This paper aims at estimating the effect on achievement of various types of schools: private, private but government-dependent and public ones. It is based on the analysis of Reading test scores of 15-year-old students surveyed in 2002 across OECD and non-OECD countries. The estimation of the...

This paper considers an economy where groups compete in a contest for power to redistribute future income in their favor. An increased external threat of terrorism--either an increase in the likelihood of a successful terrorist attack or a greater loss of income in the event of a successful...

This paper develops a positive analysis of alliance formation that builds on a simple economic model featuring a “winner-take-all” contest for control of some resource. When an alliance forms, members pool their efforts in that contest and,if successful, apply the resource to a joint...

This paper analyzes the effects of anticipated inflation on the resource allocations between production and financial services. We develop a model with heterogeneous workers and two sectors economy. A manufacturing sector producing a final composite good and a financial sector providing monetary...

We present the Progressive Second Price auction, a new decentralized mechanism for allocation of variable-size shares of a resource among multiple users. Unlike most mechanisms in the economics litterature, PSP is designed with a very small message space, making it suitable for real-time market...

This paper aims at estimating the effect on achievement of various types of schools: private, private but government-dependent and public ones. It is based on the analysis of Math, Science and Reading test scores of 15 year-olds students surveyed in 2002 across OECD and non-OECD countries. The...

The paper develops a Romer-type growth model with a research sector, a manufacturing sector, and a financial sector and shows that inflation has an adverse effect on economic growth. Higher inflation increases the incentives for agents to use money substitutes through financial services in an...

Many performance measures, such as the classic Sharpe ratio have difficulty in evaluating the performance of mutual funds with skewed return distributions. Common causes for skewness are the use of options in the portfolio or superior market timing skills of the portfolio manager. In this...

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a linear programming based method for evaluating performance of comparable production units such as firms. Although the method is already extensively applied in many areas of economics, its use in environmental economics and related fields remains limited. The...

The Commitment to Development Index of the Center for Global Development rates 21 rich countries on the “development-friendliness” of their policies. It is revised and updated annually. In the 2004 edition, the component on foreign assistance combines quantitative and qualitative measures of...