Costly Property Rights?

Interesting economic history paper on the Philippines by Lakshmi Iyer of Harvard Business School.

It talks about how the US introduced property rights into the philippines tried to introduce a Public lands policy to encourage ownership. There reforms turned out to be expensive when completely subsidized, and too expensive for tenants to purchase these rights, so take-up was small. Its seems the lesson is that land reform works when the land is bought from the original owners on the cheap, and redistributed with as much subsidy as can be afforded, and that rights be protected even at the cost of being politically unpopular.

Seems to be ‘nigh impossible under a democratic government of a poor LDC.

Moreover, the paper had some preliminary evidence that land reform and agrarian productivity aren’t too tightly tied. Maybe another model for agricultural modernization is needed?

Perverse Incentives

States are over-reporting (allegedly) HS graduation rates to rank better for No Child Left Behind. See here.

Competition Among Public Schools III

Hoxby uses the number of streams in a metro area, because it determines the number of natural school district boundaries. When these boundaries were first drawn, travel time was the main consideration. Travelling over streams significantly affect travel time, so a place with more streams would have more districts.

As the first stage regression, she regresses C over Streams(in educational market m) as a function of Y and Z [both at the market level].

Lets discuss the Results.

Competition Among Public Schools II

The main empirical challenge is to have a good measure of choice, and to discuss whether it is endogenous (i.e. Cov(Choice, error) /=0)

Let me discuss endogeneity.

Competition Among Public Schools

For my Cross Section Econometrics exam, we have to answer questions on Caroline Hoxby’s “Does Competition Among Public Schools Benefit Students and Taxpayers”

What follows is a summary of this paper about theory and estimation issues. Another post will analyse the results.