This book is based on lectures conducted for two classes at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University: A Public Finance Seminar for PhD students in public administration and State and Local Public Finance for master's students in public administration.Topics covered include the role of voters in a federal system, the sorting of different households into different communities, the determinants of public service costs, the property tax and other sources of local (and state) revenue, fiscal aspects of economic development, and intergovernmental aid (especially for education).The notes for the Ph.D. class also cover several more advanced topics, such as the estimation of education production and cost functions, the capitalization of school quality into house values, and tax competition among jurisdictions. The focus in these notes is on the highly decentralized federal system in the United States, but many of the principles and much of the behavioral analysis in the class apply to other countries as well.These notes draw on Professor Yinger's extensive teaching experience and publication record in state and local public finance. They should prove useful to many teachers, scholars, and students who find topics in state and local public finance that they wish to pursue.

"This book is based on lectures conducted for two classes at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University: A Public Finance Seminar for PhD students in public administration and State and Local Public Finance for master's students in public administration. Topics covered include the role of voters in a federal system, the sorting of different households into different communities, the determinants of public service costs, the property tax and other sources of local (and state) revenue, fiscal aspects of economic development, and intergovernmental aid (especially for education). The notes for the Ph.D. class also cover several more advanced topics, such as the estimation of education production and cost functions, the capitalization of school quality into house values, and tax competition among jurisdictions. The focus in these notes is on the highly decentralized federal system in the United States, but many of the principles and much of the behavioral analysis in the class apply to other countries as well. These notes draw on Professor Yinger's extensive teaching experience and publication record in state and local public finance. They should prove useful to many teachers, scholars, and students who find topics in state and local public finance that they wish to pursue"--Publisher's website.

This book provides a comprehensive discussion of the economics of International Trade.Key questions related to why countries trade, how they gain from trade, and how international trade can produce winners and losers are answered. The last of these questions is related to the connection of trade to inequality in the distribution of income.The book uses both theoretical models and empirical evidence to answer these questions. It also provides a discussion of the economics of labor migration and international capital mobility. The book also provides a detailed discussion of the welfare implications of various trade policy instruments such as tariffs, quotas, export subsidies etc. This is followed by a discussion of the process of actual policymaking in democratic societies which goes into the realm of political economy. The focus here is on the political economy of trade policy. It also provides a discussion of the economics of preferential trading agreements and a history of multilateral trading agreements under the aegis of GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and its evolution into the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Lecture Notes in International Trade Theory covers classical international trade models (including the Ricardian, Ricardo Viner, and Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson models). The course is designed for M.Sc. and first year PhD students. It relies on both graphical and analytic methods, requiring only intermediate microeconomics and a solid grounding in calculus. The material emphasizes 'second-best' settings, where markets are imperfect. The goal is to equip students with a good enough understanding of open-economy general equilibrium relations that they understand how distortions ripple across different markets, e.g. commodity and factor markets. The Author applies these ideas to environmental and natural resource problems, including pollution 'leakage' (where pollution reductions in one country are offset by trading partners' increased pollution) and imperfect property rights. Other applications include the general equilibrium effects of commodity and trade taxes, international transfers (the 'transfer problem'), minimum wage constraints, and immiserizing growth. The Author assumes that students have some experience in formulating and answering comparative statics questions in an optimization setting. Building on these skills, and developing the idea of stability in an equilibrium setting (the Marshall Lerner condition), students learn how to formulate and answer comparative static questions in trade models.

People pursue their own interests, whatever those interests might be. Some people have interests that are narrow and selfish, while others have interests that are broad and altruistic. The idea that people are self-interested underpins all of economic analysis and raises two fundamental questions: 1. How do people choose the actions they think will further their own interests? 2. Can the potentially conflicting interests of different people be made to 'mesh' in some sort of socio-economic equilibrium? This book is devoted to a detailed study of the first question. Its Companion Volume (Economy-Wide Microeconomics: Equilibrium, Optimality, Applications and Tests) makes a detailed study of the second question.Following some foundational remarks, this book studies the Arrow-Debreu theory of consumer choice. That theory supposes people choose so as to maximize a complete, continuous, transitive, and reflexive binary preference relation over a non-empty and compact choice set. The book then studies numerous refinements, generalizations and extensions of each of these restrictions — up to and including recent work on Behavioral theories of choice and choice behaviour when preferences are intransitive/incomplete/discontinuous. Also considered is choice behaviour in environments that are not necessarily compact. A study is also made of intertemporal choice and choice under uncertainty. The study of Arrow-Debreu choice theory and its extensions are presented from the Primal, Dual, and Revealed Preference points of view.Consumers are not the only agents in the economy, as Producers are present as well. Beginning with a study of the Arrow-Debreu idea that producers choose from a convex production set so as to maximize profit, the book considers extensions and generalizations of this framework, particularly to non-convex environments. The study is presented from the Primal and Dual points of view.The final chapter in the book provides a link to its Companion Volume. The Chapter indicates how the theories of consumer and producer choice studied here help inform answers of the second question posed above.Resources are available to instructors who adopt this book. More details at www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/12789-sm

The most interesting issues in environmental and resource economics have an explicit temporal dimension, since variables of interest such as pollutants, greenhouse gases, biomass of biological resources, or the stocks of fossil fuels accumulate in the ambient environment or are depleted through human actions and natural processes.The purpose of these lectures is to present the mathematical tools for analyzing environmental and resource management issues in a dynamic set-up.The lectures include a brief description of differential equations and then move on to describe methods of optimal control, dynamic programing, and differential games. The final chapters cover two novel topics: (1) environmental issues characterized by deep uncertainty, and aversion to ambiguity using robust control methods and formulations of precautionary policies; and (2) the study of pollution/resource management in space and time when the environmental variables evolve in time and diffuse in space.The lectures are a valuable tool for advanced graduate students in environmental and resource economics who are studying dynamic problems.

This lecture notes provides an overview of budgeting and financial management in the public and non-profit sectors. Fundamental concepts and practices of budgeting, financial management and public finance are introduced, with special emphasis on state and local government budgeting and financial management in the United States. The objectives of courses in Public Budgeting and this title are to teach the basic concepts and nomenclature of public finance, to develop an understanding of budget processes as well as the sources and uses of public revenues, and to make relatively simple, but useful computations in an intelligent way. Key course learning outcomes include the abilities to: There are no indispensable pre-requisites by the reader, and it has been designed for students from a wide variety of backgrounds and undergraduate majors. Although this works well as an introductory text to a broader public administration curriculum, it also can make sense for students to take after some more basic courses in economics, policy analysis, and public organizations. Issues of tax incidence and the effect of taxes on economic efficiency can be covered in greater depth.