“Almost” subsidy-free spatial pricing in a multi-dimensional setting

Consider a population of citizens uniformly spread over the entire plane. The population faces a problem of locating public facilities financed by its users, who face an idiosyncratic private access cost to the facility. We show that, under mild assumptions, an external intervention that covers a tiny portion of the facility cost is sufficient to guarantee secession-proofness or no cross-subsidization, where no group of individuals is charged more than the cost incurred if it had acted on its own. Moreover, we demonstrate that in this case the Rawlsian access pricing is the only mechanism that rules out secession threats.     

Access Regulation and the Timing of Infrastructure Investment

This paper examines infrastructure investment incentives under a system of 'regulation by negotiation'. We demonstrate that an appropriately specified access pricing rule can induce private firms to choose to invest at a socially optimal time. The optimal regulatory regime allocates investment costs to the access provider and seeker based on their relative use-values of the facility. It is superior to an unregulated environment because it commits firms ex ante to an access charge that allows for sunk cost recovery. In addition, we show that when the time that access is sought is flexible both replacement- and historical-cost asset valuation methodologies can lead to optimal investment incentives. However, when seeker timing is restricted, historical cost can give rise to distorted incentives.     

Central governance or subsidiarity: A property-rights approach to federalism

We consider a model where one region in a federation can realize a public project after undertaking value-increasing investments. While negotiations on the federal level ensure that an efficient project size is implemented in equilibrium, non-contractibility of investments causes the overall outcome to differ across regimes. If the region bears the entire implementation costs of its policies, underinvestment prevails and subsidiarity (centralized governance) is superior when spillovers are weak (strong). Conversely, if linear cost sharing arrangements are feasible, decentralized authority often admits a socially optimal outcome while centralized authority (with majority or unanimity rule) does not.     

Worksharing and Access Discounts in the Postal Sector with Asymmetric Information*

This paper analyzes the optimal worksharing and access amounts granted to mailers and entrants in a liberalized postal sector when there is asymmetric information about the Post Office’s (PO) costs. I show that when the regulator is unable to ascertain which part of the total cost of sorting has to be attributed to each sorting facility, the optimal “access discount” given to entrants is set in a pro-competitive way. This facilitates the entry of firms that are less efficient than the PO. However, the optimal “worksharing discount” may prevent the entry of mailers that are more efficient than the PO.     

Access to an Essential Facility: Efficient Component Pricing Rule or Unrestricted Private Property Rights?

In this paper, we compare the access to an essential facility in two different property rights regimes. In the first, the owner of the facility has an unrestricted private property right of the essential facility. In the second, access is regulated according to the efficient component pricing rule. Proponents of the second regime claim that this rule is efficient, for it forecloses the complementary market only to inefficient producers. We prove that, as far as entry is concerned, the two legal frameworks are equivalent if we do not consider the possibility of the transfer of the property right, and that if this is allowed the efficient component pricing rule might exclude efficient suppliers.     

Local public goods, inter-regional transfers and private information

Suppose that the centre wishes to make transfers between member states of a federation to reduce inequality. However, it lacks precise information concerning the cost differences that are responsible for the initial income inequality. We examine the implications of asymmetric information for the design of the transfer scheme. We show that if member states’ inherent cost levels as local public good providers take discrete values, the first best, or ‘complete information’, transfer scheme may or may not violate incentive compatibility. If inherent cost is a continuous random variable, such a scheme certainly violates incentive compatibility. We also explore the possibility of binding participation constraints. In our model, a binding incentive compatibility constraint leads to a reduction in effort devoted to cost reduction, and a binding participation constraint will also lead to a violation of Samuelson's optimality condition for public good provision.     

EXIT, CHOICE OR LOYALTY: PATIENT DRIVEN COMPETITION IN PRIMARY CARE

ABSTRACT ** :  This paper analyses the potential costs and benefits from patient driven competition between GPs and specialists by comparing gate-keeping with direct access to specialist care. The two access rules are compared under fee-for-service and capitation, on their performance at minimizing both total financial costs and patients' opportunity cost of time in care. To analyse the social cost of patients' potential access mistakes, two types of illnesses are considered, with two levels of severity and an equal probability for each of the four events. The results generated under information symmetry show that gate-keeping always dominates in terms of minimizing financial cost. Results are extended to show that under patients' heterogeneity with respect to time preferences, allocative efficiency can be enhanced in gate-keeping by giving the patient the option to seek a specialist directly, provided he bears the extra cost. When turning to information asymmetry, results are reversed, and direct access is shown to be more cost effective. This is due to patients' ability to constrain providers' opportunistic behaviour by 'voting with their feet'. Beyond increasing allocative efficiency, patient choice is therefore found, under certain conditions, to contribute towards enhancing productive efficiency. Finally, introducing co-payments to share the financial risk associated with direct access potentially weakens patients' ability to curb providers' strategic behaviour. Under information asymmetry, direct access to specialist care should therefore remain free if patient's disutility in time in care is linear. When it is instead increasing, we show that a co-payment becomes necessary to curb specialists' information rent. Finally, under information asymmetry, the mixed solution (gate-keeping with optional direct access) improves on pure gate-keeping but is still suboptimal.     

Local television,citizen knowledge and U.S. senators' roll-call voting

I study the effect of access to local television on citizens' political knowledge. I do so by utilizing the mismatch between U.S. television markets and state borders, causing some citizens to receive local television which primarily covers neighboring state politics. I find that access to relevant local television causes citizens to be more informed about their senators' roll-call votes, and more likely to hold opinions about these senators. I also find that citizens with access to relevant local television are more likely to assess their senators based on how well the senators' roll-call votes align with the citizens' policy preferences. These results suggest that passively acquired information through television can help individuals evaluate their elected representatives.     

THE DETERMINANTS OF HAZARDOUS WASTE DISPOSAL CHOICE: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF HALOGENATED SOLVENT WASTE SHIPMENTS

Disposal of hazardous waste is more complex than simply choosing the option with the lowest price: Legislation may hold a waste generator responsible for cleaning up a badly contaminated waste disposal site if the operator of that site goes bankrupt. This paper estimates conditional logit models of a generator's choice of waste management facility (TSDF) for shipments of halogenated solvent waste originating in California in 1995. The probability that a facility is selected as the destination of a shipment depends on the cost of shipping to and disposal at the facility, on existing contamination at the site, and on the track record of the facility, suggesting that generators do seem to balance current disposal costs with the likelihood of future liability. There is no evidence that generators prefer facilities owned by publicly traded firms, but when generators do choose TSDFs belonging to a publicly traded company, they prefer wealthier companies. (JEL Q21)     

Persuasion with communication costs

This paper studies strategic transmission of verifiable information with reporting costs that continuously increase in the precision of the report. Contrary to previous literature, it is shown that the unraveling result first derived by Milgrom (1981) is relatively robust to costly reporting. A separating equilibrium exists even with arbitrarily high reporting costs. Intuitively, the costs work as a signaling device and a combination of disclosure of information and costly signaling accomplishes full separation. With reporting costs there are typically multiple equilibria. For example, a pooling equilibrium exists if and only if the reporting costs are high. Finally, a separating equilibrium exists when the receiver has to make a costly effort in order to access the information in a report, as long as this cost is not too high.     

The impact of public information on bidding in highway procurement auctions

A number of papers in the theoretical auction literature show that the release of information regarding the seller's valuation of an item can cause bidders to bid more aggressively. This widely accepted result in auction theory remains largely untested in the empirical literature. Recent theoretical work has also shown that this effect can be more pronounced in auctions with larger common cost uncertainty. We examine the impact of a policy change by the Oklahoma Department of Transportation that led to the release of the state's internal estimate of the costs to complete highway construction projects. We perform a differences-in-differences analysis comparing bidding in Texas, a state that had a uniform policy of revealing the same information all throughout the period of analysis, to bidding in Oklahoma. Our results show that, in comparison to Texas auctions, the average bid in Oklahoma fell after the change in engineers’ cost estimate (ECE) policy. This decline in bids was even larger for projects where the common uncertainty in costs is greater. Moreover, the within-auction standard deviation of bids fell after the change in ECE policy with the most significant decline observed again in projects with greater common cost uncertainty.     

Transfers in a polarized country: bridging the gap between efficiency and stability

We consider a political economy model of country whose citizens have heterogeneous preferences for a national policy and some regions may contemplate a threat of secession. The country is efficient if its breakup into smaller countries leads to an aggregate utility loss. We show that in an efficient country whose citizens' preferences exhibit a high degree of polarization, a threat of secession cannot be eliminated without inter-regional transfers. We also demonstrate that if majority voting is used to determine the redistribution schemes within the country, then a high degree of polarization yields the full-compensation scheme as the unique political equilibrium.     

How Well Does the Australian Aged Pension Provide Social Insurance?

Social security plays an essential role in an economy, but if designed incorrectly, it can distort individuals' labour supply and savings behaviour. We explore how well the Australian means‐tested pension system provides social insurance by changing the settings of the system and calculating the impact on welfare. In order to exclude trivial welfare gains, we keep the cost of the programmes constant. We find that the means‐tested pension system is welfare reducing, but does provide a better outcome than a PAYG system of equivalent cost. We also find that if the benefit amount is held constant, and hence the cost of the pension programme is allowed to vary, a taper rate of 1.0 is optimal. However, once we hold the cost of the programme constant, a universal benefit scheme provides the best welfare outcome.     

On the performance of endogenous access pricing

Endogenous access pricing (ENAP) is an alternative to the traditional procedure of setting a fixed access price that reflects the regulator’s estimate of the supplier’s average cost of providing access. Under ENAP, the access price reflects the supplier’s actual average cost of providing access, which varies with realized industry output. We show that in addition to eliminating the need to estimate industry output accurately and avoiding a divergence between upstream revenues and costs, ENAP can enhance the incentive of a vertically integrated producer to minimize its upstream operating cost. However, ENAP can sometimes discourage surplus-enhancing investment.     

A Theory of Why the Ruthless Revolt

We examine whether ruthless members of society are more likely to revolt against an existing government. The decision of whether to participate can be analyzed in the same way as the decision to exercise an option. We consider this decision when there are two groups in society: the ruthless and average citizens. We assume that the ruthless differ from the average citizens because they invest in fighting technology and therefore face a lower cost of participation. The participation decision then captures two important (and conflicting) incentives. The first is that, since participation is costly, there is value in waiting to participate. The second is that there is value in being the first mover and capturing a greater share of the “spoils of war” if the revolution is successful. Our model generates the following implications. First, since participation is costly, there is some positive threshold for the net benefit that must be met before any individual decides to participate. Second, if the ruthless do not have a significant cost advantage, then one cannot predict, a priori, that the ruthless lead the revolt. Third, when the ruthless have a significant cost advantage, they have a lower threshold and always enter the conflict first. Finally, existing regimes can delay revolution among one or both groups by increasing the cost of participation.     

Complements and substitutes in common agency

In this paper we analyse the problem of the rent obtained by the agent in private common agency games. The key features for answering this question are the properties of the cost function of the agent. We prove that if this cost function is submodular (costs complements) then there is no equilibrium in which the agent makes a rent and if the cost function is supermodular (costs substitutes) then in all equilibria the agent makes a rent. We also examine the problem in some intermediate cases.     

Costly Tax Enforcement and Financial Repression

Using an overlapping generations production‐economy model characterized by financial repression, purposeful government expenditures and cost of tax collection, we analyse whether financial repression can be explained by the cost of raising taxes. We show that with public expenditures affecting utility of the agents, modest costs of tax collection tend to result in financial repression being pursued as an optimal policy by the consolidated government. However, when public expenditures are purposeless, the above result only holds for relatively higher costs of tax collection. But, more importantly, costs of tax collection cannot produce a monotonic increase in the reserve requirements. What are critical, in this regard, are the weights the consumer assigns to the public good in the utility function and the size of the government.     

Market Entry Regulation and International Competition*

We analyze a non‐cooperative two‐country game where each government decides whether to allow free market entry of firms or to regulate market access. We show that a Pareto‐efficient allocation may result in equilibrium. In particular, if the cost difference between home and foreign production is “significant,” production will be located in the cost‐efficient country exclusively; and if this cost difference is even “substantial,” the induced allocation is also Pareto efficient. Only if the cost difference is “insignificant,” production may take place in both countries and the allocation is inefficient.     

Pricing access: Forward-looking versus backward-looking cost rules

Regulators across many different jurisdictions and industries have recently adopted the practice of setting access prices based on the current costs of providing the relevant facilities. Though widely regarded as being efficient, the efficiency implications of using current costs instead of historical costs have not been formally analyzed. Our analysis shows that given stochastic costs, forward-looking access prices retard investment and are generally dominated by access prices determined by historical cost whenever investment is desired.