Working Papers

In many developed countries, the most significant housing subsidy programs are funded by tax
expenditures rather than direct appropriations. Beyond the subsidy to homeownership under the
personal income tax, the U.S. tax code provides additional subsidies to specific groups of
homeowners. For example, the Mortgage Revenue Bond program (MRB) permits lower levels
of government to issue tax-exempt debt, using the proceeds to supply mortgages at below-market
interest rates to deserving households. States are also permitted to issue and distribute Mortgage
Credit Certificates (MCCs) which entitle recipient homeowners to claim a tax credit for some
portion of the mortgage interest paid rather than the tax deduction claimed by other homeowners.

This paper documents the wide variations in reliance upon MCCs and MRBs across U.S. states
and the emergence of Mortgage Credit Certificates as the largest housing program administered
by California, the largest U.S. state.

The paper also provides an economic analysis of the MCC program using micro data on more
than 12 thousand program recipients in California. We estimate the extent and distribution of
MCC subsidies across income and demographic groups, measuring the dollar amount of federal
subsidies and their effects upon the user cost of residential capital and the demand price of
housing. We estimate Poisson models of the geographic incidence of MCC subsidies across
neighborhoods of varying socio-demographic composition and deprivation. Finally, we note
differences in the administrative and programmatic costs of MCCs and MRBs, suggesting that
there are clear reasons to favor Mortgage Credit Certificates as a means of subsidizing deserving
households.

Philanthropists have long funded a wide range of educational research, practice, and policy initiatives, primarily through namesake foundations. Some observers have criticized these efforts as doing little to change the status quo in education and have called for more aggressive action on the part of this sector. Out of this critique has emerged a new philanthropic form, often termed venture philanthropy. Perhaps nowhere is venture philanthropy more prevalent than in the charter school and policy and advocacy terrain. Drawing from document analysis and a review of historical literature, this article provides a sociopolitical, descriptive discussion of this “new” form of philanthropy in supporting the charter school reform network. It also examines the funding strategies of venture philanthropies and the areas of policy intersection in program initiatives. The article concludes with a discussion of some political and philosophical tensions that venture philanthropy raises and also provides suggestions for further research.

We find that plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) could significantly reduce automotive greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and petroleum consumption, while improving energy security and urban air quality. Widespread PHEV adoption will depend upon technological and economic advances in batteries because the initial fuel savings do not rapidly compensate consumers for the capital costs of batteries today. For PHEV purchases to become economical to consumers, battery prices must decline from $1,300 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) to about or below $500/kWh, or U.S. gasoline prices must remain at about $5 per gallon-or the federal government must institute policy innovations with equivalent effects, such as policies to lower battery cost and increase battery lifetimes (e.g. a broad and sustained program of battery RD&D), or those to widen the difference between gasoline and electricity prices (e.g. changes in energy taxes). However, even before PHEVs become cost-effective consumers, their purchase can still be highly valuable to society if their significant GHG reductions can be achieved cost-effectively (using a benchmark price of about $50/t-CO2-eq). Using the GREET model, we determine that in order for PHEVs' reductions to become cost-effective, either their purchase must approach current unsubsidized prices-requiring the same policy innovations described above-or very low-GHG electricity must be used to power them. This requires policies to decrease the GHG intensity of electricity, such as renewable portfolio standards, feed-in tariffs or other measures. Importantly, we find that any carbon price would have to exceed $100/t-CO2-eq in order to render PHEVs' reductions cost-effective, and hence a carbon price alone represents an impractical short-term means of achieving this goal.

This paper was commissioned for a plenary session at the Association for Cultural Economics International 2008 Research Conference recognizing the 25th anniversary of the publication of Patrons Despite Themselves: Taxpayers and Arts Policy.  It proposes five “big questions” to which arts policy research should attend if carried on in the spirit that animated the book, namely that arts policy should seek to generate “more, better, engagement by more people with better art.”  The five issues are:

1. Waste of cultural resources represented by works that are not heard or seen, such as unperformed music and works in reserve collections of museums.
2. Design and implementation of a workable business model for works in digital form (recordings, video, text, etc.).
3. Increasing the value created by amateur participation (in contrast to passive consumption of art provided by professionals).
4. Withdrawal of elites, especially economic elites, from their historic participation in arts governance and support.
5. Fragmentation of collective patrimony as people have fewer and fewer works commonly experienced and art serves niche markets.

This paper argues that the new interest in so-called "corporate social responsibility" is founded on a false notion of how much discretion a modern public corporation has to sacrifice profits for the sake of certain social goods, and that the promotion of corporate social responsibility by both the private and public sectors misleads the public into believing that more is being done by the private sector to meet certain public goals than is in fact the case.