majority voting and corporate control the rule of the dominant shareholder this paper incorporates a model of corporate control into a general equilibrium framework for production economies with incomplete markets the classical objective of value maximization is extended but is indeterminate instead firms are viewed as being subject to shareholder control via some decision mechanism as long as this decision mechanism is responsive to a unanimous preference by shareholders shareholder control is consistent with but stronger than value maximization next the particular institution of majority voting by shareholders is examined it is shown that for generic economies a majority rule equilibrium for a firm implies that production is optimal for the largest or dominant shareholder finally a more realistic control mechanism is considered in which majority voting by shareholders is constrained by a group of shareholders or board of directors who control the voting agenda the result is that shareholders not on the board have no influence on the equilibrium production choice of the firm

does female education prevent the spread of hiv aids in sub saharan africa cross section estimates of 31 countries for the year 2000 are used to examine the effect of the level of female education and the gap between male and female levels on the prevalence of hiv aids in sub saharan africa many standard types of education are analysed and a non standard category involving under and over aged primary school enrollees are identified although it is found that female education is positively related to country infection rates there is scope to reduce infection rates by substituting one type of education for another it is estimated that female infection rates peak within 15 17 years of the first case reported

capital controls and monetary policy in sudden stop economies abstract the dangers of high capital flow volatility and sudden stops have led economists to promote the use of capital controls as an addition to monetary policy in emerging market economies this paper studies the benefits of capital controls and monetary policy in a small open economy with financial frictions nominal rigidities and sudden stops without commitment the optimal monetary policy should sharply diverge from price stability the policymakers will also tax capital inflows in a crisis but such taxes may be welfare reducing with commitment capital controls involve a mix of current capital inflow taxes and future capital flow subsidies the optimal policy will never involve macro prudential capital inflow taxes or a departure from price stability whether or not commitment is available

a cost benefit analysis of a condom social marketing programme in tanzania this article uses the revealed preference willingness to pay approach to estimate the benefits in a cost benefit analysis of a condom social marketing csm programme in tanzania the demand curve used to derive the consumer surplus had unit elasticity and it was estimated from a cross sectional sample of 1272 persons people were willing to pay different prices for the condoms because perceived quality varied net benefits were close to zero for the minimum estimate that ignored external benefits with external benefits included the csm programme was judged socially worthwhile with our best estimate producing a benefit cost ratio ranging from 1 31 to 1 72

externality and literacy a note abstract kaushik basu and james foster 1998 have opened up an interesting approach to the measurement of literacy in which the phenomenon of externality has an important role to play the externality these authors examine is what one may call a material externality and they demonstrate that reckoning such an externality in the measurement of literacy provides an instrumental justification for horizontal equity the present note elucidates this link through a specific formulation of the basu foster thesis it also suggests that apart from a material externality there is also a psychic externality to be considered the psychic externality runs in a direction somewhat orthogonal to that of the material externality postulated by basu and foster and it is shown that reckoning such an externality in the measurement of literacy provides an instrumental justification for being sensitive to levels of literacy attainment in comparisons of literacy improvements in a broad sense the note suggests

restricted perception equilibria and rational expectation equilibrium abstract this paper studies a cobweb economy in which agents make decisions using a misspecified model of their stochastic environment specifically the agents model of the price process is restricted to be a moving average of order q ma q minimizing the mean square of their forecast error we prove existence and uniqueness of this ma q optimal equilibrium and we show that as q goes to infinity the ma q optimal equilibrium converges in mean square towards the rational expectations equilibrium the speed of convergence is dictated by the persistence of the underlying exogenous process lastly we show that when all other agents use the correctly specified model the misspecified ma q model can provide accurate forecasts this suggests that if agents have to pay for their forecasting model and if the correctly specified model is more costly a situation in which all agents use the correctly specified model might not be an equilibrium

the farmers home administration s social discount rate the aim was to estimate the sdr revealed by past decisions by the farmers home administration fmha concerning their farm ownership programme in new york state these decisions involved trading off a current loan against a long stream of future farm profits the ratio of the coefficients to these two variables in a logit equation produced the estimate of the sdr the main finding was that a very high rate of discount was uncovered in the range 70 73 these high rates may be explained by individual risk and the life cycle context in which the estimates were made

impact of pension system structure on international financial capital allocation abstract recent findings indicate that pension system structure affects private savings and through them the aggregate foreign asset position of a country we present a two country overlapping generations model that explores the relationship between the magnitude of pension guarantees and the resulting portfolio choices of workers the existence of a pay as you go pension system lowers the wealth of the young workers who consequently borrow from abroad to supplement their current consumption and lowers the overall riskiness of their lifetime wealth prompting them to invest in risky equity financed by the selling of safe bonds in particular we are able to replicate and explain the venture capitalist positive net equity accompanied by negative net debt portfolio profile of the united states more broadly we find empirical support for our results in a cross country analysis using data from 110 economies greater amounts of pension spending are associated with international indebtedness long equity positions and short debt positions

applied general equilibrium models of taxation and international trade an introduction and survey we wish to acknowledge the help of three referees and of john pencavel on several earlier drafts as well as the assistance of the modelers whose work is referred to in the paper they corrected our lack of understanding of their work and provided many other helpful comments excellent research and bibliographical assistance have been provided by debbie fretz radwan shaban and janet stotsky helpful comments have been made by charles ballard michael boskin lans bovenberg sylvester damus harvey galper glenn harrison gordon lenjosek jack mutti serena ng t n srinivasan charles stuart and eric toder the authors also acknowledgefinancial support from the national bureau of economic research the national science foundation international business machines and the social sciences and humanities research council ottawa canada

computational economics and economic theory substitutes or complements abstract this essay examines the idea and potential of a computational approach to theory discusses methodological issues raised by such computational methods and outlines the problems associated with the dissemination of computational methods and the exposition of computational results we argue that the study of a theory need not be confined to proving theorems that current and future computer technologies create new possibilities for theoretical analysis and that by resolving these issues we will create an intellectual atmosphere in which computational methods can make substantial contributions to economic analysis

railway development from the japanese occupation period to the present using kaohsiung city as an example abstractthis study intended to discuss the interactive influence of the emergence transformation and decline of the railway in kaohsiung port on urban development the population the activities and the economy in the region during the period of 1895 2010 from the perspectives of urban planning railway development population and industry this study used the crossover analysis method and used the factors of railway development and urban planning within a fixed time period to explore the chain dependence relationship among the industry the population the regional economy and the railway stations in kaohsiung city this study found that urban planning economic development railway development and industry have an interactive influence on the overall urban development urban planning promotes the rapid growth of the population and economic development propels the growth and shaping of the regional economy thus increasing employment opportunities in addition the railway development process moves

computing multi period information constrained optima this paper presents a detailed theoretical derivation and justification for methods used to compute solutions to a multi period including infinite period continuum agent unobservedeffort economy actual solutions are displayed illustrating cross sectional variability in consumption and labour effort in the population at a point in time and variability for a typical individual over time the optimal tradeoff between insurance and incentives is explored and the issue of excess variability is addressed by consideration of the analogue full information economy and various restricted contracting regimes

computing equilibria when asset markets are incomplete existence of equilibrium with incomplete markets is problematic because demand functions are typically not continuous discontinuities occur at prices for which a marketed asset suddenly becomes redundant we show that this discontinuity disappears if we allow an agent in the economy to introduce a new asset when such redundancies occur this enables us to prove existence with incomplete markets using a standard path following argument hence available algorithms for path following in r k can be applied to compute equilibria in the gei case we demonstrate this by computing equilibrium for a numerical example

an implicit price of a daly for use in a cost benefit analysis of arvs this article uses the revealed preference approach to estimate the price for a disability adjusted life year daly implied by grant decisions by the global fund for aids tuberculosis tb and malaria gfatm a cost benefit criterion is used that requires the daly price exceed the cost effectiveness ratio the estimated price was 6300 for a daly saved from any disease but it was 11 900 from a daly saved specifically from hiv aids estimates of the cost effectiveness ratios of antiretroviral drug therapies arvs in the literature were examined at the daly prices implicit by gfatm decisions arvs would be socially worthwhile

the welfare effects of the introduction of storage this paper examines the welfare effects of introducing storage into a market with stochastic supply in which all agents are competitive profit maximizers with rational expectations these welfare effects are the net result of the initial increase in demand for stock building and the partial and asymmetric reduction in the dispersion of consumption brought about by storage the distributional impacts depend crucially on the information available to producers before storage is introduced the elasticity of supply the specification of the consumption demand curve and the cost of storage

poverty and household size the widely held view that larger families tend to be poorer in developing countries has influenced research and policy the scope for size economies in consumption cautions against this view we find that the correlation between poverty and size vanishes in pakistan when the size elasticity of the cost of living is about 0 6 this turns out to be the elasticity implied by a modified version of the food share method of setting scales by contrast some measures of child nutritional status indicate an elasticity of unity consideration of the weight attached to child versus adult welfare may help resolve the non robustness of demographic profiles of poverty excerpt

health as a family matter do intra household education externalities matter for maternal and child health abstract this paper is concerned with the role of education as a determinant of health care choices the central premise of the paper is that utilisation of health services is determined not solely by an individual s own education but rather by a notion of effective education which incorporates the educational attainment of other household members the paper sets out a general framework for representing intra household education externalities and proposes a number of specific hypotheses concerning the way in which the education of different household members affects health care choices these hypotheses are tested on data from mozambique focusing on maternity services child immunisations and child malnutrition we draw four major conclusions from the analysis first while maternal education seems to be the education variable of primary importance for the health service and malnutrition variables under consideration the education of other household members does have a significant and sometimes larg

is it better to be a boy a disaggregated outlay equivalent analysis of gender bias in papua new guinea the demographic evidence of gender bias in many countries has provided an impetus for finding ways to study the status of women in developing countries because of the lack of accurate intra household data deaton 1989 introduced a method for using household expenditure data to infer discrimination in the allocation of goods between boys and girls few studies of discrimination using the method however have detected bias even though alternative indicators suggest it is a serious problem in this paper we study the case of papua new guinea a country in which there are many indicators of severe gender bias discrimination in the allocation of goods between boys and girls within households in papua new guinea is examined using deaton s outlay equivalent ratio method adding a boy to the household reduces expenditure on adult goods by as much as would a nine tenths reduction in total outlay per member but girls have no effect on adult goods expenditure the hypothesis of haddad and reardon 1993 that

community perspectives of wind energy in australia the application of a justice and community fairness framework to increase social acceptance decisions concerning the siting of infrastructure developments or the use of natural resources have the potential to damage a community s social well being if the outcomes are perceived to be unfair justice is accepted as central to the well functioning of society with fairness being an expectation in day to day interactions outcomes that are perceived to be unfair can result in protests damaged relationships and divided communities particularly when decisions are made which benefit some sections of the community at the perceived expense of others through empirical research using a wind farm pilot study community perceptions of a community consultation process are explored using procedural justice principles to evaluate fairness findings from the pilot study indicate that perceptions of fairness do influence how people perceive the legitimacy of the outcome and that a fairer process will increase acceptance of the outcome a key research finding was that different sections of a community are likely to be influenced by different aspects of justice namely by outcome fairness outcome favourability and process fairness based on this finding a community fairness framework was developed which has potential application in community consultation to increase social acceptance of the outcome

a modified human development index abstract this paper discusses a modified index for measuring human development the suggested index is based on the components of the human development index hdi developed by the united nations development programme undp since 1990 it discusses two categories of technical issues related to the hdi for 1995 those related to the components and those relevant to the structure of the index the data from the human development report 1995 for 174 countries are used to test the robustness of the suggested index and the results are compared to those of the hdi the new index is then used to delineate with some justification different groups of countries at various levels of human development

nimby or not exploring the relevance of location and the politics of voiced opinions in renewable energy siting controversies local protests against renewable energy facilities have added fuel to the debate about the so called nimby not in my back yard effect this paper identifies six variables that can hamper the comparison between different public perception studies and offers two broad conclusions on aggregate proximity does have strong influence on public attitudes to proposed projects but the nature strength and spatial scale of this effect may vary according to local context and value of the land residents of stigmatised places are more likely to welcome facilities that are relatively green while people who derive a more positive sense of identity from particular rural landscapes are likely to resist such potential developments especially if they also live there secondly the fear of being branded a nimby and the positive ethics associated with the notion of renewable are both likely to colour the responses of many interviewees these aspects need to be clarified and accounted for in analyses of elicited responses both quantitative and qualitative if we are to improve our understanding of the social construction of individual attitudes in siting conflicts

the role of labor income risk in household risk taking abstract in fifteen european countries china and the us stocks and business equity as a share of total household assets are represented by an increasing and convex function of income wealth a parsimonious model fitted to the data shows why background labor income risk can explain much of this risk taking pattern uncontrollable labor income risk stresses middle income households more because labor income is a larger fraction of their total lifetime resources compared with the rich in response middle income households reduce controllable financial risk richer households having less pressure can afford more risk taking the poor take low risk because they avoid jeopardizing their subsistence consumption

estimating the effectiveness and benefits of alcohol treatment programmes for use in economic evaluations a binary probit model based on random utility theory is employed to obtain the implicit determinants of alcohol treatment effectiveness revealed by decisions made by programme evaluators of behavioural changes by patients a scale of equivalences for the behavioural variables is constructed which uses reductions in alcohol drinking as the unit of account because one of the behavioural variables was the change in income from treatment expressed in dollars the trade offs contained in the scale of equivalences can be translated into monetary terms using the human capital approach the method is applied to a sample of 1689 observations from the national alcoholism program information system napis tapes for 1977 81

on the marginal welfare cost of taxation this paper develops a rigorous partial equilibrium analysis of the determinants of margin al welfare cost mwc of taxes on labor earnings it shows that four key parameters interact to determine the magnitude of mwc using aggregate data and plausible ranges of values for the parameters mwc can vary from under 10 percent to more than 300 percent of marginal tax revenue intermediate parameter values sugge st mwc is in the 25 50 percent range however the more extreme estimates cannot be ruled out on the basis of available evidence suggesting that mwc cannot yet be copyright 1987 by american economic association

public estimates of support for offshore wind energy false consensus pluralistic ignorance and partisan effects abstract meeting future energy demands will require large scale implementation of renewable energy projects if one of these energy sources offshore wind becomes a common sight off coastlines consideration of local public opinion and action will be critical previous research from the social sciences has lacked depth in examining the underlying factors that shape public opinion towards offshore wind development the current research brings a new perspective to the literature by showing that how members of the public perceive support among others relates to their own opinions of offshore wind energy we report results from two surveys the first focused on opinion formation relating to offshore wind in general among new england residents while the second focused on a specific offshore wind project in rhode island we find evidence that both supporters and opponents of offshore wind underestimate levels of support among others indicating a pluralistic ignorance effect and false consensus effect respectively we also find distinct patterns of perceived support among self identified republicans and democrats the findings hold important implications for policymakers and developers in understanding the nature of public support and opposition for offshore wind energy particularly with respect to individuals willingness to publicly engage with offshore wind projects

how much of a threat to economic growth is a mature aids epidemic the article models the impact on economic growth of hiv aids when the epidemic is in a mature phase in contrast with previous studies focused on periods of expansion as it is typically the case in african countries simulations for honduras the epicentre of the epidemic in central america show that aids is not likely to threaten economic growth neither through labour nor capital accumulation channels impacts are estimated between 0 007 and 0 27 points of gross domestic product gdp growth annually for the period 2001 to 2010 increasing spending on prevention higher public treatment subsidies and increasing treatment access will not jeopardize economic growth prospects critical factors that slash economic growth in africa such as human capital reductions and shifts in relative skills are not strong in honduras

learning by doing organizational forgetting and industry dynamics learning by doing and organizational forgetting have been shown to be important in a variety of industrial settings this paper provides a general model of dynamic competition that accounts for these economic fundamentals and shows how they shape industry structure and dynamics previously obtained results regarding the dominance properties of flrms pricing behavior no longer hold in this more general setting we show that forgetting does not simply negate learning rather learning and forgetting are distinct economic forces in particular a model with learning and forgetting can give rise to aggressive pricing behavior market dominance and multiple equilibria whereas a model with learning alone cannot

social acceptance of renewable energy innovation an introduction to the concept this paper introduces the special issue on social acceptance of renewable energy innovation it is a collection of best papers presented at an international research conference held in tramelan switzerland in february 2006 while there are ambitious government targets to increase the share of renewable energy in many countries it is increasingly recognized that social acceptance may be a constraining factor in achieving this target this is particularly apparent in the case of wind energy which has become a subject of contested debates in several countries largely due to its visual impact on landscapes this paper introduces three dimensions of social acceptance namely socio political community and market acceptance factors influencing socio political and community acceptance are increasingly recognized as being important for understanding the apparent contradictions between general public support for renewable energy innovation and the difficult realization of specific projects the third dimension market acceptance has received less attention so far and provides opportunities for further research particularly from management scholars

your retirement and my health behavior evidence on retirement externalities from a fuzzy regression discontinuity design this paper presents evidence on intra household retirement externalities by assessing the causal effect of partner s retirement on own health behaviour in europe we identify partner s retirement effects by applying a fuzzy regression discontinuity rd framework using retirement eligibility as an exogenous instrument for partner s retirement status using data from the survey of health ageing and retirement in europe share we find that while partner s retirement increases own physical activity it also increases smoking by up to 7 cigarettes a day and increases alcohol intake by 1 2 drinks per day furthermore we find that physical activity increases only for individuals that are themselves retired pointing toward compensated effects that arise due to husband s and wife s retirement being complements similarly an increase in alcohol intake is observed only if the individuals are themselves retired and an increase in smoking is only observed if the partner is a smoker suggesting mutual positive externalities and leisure complementarities

computing equilibria in infinite horizon finance economies the case of one asset abstract we develop methods to compute equilibria in dynamic models with incomplete asset markets and heterogeneous agents using spline interpolation methods we approximate recursive trading policies of the agents and the equilibrium pricing functions we explore various methods for determining the coefficients of these approximations including time iteration methods and acceleration techniques exploring the optimization errors implied by the approximate equilibrium rules we examine the quality of our results the results are very encouraging since we are able to compute approximate equilibria in a few minutes or less attaining optimization errors on the order of one dollar per million dollars of wealth

public attitudes towards renewable energy technologies in norway the role of party preferences abstract transition to a sustainable society requires large scale conversion of the energy system to new renewable non fossil sources of energy this presupposes public support for new technologies which means the public must deal with challenges in terms of placement area requirements ecological degradation and price developments this paper discusses how citizens view renewable energy technologies it analyses responses to representative surveys of the norwegian population on the desirability of various energy technologies such as hydroelectric dams onshore and offshore wind energy bioenergy plants and for contrast gas plants with and without carbon capture and storage our main focus is on the influence of party political preference on views of renewable energy we find that the sometimes lukewarm enthusiasm for renewable energy technologies cannot be fully explained by existing theories and that political party preference has a larger impact on energy technology attitudes than previously believed

computing equilibria in the general equilibrium model with incomplete asset markets abstract we present an intuitive homotopy algorithm for the computation of equilibria in the general equilibrium model with incomplete asset markets the central concept is the introduction of utility maximization problems for all but one agent with penalties for transactions on the asset markets we compute equilibria with homotopy path following techniques using the first order conditions of the agents optimization problems and gradually lifting the penalty restriction as the algorithm proceeds finally we present computational results from an implementation of the algorithm showing convincingly that the algorithm is very reliable in general and suitable for large scale computations

targeted characteristics and use of socially marketed preventive health goods evidence from condoms in sub saharan africa social marketing is a popular method for allocating targeted publicly funded preventive health goods in poor countries however low demand among targeted groups may inhibit take up relative to non

the income earned by women impacts on welfare outcomes abstract this paper provides an updated review of the evidence on income pooling across household members income pooling is one of the main predictions of the unitary model of the household new studies come to much the same conclusion as do past studies income pooling and the unitary model are rejected the paper then looks beyond the mere rejection of the unitary model and explores some of the issues that arise first what is the progress in testing the restrictions imposed by non unitary models of the household second what are the implications of rejection of the unitary model for policy and program design finally what are some of the challenges faced by programs and policies that internalize the rejection of income pooling in terms of impact evaluation

increasing returns in infinite horizon economies this paper shows that in a general equilibrium model with an infiniite holizonl in whichi productionl may exhibit increasing returns to scale or non conivexities marginal cost pricing equilibria exist anid are essential that is stable witlh respect to small perturbationis of the economily as in many important models of mairket imperfections marginal cost pricinig equilibria need not be pareto optimal in the presence of noni convexities so the systematic approaches to equilibrium analysis in infinite dimenisionial commodity spaces which rely crucially oln the first welfare theorem cainnot be used instead this paper introduces leray schauder degree theory the extension of degree theor y to banacih and locally convex spaces as the natural methodology for showinlg that equilibria exist and for anialyzing qualitative features of equilibria such as local uniqueness or essentiality

general equilibrium models and homotopy methods abstract our purpose is to argue the inevitable and lasting role which homotopy methods will play in both theoretical and applied economic analysis the essence of our position is that large equilibrium models are needed to anticipate adjustments in the economy following policy changes or shock events and that homotopy methods are needed to analyze these equilibrium models in addition to the computation of equilibria homotopy methods will play an important role in the study of multiplicity of equilibria t tonnement comparative statics and market instability

a note on parental and child risk valuation the paper develops a model that allows the estimation of parent s valuation of own and child health in an endogenous risk framework where parents can employ multiple activities to protect themselves and their children from a health risk these risk reducing activities may differ in their effectiveness and their intensity of use we suggest how to estimate the parent s ex ante marginal willingness to pay for a reduction in the ambient level of health risk unencumbered by expected utility terms

literacy sharing assortative mating or what labour market advantages and proximate illiteracy revisited abstract this paper explores the relationship between household literacy and the labour market outcomes of illiterate household members which basu narayan and ravallion 2002 report using household income and expenditure data from bangladesh bnr attribute a considerable wage premium for proximate illiterate women in off farm employment to labour productivity gains from intra household literacy sharing this wage premium also suggests that women may be more efficient recipients of literacy externalities than men we propose that any such relationship might not be due to higher labour productivity but may have other explanations such as systematically different and unobserved attributes of illiterate females married into literate households we also pay attention to the negative selection of illiterate females into non farm wage employment which contrary to received wisdom suggests that household literacy may not be unambiguously progressive for females we propose that the widely reported finding that

computing equilibrium prices for a capital asset pricing model with heterogeneous beliefs and margin requirement constraints abstract the mean variance capital asset pricing model capm is a useful mathematical tool for studying a variety of financial problems in contrast to existing work in the literature which has primarily focused on deriving analytical solutions under restrictive assumptions we propose a numerical algorithm for efficiently computing the set of equilibrium prices of a capm model with heterogeneous investors and arbitrary margin requirements we present the mathematical formulation of the capm model derive structural properties of the portfolio selection and excess demand functions and establish the asymptotic convergence of the proposed algorithm under mild conditions to illustrate the utility of the algorithm we perform sensitivity analysis on a simple example to study the impact of marginal requirements and interest rates on the resulting equilibrium prices numerical studies are also carried out to compare the performance of the algorithm with that of two other popular methods namely the fixed point method and the brand and bound algorithm

child growth shocks and food aid in rural ethiopia this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled child growth shocks and food aid in rural ethiopia conducted between 1995 and 1996 in ethiopia the study observed the impact of food aid on child growth and shocks in communities on the child level food aid has a positive significant impact on the growth in height of children the total amount of food aid appears on average to be sufficient to offset the negative effects of plot damage on child growth given the fact there remains a massive amount of child stunting there must be large amounts of mis targeting of aid girls seem to be more resilient to shocks than boys

capacity investment preemption and commitment in an infinite horizon model the commitment value of capacity is analyzed in an infinite horizon duopoly model the paper focuses on the role of alternative behavioral assumptions about the ability of firms to commit to investment paths each firm s investment strategy in a feedback nash equilibrium is shown to be a decreasing function of its rival s current capacity this creates an incentive for a firm to expand its capacity to preempt subsequent rival investment in a precommitment equilibrium there are no incentives to invest preemptively as a consequence steady state capacity levels are greater in a feedback nash equilibrium than in a precommitment equilibrium copyright 1987 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

shared literacy and employment in the nonfarm sector this article empirically examines the external effect of family literacy on the earnings of illiterate workers considering recent findings that rural nonfarm sectors in developing countries are becoming more important in determining the welfare of households this article tests two hypotheses 1 an illiterate person living with literate members i e a proximate illiterate person is more likely to find a job in the nonfarm sector than is an illiterate person living with no literate person i e an isolated illiterate person and 2 wage income of a proximate illiterate worker is higher than that of an isolated illiterate worker the empirical results suggest that proximate illiterate persons earn higher wages than isolated illiterate persons because they are more likely to be employed in the nonfarm sector

a cost benefit analysis of female primary education as a means of reducing hiv aids in tanzania this article uses panel data related to 20 tanzania regions and 8 years to estimate the direct and indirect effects of female primary education on hiv aids rates a recursive framework for education income and infections is employed based on two autoregressive equations that allow us to obtain dynamic estimates of effectiveness we find that the indirect effect working through changes in income outweighs the direct positive effect of education on infections implying that female education can be effective as an intervention to lower the disease in tanzania the estimates of effectiveness are then utilized to carry out a cost benefit analysis of the education expenditures the human capital approach is used to measure the benefits irrespective of the timing of the benefits and costs and the discount rate alternatives we consider our best estimates result in positive net benefits with benefit cost ratios in the range 1 3 2 9 this article was completed with the financial assistance provided by the

literacy and intrahousehold externalities abstract the size of the intrahousehold externality created when a literate household member provides literacy services to illiterate members is estimated in this paper using a model of children s height for age in papua new guinea this externality appears to be large these results support the use of a new measure of literacy developed by basu and foster 1998 to take account of the gains when illiterates live in households where at least one person is literate regional rankings change when the new measure of literacy is used suggesting that policies guided by the usual measure of adult literacy may overlook an important pathway for human development

tenure security resource endowments and tree growing evidence from the amhara region of ethiopia we analyze roles of tenure insecurity and household endowments in explaining tree growing in ethiopia where farmers cannot sell or mortgage land and factor markets are imperfect unlike most other studies we use panel data and examine determinants of the decision and intensity of tree growing unlike other studies we compare the decision to keep trees and the decision to plant in the recent past the results suggest that land tenure insecurity influences the decision to grow trees but not the number of trees households grow household endowments time and location also explain tree growing by farmers

an extension of the modigliani miller theorem to stochastic economies with incomplete markets and interdependent securities the modigliani miller theorem is shown to hold in a general model of a multiperiod stochastic economy with incomplete markets and perfect foresight in the model firms are allowed to trade all available securities thus share prices and dividends become fully interdependent also several mechanisms of corporate control are considered including value maximization and shareholder voting it is demonstrated that firms have no incentive to trade securities in equilibrium further any such trading does not alter the set of equilibrium allocations this is done by establishing that agents are able to adjust their own portfolios and neutralize corporate policy journal of economic literature classification numbers 021 022 this paper extends the modigliani miller argument on the irrelevance of corporate financial policy to an economy with incomplete markets and fully interdependent securities the approach taken is a general equilibrium model incorporating multiple periods and uncertain states the market is idealized in that there are no transaction costs short sales restrictions or limited liability constraints also agents are assumed to have fully rational expectations regarding future events within this context it is shown that value maximizing firms have no incentive to change the composition of their portfolios and that any such changes have no effect on equilibrium prices and allocations within the economy finally the theory is shown to

on repeated moral hazard with discounting in this paper we analyze optimal contracts in an infinitely repeated agency model in which both the principal and agent discount the future we show that there is a stationary representation of the optimal contract when the agent s conditional discounted expected utility is used as a state variable this representation reduces the multi period problem to a static variational problem which can be analyzed using standard variational techniques this reduction is used to obtain several properties of the contract

the role of values in public beliefs and attitudes towards commercial wind energy mandates for renewable energy lead to siting disputes because meeting the mandates requires the development of renewable energy production facilities proposals for one common form of renewable energy commercial wind farms are frequently met with forceful local opposition dissatisfied with simplistic explanations for this opposition i e nimby social scientists have urged a more nuanced understanding of public attitudes towards wind energy and other renewables based on a survey of residents of coastal michigan this article explores the role of general values and beliefs in shaping attitudes towards the potential development of commercial wind energy projects in or near respondents communities structural equation modeling reveals that support of commercial wind energy depends largely on a belief that wind farms will provide economic benefits to the community underlying values have substantial and important indirect effects on beliefs regarding the likely economic outcomes of wind farm development altruistic values buoy wind energy attitudes while values of traditionalism diminish wind energy support the pivotal role of values in attitudes towards renewables lends support for more participatory development processes

taxation and uncertainty while taxes may be certain u s tax policy has certainly not been furthermore intrinsic economic risk makes investment decisions risky therefore a serious examination of the effects of tax policy on dynamic economic behavior should consider both sources of uncertainty this paper presents a simple theoretical and computational model that can analyze both intrinsic risk and uncertain taxation furthermore it will be clear that these techniques will be useful for examining general problems of taxation and risk when studying the impact of past and or proposed tax changes one of two extreme assumptions are usually made either agents are perfectly aware of future tax policy a perfect foresight assumption or they always believe that no change will ever occur a myopic foresight assumption these two assumptions yield substantially different views of recent tax experience as alan auerbach and james hines 1987 demonstrate in a partial equilibrium context both are clearly wrong the myopic specification assumes that individuals believe at each point in time that the current tax law will surely continue forever even after they have been hit repeatedly with tax changes on the other hand it is absurd to think that in say 1977 a significant number of individuals perfectly knew the various tax changes that would occur during the following decade this paper analyzes a dynamic general equilibrium model wherein taxpayers understand the uncertainty in tax policy when making their deci

prices infrastructure household characteristics and child height household survey data from brazil matched with information collected at the municipio county level are used to examine the relation between parental characteristics primarily education community infrastructure and services and child height data are drawn from 2 sources informacoes basicas municipais 1974 is a periodic survey of 4000 municipios on infrastructure health and education services estudo nacional da despesa familiar 1974 75 is a household survey covering 37000 children under age 8 on income expenditure anthropometry and socio demographic characteristics local food price indices were derived from these data child height is significantly affected by local infrastructure particularly modern sewerage and piped water in urban areas and electricity in rural settings these effects are stronger for children over 2 those of better educated mothers and those in households spending more higher prices for dairy products and sugar are linked to lower urban child height and higher fish prices to lower rural child height significantly for children of illiterate mothers higher prices for meat and rice are associated with taller height possible because men usually eat these foods mothers with elementary schooling can counteract the effects of food prices on child height number of teachers is positively related to height in rural children numbers of nurses and of hospital beds is associated with shorter children suggesting that large hospitals locate in poor urban areas this study has succeeded in identifying some public investments that affect child health

tariffs as insurance optimal commercial policy when domestic markets are incomplete free trade is not optimal for a small country that faces uncertain terms of trade if some factors are immobile ex post and markets for contingent claims are incomplete the government can improve social welfare by using commercial policy that serves as a partial substitute for missing insurance markets using a combination of analytical and simulation techniques we demonstrate that optimal policy for this purpose will often have an anti trade bias we also show that the usual preference by economists for factor or product taxes and subsidies over tariffs and export subsidies may not be justified in this context this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item