Public and Private Hospitals,Congestion, and Redistribution

This paper studies how congestion in the public health sector can be used as both an in‐kind and in‐cash redistributive tool. In our model, agents differ in productivity and they can obtain a health service either from a congested public hospital or from a noncongested private one at a higher price. With pure in‐kind redistribution, agents fail to internalize their impact on congestion, and the demand for the public hospital is higher than optimal. When productivities are not observable but the social planner can assign agents across hospitals, the optimal congestion is higher than in the full information case in order to relax incentive constraints and foster income redistribution. Finally, if agents can freely choose across hospitals, the optimal subsidy on the private hospital price may be negative or positive depending on the relative importance of redistribution and efficiency concerns. In this case, redistribution is limited if the quality of the public facility depends on the number of users.     

Social security, public education and the growth-inequality relationship

We study how the relationship between economic growth and inequality depends upon the levels of funding of two of the largest government programs, public education and social security. We do this in the context of an overlapping generations economy with heterogeneous agents where the government collects a tax on labor income to finance these programs. We show that in our model an increase in government spending on social security reduces income inequality and can have a non-monotonic effect on growth. When the initial level of social security funding is low, as is the case in most poor economies, then its increase will enhance growth. When its funding level is high as is typical for developed countries, we show that its further increase can slow down growth while reducing income inequality. These results obtain regardless of whether the increase in social security funding is financed by a tax increase or by cutting the public education budget. We also find that the effects of increasing the level of public education expenditures or the overall size of the government budget (holding the budget composition fixed) are characterized by similar non-monotonic growth-inequality relationships.     

Decentralization,social capital,and regional growth: The case of the Italian North-South divide

This paper aims to show how a region's constant level of social capital may have a very different impact on its economic growth depending on whether the central or the local level of government is responsible for regional policy.Our case study is the economic performance of Northern and Southern Italy in the post-World War II period, when a long phase of regional convergence came to a sudden halt in the early 1970s. We focus on the economic effects of the 1970s institutional reforms on government decentralization and wage bargaining. Our main hypothesis is that decentralization allocates the provision of public capital to institutions, the local ones, more exposed to a territory's social capital. Since social capital is lower in the Southern regions, decentralization made their developmental policies less effective from 1970 onwards, and regional inequality increased.We build an endogenous growth model augmented to include the interaction between social capital and public investment as well as the reform of the Italian labour market. We calibrate our model using data of the Italian regions for 1951–71. Our quantitative results indicate that decentralization triggered the influence of local social capital on growth and played a central role in halting the convergence path of the low-social-capital regions.     

Private investment with social benefits under uncertainty: The dark side of public financing

We develop a game‐theoretic model of private–public contribution to a long‐term project with sequential actions and moral hazard. A private agent is one who is in charge of both the financial contribution and the management effort, these two actions entailing private costs and uncertain ex‐post private and social benefits. A public agent is one who decides the amount of public funding to this quasi‐public good, knowing that the size and the probability of attaining a surplus ex post depend on the private agent's effort. We consider four public‐funding scenarios: benefit‐sharing versus cost‐sharing crossed with ex‐ante versus ex‐interim government intervention. We test our theoretical predictions by means of an experiment that confirms the main result of the model: Cost‐sharing public intervention is more effective than benefit‐sharing in boosting private financial contribution to the project. Furthermore, when public intervention comes after private contribution ( ex‐interim government intervention), both public‐funding scenarios have a negative impact on the private management effort. In our model, the latter result is explained by the private agent's high degree of risk aversion. These results have policy implications for strategic investments with long‐term social consequences. In deciding the optimal timing and method of the contribution, governments should also consider the indirect effects on agents’ long‐term management efforts.     

Distributional Effects of Public Education in an Economy with Public Pensions*

We study how the allocation of government expenditures between two major outlays—education and pay‐as‐you‐go social security—affects human capital distribution in an economy with heterogeneous agents. We consider an overlapping generations economy where the government maintains both programs, and allocates tax revenues to finance them. In our model, human capital is one of the factors of production. It is itself produced as a combined result of public inputs and private inputs. Parents' decisions to invest time and material resources in education of their children are motivated by altruism, heterogeneous in its strength across the population, which leads to heterogeneity of incomes. We investigate the effect of an increase in public funding for education on the human capital distribution. We show that in this framework, contrary to some earlier results, increased spending on public education may lead to higher inequality. Our results depend crucially on the interaction of education funding with the social security budget and on the elasticity of substitution in the learning technology.     

Public Investment, Congestion, and Private Capital Accumulation

This paper analyses the impact of public investment on the dynamics of private capital formation in an intertemporal optimising market-clearing framework. The key feature characterising the analysis is that the public good is treated as a durable capital good, subject to congestion. We show how in the presence of congestion the effect of government investment on private capital formation involves a tradeoff between the degree of substitution between private and public capital in production and the degree of congestion. Both lump-sum and distortionary tax financing are considered, with this tradeoff being tightened in the latter case     

赋税沉重引发中国皇权专制社会治乱循环的经济学解释

现代意义上税收的本质是公共产品的价格。如果一个国家的税负比较重,那么由政府提供的公共福利就应较多。因此,税负过重并不会导致国民生活困难从而引发社会危机。中国皇权社会的赋税不具备公共产品价格的性质,其本质是暴力潜能租金,农民私人产权位于国家税收权利之后。政府税收的增加使土地和劳动力等生产要素收益下降,并导致土地资产的价格下降,最终突破农民的生存底线,导致社会全面崩溃,引发中国皇权专制社会治乱循环。     

MANAGING PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LAND THROUGH PARTIAL INTERESTS

As property rights concerns grow along with budget pressures, government agencies charged with balancing resource policy objectives need to consider institutional alternatives to regulation and land purchase. This paper examines how public agencies participate in markets for partial interests in public and private land as a means of influencing resource use and conservation. The paper also reviews the application of real option theory to the valuation of conservation easements and considers potential extensions to other partial interests.     

论公共部门合理边界的决定——兼论混合公共部门的价格形成机制

本文从中国公共部门(主要是提供私人品的公共部门)实际存在的问题出发,研究了其中存在的政府失灵,揭示了其根源在于政府目标的错位,在于缺乏公共需求对于公共供给的决定机制和信息互动反馈机制。由此导致了以政府目标为基础的公共部门的边界经常是模糊不清的。因此,我们从理论上提出了社会效益目标最优化所决定的公共部门边界的基本命题,以此作为评价政府行为是否合理的依据。由于公共品与私人品的边界不清还必然导致混合公共部门的价格扭曲,在合理界定两者的前提下,通过不同约束条件和不同范围内的放开行业准入,引进多元化的竞争方式,能够增加公共供给和缓解供给不足,形成合理价格的均衡基础。     

Risk perceptions,voluntary contributions and environmental policy

This article studies the effect of uncertainty on agents’ voluntary contributions to environmental quality. There is uncertainty in future environmental quality and we consider a heterogeneity in individuals’ risk perception. In this context, the social optimum can be decentralized by means of tax-financed government subsidies to private provision. We distinguish the case of a government that represents perfectly agents’ preferences from the case of a government with its own risk preferences. In the two cases, we show that neutrality still holds.     

Private finance for public goods: social impact bonds

Social impact bonds (SIBs) attract private investment to social programs by paying a market rate of return if predefined outcome targets are met. SIBs monetize benefits of social interventions and tie pay to performance, limiting governmental control once the contract is designed. Despite policy enthusiasm across the globe, SIBs have failed to attract private market investors without substantial additional guarantees. SIBs raise questions about government’s ability to ensure broader public values. Using literature on contracting, performance management, and public private partnerships, this exploratory analysis focuses on institutional design, transaction costs, and performance measurement, outlining the opportunities and concerns SIBs present.     

How can transportation policies affect growth? A theoretical analysis of the long-term effects of alternative mobility systems

We present an example of how public policies affect the evolution of the economy by influencing consumption habits, life styles and work attitudes. In particular, we show that governments can boost long-run growth by moving public investment away from collective transportation systems and towards infrastructures necessary for using private vehicles. Indeed, by augmenting the relative convenience of using private mobility systems, which are those more costly for the households, the government induces them to increase their labour supply so as to afford larger expenditures in transportation. This has long-term welfare implications depending also on the negative externalities associated with transport.     

Nationalizations,bailouts and efficiency

ABSTRACT

We develop a theoretical model in which there are public and private firms and a government. When firms become insolvent, the government can intervene with bailouts or nationalizations. The government only intervenes when the bankruptcy of a firm entails social costs. In this setting, we analyze how government interventions affect allocative and productive efficiency. Nationalizations of private firms after unprofitable investments lead to increased allocative efficiency despite private ownership. The effort level chosen by the managers and employees working for a firm is also affected by the possibility of government interventions, reducing the productive efficiency advantage of private firms.     

How (Not) to Foster Innovations in Public Infrastructure Projects*

The government wants an infrastructure‐based public service to be provided. First, the infrastructure has to be built; subsequently, it has to be operated. Should the government bundle the building and operating tasks in a public–private partnership? Or should it choose traditional procurement (i.e., delegate the tasks to different firms)? Each task entails unobservable investments to come up with innovations. It turns out that, depending on the nature of the innovations, bundling can either stimulate or discourage investments. Moreover, we find that if renegotiation cannot be prevented, public–private partnerships might lead the government to deliberately opt for technologically inferior projects.     

DISCOUNT RATE FOR PUBLIC INVESTMENT IN A MONETARY DISEQUILIBRIUM ECONOMY*

In this paper, we explore the social rate of discount for public investment in a monetary overlapping generations model which allows for market disequilibria arising from price and wage rigidities. Financing public investment with a lump-sum tax on the younger generation, borrowing and money supply, the government maximizes the sum of generational utilities discounted by a social rate of time preference. For the social welfare optimum, it is required to take the boundary-maintaining policy by making demand for output equal to supply. In a stationary state, we show that (i) the social rate of discount on the Keynesian-repressed inflation boundary should be the weighted average of the social rate of time preference and the market rate of interest, the weights depending on the amount of private investment crowded out by public investment, and (ii) on the Keynesian-classical boundary it should be a modified version of the weighted average rule, containing an extra term which represents the marginal opportunity cost of public investment through its impact on labour employment.     

Price policy and returns to soil conservation in semi-arid Kenya

This paper develops an approach that uses relatively easily-available data to examine empirically how policy-induced price changes affect the incentives of farmers in developing countries to adopt soil conservation measures. The model shows that there is no simple relationship between price distortions created by government policies and farmers' incentives to adopt conservation measures. Policy-induced price changes could lead to either more or less conservation, depending on site-specific conditions. Data from a semi-arid region in Kenya are used to illustrate the magnitude and direction of changes in price policy on returns to terracing and to show how results are affected by the nature of the conservation technology. In the study area, higher commodity prices increase incentives to adopt conservation measures on steep slopes, but lower them on shallower slopes. If terraces were to require more land to be taken out of production than assumed in the calculations, higher commodity prices would tend to discourage farmers from adopting them.     

A dynamic approach to PES pricing and finance for interlinked ecosystem services: Watershed conservation and groundwater management

A theory of payment for ecosystem services (PES) pricing consistent with dynamic efficiency and sustainable income requires optimized shadow prices. Since ecosystem services are generally interdependent, this requires joint optimization across multiple resource stocks. We develop such a theory in the context of watershed conservation and groundwater extraction. The optimal program can be implemented with a decentralized system of ecosystem payments to private watershed landowners, financed by efficiency prices of groundwater set by a public utility. The theory is extended to cases where land is publicly owned, conservation instruments exhibit non-convexities on private land, or the size of a conservation project is exogenous. In these cases, conservation investment can be financed from benefit taxation of groundwater consumers. While volumetric conservation surcharges induce inefficient water use, a dynamic lump-sum tax finances investment without distorting incentives. Since the optimal level of conservation is generated as long as payments are correct at the margin, any surplus can be returned to consumers through appropriate block pricing. The present value gain in consumer surplus generated by the conservation-induced reduction in groundwater scarcity serves as a lower bound to the benefits of conservation without explicit measurement of other benefits such as recreation, biodiversity, and cultural values.     

Partial privatization in mixed duopoly

We investigate a quantity-setting duopoly involving a private firm and a privatized firm jointly owned by the public and private sectors. The private firm maximizes profits, while the privatized firm takes both profits and social welfare into consideration. We consider how many shares the government should hold in the privatized firm. We find that neither full privatization (the government does not hold any shares) nor full nationalization (the government holds all of the shares) is optimal under moderate conditions.     

我国政府支出和公共投资对私人投资的效应分析

首先采用Diamond模型对公共投资及各项政府支出对私人投资影响进行理论分析;然后利用1980~2005年间的数据,运用协整检验、单方程误差修正模型分析了我国政府支出和公共投资及各项政府支出对私人投资的长短期效应;经验结果表明无论从长期还是短期看政府支出挤出了私人投资而公共投资则挤入了私人投资,国防支出和行政管理支出在长期和短期都挤出了私人投资,社会文教支出长期挤入了私人投资,短期挤出了私人投资。     

STRATEGIC BUDGET CONSTRAINTS IN A UNIONIZED MIXED OLIGOPOLY

This paper considers the budget‐constraint problem where the government decides whether or not to impose a budget constraint on the public firm, assuming the public firm is less efficient than private firms. We find that imposing budget constraints on the public firm is the preferred choice because of the welfare‐improving effect. Our model suggests that the wage levels of the public firm can be lower or higher than those of private firms depending upon the degree of inefficiency. These results differ from Ishida and Matsushima's findings that in a unionized mixed duopoly, tight budget constraints can enhance social welfare when the public firm is as efficient as private firms.