The governments of nearly all industrialised countries use subsidies to support the economic development of specific sectors or regions with high rates of unemployment. Conventional economic wisdom would suggest that the most efficient way to support these regions or sectors is to pay employment subsidies. We present evidence showing that capital subsidies are empirically much more important th...

ion Taxes Subsidies for Pollution Control Tradable Discharge Permits Effluent Charges Surface Water / Sea Ground Water Municipal Use Public Water

~| y electing Democrat Harris Wofford B to the Senate over former Attorney General Richard T h o r n b u r g h in November 1991, the voters of Pennsylvania proved that healthcare reform is a politically salient issue. Policy analysts, amazed that Wofford's healthcare reform message was a key factor in his election, have debated during the past few months whether this was a fluke or the precurso...

Dynamically and statically optimal Pigouvian subsidies on durables will differ in a growing economy. For durables with positive externalities, such as sanitation, statically optimal subsidies will typically grow. However, in a dynamic game, governments can most cheaply induce optimal purchasing time by committing to eventually reduce subsidies. If governments cannot commit, there may be multipl...

There are currently several reasons for reforming the CAP. First, EU-15 must now incorporate the wishes expressed by European citizens concerning the environment and food safety. Secondly, with regard to WTO requirements, the expiry at the end of 2003 of the 'Peace Clause' agreed in the Uruguay Round adds a further challenge for the reform of CAP farm subsidies. Finally, the eastern enlargement...

This paper analyzes the dynamics of trade policy reform under democracy. In an overlapping generations model, heterogeneous agents may acquire skills when young, thereby determining the skill composition of their cohort. Current and anticipated trade policies influence education decisions, and thus the identity of the median voter. We show that there may exist two political steady states: one p...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the responsiveness of the demand for college to changes in student aid arising from a Danish reform. Student aid in Denmark is means-tested, so accounting for borrowing contraints in the analysis is crucial. We separately identify the e¤ect of aid from that of other observed and unobserved variables such as parental income. For the Danish case, we exp...

Access to Higher Education and Inequality: The Chinese Experiment We apply a semi-parametric latent variable model to estimate selection and sorting effects on the evolution of private returns to schooling for college graduates during China’s reform between 1988 and 2002. We find that there were substantial sorting gains under the traditional system, but they have decreased drastically and beco...

To help finance its historic expansions of insurance coverage, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) includes several provisions aimed at slowing the rate of growth of personal health expenditures. This goal is addressed partly by reductions in payments to health care providers and partly by future reductions in the tax subsidies for extremely generous insurance plans—often refer...