1,491 research outputs found

    How did the Welsh government manage to reform council tax in 2005?

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    Repeated calls have been made for council tax (CT) in the UK to be reformed. A ‘tyranny of the status quo’ suggests that politicians will avoid this because they fear a backlash from the losers of reform. This paper claims that the tyranny of the status quo is not a fixed law. The Welsh government revalued CT in 2005 but did not communicate the complexity of reform sufficiently. Reform requires greater efforts to communicate the complexity of winning and losing

    The MOOC: Rhetoric, Political Economy and the Value of Technological Citizenship

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    This paper offers a critical political-economy of the promise and disappointment of the for- profit Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) in higher education. Our goal is to encourage awareness, dialogue, and reflexivity about the gap between the rhetoric and reality of the MOOC in higher education and to highlight and interrogate the persuasive and profit power interests served by “the rhetoric of the MOOC.” To this end, the first section outlines our critical approach and defines some key concepts: “the rhetoric of technology,” “the political- economy of edu-tech” and “the public sphere.” The second section highlights the MOOC’s rhetorical promises and real disappointments. The third section contextualizes the “rhetoric of the MOOC” with regard to the persuasive and profit power interests it serves, and then evaluates this rhetoric with regard to the norms and values of the public sphere. We argue this rhetoric is a promotional discourse that is a poor guide to public deliberation and decision making about the role of technology in higher education. In closing, we propose the ideal and practice “technological citizenship” to encourage policy-makers, administrators, professors and students to have more democratic dialogue about educational technology, so that they, not the rhetoric of educational technology and the industry that sells it, can design the future of higher education

    Cheaper, greener and more efficient : rationalising UK carbon prices

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    Current UK energy use policies, which primarily aim to reduce carbon emissions, provide abatement incentives that vary by user and fuel, creating inefficiency. Distributional concerns are often given as a justification for the lower carbon price faced by households, but there is little rationale for carbon prices associated with the use of gas to be lower than those for electricity. We consider reforms that raise carbon prices faced by households and reduce the variation in carbon prices across gas and electricity use, improving the efficiency of emissions reduction. We show that the revenue raised from these reforms can be recycled in a way that ameliorates some of the distributional concerns. Whilst such recycling is not able to protect all poorer households, existing policy also makes distributional trade-offs, but does so in an opaque and inefficient way

    Incentive Compatibility and Differentiability New Results and Classic Applications

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    We provide several generalizations of Mailath's (1987) result that in games of asymmetric information with a continuum of types incentive compatibility plus separation implies differentiability of the informed agent's strategy. The new results extend the theory to classic models in finance such as Leland and Pyle (1977), Glosten (1989), and DeMarzo and Duffie (1999), that were not previously covered
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