Paul A. Grout

Public and private sector discount rates in public–private partnerships*

Whether public sector projects should be discounted at a lower rate than private sector projects is highly contentious. This paper assesses the appropriate private and public sector discount rates in the context of public private partnerships. It shows that there are powerful arguments for using a higher rate to discount private projects than public sector projects and that failure to recognise this may lead to excessive reliance on public provision. However, the reason for the divergence is not related to the conventional incomplete market arguments in the literature. The results may have far broader implications for private sector involvement in public services. Copyright Royal Economic Society 2003

Does Experience Make You ‘Tougher’? Evidence from Competition Law

This article investigates experience effects for public officials. Using a unique data set of companies investigated under UK competition law, we find very strong experience effects for chairmen of investigation panels, estimated from the increase in experience of individual chairman. Probit and IV probit regressions indicate that replacing an inexperienced chairman with one of average experience increases the probability of a ‘guilty’ outcome by approximately 30% and, after chairing around 30 cases, a chairman is predicted to find almost every case guilty.

The costs and benefits of coordinating with a different group

We consider a setup where agents care about i) taking actions that are close to their preferences, and ii) coordinating with others. The preferences of agents in the same group are drawn from the same distribution. Each individual is exogenously matched with other agents randomly selected from the population. Starting from an environment where everyone belongs to the same group, we show that introducing agents from a different group (whose preferences are uncorrelated with those of each of the incumbents) generates costs but may also (surprisingly) generate benefits in the form of enhanced coordination.