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1
Fethers, A. V., and n/a. "Valuing public goods." University of Canberra. Management, 1991. http://erl.canberra.edu.au./public/adt-AUC20060710.105721.
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There are three broad areas of public administration that
require valuation for public goods. One of these areas is
concerned with value for cost benefit analysis. The concept
here is quantitative, in money terms, and the purpose is to
aid decision making. Planners and economists either
calculate, or estimate total costs and total benefits of
programs or projects as an aid to decision making.
The second broad area involves justifying, or allocating
public resources. Benefits bestowed by intangibles such as
the arts, or questions that affect the environment are
difficult to quantify as value may involve concepts the
beneficiaries find difficult to identify or describe. The
concept of value involves total costs, but also may involve
perceptions of the community about value. Valuation costs
may be calculated from the aggregate demand, but estimating
demand can be difficult.
The third broad area involves estimating demand for government
services such as those provided by the Bureau of Statistics,
and the Department of Administrative Services, as well as many
others, who are being required to charge fees for services
previously provided without direct charge. This development
is part of the trend called corporatisation now occurring in
many countries, including Australia.
Economists and planners have a range of approaches available
to assist them in the estimation of value, whether it be for
the purpose of comparing costs with benefits, or for
estimating the demand for tangible or intangible items like
the arts or statistics.
Surveys have been used for many years to assist a wide range
of decisions by private enterprise. The use of surveys by
government in Australia has been limited, but is increasing.
US and European governments have used surveys to value both
more and less tangible public goods since 1970. Surveys have
also proved useful to assist many other decisions, including
policy making, developing the means for implementing policies,
monitoring and adjusting programs, and evaluation.
This paper is primarily concerned with surveys. A particular
type of survey, known as contingent valuation (CV), has been
developed to assist the estimation of value for intangible
public goods. Also discussed are other applications of
surveys for government decision making, and other ways of
imputing or estimating values, largely developed by economists
and planners to assist cost benefit analysis.
Three examples of surveys used to estimate values are
discussed. These include a survey of Sydney households to
help estimate the value of clean water; an Australia wide
survey to help estimate the value of the arts; and a survey
of Australians to help estimate the value of Coronation Hill
without mining development.
While the paper suggests that surveys have potential to assist
a range of government decisions, examples also demonstrate the
care required to obtain results that are reasonably precise
and reliable.
2
Burghart, Daniel Robert. "Demand for public goods /." view abstract or download file of text, 2007. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1421618221&sid=2&Fmt=2&clientId=11238&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2007.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109-115). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
3
Interis, Matthew G. "Norms, Image, and Private Contributions to Public Goods: Implications for Public Goods Policy." The Ohio State University, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1243966667.
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Staal, Klaas. "Voting, public goods and violence." [Amsterdam : Rotterdam : Thela Thesis] ; Erasmus University [Host], 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1765/6775.
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Yuan, Kuo-chih. "Essays on local public goods." Thesis, University of Essex, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.411271.
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Jongh, Maurits de. "The primacy of public goods." Thesis, Paris, Institut d'études politiques, 2019. http://www.theses.fr/2019IEPP0007.
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Cette thèse utilise le concept de bien public comme fil conducteur herméneutique permettant d’explorer la théorie et l’histoire de l’économie politique. Située à l'intersection de la philosophie politique et de l'histoire de la pensée économique moderne, cette thèse examine la question de recherche suivante: quels sont le rôle et le potentiel que peuvent avoir les biens publics pour favoriser plutôt qu’empêcher la capacité d’action individuelle et collective en politique et dans la vie sociale ? En réponse à cette question, la thèse soutient la primauté des biens publics de deux manières. Premièrement, puisque les biens publics pluriels constituent l’infrastructure essentielle de la vie sociale et des relations humaines, ils sont prioritaires par rapport aux deux autres modes, privé et commun, d’approvisionnement et de jouissance des biens. Deuxièmement, dans la mesure où ils reposent sur la coordination et la contrainte gouvernementales au sein de relations d’autorité politique inévitables et inéluctables, les biens publics priment également sur le bien commun conçu dans son acceptation monisteThis dissertation takes up the concept of public goods as a hermeneutical thread with which to explore the theory and history of political economy. Situated at the intersection between political philosophy and the history of modern economic thought, this dissertation examines the following main research question: what is the role and potential of public goods to foster rather than disable individual and collective agency in politics and social life? In response to this question, the dissertation articulates the primacy of public goods in two senses: first, since plural public goods constitute the indispensable infrastructure of social life and human relationships, they have primacy over both private and common modes of providing and enjoying goods. Second, since they rely on governmental coordination and compulsion in inescapable and ineluctable relationships of political authority, public goods also have primacy over the common good in its monist conception
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Feehan, James P. (James Patrick) Carleton University Dissertation Economics. "Tariff financing of public goods and public inputs." Ottawa, 1989.
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8
Tse, Tsz Kwan. "Strategy Analysis of Infinitely Repeated Public Goods Game and Infinitely Repeated Transboundary Public Goods Game." Kyoto University, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/2433/245306.
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付記する学位プログラム名: グローバル生存学大学院連携プログラムKyoto University (京都大学)
0048
新制・課程博士
博士(経済学)
甲第22111号
経博第604号
新制||経||291(附属図書館)
京都大学大学院経済学研究科経済学専攻
(主査)教授 依田 高典, 教授 岡 敏弘, 講師 五十川 大也
学位規則第4条第1項該当
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No, Keesung. "Pricing and output of congestible public goods by the elected government and public bureaus." Connect to resource, 1987. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view.cgi?acc%5Fnum=osu1261421147.
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Frot, Emmanuel. "Cultural transmission, public goods, and institutions." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2007. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/1975/.
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This thesis discusses the consequences of different institutional forms in various settings, with a particular focus on the interactions between institutions, cultural transmission, and public goods. Chapter 1 introduces the main ideas, motivation, and results of the subsequent chapters. It provides a detailed summary of the thesis. Chapter 2 considers how institutions that modify behaviors affect the transmission of cultural traits. It argues that they create an environment that crowds out the behavior they were trying to promote. When applied to a model of public good provisions it illustrates how institutions that reduce free riding may decrease the level of public good in the long run. Chapter 3 extends this framework to make institutions endogenous. Individuals vote for their preferred institutional arrangement and the outcome is determined by majority voting. The crowding out of behaviors imply that agents have an incentive to affect strategically the transmission of preferences through collective socialization. Institutions can induce the formation of additional institutions such as schools in order to guarantee their sustainability. Chapter 4 considers that children acquire preferences through the choice of friends in the population, and that parents try to influence this choice. It shows how this creates a game between parents where their efforts to socialize their children to a particular cultural trait constitutes a public good. It studies the consequences for cultural groups of being intolerant and how they can survive cultural transmission. Chapter 5 uses the important example of commons as an institutional failure. It examines the case for privatization in an environment with different resources that may not be all privatized. It shows that labor reallocation reduces the gains of privatization, potentially to the point of reducing welfare. First best institutions may fail in a second best environment.
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Cipriano, Pedro Miguel Ribeiro. "Numerical simulations of public goods games." Master's thesis, Universidade de Aveiro, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10773/2656.
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Mestrado em FísicaForam simulados numericamente jogos de recursos públicos em redes usando algoritmo de Monte Carlo. Foram usadas redes regulares unidimensionais em anel, redes regulares bidimensionais (rede quadrada) e redes scale-free. São apresentados os métodos seguidos, a teoria e os algoritmos usados. Estes jogos apresentam uma transição de fase entre uma fase dominada por oportunistas de uma fase dominada por cooperadores em função de um parâmetro de rendimento das contribuições. Foi encontrado um intervalo, dependente do número médio de vizinhos, para o qual a fracção de configurações sobreviventes tende para 1 quando o tamanho da rede aumenta. Foi também encontrada uma dependência no valor de parâmetro crítico de transição no número médio de vizinhos para as configurações sobreviventes. Esses efeitos foram observados em todos os tipos de rede estudados neste trabalho. ABSTRACT: Public goods games were numerically simulated in networks using Monte Carlo Algorithm. Regular one-dimensional ring networks, regular two-dimensional lattice networks and scale-free networks had been used. The methods followed, the theory and the algorithms used are presented. This games have a phase transition between one phase dominated by defectors from one dominated by cooperators in function of the value of efficiency from the contributions. It was found an interval, dependent on the average number of neighbors, where the fraction of surviving configurations tens to 1 when the size of the network increases. It was found dependence in the critical value of transition value with the average number of neighbors. Both effects were observed in all types of networks studied in this work.
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Taylor, Isaac. "Distributive justice and global public goods." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:e392d33e-bb7c-44f5-9a63-c9bd154d36c5.
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Public goods are goods that are non-rival and non-excludable. One person enjoying the benefits of a public good will not reduce the value of the good for others. And nobody within a particular population can be excluded from enjoying those benefits. While we often think of the relevant population being co-citizens of a state - national defence is taken to be the archetypal public good - in recent years the importance of public goods that benefit individuals across different countries has increasingly been recognised. We can refer to these as "global public goods". When global public goods are supplied, various costs and benefits are generated, and these costs and benefits can be shared among countries in different ways. This thesis explores how justice requires us to share them; I develop a theory of distributive justice for global public goods. I begin by developing two principles for assigning the costs and benefits of supplying public goods within a state, and then argue that these should, for the most part, also govern the distribution of costs and benefits arising from global public good production. Finally, I assess how certain private goods that the supply of public goods make possible should be shared among states. The fact that these goods rely for their production on the supply of global public goods, I argue, will affect the principles of distributive justice that should govern these.
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Price, Shannon Marie. "Using tontines to finance public goods." College Park, Md. : University of Maryland, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/234.
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Thesis (M.S.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2004.Thesis research directed by: Dept. of Agricultural and Resource Economics. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.
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Schläpfer, Felix. "The contingent valuation of public goods revisited /." Zürich, 2007. http://opac.nebis.ch/cgi-bin/showAbstract.pl?sys=000253366.
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Cha, Inkyung. "Essays on the provision of public goods." Texas A&M University, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/199.
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In Chapter 2, we present a model that allows us to study the effect of
increased competition among charities for donations, and show that it will
result in a lower provision of public goods. When charities get donations,
they must pay two fundraising costs: a travel cost and an extra cost, a
"premium" in our terminology. This
premium arises from the extra time, effort, or incentives a charity must
provide to garner a contribution from a donor who is solicited by other
charities. Increased competition raises this premium, which leads to
deadweight loss, so that revenue net of fundraising costs falls after a new firm
enters into the market.
A problem with public goods markets is asymmetric information between
charities and donors, such that donors do not know which charities will cheat. In Chapter 3, we show that honest charities can get more
donations than dishonest charities by investing in a capital stock. We study
a two-period model under two assumptions, one where first-period investment
does not affect the provision of public goods in the second period, and one
where first-period investment does affect the provision of public goods in
the second period. In the first case, we prove the existence of a separating
equilibrium where honest charities make an investment and dishonest charities invest nothing. Thus, donors will donate
more to charities that make investments, even if the investment is not used
to produce public goods. In the second case, honest charities may invest the
efficient amount, overinvest, or underinvest, depending on the donors'
beliefs.
In Chapter 4, we borrow parts of the models in the
previous two chapters in order to see what effect the signaling cost has on
the number of firms and average revenue. In our model, donor utility
increases when they give to a charity that matches their ideology. We are
interested in the long-run equilibrium, so unlike in Chapter 2, we assume
there is free entry in the market. The two important results are that the
number of firms decreases and average revenue increases if the required signaling cost
increases.
16
Allen, James. "The public goods game on multiplex networks." Thesis, University of Surrey, 2018. http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/845834/.
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Cooperation is acting in the interests of one’s social group, often at a cost to yourself. When the level of cooperation is observed in the laboratory, people cooperate more often, and at higher levels than are predicted by standard theories. In this thesis I find two novel ways in which cooperation on multilayered populations is increased. These models contribute to an understanding of how people cooperate in real-world social situations, and help us to explain why people cooperate as much as they are observed to do. In each study I model the tension between the individual and the group using the public goods game. This game is played on a structured population defined by a multilayered network. Each layer represents a different sphere of influence on the player’s decision to cooperate or defect. The first model studies the effect of a player choosing whether to cooperate or defect on either all layers simultaneously (synchronously) or on one layer at a time (asynchronously). Updating asynchronously leads to increased cooperation across a number of different parameter regimes. This demonstrates a new way in which cooperation can be increased in a system with multiple influences, and also helps to understand exactly why cooperation is increased in multilayered systems. Inspired by empirical examples, the second model adds to the standard model of the public goods game on networks in two ways. The first is to include conditional cooperators, and the second is the addition of a layer of social influence. This combination of economic and social influence has not been considered in previous models of the public goods game, and I find that this additional layer of influence results in high levels of cooperation. In the final chapter, I study these dynamics on more realistic network structures, with results echoing empirical findings under certain parameters.
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She, Chih-Min. "Three essays on public choice and the provision of public goods." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2004. http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/3162260.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, 2004.Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-01, Section: A, page: 0271. Adviser: Gerhard Glomm. Title from dissertation home page (viewed Oct. 12, 2006).
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Bakir, Amir Abdelfattah Zakaria. "Excess burden, public goods and the marginal cost of public funds." Thesis, University of Salford, 1992. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.304548.
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Martin, Steve. "Essays on the Voluntary Provision of Public Goods." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/36036.
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Chapter 1.---Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) compete in mission statements. Opportunities for impact vary across issues---NGOs with broader missions expect to execute higher-impact projects but provide less precision to donors as to the types of projects that will be funded. I develop the first model in which competing NGOs strategically design their mission statements. Scope of the mission is a strategic complement. Competition leads NGOs to design inefficiently narrow missions while free entry leads to a socially excessive number of NGOs in operation. With low barriers to entry NGOs' missions overlap, each addressing issues that are not the preferred issue for any of its donors, and leading to greater expected impact at the periphery of its mission.
Chapter 2.---In many settings firms rely on non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to certify pro-social attributes embodied in their products. I develop a model of competition between NGOs in the provision of labeling services. Competition between a fixed number of NGOs features a race-to-the-top in labeling standards, but entry of NGOs offering new labels pushes standards down. Competition between NGOs often results in a socially-excessive number of labels, with each label excessively stringent. Compared to a setting in which firms can credibly communicate the social attributes of their products, labels demand greater pro-social behavior than desired by firms, although with proliferation of the number of labels this discrepancy disappears. In contrast to existing models, firms may engage in excessive corporate social responsibility when they rely on NGOs as certifying intermediaries.
Chapter 3.---The intrinsic motivation of a firm's management for engaging in pro-social behavior is an important determinant of a firm's social conduct. I provide the first model in which firms run by morally-motivated managers engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) in a competitive setting. CSR induced by moral management crowds out a competitor's strategic CSR, increasing profitability and leading shareholders to strategically delegate moral managers. Firms run by moral managers can engage in a socially-excessive amount of CSR, and shareholders appoint such managers if and only if moral management is sufficiently effective at crowding out a competitor's strategic CSR.
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Dragicevic, Arnaud. "Market Mechanisms and Valuation of Environmental Public Goods." Phd thesis, Palaiseau, Ecole polytechnique, 2009. http://pastel.archives-ouvertes.fr/pastel-00005650/en/.
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Patel, Amrish. "Essays on public goods, esteem and social norms." Thesis, University of Kent, 2009. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.509631.
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Doulis, Kimon Theofanis. "Essays on competition, market structures and public goods." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/20459.
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Chapter one focuses on optimal pricing in markets of consumption chains. These are markets in which one good is necessary for access to further consumption goods. I analyse optimal pricing for different market structures, focusing on the case of an integrated monopolist and the case of separate firms being in competition across markets, but not within markets. I then compare the outcomes of different market structures using basic welfare measures. I show that, compared to the first best allocation, the allocation implemented under the integrated monopolist tends to have significantly lower consumer surplus and larger producer surplus. Aggregate welfare is surprisingly not much smaller under the integrated firm when compared to a welfare maximising allocation. In some settings the integrated monopolist even implements a welfare maximising allocation. The paper explains and highlights how these results depend largely on which assumptions are made about the information available to consumers. The second chapter contributes towards the existing literatures on lobbying and on media bias by combining and extending features of both. It aims to analyse optimal slanting policies of interest or media groups and their effect on the distribution of public opinion and its evolution over time by introducing an intertemporal model of grassroots lobbying or media bias. I also allow for more general results than existing models by making fewer distributive assumptions and by allowing for further incentives of agents. In the chapter I combine demand and supply side models for bias. A main focus lies on how optimal slanting, the distribution of public opinion and its evolution over time depend on competition. The chapter aims to examine in which circumstances competition in the media market or the existence of multiple rival lobby groups can be detrimental. It shows how this can be the case because competition can create an incentive to split the public up and cater only to the own market. This can lead to a loss of the middle ground and increased dispersion of public opinion. The third chapter aims to extend the existing literature on the (in)efficiencies of voluntary contribution mechanisms for public goods. The existing body of research tries to analyse how group size affects the outcomes of such mechanisms asymptotically, while I also focus on results for given group sizes and the effect of the level of group heterogeneity in combination with group size. Agents are ex post heterogeneous in the existing literature; I also allow for them to be heterogeneous ex ante. This means that agents do not only have different valuations for the public good ex post, but different agents are also perceived differently by other agents ex ante. I show that a form of price discrimination can be used when agents are ex ante heterogeneous. Not using such price discrimination is shown to be costly in terms of efficiency in small groups. Small heterogeneous groups are outperformed by their homogeneous counterparts when price discrimination is not applied. However, this inefficiency in small groups can be eliminated by using price discrimination. The use of price discrimination becomes irrelevant in large groups and heterogeneous groups always outperform their homogeneous counterparts, whether price discrimination is used or not.
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Bierbrauer, Felix. "Essays on public goods provision and income taxation." [S.l. : s.n.], 2006. http://madoc.bib.uni-mannheim.de/madoc/volltexte/2006/1305.
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Schmidtz, David. "Public goods and the justification of political authority." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1988. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/184407.
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Currently, the argument that markets cannot provide public goods underlies the justification of political authority most widely accepted by political theorists. Yet, as theorists usually depict the problem, public goods could be voluntarily produced at levels of efficiency comparable to those attainable by coercion. Once we allow that the real problem is much more messy than its theoretical models led us to believe, we have to admit that coercion may be necessary after all. At the same time, we have to admit that the moral problem of justifying coercion is also more messy than we thought, and for precisely the same reason. I discuss contractual mechanisms for voluntary public goods provision, arguing that with such a mechanism, voluntary contribution levels might be much higher than conventional theories predict. My theory is borne out in laboratory experiments. Still, it remains an open question whether it would be worth the trouble to switch from the coercive methods presently employed to noncoercive (or less coercive) methods of public goods provision. A strictly efficient method is not among our options. We have to assess the efficiency of various methods in a relative sense. Should we find cases in which public goods cannot be provided by contract, or should we decide that in some cases we do not even want to risk trying voluntary methods, we are forced to face the moral issue squarely. I offer a traditional analysis of justice, although I employ it in a somewhat unorthodox way in drawing conclusions about the moral status of private property in a well-ordered society. I then use this analysis to develop a foundation for property rights, exploring its implications for questions concerning what people are morally obliged to do, and what they can legitimately be forced to do, for the sake of public goods production.
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Yesilirmak, Muharrem. "Essays on local public goods and private schools." Diss., University of Iowa, 2013. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2424.
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World is becoming more and more fiscally decentralized over time. Share of central government spending in total government spending declined from 75% to 65% between 1975 to 1995 in the world. Motivated by this, this thesis is concerned about two problems related to our current understanding of fiscally decentralized economies. In the first chapter, an explanation is given for the observed household income sorting pattern across municipalities where each municipality provides its own local public good. In the second chapter, an equilibrium existence result is provided for an economy where both local public schools and private schools coexist.
In the first chapter, I quantitatively explain the empirical household income distribution across municipalities. In the data, poor and rich households live together with varying fractions in all municipalities although there are large public expenditure differentials. To explain data, I construct a multi-community general equilibrium model at which heterogeneous income households probabilistically choose among communities where municipalities are comprised of several communities. The indivisibility in the choice set of households gives them the incentive to assign non-degenerate probabilities to each community which in turn gives rise to an income distribution resembling to that in data. The calibrated model is then used to analyze two public policies, uniform property tax rate and uniform housing supply across municipalities, with respect to their effects on income sorting.
The second chapter provides a median voter theorem for an economy where public and private schools coexist. Since households can opt out of public education, preferences over income tax rates are not single peaked leading possibly to nonexistence of majority voting equilibrium and decisive voter. Because of this, policy analysis of such economies proved difficult. To solve this nonexistence problem, I assume, consistently with empirical evidence, that private schools behave as monopolistically competitive firms with decreasing average costs over enrollment. In my model, there are a finite number of different quality private schools each having a different tuition. Public school spending is financed by income tax revenue collected from all households. The tax rate is determined by majority voting. I argue that preferences over tax rates are single peaked and therefore a majority voting equilibrium exists. Moreover median income household is the decisive voter. These results hold for any income distribution function and any finite number of private schools.
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Maier, Carl Georg [Verfasser]. "Prices, Public Goods and Politics : Three Essays in Public Economics / Carl Georg Maier." Konstanz : KOPS Universität Konstanz, 2018. http://d-nb.info/1212364090/34.
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Montén, Anna. "The provision of local public goods and demographic change." Doctoral thesis, Saechsische Landesbibliothek- Staats- und Universitaetsbibliothek Dresden, 2012. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:14-qucosa-88933.
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The main contribution of this thesis is a comprehensive analysis of the influence of changes in the population structure on local communities, in particular with respect to the provision of publicly provided goods. The focus is placed on the consequences of two of the major processes of demographic change, namely aging and shrinking. The three main chapters of this contribution consider the effects at the local level from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. The first model focuses on the influence of population aging on the provision of local publicly provided goods, when the young population may relocate. When aging advances, gerontocracies and social planners substitute publicly provided goods aimed at the mobile young for publicly provided goods for the elderly. However, due to fiscal competition, gerontocracies will provide even more of the publicly provided good for the young than the social planner. The second model considers in a two-period setting, the interaction of a shrinking population when the investments made by the previous generation are long lived. The laissez-faire and welfare maximizing outcomes are computed for two cases; first with no costs of upkeep and second for the case when costs of upkeep accrue. A comparison of the solutions shows that public provision for the first generation is inefficiently low in laissez-faire when there are no costs of upkeep. However, if costs of upkeep accrue, the laissez-faire outcome for the intergenerational publicly provided good may be too high. Chapter four contains an empirical analysis. In a two-stage analysis the efficiency of the provision of child care services in municipalities is evaluated in the German State of Saxony. First, the results of the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) show substantial efficiency differences; the median municipality is up to 28% inefficient. In a second stage bootstrapped truncated regression, determinants of the inefficiency are identified. Explanatory variables such as an uncompensated mayor or a larger share of over 65-year-olds significantly increase inefficiency.
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Cestau, Dario. "Essays on the Provision and Funding of Public Goods." Research Showcase @ CMU, 2014. http://repository.cmu.edu/dissertations/347.
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The first essay studies how political parties’ choice of public good provision and tax funding affect the risk of default to public debt investors. Past research has largely ignored the effects that political parties have on default risk of state governments. The objective of this paper is to address this policy question using data from Credit Default Swap contracts (CDS), and poll data from state gubernatorial elections. The findings of the paper suggest that state Republican governors have a significant positive effect on CDS spreads. On average, Republican governors reduce credit spreads by around six percent, more than half of CDS standard deviation during election race. Prospects of a Republican administration are good news for debtholders. The positive effect of Republican candidates is larger when: candidates signed the ``Taxpayer Protection Pledge'', Democrats control the state houses and for highly contested gubernatorial elections. The second essay studies profiling and affirmative action in the access to gifted programs, a common public good provided by school districts. For decades, colleges and universities have struggled to increase participation of minority and disadvantaged students. Urban school districts confront a parallel challenge; minority and disadvantaged students are underrepresented in selective programs that use merit-based admission. We analyze optimal school district policy and develop an econometric framework providing a unified treatment of affirmative action and profiling. Implementing the model for a central-city district, we find profiling by race and income, affirmative action for low-income students, and no affirmative action with respect race. Counterfactual analysis reveals that these policies achieve 80\% of African American enrollment that would be could be attained by race-based affirmative action. The third essay studies a new alternative mean of funding for States and local authorities called Build America Bonds (BAB). BABs were issued by municipalities for twenty months as part of the 2009 fiscal package. Unlike traditional tax-exempt municipals, BABs are taxable to the holder, but the Treasury rebates 35% of the coupon to the issuer. The stated purpose was to provide municipalities access to a more liquid market including foreign, tax-exempt, and tax-deferred investors. We find BABs do not exhibit greater liquidity than traditional municipals. BABs are more underpriced initially, particularly for interdealer trades. BABs also show a substitution from underwriter fees toward more underpricing, suggesting the underpricing is a strategic response to the tax subsidy.
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Abbasian, Ezatollah. "Taxation and the provision of private and public goods." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.249073.
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Lutz, Byron F. "Three essays in the economics of local public goods." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/32403.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2005."June 2005."
Includes bibliographical references.
This thesis is a collection of three empirical essays on the economics of local public goods. Chapter One examines the marginal propensity of local governments to spend out of lump- sum grant income. Economic theory predicts that this marginal propensity will equal the marginal propensity to spend on public goods out of private income. A large empirical literature contradicts the prediction. A school finance reform in the state of New Hampshire is used to test the prediction. The use of direct democracy to determine the provision level of local public goods in New Hampshire provides a uniquely appropriate environment in which to conduct the test. The results provide support for the theoretical prediction. Chapter Two examines the most significant locally provided public good, education. Specifically, the chapter examines the end of court-ordered desegregation. The widespread termination of desegregation plans in the post 1990 period has returned a large number of school districts to local control and ended efforts to promote racial integration. The results suggest that the termination of a desegregation plan results in a gradual, moderate increase in racial segregation and an increase in black dropout rates and rates of black private school attendance in localities located outside the South census region. There is no effect on black dropout rates or rates of black private school attendance in the South. Chapter Three examines the impact of the most significant local tax, the property tax, on capital investment. The results suggest that the elasticity of residential capital investment with respect to the property tax is -1.9 to -.8.
(cont.) There is no evidence that business capital investment responds to the rate of property taxation in a locality.
by Byron F. Lutz.
Ph.D.
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Sene, Omar. "Social capital, trust and provision of local public goods." Thesis, Paris 1, 2013. http://www.theses.fr/2013PA010050.
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Le but principal de la présente thèse est d'étudier le rôle du capital social dans la capacité des communautés locales à entreprendre une action collective et à produire des biens publics locaux par eux-mêmes. Nous étendons la portée des études existantes dans les pays en développement. L'analyse est effectuée en utilisant deux approches distinctes. La première approche utilise un mélange original d'enquêtes et de données expérimentales sur la confiance de quatre villages au Sénégal pour évaluer la capacité de la confiance de prévoir la participation à la fourniture de biens publics locaux. Les résultats montrent que la confiance, tel que mesurée par les questions de l'enquête, a une faible pouvoir prédictif, alors que les résultats d'une mesure expérimentale de confiance sont bien meilleurs prédicteurs de la production de biens publics. La seconde approche consiste à enquêter sur l'impact causal de la confiance dans la qualité des biens publics produits au niveau du district en Afrique. Nous utilisons les données Afro-baromètre pour tester le rôle du capital social et les divisions ethniques dans l'accès aux soins de santé de base et à une scolarisation. Nous contournons les problèmes de la causalité inverse entre la confiance et la qualité des biens publics, et de variables omises en raison de tri ethnique endogène par l'utilisation de données historiques sur les modes de fonctionnement des groupes ethniques en Afrique sub-saharienne. Les résultats que notre mesure de confiance locale (utilisé comme indicateur de capital social) a impact causal sur la qualité de la santé et de la qualité des écoles en AfriqueThe main purpose of the present dissertation is to study the role of social capital in the capacity of local communities to undertake collective action and to produce local public goods by themselves We extend the scope of existing studies encompass in developing countries. The analysis is carried out using two distinct approaches. The first approach uses an original mixture of survey and experimental data on trust from four villages in Senegal to assess the capacity of trust to predict participation in provision of local public good. The results show that trust, as measured by survey questions, has poor predictive power, while the results from a simple experimental measure of trust are much better predictors of public-goods production. The second approach consists in investigating the causal impact of trust in the quality of public goods produced at district level in Africa. We use Afro-barometer data to test the role of social capital and ethnic divisions in determining access to basic health care and schooling. We skirt any reverse-causality problems between trust and the quality of public goods, and omitted-variable bias due to endogenous ethnic sorting, by the use of historical data on the settlement patterns of ethnic groups in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our measure of local trust (used as an indicator of social capital) is shown to have a causal impact access on quality of health and quality of schools in Africa
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Guillouzouic, Arthur. "Local public goods and the geography of economic activity." Thesis, Paris, Institut d'études politiques, 2019. http://www.theses.fr/2019IEPP0030.
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Cette thèse étudie la manière dont l’hétérogénéité dans la production de biens publics locaux peut influencer la géographie de l’activité économique, en s’appuyant sur l’étude de deux mécanismes générant une telle hétérogénéité.Dans les deux premiers chapitres, le bien public local étudié est la connaissance technologique. Cette approche trouve sa source dans une vaste littérature montrant que les flux de connaissance sont sujets à un important biais spatial. Le premier chapitre étudie les dynamiques de formation des liens entre innovateurs, et leurs conséquences sur l’effet agrégé de la distance sur les flux de connaissance. L’analyse montre que les innovateurs trouvent des nouvelles sources de connaissance graduellement, via les contacts de leurs propres contacts. En introduisant cet élément dans un modèle de formation de réseau, on obtient des prédictions sur la taille des innovateurs et sur la relation entre taille et distance des citations qui sont vérifiées dans les données. Le second chapitre prend ces réseaux locaux d’innovateurs comme fixés, et examine leur influence sur les décisions de relocalisations d’établissements de R&D par les firmes. Je montre que les firmes innovantes sont plus mobiles que la moyenne, et que des réseaux d’innovation plus denses attirent les firmes tandis qu’une mauvaise position dans le réseau rend les firmes plus susceptibles de se relocaliser. J’étudie ensuite théoriquement le problème d’une firme pouvant relocaliser ses laboratoires mais possédant des informations limitées sur les autres localisations. Le troisième chapitre s’intéresse à un problème différent dans lequel le bien public local est produit par le service public de manière spatialement hétérogène, à cause de salaires fixés de manière centralisée. Il montre que les fonctionnaires génèrent des externalités positives sur le secteur privé, ce qui implique que des niveaux hétérogènes de biens publics locaux déforment la géographie de l’activité privéeThis thesis studies how heterogeneity in the quality of local public goods may influence the geography of economic activity, through the study of two mechanisms generating such heterogeneity. In the first two chapters, the local public good I study is technological knowledge. The analysis is rooted in a vast body of literature showing that knowledge flows exhibit a strong spatial bias. The first chapter studies the dynamics of link formation between innovators, and their link with the aggregate effect of distance on knowledge flows. The analysis shows that innovators learn about new knowledge gradually, using the contacts of their own contacts. Inserting this fact in a network formation model yields predictions about the size of innovators and a relation between size and the distance of citations, which are met in the data. The second chapter takes these local innovation networks as given, and investigates how they influence firms’ location choices through their decisions to relocate R&D labs. I show that innovative firms are more mobile than the average firm, and that denser innovation networks attract them while a poor position in their local network makes them more likely to leave. I then study theoretically the problem faced by firms able to relocate their R&D labs with limited information about the other locations.The third chapter studies a different problem in which a local public good provided by the public sector is spatially heterogeneous, due to wages set centrally. It shows that public sector workers exert positive spillovers on private sector workers, implying that heterogeneous levels of public good provision distort the geography of private sector activity
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Gwozdz, Mateusz. "Public goods and ethnocultural diversity: A case of Nigeria." Thesis, Gwozdz, Mateusz (2016) Public goods and ethnocultural diversity: A case of Nigeria. Masters by Coursework thesis, Murdoch University, 2016. https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/35645/.
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Ethnic and other cultural diversity has become something of an ideological holy of holies in Western societies. However, in spite of idealistic shibboleths surrounding the concept, academic literature broadly supports the contention that ethnocultural diversity is negatively correlated with public goods provision, political stability, economic growth and the like. As such, a broad reexamination of diversity’s inherent desirability is necessary. This paper takes a two-pronged approach by conducting a critical review of relevant literature, and cross-referencing it with the case study of Nigeria. Whilst multicultural “settler societies” such as the USA or Canada boast a number of fundamental differences to postcolonial, “primordially” diverse societies such as Nigeria, the latter nonetheless offers a number of generalizable lessons which can be broadly applied to Western statecraft and policy making as well. Broadly speaking, an analysis of Nigeria provides considerable circumstantial evidence to support the academic consensus on ethnocultural diversity, and allows one to conceptually link big-picture, longitudinal studies with micro-level studies. At the same time, it provides considerable nuance to those broad conclusions, indicating that even though ethnocultural diversity is broadly correlated with lower levels of public goods provision, precise causes for this state of affairs tend to differ and diversity is far from the be-all, end-all of political instability, low levels of development and the like.
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Gurgur, Tugrul. "The political economy of public spending on publicly-provided goods in developing countries." College Park, Md. : University of Maryland, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/2601.
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Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2005.Thesis research directed by: Economics. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.
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Apinunmahakul, Amornrat. "Three essays on the private provision of pure public goods." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2001. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp05/NQ66117.pdf.
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Azulai, Michel Dummar. "The political economy of government formation and local public goods." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2018. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3824/.
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This thesis examines three questions: first, do national government coalitions favour local governments connected to them to receive local public goods? Secondly, does favouritism in the allocation of public goods imply large welfare losses? Finally, how national governments form, and what are the consequences of this for national policy making? These questions are answered in the particular context of Brazil, where rich data on national politics and local public good allocation is available. The first chapter of the thesis summarizes aspects of the Brazilian context that are relevant for the rest of the thesis - covering aspects of Brazilian national politics, and of the rules for allocation of funds for local public goods. The chapter also discusses the disaggregated data on the universe of matching grant transfers from the Brazilian national government to municipalities, used in the second and third chapters. The second chapter answers the following question: are regions connected to the national government favoured to receive funding for local public goods? While a broad literature shows that "politically connected" regions receive more funds from national governments, it is unclear whether this reflects favouritism, or simply connections allowing the national government to know better the needs of regions connected to them. The chapter finds evidence broadly consistent with favouritism. The third chapter then examines the welfare losses associated with favouritism. I build a model of grant requests by cities and approvals by the national government and provide estimates of the model's parameters. Despite ample evidence of favouritism, if the only source of conflict between the national government and society is due to favouritism, the welfare losses for society due to favouritism are of the order of 0.24% of the budget for grants. The second and third chapters suggest large effects of the national coalition over local public good provision. The fourth and final chapter, instead, analyses how national coalitions interact with national policies. More precisely, do government coalitions form to include legislators ideologically close to the executive, or ideologically unattached legislators whose votes are "easier to buy"? Moreover, what are the consequences of this for policy making at the national level - in particular, for roll call votes in the chamber of deputies?
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Wisniewski, Jakub Bozydar. "The economics and ethics of public goods : a praxeological analysis." Thesis, King's College London (University of London), 2017. https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/the-economics-and-ethics-of-public-goods(0698cfdd-66be-4849-8c38-954e9aa8995b).html.
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The aim of the present thesis is to investigate the putative theoretical desirability, both from the economic and the ethical point of view, as well as the practical inevitability of the presence of a monopoly of force in any given system of political economy. The primary methodological tool used for this purpose, described in Chapter 1, is praxeological analysis in the spirit of the Austrian School of Economics, coupled with the analysis of institutional robustness of the relevant economic and social frameworks. Chapter 2 presents a general theoretical critique of the neoclassical theory of public goods. Chapters 3 and 4 make the critique in question more specific and practically grounded by analyzing the ways in which the two most paradigmatic public goods in the neoclassical theory – namely, law and defense – could be effectively produced in a contractual, entrepreneurial order of legal polycentrism. Chapter 5 tackles the claim that, while not necessary for the production of public goods, monopolies of force are nonetheless inevitable due to the combined influence of the iron law of oligarchy and the collective action problem. Finally, Chapter 6 tries to pin down various ethical conceptions of public goods and argue that none of them can sustain the notion that a fully voluntary and contractual social order generates a tradeoff between efficiency and equity, which can be countered only by corrective interventions of a monopoly of force. The final conclusion of the present thesis is that neither economic nor ethical considerations surrounding the notion of public goods establish the desirability or inevitability of the existence of territorial monopolies of force, thus lending support to the suggestion that the emergence of a world-wide contractual, competitive, entrepreneurial order of legal polycentrism would be a welcome alternative.
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Feng, Colin G. "Voluntary provision of public goods : Experimental evidence and theoretical analysis /." The Ohio State University, 1995. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1272296199.
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Claveres, Guillaume. "Sharing the financing of common public goods and macroeconomic risks." Thesis, Paris 1, 2018. http://www.theses.fr/2018PA01E045/document.
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Les quatre articles de recherche qui composent cette thèse étudient le partage de ressources fiscales utilisées pour produire des biens publics communs ou des transferts pour améliorer la stabilisation macro-économique. Dans le premier chapitre, on considère un problème de centralisation optimale avec des juridictions qui ont des préférences hétérogènes pour les biens publics et une base mobile pour les financer. On adopte un modèle théorique avec une structure fédérale et un continuum de biens publics afin de porter plusieurs conclusions normatives sur le degré optimal de centralisation. La contribution du deuxième chapitre est de considérer un modèle de concurrence fiscale où les biens publics sont potentiellement caractérisés par des effets de déversement entre juridictions. On démontre que la coopération totale peut être atteinte si les effets de déversement dans la production de biens publics sont suffisamment grands pour l’emporter sur les incitations à demeurer un pays non-coopératif avec des taxes faibles. Dans le troisième chapitre, on construit un modèle DSGE de la zone euro (avec un cœur et une périphérie) avec des rigidités nominales, financières et sur le marché de l’emploi. Un modèle de référence où les politiques sont uniquement nationales, comme c’est le cas aujourd’hui, est établi pour le calibrage et celui-ci reproduit des observations empiriques pour la zone euro. Ensuite, on introduit une assurance chômage commune afin d’étudier ses propriétés stabilisatrices. Le quatrième chapitre analyse comment une capacité fiscale ciblant directement les ménages peut améliorer la stabilisation lorsque les taux d’intérêt sont au plancher égal à zéroThe four research articles composing this PhD dissertation study the sharing of fiscal resources used to provide common public goods or transfers to contribute to macroeconomic stabilization. In the first chapter, we consider an optimal centralization problem with jurisdictions that have heterogeneous preferences for public goods and tax a mobile base to finance them. We adopt a theoretical model with a federal structure and a continuum of public goods to draw several normative conclusions from the study of the optimal degree of centralization. The contribution of this second chapter is to consider a tax competition model where public goods potentially exhibit cross-border spillovers. We show that full cooperation can be attained if spillovers in public good provision are high enough to remove the incentives to remain a low-tax non-cooperative player. In the third chapter, we build a DSGE model of the euro area (with a core and a periphery) with nominal, labor and financial rigidities. A baseline model where policies are only national, as it is the case now, is set as the reference for calibration which reproduces key empirical observations for the euro area. Then, we implement a common unemployment insurance and study its stabilization properties. The fourth chapter focuses on how a fiscal capacity targeting directly households can improve stabilization at the zero lower bound
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Cuevas, Jesus Erubiel Ordaz. "Writings on Commons, Common-Pool Resources, Public Goods, and Cooperation." Doctoral thesis, Università di Siena, 2022. http://hdl.handle.net/11365/1180903.
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Writings on Commons, Common-Pool Resources (CPRs), Public Goods (PGs), and Cooperation has a twofold aim: firstly to provide an overview of the different concepts related to Commons, CPRs and PGs in order to help us to clarify their particularities and commonalities, and secondly, to offer some explanations of the phenomenon of cooperation in settings framed by the individuals' actions over the appropriation of CPRs and/or the contribution to PGs, which, in turn, leads to the emergence of conflicting interests in terms of the reasons and benefits involved agents might have in virtue of pursuing a certain behavior - i.e., individually competitive or an individually cooperative behavior. That is, what from the collective point of view is known as a social dilemma.
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Hache, Connie. "Financing Public Goods and Services through Taxation or User Fees: A Matter of Public Choice?" Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/32252.
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Through a case study methodology this research explores the decision-making process regarding financing services provided by the Canadian federal government to individual citizens. From a transparency and accountability perspective, for those services that benefit individuals versus society as whole, it is important to understand why some services are provided through general taxation while others are financed through user fees.
The study utilizes public choice theory as developed in The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy which is the initial attempt to illustrate how the tools of economics may be applied to political institutions using a rational choice approach with an emphasis on rules about how choices are made. Rather than focusing on ‘what’ government spends funds on, the study focuses on ‘how’ government generates funds by examining three major actors: government, citizen-voters and pressure groups.
This study furthers scientific knowledge as there has been prior research on distinguishing between public versus private goods, and deciding on how to publicly fund such goods, but there has been limited research undertaken on the actual decision-making process in financing public goods and services. From an academic perspective, this study is the first time that The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy model has been adapted and applied to the Canadian federal government.
The study concludes that it depends on what elected officials decide to do to appeal to citizen-voters in order to win votes: appear fiscally prudent thus charge user fees; advance its political agenda with decisions to sometimes charge user fees or other times not; or limit costs to private sector organizations by deciding to not charge user fees. While elected officials make the decisions whether or not to charge user fees, it is the bureaucracy that implements these decisions.
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Geaves, Linda Helen. "Public priorities and public goods : the drivers and responses to transitions in flood risk management." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:6a5de60c-1920-403e-aaf7-0c8b8655edef.
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This thesis examines the role of the public in Flood Risk Management (FRM) service provision at a time when the perceptions of the distribution of benefits provided by FRM interventions are in flux, and the role the public should play in FRM highly contested among stakeholders. Two schemes have marked the revised role of the public in FRM - Partnership Funding and Flood Re - both of which challenge existing judgments of the excludability and rivalry of benefits delivered by FRM interventions. The Partnership Funding scheme allocates capital for FRM projects proportionately to the public benefits they provide, allowing communities to top-up grants through local contributions. In comparison, by increasing accessibility to affordable insurance through cross-subsidies and pricing signals, Flood Re highlights a growing recognition that the distribution of gains as a result of widespread insurance uptake is greater than the benefits received by the policyholder alone. Following the identification of these schemes, we tested their social feasibility, examining both the scale and distribution of benefits. Due to the different stages of implementation of each scheme at the time of writing this thesis, two distinct methods were developed. The Partnership Funding Chapter used field data to examine how public-private funding of flood defences has changed service provision and the public acceptance of this transition. Whereas the Flood Re chapter used computer-based experiments to hypothesize how Flood Re may make the purchase of insurance a more or less attractive investment for different types of consumer. We found that Partnership Funding enabled more FRM projects to go ahead, raised public awareness of flood risk, and improved collaboration between stakeholders, but encouraged lower-cost projects, which, in the longer term, could transfer the expense of managing residual risk to the householder. In comparison, Flood Re provided peace of mind to householders struggling to afford rises in insurance premiums, but disproportionately benefited those who annually purchased insurance. Combining this proposed inequity in Flood Re with increasing residual risks, we identify a gap in service provision for the public who cannot afford household mitigation measures. We propose that loss mitigation and flood defence should become increasingly collaborative in line with the complexities of flooding within a community. We seek a move away from the information asymmetry which currently exists between insurance providers and policyholders, and yet simultaneously call for local authorities to recognise the capacity of the public to participate in FRM, and sustain resilience in the face of rising flood risk.
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Kuminoff, Nicolai V. "Recovering Preferences for Public Goods from a Dual-Market Locational Equilibrium." NCSU, 2006. http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/theses/available/etd-09272006-090248/.
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This research extends the existing literature on revealed preference models of location choice by developing a ?dual-market? sorting framework that uses information on households and their location choices in the housing and labor markets to infer their demand for local public goods. It also recognizes that households may differ in their relative preferences for those public goods. Four interrelated objectives are addressed. First, the analysis develops a theoretical model that relates households? location choices in the housing and labor markets to the levels of local public goods provided by each of a finite set of communities. Second, it generalizes Epple and Sieg?s (1999) empirical model to recognize that: (i) households make a joint job-house choice and (ii) households differ in their job skills and in their relative preferences for different public goods. Third, the analysis uses the empirical model to develop a general equilibrium framework to simulate how households and markets would adjust to a large-scale change in the provision of a public good. Finally, the new dual-market estimation and simulation frameworks are used to analyze the welfare implications of a hypothetical air quality improvement that would allow the San Francisco-Sacramento region of Northern California to meet the state?s recently revised standards for ambient concentrations of ground-level ozone.
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Prieto, Carlos. "Mexican private higher education : the potential of private and public goods." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/28124.
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In this qualitative case study, I explore the organizational processes and policy discourses at one private higher education institution in Mexico. By using a theoretical framework relative to contestations between the global “ideology of privatization” in education (Rizvi, 2006; Rizvi & Lingard, 2009) and the “global public good” of private education (Marginson, 2007; Menashy, 2009), I examine how external forces are influencing a private institution and its opportunities relative to the public/private good.
The study provides answers to three main research questions:
1. What are the assumptions, beliefs and knowledge of upper level management of the private education institution with regard to the global and local forces (economic, political, technological, and social) that influence the organization and its opportunities?
2. What are the assumptions, beliefs and knowledge of upper level management in internal processes in response to external pressures relative to the provision of public versus private goods?
3. How does the institution position itself relative to other educational opportunities (public and private) at the local, national, and global levels?
The study was undertaken at an established private business school in Mexico. Data collection took place from February through April 2010 using a strategic sample of participants (men and women) with high-level positions in the school. The study consisted of semi structured interviews, which were digitally recorded and subsequently transcribed, coded, and analyzed thematically.
The findings of this study reveal interesting issues and processes of the social imaginary of senior level executives related to neoliberal discourses, predominantly in relation to the effects of competition in higher education. Particular attention is paid to the institution’s potential to generate public and private goods, and to the value of positional goods relative to other educational opportunities (public and private) at the local, national and global levels.
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Grassi, Simona. "Essays on the Public Provision of Private Goods under Asymmetric Information." Thesis, University of York, 2009. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.503310.
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Duranton, Gilles. "Essays on growth : imperfect competition, labour supply and local public goods." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 1997. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/1471/.
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This dissertation is primarily concerned with two major issues: 1/ Is growth really sustainable in the "long-run". 2/ What are the consequences for growth of imperfect competition. Chapter 1 explores a simple model of endogenous growth in an overlapping generations framework when labour supply is made endogenous. If leisure and consumption are substitutes, the economy experiences multiple equilibrium paths. If leisure and consumption are complements, then production remains bounded, although endogenous growth is possible and socially desirable. In chapter 2, instead of assuming that local public goods only affect the utility of consumers as is usual, we assume that they are purely productive. The implications of this assumption are analysed within standard dynamic growth models where all factors are mobile. We show that the decentralisation of the first-best is more demanding than usually. In chapter 3, we propose a strategic model of imperfect competition with endogenous growth and endogenous market structure. Assuming increasing returns at the firm level and heterogeneity on the labour market, short-run efficiency can be maximised under monopoly. However, in the long-run competition can generate growth through a distribution effect, whereas a monopoly leads to a no-growth steady-state. In chapter 4, the evolution of industries is viewed as a cumulative purposeful cost-reduction process subject to spillovers in a differentiated oligopoly. The long-run outcome depends primarily on spillovers. When they are weak, firms dig their niche over time and keep investing. On the contrary, if spillovers are strong and if the diffusion function of spillovers is concave, firms use ever more similar technologies. This involves less and less investment and thus a fall in the growth rate of productivity. In the final chapter, we propose a two-sector economy where products are substitutes. The innovation function is random, product specific and the probability of success is increasing in R&D investment. The successful innovator is in a temporary monopoly which provides an incentive for R&D. When a product has a relatively lower marginal cost, the monopoly profits are larger because of its bigger market size. Consequently, R&D investment in this product increases. So does the probability of a new cost-reducing innovation. This simple feed-back effect implies a divergence in the investment and development patterns.
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Pereira, Paulo Trigo Cortez. "Intergovernmental grants, urban congestion and the provision of local public goods." Thesis, University of Leicester, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/2381/35516.
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The basic motivation for the development of this research was to understand why we observe a degradation of local services in urban and suburban areas in Portugal. There is, I believe, an excess of demand for local services in relation to those supplied by local governments. The sprawl of illegal housing construction and the fiscal pressures associated with rapid and unplanned urbanization suggested that a "solution" to the problem should be investigated on the demand side of the problem. Famous court cases in the U.S.A. have dealt precisely with this issue. However, the enforcement of these planning rules is still a problematic issue. Zoning would be expected to be ineffective in countries like Portugal because people do not obey the Law in the same way as in Britain or the United States. Considering also that zoning raises difficult ethical issues, I realized I should start looking at the supply side of the problem. Assuming that urban growth is what it is, why do local governments not increase supply accordingly. The analysis of the particular case of Portugal clarified that part of the answer to this question relies on the centralized nature of government, where the ability of local governments to realize discretionary changes in their revenues (and therefore expenditures) is severely constrained. Therefore, this thesis can be understood as an inquiry into the implications on the quality of local services of a centralized system of government. However, most of the economic literature on local governments' decision making assumes a decentralized government and therefore the issue that naturally arises is whether this research has only a parochial scope (the Portuguese case) or a more broad range of interest. There are two main reasons to justify a broader scope for this thesis. Firstly, we might use Tullock's argument that people usually write about democracy although the majority of political regimes in the world are still autocracies. The same applies to decentralized and centralized countries if the conjecture that autocracies have usually politically centralized systems of government is accepted. Economists usually use models assuming decentralized governments (e.g. the median voter model) when most of the countries in the world are autocracies and therefore most likely centralized. Moreover, even within democratic countries there are centralized systems of government and on the other hand those which are decentralized are always subject to centralization trends. Secondly, some issues addressed in this thesis are not confined to centralized governments. This is the case of the analysis on the economies. This analysis is extremely important when considering intergovernmental grants with equalization purposes. The institutional and fiscal rigidities associated with centralized governments undermine the idea that local governments provide services according to the preferences of a representative voter within each jurisdiction (the median voter). On the other hand, it was an unexpected conclusion that there are affinities between the centralized governments' approach developed in this thesis and the approach developed by Tiebout (1956). Citizens unable to influence local decision-making through the vote will, ceteris paribus, migrate to jurisdictions where the fiscal "package" (local services and taxes) is more in line with their preferences. Alternatively, citizens who have more ability to pay may simply "exit" from public towards private provision. The analysis that follows is essentially the diagnosis of the problem.
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Celiker, Hasan. "Competition between species can drive public-goods cooperation within a species." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/70790.
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Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 40-43).
Costly cooperative strategies are vulnerable to exploitation by cheats. Microbial studies have suggested that cooperation can be maintained in nature by mechanisms such as reciprocity, spatial structure and multi-level selection. So far, however, almost all laboratory experiments aimed at understanding cooperation have relied on studying a single species in isolation. In contrast, species in the wild live within complex communities where they interact with other species. Little effort has focused on understanding the effect of interspecies competition on the evolution of cooperation within a species. We test this relationship by using sucrose metabolism of budding yeast as a model cooperative system. We find that when co-cultured with a bacterial competitor, yeast populations become more cooperative compared to isolated populations. We show that this increase in cooperation within yeast is mainly driven by resource competition imposed by the bacterial competitor. A similar increase in cooperation is observed i
by Hasan Celiker.
S.M.
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O'Brien, Siobhan Elizabeth. "Advances in the social evolution and ecology of bacterial public goods." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/17149.
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The altruistic production of public goods is one of most popular puzzles in evolutionary biology, and is most commonly explained by the indirect fitness benefit accrued by producers. I develop our understanding of the ecology and evolution of public good production by considering how inter- and intraspecific interactions can affect indirect fitness benefits, and ultimately, the evolutionary trajectory of public good cooperation in a bacterial public good system: 1) I demonstrate the ability of public good cooperators to adapt to the presence of cheats by reducing their own cooperative output, constraining cheat fitness as a consequence. 2) I examine the relative contributions of inter- (bacteriophage) and intraspecific (social cheats) parasites on shaping bacterial mutation rates, and demonstrate that social cheats can gain a fitness advantage in the presence compared with the absence of interspecific parasites. 3) I formally show for the first time, that siderophore-mediated detoxification can be an altruistic trait, rapidly selecting for the evolution of de novo cheats, and discuss the implications this process may have for community structure and function. 4) I extend (3) to assess the impact the natural microbial community has on the fitness consequences of siderophore-mediated detoxification in a natural soil environment. 5) I discuss the interplay between rapid microbial evolution and community context, and propose the impacts such interplay may have for biotechnological applications.
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Warziniack, Travis W. "Trade-related externalities and spatial public goods in computable general equilibrium." Laramie, Wyo. : University of Wyoming, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1806724721&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=18949&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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