Population ageing, inequality and the political economy of public education

Population ageing has triggered concerns about the sustainability of public systems of education. The empirical evidence is still inconclusive, whereas some theoretical results present a somewhat optimistic view (Gradstein and Kaganovich, 2004; Levy, 2005). The present note re-examines the political economy of public education in an ageing society, using the classical median voter model. The normative analysis shows that elderly households introduce distortions that render political outcomes inefficient except in rare circumstances. It is then explained that the interplay among the political and financial consequences of ageing gives rise to a non-linear, and possibly non-monotonic (inverted-U shaped) relationship between spending per pupil and the share of childless households in the population. Income inequality is shown to play a crucial role of in the process, revealing that ageing has a stronger tendency towards underprovision in economies with high inequality. The implications for the empirical literature are discussed.population ageing; income inequality; median voter model; public education

Opting-out and income mixing in urban economies:the role of neighborhood effects

Residence-based public education systems promote income segregation across neighborhoods or school districts (e.g. Epple and Romano, 2002). It has been argued that allowing private schools to enter the market may reduce the levels of income segregation because private education severs the link among school quality and place of residence for those using a private school. On the other hand, the socalled neighborhood effects constitute another segregating force in urban areas. We use a two-neighborhood model of an urban economy in order to study whether such externalities inhibit the desegregating effects of private education or not. The analysis reveals that they may indeed reduce or completely eliminate private education induced income mixing. This will happen if the best public school is located where neighborhood effects are most beneficial. However, it may also be the case that neighborhood effects promote the mixing of high income households using a private school with low income ones using a public school in the neighborhood providing the most beneficial neighborhood effects.residential mobility, segregation, neighborhood effects, school choice.

The peer group effect and the optimality properties of head and income taxes

This paper studies a Tiebout model with two school districts, housing markets and peer effects to re-evaluate the optimality properties of the allocation of households to districts induced by head and income taxes. The main novel results reveal that head taxes are not superior to income taxes and that the indirect redistribution implied by income taxation is not necessarily at odds with location optimality or associated to welfare losses. Many combinations of head taxes differentiated by household type can sustain the optimal outcome as an equilibrium. While this may not be possible using differentiated income taxes, a combination of non-differentiated ones and differentiated head taxes levied on the residents of the rich district can lead to the optimal outcome and effect significant local redistribution. In turn, non-differentiated head taxes are suboptimal (unless optimality requires one of the districts to be type-homogeneous) and a combination of uniform income taxes and head taxes levied on the rich district's population can do as well as them. Moreover, non-differentiated income taxes may generate smaller welfare losses than their lump-sum counterpart, a result which clashes with the benefit view of head taxes.Tiebout; peer effects; head tax, income tax; optimality

Income Stratification Across Public and Private Education: The Multi-community Case

This paper analyses the question of which households opt out of public education in a multi-community economy with local school finance and housing markets. In particular, the objective is to investigate whether perfect income stratification across public and private educational sectors predicted by single jurisdiction models and by multiple jurisdiction ones without housing markets holds in this setting. Nechyba (1999) has shown that the existence of a fixed stock of heterogeneous houses can prevent perfect income stratification from arising in equilibrium. Here we demonstrate that, even with homogeneous housing, perfect income stratification is not assured. On the contrary, it is possible to find equilibria in which households from intermediate income intervals use private schools, while richer ones prefer to send their youths to a local public school of higher quality. The emergence of very high quality public schools that attract students from the best-off households and survive the competition of private schools is therefore possible. The paper identifies a new way whereby housing markets affect how the market for education works.

Tiebout, local school finance and the ineffciency of head taxes

The literature on local public (school) finance has shown that the use of local head taxes to finance schools leads to an effcient allocation of households and pupils to districts (Tiebout, 1956; Hamilton, 1975; Calabrese et al., 2009). This paper revises this well established result, using a two-community model with a housing market that adds two layers of realism to the analysis: not every household receives direct benefits from schools (e.g. some do not have children at school age) and communities are vertically differentiated, in the sense that one of them is exogenously preferred to the other by every household. In such context, head taxation leads to an ineffcient allocation of households to districts, even if local governments set local spending levels effciently given their population. The ineffciency emerges because too many intermediate income "in-school" households reside in the rich district in equilibrium. Income taxation is ineffcient as well but, in a counter-intuitive result, it may cause smaller effciency losses than a lump-sum tax.

On the utility representation of asymmetric single-peaked preferences*

We introduce two natural types of asymmetric single-peaked preferences, which we name biased-above and biased-below, depending on whether the asymmetry (or preference-bias) favors alternatives above or below the peak. We de.ne a rich family of utility functions, the generalized distance-metric utility functions, that can represent preferences biased-above or biased-below, besides accommodating any degree of asymmetry. We also identify restrictions on differentiable utility representations that guarantee the underlying preferences to be biased-above or below, and allow to compare degrees of asymmetry. Finally, we consider a specific application -agents preferences over government size- to illustrate the role of factors such as risk aversion and tax distortions in shaping asymmetric preferences.Single-peaked preferences; asymmetric preferences; quadratic preferences; risk aversion; prudence

Off-the-peak preferences over government size*

We study the political consequences of policy preferences which are non-symmetric around the peak. While the usual assumption of symmetric preferences is innocuous in political equilibria with plat-forms convergence, it is not neutral when candidates are differentiated. We show that a larger government size emerges when preferences of the median voter off-the-peak are more intense towards overprovision (what we call wasteful preferences), whereas a smaller government results when her preferences are more intense towards underprovision (scrooge preferences). We then analyze the determinants of preferences off-the-peak and find that: (i) The sign of the third derivative of the policy-induced utility function indicates whether preferences are wasteful (positive) or scrooge (negative). (ii) The analog of Kimball's coefficient of prudence can be used to measure degrees of wastefulness and scroogeness. (iii) Consumers' risk aversion and government decreasing effectiveness in producing the public good generate scrooge.Single-peaked preferences; citizen-candidate; coefficient of prudence; differentiated platforms; risk-aversion

Poster Abstract: Practical issues in image acquisition and transmission over wireless sensor network

Multimedia data have become an important objective in wireless sensor networks. Due to the node resource constraints (energy consumption, memory capacity, network latency and throughput) the incorporation of image sensor at the nodes is currently a challenge. In this paper, we study different node architectures, evaluating processing time, energy consumption, image quality and data delivery issues. The study shows that a specialized image co-processor is an optimal solutionJUnta de Andalucía P07-TIC-0247

Automatic Lesser Kestrel’s Gender Identification using Video Processing

Traditionally, animal surveillance is a common task for biologists. However, this task is often accompanied by the inspection of huge amounts of video. In this sense, this paper proposes an automatic video processing algorithm to identify the gender of a kestrel species. It is based on optical flow and texture analysis. This algorithm makes it possible to identify the important information and therefore, minimizing the analysis time for biologists. Finally, to validate this algorithm, it has been tested against a set of videos, getting good classification results.Junta de Andalucía P10-TIC-570

Survival of the firm and territory.

El objetivo de este trabajo es evaluar el riesgo de mortalidad empresarial. Para ello, en una muestra de más de 11.741 empresas pertenecientes al sector textil-confección se ha estudiado, junto con otros factores, la influencia de la proximidad geográfica (efecto distrito) y la actividad productiva principal (efecto subsector) en la supervivencia de las empresas textiles españolas. Desde un punto de vista teórico-práctico esta industria es especialmente relevante para realizar ese tipo de estudios al menos por dos motivos: 1) porque después de la liberalización del comercio textil se ha visto inmersa en una profunda crisis en las economías más desarrolladas, y 2) porque tiende a agruparse geográficamente en torno a clusters o distritos industriales. Los resultados obtenidos sugieren que el riesgo de mortalidad empresarial se ve reducido por aspectos relativos a la empresa como la antigüedad y el subsector de actividad y, bajo determinadas circunstancias, por la localización en un distrito industrial. PALABRAS CLAVE: mortalidad empresarial, textil, distrito industrial