nash cournot or lindahl behavior an empirical test for the nato allies this paper derives systems of demand equations for distinguishing between nash cournot and lindahl behavior in a group that either shares a pure public good or an activity that provides a private and a pure public joint product systems of simultaneous equations are estimated based upon nash cournot and lindahl behavior for a sample of ten nato allies for the 1956 1987 period nonnested hypothesis tests support the nash cournot specification for five of the ten sample allies no evidence of lindahl behavior is found the nash cournot joint product specification outperforms the pure public model for all sample allies

exchange rate pass through in two period duopoly abstract this paper analyzes the issue of exchange rate pass through in a two period model of duopolistic competition with differentiated products and constant marginal costs conditions on import demand elasticities for normal and perverse pass through respectively are derived for the case of perfect and imperfect capital mobility in an example with linear demand it is additionally shown that temporary exchange rate fluctuations cause current as well as future price changes which do not necessarily point in the same direction this model reproduces features of the macroeconomic j curve at a microeconomic level

are church and state substitutes evidence from the 1996 welfare reform abstract churches provide community services similar to those provided by the government but there has been no convincing analysis of the extent to which church activity can substitute for government activity to address this important issue this paper uses a new panel data set of presbyterian church usa congregations to regress both church member donations and a church s community spending on a number of variables including government welfare expenditures a provision of the 1996 welfare law that decreased the availability and use of welfare services by non citizens serves as an instrument to identify the causal effect of government spending on church activity the results show that church activities substitute for government activities extrapolating the findings to all denominations the estimated crowd out effect lies between 20 and 38 cents on the dollar the results are subjected to a number of robustness tests

the supply of charity services by nonprofit hospitals motives and market structure this article studies provision of charity care by private nonprofit hospitals we demonstrate that in the absence of large positive income effects on charity care supply convex preferences for the nonprofit hospital imply crowding out by other private or government hospitals extending our model to include impure altruism rivalry provides a possible explanation for the previously reported empirical result that both crowding out and income effects on indigent care supply are often weak or insignificant empirical analysis of data for hospitals in maryland provides evidence of rivalry on the supply of charity care

demand for charity donations in private non profit markets the case of the u k abstract this paper presents estimates of the demand for donations for u k charities in 1985 these estimates make demand depend upon price fund raising expenditure a quality index and alternative revenue sources the price elasticity of donations found here shows for the most part an elastic response and is consistent with previous studies using u s data our empirical results suggest that non profits in the u k unlike their counterparts in the u s are net revenue maximisers we discovered no significant evidence that public donations crowded out private donations in our sample of 300 charities

school board politics school district size and the bargaining power of teachers unions this paper presents a public choice theory of the bargaining power of teachers unions the theory predicts that the power of the unions rises with the size of a district the theory is tested by examining the relationship between district size and various bargaining outcomes for a sample of 771 california school districts in 1999 2000 as hypothesized teachers salaries rise and the ratio of teachers per pupil falls with increasing district size the paper also considers several alternative explanations for these results

choosing size of government under ambiguity infrastructure spending and income taxation i examine choice of size of government by a planner who has partial knowledge of population preferences and the productivity of public spending focusing on income tax financed spending for infrastructure i examine scenarios where the planner observes the outcome of a status quo policy and uses various decision criteria to choose policy the analysis shows that the planner can reasonably choose a wide range of spending levels thus a society can rationalise having a small or large government i conclude that to achieve credible conclusions about the desirable size of government we need to improve current knowledge of preferences and the productivity of spending vastly

the many faces of tiebout bias in local education demand parameter estimates abstract tiebout sorting can occasion bias in public service demand parameter estimates in at least three distinct ways this paper identifies each of these types of tiebout bias and provides estimates of each of their magnitudes first the empirical results suggest that the type of tiebout bias first identified by goldstein and pauly is positive and large but that their proposed method of correcting for that bias substantially overestimates its magnitude second failing to control for unobservable taste variations that are negatively correlated with the difference between an individual household s income and the income of the decisive voter is found to impart a significant negative bias into the income parameter estimate we find that conventional demographic descriptors do not adequately control for such taste variations and consequently fail to protect the income parameter estimates from this type of tiebout bias finally the significant negative relationship between individual household school expenditure demands and deviations of individual household income from the income of the decisive voter suggest that tiebout sorting is a significant phenomenon

the theory of public goods non nash behaviour abstract most treatments of equilibrium public goods provision assume zero conjectural variations in the sense that each individual regards the behaviour of the rest of the community as independent of his own this paper introduces nonzero conjectural variations into the model a diagram is introduced which can depict both the individual s and the community s equilibrium in the presence of nonzero conjectural variations equilibrium and optimal outcomes are compared and a specific functional form is used to investigate the effect of community size on the nature of equilibrium finally we discuss the requirement that conjectures should be consistent

search profiling with partial knowledge of deterrence consider the choice of a profiling policy where decisions to search for evidence of crime may vary with observable covariates of the persons at risk of search i pose a planning problem whose objective is to minimise the social cost of crime and search the consequences of a search rule depend on the extent to which search deters crime i study the planning problem when the planner has partial knowledge of deterrence i show how the planner can eliminate dominated search rules and how he can use the minimax or minimax regret criterion to choose an undominated rule

why do people give testing pure and impure altruism abstract researchers measure crowd out around one level of charity output to identify whether giving is motivated by altruism and or warm glow however crowd out depends on output implying first that the power to reject pure altruism varies and second that a single measurement of incomplete crowd out can be rationalized by many different preferences by instead measuring crowd out at different output levels we allow both for identification and for a novel and direct test of impure altruism using a new experimental design we present the first empirical evidence that consistent with impure altruism crowd out decreases with output jel d64 l31

production economics and optimal stock size in a north atlantic fishery this paper contains an analysis of a fishery production function and an empirical analysis of the north sea herring fishery an intertemporal profit function is defined by introducing stock dynamics and the concept of a sole resource manager some new results with respect to the relationship between the optimal stock level and production technology are derived estimates of the optimal stock level for herring are also presented

school finance reform and voluntary fiscal federalism california has transferred the financing of its public schools from localities to the state in response many families have supplemented the tax revenue of their local public schools with voluntary contributions this paper analyzes that phenomenon we propose a model of partial cooperation among parents in making voluntary contributions to their public schools under reasonable conditions the model predicts that contributions per pupil should decline with school size we estimate this relationship using data on contributions to california schools our estimates reveal that contributions per pupil do decline with size however the rate of decline is surprisingly slow 2002 elsevier b v all rights reserved

negative externalities and welfare improving preference changes when the over consumption of open access resources and congestible public goods generate negative externalities and social welfare losses many individuals and environmental advocacy organizations offer as an alternative nongovernmental solution the adoption of new ecology sustaining preferences this paper shows that exogenously inducing a change in preferences and the adoption of new externality internalizing preferences which increase an individual s marginal rate of substitution between a private good and a good whose consumption imposes external costs on others not only reduces the aggregate output of the negative externality but also produces an economic state that is socially superior to the initial state because it is based on both the initial and new preferences the social superiority welfare criterion makes possible meaningful welfare comparisons of economic states generated by preference changes a computational general equilibrium model is then used to simulate preference changes and to calculate the resulting allocative and welfare effects the computer simulations reveal that important factors in the attainment of a socially superior state include i the particular characteristics of an individual s negative externality reaction function ii the magnitude of the preference change and iii the number of individuals changing preferences

the effects of group size and income on contributions to the corporation for public broadcasting this paper examines the extent to which individual contributions to public television are explained by the size of the audience which receives the individual station s television signal it also incorporates the effects of income on contributions to public television in order to assess the combined effects of income and group size on contributions to public goods

does the government crowd out private donations new evidence from a sample of non profit firms abstract during the 1980s government grants to non profit organizations declined dramatically and the price of private donations increased given there are different costs associated with government grants and private donations to non profits it is important to study the relationship between these two sources and determine whether government grants crowd out private donations i take a fresh look at the issue of crowd out and improve upon the literature by exploiting a panel data set that links private donations to non profit firms with the government grants they received i study 430 non profit shelter human services and other similar types of organizations that were in operation between 1982 and 1992 i find private donations to these non profits effectively do not change with changes in government grants after controlling for firm heterogeneity and political and economic factors under an ols specification in a 2sls specification after controlling for possible endogeneity of the government grants the estimated crowd out is significantly different from zero and one dollar on average the estimated crowd out is 50 cents

the chicago fire of 1871 a bottom up approach to disaster relief can bottom up relief efforts lead to recovery after disasters conventional wisdom and contemporary public policy suggest that major crises require centralized authority to provide disaster relief goods using a novel set of comprehensive donation and expenditure data collected from archival records this paper examines a bottom up relief effort following one of the most devastating natural disasters of the nineteenth century the chicago fire of 1871 findings show that while there was no central government relief agency present individuals businesses corporate entities and municipal governments were able to finance the relief effort though donations the chicago relief and aid society a voluntary association of agents with a stake in relief outcomes leveraged organizational assets and constitutional rules to administer aid

consistent conjectures and voluntary contributions to public goods why the conventional theory does not work abstract the conventional theory of voluntary contributions to public goods assumes that each person maximises his utility taking other people s behaviour as given nash conjectures it is now coming to be recognised that this theory is inconsistent with observed behaviour this paper argues that the problems of the theory are compounded and not as some economists have argued resolved by relaxing the assumption of nash conjectures if individuals conjectures are consistent each person will hold the correct belief that other people s contributions are inversely related to his own under most reasonable assumptions equilibrium is a state in which no one contributes anything

the 2009 lawrence r klein lecture diversified treatment under ambiguity this article develops a broad theme about treatment under ambiguity through study of a particular decision criterion the broad theme is that a planner may want to cope with ambiguity by diversification assigning observationally identical persons to different treatments study of the minimax regret mr criterion substantiates the theme the article significantly extends my earlier analysis of one period planning with an individualistic treatment and a linear welfare function i show that mr treatment allocations are fractional in a large class of planning problems with nonlinear welfare functions interacting treatments learning and noncooperative aspects

welfare implications of learning through solicitation versus diversification in health care using roy s model of sorting behavior i study welfare implications of learning about medical care quality through the current health care data production infrastructure that relies on solicitation of research subjects due to severe adverse selection issues i show that such learning could be biased and welfare decreasing direct diversification of treatment receipt may solve these issues but is infeasible unifying manski s work on diversified treatment choice under ambiguity and heckman s work on estimating heterogeneous treatment effects i propose a new infrastructure based on temporary diversification of access that resolves the prior issues and can identify nuanced effect heterogeneity

fishing as a supergame abstract this paper considers how cooperative solutions to games of sharing fish resources can be supported by threat strategies with highly mobile fish stocks the number of agents compatible with a cooperative self enforcing solution is not very high for reasonable values of the discount rate but sensitive to changes in the discount rate and costs and to cost heterogeneity with migrating stocks where growth and reproduction depend on how much all agents leave behind after harvesting the likelihood of a cooperative self enforcing equilibrium is increased with a dominant player and a competitive fringe the rents and optimum stock level of the dominant player fall quickly as the share of the competitive fringe increases

individual rationality and the zonal attachment principle three stock migration models shared fish stocks migrate across borders between different countries exclusive economic zones this paper discusses the individual rationality of fish sharing agreements based on the zonal attachment of such stocks three types of migrations are considered i a common stock that grows and reproduces and is then distributed in given proportions between two countries zones at the beginning of each fishing season ii sub stocks that breed and grow independently in their separate zones but spill over between zones according to relative abundance iii a stock that grows and breeds in one country s zone but migrates into the zone of another if it exceeds a certain size it is shown that in all these cases the minor partner in a fish sharing agreement may not have an incentive to cooperate unless he gets a larger share of the cooperative profits than that corresponds to his share of the stock this is particularly likely to happen when the unit cost of fish does not depend on the stock an exception could occur if stock migration depends on the stock level the major partner could then keep the entire stock by fishing it down to a critical level

altruistic voting and campaign contributions abstract an altruistic citizen votes yes in a referendum if the perceived benifit of the project exceeds its perceived cost the altruist gets information about benifits and costs from contributions to the pro and con campaigns in the nash equilibrium of a campaign contribution game with two beneficiaries altruists vote on the side with the largest contribution and altruistic voting guarantees efficient choices if there are many agents however altruistic voters do not always make efficient choices a disclosure law that provides information about the number of beneficiaries increases the efficiency of the referendum process

an accurate measurement of the crowd out effect income effect and price effect for charitable contributions in the past empirical research on charitable contributions has focused on two issues estimating the income and price elasticities of contributions and estimating the extent to which government funding crowded out private contributions the two fundamental problems in all these studies are the differences in the underlying conceptual models and the use of imperfect data for empirical analysis this paper addresses both of these problems

media coverage and charitable giving after the 2004 tsunami author affiliation philip h brown department of economics colby college 5246 mayflower hill waterville me 04901 usa e mail phbrown colby edu corresponding author jessica h minty analysis group inc 111 huntington avenue 10th floor boston ma 02199 usa e mail jminty analysisgroup com acknowledgment we are grateful to claudio agostini michael donihue martin farnham rebecca graninger daniel hamermesh melanie siben tom tietenberg andreas waldkirch seminar participants at colby college and two anonymous referees for numerous helpful comments and suggestions we would also like to acknowledge reuters alertnet and chuck lakin for their assistance in identifying data sources and care usa catholic relief services mercy corps surfaid international and four other relief agencies for providing data for the purpose of this research finally philip h brown would like to thank the international food policy research institute for sabbatical support during the preparation of this manuscript 1 introductionrelief workers have long believed in the causal relationship between media coverage of humanitarian crises and charitable giving to relief agencies for example private donations to relief agencies during the early stages of the 1994 rwandan genocide were sufficient to support approximately one million displaced rwandans but after the tribulations of o j simpson and tanya harding eclipsed rwanda in the media funding for relief activities began to decline the perception among many aid workers in the camps for rwandan refugees including one of the authors was that the media had turned its back on the crisis with potentially dire consequences 1while anecdotal evidence abounds few studies have systematically assessed the relationship between media coverage and the behavior of private donors and those that do suffer from important analytical shortcomings for example an analysis undertaken by the institute for philanthropy finds that 14 of 15 surveyed british philanthropists believe that the media has the power to encourage private giving with 11 of the 15 being inspired to make charitable donations themselves breeze 2005 similarly olsen carstenson and hoyen 2003 find a high correlation between the total number of relevant articles in western newspapers and the total amount of humanitarian assistance allocated to victims of the flooding in mozambique in 2000 and the cyclone in eastern india in 1999 unfortunately neither sample is large enough to make generalizations nor is there any attempt to quantify the magnitude of the causal relationship in part the difficulty in quantifying the relationship stems from disentangling the effect of new developments in stories covered in the media from the pure effect of media coverage returning to the rwanda case the former is tantamount to asking what is the combined effect of 10 000 additional deaths and a five minute news story on donations to u s charities while the latter is equivalent to asking given that 10 000 people were killed what is the effect of increasing the news story from five minutes to six in this paper we use the december 26 2004 tsunami as a case study to quantify the causal effect of media coverage on donations to charity specifically we consider the effects of reporting on three nightly network news broadcasts and articles in two prominent newspapers on private donations to seven u s relief agencies to eliminate the time lag between when news reports are seen or read and when donations are received by relief agencies we focus exclusively on donations made via the internet we also control for donor fatigue tax incentives and weekends to better isolate the effect of media coverage finally to alleviate simultaneity concerns and omitted variable bias including new developments in the tsunami story itself we use announcements of casualties among u

public sector performance measurement and stakeholder support abstract over the past several decades there has been dramatically increased attention paid to measuring the performance of public sector and nonprofit organizations in the united states and elsewhere recent research has indicated that public sector and nonprofit organizations are responsive to performance measurement in both productive and unproductive ways however it is not yet known how stakeholders respond to this measurement this paper makes use of a unique panel survey dataset of the population of elementary and middle schools in the state of florida to directly investigate this question we exploit the fact that florida changed its school grading system in 2002 and study the degree to which private contributions to schools are responsive to the information contained in school grades we find evidence that school grades can have substantial effects on a school s ability to obtain private contributions we also observe that schools serving different clienteles are treated differently in response to changes in school grades

government growth and private contributions to charity we exploit the time series properties of charitable giving to provide additional insights into the relationship between charitable contributions and government spending cointegration tests reveal a significant long run relationship between several categories of charitable giving and government spending granger causality tests provide evidence on the short run giving and spending relationship evidence suggests that charitable contributions to education respond quite differently to state and local government education expenditures versus federal government expenditures we argue that the government spending and charitable giving relationship depends on the source of government revenue how this revenue is used and the rational ignorance of private donors

voluntary donations and public expenditures in a federal system proponents of the new federalism argue that nonprofit organizations and local governments will fully offset federal social service expenditure cutbacks the author analyzes this proposition as a competitive game in which donations are motivated by private and public good considerations the author characterizes the response of political economic equilibrium to exogenous changes in federal expenditures when local voters are cognizant of donor reactions partial replacement is the most likely outcome though others are possible copyright 1987 by american economic association

the flypaper effect and other anomalies abstract i develop a model in which income both in its own right and as a proxy for other socioeconomic characteristics is an input in the production function for local public services the most obvious example is education though there are other applications as well the comparative statics results from this model yield the following results 1 the observed flypaper effect the tendency for local government to spend a higher fraction of unrestricted grants than income of residents may be due at least in part to the fact that own income but not grants is a substitute for purchased inputs in the technology hence the propensity to spend on purchased inputs out of own income is lower than out of grants 2 the income elasticity of demand for public sector output may be higher than the observed income elasticity of demand for purchased inputs 3 equalization of educational opportunity via wealth neutrality as suggested by feldstein requires major changes in education finance once we recognice the distinction between purchased inputs and output

the legacy of serrano the impact of mandated equal spending on private school enrollment 1 introduction the california supreme court decision in serrano v priest in 1971 was the first state supreme court ruling to declare a state s education finance system unconstitutional 1 the suit originally filed by a class of los angeles county public school children and their parents argued that the california public school finance system was unconstitutional because of its reliance on a local property tax system under this system large differences in property wealth created enormous variations in educational resources across the state in its subsequent 1976 serrano h decision the california supreme court found that the state legislature s response to the first serrano decision was insufficient the court ordered the state legislature to follow a trial court s requirement to implement a funding formula that reduces wealth related per pupil expenditure disparities i e property tax revenue exclusive of categorical aid and special needs to 100 across school districts the serrano ii decision resulted in a nearly complete shift of the fiscal responsibility for k 12 education in california from local to state government in the aftermath of the initial serrano decision suits were filed in several other states claiming unconstitutional inequities in the state education system many of these suits were successful between 1973 and 1983 six state supreme courts new jersey 1973 connecticut 1977 washington 1978 west virginia 1979 wyoming 1980 arkansas 1983 found their systems of educational finance unconstitutional similar rulings followed in 1989 in kentucky montana and texas in 1993 in massachusetts and tennessee in 1994 in arizona and in 1997 in new hampshire ohio and vermont a third of the states education finance systems now have been ruled unconstitutional as a result of these rulings and legislative based education reforms in a number of other states education expenditure inequality has been reduced 2 this in turn has left local districts with less latitude in determining spending levels parents in richer districts are expected to be especially frustrated with the limits on spending that accompany equalization changes in state educational finance systems to gain greater equity affected average spending on education in these states the initial research on this issue focused on the california experience where raw expenditure figures reveal the dramatic change in per pupil spending in california since the initial serrano decision in 1971 in academic year ay 1969 1970 per pupil spending in california s public elementary and secondary schools was slightly greater than the national average 106 25 of the national average ranking 14th among all states however by ay 1992 1993 education expenditures in california had fallen to 85 6 of the national average and its rank had dropped to 34th silva and sonstelie 1995 concluded that education spending in california in 1989 1990 was significantly lower than they would have otherwise predicted they attributed about half of the lowered spending to the legislation following serrano ii and the other half to the growth of the student population in california but the california experience of reduced expenditures appears to be atypical manwaring and sheffrin 1997 found spending to be higher in many states as a result of litigation or legislativebased educational finance reform downes and shah 1995 similarly estimated that school finance reform raised spending in some states and lowered spending in other states murray evans and schwab 1998 found state per pupil spending rose with successful state education finance litigation the variation across states in the spending effects of education finance reforms may be due to the source court ordered or legislative and or degree e g weak reform strong reform etc of the reforms in any case there should be greater interest in supplementing what the public schools do or opting out of the public system if reforms cause spending in a state to fall

competitive lending with partial knowledge of loan repayment some positive and normative analysis we study a credit market where lenders with partial knowledge of repayment use one of several criteria to make lending decisions supposing that a public authority wants to maximize the social return to borrowing we study interventions that manipulate the return on the safe asset or guarantee a minimum loan return manipulating the return on the safe asset is effective if lender beliefs about the return to lending are not too pessimistic relative to those of the authority guaranteeing a minimum return is effective if lender beliefs are not too optimistic relative to those of the authority

school finance spatial income segregation and the nature of communities in a general equilibrium model that links school and housing markets a purely public school system regardless of the degree of centralization results in substantially more spatial income segregation than a purely private system however the combination of a public system with a private school market yields the least residential segregation as housing price distortions from the capitalization of the public system generate incentives for middle and high income private school attendees to live with lower income public school attendees the impact of vouchers and the sensitivity of results to alternative school production models is also investigated

tiebout bias and the demand for local public schooling institute of university of ii business and california economic research berkeley center for real estate and urban economics working paper series working paper 86 109 tiebout bias and the demand for local public schooling by daniel l rubinfeld perry shipiro judith roberts these papers are preliminary in nature th urpose 39 to stimulate 39 ussion comment therefore they are not t cited or quoted 39 ny p ation wit express permissio the author graduate school of business administration

the effects of grants in aid on state and local expenditures abstract this paper develops econometric methods to estimate the effect of the piecewise linear budget constraints created by grant formulas in which the subsidy rate is not constant over expenditures e g closed end grants the methods are applied to the afdc program the results show that because of the kinked nature of the grant formula 1 the present federal formula actually increases cross state inequality in afdc benefits 2 several subsidy rates in the formula actually reduce benefits and 3 the so called flypaper effect disappears

a signaling explanation for charity this article examines a novel but plausible motive for charitable giving charitable donations which are observable can signal wealth or income the signaling equilibrium of charitable donations has attractive properties donations increase proportionally with population size governmental funding for public goods affects private charity only through an income effect crowding out need not be complete income redistribution is generically nonneutral increasing the spread between the poorest and richest person in a community tends to increase private donations our theory are based on the assumption that people are willing to make charitable donations even if they will not increase provision of the public good the data on charitable giving support the hypothesis that donors donate at least partly for signaling purposes rather than only to aid the recipient or to obtain satisfactions unrelated to status though charitable organizations usually report donations within categories thus not allowing perfect revelation for analytical tractability we shall consider an equilibrium with perfect revelation and a continuum of types as characterized in george j mailath 1987 and norman j ireland 1994

nonparametric bounds on treatment effects assume that each member of a population is characterized by values for the variables ya yb z x here x is a vector describing a person and z is a binary variable indicating which of two treatments this person receives the treatments are labelled a and b the variables ya and yb are scalar measures of the outcomes of the two treatments for example a cancer patient might be treated by a drug therapy or b surgery the relevant outcome y might be life span following treatment an unemployed worker might be given a vocational training or b job search assistance here the relevant outcome might be labor force status following treatment assume that a random sample is drawn and that one observes the realizations of z x and of the outcome under the treatment received thus ya is observed if treatment a is received but is a latent variable if treatment b is received similarly yb is either observed or latent suppose that one wants to learn the difference in expected outcome if all persons with attributes x were assigned to treatment a or b this treatment effect is

a non cournot model of voluntary collective action the interaction of selfish rational actors in the provision of a public good is analyzed in an attempt to explain recent experimental findings as well as real world cases of voluntary collective action the model which allows for more sophisticated behavior than that assumed by the conventional cournot theory predicts a higher level of collective action that that theory the impacts of income effects and of the price elasticity of demand for the public good are given special emphasis

on the economics of philanthropy friedman says that he accepts this argument as justifying governmental action to alleviate poverty economists will be familiar with this kind of argument someone takes as a premise that a particular activity is the subject of altruistic concern by individuals he shows that if matters are left to unco ordinated private philanthropy a free rider problem will arise and then he claims that this problem can be solved by some kind of intervention by government this strategy has been used to justify many kinds of intervention including compulsory transfers of income through the tax system hochman and rodgers i969 public policy to stimulate saving and investment marglin i963 sen i967 and the subsidisation or public provision of health care arrow i963 lindsay i969 culyer i976 this whole line of argument rests on a particular theory of private philanthropy which in turn relies on three principal assumptions first there is the publicness assumption the charitable activity in question say the relief of poverty or the provision of health care is a common argument in many individuals utility functions and so is a public good in the theoretical sense samuelson i954 in some cases of private philanthropy it is indisputable that the charitable activity is a public good from which donors derive utility consider for example the case of yachtsmen contributing to the royal national lifeboat institution or potential cancer victims contributing to the cancer research campaign in other cases the assumption takes on a rather different character rich britons contribute towards famine relief in cambodia childless old age pensioners contribute towards the care of handicapped children in such cases one would have to be extremely cynical to believe that the charitable activity furthers the self interest of the donor in any significant way but one might suggest that for purely altruistic reasons the donor derives utility from knowing that less fortunate people are being made better off such an effect will be called an altruistic externality friedman along with all of the other writers quoted in the first paragraph of this paper relies on altruistic externalities to justify the publicness assumption the second assumption is that of utility maximisation each individual s decisions concerning his philanthropic

pareto optimal redistribution and private charity abstract when private charity exists and is motivated by utility interdependence a non pareto optimal outcome the free rider problem typically arises nevertheless incremental fiscal redistribution cannot achieve a paretian welfare improvement so long as private charity continues at positive levels donors respond to incremental fiscal redistribution by reducing their voluntary contributions by exactly a dollar for every dollar transferred in this way no net transfer is achieved unless incremental fiscal redistribution is pursued to the point where private contributions have been driven to zero alternatively a net transfer may be achieved by fiscal measures which affect donors marginal incentives to donate

government free riding in the public provision of higher education panel data estimates of possible crowding out this article employs panel data on more than 1000 us public colleges and universities to investigate the effect of private giving on state government funding government free riding is at question and is found to be active in that private donations partially displace state government funding at the rate of 83 cents on the dollar that compares to the 45 cents political substitution of the 1960s but is much diminished from the 1 07 of the 1980s those are aggregate comparisons for all public institutions a disaggregated approach in this article additionally reveals that doctoral granting research universities are somewhat lesser victims of crowd out in experiencing a 71 cents cut at master level colleges and universities and associate 2 year degree granting colleges crowding out is estimated to be on the order 87 cents and 1 10 respectively relative to the academic year 2000 to 2001 publicly controlled colleges and universities are found to experience significant reductions in state appropriated fu