State Lotteries and Agency Costs: Hidden Costs to Nonparticipants

A bstract .   Some nonparticipants support lotteries because they expect the lottery will shift a portion of their tax burden to participants. The principal-agent model suggests that lotteries will result in an above normal increase in state expenditures. This paper finds that 77 percent of net lottery proceeds are utilized for above normal spending increases, suggesting that tax benefits to nonparticipants are greatly diminished.     

State Lotteries, Isolation and Economic Growth in the U.S.

This paper uses a Granger causality test adapted for use with cross-section time series data, to (1) test the relationship between lottery revenue and state economic growth (per capita income), and (2) address the importance of cross-border purchases in the relationship. Neither issue has been empirically tested previously. Previous evidence (Caudill, et al., 1995) suggests that states surrounded by lotteries are more likely than isolated states to introduce lotteries. But the empirical results here suggest that lotteries do not contribute to economic growth unless the state is isolated from other state lotteries. The importance of isolation suggests that cross-border purchases (exports) of lottery tickets have a significant impact on the effectiveness of lotteries as fiscal policies, and that defensive lotteries (those introduced to keep citizens from buying tickets from neighboring states) are ineffective.     

Welfare Spending and Poverty: Cutting Back Produces More Poverty, Not Less

The "New Consensus " on welfare expresses the idea that the major problem in social welfare is dependency , not poverty Much of the evidence for this perspective has come from trend line data indicating that over time poverty did not evaporate in the face of increases in social welfare spending Using various measures of the "dependent" poor, the empirical analysis presented suggests that reducing welfare expenditures relative to need does not produce less poverty and dependency     

西部贫困开发：格局·障碍·路径

贫困西部化是我国政府步入新世纪的一项重大理论课题和实践课题。中国西部曾是演绎中国历史的重要舞台,农业明的发祥地,今天无论是贫困发生率,还是贫困深度及贫困强度都客观地成为我国最大的贫困区。西部贫困地区是一种低水平均衡状态,由自然,历史,社会,化,体制等多种因素不断演绎形成贫困循环,所以,贫困开发的路径选择应用系统和综合的观点,树立“持久战”的思想,实施多样化战略。     

Estimating the Demand for Housing, Land, and Neighbourhood Characteristics

This paper provides estimates of the structure of demand for individual housing and neighbourhood characteristics and for land in two British cities. We estimate a hedonic price function, and from this obtain the implicit prices of house attributes. These prices are used to estimate a demand system for each city. These perform well, and enable us to calculate price and income elasticities for each of the non-dichotomous characteristics and for land. To counteract criticisms of demand estimates derived within the hedonic framework a method is developed for selecting an appropriate set of instrumental variables. Estimates derived from this method, however, differ only slightly from those obtained using the conventional techniques. Several features of these estimates provide insights into the unusual characteristics of the British housing market, the effects of constraints imposed by land use planning, and the effects of changing income distribution on the structure of demand.     

Demand for education, and its estimation

Since education produces major externalities and has important merit want characteristics, the estimation of a demand schedule is extremely difficult. Demand estimation for higher education is made somewhat easier because of the great importance of the associated costs and the relevant private substitutes, i.e. private colleges and universities. Therefore higher education is a good candidate for the application of the individual (economic) preference approach, which is based on the assumption that individuals are aware of their need for education about as they are aware of their needs for products provided by the open market.

The estimation of demand for primary and secondary education can rely only to a minor extent on the individual (economic) preference approach. The voter's behavior approach analysis is likely to be more directly applicable. Study of the behavior of voters and the behavior of legislators and members of school boards can shed light on the demand for education. Analytic insight can be gained also by the “voting with one's feet”, and the “calculus of consent” methods.

Finally, benefit-cost analysis can be applied in situations where education gives an extremely weak demand signal. In education we often are less interested in overall benefit-cost estimates than in the benefit-cost positions in which different important interest groups find themselves with regard to education. Such analysis requires the identification of significant interest groups, bargaining strategies, and bargaining patterns, as well as of ways in which education decision makers respond to group pressures.     

Ricardo,Gold, and Rails: Discovering the Origins of Progress and Poverty

Henry George's Progress and Poverty was one of the most widely read books of the 19^th century. It is important to acknowledge the influence of classical writers such as Smith and Ricardo on George's thought. However, the content of George's most popular work cannot be fully appreciated unless one takes account of the historical period and social context within which its author came to maturity: Philadelphia and California before 1879 are part of the story of Progress and Poverty ( 1979 ).     

Child Poverty and Welfare Benefits: A Reassessment with State Data of the Claim That American Welfare Breeds Dependence

Abstract . Several critics of the American welfare system have claimed that it exacerbates the problem of poverty by making living in poverty preferable to acting in ways that would promote upward mobility. One version of this argument, by Gallaway and Vedder, proposes that in the 1970s this resulted in states with high welfare benefit exhibiting increases in child poverty. State data for 1970, 1980, and 1970-1980 are analyzed by means of multiple regression to assess this argument. The results suggest that the relationships between high welfare benefits, child poverty, and recipiency of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) are much less clear-cut than has been alleged. They also cast doubt on the wisdom of using aggregate data to analyze these relationships.     

Robust Methods for the Analysis of Income Distribution, Inequality and Poverty

Income distribution embeds a large field of research subjects in economics. It is important to study how incomes are distributed among the members of a population in order for example to determine tax policies for redistribution to decrease inequality, or to implement social policies to reduce poverty. The available data come mostly from surveys (and not censuses as it is often believed) and often subject to long debates about their reliability because the sources of errors are numerous. Moreover the forms in which the data are availabe is not always as one would expect, i.e. complete and continuous (microdata) but one also can only have data in a grouped form (in income classes) and/or truncated data where a portion of the original data has been omitted from the sample or simply not recorded.
Because of these data features, it is important to complement classical statistical procedures with robust ones. In tis paper such methods are presented, especially for model selection, model fitting with several types of data, inequality and poverty analysis and ordering tools. The approach is based on the Influence Function (IF) developed by Hampel (1974) and further developed by Hampel, Ronchetti, Rousseeuw & Stahel (1986). It is also shown through the analysis of real UK and Tunisian data, that robust techniques can give another picture of income distribution, inequality or poverty when compared to classical ones.     

Household Surveys,Consumption, and the Measurement of Poverty

Household surveys are playing an increasingly important role in the measurement of poverty and well-being around the world. The Living Standards Measurement Study, which was begun in the World Bank under the guidance of Graham Pyatt in 1979, has played an important role in this movement. Its surveys are widely used within the Bank to measure consumption-based poverty, and survey data are now the exclusive basis for the global poverty counts. This paper discusses a number of unresolved issues in using consumption-based surveys for measuring well-being, including the choice of a money-metric versus welfare-ratio approach, the collection of suitable price information, the effects of measurement error on estimation, and methods for correcting per capita consumption for the demographic structure of the household.     

贵州省毕节市贫困动态研究 ——基于贫困距离指数分析

科学的掌握贫困的动态变化,可以为扶贫开发政策的制定提供良好的建议。本文通过计算毕节市2000-2015年各县区贫困距离指数,分析了该地区的贫困格局及动态。结果表明,全区8个县区经济维度上在2010年已实现脱贫。各县区之间的脱贫速率存在较明显的差异性,从脱贫速率上来看七星关区、金沙县、黔西县快于其他5个县区。贫困县区在空间上存在依赖性,贫困呈现出连片分布的特征。最后,建议在发展经济的同时,应该加强对相对落后的地区的扶持力度,缩小地区之间的差异。     

需求与我国自主创新能力的形成：基于收入分配视角

收入分配所决定的需求因素,是决定微观企业乃至一国自主创新动力的关键内生要素.我国宏观国家层面与微观企业层面自主创新发展能力滞后,是现阶段偏向于资本而非劳动者的收入分配结构的造成的需求规模与需求结构的"扭曲"所导致.本文分析表明,这种"扭曲性"收入分配结构的形成与决定机制,是由劳动力供需条件、地方政府的官员治理行为以及二元化城乡分割中农民工的收入来源结构三方面因素综合作用而成的.任何试图改变我国自主创新能力发展滞后局面的政策措施,都应当充分考虑我国收入分配决定机制形成的复杂性、长期性以及战略时机.     

Social Security, Poverty and Economic Transition: An Analysis for Bulgaria 1992–96

The paper addresses the issues of poverty and social security in a transitional environment on the basis of recent economic developments in Bulgaria. Special emphasis is placed on the need for a new type of social safety net stemming from the radical changes in the political and economic system. The evolution of the social security system in Bulgaria during the transition is analysed focusing on such elements as the pension system, unemployment benefits, child allowances, etc. The empirical analysis is based on extensive use of data from the Bulgarian Household Budget Surveys during the period 1992–1996. Poverty in Bulgaria is measured using different poverty measurements and some quantitative results showing the changing dimensions of poverty in the transition period are presented and discussed in the paper.EES or e-mail at Corresponding author. E-mail:     

Demand for Customized Products, Production Flexibility, and Price Competition

We examine markets where, in addition to production of standard (core) products, mass customization is technologically feasible. We compare a setting where a monopolist provides both standard and custom goods to a setting where an entrant joins the custom market and find customers' tastes affect the social desirability of entry. The entrant is unconcerned about the impact of its custom production on the incumbent's core product market and in some cases may supply more custom products than is socially desirable. Entry enhances (reduces) social welfare if consumers' core valuations are positively (negatively) related to their value added for customization.     

浅析中国部分地区的贫困成因及脱贫对策

本文立足于加快实现贫困地区的全面脱贫,系统分析了当前我国部分地区长期处于贫困状态的原因,并结合我国国情,有针对性地提出了相应的脱贫对策,最后援引广东省乐昌市九峰镇的脱贫事例,进一步诠释了文中的观点。