On the behavioural relevance of optional and mandatory impure public goods

Aspects of the method developed by Aaron and McGuire and Maital (AMM) for estimating the benefit distributions associated with the provision of pure public goods are clarified and the method is extended to cover the case of public projects designed to improve the quality of impure public goods. The extended method is used to estimate the distributional impact of a proposed public project in the Cleveland-Akron metropolitan region, and the results are compared with estimates obtained from three naive models and from the AMM model for pure public goods. It is found that the native models overestimate substantially the net benefits received by low-income families and underestimate the net benefits received by high-income families. Using the AMM method for a pure public good similarly distorts the results, though by a much smaller magnitude.

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How Markets for Impure Public Goods Organize: The Case of Household Refuse Collection

The Journal of Law Economics and Organization ◽

10.1093/oxfordjournals.jleo.a036951 ◽

1988 ◽

Cited By ~ 14

Keyword(s):

Public Goods ◽

Refuse Collection ◽

Impure Public Goods

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Estimating Free-Riding Behavior: The StratAM Model

Political Analysis ◽

10.1093/pan/mpr026 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 19 (4) ◽

pp. 488-502 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Martin C. Steinwand

Keyword(s):

Cold War ◽

Public Goods ◽

Foreign Aid ◽

Good Governance ◽

Free Riding ◽

Public Goods Provision ◽

Developmental Needs ◽

Impure Public Goods ◽

Sar Model ◽

Spatial Autoregressive

Spatial statistical methods in political science provide a tool to deal with spatial and other forms of interdependence in observational data. In this article, I derive a statistical model from a game of impure public goods provision. The resulting strategic autoregressive model (StratAM) allows the researcher to systematically explore the sources of free-riding behavior in the provision of public goods. The StratAM model is tightly related to the well-known spatial autoregressive (SAR) model and can be estimated in a maximum likelihood framework. I demonstrate the use of the StratAM model by analyzing free riding in the provision of foreign aid. Indicators of developmental needs and good governance strongly increase free-riding during the 1990s. Free-riding patterns in the 2000s are more similar to Cold War patterns.

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