We look at the role of credit ratings when assets are issued in a primary market and sold by dealers into a secondary, over-the-counter market in order to study regulatory proposals for rating agencies. Credit ratings are used to overcome a lemons problem. When the lemons problem is moderate,...

We propose a new methodology for estimating the demand and cost functions of differentiated products models when demand and cost data are available. The method deals with the endogeneity of prices to demand shocks and the endogeneity of outputs to cost shocks, but does not require instruments...

Through tax evasion, through the labour-leisure choice or in other ways, taxpayers reduce the tax base in response to an increase in the tax rate. The process is commonly-believed to generate a humped Laffer curve with a revenue-maximizing tax rate well short of 100%. That need not be so. In the...

The Millennium Development Goals adopted by the Government of Senegal envision that 82% of rural households should have access to drinking water by 2015, as compared to 64% in 2005. On the sanitation side, 59% of rural households should have adequate on-site systems by the same time as compared...

This research examines households’ willingness to pay (WTP) for an improved electricity service. Households’ WTP is estimated using the contingent valuation (CV) method on data from 350 in-person interviews in North Cyprus. In order to avoid the cost of outages, households are willing to...

This paper reports on a cost-effectiveness analysis of four types of water heating systems operating in a situation where there is an unreliable water supply. These systems are electric water heating, a solar water heating system (SWHS) with electricity back-up, the SWHS with an LPG water...

This paper is mainly concerned with weighted average measures of the social discount rate, where the components of the average are the marginal productivity of investment (measured by its gross-of-tax rate of return), and the marginal rate of time preference (measured by the net-of-tax yield of...

Because hydro dams are complex to design and usually involve long-term planning, they are particularly susceptible to cost and time overruns. The controversy surrounding their development remains an unresolved issue in the energy policy debate. This study re-examines the cost issues associated...

This paper extends our earlier work on reverse Bayesianism by relaxing the assumption that decision makers abide by expected utility theory, assuming instead weaker axioms that merely imply that they are probabilistically sophisticated. We show that our main results, namely, (modified)...

Targeted employment subsidy programs are commonly employed by governments. This study examines one such initiative that rebated unemployment insurance premi- ums to employers with net increases in insurable earnings for youth aged 18 to 24. In each of two datasets, statistically and economically...