designing forest taxes with varying government preferences and budget targets abstract a model of forest policy design is constructed to examine how government preferences affect the choice of forest taxes government preferences are modelled by assuming that the government faces a binding revenue constraint and cares about the provision of public goods from forests the equilibrium is second best given the imposition of the revenue constraint on the government s decision making our results show that a revenue constrained government will make different choices than a government that does not face revenue constraints this has important implications for the choice of property and harvest taxes as well as pigouvian forest taxes

the harvesting decisions when a standing forest with multiple age classes has value a solution is demonstrated to an infinite horizon discrete time utility model describing the consumption and cutting behavior of a nonindustrial private landowner who is managing a multiple age class forest and who values both consumption derived from harvesting the trees and amenity derived from the standing trees a policy rule is derived to attain a normal forest from any initial age class distribution it is demonstrated that a noncyclical forest allowing a constant periodic harvest is typically not a normal forest therefore an even flow timber harvesting is not tied to the existence of a normal forest forest economics literature has a long tradition of looking at the optimal management of one single stand this tradition goes back to faustmann s work in the nineteenth century faustmann however a characteristic feature in forest management is the existence of and possible interdependencies between multiple age classes stands these interdependencies become especially difficult to ignore when one is dealing with multiple use forest management problems forest economics literature recognizing the feature of multiple stands has two main strains one has been interested in landowner timber and nontimber decisions in the presence of spatial interactions of two or more adjacent stands swallow and wear swallow talukdar and wear koskela and ollikainen the other has incorporated stand or age class dynamics into models describing landowner or timber market behavior this latter literature has modeled optimal behavior either based on timber benefits berck 1976 berck 1979 johansson and l ofgren lyon and sedjo sedjo and lyon mitra and wan 1985 mitra and wan 1986 salo and tahvonen 2002 2003 sohngen mendelsohn and sedjo or both

household time use among older couples evidence and implications for labor supply parameters using the consumption activities mail survey cams module in the hrs we document how individual time allocations change when one or more household members transitions from full time work to not working we find that the ratio of home production to leisure time is approximately constant for both family members using a model of household labor supply to understand the implications of this finding we conclude that the elasticity of substitution between the leisure of the two members is quite large this elasticity plays a key role in models of household labor supply and is important for understanding how changes in relative wages and taxes affect household labor supply

efficiency and productivity of world health systems where does your country stand this article deals with estimating efficiency of world health systems using panel data on world health organization who member countries the stochastic frontier sf approach is used for this purpose we evaluate absolute efficiency as well as rankings and their sensitivity across alternative model specifications using both output maximizing and cost minimizing frameworks we also compare productivity of health service among countries derived from the output maximizing and cost minimizing models results show that efficiency rankings of countries vary substantially depending on whether the goal of healthcare provision is output maximization or health cost minimization the same applies to different sf model specifications

forest management under fire risk when forest carbon sequestration has value abstract we develop a multiple forest use model to determine the optimal harvest date for a forest stand producing both timber and carbon benefits under a risk of fire an empirical application is provided for a forest owner producing maritime pine in southwest of france our results indicate that a higher risk of fire will decrease the optimal rotation period on the contrary higher carbon prices increase the optimal harvesting age to investigate the contradictory effects of fire risk and carbon price on forest rotation we identify the set of carbon prices and fire risks that lead to a given rotation age we also show that forest owner s willingness to pay for a risk reduction can be substantial 37 33 euros by ha and by year to reduce the annual fire risk from 1 26 to 0 07

budget constrained frontier measures of fiscal equality and efficiency in schooling equality and efficiency are key issues in educational reform here the authors analyze the efficiency and equality consequences of various school finance reforms using a cost indirect output distance function this function readily models multiple output production under conditions of budgetary constraint and provides a natural measure of performance that is closely related to farrell type measures of efficiency the analysis suggests that despite school district inefficiency finance reforms can affect student achievement however any potential gains in output from redistribution are dwarfed by the potential gains from increased efficiency more strikingly the analysis demonstrates that budgetary reforms designed to equalize expenditures could actually increase the inequality of student achievement

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

policy relevant nonconvexities in the production of multiple forest benefits abstract this paper challenges common assumptions about convexity in forest rotation models which optimize timber plus nontimber benefits if a local optimum occurs earlier than the globally optimal age policy based on marginal incentives may achieve suboptimal results policy relevant nonconvexities are more likely if i nontimber benefits dominate for young stands while the optimal age depends primarily on timber benefits or ii nontimber benefits dominate for mature stands and also determine the optimal age nonconvexities may create either temporary or persistent difficulties policymakers may improve efficiency by exploiting the relationship between the timber only optimum and the global optimum

nutrition information and household behavior experimental evidence from malawi incorrect knowledge of the health production function may lead to inefficient household choices and thereby to the production of suboptimal levels of health this paper studies the effects of a randomized intervention in rural malawi that over a six month period provided mothers of young infants with information on child nutrition without supplying any monetary or in kind resources a simple model first investigates theoretically how nutrition and other household choices including labor supply may change in response to the improved nutrition knowledge observed in the intervention areas we then show empirically that the intervention improved child nutrition household food consumption and consequently health we find evidence that labor supply increased which might have contributed to partially fund the increase in food consumption this paper is the first to study whether non health choices particularly parental labor supply might be affected by parents knowledge of the child health production function

spatial interactions in multiple use forestry and substitution and wealth effects for the single stand abstract forestry models often ignore spatial relationships between forest stands this paper isolates the effects of stand interactions in multiple use forestry through a straightforward extension of the single stand model effects of stand interactions decompose into wealth and substitution effects and may cause time varying patterns of resource use for a forest stand simulations illustrate that a stand s role even in steady state may alternate an emphasis on timber with an emphasis on nontimber optimal management plans differ substantially depending on whether the manager values nonmarket goods from neighboring stands the model offers insights for improving heuristic forest level optimization models in current usage

some theoretical results on the economics of forestry pose the value of timber from a tree is related to its age a according to a function ft and a discount rate of p 0 is given at what age should a tree or a stand of trees of the same vintage be cut down to maximize the present value of the timber content the answer to this question proposed by jevons 1871 wicksell 1911 and others can be stated as follows cut the tree at an age at which the increase in value of timber content of the standing tree over an additional unit time interval equals the interest that can be earned over an additional unit time interval if the revenue from cutting the tree is invested at an interest rate p from the point of view of the economics of forestry the above solution and indeed the above question is missing something more precisely the solution is based on the assumption that the land on which the stand of trees was growing is not used after the trees are cut down consequently it fails to encompass an important aspect of the forest rotation problem once trees are removed from a given area the land is available for new forest growth clearly the longer the felling of the existing forest is delayed the longer it takes to acquire revenues from future harvests the opportunity cost of utilizing the forest site for the existing stand of trees must be considered taking this reforestation aspect into account faustmann 1849 noted that the question to be asked is the following assuming that one had an empty tract of land and one were interested in maximizing the discounted sum of the value of timber content of trees harvested timber being evaluated at a constant price what pattern of planting and harvesting trees should one follow

bias and precision in the dea two stage method in data envelopment analysis dea the two stage method is a popular procedure for accounting for exogenous influences on efficiency with the conventional two stage method a dea is first conducted using only traditional endogenous inputs and outputs then the first stage dea scores are regressed on the environmental contextual exogenous inputs of interest the regression outcomes are used to identify exogenous inputs that influence the first stage dea scores to a statistically significant degree and to adjust dea scores to account for these influences herein it is demonstrated empirically that the conventional method exhibits substantial bias and low precision with the degree of bias and precision affected by input variance and correlation a reverse two stage procedure that yields estimates without the bias and precision problems that compromise the validity of the conventional method s estimates is suggested

economies of scale and the optimality of rotational dynamics in forestry forest harvesting is traditionally analyzed in terms of the faustmann rotation model this paper considers the identification of optimal forest harvest regimes using jump controls this approach enables the structural assumptions of clear cut technology and identical cycles in perpetuity which are imposed in a faustmann model to be relaxed jump control models permit investigation of the biological and economic conditions which favour continuous growth management regimes as opposed to clear cut harvest regimes a numerical solution approach to the jump control model is presented the link between the harvest cost function and the optimal biomass path is analyzed economies of scale are shown to generate rotational harvest as optimal policies

virtual price approach to short term timber supply under credit rationing abstract duality and virtual prices are used in a fisherian two period savings consumption model to simplify the analysis of nonindustrial private timber supply under credit rationing a possible way to measure the degree of credit rationing perceived by nonindustrial private forest owners is proposed slutsky type decompositions for the derivatives of the credit rationed timber supply function are calculated and the credit rationed derivatives are related to corresponding derivatives in a perfect capital market further the impact of the degree of credit rationing on the substitution and income effects of the exogenous variables are discussed and it is shown that the total effects are independent of the degree of credit rationing the results help to interpret parameter estimates of private nonindustrial timber supply functions especially if micro data are available

substitution between goods and leisure in a developing country the paper explores the substitutability between goods female leisure and male leisure we find that goods and leisure are not separable we then adapt the almost ideal demand system aids to include leisure in the system in the same manner as commodities the model is not sensitive to variations in the assumption of total time available for each individual s work and leisure results from sri lanka indicate the marginal propensity to consume leisure is quite high especially in rural areas this finding has important implications for transfer programs designed to raise food consumption a somewhat surprising complementarity between male and female leisure was also observed a number of goods were found to be complements to both male and female leisure

program interventions intrahousehold distribution and the welfare of individuals modelling household behavior abstract in this essay the implications for the intrahousehold distribution of resources derived from economic models of household behavior that treat the household as maximizing a single welfare function are reviewed particular attention is paid to the within family allocation of time and food and to the effects of these resources on the schooling earnings and health status of individuals as they are affected by direct food intervention and female employment schemes and price altering policies empirical applications are provided from data sets from india indonesia and the philippines to illustrate the power and limitations of such models for illuminating household interventions and for placing restrictions on data

the role of household production in models of involuntary unemployment and underemployment a classic result in the theory of labor contracts with asymmetric information is that underemployment results if and only if leisure is an inferior good a classic result in models where unemployment occurs because of indivisibilities including implicit contract models and some equilibrium macroeconomic models is that unemployment is involuntary if and only if leisure is an inferior good the authors introduce household production into otherwise standard versions of these models and show that this implies they can have underemployment in asymmetric information models or involuntary unemployment in indivisible labor models without assuming that leisure is inferior

welfare evaluation and the cost of living index in the household production model the household production model provides a new framework for the theory of the household and most applications have focused on its implications for market and nonmarket behavior in this paper i examine the consequences of the new home economics for welfare analysis and in particular for the cost of living index in the household production framework market goods are combined with time to produce commodities these commodities rather than the market goods are the arguments of the household s preference ordering the demand for goods and time is a derived demand since goods are not desired for their own sake but only as inputs into the production of commodities this paper is an analysis of the implications of the household production model for welfare evaluation not a critique of the model hence it accepts the fundamental distinction between goods and commodities and assumes that commodities as well as goods are observable and measurable 2 the distinction between technology and tastes follows unambiguously from that between goods and commodities in orthodox demand theory the household s preference ordering is defined over the goods space and welfare analysis is based on those preferences the cost ofliving index is defined as the ratio of the minimum expenditures required to attain a particular indifference curve of this preference ordering under two price regimes in the household production model the preference ordering over the commodity space provides a corresponding basis for welfare evaluation one way to extend the notion of the cost of living index to the new framework is to define it as the ratio of the minimum expenditures required to attain a par

the social cost of living index abstract household cost of living indexes reflect household preferences analogous indexes for groups of households require a corresponding concept of group preferences in this paper i investigate the social cost of living index a group index based on the bergson samuelson social welfare function i first define the index and examine its properties under the assumption that the investigator constructing it expresses his distributional judgments in an explicit bergson samuelson social welfare function i then examine the maximizing society and the independent society two cases in which the index can be constructed from the information contained in the market demand functions in these two cases a laspeyres index i e the fixed weight index based on the reference consumption pattern is an upper bound on the exact social cost of living index in general however the assumptions required to place bounds on the social cost of living index are much more likely to be satisfied than those required to place analogous bounds on a household s cost of living index

analysing the technical efficiency of the spanish football league first division with a random frontier model this article analyses technical efficiency of football clubs in the spanish football league division 1 primera liga from the seasons 1995 1996 to 2004 2005 with an unbalanced panel data the random frontier model is used allowing the identification of random variables in the cost frontier it is concluded that the price of capital investment the number of points won and attendance are heterogeneous variables therefore no common public policy aiming to improve efficiency can embrace all of the clubs so that policies by clusters are required

the treatment of quality in the cost of living index abstract this paper develops the implications of cost of living index theory for measuring the impact of changes in the availability and prices of goods on a household s welfare it considers both the goods approach which treats each variety as a separate entity and two characteristics approaches l characteristics and h characteristics l characteristics are lancaster s linear and additive specification h characteristics are houthakker s heterogeneous specification in which the household consumes only a single variety of each product the paper concludes by discussing the implications of the theory for actual index number construction and relating it to the literature on quality and hedonic indexes

the impact of site characteristics on housing cost estimates abstract hedonic housing regressions using micro data for owners and renters from the 1972 1973 consumer expenditure survey are presented by including tract characteristics and public goods in these regressions evidence is presented which indicates sensitivity of the physical housing variable coefficients to the choice of included site related characteristics furthermore omission of public good variables can result in misleading and possibly perverse coefficients on access intermetropolitan housing cost estimates however are shown to be relatively insensitive to the choice of site related characteristics

joint production and consumption in traditional households fuelwood and crop residues in two districts in nepal forest conversion by agricultural households is the leading cause of deforestation yet we know little about agricultural household use of forest and tree products this article measures household production of and demand for fuelwood and fuel substitutes in two districts in nepal women play a larger role in collection in the district dependant on production from common forestlands men and agricultural capital are more important inputs in the district dependant on production from private lands the article also measures demand elasticities for fuelwood combustible agricultural residues and improved stoves a technological substitute each by household income group all price and income demand elasticities are less than one the substitution elasticities between residues and fuelwood are less than one residues are more important substitutes for low income households and improved stoves are more important substitutes for high income households

when is the optimal economic rotation longer than the rotation of maximum sustained yield abstract contrary to the assertions of many the rotation which maximizes the net present value of timber receipts may be longer than the rotation which maximizes average annual physical yield this circumstance may arise even in a very simple economic model once regeneration and management costs are recognized the most interesting situations arise with short rotation fast growing species along with a theoretical comparison of the two rotation criteria an example using pinus patula plantations in tanzania demonstrates the potential practical importance of this conclusion

labor income taxation human capital and growth the role of childcare in this paper we examine the effects of labor income taxation on growth in an overlapping generations model in which schooling and childcare play a role in the production of human capital we compare such effects with those obtained in a model in which only schooling matters for skill formation we show that the omission of childcare from the technology of skill formation can bias the results related to the impact of labor income taxation on growth

the rebound effect microeconomic definitions limitations and extensions abstract the rebound effect results in part from an increased consumption of energy services following an improvement in the technical efficiency of delivering those services this increased consumption offsets the energy savings that may otherwise be achieved if the rebound effect is sufficiently large it may undermine the rationale for policy measures to encourage energy efficiency the nature and magnitude of the rebound effect is the focus of long running dispute with energy economics this paper brings together previous theoretical work to provide a rigorous definition of the rebound effect to clarify key conceptual issues and to highlight the potential consequences of various assumptions for empirical estimates of the effect the focus is on the direct rebound effect for a single energy service indirect and economy wide rebound effects are not discussed beginning with khazzoom s original definition of the rebound effect we expose the limitations of three simplifying assumptions on which this definition is based first we argue that capital costs form an important part of the total cost of providing energy services and that empirical studies that estimate rebound effects from variations in energy prices are prone to bias second we argue that energy efficiency should be treated as an endogenous variable and that empirical estimates of the rebound effect may need to apply a simultaneous equation model to capture the joint determination of key variables third we explore the implications of the opportunity costs of time in the production of energy services and highlight the consequences for energy use of improved time efficiency the influence of time costs on the rebound effect and the existence of a parallel rebound effect with respect to time each of these considerations serves to highlight the difficulties in obtaining reliable estimates of the rebound effect and the different factors that need to be controlled for we discuss the implications of these findings for econometric studies and argue that several existing studies may overestimate the magnitude of the effect

welfare measurement in the household production framework the household production approach to consumer behavior developed from the work of gary becker william gorman and kelvin lancaster has considerable descriptive appeal in modelling the decisions of households the approach derives from the observation that households frequently purchase market goods that do not yield utility directly but are combined to produce commodity service flows which the household values thus observed behavior is determined by household production technology as well as by tastes the advantage of this distinction is that we can pose reasonable hypotheses about characteristics of technology though we rarely possess useful a priori information regarding tastes the putative advantages of the household production approach are questioned on empirical and conceptual grounds by robert pollak and michael wachter 1975 they show that jointness in production or nonconstant returns to scale cause implicit commodity prices to depend on both tastes and technology raising serious econometric difficulties in the estimation of commodity demand functions in addition since commodity prices become functions of the commodity bundle consumed the analogy to traditional demand theory breaks down joint production occurs when a good enters several production processes simultaneously or equivalently when a good in one production process also enters directly into the individual s utility function the most common example is time which provides the context for all production processes and is often associated with the production of several commodities simultaneously since joint production in the household is likely to be pervasive the critique by pollak and wachter cannot be ignored in response to the comment by william barnett pollak and wachter 1977 suggest dispensing with the notion of commodity prices and treating the demand for commodities as a function of goods prices this approach confounds tastes and technology but it eliminates the troublesome concept of commodity prices as parameters when in fact they are likely to be endogenous in this paper we show that results from positive analysis such as the critique by pollak and wachter have implications for the use of the household production framework for welfare analysis the household production function approach has had considerable appeal for measuring welfare effects of public actions in the environmental and natural resource areas gardner brown john charbonneau and michael hay elizabeth wilman yet traditional approaches to welfare measurement are frequently inapplicable we argue that welfare measurement in this framework is complicated by the difficulties of unravelling tastes and technology we extend pollak and wachter s results by demonstrating that marshallian demand functions for commodities cannot be uniquely defined thus marshallian functions cannot be used to derive exact compensated functions in the manner of jerry hausman and of george mckenzie and i f pearce nor can compensating and equivalent variation measures be bounded by marshallian consumer s surplus estimates following robert willig in fact duality results that normally allow us to move between marshallian and hicksian functions are not assistant and associate professors respectively department of agricultural and resource economics university of maryland college park md 20742 this paper is scientific article no a3404 contribution no 6476 of the maryland agricultural experiment station we wish to thank darrell hueth james opaluch v kerry smith and elizabeth wilman for comments on an earlier draft

consumption technology and the intrafamily distribution of resources adult equivalence scales reexamined adult equivalence scales are supposed to measure differences in the needs of households of different demographic composition formally they purport to measure the change in the cost of attaining a certain welfare level when the family composition varies this paper shows that the definition and the measurement of these scales depend crucially on the concept of welfare used when welfare is the utility parents derive from their own consumption one has to assume separability of parents and children s consumption this assumption implies that the only way of imputing the intrafamily allocation of resources is by observing the consumption patterns of adult goods regardless of the definition used one cannot separate the factors reflecting home technology i e needs from those determining the intrafamily distribution rule i e wants out of consumption data

willingness to pay for ozone control inferences from the demand for medical care abstract the paper applies a discrete choice version of the household production approach to the valuation of nonmarket goods willingness to pay for tropospheric ozone control is estimated using medical care demand under assumptions of input necessity and weak complementarity in example calculations individuals living in high ozone areas are willing to pay over 170 annually for an environment in which ozone concentrations never exceed 12 pphm willingness to pay figures are two to four times larger than medical expense savings caused by the same ozone reductions estimates obtained are compared with results of previous studies and proposed ozone control measures are discussed

intergenerational support and the life cycle incomes of young men and their parents human capital investments coresidence and intergenerational financial transfers this article examines the resource allocations of parents in the form of both shared residence with and financial transfers to their young adult sons based on an overlapping generations model incorporating a game between parents and adult children estimates of the determinants of such transfers are obtained from the kinship linked cohorts of the national longitudinal surveys the estimates suggest that both types of parental assistance are as important as governmental transfers in supporting young men and are responsive to the current and anticipated earnings of their offspring suggesting that young men cannot adequately smooth their consumption without parental help

technological progress and sustainable development what about the rebound effect abstract sustainability concepts that rest on the idea of resource or energy efficiency improvements due to technological progress tend to overestimate the potential saving effects because they frequently ignore the behavioral responses evoked by technological improvements efficiency improvements also affect the demand for resources and energy and often an increase in efficiency by 1 will cause a reduction in resource use that is far below 1 or sometimes it can even cause an increase in resource use this phenomenon is commonly labeled the rebound effect which is well known among energy economists but never attracted much attention in ecological economics the paper starts with the traditional neoclassical analysis of the rebound effect in a partial equilibrium framework that concentrates on the demand of one particular energy service such as mobility or room temperature it also provides an overview of some of the main empirical studies based on this model that mostly confirm the existence of the rebound effect but are controversial about its actual importance however we have to go beyond the neoclassical single service model in order to take care of the variety of possible feedback affecting energy use the paper presents two important expansions of the single service model in order to show the potential relevance of the rebound effect to ecological economics first it is shown that in a multi services model it proves to be difficult to make general statements about the relevance of the rebound effect in this case the overall effect of an increase in energy efficiency on total energy use depends on the on the assumptions about the substitutability between the services considered and the direction of the income effect second the paper also tries to take care of the fact that changes in resource use or energy use are frequently just side effects of other forms of technological progress especially technological change of a time saving nature can have a large influence on energy use as many time saving devices for example faster modes of transport require an increase in energy consumption that is frequently reinforced by a rebound effect with respect to time this effect will be especially strong when wages are high and at the same time energy prices are low as is currently the case in most industrialized countries consequently the paper also provides a strong argument for the introduction of energy taxes

marriage markets and money a coasian theory of household formation this article integrates search based models of marriage and money we think about households as organizations the way coase thinks about firms as alternatives to markets that become more attractive when transactions costs increase in the model individuals consume market and home produced goods and home production is facilitated by marriage market frictions including taxes search and bargaining problems increase the marriage propensity the inflation tax encourages marriage because being single is cash intensive microdata confirm singles use cash more than married people we use macrodata over many countries to investigate how marriage responds to inflation taxation and other variables

the demand for variety a household production perspective abstract economists have devoted substantial attention to firms supply of variety but little to consumers demand for variety employing the framework of home production we trace differences in demand to differences in the opportunity costs of activities associated with investments in human capital schooling alters time costs and changes the variety of activities household members choose time budgets from australia israel and west germany show that higher own and spouses incomes raise variety suggesting positive income effects education increases variety independent of income and earnings part of its impact goes beyond a correlation of educational attainment with preferences for variety

optimal forest rotation and land values under a borrowing constraint abstract this study relaxes the assumption of perfect capital markets in the classical faustmann forest rotation model a constraint on borrowing changes all the basic properties of optimal forest harvesting instead of a constant rotation period an infinite chain of rotations is determined by a nonlinear difference equation the rotation period evolves over time and approaches a stationary rotation in finite or infinite time the length of optimal rotation timber supply and the value of forest land depend on forest owner specific factors that are normally nonexistent in rotation problems the model explains several empirical findings that cause problems for the classical versions of the faustmann model

specification and estimation of stochastic multiple output production and technical inefficiency this paper presents a primal based approach for specification and estimation of multiple output production frontiers that allows simultaneous identification and estimation of determinants of technical inefficiency the proposed model extends the technical efficiency effects model by battese and coelli 1995 to general multiple output technologies an empirical application using swedish health care panel data from the years 1989 1994 is included the key issue is to test for the effects on technical efficiency of an organizational reform implemented with the primary purpose to increase efficiency the results reveal no significant effect on technical efficiency of the reform but evidence of overall decreased technical efficiency and technical progress in the provision of health care over the studied time period are found

networks and transaction costs based on the well known fact that social networks can provide effective mechanisms that help to increase the trust level between two trade partners we apply a simple game theoretical framework to derive transaction costs as a high risk of opportunistic behavior in a repeated trade relation determined by the density and size of trading networks in the empirical part of the paper we apply a two stage procedure to estimate the impact of social network structures on farm s transaction costs observed for different input and output markets at a first stage we estimate a multiple input multiple output stochastic ray production function to generate relative shadow prices of three inputs and two outputs traded by farms at a second stage a structural equation system is derived from the first order conditions of farm s profit maximization to estimate simultaneously the of commodity specific transaction cost functions for all traded farm inputs and outputs estimation results based on a sample of 315 polish farms imply a significant influence of social network structures on farm s transaction costs moreover estimated transaction costs correspond to a reasonable amount of farm specific shadow prices this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

optimal forest rotation with in situ preferences abstract this study develops a utility maximization infinite horizon forest rotation model that includesin situvalues and the forest owner s consumption savings decision making the value of forest land becomes owner specific and depends on property rights related toin situbenefits the length of the rotation period depends e g on the wealth of the forest owner and may evolve in time a forest owner with accumulating nonforest assets never continues harvesting forever in contrast with decreasing nonforest assets the rotation period converges toward the faustmann solution in a multiple stand version of the model the harvesting decisions regarding different stands are linked together via the budget constraint and the dependence of an individual stand sin situvalue on the age structure of the whole forest numerical simulation with two stands suggests that within the class of concavein situvaluation functions the optimal solution yields convergence toward forests with increasing heterogeneity of age structures

introduction to a theory of the allocation of time by gary becker gary becker s classic study a theory of the allocation of time laid the analytical foundations for the study of household production and the allocation of time within the household it spawned a large literature and continues to influence economics and other social sciences the article was written when becker was in his mid 30s teaching at columbia university and conducting research at the national bureau of economic research then headquartered in new york over the period 1958 69 becker along with jacob mincer organised the legendary columbia labour economics workshop becker mincer and their students applied price theory to study the economics of fertility labour supply income inequality education on the job training crime and punishment and the theory of irrational behaviour among other topics the interplay between theory and data was the hallmark of that group from this crucible emerged the modern theory of human capital becker and important components of the modern economics of the family that were distilled and extended in becker s classic a treatise on the family 1981 enlarged in 1991 a generation of productive and influential scholars was trained at columbia during this period heckman 2014 in his introduction to this article becker discusses the body of research on the economics of time that was being conducted at columbia to which he contributed and from which he had drawn this article is the analytical synthesis of a body of ideas developed in that intense intellectual climate many scholars have tried to disentangle the contributions of jacob mincer from those of gary becker during the period of their synergistic collaboration attempts to do so miss the highly interactive and mutually supportive intellectual environment of the columbia group and the ability of becker to create clean analytical insights from diverse bodies of empirical work and to stimulate all those around him

the impact of internal markets on health care efficiency evidence from health care reforms in sweden a purchaser provider split together with output based reimbursement were recently introduced by several swedish county councils these changes have been motivated by arguments of efficiency and consumer choice this paper tests the null hypothesis that hospital services are provided as efficiently by county councils with internal markets and output based reimbursement as by county councils with budget reimbursement we first estimate technical efficiency using data envelopment analysis and then we regress the efficiency scores as the dependent variable on new internal organizations in a multiple regression by use of pooled cross section data for the 26 county councils for two years 1993 and 1994 the results reject our null hypothesis and we conclude that the organizational changes in the county councils improve health care efficiency our results further indicate that the potential savings in costs due to a hypothetical switch from budget based allocation to an output based allocation is about 13 we

are all tastes constant and identical abstract george stigler and gary becker have attempted to eliminate the concepts of changing preferences and varying preferences across individuals from economic theory by postulating a household production function hpf stigler and becker reinterpret changing tastes as changes in the constraints used to produce utility from commodities the postulated changes in the hpf however are no less arbitrary than assertions of changing or different preferences and add no explanatory power furthermore problems of addiction taste change and weakness of will do not fit the constant tastes praradigm very well the stigler becker approach also involves infinite regress problems a change in the demand for x can be interpreted as an increase in x s ability to produce z where z is the true object of desire but how are we to explain a change in the demand for z

household economies of scale in consumption theory and evidence household economies of scale arising from the existence of househo ld public goods increasing returns in household production and or bulk discounts are incorporated into a utility theoretic model of household demands individuals are assumed to be identical and symmetrically treated within households economies of scale parameters for five goods are estimated using the quadratic expenditu re system and data from the u s consumer expenditure survey on expenditures by all adult households results suggest the existence o f significant economies of scale in the consumption of all of the included goods with economies being especially pronounced in the consumption of shelter copyright 1988 by the econometric society

the time cost of food at home general and food stamp participant profiles little is known about the cost of time in food preparation at home yet this economic variable is a common thread running through recent concerns about obesity and the food stamp fs program this article provides initial estimates of the time cost in food preparation at home for the united states two standard methods of estimation are implemented and three demographic profiles are considered i the general population ii the typical fs participant and iii the typical fs participant following the united states department of agriculture thrifty food plan for the general population and averaging across methods the time cost share of total food cost is about 30 if the individual works in the market and at home but it is about 49 if the individual does not work in the market for the typical fs participant especially one following the thrifty food plan the time cost share of total food cost can be as much as 26 higher than the general population these substantial percentages provide strong i

productivity of men and women and the sexual division of labor in peasant agriculture of the peruvian sierra abstract this paper estimates the productivity of men and women in the peasant agriculture of the peruvian sierra using recent household survey data a sexual division of labor on the farm implies that male and female labor are not perfectly substitutable evidence is found for female specialization on livestock production a translog production function reveals that the use of animal traction and land affect the marginal productivity of male and female labor differently suggesting that the two types of labor cannot be aggregated overall adult male labor is found to contribute more to farm output at the margin than adult female labor though the extent of the difference is sensitive to how farm output and the labor inputs are measured

determinants of women s time allocation in rural bangladesh time allocation patterns of women in developing countries have received attention due to interest in 2 problems the 1st is whether womens time is governed by economic constraints or by local customs and patriarchy 2nd is the question of whether these women have a 2 way to work or not to work or a 3 way to work inside or outside the family or not to work choice structure an economic framework is outlined that elucidates how jointly made decisions on labor force participation and hours of work affect womens time allocation decisions this econometric model of womens time allocation is based on a random sample of 500 households in different regions of rural bangladesh market production is defined as work for cash income whether inside or outside the home the study focused on married women aged 15 49 of whom 195 out of 444 engaged in market production these women tended to be younger live closer to market centers and have more schooling than those not participating in market production time use by these women was influenced by individual and household economic factors and was not rigidly set by local customs thus women in rural bangladesh will probably respond to market opportunities as development proceeds there the husbands educational level also had a large effect on time allocation and this may have been due to a spouse selection bias rather than the husband determining his wifes time use

the value and allocation of time in rural botswana abstract time use data indicate that there is substantial surplus labor in rural areas of botswana with the incidence of underutilization varying by age sex and asset position time allocations are influenced by economic incentives i e income and productivity effects the more productive capital the household has the more productive work its members perform particularly its children the positive productivity effect of capital on economic work somewhat outweighs its negative income effect time allocations also are constrained by a culturally determined division of labor by age and sex which however shows some flexibility at the margin

bequests credit rationing and in situ values in the faustmann pressler ohlin forestry model the problem of determining the optimal time to stop the pure aging process has a 150 year history in forestry the success of the rotation model lies in the fact that it is taken to be theoretically sound empirically testable and has clear practical relevance nonetheless empirical findings show that timber supply depends on variables missing from the original formulation previous research has addressed the problem by abandoning the pure aging description of forests this study demonstrates that the optimal aging process becomes forest owner specific under imperfect land and capital markets and if the owner has in situ preferences

labor market opportunities and intrafamily time allocation in rural households in south asia this paper utilizes a time allocation survey of a four year panel of households from six villages in semi arid tropic rural india estimates of the inter relationships between adult male female and child market wage rates and time allocated to the market domestic production leisure and schooling by boys and girls are presented the role of individual unobservable heterogeneity and self selection into activity participation is also accounted for the overall results suggest the importance of the opportunity cost of time in intrafamily time use

environmental efficiency and economic growth of china a ray slack based model analysis abstract the chinese economy has been experiencing rapid growth since the implementation of the reform and opening up policy however at the same time it faces issues regarding resource savings and environmental protection which are important aspects of the new industrialization therefore this study conducts data envelopment analysis dea to evaluate the environmental efficiency of chinese regions certain existing dea models account for undesirable outputs and do not elucidate the weak disposable relationship between undesirable and desirable outputs thus polar theory is introduced among the dea modeling in this study first drawing on stochastic frontier analysis ray stochastic frontier analysis and dea we propose a ray slack based model rsbm to evaluate provincial environmental efficiencies in china from 2004 to 2012 subsequently an rsbm malmquist luenberger total factor productivity index is structured finally economic growth environmental efficiency and energy consumption are analyzed using spatial panel econometrics as this study treats industrial waste as undesirable outputs the rsbm results show that the environmental efficiencies in the east are the highest while those in the central regions are the lowest the spatial econometric analysis reveals that the ratios of direct to total elasticity and those of direct to total effect for capital labor and energy input variables are fixed furthermore the study provides policy implications and suggestions for future research