Suchergebnisse

The paper analyses the implementation of voucher privatization in Russia in the framework of incentive theory. The central government needs the support of local privatization agencies. These agencies possess private knowledge concerning: a) their personal reform attitude; b) local privatization conditions. According to the trade‐off between rent extraction and efficiency, the speed of privatization (the efficiency goal) is constrained by the informational rents that the government must pay to local agents. Through voucher privatization, the government learns about local privatization conditions. Surprisingly, this additional information does not necessarily lead to more privatization. In fact, the government may even slow down reforms in order to save on bureaucrats' rents. This result of the model matches with the facts of Russian privatization in the period 1992–93.

Inspiré par les tendances récentes du système universitaire en Europe, nous étudions des réformes partielles donnant aux universités le droit de sélectionner leurs étudiants mais pas le droit de percevoir des frais de scolarité. Donner aux universités le droit de sélectionner leurs étudiants devrait augmenter la productivité des étudiants sur le marché du travail car l'appariement du capital humain des enseignants et des étudiants serait meilleur. Cependant, dans des conditions réalistes, en absence de droit de percevoir des frais de scolarité, les incitations des universités à améliorer le capital humain des professeurs peuvent diminuer. JEL Codes : I2, I23

ABSTRACTWe model the decisions of young individuals to stay in school or drop out and engage in criminal activities. We build on the literature on human capital and crime engagement and use the framework of Banerjee (1993) that assumes that the information needed to engage in crime arrives in the form of a rumour and that individuals update their beliefs about the profitability of crime relative to education. These assumptions allow us to study the effect of social interactions on crime. In our model, we investigate informational spillovers from the actions of talented students to less talented students. We show that policies that decrease the cost of education for talented students may increase the vulnerability of less talented students to crime. The effect is exacerbated when students do not fully understand the underlying learning dynamics.