This paper aims to provide a swift tour of the economic issues presented by vouchers and thus to fill an apparent gap in the literature for a basic survey of the subject. Among the issues it considers are: factors determining a voucher's cash-equivalence; reasons (such as paternalism,...

This chapter provides a selective review of some contemporary approaches to program evaluation. One motivation for our review is the recent emergence and increasing use of a particular kind of "program" in applied microeconomic research, the so-called Regression Discontinuity (RD) Design of...

In elections that take place in a less-than-perfect democracy, incumbency advantages are different from those in mature democracies. The incumbent can prevent credible challengers from running, organize vote fraud, or even physically eliminate his main opponents. At the same time, formally...

This paper illustrates that evaluating alternate abatement polices that affect the growth path of an economy on the basis of their effects on asset valuation may not be welfare enhancing. We show that the class of abatement polices considered in the integrated assessment literature are robust...

Insurance induces a well-known tradeoff between the welfare gains from risk protection and the welfare losses from moral hazard. Empirical work traditionally estimates each side of the tradeoff separately, potentially yielding mutually inconsistent results. I develop a nonlinear budget set model...

This paper investigates the effects of local regulatory effort on ground level ozone air quality and on industrial location. Local regulatory effort varies by annual air quality attainment status and by state attitudes towards the environment. A switch from attainment to non-attainment status...

This lecture examines the effects of tax policy and social security retirement benefits on capital accumulation and economic welfare. The paper begins by examining how capital income taxes reduce the real return to savers and then discusses the welfare loss of capital income taxation relative to...

Crime, Imprisonment, and Female Labor Force Participation: A Time-Series Approach Robert Witt and Ann Dryden Witte NBER Working Paper No. 6786 November 1998 JEL No. K14, H0 Rapidly growing prison population in the US has led to an upsurge of interest in discerning the impact of this costly...

We show that agglomeration forces can reverse standard international-tax-competition results. Closer integration may result first in a race to the top' and then a race to the bottom, a result that is consistent with recent empirical work showing that the tax gap between rich and poor nations...