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.     

RANDOM AUTHORITY

This article rationalizes matrix management in a multiproject organization in which decisions must be adapted to local conditions but also coordinated with each other. Project managers are privately informed about local conditions and communicate strategically via cheap talk. Matrix management is modeled as a randomization over deterministic authority allocations. We show that random authority is strictly optimal when the conflict between adaptation and coordination is very severe or the coordination need is very small. Moreover, the optimal degree of delegation changes nonmonotonically in the coordination need when the incentives of the project managers are sufficiently aligned.     

Distribution of tastes and skills and the provision of local public goods

This paper introduces into the Tiebout model individuals with different skills. It is shown that the production techniques, the distribution of tastes and skills and intercommunity trade will affect the pattern of communities. In the suggested model competition with local public goods is Pareto optimal: communities will not be composed of identical people. The optimal solution requires that every community will tax everybody according to his marginal social cost. A Pareto efficient redistribution policy can be carried out only by a central government using lump-sum taxes. A federal income tax will affect community patterns and therefore is inefficient.     

一级密封招标在项目建设BOT方式中的应用分析

在项目建设BOT方式的环境下,分别对以特许期、单位产品收费价格、支付资金及总回收资金为竞标变量的一级密封招标进行了研究。建立了投标人之间的不完全信息静态博弈模型,给出了投标人的最优竞标策略并对各竞标变量选拔投标人的有效性进行了分析。分析显示当竞标人之间对市场的预期不同时,几种竞标变量下的最优竞标策略均存在失效的可能;当单位时间运营和维护成本可以忽略时,以总回收资金为竞标变量是最佳的选择。     

HOW SHOULD BANK REGULATORY AGENCIES BE ORGANIZED?

The U.S. Treasury Department (1991) makes a strong case for consolidating federal bank regulatory authority. However, its proposal to eliminate direct FDIC authority over insured nonmember banks contributes little to this end because deposit insurance requires supervisory oversight. The U.S. Treasury Department (1991) also maintains an independent role for the Federal Reserve. Elimination of neither the insurance agency nor the central bank appears practical. A better approach to regulatory agency consolidation would combine supervision with deposit insurance and central banking in an institutional structure modified somewhat from the present Federal Reserve structure.     

Decentralization via Federal and Unitary Referenda

This paper studies a model where the power to set policy (a choice of project) may be assigned to central or regional government via either a federal or unitary referendum. The benefit of central provision is an economy of scale, while the cost is political inefficiency. The relationship between federal and unitary referenda is characterized in the asymptotic case as the number of regions becomes large, under the assumption that the median project benefit in any region is a random draw from a fixed distribution, G. Under some symmetry assumptions, the relationship depends only on the shape of G, not on how willingness to pay is distributed within regions. The relationship to Cremer and Palfrey's “principle of aggregation” is established. Asymptotic results on the efficiency of the two referenda are also proved.     

Regulation and Investment under Uncertainty: An Application to Power Grid Interconnection

Using real options, we consider a firm that must undergo a costly and time-consuming regulatory process before making an irreversible, lagged investment whose value varies randomly. We apply our model to Hydro-Québec's proposal to build a 1,250 megawatts interconnection with Ontario. We find that the optimal starts of the regulatory review and of the project construction depend on the randomness of project benefits and on the duration of the regulatory authorization. A sensible limit on the latter allows the regulator to address changing circumstances at little cost to the firm. However, long and uncertain regulatory proceedings make investing less attractive.     

An evaluation of the relationship between minimum wage and unemployment: does the local cost-of-living matter?

This article examines the relationship between federal, state and municipal minimum wage laws, local cost-of-living (COL) and the unemployment rate. It finds a strong statistically significant positive relationship between minimum wages and unemployment once COL is taken into account. Our results suggest that federal minimum wage policy is likely to have more harmful effects in rural/low cost areas.     

Privatization of Water-Resource Development

This paper analyzes the inefficiencies from market power and return-flow externalities in private construction of a water project. The model pays special attention to increasing groundwater pumping costs, project set-up costs, limited project capacity, and return flow to the aquifer. For a given capacity, the return-flow externality causes project owners to construct the project too late when the price of groundwater is too high because the external benefit of return-flow to the aquifer is not captured. Market power exacerbates these effects since the project owner delays construction to accelerate groundwater overdraft. The return-flow externality and market power also decrease installed capacity and increase overdraft from the aquifer. Applying the model to the construction of the Central Arizona Project (CAP) for a given capacity, the estimated deadweight loss from hypothetical private construction of the project ($0.853 billion) is substantially less than the literature’s estimate of deadweight loss from actual construction by the Bureau of Reclamation ($2.603 billion). However, under the federal subsidies and insecure property rights that accompanied the CAP, private construction results in a larger estimated efficiency loss ($6.126 billion).     

Tax incentives in fiscal federalism: an integrated perspective

Abstract Models of fiscal federalism rarely account for the efficiency implications of intergovernmental fiscal ties for federal tax policy. This paper shows that fiscal institutions such that federal tax deductibility, vertical revenue‐sharing, and fiscal equalization (being common features of existing federations) encourage local taxation, but may discourage federal taxation. Furthermore, the structure of public spending is skewed towards local spending. We also show that, when considering Leviathan governments, fiscal institutions reduce confiscatory taxation by the federal government. The result is contrary to the Cartelization Hypothesis ( Brennan and Buchanan 1980 ). Finally, we characterize the efficient design of intergovernmental fiscal ties.     

Decentralizing development: Allocating public goods via competition

Decentralizing the allocation of public goods by giving funds directly to communities takes advantage of local information concerning needs, but leaves funds open to misuse or capture by local elites. A large scale development project in Indonesia attempts to overcome this downside of decentralized allocation by having communities compete locally for block grants. Competition weeds out less efficient projects. Increasing the number of villages bidding by 10% leads to a 1.8% decline in road construction costs. Increased community participation in project planning also leads to better outcomes.     

水权交易比率制度的设计与模拟

在传统水权交易制度下 ,不同用户之间的水权交易可能会减少交易双方之间河段、以及后续河段的留川水量。由于此第三者负效应的存在 ,水权交易一直难于应用与实施。本文设计了一套简单易行的水权交易比率制度。首先 ,政府规定各河段的最小留川水量需求 ;接着 ,根据留川水量需求决定各河段水权的初始分配 ,并根据交易双方用水的回流系数规定各用水者之间的交易比率。     

Is the value of an environmental public good sensitive to the providing institution?

In this paper we examine whether stated preferences and Willingness To Pay estimates, obtained in a choice experiment, are sensitive to the institutional context in which the good under evaluation is provided. Specifically, we examine the effects on valuation from employing two different institutions, an authority under the supervision of the National government and an authority under the supervision of an international body, the European Commission, as responsible for the design and implementation of a forest restoration project following a split sample approach. We find that coefficients of the utility model and Willingness To Pay estimates for all attributes are not statistically different between the two treatments. This is so despite the significant differences in the trust levels reported for the two institutions. We speculate that our results reflect the significance of the environmental good to the citizens given its local nature and the sheer size of the fire disaster.     

The effects of irreversibility on the timing and intensity of lumpy investment

This paper examines how changes in irreversibility of investment affect the timing and intensity of lumpy investment. We develop a continuous-time model wherein a firm is endowed with a perpetual option to invest in a project at any time by incurring a partially reversible investment cost at that instant. The amount of the investment cost is directly related to the intensity of investment that is endogenously chosen by the firm at the instant when the investment option is exercised. We show that higher irreversibility of investment induces the firm to raise its optimal investment trigger, thereby deferring the undertaking of the project. Furthermore, we show that changes in irreversibility of investment have no impact on the firm's optimal investment intensity due to two opposing effects that exactly offset each other. Finally, we show that higher irreversibility of investment reduces the value of the investment option and, therefore, makes the firm less valuable.     

公共资源节约管理任务实证研究——基于CPFL模型的地铁项目

提出了地铁工程的公共资源节约问题,设计了RCA模型,把地铁项目公共资源消耗问题的研究代换为对其全寿命周期成本LCC问题的研究;设计和使用CPFL模型建立LCC问题与功能缺陷之间的关联,实证获得地铁项目的建设活动性功能缺陷,指出克服这些缺陷是公共资源节约管理的任务.     

Horizontal Mergers,Entry and International Trade

We use a two‐country trade model to analyze an authority's decision to approve or reject a merger followed by entry, when the entrant can choose where to locate. We show that approval of a merger in the small country followed by timely, likely and sufficient entry may lead to lower consumer welfare than its rejection: when the alternative to such entry is entry into another country that also benefits consumers through trade, then the gains of attracting entry are small. In this context, we discuss differences between optimal decisions by the small country's authority, large country's authority and supranational authority.     

Alliances versus Federations: An Extension of Riker's Analysis of Federal Formation

This essay explores the distinction between federations and alliances and asks the question: When will states choose to federate rather than ally? William Riker argues that a necessary condition for a federal state's formation is that those offering the federal bargain must seek to “expand their territorial control, usually either to meet an external military or diplomatic threat or to prepare for military or diplomatic aggression and aggrandizement.” This argument, though, does not tell us why states sometimes respond to threats by forming federations and at other times by forming alliances. Here we address this issue directly and use a formal model of alliance formation to illustrate our arguments. Briefly, that model assumes states have initial endowments of military and economic resources, where economic resources enter utility functions directly and military capability influences preference only insofar as it determines a state's ability to counter or make threats. State can divert economic resources to military spending, and alliances, in turn, are self-enforcing coalitions designed to augment a state's offensive or defensive capabilities. Federations, which serve the same ends as alliances, are coalitions that need to be enforced by the “higher authority” established when the federation is formed. Our assumption is that states form federations in lieu of alliances if and only if (1) a stable alliance partition does not exist or, if one exists, it is dominated by an unstable partition and (2) if the cost of the loss of sovereignty to each state in the federation is offset by the gains from joining it, relative to what that state secures as its security value.     

Green auctions: A biodiversity study of mechanism design with externalities

This paper uses a mechanism design approach to study the biodiversity improvement in a territory, where the government is the principal and the landholders are the agents. In particular, I analyze an optimal mechanism that considers multidimensional bid which includes both the biodiversity improvement of the project and its cost. Additionally, this mechanism incorporates the externality (either positive or negative) that a biodiversity project causes in the surrounding agents who decided not to participate. Specifically, I assume that externalities enter in the cost function of the nonparticipating landholders. I show that, in the case of negative externalities, the government will implement a transfer function which is decreasing in the landholder's efficiency level. On the other hand, in the case of a positive externality, paradoxically the government may be interested in the nonparticipation of the most efficient landholders.     

Incentive Regulation and The Cost Structure of The Local Telephone Exchange Network

This paper combines an engineering process model of the cost of local exchange telecommunications firms with an analytical model of optimal incentive regulation (with ex post cost observability), to study empirically the properties of the optimal regulatory mechanism. Relying on detailed properties of the cost function, we examine three issues: (i) the extent of natural monopoly when informational rents associated with regulation are taken into account; (ii) the extent of incentive correction, which expresses the divergence of pricing under the optimal mechanism from optimal pricing under complete information; (iii) the implementation of optimal regulation through a menu of linear contracts. Our findings are that, for fixed territory, strong economies of scale allow local exchange telecommunications to retain monopoly characteristics even when the (informational) costs of regulation are properly accounted for, the incentive correction term is small in magnitude, and that optimal regulation can be well approximated through relatively simple linear contracts.     

Reserve accumulation and financial crises: From individual protection to systemic risk

This paper provides a new perspective on the relationship between countries׳ international reserve holdings and financial crises: while the “local” view holds that reserves may prevent domestic crises, it overlooks that the accumulation of reserves relaxes the financing constraint of the reserve currency country and may cause a financial crisis in the centre, which is transmitted globally. According to this “global” view reserve accumulation might destabilize the international financial system. Since the crisis affects all countries alike, the accumulation of reserves imposes a negative externality on non-accumulating countries.We integrate this idea in a theoretical model of the optimal amount of reserves and illustrate the gap between local and global optimality: the consideration of systemic risk lowers the demand for reserves. Moreover, if a supranational authority determines the optimal level of reserves, it internalizes the negative externality and accumulates fewer reserves. A macroprudential tax on reserve hoardings might implement the socially optimal solution. Our calibration analysis shows that these considerations are economically significant: they lower the optimal amount of reserves in the benchmark case by 45%.