farming efficiency and the determinants of multiple job holding by farm operators the extent to which farm families engage inoff farm employment activities is a topic ofcentralimportancetounderstandingthe nan cial well being of farm households the degreeof nancial stress experienced by u s farmfamilies is always a concern to policy makers yet policyconsiderationsoftenignorethesub stantial involvement of most farm householdsin nonfarm labor markets it has been shownthat whentheentirefarmhouseholdisconsid ered the average u s farm household hasa higher total income and much greater assetholdings than is the case for nonfarm house holds see e g goodwin mishra et al pre sented data for 2000 suggesting that when allfarms are considered 92 of total householdincomecamefromnonfarmsources ofcourse such gures depend on how one chooses to de neafarm whenoneconsiderslargeandverylarge commercial farms the share of farm in come in total household income ranges from50 to 75

off farm work decisions of husbands and wives joint decision making theoretical and econometric models are developed to examine joint wage labor participation and hours decisions of a husband and wife in farm households the econometric model is multiple equation and recursive the specification of the off farm labor supply equation of the husband wife depends on whether his her wife husband does or does not work off the farm and this structure is endogenous the model is fitted to data for iowa farm households the main conclusion is that the off farm labor supply equation of a married individual differs significantly depending on whether his or her spouse also works for a wage copyright 1989 by mit press

a decomposition of total factor productivity growth the case of chinese agricultural growth before and after reforms our objective in this paper is to explain a method to decompose the sources of total factor productivity tfp growth into technological progress and changes in technical efficiency within the framework of the varying coefficients frontier production function an empirical application is demonstrated using the chinese provincial level agricultural data covering the period 1970 87 the results indicate that tfp growth in the prereform period was negative in twenty out of twenty eight provinces and that it was positive in almost all provinces during the reform periods while negative in sixteen out of twenty eight provinces in the postreform periods of 1984 87

off farm work decisions of farm couples estimating structural simultaneous equations with ordered categorical dependent variables we estimate a full system of structural farm and off farm labor supply equations of farm couples as a set of simultaneous equations with categorical dependent variables in a first step the reduced form is estimated by ordered probit with unknown thresholds then the identified structural coefficients are recovered from the reduced form coefficients through minimum distance estimation using census data from israel we find that for men a one hour increase in farm labor supply causes a one hour decrease in off farm labor supply but not for women this could not have been found without estimating structural coefficients

aggregate agricultural supply response in developing countries a survey of selected issues the authors review several studies of the aggregate agricultural supply response using both economic and econometric reasons they argue that time series estimation typically generates a downward biased estimate of the response to a credible reform even though time series estimates can provide an accurate picture of past behavoiral relations they do not provide an adequate basis for forecasting the impact of policy reform this is especially true in developing countries where policy reforms involve large changes and have included agricultural price reform industrial trade liberalization financial sector reform and macroeconomic stabilization under those circumstances parameters values obtained under the former policy regime have little relevance in the new regime the authors also argue that investment in public goods should be viewed as complementary to not competitive with price policy they claim that to select the policy with the biggest impact on output makes no sense they provide what they consider to be better criteria for choosing the best from alternative policies

the corporation competition and the invisible hand few would disagree that adam smith s invisible hand theorem is the heart of the economist s weltanschauung ask whether trade barriers should be lowered the spread of multinational corporations restrained oil prices deregulated cartels dissolved or more fundamentally whether a market based capitalist system is economically superior to a state run socialist system and economists almost certainly will begin to answer the question by trying to apply the theorem every student knows that the theorem depends on the assumption of atomistic competition which in turn assumes that the system is decentralized and that no competitor is large relatively to others there is another crucial assumption however that is often ignored and usually underemphasized namely that all competition is price competition in reality one of the most distinctive features of capitalism one that is most often raised in lay discussions of its merits and demerits is the prevalence of other forms of competition such as competition in research development and advertising competition to obtain and hold monopoly and competition for corporate growth these various forms of non price competition we shall aim to show are not clearly analogous with the theory of price competition more non price competition rather than less is not necessarily pareto optimal self evidently the production side of a market economy is decentralized only to a limited degree i e to the level of a decision making unit composed of more than one human such a unit playing neuron to the invisible hand is typically called a firm it is in fact a team rather than remaining small firms are in practice composed of any number of individuals from a handful on to half a million some

the supply of off farm labor a random coefficients approach a joint model of off farm labor decisions for farm operator and spouse is presented attention is given to operator and spouse participation decisions as well as associated problems of multiple sample selectivity biases two stage fixed and random coefficient methods corrected for possible selectivity biases are used to estimate supply function parameters results indicate that supply function parameters are random variation in important supply parameters is investigated results also illustrate the importance of spouse decisions on off farm labor supply function structure

an aggregator model of canadian export supply and import demand responsiveness the aggregate canadian technology is modeled by a gnp function with four export and four import components included by the use of aggregator functions and a two stage estimation process the recently developed symmetric generalized mcfadden functional form is used at both the aggregator and gnp function levels the aggregate export own price elasticity is found to be 1 67 in 1970 while the import own price demand elasticity is 1 62 increases in the prices of both imports and labor are found to decrease the supply of exports while exports are found to be complementary to the output of domestic sales supply

job assignments signalling and efficiency this article analyzes a model in which information about a worker s ability is only directly revealed to the firm employing the worker other firms however use the worker s job assignment as a signal of ability three results recur throughout the analysis first wage rates tend to be more closely associated with jobs than with ability levels second there is frequently an inefficient assignment of workers to jobs i e even when a firm has complete information about a worker s output third the severity of this inefficiency tends to be negatively correlated with the level of firm specific human capital in the economy

modelling labour decisions of french agricultural households a joint model of labour decisions for farm couples is presented attention is given to operator and spouse participation decisions in the off farm labour market as well as the decision to use hired farm labour farm household labour choices which include both on farm and off farm work decisions and hired labour decisions are thus modelled as a household joint process the model is applied to a sample of french farm households empirical results illustrate the importance of spouse decisions on off farm labour participation and supply function structure they also show that operator labour and hired farm labour are complementary but wife labour and hired farm labour are substitutable

multiple job holdings among dairy farm families in new york and ontario abstract previous empirical studies of multiple job holding have tended to focus on the characteristics of those obtaining off farm employment and the factors affecting the hours supplied to those obtaining off farm activities none of these studies have explicitly addressed the reasons behind the decision to seek off farm employment neither have they been able to examine in depth the important issue of how this major component of the farm sector responds to alternative policies since most studies have used cross sectional data for a given region a comparison between countries would permit the analysis of how multiple job holding responds to differing government policies the purpose of this paper is to examine the reasons for and factors affecting multiple job holdings of dairy farm families in neighboring regions of two counties united states and canada the bordering regions of new york and ontario have similar geographic conditions but significantly different farm support and social service policies the results indicate the importance of farm income on why people work off the farm and provide evidence of multiple job holding as a flexible mechanism for coping with changes in the economic environment facing the household for operators the driving characteristics influencing off farm labor participation is the farm s financial position the supply managed milk marketing system ensures higher and more stable returns for ontario dairy farm labor in contrast it is family demographics educational level and social support policy that appears to largely influence spousal off farm employment decisions free medical care in ontario lowers the reservation wage for household members the effect of these farm and social support policies on the relative returns to labor in agriculture and non farm employment explains the lower participation rate and hours supplied in off farm work by both operators and hours supplied in off farm work by both operators and spouses in ontario dairy farm household

risk and farm operator labour supply this study uses a large increase in us federal crop insurance subsidies as a natural experiment to identify the importance of risk for farm operator labour supply subsidy increases induced greater crop insurance coverage which in turn reduced farmers financial risks crop insurance participation data are merged with farm level census of agriculture data from 1992 and 1997 to compare how individuals off farm labour supply changed in response to the policy induced change in insurance coverage the empirical approach controls for unobserved heterogeneity and accounts for the censored nature of the data it is found that greater insurance coverage reduces the off farm labour supply of operators who produced at least 100 000 of output and increased the labour supply of small farm operators who produced less than 25 000 of output

from plan to markets abstract while formerly planned economies lack critical institutions ailing welfare economies have too many reducing investment incentives in both while institutional redesign is urgent in the formerly planned economies there is no instant concern in the west where institutional change must be realized through reluctant democratic procedures some formerly planned economies therefore are likely to improve upon the west in institutional design and experience superior long run economic growth they explicitly link investment incentives one way to property rights and the other to investment and growth to demonstrate how such superior performance can be achieved

the sensitivity of an empirical model of married women s hours of work to economic and statistical assumptions this study undertakes a systematic analysis of several theoretic and statistical assumption s used in many empirical models of female labor supply using a singl e data set psid 1975 labor supply data the author is able to replic ate most of the range of estimated income and substitution effects fo und in previous studies in this field he undertakes extensive specif ication tests and finds that most of this range should be rejected du e to statistical and model misspecifications the two most important assumptions appear to be the tobit assumption used to control for sel f selection into the labor force and exogeneity assumptions on the wi fe s wage rate and her labor market experience copyright 1987 by the econometric society

the nature and importance of economic competence this chapter takes on three tasks 1 to survey the study of economic competence as it appears in economic literature 2 to give a meaningful and operational definition of economic competence as one of the factors contributing to macroeconomic growth and 3 to suggest a methodology pursued in greater depth elsewhere to generalize and link economic competence as defined at the micro firm individual level to macroeconomic growth through simulation on the micro based macroeconomic model of the swedish economic system moses by introducing knowledge in the micro setting of firm organizational competence we arrive at a very different interpretation measured at the macro industry level from that of standard neoclassical theory

the meta production function approach to technological change in world agriculture abstract an alternative meta production function for agriculture is estimated with the cross section data for 43 countries and three years 1960 1970 and 1980 constructed and used by kawagoe hayami and ruttan and hayami and ruttan in their studies by allowing for country specific efficiency factors and using a flexible functional form the transcendental logarithmic production function strikingly different results from those of kawagoe hayami and ruttan are obtained in particular it is found that elasticity of output with respect to machinery is variable and the degree of local returns to scale is not constant and increases with the usage of machinery

family composition and off farm participation decisions in israeli farm households this article studies the relationship between the off farm participation behavior of farm operators and their spouses and the demographic composition of the household we focus on farm families without parents siblings or partners and examine the effects of the existence of elderly children of the farm couple we find that both the father and the mother tend to reduce their participation in off farm work as the number of elderly children rises this result holds even after controlling for observed characteristics we also find that the effect of elderly children stems from considerations related to both farm production and household production

local economic conditions and wage labor decisions of farm and rural nonfarm couples effects of geographical differences in local economic conditions on wage labor demand and wage labor participation decisions of rural couples are examined for current population survey households 1978 82 wage premiums are shown to exist for localities anticipating labor demand growth higher unemployment rates larger share of employment in services and higher costs of living these effects are stronger for males than females effects of local economic conditions on the probability of wage work are consistent with expected market wage and reservation wage effects and for farm households the probability of wage work increases when expected farm output prices decline or the wage increases

the happy farmer the effect of nonpecuniary benefits on behavior i test empirically the relationship between farmers perceptions of the nonpecuniary benefits from farming with a variety of field behaviors such as disinvestment production diversification and off farm labor market participation results suggest that nonpecuniary benefits have an important influence on a wide range of farmer activities while costs and returns are clearly important i suggest that nonpecuniary benefits may make some choices more attractive than others which may be more rewarding financially

imagination and leadership the neglected dimension of an evolutionary theory of the firm abstract bounded rationality prevents humans from tracing all action plans that could in principle be imagined in the present paper individuals partly socially shaped cognitive frames explain which action plans do gain attention this provides the basis for a new entrepreneurial theory of the firm where business conceptions which underlie any entrepreneurial venture play a key role coordination and motivation of the firm members can be achieved and opportunism be held down if through cognitive leadership the entrepreneur succeeds in implementing and defending his own business conception as a tacit cognitive frame collectively shared within the firm

a new database on human capital stock in developing and industrial countries sources methodology and results abstract the paper describes the techniques and data adopted for the construction of a new series of estimates of the stock of education in 85 countries over 28 years 1960 1987 the series are built from enrollment data using the perpetual inventory method adjusted for mortality estimates are corrected for grade repetition among school goers and country specific drop out rates for primary and secondary students enrollment data series used start as far back as 1930 for most countries and even earlier for others this reduces the need for backward extrapolation of enrollments to provide the initial estimates of the investment inventory

the intercountry agricultural production function and productivity differences among countries abstract the sources of differences in labor productivity in agriculture between developed countries dc s and less developed countries ldc s are identified by estimating an aggregate agricultural production function based on cross county data for 1960 1970 and 1980 the production function was found to be stable over the entire period agriculture in the dc s was characterized by increasing returns and in the ldc s by constant returns to scale the results imply that unfavorable man land ratios do not represent an immediate barrier to rapid agricultural development in the low income ldc s but they may create a serious agricultural adjustment problem as those countries advance into the middle income range

the impact of coupled and decoupled government subsidies on off farm labor participation of u s farm operators with the 1996 farm act the united states introduced payments that were designed to be decoupled labor allocation choices are likely to be affected by receipt of payments and income from off farm jobs has been the major source of income for most farm households for sometime this article examines whether the 1996 change has affected the off farm labor participation of farm households we conclude that the observed increase in off farm participation of farm operators who received payments was not the result of the 1996 policy change government payments whether coupled or decoupled have a negative effect on off farm labor participation

corporate takeovers the efficiency arguments in recent years the tender offer takeover has been praised and damned with a ferocity suggesting that the survival of capitalism is at stake the truth as in most disputes with substantial metaphysical content is more prosaic some takeovers enhance economic efficiency some degrade it and the balance of effects though not fully known is most likely a close one in this essay i try to lay bare the debate s foundations and bring it back to earth with an injection of evidence

determinants of agriculture s relative decline thailand during economic development agriculture declines as a proportion of aggregate national output a number of theoretical explanations for this phenomenon have been advanced in the economic literature but their relative historical significance has not been clear this paper develops an econometric methodology to analyze this issue and applies it to time series data for thailand the study investigates the importance of relative commodity prices factor endowments and technical progress as explanations for changing sectoral gdp shares of agriculture manufacturing and services it is concluded that the movement in thailand s aggregate factor endowment relative to labor was the most important determinant of agriculture s relative decline

the off farm labor supply of farmers theoretical and empirical models are developed to examine the off farm wages labor force participation and hours of work of farmers econometric estimates use data from a 1971 survey of illinois farmers the off farm wage depends on farmer human capital and the local labor market the major result confirms the sensitivity of off farm work to economic incentives a 10 increase in the off farm wage entails an 11 increase in hours of off farm work holding farm characteristics constant results also indicate effects of seasonality risk and life cycle factors on off farm work

off and on farm labour participation in italian farm households most farms are family business both in developed and developing countries labour allocation choices of farm household members are therefore relevant both for production choices in the farm and for rural labour markets in particular off farm work and combination of on and off farm work pluriactivity are viewed as an efficient allocation of household labour resources moreover labour choice of the children of the farm household is relevant for farm succession in this article we extend previous literature by estimating in an unified framework labour participation choices both for on and off farm work for operators spouses and their eldest children in working age using a five equation multivariate probit

competence and contract in the theory of the firm abstract the coase williamson response to the question why do firms exist is based on the idea that transaction costs in viable firms are lower than they would be if production was coordinated through the market the explanatory focus of this argument is on the diminution of costs related to transactions between given individuals however this ignores the possibility of activities which are in principle non contractible including aspects of the process of production further the reliance on comparative statics in transaction cost theory downplays the distinctive kind and rate of human learning that takes place within firms this paper argues that work on organizational learning and cultural transmission reinforces a competence based explanation of the existence and relative efficiencies of firms and this approach can also provide answers to the original question posed by coase accordingly the development of a research program involving a conjoint evaluation of both competence based and transaction cost approaches is proposed

privatization and efficiency differentiating ownership effects from political organizational and dynamic effects this paper argues that the private public ownership factor should be differentiated from other factors that also influence the effect of privatization on efficiency this is empirically confirmed in a longitudinal study of 24 spanish firms for which several political and organizational factors are found to influence the estimated effects of privatization on efficiency the analysis of the timing of the effects reveals a strong significance for post privatization years 5 6 negative and 7 8 positive this suggests that the negative effect of these factors is transitional being eventually offset by the positive effects of the change to private ownership 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved jel classification l33

evolution economic competence and the market for corporate control abstract to assess the merits of the market for corporate control this paper examines two processes which standard analysis does not study the allocation of economic competence and the evolution of organizational structures economic competence is seen to be an unusual scarce resource embodied in the very ways in which individuals and organizations take economic decisions which guides the allocation of all scarce resources including itself its efficient allocation is shown to require an evolutionary trial and error process where the market for corporate control plays a crucial role

interrelated labor decisions of farm couples a censored response analysis of off farm work farm couples labor market responses are partly the discrete choice of entering the off farm labor market and partly the continuous choice of off farm working hours given entry such a setting is interesting when examining the increasing occurrence of multiple job holdings among farmers in western economies most existing analyses of off farm labor supply only model the decisions of the farmer not the joint decisions of the farm couple this article presents a framework for handling such interrelated discrete continuous choices involving also farm production and household consumption the derived two equation sub model for husband wife s censored labor responses is estimated from a 10 year norwegian panel data for 342 farms the results agree to some extent with earlier studies but are more informative because of the longer panels which allows a more extensive examination of latent heterogeneity and behavioral persistence because it provides cross effects in the spouses labor supplies the results show some interesting differences between how the independent variables influence the labor supply of operator and spouse this is most evident for the cross effects of education children and wage rate overall the results strongly support applying a panel censoring model that accounts for latent heterogeneity in this context

an analysis of short run response of export and domestic agriculture in sub saharan africa abstract short run responses of export and domestic shares of total agricultural output to changes in stocks of domestic savings sav development assistance oda private foreign commercial capital pfx and other variables is investigated a profit function approach is used time series data for 19 sub saharan african countries are pooled into three panels using similarities in changes in economic policy regime statistical evidence suggests that for the panel of countries that were undertaking liberalized economic reforms the slope coefficients of some of the variables in the models have changed significantly between 1970 1980 and 1981 1993 for the 1981 1993 period the impacts of oda pfx and sav on export and domestic shares were different for this panel the effect of increases in agricultural labor was different across the three panels there is also evidence that productivity growth in the export agriculture sub sector is negative in all the groups it is recommended that to halt the decline in export share of agricultural output in the group of countries that have undertaken substantial improvements in economic policy environment efforts must be made to reduce the negative impact of domestic savings and agricultural labor while at the same time working to reduce the bias of development assistance against food security