We generate estimates of the costs of broad-based stock option programs under varying assumptions about why firms use these pay schemes. We show that, if accounting considerations alone drive option grants, a typical firm in our sample incurs between 50 cents and one dollar of real costs in order to increase reported pre-tax net income by $1. This cost is reduced, but is still quite substantial...

Heavily subsidizing essential health products through existing health infrastructure could substantially improve health in sub-Saharan Africa. There is, however, widespread concern that poor governance – in particular, limited health worker accountability – seriously undermines the effectiveness of subsidy programs. Using innovative audits of targeted bed net distribution programs in Ghana, Ken...

A two-stage setting for determining subsidies and tuitions in a public university context is developed where fixed costs introduce an efficiency-enhancing role for taxpayer-financed appropriations. The optimal subsidy per enrollment is shown to be proportional to students’ maximum net willingness to pay. This result extends a well-known result associated with Ramsey pricing to include endogenou...

In the last fifteen years, the automatic payment in Portugal has showed periods of very strong growth. In fact, the present Portuguese banking net system has a capacity of more than 90.600 point-of-sale machines, where it is allowed to buy and pay any service in a very comfortable way. Due to the great impact that this service has been getting on the Portuguese population since its appearance i...

The annual U.S. News and World Report (USNWR) Guide to America’s Best Colleges is a much anticipated magazine among both high-ability prospective students and college and university administrators. In this paper we use a decade of Colgate University Admitted Student Questionnaire surveys to estimate the influence of changes in a school’s USNWR rank on the probability of matriculation of high-ab...

AIM Untreated trichiasis can lead to corneal opacity. Surgery to prevent the eyelashes from rubbing against the cornea is available, but many individuals with trichiasis never undergo the operation. This study estimates the cost of illness of untreated trichiasis and the willingness to pay for surgery and compares them with the actual cost of providing surgery. MATERIALS AND METHODS The cost ...

INTRODUCTION Despite strong evidence that increasing alcohol taxes reduces alcohol-related harm, state alcohol taxes have declined in real terms during the past 3 decades. Opponents of tax increases argue that they are unfair to "responsible" drinkers and those who are financially disadvantaged. The objectives of this study were to assess the impact of hypothetical state alcohol tax increases o...

In Parallel computing environments, each user can submit his job that is represented as a workflow composed of tasks that require multiple types of computational resources. How to develop a mechanism that ensures the success of these workflows is a challenging issue because the resources they use are dynamic and heterogeneous. In order to schedule these workflows conveniently, a model is needed...

We study a controlled corporate experiment in which loan officers was altered from fixed salary to volume-based pay. The incentives increased aggressiveness of origination: higher origination rates (+31%), loan sizes (+15%), and default rate (+28%). The effects are partly driven by moral hazard: approval decision is driven by loan officers’ discretion; however, default is uncorrelated with disc...

Many biases plague the estimation of rent sharing in labour markets. Using a Portuguese matched employer-employee panel, these biases are addressed in this paper in three complementary ways: 1) Controlling directly for the fact that firms that share more rents will, ceteris paribus, have lower net-of-wages profits. 2) Instrumenting profits via interactions between the exchange rate and the shar...