{"title":"Can Increasing Private School Participation and Monetary Loss in a Voucher Program Affect Public School Performance? Evidence from Milwaukee","authors":"R. Chakrabarti","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1013623","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1013623","url":null,"abstract":"The Milwaukee voucher program, as implemented in 1990, allowed only nonsectarian private schools to participate in the program. However, following a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling, the program was expanded to include religious private schools in 1998. This second phase of the voucher program led to more than a three-fold increase in the number of private schools and almost a four-fold increase in the number of choice students. Moreover, because of some changes in funding provisions, the revenue loss per student from vouchers increased in the second phase of the program. This paper analyzes, both theoretically and empirically, the effects of these changes on public school performance (as measured by test scores) in Milwaukee. It argues that voucher design matters and that the choice of parameters in a voucher program is crucial in determining the effects of public school incentives and performance. In the context of a theoretical model of public school and household behavior, the paper establishes that the policy changes will lead to an improvement of the public schools in the second phase of the program as compared with the first phase. Following Hoxby (2003a, 2003b) in the classification of treatment and control groups and using 1987-2002 data and a difference-in-differences estimation strategy in trends, the paper then shows that the theoretical prediction is validated empirically. This result is robust to alternative samples and specifications and survives robustness checks, including correcting for mean reversion.","PeriodicalId":393862,"journal":{"name":"Urban Economics & Regional Studies (Forthcoming)","volume":"175 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129526997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Regional Social Policy","authors":"B. Deacon, I. Ortiz, S. Zelenev","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.1001491","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.1001491","url":null,"abstract":"This paper argues why countries should give priority to developing cross-border regional social policies. The first part presents the conceptual case for regional social policies in terms of how the social dimension of regionalism can provide an alternative to the current pattern of globalization. The second presents the concept and dimensions of regional social policies. The third part reviews progress to date, which suggests that the time is right to pursue this agenda. The paper closes with some institutional issues related to how regional social policy might be advanced, including options for financing regional social policies.","PeriodicalId":393862,"journal":{"name":"Urban Economics & Regional Studies (Forthcoming)","volume":"77 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131464919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Implicit Compensation for Career Employees in Public Defined Benefit Pension Plans: The Colorado PERA Case","authors":"M. Mannino, E. Cooperman","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.985621","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.985621","url":null,"abstract":"We report on implicit compensation provided by the Colorado Public Employees Retirement Association plan using a unique data set of salary histories of recent university retirees. Implicit compensation is the difference between the expected present discounted value of retirement benefits and retirement account balances. Our results indicate sizable implicit compensation across four measures with strong evidence of significant relations on job class, retirement age, retirement period, and service years and some evidence of a gender effect. The results provide a historical baseline that should be useful in the design of compensation models with more realistic estimates of implcit retirement compensation.","PeriodicalId":393862,"journal":{"name":"Urban Economics & Regional Studies (Forthcoming)","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124037556","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Regionalization, Changes in Home Bias, and the Growth of World Trade","authors":"J. Whalley, Xian Xin","doi":"10.3386/W13023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3386/W13023","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper we use numerical modeling methods to quantitatively assess the impacts of changes in home bias within regions on the growth of world trade among major blocs over the last three decades. Existing work focuses on the impacts of trade barrier, transport cost and income changes on trade growth, rather than preferences. Removing changes in home bias over the last three decades from our global general equilibrium model reduces world trade by 27% compared to actual world trade in 2004 in our central case scenario. These results support the view that world trade among major blocs has became more regionalized rather than internationalized which we suggest may be due to a proliferation of free trade agreements. We calibrate a simple global trade model of inter bloc trade to both 1975 and 2004 data and substitute different calibrated parameters from the two data sets between model parameterizations. Our results suggest that if changes over time in home bias involving different regionally sourced goods in a multi-region multi product model are removed, substantial effects follow for the growth of world trade in the last three decades. Home bias changes in developed and developing economies reduce world trade by 8% and 19% respectively, suggesting that regionalization is more pronounced in developing country trade. Our results also indicate that income growth, income convergence, and falling trade costs explain 76%, 4%, and 7% respectively of the growth of world trade over the last three decades.","PeriodicalId":393862,"journal":{"name":"Urban Economics & Regional Studies (Forthcoming)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129480974","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bribery in Health Care in Peru and Uganda","authors":"J. Hunt","doi":"10.3386/W13034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3386/W13034","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, I examine the role of household income in determining who bribes and how much they bribe in health care in Peru and Uganda. I find that rich patients are more likely than other patients to bribe in public health care: doubling household consumption increases the bribery probability by 0.2-0.4 percentage points in Peru, compared to a bribery rate of 0.8%; doubling household expenditure in Uganda increases the bribery probability by 1.2 percentage points compared to a bribery rate of 17%. The income elasticity of the bribe amount cannot be precisely estimated in Peru, but is about 0.37 in Uganda. Bribes in the Ugandan public sector appear to be fees-for-service extorted from the richer patients amongst those exempted by government policy from paying the official fees. Bribes in the private sector appear to be flat-rate fees paid by patients who do not pay official fees. I do not find evidence that the public health care sector in either Peru or Uganda is able to price-discriminate less effectively than public institutions with less competition from the private sector.","PeriodicalId":393862,"journal":{"name":"Urban Economics & Regional Studies (Forthcoming)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129580166","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Do No Harm: Aid, Weak Institutions, and the Missing Middle in Africa","authors":"N. Birdsall","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.981190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.981190","url":null,"abstract":"The implicit assumption of the donor community is that Africa is trapped by its poverty, and that aid is necessary if Africa is to escape the trap. In this working paper, CGD president Nancy Birdsall suggests an alternative assumption: that Africa is caught in an institutional trap, wherein a robust middle-income population contributing to the creation and sustenance of healthy institutions - particularly healthy institutions of the state - is largely lacking. She offers recommendations to donors about how to help bolster the middle-income population, chief among them: Donors should take more responsibility for reporting and monitoring aggregate inflows of aid to recipient countries, and aid increases in already aid-dependent states should probably be explicitly planned to be more gradual. Donors should minimize poaching of skilled workers, including by the NGOs they finance. That means paying closer attention to their collective impact on local salaries (and housing and other costs); putting more donor resources into adequate compensation for government staff; and ensuring they are funding local competitive contracting whenever possible. Donors should ensure that aid inflows that are less volatile. Unpredictable aid further complicates management and coordination of fiscal and monetary policy, and reduces whatever fragile confidence of small private investors in future relative prices responsible governments are trying to achieve. Donors need to ensure that increases in aid inflows do not discourage restructuring of tax systems to make them less reliant on the trade sector. Otherwise aid sustains tax regimes that are likely to be burdening disproportionately job-intensive export sectors, including agriculture and small industry.","PeriodicalId":393862,"journal":{"name":"Urban Economics & Regional Studies (Forthcoming)","volume":"51 ","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114091206","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Will a Regional Bloc Enlarge?","authors":"G. Albertin","doi":"10.5089/9781451866339.001.A001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5089/9781451866339.001.A001","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates whether a regional bloc would enlarge or remain stagnant in size using a model where enlargement is the endogenous outcome of the interaction between the supply of and demand for membership. We show that a maximum size of the bloc exists beyond which the regional policy-maker will be unwilling to enlarge further, and that either the supply side or the demand side of membership might be binding in the determination of the equilibrium size of the bloc. Furthermore, we analyze how the deepening of integration within a regional bloc affects its width. We show that deeper integration may lead to wider integration when the demand side of membership is binding in the determination of the equilibrium size of the bloc, while the equilibrium size of the bloc will be unaffected when the supply side of membership is binding.","PeriodicalId":393862,"journal":{"name":"Urban Economics & Regional Studies (Forthcoming)","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123172627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Illusion of Precision and the Role of the Renminbi in Regional Integration","authors":"Y. Cheung, M. Chinn, Eiji Fujii","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1008742","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1008742","url":null,"abstract":"The debate on renminbi (RMB) revaluation has not subsided, despite the policy change announced by the Chinese authorities in July 2005. In this chapter, we show that the evidence of RMB undervaluation may not be as strong as it appears. Specifically, depending on the method used, the evidence ranges from slight overvaluation to undervaluation. Even in the case of undervaluation, the results are not significant in the statistical sense. We also note that China is playing an important economic role in Asia and has established a complex production and trade network with its neighboring economies, which complicates the calculation of the equilibrium exchange rate. Thus, a change in Chinese exchange rate policy in response to demands from foreign countries and short-run considerations may have undesirable effects on the economies of China and the Asian region.","PeriodicalId":393862,"journal":{"name":"Urban Economics & Regional Studies (Forthcoming)","volume":"45 1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125602823","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Property Rights and Land Value: The Impacts of Political Instability","authors":"Yong Tu, Helen X. H. Bao","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.946069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.946069","url":null,"abstract":"Motivated by the valuation of a leasehold property in relative to a comparable freehold property under different land lease policy scenarios, this paper attempts to offer an explanation to the premium fetched by a freehold property as well as an explanation to the variations of the premium across jurisdictions. The conceptual framework justifies the causes of and the policy impacts on freehold premiums. The empirical analyses are based on the transaction data drawn from both Singapore and Hong Kong private residential housing markets where two different but comparable land lease structures and land lease policies are in force. The results estimate the freehold premiums and illustrate their variations which support our arguments that a larger bundle of property rights associated with a freehold reduces the housing investment risks for a freehold owner in relative to a leasehold owner. A buyer therefore likes to pay more for a freehold, initiating the freehold premium. Any government land lease or related policies that are unfavorable to a leasehold owner may increase the housing investment risks for a leasehold owner, which may reduce the value of option to redevelop a leasehold property, leading to a higher freehold premium.","PeriodicalId":393862,"journal":{"name":"Urban Economics & Regional Studies (Forthcoming)","volume":"144 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123233618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Deed Types, House Prices, and Mortgage Interest Rates","authors":"David M. Brasington, R. Sarama","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.924001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.924001","url":null,"abstract":"Deeds spell out the legal guarantees the seller makes about a house. Using a house price hedonic with a Bayesian spatial error model, we find deed types dramatically affect a house's sale price. Ten deed types command a discount and one commands a premium relative to warranty deeds. The 27% discount for guardian deeds suggests a principal-agent problem. Certain deed types appear more often in poor neighborhoods. Foreclosure deeds have lower mortgage rates than warranty deeds. The Fair Housing Act and Equal Credit Opportunity Act forbid it, but we find higher mortgage interest rates in racially heterogeneous neighborhoods.","PeriodicalId":393862,"journal":{"name":"Urban Economics & Regional Studies (Forthcoming)","volume":"20 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123505571","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}