The Continuing Cost of Privatization: Extra Payments to Medicare Advantage Plans Jump to $11.4 Billion in 2009

Outlines the impact of the 2003 increase in payments to private Medicare Advantage plans, efforts to phase out extra payments in order to finance improvements for low-income beneficiaries, and alternative approaches to providing equitable coverage

The Effectiveness of Juvenile Correctional Facilities: Public versus Private Management

This paper uses data on juvenile offenders released from correctional facilities in Florida to explore the effects of facility management type (private for-profit, private nonprofit, public state-operated, and public county-operated) on recidivism outcomes and costs. The data provide detailed information on individual characteristics, criminal and correctional histories, judge-assigned restrictiveness levels, and home zipcodes—allowing us to control for the non-random assignment of individuals to facilities far better than any previous study. Relative to all other management types, for-profit management leads to a statistically significant increase in recidivism, but, relative to nonprofit and state-operated facilities, for-profit facilities operate at a lower cost to the government per comparable individual released. Costbenefit analysis implies that the short-run savings offered by for-profit over nonprofit management are negated in the long run due to increased recidivism rates, even if one measures the benefits of reducing criminal activity as only the avoided costs of additional confinement.Juvenile Crime; Juvenile Correctional Facilities; Recidivism; Prison Privatization; Provision of Public Goods: Nonprofit, For-profit, Public

Competition and Regulation in the Stock Markets

Part I of this article suggests that the courts have not satisfactorily resolved the tension between competition and regulation in the stock markets, and that the proposed legislation would in fact aggravate that tension. Part II uses an economic model of stock transactions to derive an alternative approach for reconciling competitive and regulatory considerations. Part III applies this approach to several key governmental decisions in the transition from fixed commission rates to the central market system

Building Criminal Capital behind Bars: Peer Effects in Juvenile Corrections

This paper analyzes the influence that juvenile offenders serving time in the same correctional facility have on each other’s subsequent criminal behavior. The analysis is based on data on over 8,000 individuals serving time in 169 juvenile correctional facilities during a two-year period in Florida. These data provide a complete record of past crimes, facility assignments, and arrests and adjudications in the year following release for each individual. To control for the non-random assignment to facilities, we include facility and facility-by-prior offense fixed effects, thereby estimating peer effects using only within-facility variation over time. We find strong evidence of peer effects for burglary, petty larceny, felony and misdemeanor drug offenses, aggravated assault, and felony sex offenses; the influence of peers primarily affects individuals who already have some experience in a particular crime category. We also find evidence that the predominant types of peer effects differ in residential versus non-residential facilities; effects in the latter are consistent with network formation among youth serving time close to home.

Building Criminal Capital Behind Bars: Social Learning in Juvenile Corrections

This paper analyzes the influence that juvenile offenders serving time in the same correctional facility have on each other's subsequent criminal behavior. The analysis is based on data on over 8,000 individuals serving time in 169 juvenile correctional facilities during a two-year period in Florida. These data provide a complete record of past crimes, facility assignments, and arrests and adjudications in the year following release for each individual. To control for the non-random assignment of juveniles to facilities, we include facility fixed effects in the analysis. This ensures that the impact of peers on recidivism is identified using only the variation in the length of time that any two individuals serving a sentence in the same facility happen to overlap. We find strong evidence of peer effects for various categories of theft, burglary, and felony drug and weapon crimes; the influence of peers primarily affects individuals who already have some experience in a particular crime category.social learning, peer effects, social interactions, recidivism, juvenile crime, human capital accumulation

Hidden Foreign Aid

Few issues in global politics are as contentious as foreign aid – how much rich countries should give, in what ways, to whom. For years, it has been a commonplace that U.S. policies are stingy. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) routinely ranks the United States far behind its industrialized peers in official development assistance (ODA), measured as a percentage of gross national income (GNI). An endless parade of critics has implored the government to do more; some suggest that the Bush Administration\u27s support for the Monterrey Consensus, which sets a goal of increasing assistance to 0.7% of GNI, commits it to do more. Against these allegations of miserliness, executive officials and certain sympathetic scholars have begun to argue that the published statistics are misleading because they fail to account for individual and corporate philanthropy. What the OECD misses, this argument runs, is the exceptional extent of Americans\u27 private generosity. What both sides of the debate have missed, this Article proposes, is not the role of the private sector in generating foreign aid but the role of tax expenditures in subsidizing it. Better known as tax breaks or loopholes, tax expenditures are deviations from the normal tax structure designed to favor a particular industry, activity, or class of persons.” They take the form of deductions, exemptions, exclusions, deferrals, credits, or preferential rates. Economically, these expenditures may be seen as equivalent to direct government outlays: if U.S. taxpayers saved $70 billion last year from, say, the mortgage interest deduction, the government therefore gave a$70 billion (implicit) subsidy to homeownership. Stanley Surrey pioneered the theory of tax expenditures in the late 1960s, and the concept is now widely, though not universally, credited. Since 1974, Congress has required the annual publication of a tax expenditure budget. Although not immediately evident from the budget data, in recent years a growing amount of expenditure has gone toward foreign aid. The reason lies in America\u27s tax treatment of nonprofit organizations. Whenever U.S. charities and foundations spend money overseas – as they have increasingly been doing – some portion of this spending can be attributed to the support they receive from numerous state and federal tax privileges. More controversially, several other domestic tax expenditures, such as the deferral granted to foreign source active business income, might also be seen as providing foreign assistance. Unlike traditional ODA, these tax expenditure funds are privately organized and distributed, yet unlike voluntary transfers they are paid for by the public fisc. This is not private aid; it is privatized aid. The basic, descriptive goal of this Article is to show, in Parts I and II, how nonprofit tax policies have shaped the content of American aid. This analysis implies that the definition of ODA should be revised, as the next Part explains. The broader goal is to begin to connect these insights, in the balance of Part III, with the literatures on tax expenditures and international development – and, in so doing, to illuminate some attractive and unattractive features of using tax expenditures in the foreign aid context. While my focus throughout is on the United States, the central argument can be generalized to any country with broadly analogous international tax policies