Education, Benefitting from Oil Revenues, and Sustainable Development A. Ansari, Ph.D. To assess the status of Iranian educational system within a special conceptual framework of economic development, a number of existing documents related to the expenditure of oil revenues on education were critically reviewed. The results show that within any economic framework in which sustainable deve...

We propose an approach to optimally select corporate bond portfolios based on bond-specific characteristics (maturity, credit rating, coupon, illiquidity, past performance, and issue size) and macroeconomic conditions (recessions and macroeconomic uncertainty measures). The approach relies on a parametric specification of the portfolio weights and allows us to consider a large cross-section of ...

Legalized gambling is an attractive option to state governments facing tightening fiscal constraints. Yet, the empirical evidence on the effect of gambling on state revenues is limited. Most studies examine a single industry in a single state, and for a relatively short period of time. This study provides a more general analysis of gambling industries and their effects on state revenues. We use...

This paper focuses on the question of neuronal differences in the evaluation of hypothetical and real payoffs. Previous research in experimental economics (e.g. Holt and Laury 2002) has shown that there are differences in subjects’ behavior when evaluating hypothetical and real payoffs. We conducted a two sessions EEG-experiment with high-stake payoffs. We used the certainty equivalent method f...

T internal rate of return (IRR) is a venerable technique for evaluating deterministic cash flow streams. Part of the difficulty in extending this measure to stochastic cash flows is the lack of coherent methods for accounting for multiple or nonexistent internal rates of return in deterministic streams. Recently such a coherent theory has been developed, and we examine its implications for stoc...

The traditional theory of fiscal federalism prescribes a very limited tax base for subnational governments. The only "good" local taxes are said to be those (1) that are easy to administer locally, (2) that are imposed solely (or mainly) on local residents, and (3) that do not raise problems of "harmonization" or "competition" between subnational governments or between subnational and national ...

The fragility of livelihoods and hence the vulnerability of consumption growth due to aggregate shocks in the Indian rural sector have been highlighted recently. However, as yet there exist no estimates of the vulnerability of consumption growth in rural India. This paper attempts to fill this lacuna by providing certainty equivalent growth of consumption in 14 major states of India over the pe...