Richard E. Romano

Public Provision of Private Goods

Government may provide a good that can, if legally permitted, be supplemented by private purchases. Policy is determined by majority rule. Under standard assumptions on preferences, a majority voting equilibrium exists. A regime of positive government provision with no restriction on private supplements is shown to be majority preferred to a regime of either only market provision or only government provision. Combined public and private expenditure on the good is higher under this dual-provision regime than under either of the alternatives. Under some preference configurations, the median-income voter is pivotal; under others, a voter with income below the median is pivotal.

Ends against the middle: Determining public service provision when there are private alternatives

Abstract Public provision of a service coexists with private market provision. The quality of public provision is determined by majority vote. Preferences are not single peaked owing to the presence of private alternatives. We identify two cases. In one, majority voting equilibrium always exists and the median-income voter is pivotal. In the other, a necessary condition for equilibrium indentifies the pivotal voter who must have income below the median. When equilibrium exists, a coalition of middle-income households who consume the public alternative will be opposed by a coalition of rich and poor households, with the rich choosing private consumption.

Competition between Private and Public Schools: Testing Stratification and Pricing Predictions

When there are peer effects in education, private schools have an incentive to vary tuition to attract relatively able students. Epple and Romano (1998) develop a general equilibrium model characterizing equilibrium pricing and student selection into schools when peer effects are present. The model predicts that competition will lead private schools to give tuition discounts to more able students, and that this will give rise to an equilibrium exhibiting stratification by income and ability between the public and private sectors and to a hierarchy of schools within the private sector. The model also yields a variety of comparative-static predictions. The predictions of the model are tested in this paper using a unique data set assembled by Figlio and Stone (1999). Tests of equilibrium predictions of the model reveal that: The propensity to attend private school increases with both income and ability, and, among private schools, the propensity to attend the highest-tuition school rises with both income and ability. Within private schools, tuition declines with student ability, with a substantial of even high-income households paying little or no tuition. The correlation between income and ability is greater in public than private schools. Tests of comparative static predictions of the model reveal that: Both income and ability become stronger predictors of private school attendance as public school expenditure falls. Income becomes increasingly important in determining placement in the private school hierarchy as public school expenditure falls. Discounts to ability in the lowest-quality private school decline as public school expenditure rises while discounts to ability in the highest-quality private school are little affected by changes in public school expenditure. Expenditure in private schools rises as expenditure in public school increases. These empirical results are consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model.

Ability tracking, school competition, and the distribution of educational benefits

Abstract To study the effects of ability grouping on school competition, we develop a theoretical and computational model of tracking in public and private schools. We examine tracking’s consequences for the allocation of students of differing abilities and income within and between public and private schools. Private schools tend to attract the most able and wealthiest students, and rarely track in equilibrium. Public sector schools can maximize attendance by tracking students. Public schools retain a greater proportion of higher-ability students by tracking, but lose more wealthy, lower-ability students to the private sector. Consequently, socioeconomic status is a predictor of track assignment in public schools. For the entire population, public-sector tracking has small aggregate effects on achievement and welfare, but results in significant redistribution from lower- to higher-ability students.

Peer Effects in Education: A Survey of the Theory and Evidence

Abstract We survey the theoretical and empirical literature on peer effects in education. Theoretical models of peer effects are first summarized. Models of educational provision regimes in which peer effects play a central role are then discussed. Next we discuss the identification issues in estimating peer effects and strategies used to resolve them. Last we survey the empirical evidence on and channels of peer effects in education. JEL Codes: I210, C590, D620

Why charities announce donations: a positive perspective

Charities frequently announce contributions of donors as they accrue. Doing so induces donors to play a sequential-move rather than simultaneous-move game. We examine the conditions under which a charity prefers such sequential play. It is known that if donors only value contributions through their effect on the total provision of a public good, then the charity will not announce contributions sequentially. However, with more general utility functions that include additional effects such as warm-glow or snob appeal, the charity may benefit from announcing contributions.

Peer Effects, Financial Aid, and Selection of Students into Colleges and Universities: An Empirical Analysis

The goal of this paper is to develop predictions regarding market consequences of peer effects in higher education and to offer empirical evidence about the extent to which those predictions are borne out in the data. We develop a model in which colleges seek to maximize the quality of the educational experience provided to their students. From this model we deduce predictions about the hierarchy of schools that emerges in equilibrium, the allocation of students by income and ability among schools, and about the pricing policies that schools adopt. In the empirical analysis, we use both university-level data provided primarily by Petersons and student-level data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study obtained from the NCES. The findings of this paper suggest that there is a hierarchy of school qualities which is characterized by substantial stratification by income and ability. The evidence on pricing by ability is supportive of positive peer effects in educational achievement from high ability at the college level. However, the evidence on pricing also suggests that more highly ranked schools exercise some degree of market power. This is reflected in the substantial variation of price with income coupled with discounts to more able students that are modest at best.

Private provision of a discrete public good with uncertain cost

Abstract It is known that a discrete public good is efficiently provided in the subset of ‘undominated equilibria’ (those not Pareto dominated within the set of Nash equilibria). We make the cost of the discrete public good uncertain at the time the contribution game is played. This can lead to strikingly different results. Often, the public good is underprovided in any Nash equilibrium and there is a unique undominated equilibrium. These results hold for some distributions when there is arbitrarily little uncertainty and always when there is enough uncertainty.

On the Endogeneity of Cournot-Nash and Stackelberg Equilibria: Games of Accumulation

Abstract We characterize equilibria of games with two properties: (i) Agents have the opportunity to adjust their strategic variable after their initial choices and before payoffs occur; but (ii) they can only add to their initial amounts. The equilibrium set consists of just the Cournot–Nash outcome, one or both Stackelberg outcomes, or a continuum of points including the Cournot–Nash outcome and one or both Stackelberg outcomes. A simple theorem that uses agents’ standard one-period reaction functions and the one-period Cournot–Nash and Stackelberg equilibria delineates the equilibrium set. Applications include contribution, oligopoly, and rent-seeking games.

Private Provision of Public Goods and the Failure of the Neutrality Property in Large Finite Economies

The pure public goods paradigm has been criticized because it implies the implausible result that, under certain assumptions, any (small) arbitrary income redistribution will have no effect on the allocation of resources. It is shown that this particular criticism is unwarranted because, for large enough economies, the assumptions necessary for this neutrality property will hold true for a negligible small subset of the parameter space. Copyright 1991 by Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.