The state of state and local government finance

This paper provides an overview of the state-local government sector, a review of the short-run impact of the 2007-09 recession on state and local governments, and a brief summary of key long-run challenges state and local governments will encounter in the next decade. State and local governments in aggregate represent about one-seventh of the U.S. economy, with education and welfare (mostly Medicaid) accounting for more than half. These governments currently face nearly unprecedented fiscal turmoil as a result of the recent recession. Even after the economy recovers, states and localities will face challenges both to improve effectiveness and efficiency in public service provision and to generate revenue sufficient to fund these crucial public services.Municipal finance ; State finance ; Fiscal policy

POLITICS OF RURAL DEVELOPMENT

Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Revenue-Based Auctions and Unbundling Infrastructure Franchises

This paper discusses privatization among investments in infrastructure. The goal of this paper is to present a new auction mechanism that solves many of the problems that have hindered the use of franchises. The first section of the paper discusses least present value of revenue (LPVR) auctions, where the regulator fixes user fees (according to some optimizing criterion) and asks for bids on the present value of revenue from user fees that franchise holders will accept in exchange for building, operating and maintaining the infrastructure. Section 2 of the paper classifies infrastructure projects according to their technological characteristics in order to establish conditions under which franchising is feasible and desirable. In Section 3, the authors discuss several conceptual issues that arise in franchising. Section 4 discusses the shortcomings of fixed-term mechanisms. Section 5 introduces and analyzes LPVR auctions. Section 6 discusses the unbundling of franchises. The authors' conclusions are presented in the final section.Infrastructure & Transport, Private Sector, least present value of revenue (LPVR) auctions, privatization, infrastructure sector

Consumer Installment Loan Risk: A Discriminant Analysis

All lending institutions are faced with the fact that a portion of their outstanding loans will not be repaid. A loan officer, or other designated individual, is normally charged \u27it h the responsibility of evaluating loan applicants in terms of their comparative risks in order to reduce this inherent cost of doing business. The loan officer has traditionally evaluated consumer installment loan applicants using the three C\u27s rule: character, collateral and capacity to repay, as his guideline for evaluating risk. The information required for this type of evaluation came from the data on the loan application, a credit check and character references. This study attempts to give a more objective alternative means of evaluating risk in consumer installment loans. It is believed that there are shared characteristics of individuals who repay loans and a different set of shared characteristics for those who do not. If these sets of characteristics are significantly different, future applicants could then be evaluated to see if their characteristics are more like those of the group which repaid their loans or to the group who didn’t. In order to accomplish this study, one particular lending institution was chosen whose principal business is that of consualer installment loans. Discriminant analysis was employed as the statistical tool used to determine if a sample of loans that were repaid and those which were not could be separated into two groups solely on their shared characteristics. The discriminant analysis allows the researcher the means of accomplishing this separation and ascertaining the degree of certainty that. the two groups are dissimilar, as well as evaluating which factors are most important in the discrimination process

Wave propagation and tunneling through periodic structures

The phenomenon of tunneling manifests itself in nearly every field of physics. The ability to distinguish a wave tunneling through a barrier from one propagating is important for a number of applications. Here we explore the properties of the wave traveling through the band gap created by a lattice, either as a consequence of tunneling through the barrier or due to the presence of a pass band inside the gap. To observe the pass band for studying tunneling and propagating waves simultaneously, a localized lattice defect was introduced. The differences between the two phenomena are highlighted via waves' dispersion characteristics

239: The "Sewall Wright Effect".

Reproduced with permission of Blackwell Science