnerability to poverty have changed as a result of changes in land rights

nature of transfers income tax function and empirical estimation of elasticity of taxable income for brazil abstractthis article aims to estimate the elasticity of taxable income eti taking into account the nature of transfers and their use as a redistribution package involving cash and in kind transfers to households in brazil our contributions are twofold first we provide a simple model with balanced budget government that reveals the role played by cash and in kind transfers on the labour supply and income tax revenues thereof next in order to estimate eti in the presence of cash and in kind transfers brazilian population surveys pesquisa nacional por amostra de domicilios pnad are used to explore a limited tax reform that was implemented between 1997 and 1998 this reform only affected the higher income tax bracket our findings suggest that in kind cash transfers are positively negatively associated with reported taxable income and precise estimation of eti requires estimates of both types of transfers last we estimate the eti for brazil in the range from 0 4 to 1 3 not different fro

children s environmental health education and economic development this article aims at investigating the interplay between environmental quality health and economic development in a unified olg framework human capital accumulation depends on the environment through its impact on children s health and workers productivity in turn environmental quality dynamics rely upon human capital that determines maintenance efforts this two way relationship generates a co evolution of human capital and environmental quality in the long run along the transition path the dynamic interactions between economic and environmental spheres allow for replicating two different trajectories some economies experiment an environmental kuznets curve while some others are caught into the environmental poverty trap

locating chinese urban housing policy in an international context china s economic development has often been contrasted with that of other transition economies in europe but academics have fought shy of making direct comparisons of urban housing reform in the two systems this paper fills this gap by making such direct comparisons adopting the market housing model advocated by the world bank as an analytical framework it finds that extensive housing privatisation in china is supported by a system of urban housing property rights and a growing residential mortgage market although china has a distinctive institutional framework there is also much variety among the european transition countries and a distinctive chinese model was not identified so this micro level analysis did not support the contention that china represents a form of contested modernity nonetheless a crucial point arises from china s hybrid status as a developing as well as a transition country the bulk of the urban migrant population remains excluded from formal housing policy and enabling st

status effects public goods provision and excess burden abstract most studies of the optimal provision of public goods or the excess burden from taxation assume that individual utility is independent of other individuals consumption this paper investigates public good provision and excess burden in a model that allows for interdependence in consumption in the form of status relative consumption effects in the presence of such effects consumption and labor taxes no longer are pure distortionary taxes but have a corrective tax element that addresses an externality from consumption as a result the marginal excess burden of consumption taxes is lower than in the absence of status effects and will be negative if the consumption tax rate is below the pigouvian rate correspondingly when consumption or labor tax rates are below the pigouvian rate the second best level of public goods provision is above the first best level contrary to findings from models without status effects for plausible functional forms and parameters relating to status effects the marginal excess burden from existing u s labor taxes is substantially lower than in most prior studies and is negative in some cases

are cadre offspring in the fast lane evidence from the labour market for college graduates in china this paper studies the impact of having a cadre parent on the labour market performance and channels of the intergenerational transference using a recent data set we find that college graduates w

specification of the logit model the case of valuation of nonmarket goods abstract we address the proper specification of the logit model for estimation of nonmarket commodity demand economic theory is used to show the conditions which must be met by the logit functional form if it is to yield valid estimates of welfare change measures and demand relationships an empirical example is used to illustrate the argument recreational boating data were collected using the contingent valuation method cvm in texas in one instance the demand curve is positively sloped due to the specific functional form chosen the estimated demand curve for the theoretically preferred functional form has the expected negative slope

public goods self selection and optimal income taxation using the self selection approach to tax analysis this paper derives a modified samuelson rule for the provision of public goods when the government deploys an optimal nonlinear income tax this approach gives a straightforward interpretation of the central result in this area generalises it and provides a simple characterisation of optimal policy in a wide range of circumstances the analysis also emphasises and clarifies the significance of the choice of numeraire for the optimality of decentralising public spending decisions it is well known that the famous samuelson rule for the provision of public goods may not be applicable when the tax revenues used to finance the public goods come from distorting taxes the principle was recognized as long ago as pigou 1947 long before the samuelson rule was devised pigou saw that in addition to the resource cost involved in transferring funds from the private to the public sector there was a deadweight loss involved from this insight he suggested that the criterion for providing public goods should be more stringent than the samuelson rule would later suggest in particular one might expect that the inclusion of the deadweight loss of taxes as part of the cost of providing a public good would lead to a reduction in its optimal provision relative to a situation in which lump sum taxes were available the problem was investigated more systematically by atkinson and stern 1974 who considered the case in which a public good is financed by a set of optimal commodity taxes all individuals were assumed to be identical so efficiency alone dictated the objective they found that no prima facie case could be made for the pigou position that the use of distortionary taxes called for a reduction in the supply of the public good their analysis clearly showed that there were two influences at work when the financing of a public good was by distorting taxes on the one hand

a critical analysis of housing finance reform in a super home ownership state the case of armenia communist countries in central and eastern europe commonly lacked market based mortgage finance systems the establishment of such systems is generally regarded as being a crucial part of the transition process across the region even though the emphasis placed on home ownership varies greatly a framework for analysing the adequacy of the housing reform process is applied to armenia as an example of a super home ownership state the housing economic and political context suggests that even if an efficient mortgage finance system were to be established the housing needs of large sections of the population would remain unmet this is because they would still be unable to afford to access finance or because of the nature of their housing need such is the prevalence of housing need and poverty that conventional subsidy programmes no matter how well designed are unlikely to fill the gap instead there is a need to draw on examples from development literature such as micro finance whereby relatively

participation determinants in armenia s housing purchase certificate programme a housing purchase certificate hpc is a voucher for the purchase of a dwelling unit either for the full price up to a programme determined maximum or a grant for a partial payment i e a downpayment subsidy using a special sample survey of programme participants this paper examines why some participants have been successful and others not in using the certificates for the full price of a unit distributed under the hpc programme providing assistance to victims of armenia s 1988 earthquake findings indicate that participants with the following attributes are more likely to succeed in finding a unit and using the certificate living in more difficult housing conditions at the time they receive the certificate having more economic resources considering more units in their housing search relying on information about available dwellings from friends and family members rather than relying on information in the mass media and searching in markets where the supply of units on offer is relatively gre

a sectoral approach balancing global efficiency and equity this paper explores the idea that a properly designed sectoral approach could be the answer to two sets of constraints that hinder international agreements on climate change namely a genuine concern from developing countries for economic growth and competitiveness issues from industrialized countries our sectoral approach builds on three premises i cap and trade systems are established in industrialized countries and intensity targets in developing countries ii sectors subject to international trade abide by the rules of the countries in which they trade and iii a fraction of the revenues from permits in industrialized countries go towards carbon mitigation in developing countries we design an economic model that features interactions in three carbon intensive sectors two of which are internationally traded and two countries an industrialized country and a developing country two scenarios are constructed an enhanced sectoral approach which refers to our proposal and a global cap which implements a uniform co2 price we compare the two scenarios in terms of total welfare and equity it is shown that for a minor global welfare loss the enhanced sectoral approach ranks high in terms of equity for emerging countries this approach also eliminates competitiveness and leakage issues

redistribution and the marginal cost of public funds abstract discussions of the marginal cost of public funds with distortionary taxation are often cast in the framework of a one consumer economy while the main justification of distortionary taxes is that they are needed for redistribution this paper analyzes the issue in a model with heterogeneous consumers and a linear income tax focusing on the tradeoff between labour market distortions and the redistribution from high wage to low wage workers in an optimal tax system the mcf will be the same for all sources of funds and under certain assumptions less than one without optimality the mcf will in general differ between different sources of finance

property taxation congestion and local public goods abstract the residential property tax has been viewed as a congestion fee even if it distorts housing decisions this paper shows that the rule for a competitive jurisdiction s optimal public good supply may be written in a form in which no such role appears congestion costs enter the cost side of this rule in the same way that they enter when only a land tax is available the new rule is reconciled with an alternative rule in the literature which contains no congestion costs

intergenerational discounting a new intuitive approach abstract this paper proposes a new intergenerational discounting approach for computing net benefits from the use of environmental resources the approach explicitly incorporates the perspectives of both the current and future generations as argued for by pigou pigou a c 1920 the economics of welfare 1952 4th edition london macmillan and ramsey ramsey f p 1928 a mathematical theory of saving econ j 38 543 559 and required by most national and international laws related to the use of these resources an equation for use in the calculation of net discounted benefits is developed which provides a middle position whereby both the reality of personal discounting and that of social discounting are included in a social welfare function

a marginal cost of funds approach to multi period public project evaluation implications for the social discount rate abstract although the use of marginal cost of funds mcf has been widely appreciated in public finance literature discussions of mcf have been confined to a static setting this paper develops a multi period project evaluation rule that is based on mcf unlike previous approaches the parameters required for implementing the mcf rule are independent of projects under consideration a lesson from this paper is that the government discount rate policies that are largely based on the concepts of social discount rate and shadow price of capital should be rewritten with the use of parameters representing mcf

china s urban housing reform price rent ratio and market equilibrium china s urban housing marketisation hinges on a sensible ratio of housing price to rent this research derives a rational level for such a ratio and examines its distortions under the chinese system it shows that the prevailing housing price to rent ratios are significantly higher than the rational level for both subsidised and free market housing unique chinese housing market equilibria are analysed and policy recommendations on commercialising chinese urban housing are suggested

welfare and optimum dynamic taxation of consumption and income abstract this paper estimates that the us could attain large welfare gains by implementing an optimal ramsey tax policy that taxes consumption and income it is also found that the welfare implications associated with taxing consumption are quantitatively more important than those associated with dynamically taxing income indeed replacing income taxes with a constant consumption tax leads to a welfare gain that is only slightly lower than that attained by a dynamic policy that taxes consumption and income in computing these welfare gains careful attention is given to the dynamic path of tax rates and the transitional dynamics associated with how the economy responds to a new tax policy

optimal public good provision with limited lump sum taxation it is often argued that the use of distortionary taxation lowers the optimal provision of public goods below its optimal level in a first best economy which contains no restrictions on lump sum taxation however this issue is usually investigated using commodity tax models that contain no lump sum taxes this paper examines a many consumer economy in which the only tax instruments are commodity taxes and a poll tax subsidies are negative taxes the optimal level of public good provision in this economy typically exceeds the first best level at least for distributionally neutral public goods copyright 1991 by american economic association

when do distortionary taxes reduce the optimal supply of public goods abstract it is often argued that the optimal level of public good provision is below the first best level as long as the government s expenditures have to be financed by distortionary taxes i examine this hypothesis and show that it is correct in a representative consumer economy if i the public good is normal and ii private commodities are normal and gross substitutes otherwise counterexamples can be constructed these results hold also with heterogeneous households provided that equity considerations are ignored in general however distributional objectives may lead to a higher level of public expenditures in second best than in first best

why the far distant future should be discounted at its lowest possible rate abstract a critical feature of the distant future is currently unresolvable uncertainty about what will then be the appropriate rate of return on capital to use for discounting this paper shows that there is a well defined sense in which the lowest possible interest rate should be used for discounting the far distant future part of any investment project some implications are discussed for evaluating long term environmental projects or activities like measures to mitigate the possible effects of global climate change

willingness to pay for ancillary benefits of climate change mitigation assessing the willingness to pay wtp of the general public for climate change mitigation programmes enables governments to understand how much taxpayers are willing to support the implementation of such programs this paper contributes to the literature on the wtp for climate change mitigation programmes by investigating in addition to global benefits the ancillary benefits of climate change mitigation it does so by considering local and personal benefits arising from climate change policies the contingent valuation method is used to elicit the wtp for ancillary and global benefits of climate mitigation policies in the basque country spain results show that wtp estimates are 53 73 higher when ancillary benefits are considered

when is efficiency separable from distribution in the provision of club goods abstract using the homogeneous of degree zero inverse congestion quality function employed most frequently in the literature we characterise completely the families of utility functions which are then necessary and sufficient for break even utilitarian welfare maximising provision of club goods with self selection to be separable from distribution two types of separation involving alternatively a the price and quality b the price quality facility size and total utilisation are considered when separation is possible utility functions and optimal decisions take simple intuitive forms our results extend the scope of separation results previously obtained only for pure public goods journal of economic literature classification numbers d62 h23 h40

discounting according to output type federal discount rate policies advocate both a high rate representing the marginal productivity of capital and a low rate representing the government borrowing rate these differential discount rate policies could be inconsistent and biased in favor of projects on which the lower discount rate is applied this paper shows that the coexistence of different discount rates may be appropriate depending on the type of project output when a project s outputs are perfect substitutes for private consumption both its costs and benefits should be discounted using the marginal productivity of capital however if the project s outputs are separable in the utility function the benefits should be discounted using the net of tax rate of return

a transitional institution for the emerging land market in urban china chinese economic reforms since 1978 have been a continuous process of fundamental institutional change the new institution of ambiguous property rights over state owned urban land evolves from the

fat tails and truncated bids in contingent valuation an application to an endangered shorebird species a yes response function in a contingent valuation study is said to have fat tails if it has a high and slowly declining yes response rate at high bid levels truncated bids refer to the practice of dropping high bid offers before a yes response rate of near zero is reached this is a common practice in contingent valuation we explore the extent and implications of fat tails and truncated bids in a study of an endangered shorebird species we find among other things that mean willingness to pay is quite sensitive to the highest bid offered so much so that the choice of highest bid nearly dictates outcomes

is public spending good for you the whole world is marching towards the right with the transformation of the soviet union and eastern europe the drastic economic reforms in china and the privatisation liberalisation and reversing the historical increasing trend reduction in public spending in many western countries 1 much about these changes is applaudable and economists may feel proud for partially contributing to them however this paper argues that the reduction in public spending especially in education research and environmental protection is counter productive this may not be so viewed in the narrow perspective of production and consumption especially in the short run but is almost certainly so viewed in the wider perspective of welfare or happiness in the long run it is well known that public spending has some efficiency problems but the probably much worse inefficiency of private consumption has been largely ignored this paper attempts to provide a broader and more balanced picture from an interdisciplinary perspective

how beliefs influence the willingness to contribute to prevention expenditure we study how beliefs affect individuals willingness to contribute to prevention expenditure through a two type n person public good game and test several results empirically we show analytically that pessimistic agents will invest more in prevention expenditure than optimists we also demonstrate how small differences in beliefs may induce substantial differences in type related prevention expenditure the more atomistic agents are the less they will contribute to the public good pessimistic beliefs then lead to a double deprivation and we discuss potential issues and remedies the more optimistic a society is the lower will be its total green expenditure we then use a large international survey to study how beliefs and additional controls determine prevention expenditure we rely on several proxies for beliefs and the willingness to contribute to prevention expenditure which we combine through principal component analysis in addition we investigate the role of environmental education for the relationship between beliefs and the willingness to contribute because of potential endogeneity bias due to unobserved variables that are likely to affect both beliefs and the willingness to contribute we follow the theoretical analysis and resort to a recursive bivariate model our main findings are very much in line with the theoretical predictions we find across all specifications that more optimistic beliefs lead to a lower willingness to contribute environmental education affects the willingness to contribute only indirectly through its impact on beliefs

social accounting and the public sector this article contributes to the theory of social accounting as such it tries to extend earlier literature on the welfare equivalence of the comprehensive net national product in two main directions both of which refer to the public sector one is by considering welfare measurement problems associated with public good provision and redistributive policy respectively when the public revenues are raised by distortionary taxes the other is by addressing the consequences of a federation like decision structure where independent tax and expenditure decisions are made both by the central government and by lower level governments

imperfect competition the marginal cost of public funds and public goods supply abstract this paper analyses the impact of changes in product market competition on the marginal cost of public funds mcpf and public goods supply when distortionary commodity taxes are used to raise revenue first less competition measured by a switch from bertrand to cournot conduct or a decrease in the elasticity of demand does not necessarily raise the mpcf second even if it does optimal public good supply does not necessarily fall the paper also presents a method for modelling bertrand and cournot competition in general equilibrium that may be of independent interest

optimal environmental taxation in the presence of other taxes general equilibrium analyses this paper examines the optimal setting of environmental taxes in economies where other distortionary taxes are present we employ analytical and numerical models to explore the degree to which in a second best economy optimal environmental tax rates differ from the rates implied by the pigovian principle according to which the optimal tax rate equals the marginal environmental damages both models indicate contrary to what several analysts have suggested that the optimal tax rate on emissions of a given pollutant is generally less than the rate supported by the pigovian principle moreover the optimal rate is lower the larger are the distortions posed by ordinary taxes numerical results indicate that previous studies may have seriously overstated the size of the optimal carbon tax by disregarding pre existing taxes this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

a generalized approach to multigeneration project evaluation 1 introductionit is well known that the choice of discount rate plays a significant role in the ranking of projects with varying time paths of costs and benefits for public projects the choice of the appropriate social discount rate sdr is not clear cut even in the context of short lived projects in which costs and benefits occur within a single generation in particular when capital taxes produce a wedge between gross and net rates of return should one discount at the economy s rate of return the before tax rate or the individual s rate of return the after tax rate in the single generation context the literature falls in two camps 1 one camp argues that the appropriate sdr is a weighted average of the gross and net rates of return with weights typically determined by the fractions of resources drawn from consumption and private investment respectively 2 a second camp argues that future benefits should be discounted at the net rate of return but that the initial investment should be multiplied by a scale factor so that the direct costs of the project can be expressed in terms of consumption units 3both approaches suffer from severe implementation problems for the first approach there is no general formula for the weights needed to calculate the sdr as a weighted average of two market rates of return dreze 1974 indeed the appropriate sdr to use is project specific stiglitz 1982 without a systematic methodology to derive project specific sdrs the weighted average approach is hard to implement for the second approach which equalizes the sdr to the net rate of return the scale factor the opportunity cost of public investment must be quantified the opportunity cost of public investment depends on whether resources come from private investment or consumption and on the calculation of the present value of the future consumption yielded by a unit of capital discounted at the net rate of return that is the shadow price of capital as lind 1997 points out however there is no general agreement on a specific procedure for calculating the shadow price of capital indeed the concept of the opportunity cost of public investment suffers the same project dependence problem as the first view of the sdr diamond 1968 multigeneration projects such as nuclear waste disposal natural resource conservation or even social security reform further complicate discount rate choice specifically intergenerational equity in addition to intertemporal efficiency plays a role in determining the appropriate social discount rate for multigeneration public project evaluation 4 as in the single generation context there are two competing views on the appropriate discount rate when evaluating multigeneration projects the descriptive and the prescriptive approaches 5the descriptive approach to discounting is a market based approach it does not rely on an explicit social welfare function swf or the pure time preference rate embedded in the swf however the descriptive approach works under the assumption that intergenerational compensation through changes in the tax debt policy is available 6 it is argued that under appropriate intergenerational compensation the market rates of return are still relevant for calculating the sdr for multigeneration project evaluation and in general the sdr should be a weighted average of the gross and net rates of return this descriptive view of setting the sdr equal to the market return appears to underlie the office of management and budget s omb adoption of 7 as the appropriate discount rate for federal programs 7the intent of the prescriptive approach is to use the social discount rate as an expression of ethical judgment on how consumption of future generations should be compared to consumption of current generations

a pigovian rule for the optimum provision of public goods abstract the integrated treatment of optimal taxation and public expenditure presented here is based on the dual relationship between the prices of private goods and the quantities of public goods the conditions for optimum public good provision can be expressed as a modification of the samuelson conditions with extra terms representing a the distortionary effect of taxes on the willingness to pay for the public good and b distributional effects the former captures pigou s notion of the indirect damage caused by the need to finance public expenditure out of distortionary taxes and we call this the pigou term in certain cases a very simple benefit cost ratio for public projects emerges that is equivalent to measuring benefits as if they were taxed

cross border pollution terms of trade and welfare we construct a two good general equilibrium model of international trade for two small open economies where pollution from production is transmitted across borders governments in both countries impose emission taxes non cooperatively within this framework we examine the effect of changes in the degree of cross border pollution on nash emission taxes emission levels and welfare we do so under two scenarios when changes in cross border pollution do not affect domestic pollution non strategic and when they do strategic we also examine the effect of changes in international terms of trade on pollution and welfare when cross border pollution is non strategic

democratic public good provision this paper analyzes an overlapping generation model of redistribution and public good provision under repeated voting expenditures are financed through age dependent taxation that distorts human capital investment taxes redistribute income both across skill groups and across generations we focus on politico economic markov equilibria and contrast these with the ramsey allocation under commitment the model features indeterminate equilibria with a key role of forward looking strategic voting due to the lack of commitment to future policies the tax burden may be on the wrong side of the dynamic laffer curve moreover restrictions on government policies can in some cases be welfare improving

efficient estimation methods for closed ended contingent valuation surveys closed ended contingent valuation surveys can be very useful in the evaluation of nonmarket resources respondents merely state whether they would accept or reject a hypothetical threshold amount either as payment for giving up access to the resource or as a fee for its use the authors develop a maximum likelihood procedure which exploits the variation in the threshold values to allow direct and separate point estimates of regression like slope coefficients and error standard deviations without truncation bias their illustration uses data from a survey of recreational fisherman to examine factors which influence individuals willingness to pay copyright 1987 by mit press

life expectancy and the environment we present an olg model in which life expectancy and environmental quality dynamics are jointly determined agents may invest in environmental care depending on how much they expect to live in turn environmental conditions affect life expectancy as a result our model produces a positive correlation between longevity and environmental quality both in the long run and along the transition path eventually multiple equilibria may also arise some countries might be caught in a low life expectancy low environmental quality trap this outcome is consistent with stylized facts relating life expectancy and environmental performance measures we also discuss the welfare and policy implications of the inter generational externalities generated by individual choices finally we show that our results are robust to the introduction of growth dynamics based on physical or human capital accumulation c 2009 elsevier b v all rights reserved

optimal public good provision in the ramsey tax model a generalization abstract for the single consumer ramsey tax model the use of distortionary taxation to finance public good provision is shown to lower the optimal level of public good provision below its optimal value ina first best economy where lump sum taxation is available the assumptions used in the proof include a previous cobb douglas example as a special case

climate change population ageing and public spending evidence on individual preferences abstract economic theory as well as empirical research suggest that elderly people prefer public spending on policies yielding short term benefits this might be bad news for policies aimed at combating climate change while the unavoidable costs of these policies arise today the expected benefits occur in the distant future drawing on data from over 12 000 households and using the ordered logit and the generalized ordered logit model we analyze whether attitudes towards climate change and climate policies as well as public spending preferences differ with respect to age our estimates show that elderly people are less concerned about climate change but more concerned about other global challenges furthermore they are less likely to support climate friendly policies such as the subsidization of renewables allocate less public resources to and have lower willingness to pay for environmental policies thus our results suggest that the ongoing demographic change in industrialized countries may undermine climate policies

self interest altruism and health risk reduction an economic analysis of voting behavior while classical economic theory suggests that the demand for private goods is motivated by economic self interest a growing body of literature suggests that the demand for public goods is driven both by self interest and by altruistic motives the political arena has been a major testing ground for this hypothesis recently a number of studies have tried to empirically isolate and determine the importance of economic versus ideological factors in explaining political choices by representatives kau and rubin 1979 peltzman 1984 kalt and zupan 1984 while congressional voting records have provided a rich source of data for empirical analysis a consensus opinion on the importance of self interest versus altruism has not been reached and remains controversial altruistic motivations have also been

exclusion and moral hazard a further analysis abstract this paper examines the impact of increasing exclusion costs on the price of a shared good and establishes a simple elasticity condition which determines whether or not the price increases with the exclusion costs we correct an error in the reasoning in silva and kahn s journal of public economics 1993 52 217 235 paper on exclusion and moral hazard and construct a class of examples to show that contrary to their claim costly exclusion of non subscribers from the consumption of a non rivalrous good can result in a lower price as compared with the first best with costless exclusion

an empirical study of the determinants of green party voting i empirically study the determinants of individuals green voting behavior for this i make use of three datasets from germany a panel dataset and two cross sectional datasets the empirically strongest determinants are the voters attitude or distance to nuclear sites the level of schooling and net income i show that those voters with deviant attitudes or alternative world views are more likely to vote green a result of the fact that the green party has always had the position of a protest party i find little role for demographic variables like gender marital status or the number of children this is in contrast to the stated preference literature age plays a role for explaining voting behavior only insofar as it proxies for health

building talented worker housing in shenzhen china to sustain place competitiveness in china economic reforms over the last three decades have transformed its urban governments so that economic growth takes priority over other policy goals the purpose of this paper is to explore how talented worker housing policies have emerged within one of china s first class cities namely shenzhen to address its affordability problems but also to enhance local economic competitiveness whilst shenzhen is heading in the direction of an international entrepreneurial city focusing in particular on high value added industry it needs to attract and retain professional skilled workers to sustain this growth trajectory drawing on the concept of urban entrepreneurialism the paper examines how talented worker housing policies and procedures have been initiated and implemented in shenzhen in relation to its economic development strategy and affordable housing programme the paper suggests that not only is policy delivery proving problematic but affordability problems remain insurmountable thus potentially limiting the effectiveness of this particular urban entrepreneurial strategy in supporting place competitiveness

the economics of the private finance initiative this article outlines and assesses the private finance initiative in the uk the initiative has been slow to develop despite pressure from governments anxious to limit the psbr and several revamps to facilitate the pfi approach within a pfi project there are beneficial incentives to avoid cost over runs but not to reduce costs where they affect long run services these incentives and the limits to their effectiveness are explored such contracts require the transfer of risk from the public does not value risk correctly and that the value for money test is biased against private sector provision policy implications are discussed including a revamp of the value for money test and the introduction of explicit assessment of the impact of potential renegotiation and other contractual difficulties copyright 1997 by oxford university press

the evolution of the housing market and its socioeconomic impacts in the post reform people s republic of china a survey of the literature the development of the housing market in the people s republic of china is not only a major component of chinese economic growth but also has wide ranging influential impacts on chinese society a burgeoning number of papers have examined the housing market in the postreform people s republic of china from various perspectives this paper aims to provide a thorough survey of the key literature in the field and then supply a complete picture of the dynamics of the housing market in the people s republic of china to assess the functional efficiency of this nascent market we pay particular attention to the literature that is related to the academic debate over the chinese housing bubble issue the structure and operation of the housing market is another major concern in this paper finally we summarize the key insights of the literature that we surveyed note research gaps in the literature and discuss further research directions in this field

consumption vs wage taxation and the capital levy abstract based on a representative consumer framework it has been argued that wage taxation is inferior to consumption taxation this note shows that the opposite result may emerge in a model where households are heterogeneous and where a uniform poll tax or subsidy is available