Abstract. The basic concern of this paper is the effect of private sponsorship of university research on the allocation of expenditures between public good research and commercial applications. Throughout the land-grant university system, there is much concern that as a result of reduced government funding, fundamental research will be neglected at the expense of research that is geared toward commercial applications. This paper attempts to shed some light on the relationship between research priorities and the availability of public funding for university research. In particular, we use both a static and a dynamic model to investigate the conditions under which university/private research partnerships can "crowd-in" or "crowd-out" basic science research as public funding becomes scarcer.

This paper presents a framework for analyzing the structure of contracts for public-private partnerships (PPP) that produce products and services that generally include mixtures of both public and private goods. A three-stage framework, sourced with the incomplete contracting and control rights literature, is advanced to evaluate the successes and failures of a variety of PPP in the natural resources. These case studies provide unique insights into the contract structures that are typically designed for the management and provision of impure public goods. We demonstrate the desired contract structure of a PPP depends on the type of good or service produced, and it is this pivotal point that generally results in shared authority in the extraction or production and consumptive distribution of natural resources. 75 Annu. Rev. Resour. Econ. 2009.1:75-98. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by Michigan State University Library on 02/19/15. For personal use only.

West Texas Intermediate (WTI) and Brent Crude are primary benchmarks in oil pricing. Although produced in different locations, WTI and Brent are of similar quality and are used for similar purposes. Under the oil market globalisation assumption (Weiner, 1991), prices of crude oils with the same quality should move closely together at all times. However, empirical evidence shows that notable variations exist in the WTI/Brent spread, particularly after 2010, creating risks as well as potential arbitrage opportunities for oil market participants. The paper analyses the dynamics of WTI/Brent price spread for the period between January 1994 and December 2016. A test for structural breaks in the WTI/Brent price spread indicates a change from a stationary to a non-stationary time series in December 2010, which is also confirmed by the unit root and cointegration tests. The impact of physical market fundamentals on the dynamics of WTI/Brent price spread is then analysed using the Structural Vector Autoregression Model for each sub-sample period separated by the structural break. Impulse response functions show that the WTI/Brent spread is mainly driven by US production shocks.

Have U.S. oil market policy interventions succeeded in lowering the price of crude oil? This paper uses a structural vector autoregression model of the U.S. oil market to estimate the effect of purchases and releases by the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). Unanticipated releases from the SPR have no measurable impact on oil prices, but unanticipated purchases for the SPR raise oil prices by about 1 percent.These results are robust to identification using external instruments.

Systemic risk propagated through over-the-counter derivatives can best be managed by a public-private central counterparty clearing house (CCP). Though private CCPs provide an adequate amount of clearing's private good, they do not provide the socially optimal level of the public good or impure goods. By undersupplying both public and impure goods, private CCPs may exacerbate the conditions under which financial crises develop and propagate. A publicprivate partnership could align incentives so that the CCP produces the socially optimal level of the private, public, and impure goods. A partnership using a two-part pricing scheme for OTC structured composite transactions could properly compensate both partners and provide an effective policy instrument for controlling systemic risk. Moreover this structure, in contrast to current proposed government regulations, will not drive out the "good" with the "bad" OTC derivative instruments. 1 Centralized Clearing for Over-the-Counter DerivativesGordon Rausser*, William Balson**, and Reid Stevens*** Copyright 2009Abstract Systemic risk propagated through over-the-counter derivatives can best be managed by a public-private central counterparty clearing house (CCP). Though private CCPs provide an adequate amount of clearing's private good, they do not provide the socially optimal level of the public good or impure goods. By undersupplying both public and impure goods, private CCPs may exacerbate the conditions under which financial crises develop and propagate. A public-private partnership could align incentives so that the CCP produces the socially optimal level of the private, public, and impure goods. A partnership using a two-part pricing scheme for OTC structured composite transactions could properly compensate both partners and provide an effective policy instrument for controlling systemic risk. Moreover this structure, in contrast to current proposed government regulations, will not drive out the -good‖ with the -bad‖ OTC derivative instruments.