Autocracy, democracy, bureaucracy, or monopoly: can you judge a government by its size?

We develop a simple theoretical framework to examine on an integrated basis how the form of government affects its power and size. The analytical framework abstracts from distortions that arise from the means ofgovernment finance and separates government power into two dimensions-pure coercive power and pure monopoly power. A government can exert its coercive power to shift the demand for its services outward and/or its monopoly power to restrict the output along a given demand curve to earn rents. Among the implications drawn from the analysis are that government officials have an incentive to provide a non-optimal combination of taxes and services, and that neither size nor rents alone are reliable indicators of the extent to which government fails to achieve optimality in its provision of services.Finance ; Power resources

Compressing Sparse Sequences under Local Decodability Constraints

We consider a variable-length source coding problem subject to local decodability constraints. In particular, we investigate the blocklength scaling behavior attainable by encodings of $r$-sparse binary sequences, under the constraint that any source bit can be correctly decoded upon probing at most $d$ codeword bits. We consider both adaptive and non-adaptive access models, and derive upper and lower bounds that often coincide up to constant factors. Notably, such a characterization for the fixed-blocklength analog of our problem remains unknown, despite considerable research over the last three decades. Connections to communication complexity are also briefly discussed.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure. First five pages to appear in 2015 International Symposium on Information Theory. This version contains supplementary materia

What should economists measure? The implications of mass production vs. mass customization

Consumer behavior ; Production (Economic theory) ; Productivity

Prefix Codes: Equiprobable Words, Unequal Letter Costs

Describes a near-linear-time algorithm for a variant of Huffman coding, in which the letters may have non-uniform lengths (as in Morse code), but with the restriction that each word to be encoded has equal probability. [See also ``Huffman Coding with Unequal Letter Costs'' (2002).]Comment: proceedings version in ICALP (1994

Targeting nominal income: a closer look

Income

Allocative inefficiency and school competition

A substantial literature indicates that the public school system in the United States is inefficient. Some have posited that this inefficiency arises from a lack of competition in the education market. On the other hand, the Tiebout hypothesis suggests that public schools may already face significant competition. In this paper, the authors examine the extent to which competition for students influences public school inefficiency in Texas. They use a Shephard input distance function to model education production and use bootstrapping techniques to examine allocative inefficiencies. Switching regressions estimation suggests that school districts in noncompetitive metropolitan areas are more than twice as allocatively inefficient as school districts in competitive metropolitan areas.Competition ; Education