does informative media commentary reduce politicians incentives to pander abstract elections sometimes give policy makers incentives to pander i e to implement a policy that voters think is in their best interest even though the policy maker knows that a different policy is actually better for the voters pandering incentives are typically attenuated when voters learn prior to the election whether the policy chosen by the incumbent truly was in their best interest this suggests that the media can improve accountability by reporting to voters information about whether an incumbent made good policy choices we show that although media monitoring does sometimes eliminate the incumbent s incentive to pander in other cases it makes the problem of pandering worse furthermore in some circumstances incumbent incentives are improved when the media acts as a yes man suppressing some information that indicates the policy maker made the wrong choice we explain these seemingly paradoxical results by focusing on how media commentary affects voters tendency to apply an asymmetric burden of proof to the incumbent based on whether she pursues popular or unpopular policies

how reliable are household expenditures as a proxy for permanent income implications for the income nutrition relationship using short run expenditures from household surveys as a proxy may create attenuated estimates of the impact of permanent income on economic outcomes we use repeated observations to calculate reliability ratios and estimate errors in variables regressions of the impact of income on nutrition we find significant responses to income in contrast to previous influential studies

corporate conservatism and relative compensation this paper demonstrates that in a simple setting with managerial concern for reputation and asymmetric information on ability most managers may refrain from undertaking innovations that stochastically dominate an industry standard common components of uncertainty lead to market inferences of managerial ability based on relative performance managers who undertake the industry standard are consequently evaluated with a more accurate benchmark than those innovating discontinuities in compensation when performance is low because of firings lead managers to have differing valuations of an accurate benchmark depending on type in particular very high and very low ability managers are more likely to undertake superior innovations than those of average ability

on measuring the quality of life abstract it is widely recognized that per capita income is not an adequate indicator of aggregate well being it has thus become customary to use a range of socioeconomic indices for assessing the quality of life in a society in this article we extend measures of general well being in current use by including ordinal indices of political and civil liberties and we provide a ranking of the world s poorest countries on the basis of the borda rule we then compare improvements in socioeconomic performance with the availability of political and civil liberties during the decade of the 1970s and observe that improvements in per capita national income life expectancy at birth and infant mortality are positively correlated with the extent of political and civil liberties enjoyed by citizens while improvements in literacy are negatively correlated with these liberties

career concerns incentives and endogenous learning in labour markets models of career concerns provide a framework for analyzing the actions that may be taken by a manager in an attempt to influence performance signals that the market uses to update its beliefs on her productivity and the incentive problem that arises if such actions do not coincide with those that maximize the financial return to a firm s owner this survey provides a formal introduction to the main types of models of career concerns hidden action and hidden information and discusses some extensions of these models applications of the career concerns framework to explain aspects of managerial behavior and the form of labor market institutions are emphasized copyright 1992 by blackwell publishers ltd

methods of household consumption measurement through surveys experimental results from tanzania consumption expenditure has long been the preferred measure of household living standards however accurate measurement is a challenge and household expenditure surveys vary widely across many dimensions including the level of reporting the length of the reference period and the degree of commodity detail these variations occur both across countries and also over time within countries there is little current understanding of the implications of such changes for spatially and temporally consistent measurement of household consumption and poverty a field experiment in tanzania tests eight alternative methods to measure household consumption on a sample of 4 000 households there are significant differences between consumption reported by the benchmark personal diary and other diary and recall formats under reporting is particularly relevant in illiterate households and for urban respondents completing household diaries recall modules measure lower consumption than a personal diary with larger gaps among poorer households and households with more adult members variations in reporting accuracy by household characteristics are also discussed and differences in measured poverty as a result of survey design are explored the study concludes with recommendations for methods of survey based consumption measurement in low income countries

on the bad reputation of reputational concerns can reputational concerns do any good economists have shown how they lead agents to ignore valuable information to herd and to become overly risk averse we explore how they may be a social blessing an agent may exert effort to become informed about the uncertain benefits of a project a smart agent s efforts make him better informed a dumb agent s efforts are to no avail if an agent does not know his type reputational concerns are socially beneficial if an agent knows his type reputational concerns may be socially beneficial a dumb agent takes inefficient unconventional decisions to mimic a smart agent the latter exerts more effort in order not to be mistaken for a dumb this holds whether or not project rejection is a safe haven for the dumb

decomposing response errors in food consumption measurement implications for survey design from a survey experiment in tanzania there is wide variation in how consumption is measured in household surveys both across countries and over time this variation may confound welfare comparisons in part because these alternative survey designs produce consumption estimates that are differentially influenced by contrasting types of survey response error although previous studies have documented the extent of net error in alternative survey designs little is known about the relative influence of the different response errors that underpin a survey estimate this study leverages a recent randomized food consumption survey experiment in tanzania to shed light on the relative influence of these various error types the observed deviation of measured household consumption from a benchmark is decomposed into item specific consumption incidence and consumption value so as to investigate effects related to a the omission of any consumption and then b the error in value reporting conditional on positive consumption the results show that various survey designs exhibit widely differing error decompositions and hence a simple summary comparison of the total recorded consumption across surveys will obscure specific error patterns and inhibit the lessons for improved consumption survey design in light of these findings the relative performance of common survey designs is discussed and design lessons are drawn to enhance the accuracy of item specific consumption reporting and consequently the measures of total household food consumption

anti herding and strategic consultation in this paper i analyze how careerist decision makers aggregate and use information provided by others i find that decision makers who are motivated by reputation concerns tend to anti herding i e they excessively contradict public information such as the prior or others recommendations i also find that some decision makers may deliberately act unilaterally and not consult advisers although advice is costless moreover advisers to the decision maker may not report their information truthfully even if the advisers care only about the outcome they bias their recommendation since they anticipate inefficient anti herding behavior by the decision maker

one signal two opinions strategic heterogeneity of analysts forecasts we present a model of investors acquiring forecasts from a group of investment analysts investors may pick an analyst based on his past performance in the literature it is typically assumed that agents rewards depend solely on the type they are perceived to be which leads to typical herding results in contrast here analysts rewards not only depend on their own reputation but also on the number of analysts with a similar reputation there exist two interesting types of equilibria in the first type it is optimal for investors to ignore analysts past performance even though analysts make predictions according to their best knowledge in a second type investors do use past performance to select analysts however this induces analysts to predict strategically i e some analysts knowingly make wrong predictions

intellectual property rights and developing country agriculture abstract theoretical studies indicate that the welfare of the developing countries might either be improved or damaged by the strengthening of their own intellectual property rights net gains through their agricultural sectors will be positive if the payoff from new innovations is sufficiently different as compared to the technology exporting countries scattered evidence supports the hypotheses that agricultural r d is responsive to iprs in developing countries but there is also evidence that developed country technology is sufficiently appropriate for developing countries as to offer substantial free rider gains however without iprs it seems unlikely that the agricultural productivity rates in developing countries can begin to catch up with those in developed country agriculture

encouraging private sector research for tropical agriculture summary agricultural needs in poor tropical countries differ significantly from those in temperate rich countries yet little agricultural research is performed on products for the tropics private research is particularly concentrated in rich countries this is a result of significant failures in the market for research and development r d in particular the difficulty of preventing the resale of seed in developing countries to encourage private r d in tropical agriculture traditional funding of research may be usefully supplemented by a commitment to reward developers of specific new agricultural technologies rewards tied to adoption may be especially useful in increasing up take an illustration of how a commitment to reward developers of new agricultural technologies might work is provided

a cross country index of intellectual property rights in pharmaceutical inventions abstract building on the seminal work of ginarte and park 1997 research policy 26 283 301 we develop an index of property rights in pharmaceutical inventions the pharmaceutical intellectual property protection pipp index for 154 countries spanning 1960 to 2005 it incorporates five types of property rights in pharmaceuticals six statutory measures of enforcement and adherence to three international agreements providing for the grant and enforcement of rights to foreigners for both developed and developed countries the pipp index starts at low levels in 1960 increases slowly through the early 1990s and then sharply increases due to minimum standards set by the 1995 trips agreement

do stronger intellectual property rights promote seed exchange evidence from u s seed exports with increased private investment in crop breeding research in the developed world intellectual property rights have gained importance in seed sector trade related aspects of intellectual property rights trips plus provisions included in recent free trade agreements between the developed and developing countries show a tendency of the developed world to impose their high standards for protection of plant intellectual property on the developing world while stronger intellectual property rights can increase international exchange in seed market power effect can lead to a reduction in exports of seed to foreign markets this article estimates the impact of intellectual property rights on u s seed exports the estimation is performed at a crop level using heckman selection model the results reveal that the impact of intellectual property rights varies across different types of crops open pollinated genetically modified and hybrid crops while trips provisions are important to facilitate transfer of genetically modified crops they play a minor role for open pollinated and hybrid crops the results also show that plant breeders rights envisioned by the upov system can be important to promote seed exchange when proper mechanisms are put in place to enforce these rights

determinants of patent rights a cross national study abstract this paper presents an index of patent rights for 110 countries for the period 1960 1990 the index is used to examine what factors or characteristics of economies determine how strongly patent rights will be protected the evidence does indicate that more developed economies tend to provide stronger protection but the underlying factors which influence patent protection levels are the country s level of research and development r d activity market environment and international integration which are correlated with its level of development the results qualify however that r d activity influences patent protection levels after a nation s research sector reaches a critical size an implication of this is that to raise patent protection levels in weakly protecting countries it is important to foster a significant research base in those countries and thereby create incentives for protecting patent rights

managerial incentive problems a dynamic perspective the paper studies how a person s concern for a future career may influence his or her incentives to put in effort or make decisions on the job in the model the person s productive abilities are revealed over time through observations of performance there are no explicit output contingent contracts but since the wage in each period is based on expected output and expected output depends on assessed ability an implicit contract links today s performance to future wages an incentive problem arises from the person s ability and desire to influence the learning process and therefore the wage process by taking unobserved actions that affect today s performance the fundamental incongruity in preferences is between the individual s concern for human capital returns and the firm s concern for financial returns the two need be only weakly related it is shown that career motives can be beneficial as well as detrimental depending on how well the two kinds of capital returns are aligned it is well understood by now that informational externalities may place special demands on the organization of economic exchange simple price mediated markets will frequently fail in the presence of asymmetric information in that case more elaborate contractual arrangements have to be used as substitutes for the price system lately considerable effort has been devoted to the analysis of contracting under incomplete information with the objective to understand the range of economic institutions that emerge in response to the failure of the price system the analysis of moral hazard has played a prominent role in this development moral hazard problems arise when for some reason or another transacting parties cannot contract contingent on the delivery of the good for instance in buying labour services it may be that the amount of labour supplied is not directly observable precluding a simple exchange of wage for labour as a partial remedy to this problem an imperfect mutually observed signal about the supply of labour can be used as a proxy in the contract frequently output is taken as such a proxy the drawback is that output is often influenced by other factors than labour input which induce undesirable risk into the contract one is therefore faced with a tradeoff between allocating risk associated with incomplete observability and providing incentives for a proper supply of labour gaining insight into this tradeoff is important not only for understanding contracting in the small e g managerial incentive schemes but also because it is closely related to the fundamental tension between equity and efficiency in the society as a whole while our understanding of moral hazard has advanced a lot in past years it is clear that much work remains an important question that has received little attention until

intellectual property protection in plant varieties a worldwide index 1961 2011 in this paper we construct a new index measuring the strength of intellectual property ip protection for plant varieties in 69 countries over the period 1961 2011 we examine the statistical properties of the index and compare it with other indicators of ip protection we conclude that the index provides a reasonable synthetic assessment of the relative strength of ip protection in plant varieties across countries in addition we study the main determinants of the evolution of the index and examine the patterns of correlation between the index and agricultural production

the contribution of genetic modification to changes in corn yield in the united states we use a large rich dataset compiled from results of university extension trials to estimate the contribution of genetic modification gm to changes in corn yield in the united states from timea to timeb through repeated experimental trials we obtain consistent estimates of the effect of these traits by using both the hausman taylor estimator and a comparison of fixed effects estimates analogous to the agronomic practice of comparing near isolines our results suggest that gm traits had a positive impact on yield but that gains associated with combining several gm traits in one hybrid are not necessarily additive

data gaps data incomparability and data imputation a review of poverty measurement methods for data scarce environments this paper reviews methods that have been employed to estimate poverty in contexts where household consumption data are unavailable or missing these contexts range from completely missing and partially missing consumption data in cross sectional household surveys to missing panel household data the paper focuses on methods that aim to compare trends and dynamic patterns of poverty outcomes over time it presents the various methods under a common framework with pedagogical discussion on the intuition empirical illustrations are provided using several rounds of household survey data from vietnam furthermore the paper provides a practical guide with detailed instructions on computer programs that can be used to implement the reviewed techniques

why do southern countries have little incentive to protect northern intellectual property rights instead of focusing on the conflict of interests between north and south the author studies the conflict of interests among southern countries and provides an alternative answer to the question why do southern countries have little incentive to protect northern intellectual property rights owing to the incentive of each southern country to free ride on other southern countries with respect to providing protection the overall protection they provide is not sufficient therefore a new source of mutual gains exists among southern countries and also between north and south a joint effort of southern countries is required to exploit these gains

careerist experts and political incorrectness abstract while political correctness is a dominant norm in many public situations we also observe behaviors that are apparently politically incorrect often from professionals and experts this paper examines the flip side of political correctness as analyzed in morris 2001 to shed some light on the elusive notion of political incorrectness and elucidate its equilibrium and welfare properties we show that there are circumstances in which unbiased experts deliberately take a politically incorrect stance out of reputational concerns and identify key elements which give rise to this perverse reputational incentive the results suggest that political incorrectness cannot necessarily be viewed as a sign of blunt honesty when informed experts have long term reputational concerns we also examine the welfare consequences of political incorrectness and argue that this form of information manipulation can be beneficial under some conditions

team production endogenous learning about abilities and career concerns abstract this paper studies career concerns in teams where the support a worker receives depends on fellow team members efforts and abilities in this setting by exerting effort and providing support a worker can influence her own and her teammates project outputs in order to bias the learning process in her favor to manipulate the market s assessment we argue that in equilibrium a worker has incentives to help or even sabotage her colleagues in order to signal that she is of higher ability in a multiperiod stationary framework we show that the stationary level of work effort is above and help effort is below their efficient levels

incentive to reduce crop trait durability to reduce the competition from farmers who self produce seed an inbred line seed producer can switch to nondurable hybrid seed in a two period model we investigate the impact of crop durability on self production pricing and switching decisions and we examine the impact of license fees paid by self producing farmers first in an inbred line seed monopoly model we find that the monopolist may produce technologically dominated hybrid seed in order to extract more surplus from farmers further the introduction of license fees improves efficiency second we study how the monopolist s behavior is affected by the entry of a nondurable hybrid seed producer we show that the inbred line seed producer might benefit from competing with a technologically dominated hybrid seed producer as this allows for consumers discrimination

food counts measuring food consumption and expenditures in household consumption and expenditure surveys this special issue presents new evidence on the impact of survey design choices on the quality and availability of data collected in household consumption and expenditure surveys hces the 13 studies in this issue analyze how different survey design options affect the quality of the data being collected and the implications for statistical inference and policy analysis the studies offer practical insights into survey design for national statistical offices and survey practitioners worldwide and also provide policymakers with improved tools and a better understanding of poverty food security and nutrition for effective policymaking

an analysis of selectivity in the productivity evaluation of biotechnology an application to corn we investigate selectivity bias in the evaluation of biotech hybrid productivity the analysis is applied to experimental data on wisconsin corn yields from 1990 to 2010 relying on a heckman like factor that accounts for selectivity we find evidence of selection bias indicating that some of the observed yield advantage associated with gm hybrids can be attributed to their conventional genes we document how the rising market concentration of biotech firms has contributed to increasing selectivity bias in corn yield the impact however is offset by the negative effect of the rising adoption rate of gm corn on selectivity bias copyright 2013 oxford university press

how much should society fuel the greed of innovators on the relations between appropriability opportunities and rates of innovation the paper attempts a critical assessment of both the theory and the empirical evidence on the role of appropriability and in particular of intellectual property rights iprs as incentives for technological innovation we start with a critical discussion of the standard justification of the attribution of ipr in terms of market failures in knowledge generation such an approach we argue misses important features of technological knowledge and also neglects the importance of non market institutions in the innovation process next we examine the recent changes in the ipr regimes and their influence upon both rates of patenting and underlying rates of innovation the evidence broadly suggests that first iprs are not the most important device apt to profit from innovation and second they have at best no impact or possibly even a negative impact on the underlying rates of innovation rather we argue technology and industry specific patterns of innovation are primarily driven by the opportunities associated with each technological paradigm conversely firm specific abilities to seize them and profit from innovation depend partly on adequacy of the strategic combinations identified by the taxonomy of teece d 1986 profiting from technological innovation implications for integration collaboration licensing and public policy research policy 15 285 305 and partly on idiosyncratic capabilities embodied in the various firms

intellectual property rights in mexico do they play a role summary there is little empirical evidence concerning the effects of intellectual property rights ipr in technologically advanced developing countries complete enumeration of the mexican maize breeding industry showed that contrary to the hypothesis that ipr would support innovation ipr play no role in the industry ipr theory should be revised to include characteristics of developing countries critical for the good functioning of ipr quality of the institutional environment and importance of transaction given the relatively good score of mexico on these critical aspects ipr are likely to play an even smaller role in other developing countries

trips trade and growth a two country model of endogenous growth is employed to assess the importance of intellectual property rights to trade growth and technology transfer the paper provides theoretical results linking the intellectual property rights regime to trade patterns aggregate r d worldwide growth and aggregate welfare measures failure to provide patent protection for foreign made innovations forces innovators to employ less than the best practice research technologies reduces aggregate r d activities worldwide effectively eliminates technology transfer across countries and reduces worldwide growth copyright 1994 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

information externalities share price based incentives and managerial behaviour abstract we survey recent theoretical research on the effects of short term share price based managerial incentive schemes such schemes can induce inefficient managerial behaviour in both hidden action and hidden type contexts these problems arise from informational asymmetries managers take actions to manipulate the information flow rather than to maximize firm value more generally imperfect transmission of information between managers and shareholders or between managers of different firms can lead to similar distortions even when the parties interests are aligned

welfare effects of global patent protection this paper uses a simple model of invention and patent protection to examine the welfare effects of extending patent protection from the country where invention takes place to another country that is only a consumer of invented products it is shown that while the welfare of the inventing country certainly rises with the extension of patent protection that of the other country probably falls and may well fall by more than the increase in welfare of the inventing country in particular as patent protection is extended to a larger and larger portion of the world the effect on the welfare of the world as a whole of extending it to the rest of the world becomes negative

endogenous public information and welfare in market games this paper performs a welfare analysis of markets with private information in which agents can condition on noisy prices in the rational expectations tradition pricecontingent strategies introduce two externalities in the use of private information a payoff pecuniary externality related to aggregate volatility and a learning externality the impact of the first depends on whether competition is of the strategic substitutes or complements variety and the second induces agents to put too little weight on private information we find that with strategic substitutes and when the learning externality is not very strong agents put too much weight on private information and prices are too informative this will happen in the normal case where the allocational role of price prevails over its informational role under strategic complementarity there is always under reliance on private information the welfare loss at the market solution may be increasing in the precision of private information the analysis provides insights into optimal business cycle policy and a rationale for a tobin like tax for speculators in financial markets

do stronger intellectual property rights induce more agricultural trade a dynamic panel data model applied to seed trade do stronger intellectual property rights iprs induce more agricultural trade based on panel data for 60 countries during 1990 2000 and using a dynamic panel data model this article assesses whether and how national differences in iprs affect the trade flow of planting seeds imports from the united states the empirical results show that whether or not a country adheres to iprs agreements has no discernible impact on planting seeds that are imported from the united states implying that the strengthening of iprs seems not to induce more agricultural trade this result sheds some light on the debate in the theoretical literature on the importance of iprs and trade

international patent protection 1960 2005 abstract this note provides an update to the index of patent protection published in this journal in 1997 the original paper presented the index for 1960 1990 for 110 countries the index has now been updated to 2005 and extended to 122 countries the adoption of stronger patent laws and the composition of patent rights vary across countries by level of economic development

welfare impacts of cross country spillovers in agricultural research the welfare implications of intellectual property protection ipp for private sector agricultural research are analyzed focusing on the realistic cases where countries provide different ipp levels technology spills over across countries and the public sector is involved in research a model is developed to determine who benefits from and who should pay for the associated research the article contains some interesting results on the implications of a harmonization of ipp policies through multilateral agreements or via technology that allows research firms to prevent the copying of plants and animals that express traits that have emerged from their research

infringement of intellectual property rights causes and consequences parallel revolutions in molecular biology and the legal framework that assigns intellectual property rights iprs to plant genetic resources have resultedin the emergence of agricultural biotechnology andthe introd uction of genetically modified gm products into the foodsystem iprs create economic incentives for research andd evelopment by making the innovator the residual claimant of the benefits associatedwith the new technology whereas iprs purport to protect intellectual property full appropriation of the benefits from the innovation is not a given when infringement of iprs i e piracy is profitable rational economic agents compliance with ipr provisions is by no means assured costly monitoring and enforcement are requiredto d eter unauthorized illegal use of the new technology experience from various countries aroundthe worldind icates that ipr enforcement is far from being perfect andmany successful innovations are

what is behind the recent surge in patenting abstract we investigate the cause of an unprecedented surge of us patenting over the past decade conventional wisdom points to the establishment of the court of appeals of the federal circuit by congress in 1982 we examine whether this institutional change which has benefited patent holders explains the burst in us patenting using both international and domestic data on patent applications and awards we conclude that the evidence is not favorable to the conventional view instead it appears that the jump in patenting reflects an increase in us innovation spurred by changes in the management of research

information aggregation in debate who should speak first abstract privately informed individuals speak openly in front of other members of a committee about the desirability of a public decision each individual wishes to appear well informed for any given order of speech committee members may herd by suppressing their true information with individuals of heterogeneous expertise optimizing over the order of speech can improve the extraction of information but not perfectly so it is not always optimal to use the common anti seniority rule whereby experts speak in order of increasing expertise a committee with more able experts may be afflicted by greater herding problems yielding a worse outcome

productivity growth in world agriculture sources and constraints during the last half century advances in crop production came from expansion in areas irrigated from more intensive application of fertilizers and crop protection chemicals and from crop varieties that were more responsive to technical inputs and management advances in animal production came from genetic improvements and advances in animal nutrition differences among developed and developing countries in output per hectare and per worker have widened if these gaps are to be narrowed agricultural research capacity in developing countries will have to be substantially strengthened

the effect of intellectual property rights on agricultural productivity this article explores how the strengthening of intellectual property ip protection affects agricultural productivity in a panel of countries for the period 1961 2011 using an index of ip protection for plant varieties we study the effect of stronger intellectual property rights iprs on cereal yields and two different types of cereals open pollinated wheat and hybrid maize we found that the strengthening of iprs has a positive effect on productivity of cereals for high and low income countries however we found no significant effect for middle income countries in addition we found that becoming a member of the trade related aspects of intellectual property rights negatively affects cereal yields finally we found evidence of the existence of nonlinearities in the effect of iprs on agricultural yields which confirms a threshold effect of iprs that also varies for countries of different income level the findings support the hypothesis that country specificities are important in determining the effect of iprs and imply that there is no unique system that fits all

economic growth lessons from two centuries of american agriculture this paper reviews the growth experience of u s agriculture over the past two centuries in consonance with the view that growth is determined by the economic environment which consists of the available technology incentives constraints and institutions within this framework the implemented technology is determined jointly with the resource allocation the review covers the role played by resource endowment resource flow technical change and its factor bias and product demand it highlights the importance of the income elasticity of demand and the labor augmentation of the technical change the total factor productivity tfp was almost nil at the beginning of the nineteenth century increasing gradually to the point where it exhausted output growth in the latter part of the twentieth century this pattern is consistent with the postulate emerging from this framework where the tfp is endogenous and determined jointly with growth rather than determining it the more recent performance of u s agriculture is placed within a global perspective in order to generalize the discussion

when managers cover their posteriors making the decisions the market wants to see the stock market has opinions as to what choices firms should make we show that concern for current share prices may lead managers to make these choices rather than those suggested by their own superior information even when arbitrarily many privately informed firms have to make a similar decision the market s prejudices may still prevail we compare the distortions that arise from share price maximization with those due to herd behavior among profit maximizing firms and show that the former results in strictly less efficient use of information

an option perspective on generating and maintaining plant variety rights in china notwithstanding the ambiguous research and productivity promoting effects of plant variety protections pvps even in developed countries many developing countries have adopted pvps in the past few years in part to comply with their trade related aspects of intellectual property rights trips obligations seeking and maintaining pvps reserves options to an expected revenue stream from the future sale of protected varieties the value of which varies for a host of reasons in this article we empirically examine the pattern of pvp applications in china since its pvp laws were first introduced in 1997 we place those pvp rights in the context of china s present and likely future seed markets to identify the economic incentives and institutional influences on decisions to develop and apply for varietal rights

the impact of experience on risk taking overconfidence and herding of fund managers complementary survey evidence abstract empirical research has shown that inexperienced fund managers yield significantly higher returns than their more experienced colleagues if the portfolios of inexperienced are not more risky this result would contradict the hypothesis of market efficiency therefore it is an important question whether inexperienced fund managers tend to taker higher risks higher risk taking may be explained by a higher degree of overconfidence less herding behavior or a lower degree of risk aversion since the results concerning the relationship between experience and risk taking in previous studies are rather contradictory we provide complementary survey evidence of 117 german fund managers which can improve our understanding in this field in line with the results of previous studies we find that herding is decreasing with experience while the evidence concerning risk taking and overconfidence is mixed nevertheless our results provide some support for the hypothesis that inexperienced managers do indeed take higher risks

the heterogeneous effects of a food price crisis on child school enrollment and labor evidence from pakistan using a panel survey this paper investigates how the increase in food prices in pakistan in 2008 2010 affected children s school enrollment and labor the causal identification relies on geographical variations in the price of food wheat the results show that the negative impacts of food price increase on school enrollment differ by gender economic status and the presence of siblings the negative effects on school do not directly correspond to the increase in child labor because the transition from being idle to labor activity or from school to being idle are significant particularly among the poor girls the results also show that children in households with access to agricultural land are not affected by higher food prices the analyses reveal a more dynamic picture of the impact of food price increase on child status and contribute to broader policy discussion to mitigate the impact of crises on children s education

herding and anti herding a model of reputational differentiation abstract we analyze a model related to the strategic herding literature where a second expert maximizes his expected second period value by conforming with a first expert herding in contrast to the herding literature we assume that an agent is most valuable if he is the only smart agent if the value of being the only smart agent is sufficiently large the second expert always opposes its predecessor s report otherwise herding may result

measurement error in recall surveys and the relationship between household size and food demand variation in household survey design and implementation is used to obtain evidence of nonrandom measurement error in recall surveys of household expenditure these surveys which are used especially in developing countries appear to have measurement errors in food expenditures and in food budget shares that are correlated with household size these correlated errors may be part of the explanation for a puzzling pattern of falling food demand with rising household size in poorer countries

intellectual property rights and the world trade organization retrospect and prospects this paper analyzes the main economic issues of intellectual property rights iprs protection in the context of the world trade organization wto a retrospective view on the establishment of the trips trade related aspects of intellectual property rights agreement a still controversial accomplishment of the uruguay round of trade liberalization is provided the paper reviews the economic rationale for the harmonization of iprs drawing both on economic theory considerations as well as emerging empirical evidence the logic of linking ipr protection and trade in the context of the wto is also re examined some specific attention is devoted to the implications of trips for agricultural and biotechnology innovations the impact that ipr protection can have in promoting growth and development and the relation of iprs with other economic policies is discussed the paper concludes with an analysis of the prospects for more or less iprs related consensus in the current round of wto negotiations

private sector incentives and the diffusion of agricultural technology evidence from developing countries abstractthe role of intellectual property rights iprs has been extensively debated in the literature on technology transfers and agricultural productivity growth in developing countries however few studies offer cross country evidence on how iprs affect yield growth by incentivising private sector investment in cultivar improvement we address this knowledge gap by testing technology diffusion patterns for six major crops using a unique dataset for the period 1961 2010 and an arellano bond linear dynamic panel data estimation approach findings indicate that biological and legal forms of iprs promote yield gap convergence between developed and developing countries although effects vary by crop

does it matter how we survey demand for food evidence from kenya and the philippines abstract this article examines the reliability of food quantity information collected from expenditure surveys and finds that measurement errors will very often be systematically correlated with income such that the response of food intakes to increases in income is seriously overstated this may be firstly because food quantities are not measured independently of income if total expenditures are the proxy used for income and secondly because food transfers in the form of guest and hired worker meals are under recorded these biases are illustrated using household surveys from kenya and the philippines

when second opinions hurt a model of expert advice under career concerns we augment the standard career concerns model by introducing i an action that blocks the information about the true state of the world and ii a second opinion interim news after the initial consultation with the expert in this model the principal s action as well as the expert s message endogenously determine the observability of the states and consequently the assessment of the expert s ability by the principal we show that having access to better interim news could reduce the welfare of the principal due to its strategic effect on the expert s recommendation we also discuss the implication of the results for possible delegation of decision making to another person with different decision parameters

rational frenzies and crashes most markets clear through a sequence of sales rather than through a walrasian auctioneer because buyers can decide whether to buy now or later rather than only now or never their current willingness to pay is much more sensitive to price than the demand curve is a consequence is that markets will be extremely sensitive to new information leading to both frenzies in which demand feeds on itself and crashes in which price drops discontinuously the paper also shows how a result from static auction theory the revenue equivalence theorem can be applied to solve for a dynamic price path

diffusion of knowledge based products applications to developing economies demand for a knowledge based product often must be created by the product s innovator but the process which diffuses knowledge and so enhances demand accelerates decay of the company s ability to appropriate benefits generated both by the product and by the company s complementary explanation of its qualities and uses decay of the ability to appropriate profit arises from a pervasive free rider problem rivals as well as users become educated by the innovator as the market deepens and expands entry will become feasible for firms capable of production but incapable of supplying effective educational packages at least two principal themes emerge i logically innovative products will be sold bundled with education and other complementary services at least in their early stages ii intensity of diffusion will be sensitive to the nature of governing property rights regimes the analysis suggests that because of free rider and other problems an innovator often finds initial product development plans unproductive and must resort to alternatives feasible diffusion often requires that the product space allocated to an innovator by grants of property rights be larger contain more dimensions than one confined to primary invention s

assessing the implications of intellectual property rights on plant and animal agriculture many readers over their careers will have shared my experience of initiating some really innovative work only to learn that it had been done and done better thirty years earlier that is one key attraction of research on intellectual property rights iprs for plants and animals they are in the main very recent so whatever one does cannot have a direct antecedent indeed to date little economic research has been completed on the implications of expanding ipr protection for living agricultural inputs protection in the united states for asexually propagated plants has been available since 1930 1990 in canada for sexually propagated plants for over twenty five years and for patented plants for a dozen years see below however only in the last year has significant acreage of patented bioengineered plants some 2 5 million in total been planted with higher levels going in the ground in the united states and canada as this paper is being drafted those crops are primarily herbicide resistant beans canola and corn bt producing corn cotton and potatoes and virus resistant squash james and krattiger only one livestock application to my knowledge has been patented a pig in australia with a controllable growth hormone but as yet it is not a commercial product what has been explored extensively in the literature are expressed concerns about iprs on farm structure ethics university industry relationships information exchange and related matters see e g kloppenburg nor is the debate limited to the united states or developed countries the international enhancement of

can rational stubbornness explain forecast biases this paper examines whether the rational jumpiness stubbornness hypothesis can explain forecast biases using a dataset of professional gdp forecasts for the g7 countries over the period 1989 2010 we find evidence supporting the rational stubbornness hypothesis specifically forecasters underreact more when large forecast revisions are highly indicative of low forecast ability underreaction is less likely when the size of forecast revisions is unrelated to ability these findings are consistent with the hypothesis that forecasters choose to smooth gdp forecasts to maximize their perceived ability

the effects of the us plant variety protection act on wheat genetic improvement in our model of partially appropriable invention if the us plant variety protection act pvpa of 1970 succeeded in strengthening intellectual property protection for plant breeders it should have led to increases in investment in varietal r d improved varietal quality and enhanced royalties these hypotheses are tested using data on us wheat we find that the pvpa may have stimulated public but not private sector investment in wheat varietal improvement but that the pvpa did not cause any increase in experimental or commercial wheat yields these findings indicate that the pvpa had little impact on excludability or appropriability in wheat varieties

intellectual property rights and the mode of technology transfer abstract transferring technology in an environment where patent protection is uncertain can pose significant risks to an innovating firm s ability to appropriate rents this paper incorporates asymmetric information in a screening game where the innovating firm has the choices of licensing a new product at arm s length to a foreign firm exporting it or licensing it to a subsidiary subsidiary production avoids the risk of imitation but involves higher costs for the innovating firm the gains to the southern country from the lack of intellectual property right protection may be offset by strategic behavior by northern firms who opt for technology transfer via subsidiary or monopoly production