Since the early Nineties, a dozen states have established broad-based merit aid programs. The typical program waives tuition and fees at public colleges and universities in one’s home state. Unlike traditional merit programs, such as the National Merit Scholarship, this aid requires relatively...

In 2001, China’s Ministry of Education launched a new graduate program in public administration at twenty-four universities around the country, with the explicit goal of improving management and policy-making skills in the public sector. From the beginning, these professional training schools...

Recommender and reputation systems seek to inform potential customers by securing current consumers' feedback about products and sellers. This paper proposes a payment-based system to induce honest reporting of feedback. The system applies proper scoring rules to each buyer's report, looking to...

This paper draws on American experience with four categories of market-based instruments for environmental protection: charge systems; tradeable permits; market friction reduction; and government subsidy reduction. The paper examines normative and positive lessons that can be learned from these...

Electronic government and electronic civics embrace a wide range of topics. Electronic government and electronic civics include in their purview the development, use, and implications of new practices, processes, forms and interests in government and civic life occasioned by the Internet, World...

Does student financial aid increase college attendance, or simply subsidize costs for infra-marginal students? Settling the question empirically is a challenge, because aid is correlated with many characteristics that influence schooling decisions. A shift in financial aid policy that affects...

First Amendment doctrine has traditionally been carved along conceptual rather than institutional lines. Legal categories like “public forum,” “content-neutral,” and “defamation” have dominated the doctrine, with the general understanding being that it was the nature of the speech or...

Developing countries traditionally experience passthrough of exchange rate changes that is greater and more rapid than high-income countries experience. This is true equally of the determination of prices of imported goods, prices of local competitors’ products, and the general CPI. But...

This paper presents a model of innovations and economic growth, which departs from standard endogenous growth models by assuming that the set of potential projects for innovation in each period is limited. The model differs in a number of results from former endogenous growth models. First, it...

This paper considers whether highly concentrated industries are better represented in the political process, as Olson’s Logic of Collective Action suggests, and, if they are, whether this is so for the reasons that the Logic claims. It begins with a review and critique of the quantitative...