This paper models two key roles of subjective performance evaluations: their incentive role and their feedback role. The paper shows that the feedback role makes subjective pay feasible even without repeated interaction, as long as there exists some verifiable measure of performance. It also...

Differences across decades in the counter-cyclical stance of fiscal policy can identify whether the growth in government spending affects output growth and so speeds recovery from a recession. We study government-spending reaction functions from the 1920s and 1930s for twenty countries. There...

In this paper, we analyze the asymmetric pure strategy equilibria in a dynamic game of pure information externality. Each player receives a private signal and chooses whether and when to invest. In some of the periods, only a subgroup of the players make decisions, which we call bunching, while...

For the most part, the differences between the analysis of an owner-operated private venture project and that of typical public-sector projects are concentrated in the valuation of benefits. Most project costs are indeed cash outlays, just like those of a business venture, but this is not at all...

The concept of economic opportunity cost is derived from the recognition that when resources are used for one project, opportunities to use these resources are sacrificed elsewhere. Typically when workers are hired by a project, they are giving up one set of market and non-market activities for...

The stakeholder impacts of a project can be estimated by the comparison of the financial and economic impacts of the project on the key stakeholders of a project. This analysis allows one to estimate how the income changes caused by the project that are distributed across the key groups affected...

The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate how a proposed investment in upgrading a gravel road to a tarred surface should be evaluated. The project is located in the Limpopo Province of South Africa. It involves upgrading of two existing, mainly gravel, roads into a tar surface road...

This study undertakes an integrated financial, economic and distributive appraisal of an Independent Power Producer (IPP) project to generate electricity. The critical issue is that the private sponsors of the IPP have proposed to build a single cycle electricity generation plant that is...

Non-tradable items are those which are not traded internationally. They include items such as services where the demander and producer must be in the same location, and commodities which have low value relative to either their weight or volume. In such cases the transportation charges prevent...

This chapter will focus on the problems of evaluating transportation projects in the context of the less-developed countries. Emphasis will be placed on highway projects, because these account for the bulk of transport investments in the developing parts of the world. If a project passes a...