We develop a model of education where individuals face educational risk. Successful graduation depends on individual effort to study and public resources. After realization of risk, they either work as skilled or as unskilled worker. We show that an optimal public policy consists of tuition fees combined with skill-contingent loans, lump-sum transfers/taxes, and public funding of the educationa...

Online Auction Demand Online auctions represent a sizable and growing sector of the retail economy. As a result, there has been a proliferation in auctions research in recent years. However, few empirical papers consider the role of the seller in shaping the demand for auctions, a point we seek to redress. Sellers are an important component of the auctions environment because their listing beha...

School Fees in South Africa: Increasing quality or decreasing equality? Introduction As the 2015 Education for All (EFA) and Millennium Development Goals deadline approaches, the issue of school fees and its connection to enrollment has increased in importance. Given that unenrolled children tend to be poor and less able to pay costs associated with education, school fees have come to be one of...

In this article, we analyze the redistributive impact of a recent reform of tuition fees in Quebec. We adapt Duclos, Makdissi and Wodon's (2005) methodology to a Generalized Lorenz framework. Many policy analysts argued that maintaining low higher education tuition fees is regressive. We take a look at the empirical validity of this argument using data from Statistics Canada's Survey of Labor a...

Local governments in the United States typically rely on several main sources of own-source revenues, including individual income taxes, general sales taxes, specific excise taxes, fees and charges, and local property taxes. Of these sources, the dominant is by far the property tax. According to the United States Census Bureau (http://www.census.gov/govs/estimate), local property taxes accounte...

This article provides a brief history of tax and expenditure limitation initiatives in Oregon, along with a narrative of contemporary events. Largely as a consequence of the initiative’s increased role in the formulation of Oregon’s fiscal policy, state and local taxes paid by Oregon households declined from 7.4 percent of income in 1989 to 6.8 percent in 2003; state revenue, which is heavily d...

A judge facing exogenous constraints on his pecuniary income has an incentive to reduce his workload to increase his private welfare. In the face of a large caseload, this incentive will induce judges to attempt to terminate some cases as quickly as possible. In class action cases, failing to grant an attorney’s fee request will delay termination. This conflict is likely to lead judges to autho...