Efficient Tuition Fees, Examinations, and Subsidies (new title: Efficient tuition fees and subsidies)

We assume that students can acquire a wage premium, thanks to studies, and form a rational expectation of their future earnings, which depends on personal "ability". Students receive a private, noisy signal of their ability, and universities can condition admission decisions on the results of noisy tests. We assume first that universities are maximizing social surplus, and contrast the results with those obtained when they are profit maximizers. If capital markets are perfect, and if test results are public knowledge, then the optimal tuition fee is greater than marginal cost, and there is no sorting on the basis of test scores. Students optimally self-select as a result of pricing only. If capital markets are perfect but asymmetries of information are bilateral, i.e., if universities observe a private signal of each student's ability, or if there are borrowing constraints, then the optimal policy involves a mix of pricing and pre-entry selection on the basis of test scores. Optimal tuition can then be set below marginal cost, and can even become negative, if the precision of the university's private assessment of students' abilities is high enough.tuition fees, examinations, state subsidies, higher education, incomplete information

La querelle des redoublements : l'apport de l'économétrie

Il existe une économie politique du redoublement dont il faut essayer de mettre à jour quelques ressorts : le redoublement est une modalité particulière de la gestion du système éducatif qui présente des coûts et des bénéfices et dont l’efficacité est mise en question depuis de nombreuses années. Si la question du redoublement est aussi difficile à trancher, c’est d’une part qu’elle pose un véritable problème méthodologique et d’autre part que ses implications dépassent et de loin le strict cadre scolaire pour déborder sur le marché du travail

On the Optimal Number of Representatives

We study a model of public decision-making in simple public goods economies with moral hazards and adverse selection. Economic agents must invest resources (or provide effort) to discover their own preferences. We consider direct revelation mechanisms based on sampling. A sample of agents is drawn in the population, and each member of the sample reports a preferences type to a Principal. The determinants of the "representative sample" size are studied. The structure and magnitude of effort and sampling costs affects the optimal number of representatives. If the net social value of the effort is high, first and second best optimality require a maximal sample (or "direct democracy"). If, on the contrary, effort is too costly, the recourse to samples ("representative democracy") is justified as a second best. To obtain the results, we not only take effort and revelation incentives into account, but also restrict decision rules to satisfy an additional property of robustness to opportunistic manipulation by the Principal, which forbids the use of a priori knowledge in public decision procedures.