City Tolls – One Element of an Effective Policy Cocktail

Stadtverkehr, Verkehrsstau, Straßenbenutzungsgebühr, Stadtverkehrspolitik, Urban transport, Traffic jam, Road pricing, Urban transport policy

The Stability of Downtown Parking and Traffic Congestion

In classical traffic flow theory, there are two velocities associated with a given level of traffic flow. Following Vickrey, economists have termed travel at the higher speed congested travel and at the lower speed hypercongested travel. Since the publication of Walters. classic paper, there has been an on-going debate concerning whether a steady-state hypercongested equilibrium can be stable. For a particular structural model of downtown traffic flow and parking, this paper demonstrates that a steady-state hypercongested equilibrium can be stable. Some other sensible models of traffic congestion conclude that steady-state hypercongested travel cannot be stable, and that queues develop to ration the demand in steady states. Thus, we interpret our result to imply that, when steady-state demand is so high that it cannot be rationed through congested travel, the trip price increase necessary to ration the demand may be generated either through the formation of steady-state queues or through hypercongested travel, and that which mechanism occurs depends on details of the traffic system.traffic congestion, cruising for parking, on-street parking, hypercongestion

Electrolytic separation of crystals of transition-metal oxides

Versatile flux system grows large, well-formed, stoichiometric single crystals of mixed oxides of the transition-metal elements. These crystals have important uses in the microwave field, and applications as lasers and masers in communications

Dysfunctional Non-Market Institutions and the Market

There is a widespread belief that when significant market failure occurs, there are strong incentives for non-market institutions to develop which go at least part of the way to remedying the deficiency. We demonstrate that this functionalist position is not in general valid. In particular, we examine a situation where insurance is characterized by moral hazard. We show that when market insurance is provided, supplementary mutual assistance between family and friends (unobservable to market insurers) -- a form of non-market institution -- will occur and may be harmful. This example suggests that non-market institutions can arise spontaneously even though they are dysfunctional.

Randomization with Asymmetric Information

It is by now well-known that, in the presence of moral hazard or adverse selection, randomization of insurance premia and benefits may be Pareto efficient. This paper: i) provides a typology of the various forms that randomization may take; ii) derives necessary and/or sufficient conditions for the desirability of these various forms of randomization; iii) obtains some simple characterization theorems of the efficient random policies; iv) gives some intuition behind the results; and v) considers why randomization appears to occur less often in practice than the theory suggests it should.

The Basic Analytics of Moral Hazard

This paper develops the basic analytics of moral hazard, for the two-outcome case where either a fixed damage accident occurs or it does not. The analysis focuses on the relationship between the insurance premium paid and the insurance benefits received in the event of an accident, and is conducted in benefit-premium space. The central message of the paper is that even when the underlying functions, the expected utility function and the function relating the accident probability to accident-prevention effort, are extremely well-behaved, the indifference curves and feasibility set (the set of insurance contracts which at least break even) are not-indifference curves need not be convex and feasibility sets never are; price-and income- consumption lines may be discontinuous; and effort is not in general a monotonic or continuous function of the parameters of the insurance policies provided. Part I of this paper establishes these results, while Part II discusses sane of their implications. The bad behavior of indifference curves and the feasibility set profoundly affects the nature and existence of a competitive equilibrium. We illustrate this, though we do not provide a thorough analysis. We also show that our canonical model of an insurance market with moral hazard can be reinterpreted to provide a model of loans with bankruptcy, or of work incentives.

Moral Hazard and Optimal Commodity Taxation

The central result of this paper is that when moral hazard ispresent,competitive equilibrium is almost always (constrained) inefficient. Moral hazard causes shadow prices to deviate from market prices. To remedy this market failure, the government could introduce differential commodity taxation. Moral hazard causes people to take too little care to prevent accidents. The corresponding dead-weight loss can be reduced by subsidizing (taxing) those goods the consumption of which encourages (discourages) accident avoidance.At the (constrained) optimum, the sum of the deadweight losses as-sociated with moral hazard, on the one hand, and differential commodity taxation, on the other, is minimized.

Reviews

John Bowden and Ference Marton, The University of Learning: Beyond Quality and Competence in Higher Education, London: Kogan Page, 1998. ISBN: 0–7494–2292–0. Hardback, x310 pages, £35.00

Establishing the potential for using routine data on Incapacity Benefit to assess the local impact of policy initiatives

<i>Background</i>: Incapacity Benefit (IB) is the key contributory benefit for people who are incapable of work because of illness or disability. <i>Methods</i>: The aims were to establish the utility of routinely collected data for local evaluation and to provide a descriptive epidemiology of the IB population in Glasgow and Scotland for the period 2000–05 using data supplied by the Department for Work and Pensions. <i>Results</i>: Glasgow's IB population is large in absolute and relative terms but is now falling, mainly due to a decrease in on flow. Claimants, tend to be older, have a poor work history and suffer from mental health problems. The rate of decline has been greater in Glasgow than Scotland, although the rate of on flow is still higher. <i>Conclusions</i>: Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) data can be used locally to provide important insights into the dynamics of the IB population. However, to be truly useful, more work needs to be undertaken to combine the DWP data with other information

Multimodal Lifeworlds: Pedagogies for Play Inquiries and Explorations

In this paper, we advocate a reconceptualisation of early learning in the 21st century in the form of multimodal lifeworlds. We review the research literature on the role of new technologies for young children’s learning, both in their homes and in educational contexts. We contend that, in order to make our work accessible, and to describe the ways in which digital artefacts can create new contexts for learning, we should foreground the learning that is possible in contemporary multimodal learning ecologies. We raise complex questions and issues that require consideration as we plan for pedagogies that will encourage, support and transform children’s learning. The paper presents an understanding of new and continually evolving technologies as artefacts that inhabit the contemporary child’s lifeworld. These resources form part of their suite of learning devices, which impact on children’s identities, learning ecologies and how they make meanings of self. Finally, we present a possible conceptualization, which combines these elements that are relevant for pedagogical planning, discussed in the article, to consider how new technologies, as social, cultural and personal artefacts can contribute to children’s learning ecologies