Interjurisdictional Housing Prices and Spatial Amenities: Which Measures of Housing Prices Reflect Local Public Goods?

Understanding the spatial variation in housing prices plays a crucial role in topics ranging from the cost of living to quality-of-life indices to studies of public goods and household mobility. Yet analysts have not reached a consensus on the best source of such data, variously using self-reported values from the census, transactions values, tax assessments, and rental values. Additionally, while most studies use micro-level data, some have used summary statistics such as the median housing value. Assessing neighborhood price indices in Los Angeles, we find that indices based on transactions prices are highly correlated with indices based on self-reported values, but the former are better correlated with public goods. Moreover, rental values have a higher correlation with public goods and income levels than either asset-value measure. Finally, indices based on median values are poorly correlated with the other indices, public goods, and income.

Do Vouchers Lead to Sorting under Random Private School Selection? Evidence from the Milwaukee Voucher Program

This paper analyzes the impact of voucher design on student sorting, and more specifically investigates whether there are feasible ways of designing vouchers that can reduce or eliminate student sorting. It studies these questions in the context of the first five years of the Milwaukee voucher program. Much of the existing literature investigates the question of sorting where private schools can screen students. However, the publicly funded U.S. voucher programs require private schools to accept all students unless oversubscribed and to pick students randomly if oversubscribed. This paper focuses on two crucial features of the Milwaukee voucher program - random private school selection and the absence of topping up of vouchers. In the context of a theoretical model, it argues that random private school selection alone cannot prevent student sorting. However, random private school selection coupled with the absence of topping up can preclude sorting by income, although there is still sorting by ability. Sorting by ability is not caused here by private school selection, but rather by parental self selection. Using a logit model and student level data from the Milwaukee voucher program for 1990-94, it then establishes that random selection has indeed taken place so that it provides an appropriate setting to test the corresponding theoretical predictions in the data. Next, using several alternative logit specifications, it demonstrates that these predictions are validated empirically. These findings have important policy implications.Vouchers, Sorting, Cream Skimming, Private Schools

Does the Diversity of Human Capital Increase GDP? A Comparison of Education Systems

This paper examines how different education systems affect GDP by influencing the diversity of human capital. We construct an overlapping generation model in which agents are heterogeneous in income and innate ability, and the final goods are produced with differentiated intermediate goods. We analyze an economy in which an income distribution converges to a stationary distribution. It is shown that the diversity of human capital induced by income inequality always lowers the GDP of the next period, while the diversity of human capital induced by heterogeneous ability can increase GDP, if the produced intermediate goods are sufficiently substitutable and firms have a large span of control. Hence, as public education equalizes education resources across households, it mitigates the negative effect of income inequality on GDP, while the effects of ability tracking crucially depend on the production structure of the economy.Span of control, Complementarities, Human capital, Ability tracking

Determinants of the Timing and Incidence of Exploratory Drilling on Offshort Wildcat Tracts

This paper documents exploratory drilling activity on offshore wildcat oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico that were sold between 1954 and 1990, with emphasis on the period before 1980. For each year of the lease, we study the determinants of the decision whether or not to begin exploratory drilling, and the outcome of any drilling activity. Our results indicate that equilibrium predictions of plausible noncooperative models are reasonably accurate, and more descriptive than those of cooperative models of drilling timing. We discuss why noncooperative behavior may occur, and the potential gains from coordination.

Colón en Carpentier y Carpentier en Colón: «El arpa y la sombra»

Alejo Carpentier, en El arpa y la sombra (1979), utiliza el molde de la nueva novela histórica para ofrecer una imagen de Cristóbal Colón a través de la cual pueda manifestar su propia visión de la historia de las relaciones entre Europa y América Latina desde el Siglo de Oro hasta nuestros días. Para ello, utiliza a un narrador homodiegético —el mismo Cristóbal Colón— que se parece mucho al propio Carpentier, por su erudición, su estilo barroco, sus amplios conocimientos de la historia, la ciencia y la cultura de su tiempo, y su pasión irrefrenable por la lectura