Goods are often allocated publically by means of queuing processes in developing countries.In such situations, which group of citizens should a corrupt government official favor? In addition,what should be the basis for this favoritism? To the best of our knowledge, these salient questionshave...

Various plants and resources such as orchards are vulnerable to the detrimental effects of successful invasions by alien animal or plant species. To outline an appropriate policy response, we first use renewal theory to construct a stochastic model of optimal orchard management in the presence...

Analyses of optimal government capital structure generally follow Bohn (1990) and Barro (1995) in assuming risk neutrality or an exogenous risk premium. These analyses usually conclude that the optimal government capital structure stabilizes tax rates over time and states of nature to the...

We employ a stochastic dynamic programming approach to study decision making by an individual wishing to have an arranged marriage. First, we show that this individual never opts out of a voluntarily agreed upon marriage. Second, we demonstrate that our marrying individual uses a reservation...

Recently, Batabyal and Beladi (2009) have constructed a metric of the expected total monetary damage from the unintentional introduction of invasive species into a country called Home. In this note, we extend this line of inquiry by analyzing the statistical properties of this total monetary...

We study some measurement issues that arise when analyzing the long run behavior of the jth creative region's time t log output per creative class member (y_j(t)) when this region is part of an aggregate economy of j = 1, …, N creative regions. We focus first (second) on absolute (relative)...

Privatization generally enhances firm-level efficiency. The impact of privatization on fiscal efficiency has, however, been overlooked. Using the "tax-smoothing" ideas articulated in Barro (1979) and Bohn (1990), we argue that privatization may have an important impact on the welfare losses...