The 1971 ruling of the California Supreme Court in the case of Serrano v. Priest initiated a chain of events that abruptly ended local financing of public schools in California. In seven short years, California transformed its school finance system from a decentralized one in which local...

Various theories have been put forward to explain the fact that humans experience menopause while virtually no animals do. This paper aims to investigate one such theory: children provide a savings technology into old age, but as human babies are usually large and have long gestation periods, a...

In this paper, we discuss the provision of bibliographic data as an extension of the open source concept. Our particular concern is the sustainability of such endeavors. We describe the RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) project, probably the largest "open source" bibliographic database. It...

While there is debate regarding the magnitude of the impact, immigrant inflows are generally understood to depress wages and increase employment in immigrant-intensive sectors. In light of the over-representation of the foreign-born in the childcare industry, this paper examines whether...

This paper re-examines the stochastic properties of US State real per capita personal income, using new panel unit-root procedures. The new developments incorporate non-linearity, asymmetry, and cross-sectional correlation within panel data estimation. Including nonlinearity and asymmetry finds...

By employing modularity theory, we study the general phenomenon of open-source collaboration, which includes, e.g., collective invention and open science besides open-source software production. We focus on how open-source collaboration coordinates the division of labor. We find that open-source...

Using the non parametric approach of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) this paper examines firm’s heterogeneity in the Indian pharmaceutical industry by measuring their input and output efficiencies for the period 1991 to 2005. The analysis establishes that even though firms have been able to...

This paper examines the theoretical foundations of precautionary wealth accumulation in a multi-period model where consumers face uninsurable earnings risk and borrowing constraints. We begin by characterizing the consumption function of individual consumers. We show that consumption function is...

Debtors' prisons have been commonplace throughout history, including in the United States. While imprisonment for debt no doubt elicited some repayment by benefactors of the debtor, we argue that its primary function was to deter default in the first place by giving borrowers an incentive to...

Costly state verification models predict that the sensitivity of borrowing costs to financial leverage is positively related to the level of state verification costs (financial frictions). This paper constructs a measure of financial frictions that is consistent with this prediction of theory....