The Private Life of Public Finance


Book Description

The son of a steelworker from Pennsylvania tells the inside story, warts and all, of his career as a successful investment banker at two of the biggest, best-known, and most controversial firms in the world-Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase-during a historic and turbulent period in US history. Mark Melio's personal anecdotes and observations illustrate the self-absorbed culture, hypocrisy, and rapacious practices of Wall Street's leading banks, how he bought into the fiction that "the customer always comes first," and how investment banks morphed from once-proud partnerships into predators in constant search of new ways to scalp clients. This is a rare glimpse by a thoughtful observer behind the scenes of an institution that built America's "new" economy and then nearly destroyed it.




Private and Public Finance


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Policy and Choice


Book Description

Argues that public finance--the study of the government's role in economics--should incorporate principles from behavior economics and other branches of psychology.




Public Finance and Public Policy


Book Description

Chapters include: "Income distribution and welfare programs", "State and local government expenditures" and "Health economics and private health insurance".







Private and Public Finance


Book Description




Public Finance and Public Policy


Book Description

The second edition of Public Finance and Public Policy retains the first edition's themes of investigation of responsibilities and limitations of government. The present edition has been rewritten and restructured. Public choice and political economy concepts and political and bureaucratic principal-agent problems are introduced at the beginning for application to later topics. Fairness, envy, hyperbolic discounting, and other concepts of behavioral economics are integrated throughout. The consequences of asymmetric information and the tradeoff between efficiency and ex-post equality are recurring themes. Key themes investigated are markets and governments, institutions and governance, public goods, public finance for public goods, market corrections (externalities and paternalist public policies), voting, social justice, entitlements and equality of opportunity, choice of taxation, and the need for government. The purpose of the book is to provide an accessible introduction to the use of public finance and public policy to improve on market outcomes.




Public Finance and the Political Process


Book Description

Holcombe presents theoretical models, melds theory and empirical work, and jux­taposes economics and political science. Fur­ther, he provides insights into such concepts as agenda control, points out the advantages of incumbency, explains government as a natural monopoly, establishes an updating of the social contract, and examines the virtues of common law in contrast to statutory law. In his final chapters, Holcombe provides a foundation upon which the preceding chap­ters are logically built. From his analysis, itappears that there is an approximate corre­spondence between voter preferences and political outcomes, as depicted by a median voter model, but that for many reasons re­source allocation through the public sector is considerably less efficient than through the private sector.







Public Finance and Public Choice


Book Description

Are the way in which governments tax and spend efficient, and are they equitable? These questions are central to public sector economics and this second edition of Public Finance and Public Choice illustrates the controversies which surround them. This new edition continues to focus on both the social optimality and public choice approaches but also includes alternative perspectives. This successful text has been extensively rewritten, offering further microeconomic insight and additional examples of the application of theory. New sections include: The private provision of public goods Privatization The quasi market The EC budget QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years) Public debt The impact of the public sector on economic growth. This clearly written, rigorous text offers a complete course in the economics of the public sector. It will be an indispensable text for students studying public economics, and also for students taking technical public policy or public administration courses.