Is capital allocated so that its marginal product is equated to the market interest rate? Is the marginal product of capital equalized across its alternative uses. This paper attempts to answer both of these questions using data from India, and concludes that both these standard properties fail by a wide margin.

While recent research has emphasized the desirability of studying effects of changes in marginal tax rates on taxable income, broadly defined, there has been comparatively little analysis of effects of marginal tax rate changes on entrepreneurial entry. This margin is likely to be important both because of the likely greater elasticity of entrepreneurial decisions with respect to tax changes (r...

Real interest and inflation rates have been very low in many industrialized countries since the Great Recession. In this paper, a mechanism of low and floating real interest and inflation rates is examined based on the concept a “Nash equilibrium of a Pareto inefficient path” and the law of motion for trend inflation. I show that, because the link between the marginal product of capital and the...

Water rates are designed to meet multiple objectives, typically resulting in tradeoffs among the objectives of economic efficiency, revenue sufficiency, and related revenue stability. Standard theory of natural monopoly is extended here to explain why long-run marginal cost (LMC) can be greater than both average cost and short-run marginal cost (SMC) for municipal water utilities. The distincti...

Approximately 100,000 youths are currently incarcerated in the US, yet little is known whether such a penalty deters future crime or interrupts human capital formation in a way that increases the likelihood of later criminal behavior. This paper uses the incarceration tendency of randomly-assigned judges as an instrumental variable to estimate causal effects of juvenile incarceration on adult r...

Top income inequality, defined as the income gap within the top 1% income group, has been rising in the United States since the 1980s. Coinciding with this rise, the large reductions in the topmarginal tax rate exhibit a strong correlation with the increase in both top income inequality and top income shares. This paper identifies endogenous human capital accumulation as the link between change...

In this paper, dynamic aspects of railway infrastructure operation and maintenance costs in Sweden are explored. Econometric cost functions are estimated to check the robustness of previous marginal cost estimates by introducing lags and leads of both dependent and independent variables. We find support for a forward-looking behaviour within the Swedish National Rail Administration (Banverket) ...

Suppose we have data from a bivariate model with parametric marginals. Efficient estimators of the parameters in the marginal models are generally not efficient in the bivariate model. In this article, we propose a method of improving these marginal estimators and demonstrate that the magnitude of this improvement can be as large as 100 percent in some cases.