Students' Characteristics and Performance in Economic Statistics

The vast majority of studies in college economics have dealt with the introductory principles course. In one of the rare research projects dealing with other courses, Professor Cohn attempts to identify factors affecting student performance in economic statistics. He considers such variables as grade point average, graduate vs. undergraduate status, major field, sex and credits in economics, mathematics and statistics. There are a few recognized limitations to his model, but the reader will find some of his results to be surprising indeed.     

Implementation with partial provability

We extend implementation theory by allowing the social choice function to depend on more than just the preferences of the agents and allowing agents to support their statements with hard evidence. We show that a simple condition on evidence is necessary for the implementation of a social choice function f when the preferences of the agents are state independent and sufficient for implementation for any preferences (including state dependent) with at least three agents if the social planner can perform small monetary transfers beyond those called for by f. If transfers can be large, f can be implemented in a game with perfect information when there are at least two players under a boundedness assumption. For both results, transfers only occur out of equilibrium. The use of evidence enables implementation which is robust in the sense that the planner needs little information about agents? preferences or beliefs and agents need little information about each others? preferences. Our results are robust to evidence forgery at any strictly positive cost.     

Communication in Repeated Games with Private Monitoring

The paper considers repeated games where each player can be observed by only a subset of the other players, and where players can make public announcements about the behavior of the players they observed. We address the following question: What is the minimal level of observability that is required to obtain efficient outcomes? The main result is that the limit set of sequential equilibrium payoffs, when the discount factor tends to one, contains the set of individual rational payoffs whenever each player is observed by at leasttwoother players.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Number: C73.     

Revenue and formula effects of school finance reform of wealth neutrality

The impact of school finance reform in South Carolina on wealth neutrality is analysed in the context of revenue and formula effects. The total effect is analysed, with or without local revenue effects, by splitting the revenue effect into state revenue and local revenue effects. Results indicate considerable improvements in wealth neutrality from 1978 to 1982. Moreover, only 25% of the total reduction in the wealth coefficient may be attributed to the change in the formula, the remainder being explained by changes in state and local revenues.