Welcome to the Economics 230B Website. If you are
taking Econ 230B, please check this site regularly. I will use
this site for posting announcements about class procedures. I
will also occasionally update the syllabus and the class reading
list.
| Reading List |
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| Introduction to Public Goods Theory | ||
| Paul
Samuelson, The
Pure
Theory of Public Expenditures, Review of
Economics and Statistics, 36(4): 350-356, 1954
Paul Samuelson, Diagrammatic Exposition of a Theory of Public Expenditure, Review of Economics and Statistics, 37(4):350-356, 1955 Paul Samuelson, Aspects of Public Expenditure Theories, Review of Economics and Statistics, 40(4):332-338, 1958 Erik Lindahl, Just Taxation--A Positive Solution, in Classics in the Theory of Public Finance, edited by R. Musgrave and A. Peacock Theodore Bergstrom and Richard Cornes, Independence of Allocative Efficiency from Distribution in the Theory of Public Goods, Econometrica, 51(6):1753-1765, 1983 Lectures 1, 2, 3, and 4 from Bergstrom's Lecture Notes on Public Economics Remarks on Readings in this sectionThe Lindahl article is a classic, written as a chapter in a book (in German) by the Swedish economist, Lindahl in 1919. It is short, modern in spirit, and a good thing to read. If you want to read more old classic articles by European public finance economists of the early 20th century, you can find them in the book "Classics in the Theory of Public Finance" from which this article is taken. The Samuelson papers are modern classics and everybody who studies public finance should read them. The Bergstrom-Cornes paper is well-known to your instructor. |
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| Externalities and the Coase Theorem | ||
|
Ronald Coase The
Problem
of Social Cost Journal of Law and Economics
3: pages 1-44 1960
Urs Schweitzer, Externalities
and
the Coase Theorem: Hypothesis or Result? Journal
of Institutional and Theoretical Economics,
144:245-266, 1988 William Vickrey, Accidents,
Tort Law, Externalities, and Insurance: An
Economist's Critique, Law and Contemporary
Problems, Vol 33, 1968, Garrett Hardin, The tragedy of the Commons, Science, 144:245-266, 1968 Scott
Gordon,
The Economic Theory of a Common Property Resource: The Fishery, Journal of
Political Economy, 62:2, 124-142, 1954 Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons,
Chapter
3 Theodore Bergstrom, The Uncommon Insight of
Elinor Ostrom, Harold Demsetz, Toward a
Theory of Property Rights, American Economic Review, 57:2,
347-359, 1967 Elinor Ostrom and Edella Schlager Property-rights regimes and natural resources, Land Economics, 68:3, 199, 249-262 Theodore Bergstrom, Regulation of Externalities, Journal of Public Economics, 5:131-138, 1976 Richard Schmalensee, et. al., An
Interim
Evaluation of Sulphur Dioxide Emissions Trading, Journal
of
Economic Perspectives, 12(3):53-68, 1998 Ted Bergstrom, When was Coase Right?,
January 2017 Lectures 5 and 6 from Bergstrom's Lectures
on
Public Economics Remarks on Readings in this Section The Coase article is another classic that
every student of public finance should read.
Schweitzer's article presents a fine modern
interpretation of Coase's ideas. Schweizer's piece
is also an excellent introduction to mechanism design
theory.
|
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| Congestion Externalities |
||
| William
Vickrey, Pricing
in
Urban and Suburban Transport, American Economic
Review, 52(2):,1963
William Vickrey, Congestion Theory and Transport Investment, American Economic Review, 59:251-260, 1969 Richard Arnott, Andrew de Palma, and Robin Lindsey, A Structural Model of Peak-Period Congestion: A Traffic Bottleneck with Elastic Demand, American Economic Review 83: pages161-179 1993 Richard Arnott and Ken Small, The Economics of Traffic Congestion, American Scientist 82: pages 446-455, 1994. Jam
Today,
Road Pricing Tomorrow The Economist,
December 6, 1997 David Easley and Jon Kleinberg, Modeling
Network Traffic Using Game Theory, Eric I Pas and Shari L Principio, Braess' Paradox: Some
New Insights Transportation Research B,
Vol 31, No. 3 pp 265-276, 1997 Tim Roughgarden and Eva
Tardos, How Bad is
Selfish Routing? London's
Congestion Pricing Southern California congestion pricing Hal Varian and Jeffrey Mackie-MasonEconomics of the Internet, 1994 Public goods theory has a lot to say about new economic problems that have arisen in the "information age." Several related papers and links can be found on Hal Varian's web page. Remarks on Readings in this Section I believe that the economics of congestion is a very promising area for further research. Two areas in which there are very important practical applications are traffic congestion and congestion on computer networks. In my opinion neither of these areas has received the attention from economists that is merited by its importance and interest. Both seems to me areas in which economic theory and econometrics are likely to be powerful tools. Vickrey's papers are full of clever
insights. The papers by Arnott and his coauthors develop
these ideas with skill and elegance. |
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| Introduction to Public Choice Theory and Voting | ||
| H. Bowen, The
Interpretation
of Voting in the Allocation of Resources, Quarterly
Journal
of Economics, 58(1):27-48, 1943 John Geanakoplos, Three Brief Proofs of Arrow's Theorem, Cowles Foundation Discussion Paper, June 2001 Jonathan
Levin and Barry Nalebuff, An
Introduction
to Vote-Counting Schemes, Journal of Economic
Perspectives, 9(1): 3-26, 1995
Hugo Sonnenschein, The Economics of Incentives: An Introductory Account, Nancy Schwartz Memorial Lecture, J. L. Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 1983 Theodore Bergstrom, When Does Majority Rule Supply Public Goods Efficiently? Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 216-226, 1979 H. Payton Young Condorcet's Theory of Voting, American Political Science Review, 82(4) 1988, pp 1231-1244Timothy Feddersen and Wolfgang Pesendorfer, The Swing Voter's Curse, American Economic Review, 1996, vol 86, pp408-426 Tom Palfrey and Richard McKelvey An Experimental Study of Jury Decision Rule, Cal Tech working paper, 1997 Andrew Caplin and Barry Nalebuff, On 64%-Majority Rule, Econometrica, Vol. 56, No. 4. (Jul., 1988), pp. 787-814. Theodore Bergstrom and Robert Goodman, Private
Demands for Public Goods, Arye L. Hillman and John Riley, Politically Contestable Rents and Transfers, UCLA working paper, September, 1987 Decisions and Elections, Donald G. Saari, Cambridge University Press, 2001 A good place to look for more
discussion and references on voting theory (and
tips on ice-fishing technique and sauna etiquette)
is Don Saari's
home page |
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| Private Provision of Public Goods | ||
| Theodore Bergstrom, Laurence Blume, and Hal Varian, Private Provision of Public Goods, Journal of Public Economics, 29:25-49 1986 James Andreoni and Theodore
Bergstrom, Do government subsidies increase the
private supply of public goods? Public Choice,
1997 (pdf
file) (postscript
file) Richard Cornes and Roger Hartley, Aggregative Public
Goods Games. James Andreoni Impure Altruism and Donations to
Public Goods: A Theory of Warm-Glow Giving,
Economica, June 1990 Wolfgang Buchholz, Richard Cornes,
and Dirk Rubbelke, Potentially
Harmful International Cooperation on Global Public
Good Provision Alex Tabarrok The
private provision of public goods via dominant assurance
contracts
Mark Bagnoli and Bart Lipman, Implementing
the
Core Through Private Contributions, Review
of Economic Studies, October, 1989, pp 583-601 Mark Bagnoli and Michael McKee, Voluntary
Contribution Games: Efficient Provision of Public
Goods, Economic Inquiry,
April 1991, volume 29, pages 351-366 John Morgan Financing Public Goods by Means of Lotteries Review of Economic Studies, 2000 John Morgan Funding Public Goods with Lotteries: An Experiment Working Paper, 1998 Theodore Bergstrom, Puzzles:
Love
and Spaghetti, The Opportunity Cost of Virtue, The
Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 3, No. 2.
(Spring, 1989), pp. 165-173. Weifeng Liu, Global
Public Goods and Coalition Formation under Matching
Mechanisms Eduardo Ley, On
the
Private Provision of Public Goods, A Diagrammatic
Approach, Investigaciones Economicas,
20(1): 691-704, 1996 Robertas Zubrickas, The provision
point mechanism with reward money, John Morgan Corporate
Provision of Public Goods The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970Let Me or Let George: Motives of Competing Altruists Ted Bergstrom, Rod Garratt, Greg Leo, 2015. Jim Andreoni's home page Jim Andreoni has written a whole slew of nice papers about charitable giving, theory, empirical work, and experimental work. This is the first place to look if you want to learn more about this subject. |
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| Public Goods in the Experimental Laboratory | ||
| John Ledyard,
Public Goods: A Survey of Experimental Research in Kagel
and Roth ed.Handbook of Experimental Economics
Princeton University Press. 1993
James Andreoni and John Miller, Analyzing Choice with Revealed Preference: Is Altruism Rational?, University of Wisconsin working paper, June 1998 James Andreoni and Rachel Croson Partners versus Strangers: The Effect of Random Rematching in Public Goods Experiment, University of Wisconsin working paper, June 1998 Tom Palfrey and Jeffrey Prisbey, Anomalous Behavior in Public Goods Experiments, How Much and Why?, to appear, American Economic Review |
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| Public Goods with Distortionary Taxation | ||
| Anthony B. Atkinson and Nicholas Stern. Pigou, taxation, and public goods. Review of Economic Studies 41:119--128, 1974. | ||
| Edward Foster and Hugo Sonnenschein. Price Distortion and Economic Welfare Econometrica 38:281--297, 1970. | ||
| Trout Rader.
The
Welfare
Loss from Price Distortions Econometrica
44:6 1253--1257, 1976.
Theodore Bergstrom. Commentary on Rader and Foster-Sonnenschein in Economics with No Special Technology by Trout Rader, Input-Output Publishing Company pp 179-182 |
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| Public Goods With Exclusion | ||
| Minasian J,Television pricing and the
theory of public goods. Journal of Law and
Economics 7:71-80,1964.
Paul Samuelson.Public goods and subscription tv: Correction of the record. Journal of Law and Economics 7:81--84, 1964 William Oakland, Public Goods, Perfect Competition, and Underproduction, Journal of Political Economy, 82(5), 927-939, 1974 Geoffrey Brennan and Cliff Walsh, A Monopoly Model of Public Goods Provision: The Uniform Pricing Case The American Economic Review, 71(1):196-206,1981 Dagobert L. Brito, William H. Oakland, On the Monopolistic Provision of Excludable Public Goods The American Economic Review, 70(4):691-704, 1980 Michael E. Burns and Cliff Walsh, Market Provision of Price-excludable Public Goods: A General Analysis The Journal of Political Economy, 89(1):166-191, 1981 Michael Spence, Monopoly, Quality and Regulation, The Bell Journal of Economics, 6(1) 417-429, 1975 Michele Boldrin and David Levine, Why
Napster
is right, web publication Ted Bergstrom and Carl Bergstrom The
costs
and benefits of library site licenses to academic
journals Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, Jan 20, Ted Bergstrom Free
Labor
for Costly Journals? , Journal of Economic Perspectives , John Bohannon Who's Afraid
of Peer Review, Science, October 2013 Carl Bergstrom and Ted Bergstrom Can
author-pays journals compete with reader-pays?
Nature 2004 |
Ted Bergstrom,
Benefit-Cost
in
a Benevolent Society,
American Economic Review, March 2006, vol 96, No.
1, pp 339-351
Ted Bergstrom, Rod Garratt, Damien Sheehan-Connor
One
Chance in a Million: Altruism and the Bone Marrow Registry
UCSB working paper, September 2007
Damien Sheehan Connor,
Life
an Death at the CAFE, Predicting
the Impact of Fuel Economy Standards on Vehicle Safety
Wesleyan University Working paper, 2012
Mark
R. Jacobsen,
Fuel Economy and Safety:The Influences of
Vehicle Class and Driver Behavior,
UCSD Working Paper, 2012
Preference Revelation Mechanisms
Theodore Groves and John Ledyard , Optimal Allocation of Public Goods: A Solution to the Free Rider Problem, Econometrica 45(4):783-809, May, 1977
Yan Chen and Charles Plott, The Groves-Ledyard Mechanism: An Experimental Study of Institutional Design",Journal of Public Economics 59:335-364, 1996
John Ledyard Voting and
Efficient Public Good Mechanisms, Handbook of
Political Science, Chapter 27, 2006
Matthew Jackson,
Mechanism Theory, 2003
| Lecture Notes |
|
Lecture notes will be updated and improved as the course progresses. My plan is eventually to make them into a book. Lecture 1. An Introduction to Public
Goods pdf
file Lecture 2. Private Goods and Public
Goods pdf
file Lecture 3. Independence of Allocation
and Distribution pdf file Lecture 4. Lindahl Equilibrium pdf file Notes on
Lindahl's Cost-Sharing Game Lecture 5. Externalities pdf file Lecture 6. Law'n Economics pdf file Lecture 7. Crowding pdf file Lecture 8. Traffic Congestion pdf file Lecture 9. Excludable Public Goods pdf file Lecture 10 Preference Revelation and
the Pivotal Mechanism. pdf file Lecture
on Elinor Ostrom and Tragedy of the Commons Lecture 12 Benefit Cost Analysis
pdf file |