We study voting over higher education finance in an economy with two regions and two separated labor markets. Households differ in their financial endowment and their children’s ability. Non-students are immobile. Students decide where to study; they return home after graduation with exogenous...

The paper provides a comparative analysis of the association between student achievement and public-private partnerships (PPPs) in schooling across countries. Student-level data from the PISA international achievement test provides information on the public-private character of both operation...

We study voting over higher education finance in an economy with risk averse households who are heterogeneous in income. We compare four different systems and analyse voters' choices among them: a traditional subsidy scheme, a pure loan scheme, income contingent loans and graduate taxes. Using...

Using a household production model of educational choices, we characterise a free market situation in which some agents (high wagers) educate their children full-time and spend a sizable amount of resources on them, while others (low wagers) educate them only partially. The free-market...

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...

Fiscal policy has become quite controversial in the post-Keynesian era, the debate over the Obama stimulus package being a contentious recent example. Some pundits go so far as to take the position that macroeconomic theory has failed to meaningfully progress in terms of providing useful...

The Mirrlees Review recommends that commodity taxation should in general be uniform, but with some goods consumed in conjunction with labour supply (such as child care) left untaxed. This paper examines the validity of this claim in an optimal income tax framework. Contrary to the recommendation...

Theory of mind and individual preferences are important determinants in social decision making. The current study examined in a large sample whether being a cooperative preference type is related with better theory of mind skills. Furthermore, by testing adolescents and adults, we examined the...

We model centralized school matching as a second stage of a simple Tiebout-model and show that the two most discussed mechanisms, the deferred acceptance and the Boston algorithm, both produce inefficient outcomes and that the Boston mechanism is more efficient than deferred acceptance. This...