Buyer Alliances as Countervailing Power in WIC Infant-Formula Auctions

State agencies in infant-formula procurement auctions receive lower bids when they are in buyer alliances than when they are unallied. The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) uses an auction to procure infant formula. Manufacturers bid on the right to be an agency’s sole supplier by offering a rebate on formula sold through WIC. Agencies frequently join together in buyer alliances. An empirical estimation shows that bids are lower to alliances and that lower prices result because alliances are heterogeneous. Results suggest that when heterogeneity is not controlled, bids decline with alliance size, which has policy implications because Congress recently limited alliance size.     

Learning from cost analyses: an illustration from the UK's New Deal for Disabled People (NDDP)

This article describes a cost analysis of an employment programme available to people claiming incapacity benefits in the UK. The NDDP was delivered locally by contracted providers called ‘job brokers’. The cost analysis found great variation among job brokers' costs and profitability, much of which seems attributable to differences in job broker size. The methods described here will be useful in evaluations wherever multiple institutions are contracted by governments to deliver services, especially when these institutions are involved in several different programmes.     

Using surveys of business perceptions as a guide to growth‐enhancing fiscal reforms

This paper assesses the merits of using business perceptions of growth constraints as a guide to growth‐enhancing fiscal policy reforms. Using endogenous growth models in which the government levies an income tax to provide public inputs to the production of private firms, the paper demonstrates that such perceptions of growth constraints may be misleading from a policy perspective. In particular, firms can be expected to systematically overestimate the growth‐enhancing effects of lower tax rates relative to public services and public capital, and underestimate the growth‐enhancing effects of greater provision of public capital relative to taxation and public services. In addition, we show that firms rank different public services and different types of public capital according to the actual costs they impose on firms. It is then shown that these theoretical predictions regarding how firms rank constraints correspond closely to the observed ranking of constraints by firms in the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys.     

Good timing: The economics of optimal stopping

This paper presents an economic interpretation of the optimal “stopping” of perpetual project opportunities under both certainty and uncertainty. Prior to stopping, the expected rate of return from delay exceeds the rate of interest. The expected rate of return from delay is the sum of the expected rate of change in project value and the expected rate of change in the option premium associated with waiting. At stopping the expected rate of return from delay has fallen to the rate of interest. Viewing stopping in this way unifies the theoretical and practical insights of the theory of stopping under certainty and uncertainty.     

入美企业如何避开国家安全限制

2008年11月14日,美国财政部发布《2007年外国投资与国家安全法》（FINSA）的实施细则,此项法律旨在改革美国外国投资委员会（CFIUS）关于国外机构收购、兼并和接管美国企业国家安全审查体制。2008年12月,美国财政部发布了有关经过CFIUS审核认为存在国 家安全问题的交易类别指引，正式条例和相关指引传递的明确信息是，在个案基础上，CFIUS将保持其对外国投资交易进行国家安全审查的广泛自由裁量权。那么，美国这些法规的出台将会给我国企业以外资并购的方式进入美国市场带来怎样的影响？     

Contingent Valuation: Controversies and Evidence

Contingent valuation (CV) has become one of the most widely usednon-market valuation techniques. CV's prominence is due to itsflexibility and ability to estimate total value, includingpassive use value. Its use and the inclusion of passive use valuein benefit-cost analyses and environmental litigation are thesubject of a contentious debate. This paper discusses key areasof the debate over CV and the validity of passive use value. Weconclude that many of the alleged problems with CV can beresolved by careful study design and implementation. We furtherconclude that claims that empirical CV findings are theoreticallyinconsistent are not generally supported by the literature. Thedebate over CV, however, has clarified several key issues relatedto nonmarket valuation and can provide useful guidance both to CVpractitioners and the users of CV results.