General Stream Adjudications: A Good Public Investment?

Social capital--is it a good investment strategy for public health?

Is biomedical research a good investment?

As the US addresses its budget dilemma, the easiest items to cut are those with the longest-term payoff. Research stands out among this group. Biomedical research has already been markedly reduced, and further reductions appear to be in store. As a frequent witness in Congressional hearings on such matters, here I discuss the challenge of assessing the value of investments in biomedical research.

Federalism as a Public Good

This paper suggests that stabilizing federalism is like solving a public good provision problem. It reviews results in the public good provision literature that are relevant for federalism, and discusses the implications of these results for the institutional design of federalism. 1For useful feedback, I thank seminar participants at Washington University, Duke, and Michigan. Federalism now rea...

Public-Good Productivity Differentials and Non-Cooperative Public-Good Provision

We explore the generality of Konrad and Lommerud (1995)’s Rotten Spouse Theorem. While the result holds for an arbitrary number of agents, it fails to hold for general technologies. We discuss some of the implications for CO2-emissions models.

Public investment as commitment

Should public assets such as infrastructure, education, and the environment earn the same return as private investments? We consider if time-inconsistent decisionmakers can gain from institutions that enforce cost-benefit rules on large projects that influence the economy as a whole. Long-term public investments provide commitment to current preferences, leading to investment biases in such ass...