Grants or Loans? Theoretical Issues Regarding Access and Persistence in Postsecondary Education

Most economic investigations of access to education treat an investment in college or university as if it were a financial investment offering a particular expected rate of return. Since the average measured rates of return are quite favourable, other factors such as lack of information, contrary parental infl�uence, or "debt aversion" must be invoked to explain the unwillingness of some qualified students from poorer backgrounds to borrow money and attend. However, a model that recognizes the hardship associated with low levels of expenditure suggests that, ceteris paribus, poorer students will actually need a higher measured rate of return before they will decide to attend. The result holds even when there is an efficient student loan system. This approach can provide some normative guidance for decisions about the choice of grants or loans as vehicles for student aid, and has positive implications about the effects of grants and loans on access and persistence.postsecondary education, educational subsidies, student loans, equal access, hyperbolic preferences

The theory of the firm and its critics: a stocktaking and assessment

Includes bibliographical references."Prepared for Jean-Michel Glachant and Eric Brousseau, eds. New Institutional Economics: A Textbook, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.""This version: August 22, 2005."Since its emergence in the 1970s the modern economic or Coasian theory of the firm has been discussed and challenged by sociologists, heterodox economists, management scholars, and other critics. This chapter reviews and assesses these critiques, focusing on behavioral issues (bounded rationality and motivation), process (including path dependence and the selection argument), entrepreneurship, and the challenge from knowledge-based theories of the firm

Firm-Specific Human Capital and Promotion Ladders

This article shows that contracts which make workers' wages depend on their seniority level as well as their length of service can induce optimal turnover in the presence of transactions costs and investments in specific capital. Other arrangements which are shown to be inferior include Becker's standard sharing contract and contracts which embody explicit separation penalties. The optimal wage profile is derived and it corresponds to those we observe.