satisficing and stochastic choice abstract satisficing is a hugely influential model of boundedly rational choice yet it cannot be easily tested using standard choice data we develop necessary and sufficient conditions for stochastic choice data to be consistent with satisficing assuming that preferences are fixed but search order may change randomly the model predicts that stochastic choice can only occur amongst elements that are always chosen while all other choices must be consistent with standard utility maximization adding the assumption that the probability distribution over search orders is the same for all choice sets makes the satisficing model a subset of the class of random utility models

ingredients of famine analysis availability and entitlements famines often take place in situations of moderate to good food availability without any significant decline of food supply per head the paper presents an alternative approach to famines which does not concentrate on availability but on people s ability to command food through legal means available in the society including the use of production possibilities trade opportunities entitlements vis a vis the state etc the approach is explained focusing on exchange entitlement mappings fluctuations in which can lead to big shifts in the intergroup distribution of food command the approach is then applied to the bengal famine of 1943 the ethiopian famine in wollo in 1973 and the bangladesh famine in 1974 and some general conclusions are drawn about the nature and classes of famines

calories conflict and correlates redistributive food security in post conflict iraq war torn iraq manifests itself as an ideal laboratory for food policy experimentation due to availability of unique data surrounding intra household calorie consumption and the presence of selected correlates including but not restricted to substantial disruptions to social infrastructure and fundamental public policy intervention among other findings expenditure elasticities are mostly positive and dramatically curvilinear with respect to wealth and lump sum redistribution of the iraqi public distribution system emerges as a feasible policy intervention extensions are discussed

food preferences and nutrition in rural bangladesh t he dietary choice of households near subsistence levels of nutrient intake is one of obvious policy importance in many countries such as bangladesh national goals are set in terms of nutritional intake and there is heavy intervention in the markets for foods however little is known about the manner in which food preferences vary with food expenditure and nutrient intake the design of efficient programs to aid nutritionally deficient households in attaining minimal levels of nutrient intake requires information on all ownand cross price elasticities for both target and non target groups the net effect of a food price subsidy on the consumption of food nutrients cannot be predicted without knowledge of the complete elasticity matrix results presented below demonstrate that substitution effects can be so strong that the subsidization of certain foods quite often reduces nutrient consumption in this study demand equations for nine foods which allow for extremely flexible consumer price response are estimated from the individual budgets of 5 750 rural bangladeshi households estimation at the household level is preferred because it more readily permits the incorporation of household composition variables into the demand analysis such as household size occupation and employment status that are typically lost in aggregation there is also a greater range and variation in expenditure levels than found in grouped data this is of particular importance in the study of nutritional well being as it is the poorest households which are of special interest moreover the household sample provides sufficient degrees of freedom to estimate a simple varying parameter model which requires the estimation of 270 parameters previous econometric analysis of income class specific dietary choice has been limited and not altogether satisfactory pinstrup anderson de londono and hoover 1976 estimated complete sets of price elasticities for different income strata using frisch s scheme in order to study the impact of changes in relative prices on nutrient consumption their results are suspect because of the assumption of want independence necessary for this methodology to be valid alderman and timmer 1980 who were also concerned with studying the relationship between food price policy and nutrient intake by income classes econometrically estimated separate price coefficients for each income group by including slope dummy variables in their demand equations for rice and cassava in indonesia the inclusion of these dummy variables revealed surprisingly large differences in compensated price response across income groups although their results support the notion that poorer households respond differently to prices than the rich the limitations of their data constrained them to consider only two foods and to specify changes in price response which are discontinuous with respect to income i the formulation and estimation of the food demand equations is discussed in section ii below section iii presents the results of the estimation and discusses the nutritional implications of movements in relative food prices and other exogenous variables section iv summarizes our findings

political economy of public policies insights from distortions to agricultural and food markets the agricultural and food sector is an ideal case for investigating the political economy of public policies many of the policy developments in this sector since the 1950s have been sudden and transformational while others have been gradual but persistent this paper reviews and synthesizes the literature on trends and fluctuations in market distortions and the political economy explanations that have been advanced based on a rich global data set covering a half century of evidence on commodities countries and policy instruments the paper identifies hypotheses that have been explored in the literature on the extent of market distortions and the conditions under which reform may be feasible

marketed surpluses of agricultural households in sierra leone an agricultural household model is used with household level data from sierra leone to estimate elasticities of marketed surplus for several outputs and for labor with respect to price and nonprice variables positive own price elasticities are found with magnitudes considerably above own price output elasticities changes in household characteristics and production technology also affect marketed surpluses but not always in anticipated directions elasticities are reported for households when grouped by their total expenditure not just for the sample mean the differences are important showing that low expenditure households respond as much as high expenditure households

testing models of consumer search using data on web browsing and purchasing behavior using a large data set on web browsing and purchasing behavior we test to what extent consumers are searching in accordance to various classical search models we nd that the benchmark model of sequential search with a known distributions of prices can be rejected based on the recall patterns we observe in the data moreover we show that even if consumers are initially unaware of the price distribution and have to learn the price distribution observed search behavior for given consumers over time is more consistent with non sequential search than sequential search with learning our

productivity health and inequality in the intrahousehold distribution of food in low income countries a model is formulated incorporating linkages among nutrition labor market productivity health heterogeneity and the intrahousehold distribution of food and work activities in a subsistence economy empirical results based on a sample of households from bangladesh indicate that despite considerable intrahousehold disparities in calorie consumption households are averse to inequality furthermore consistent with the model the results also indicate that both the higher level and greater variance in the calories consumed by men relative to women reflect in part the greater participation by men in activities in which productivity is sensitive to health status copyright 1990 by american economic association

does experience make you tougher evidence from competition law this article investigates experience effects for public officials using a unique data set of companies investigated under uk competition law we find very strong experience effects for chairmen of investigation panels estimated from the increase in experience of individual chairman probit and iv probit regressions indicate that replacing an inexperienced chairman with one of average experience increases the probability of a guilty outcome by approximately 30 and after chairing around 30 cases a chairman is predicted to find almost every case guilty

the impact of war on calorie food demand in bangladesh daily per capita calorie intake in bangladesh averaged almost 2 100 kilo calories in the 1960s but fell to 1 840 in 1972 following the war of independence in 1971 and only by 1987 did it reach 2 000 again this article examines the long run relationship between per capita income food prices and per capita calorie intake using aggregate data for bangladesh for 1962 97 and the recent cointegration procedure of johansen et al which permits structural breaks results show that a long run relationship exists and that the war reduced average calorie intake permanently by 10 per cent impulse responses show that income granger causes calorie intake but not vice versa

estimating the demand for calories in india this article examines the long run relationship between per capita calorie intake per capita income and food prices using aggregate data for india 1961 1992 cointegration analysis yields an income elasticity of calorie intake of 0 34 while the food price elasticity is insignificant thus economic growth in india as measured by increasing per capita income has significantly improved calorie intake future income growth can alleviate further inadequate nutrition however significant improvements in calorie intake cannot be made directly by food subsidies a further result is that calorie intake is granger caused by income and not vice versa income generation is unconstrained by calorie intake

the effect of price and income changes on food energy intake in sri lanka data is used to analyze the food acquisition behavior of households from a 1980 81 survey designed to be nationally sectorally and regionally representative of sri lanka the poor are shown to be much more responsive to price and income changes than other income groups the urban population generally exhibits lower income elasticities of demand for food commodities the poor appear to efficient substitutors thereby mitigating the effects of a price change on caloric intake the important exception is rice whose elasticity of calorie consumption with respect to price was about 4 times higher than for any other commodity the reluctance of households to substitute for rice even when faced with rising prices coupled with its large budget share show rice to be the most important consumption good higher rice prices are an important determinant of poverty for landless and urban workers moderating food prices preferably through technological change is a key ingredient to raising consumption among the poor simulations show that even if there are rapid and proportional increases in expenditures of all income groups this will not dramatically increase caloric intake among the poor however if the absolute value of the increase in real expenditures were distributed equally to all households there would be a marked increase in the of households consuming an adequate diet

joint determination of food consumption and production in rural sierra leone estimates of a household firm model abstract this paper investigates the determination of food consumption for rural households in sierra leone that produce the foods which they consume a household firm model is estimated with seven commodities including five foods non foods and labor as compared to three commodities in past studies such food disaggregation permits tracing of the effects of socioeconomic variables on household nutrient availability household specialization in production is such that censored data is a problem a tobit approach is used to correct for this for most crops the own price effects on consumption remain negative when a price change is allowed to shift the budget constraint by effecting the profits from home production elasticities of calorie availability with respect to toal expenditure are found to be sizeable varying little by expenditure group the price elasticities of calorie availability are generally positive however an important exception occurs for price of the staple food rice this exception has several important policy implications which are explored

entitlements availability and famine a revisionist view of wollo 1972 1974 abstract this article reviews two stylized theories of famine causation food availability decline fad and food entitlement decline fed as competing explanations of the famine of 1972 1974 in wollo province ethiopia a sen s market entitlement failure argument is challenged by j seaman and j holt s price ripple hypothesis a consideration of the role of transactions costs and wealth inequalities suggests a synthesized approach wollo 1972 1974 was a fad supply slump famine for the relatively wealthy and an entitlements collapse demand slump famine for the absolutely poor

will developing country nutrition improve with income a case study for rural south india aggregate estimates of food expenditure are consistent with such a possibility implying income expenditure elasticities close to one however the high degree of aggregation at which such estimates are made means that the considerable increase in price per nutrient as income increases is ignored and the nutrient elasticities are therefore overstated estimates for a rural south indian sample indicate that this bias is considerable and that the true nutrient elasticities with respect to income may be close to zero

working in the for profit versus not for profit sector what difference does it make an inquiry on preferences of voluntary and involuntary movers we investigate the drivers of the for profit not for profit wage differential by comparing judgments of job characteristics of workers who voluntarily or involuntarily moved from the former to the latter sector we define voluntary movers as those who applied for a job in a not for profit organization and when successful resigned from a for profit position while involuntary movers have either been laid off by their company or resigned without already having a job offer in the not for profit sector we observe that a large share of voluntary movers do not end up with higher wages but surprisingly do have higher job satisfaction after the change the vast majority of voluntary movers find significantly higher time flexibility improved relationships with stakeholders and closer conformity to educational skills in their new jobs our findings support the forprofit not for profit compensating differential hypothesis and shed light on mechanisms that are beyond the job donation behavior of intrinsically motivated workers

the limits of bureaucratic efficiency bureaucracies tend to be used when consumers cannot be trusted to choose outcomes efficiently but a primary means of bureaucratic oversight is consumer complaints but this can give bureaucrats an incentive to inefficiently accede to consumer demands to avoid a complaint i show that when this incentive is important bureaucracies efficiently respond by i ignoring legitimate consumer complaints ii monitoring more in situations in which it is not needed iii delaying decision making too long and iv biasing oversight against consumers i also show that bureaucracies are used only when consumers cannot be trusted as a result observed bureaucracies are always inefficient

corporate philanthropy and productivity evidence from an online real effort experiment contributing to a social cause can be an important driver for workers in the public and nonprofit sectors as well as in firms that engage in corporate philanthropy or other corporate social responsibility policies this paper compares the effectiveness of a social incentive that takes the form of a donation received by a charity of the subject s choice to a financial incentive we find that social incentives lead to a 13 rise in productivity regardless of their form lump sum or related to performance or strength the response is strong for subjects with low initial productivity 30 whereas high productivity subjects do not respond when subjects can choose the mix of incentives half sacrifice some of their private compensation to increase social compensation with women more likely to do so than men furthermore offering subjects some discretion in choosing their own payment schemes leads to a substantial improvement in performance comparing social incentives to equally costly increases in private compensation for low productivity subjects reveals that the former are less effective in increasing productivity but the difference is small and not statistically significant data as supplemental material are available at http dx doi org 10 1287 mnsc 2014 1985 this paper was accepted by uri gneezy behavioral economics

managerial contracting and corporate social responsibility abstract this paper presents a theory of corporate social responsibility in the form of the private provision of public goods and private redistribution by a firm these social expenditures are determined by a manager operating under a compensation contract chosen by shareholders in a capital market that prices social expenditures the theory incorporates three explanations for compensation systems that encompass social performance first consumers may reward the firm for its social expenditures second managers may have personal preferences for contributing to social causes and third the shareholder clientele a firm attracts may prefer social expenditures social incentives are higher powered the more consumers reward the firm and the stronger are shareholders warm glow preferences for social expenditures profit incentives are higher powered the more consumers reward the firm but are independent of shareholder preferences when consumers reward the firm for its social expenditures firms with higher ability managers have both higher operating profits and higher social expenditures when times are good so a positive correlation is predicted in bad times however the correlation is negative except for firms with very low ability managers in very bad times where the correlation is zero

bonus culture competitive pay screening and multitasking to analyze the impact of labor market competition on the structure of compensation we embed multitasking and screening within a hotelling framework competition for talent leads to an escalation of performance pay shifting effort away from long term investments risk management and cooperation efficiency losses can exceed those from a single principal who dulls incentives to extract rents as competition intensifies monopsonistic underincentivization of low skill agents first decreases and then gives way to growing overincentivization of high skill ones aggregate welfare is thus hill shaped while inequality tends to rise monotonically bonus caps can help restore balance in incentives but may generate other distortions

intrinsic motivation in public service theory and evidence from state supreme courts abstractthis paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the intrinsic preferences of state appellate court judges we construct a panel data set using published decisions from all state supreme courts from 1947 to 1994 we estimate the effects of changes in judges employment conditions on a number of measures of judicial performance the results are consistent with the hypothesis that judges are intrinsically motivated to provide high quality decisions and that at the margin they prefer quality over quantity when judges face less time pressure whether from the introduction of an intermediate appellate court the weakening of electoral demands or an increased salary they write more well researched opinions that are cited more often by other judges these effects are strongest when judges have more discretion to select their portfolios of cases

the choice between market failures and corruption because government intervention transfers resources from one party to another it creates room for corruption as corruption often undermines the purpose of the intervention governments will try to prevent it they may create rents for bureaucrats induce a misallocation of resources and increase the size of the bureaucracy since preventing all corruption is excessively costly second best intervention may involve a certain fraction of bureaucrats accepting bribes when corruption is harder to prevent there may be both more bureaucrats and higher public sector wages also the optimal degree of government intervention may be nonmonotonic in the level of income

selfish bakers caring nurses a model of work motivation abstract work contributes to people s self image in important ways we propose a model in which effort is unobservable and where individuals have a preference for being important to others this gives the following predictions 1 if a worker s effort is paid by his marginal productivity bakers effort is just like in the standard model 2 if a worker s wage is unaffected by his effort nurses more effort is provided than in the standard model 3 to prevent that shirkers become nurses nurses wages must be kept strictly lower than bakers income at this wage level there will be too few nurses 4 overinvestment in nursing equipment can be justified as a means to attract motivated nurses 5 even with full income compensation both nurses and bakers may experience a net utility loss when losing their job 6 similarly both nurses and bakers may prefer work to welfare even with full income compensation

how important is pro social behaviour in the delivery of public services a number of papers have suggested that pro social behaviour in the workplace may be sensitive to the institutional environment but there is little empirical research that attempts to test this directly using data on worker behaviour this is the aim of this paper we show that individuals in the non profit sector are significantly more likely to do unpaid overtime than those in the for profit sector however we find no evidence of adjustment along either the extensive or intensive margins when individuals change sectors the results of our analysis therefore point to selection and we find supporting evidence that individuals do self select on the basis of their propensity to donate labour

incentives for motivated agents under an administrative constraint consider an agent who has an expertise in producing a non marketable good this good is valued by a single principal and there is a verifiable measure of the agent s performance crucially the agent is intrinsically motivated due to warm glow altruism in addition the agent s budget which is controlled by the principal must not be less than the monetary performance cost faced by the agent this gives rise to a limited liability constraint it also restricts the agent s ability to under report costs in such environment we determine the link between the agent s budget and performance our results come in contrast to the received solution of the principal agent problem and to most in the literature on mission motivated organisations and public services provision

identity and the economics of organizations on plebes first day at west point called r day they strip down to their underwear their hair is cut off they are put in uniform they then must address an older cadet with the proper salute and with the statement sir new cadet doe reports to the cadet in the red sash for the first time as ordered plebes must stand and salute and repeat and stand and salute and repeat until they get it exactly right all the while being reprimanded for every tiny mistake in the summary of david lipsky 2003 pp 145 154 who spent four years tracking a company of cadets at west point on r day you surrender your old self in stages but r day is just the beginning of the training and personal re engineering that is to come so that west point graduates emerge four years later as loyal officers in the u s army lipsky shows that despite some failure this tough program is remarkably successful in creating officers with the will to lead in battle economists current picture of organizations and work incentives has no place for the west point program and the motivations it seeks to inculcate in recruits in a standard economic model an individual s preferences are fixed and utility depends only on pecuniary variables the army s aim at west point is to change cadets preferences they wish to inculcate non economic motives in the cadets so that they have the same goals as the u s army alternatively stated the goal of west point is to change the identity of the cadets so they will think of themselves above all else as officers in the u s army they will feel bad about themselves they will lose utility if they fall short of the ideals of such an officer this change in identity

estimation of demand functions using cross sectional household data the problem revisited a procedure that corrects for selectivity bias is proposed to estimate demand functions using cross sectional data under the assumption that prices vary across households this procedure which extends the work by cox and wohlgenant includes a two equation system of expenditure and unit value functions this model is applied to household expenditures for beef steaks and roasts

social responsibility messages and worker wage requirements field experimental evidence from online labor marketplaces this paper examines the effects of employer social responsibility on the wages workers demand through randomized field experiments in two online labor marketplaces workers were recruited for short term jobs and i manipulated whether or not they received information about the employer s social responsibility i then observed the payment workers were willing to accept for the job in the first experiment information about the employer s social responsibility marginally reduced prospective workers wage requirements on average and had a significant effect on the highest performers who were willing to give up the wage differential they would otherwise demand in the second prospective workers submitted 44 lower wage bids for the same job after learning about the employer s social responsibility this paper provides causal empirical evidence of a revealed preference for social responsibility in the workplace and of a greater preference among the highest performers more broadly it provides evidence that

the provision of incentives in firms i ncentives are the essence of economics despite many wide ranging claims about their supposed importance there has been little empirical assessment of incentive provision for workers the purpose of this paper is to critically overview existing work on the provision of incentives since the interests of workers and their employers are not always aligned a large theoretical literature has emphasized how firms design compensation contracts to induce employees to operate in the firm s interest this literature has reached into many areas of compensation and has pointed to a multitude of different mechanisms that can be used to induce workers to act in the interests of their employers these include piece rates options discretionary bonuses promotions profit sharing efficiency wages deferred compensation and so on my objective here is to evaluate this literature in the light of a growing empirical literature on compensation where possible i will address the literature from two perspectives first an underlying assumption of this literature is that individuals respond to contracts that reward performance accordingly i consider whether agents behave in this way and whether these responses are always in the firm s interest second i address whether firms write contracts with these responses in mind in other words do contracts look like the predictions of the theory incentives are provided to workers

civil service reform abstract civil service rules governing the selection and motivation of bureaucrats are among the defining institutions of modern democracies although this is an active area of reform in the us and elsewhere economic analyses of the issue are virtually nonexistent this paper provides a welfare evaluation of civil service reform it describes the effect of reform on the interaction of politicians voters and bureaucrats and shows that society often faces trade offs between improving the bureaucracy and improving the performance of politicians my results characterize the conditions under which merit based recruitment and civil service protections such as tenure can improve welfare

the incentive effects of missions evidence from experiments with ngo employees and students abstract this paper studies the incentive effects of an organization s mission on the effort provision of agents across treatments i exogenously vary how much the agents and their projects missions match in the first study ngo employees are assigned the role of agents in an online one shot principal agent experiment in the second study i replicate the experimental design with a student subject pool in both experiments the agents effort choices are for any given piece rate increasing in their mission match in a third study a laboratory experiment with a finitely repeated principal agent game with random matching i do not find a motivational effect of missions unlike in my first two studies

hospital competition and quality with regulated prices we analyse the effect of competition on quality in hospital markets with regulated prices considering the effect of both introducing competition monopoly versus competition and increasing competition through either lower transportation costs increased substitutability or a higher number of hospitals with semi altruistic providers and a fairly general cost structure we show that the relationship between competition and quality is generally ambiguous in contrast to the received body of theoretical literature this is consistent with and potentially explains the mixed empirical evidence

food demand studies in sub saharan africa a survey of empirical evidence abstract the recent empirical food demand studies on sub saharan africa show significant advances in demand specification and methodology especially in the application of less restrictive and theoretically consistent flexible functional forms the findings to date establish some broad patterns on effect of income household demography and life cycle location and prices on food demand patterns however the numerical values of the demand estimates are less generalizable because of an insufficient number of data points to separate the true demand component from other confounding factors which are linked to differences in modeling and estimation of demand relations the priority for future research is to generate sufficiently detailed demand estimates that have a high utility for disaggregated policy analysis but are based on a theoretically consistent and comparable methodology

competition and incentives with motivated agents a unifying theme in the literature on organizations such as public bureaucracies and private nonprofits is the importance of mission as opposed to profit as an organizational goal such mission oriented organizations are frequently staffed by motivated agents who subscribe to the mission this paper studies incentives in such contexts and emphasizes the role of matching the mission preferences of principals and agents in increasing organizational efficiency matching economizes on the need for high powered incentives it can also however entrench bureaucratic conservatism and resistance to innovations the framework developed in this paper is applied to school competition incentives in the public sector and in private nonprofits and the interdependence of incentives and productivity between the private for profit sector and the mission oriented sector through occupational choice jel d23 d73 h41 l31 the late twentieth century witnessed a historic high in the march of market capitalism with unbridled optimism in the role of the profit motive in promoting welfare in the production of private goods moreover this generated a broad consensus on the optimal organization of private good production through privately owned competitive firms when it comes to the provision of collective goods no such consensus has emerged debates about the relative merits of public and private provision still dominate this paper suggests a contracting approach to the provision of collective goods it focuses on two key issues how to structure incentives and the role of competition between providers at its heart is the idea that organizations that provide collective goods cohere around a mission 2 thus production of collective goods can be viewed as mission oriented

strengthening state capabilities the role of financial incentives in the call to public service we study a recent recruitment drive for public sector positions in mexico different salaries were announced randomly across recruitment sites and job offers were subsequently randomized screening relied on exams designed to measure applicants intellectual ability personality and motivation this allows the first experimental estimates of i the role of financial incentives in attracting a larger and more qualified pool of applicants ii the elasticity of the labor supply facing the employer and iii the role of job attributes distance attractiveness of the municipal environment in helping fill vacancies as well as the role of wages in helping fill positions in less attractive municipalities a theoretical model guides each stage of the empirical inquiry we find that higher wages attract more able applicants as measured by their iq personality and proclivity towards public sector work i e we find no evidence of adverse selection effects on motivation higher wage offers also increased acceptance rates implying a labor supply elasticity of around 2 and some degree of monopsony power distance and worse municipal characteristics strongly decrease acceptance rates but higher wages help bridge the recruitment gap in worse municipalities

the economic rationale for investing in nutrition in developing countries abstract studies of experimental and socioeconomic survey data on the direct productivity effects of nutrition indicate growing though qualified evidence of positive direct effects of nutrition on labor productivity of poorer individuals in developing countries greater productivity effects for nutrition than for formal schooling studies on the indirect productivity effects of nutrition through cognitive achievement schooling and preschool ability also indicate positive productivity effects through these channels therefore for productivity reasons alone policies that favor better nutrition among the poorer members of society merit serious consideration that productivity and equity concerns are in harmony is an important plus

anti social behavior in profit and nonprofit organizations abstract two types of intrinsically motivated workers are considered good workers care about the mission of an organization whereas bad workers derive pleasure from destructive behavior compared to the case with only good motivated workers the mission oriented sector has to resort to higher monitoring to deter bad workers from entering the sector in equilibrium bad workers work in the for profit sector where they behave like normal people while good workers self select into the mission oriented sector in the profit oriented sector both monitoring and bonus payments for good behavior increase to control the damage caused by bad workers the results of the paper are illustrated by examples from child care and the threat posed by pedophiles in this sector

agricultural production dietary diversity and climate variability nonseparable household models outline the links between agricultural production and household consumption yet empirical extensions to investigate the effect of production on dietary diversity and diet composition are limited although a significant literature has investigated the calorie income elasticity abstracting from production this paper provides an empirical application of the nonseparable household model linking the effect of exogenous variation in planting season production decisions via climate variability on household dietary diversity using exogenous variation in degree days rainfall and agricultural capital stocks as instruments the effect of production on household dietary diversity at harvest is estimated the empirical specifications estimate production effects on dietary diversity using both agricultural revenue and crop production diversity significant effects of agricultural revenue and crop production diversity on dietary diversity are estimated the dietary diversity production elasticities imply that a 10 percent increase in agricultural revenue or crop diversity results in a 1 8 percent or 2 4 percent increase in dietary diversity respectively these results illustrate that agricultural income growth or increased crop diversity may not be sufficient to ensure improved dietary diversity increases in agricultural revenue do change diet composition estimates of the effect of agricultural income on share of calories by food groups indicate relatively large changes in diet composition on average a 10 percent increase in agricultural revenue makes households 7 2 percent more likely to consume vegetables and 3 5 percent more likely to consume fish and increases the share of tubers consumed by 5 2 percent

more evidence on nutrition demand income seems overrated and women s schooling underemphasized abstract malnutrition is widespread in the developing world controversy continues concerning the roles of income household size and women s schooling on nutrient demand empirical estimates for nicaragua suggest that income elasticities are small and inversely associated with income levels there are some economies of scale in household size the elasticity for women s schooling is higher than those for income or household size and women s backgrounds are important the results cast doubt on the strong emphasis the world bank and others have placed on income and suggest that schooling may be working through tastes not only through productivity

analyzing nutritional impacts of policies an empirical study for malawi summary widespread malnutrition in developing countries calls for appropriate strategies presupposing good knowledge about nutritional impacts of policies little previous work has been carried out in this direction especially with respect to micronutrients we use representative household data from malawi and develop a demand systems approach to estimate income and price elasticities of food demand and nutrient consumption these estimates are applied for policy simulations given multiple nutritional deficiencies income related policies are better suited than price policies to improve nutrition while consumer price subsidies for maize improve calorie and mineral consumption they can worsen vitamin consumption in urban areas

dynamic reform of public institutions a model of motivated agents and collective reputation abstract state capacity is optimized when public institutions are staffed by individuals with public service motivation however when motivated agents value the collective reputation of their place of employment steady state equilibria with both high and low aggregate motivation reputation in the mission oriented sector exist reforming a low motivation institution requires a non monotonic wage path since the effect of higher wages on motivation is negative for a high reputation institution but positive for a low reputation institution a transition to a high reputation steady state requires an initial wage increase to crowd motivated workers in followed by a wage decrease to crowd non motivated workers out

prices and quality effects in cross sectional demand analysis a conceptual clarification of the sources and meaning of cross sectional price variability is used to motivate a theoretical and econometric framework for the estimation of cross sectional demand functions quality effects are distinguished from supply related price variability to identify cross sectional demand for disaggregated food commodities an empirical application using data from the 1977 78 nationwide food consumption survey indicates that parameter differences resulting from a failure to adjust cross sectional prices for quality effects are likely to be small for relatively homogenous disaggregated food commodities in demand analysis with cross sectional household budget data it is usually assumed that prices are constant allen and bowley prais and houthakker george and king given this assumption engel functions are estimated where expenditure or quantity is regressed on income or total expenditures family size and other demographic characteristics the assumption that cross sectional price effects are absent or are captured adequately by spatial and temporal dummy variables has not been evaluated empirically whether cross sectional price effects can be treated in this manner has implications for the specification of cross sectional demand functions as well as the estimation of engel functions there is a considerable literature on estimating price elasticities with cross sectional data most of the applications utilize timeseries cross sectional data annual or quarterly household consumption surveys and

food prices wages and welfare in rural india this paper considers the welfare and distributional consequences of higher relative food prices in rural india through the lens of a specific factors general equilibrium trade model applied at the district level the evidence shows that nominal wages for manual labor both within and outside agriculture respond elastically to increases in producer prices that is wages rose faster in rural districts growing more of those crops with large price run ups over 2004 09 accounting for such wage gains the analysis finds that rural households across the income spectrum benefit from higher agricultural commodity prices indeed rural wage adjustment appears to play a much greater role in protecting the welfare of the poor than the public distribution system india s giant food rationing scheme moreover policies like agricultural export bans which insulate producers as well as consumers from international price increases are particularly harmful to the poor of rural india conventional welfare analyses that assume fixed wages and focus on households net sales position lead to radically different conclusions

the growth of agricultural protection in europe in the 19th and 20th centuries 1247 johan f m swinnen dramatic changes took place in agricultural policies in europe in the 19th and 20th centuries in the 1860s european nations agreed on a series of trade agreements which spread free trade across the continent in the 1960s european nations concluded an international agreement which spread heavy government intervention and protection against imports across the continent this paper quantifies these changes in protection over the course of a century relates them to changes in policies and offers a political economy explanation for the growth in agricultural protection in europe

excessive public employment and rent seeking traps we propose a model where the size of the public sector and aggregate output are interrelated through the occupational choice of agents who differ in their skill level and degree of public mindedness when the public sector attracts bureaucrats with low degree of public service motivation they will use their position to rent seek by employing an excessive number of unskilled workers this leads to an equilibrium with relatively high unskilled wages which lowers profits and deters entrepreneurship conversely an equilibrium with a lean public sector and greater private economic activity arises when public service motivated agents populate the state bureaucracy these agents exert high effort and employ a limited number of unskilled workers our model also shows that a bloated public sector with high wages may be supported by the unskilled agents

the economics of career concerns part ii application to missions and accountability of government agencies the paper uses a simple multitask career concern model in order to analyse the incentives of government agencies officials incentives are impaired by the agency pursuing multiple missions a lack of focus is even more problematic in the case of fuzzy missions that is when outsiders are uncertain about the exact nature of the missions actually pursued by the agency consequently agencies pursuing multiple missions receive less autonomy the paper further shows that professionalization creates a sense of mission for the agency and that the specialization of officials raises their incentives last the paper compares its predictions with the stylized facts on government bureaucracies 1999 the review of economic studies limited

the causes of famine abstract this article argues that sen s theory of famine will lead to the wrong diagnosis and the wrong remedies for famine and will therefore worsen the situation his analysis of the bengal famine is a case in point it is based on unreliable and inaccurate statistics even the statistics he does use contradict his thesis his explanatory hypotheses are shown to be theoretically and factually wrong the actions of the bengal government of 1943 are looked at in the light of sen s recommendations

incentives and the sorting of altruistic agents into street level bureaucracies many street level bureaucrats such as caseworkers have the dual task of helping some clients while sanctioning others we develop a model of such a street level bureaucracy and study the implications of its personnel policy on the self selection and allocation decisions of agents who differ in altruism towards clients when bureaucrats are paid flat wages they do not sanction and the most altruistic types sort into bureaucracy pay for performance induces some bureaucrats to sanction but necessitates an increase in expected wage compensation which can result in sorting from both the top and bottom of the altruism distribution we also show how client composition affects sorting and why street level bureaucrats often experience an overload of clients

search and satisficing many everyday decisions are made without full examination of all available options and as a result the best available option may be missed we develop a search theoretic choice experiment to study the impact of incomplete consideration on the quality of choices we find that many decisions can be understood using the satisficing model of herbert simon 1955 most subjects search sequentially stopping when a satisficing level of reservation utility is realized we find that reservation utilities and search order respond systematically to changes in the decision making environment jel d03 d12 d83

a model of an agricultural household in a multi crop economy the case of korea it is the purpose of this paper to describe one method of extending the empirical applicability of the theory of the farm household to multi crop economies by integrating the econometric and linear programming models already available in the literature section i introduces the subject in section ii the theoretical model is presented in section iii korean data are used to assess the quantitative significance of the approach by calculating and comparing household response to changes in input and output prices for two different specifications of the models first the household is analyzed from the consumption side on the assumption that farm profits are exogenous this corresponds to the standard approach in consumer demand theory and second results are presented for a model in which consumption and production responses are integrated in a theoretically consistent fashion and farm profits are allowed to reflect production responses to price changes the results from this and other studies that use an integrated approach to production and consumption decisions highlight the need to change perceptions concerning agricultural household response to economic incentives in developing countries and to revise the design of economic projects and policies accordingly

quality competition with motivated providers and sluggish demand we study incentives for quality provision in markets where providers are motivated semi altruistic prices are regulated and firms are funded by a combination of block grants and unit prices competition is based on quality and demand adjusts sluggishly health or education are sectors in which the mentioned features are the rule we show that the presence of motivated providers makes dynamic competition tougher resulting in higher steady state levels of quality in the closed loop solution than in the benchmark open loop solution if the price is sufficiently high however this result is reversed if the price is sufficiently low and below unit costs sufficiently low prices also imply that a reduction in demand sluggishness will lead to lower steady state quality prices below unit costs will nevertheless be welfare optimal if the providers are sufficiently motivated

the motivation and bias of bureaucrats many individuals are motivated to exert effort because they care about their jobs rather than because there are monetary consequences to their actions the intrinsic motivation of bureaucrats is the focus of this paper and three primary results are shown first bureaucrats should be biased second sometimes this bias takes the form of advocating for their clients more than would their principal while in other cases they are more hostile to their interests for a range of bureaucracies those who are biased against clients lead to more efficient outcomes third self selection need not produce the desired bias instead selection to bureaucracies is likely to be bifurcated in the sense that it becomes composed of those who are most preferred by the principal and those who are least preferred

reputational concerns with altruistic providers we study a model of reputational concerns when doctors differ in their degree of altruism and they can signal their altruism by their observable quality when reputational concerns are high following the introduction or enhancement of public reporting the less altruistic bad doctor mimics the more altruistic good doctor otherwise either a separating or a semi separating equilibrium arises the bad doctor mimics the good doctor with probability less than one pay for performance incentive schemes are unlikely to induce crowding out unless some dimensions of quality are unobservable under the pooling equilibrium a purchaser can implement the first best quality by appropriately choosing a simple payment scheme with a fixed price per unit of quality provided this is not the case under the separating equilibrium therefore policies that enhance public reporting complement pay for performance schemes

a model of public opinion management abstract policymakers often motivate their decisions using information collected by government agencies while more information can help hold the government to account it may also give policymakers an incentive to meddle with the work of bureaucrats this paper develops a model of biased information gathering to examine how different disclosure rules and the degree of independence of government agencies affect citizen welfare disclosure rules and agency independence interact in subtle ways we find that secrecy is never optimal and yet insulating the agency from political pressure so that its information is always unbiased may also not be socially optimal a biased information gathering process can benefit the government by helping it to shape public opinion but it can also benefit the public by curbing the government s tendency to implement its ex ante favored policy thus mitigating the agency conflict between policymakers and the public

intrinsic motivation and incentives workers act in the interests of their employ ers for a host of reasons sometimes money is the motivation but often it is because they care about what they do despite the importance of such intrinsic motivation the economic litera ture has offered little in terms of understanding relevant trade offs when alignment of inherent preferences rather than monetary interests is what motivates people 1 instead the literature has focused largely on the efficiency gains that arise from agents sharing the preferences of their employers 2 this paper offers such a theory of intrinsic motivation where firms partially solve agency problems by hiring agents with particu lar preferences unlike the previous literature i show that firms in general hire agents who do not share their interests instead agents are disproportionately motivated to carry out a sub set of what the firm cares about specifically i show that the institution hires the agent with similar preferences to himself only in the limit ing case where the agent s preferences are irrel evant namely when output can be perfectly contracted on instead the optimal response of the institution is to hire biased agents with the degree of bias increasing as contracting mea sures get worse the reason for this is rather simple that jobs within firms are specialized so for example some people make things others design them yet other sell them and so on similarly aca demics do research deans raise money admin istrators do the books social workers provide services to clients while their superiors are charged with cost control etc the principal novelty of this paper is to show how hiring practices and specifically the intrinsic moti vation of those hired changes as the ability to contract worsens in a world where tasks are specialized in doing so it paints a picture of firms responding to noncontractibility by hiring agents with very extreme interests at the cost of their ignoring other aspects of their jobs so for example if the output of a social worker cannot be measured a natural response will be to hire agents who are highly motivated to get benefits to clients at the cost of their ignoring things like cost control simple though this observation is it illustrates a cost to using intrinsic motiva tion namely the endogenous hiring of those who increasingly care only about one aspect of their job in this way the simple model outlined here lays the foundation for a view of poor contracting firms as fiefdoms where those with extreme competing interests reside a point i elaborate on elsewhere prendergast 2008 for a theory of intrinsic motivation to be use ful firms must have some control over it the central assumption here is that firms have some ability to hire employees based on these intrin sic preferences i build a model of an institution that carries out two activities say service pro vision and cost control it employs two agents to do so the tasks are somewhat specialized in that one agent primarily but not exclusively does service provision and the other primarily does cost control the institution has an objec tive that trades off these two components and has a performance measure that can reward agents the firm also chooses whom to hire potential discussant robert gibbons massachusetts institute of technology

are estimates of calorie income fxelasticities too high a recalibration of the plausible range abstract the wide range of calorie income elasticities in the literature results in large part from the particular calorie and income variables used for estimation elasticities across four estimation techniques and four calorie income variable pairs for a sample of philippine farm households ranged from 0 03 to 0 59 estimates associated with calorie availability are biased upwards first because random errors in measuring food purchases are transmitted by construction both to calorie availability and total expenditures and second because the residual difference between family calorie intake and household calorie availability will often increase with income the calorie intake total expenditure variable pair gives the preferred elasticity estimate in the 0 08 0 14 range

viewpoint innovations in the theory and practice of redistribution policy we present a survey of key results from second best optimal redistribution theory and their implications for tax transfer policy the core results include the corlett hague theorem the deaton conditions the production efficiency theorem the atkinson stiglitz theorem and the mirrlees saez characterization of the optimal non linear income tax system these have been augmented in recent years by optimal participation tax rates the implications of involuntary unemployment the use of unconventional instruments such as minimum wages in kind transfer and workfare and the optimal taxation of capital income and bequests l auteur presente un survol des principaux resultats theoriques de la redistribution optimale de second ordre et de leurs implications pour les politiques d imposition et de transferts les resultats fondamentaux incluent le theoreme de corlett hague les conditions de deaton les theoremes d efficacite en production le theoreme d atkinson stiglitz ainsi que la caracterisation du systeme optimal d imposition non lineaire du revenu a la mirrlees saez ces derniers resultats ont ete enrichis au cours des dernieres annees par certains autres portant sur les taux d imposition decoulant des allocations conditionnelles les implications du chomage involontaire l usage d instruments non conventionnels tels que le salaire minimum les transferts en nature le workfare ainsi que l imposition optimale des revenus du capital et des legs ces resultats sont exposes et leurs implications pour les politiques d imposition et de transferts sont discutees

how elastic is calorie demand parametric nonparametric and semiparametric results for urban papua new guinea this article seeks further evidence on the elasticity of calorie demand with respect to household resources the case presented is for urban areas of papua new guinea where just over one half of the population appear to obtain less than the recommended amount of dietary energy the relationship between per capita calorie consumption and per capita expenditure in urban areas of papua new guinea is not consistent with the view that income changes have negligible effects on nutrient intakes the unconditional calorie demand elasticity is approximately 0 6 for the poorest half of the population using parametric and semiparametric estimation to control for a wide range of other influences on calorie consumption does not materially reduce the size of the elasticity therefore these results are not supportive of growth pessimism and instead suggest that policies that increase urban household incomes will also act to reduce undernutrition

monitoring for worker quality much nonmanagerial work is routine with all workers having similar output most of the time however failure to address occasional challenges can be very costly and consequently easily detected while challenges handled well pass unnoticed we analyze job assignment and worker monitoring for such guardian jobs if monitoring costs are positive but small monitoring is nonmonotonic in the firm s belief about the probability that a worker is good the model explains several empirical regularities regarding nonmanagerial internal labor markets low use of performance pay seniority pay rare demotions wage ceilings within grade and wage jumps at promotion

opinions as incentives we study costs and benefits of differences of opinion between an adviser and a decision maker even when they share the same underlying preferences over decisions a difference of opinion about payoff relevant information leads to strategic information acquisition and transmission a decision maker faces a fundamental trade off a greater difference of opinion increases an adviser s incentives to acquire information but exacerbates the strategic disclosure of any information that is acquired nevertheless when choosing from a rich pool of opinion types it is optimal for a decision maker to select an adviser with some difference of opinion centralization of authority is essential to harness these incentive gains since delegation to the adviser can discourage effort

organizational form and output quality this paper re examines the relationship between a firm s organizational form not for profit versus for profit and its output quality the arrow hansmann theory of hidden action on the part of providers predicts higher quality for not for profit suppliers this prediction has a puzzling lack of support in the empirical literature we propose a theory that resolves the empirical puzzle and generates additional testable implications the theory starts with the traditional assumptions of hidden action and supplier altruism it then incorporates two additional features of real world markets hidden information on supplier ability to provide high quality and a variation across buyers in the degree of informational asymmetry the central prediction of the theory is that quality has a higher variance across for profits than across not for profits preliminary evidence from the us market for hospital care is consistent with this prediction

nutrient consumption and household income in rural mexico we estimate the income elasticity for a variety of macro and micronutrients using a sample of poor rural households in mexico the nutrientincome elasticity is estimated using both parametric and semiparametric methods a special focus is placed on the nonlinearity of the relationship between nutrient intake and income and on measurement error and endogeneity issues one major finding is that income elasticity for calories is close to zero when we control for measurement error issues for some nutrients namely fats vitamin a and c calcium and heme iron we find a sizeable positive income elasticity robust to the choice of the estimator and percentiles at which it is evaluated these nutrients are also those for which we find the largest deficiency in our sample in addition we find that for the poorest households in our sample the deficiency of total energy protein and zinc is not accompanied by a positive income elasticity

nutrient demand and the allocation of time evidence from guam this paper presents an econometric study of nutrient intake in guam which explicitly accounts for household time allocation and household capital variables the empirical framework is based on a household production model of nutrient consumption food expenditure and the allocation of time between labour leisure and food preparation activities the study finds evidence that 1 capital and wage variables have significant impacts on households nutrient demands 2 income wage and educational status have very different effects on the nutrient choices of low calorie households than on the nutrient choices of high calorie households and 3 a family s participation in the food stamp programme leads to higher levels of food expenditure but this impact is attributable to the purchase of more costly taste characteristics in food rather than to the purchase of more nutritious foods

public and private sector wages interactions in a general equilibrium model it is common wisdom that public sector wages are not determined in the same way as private sector wages at the same time the empirical evidence available for oecd countries finds a strong positive correlation between public and private sector wages in this paper we develop a model that is consistent with a political economy view of the determination of public sector wages and employment while being consistent with the said empirical evidence public finance constraints are crucial in booms governments expand employment and wages while in downturns lack of tax revenues forces the government to cut back the wage bill

is the calorie income elasticity sensitive to price changes evidence from indonesia abstract the calorie income demand elasticity is an important parameter in the development literature and in the policy arena yet there is very little evidence on the extent to which it can be considered as an unchanging parameter or a time shifting parameter that for example changes with the economic conditions faced by households in this paper i use data from the 1996 and 1999 susenas surveys in indonesia to examine whether the relationship between income changes and caloric availability has changed and if so how using the same questionnaire the susenas surveys collect detailed information on more than 200 different food items consumed over the last seven days by 60 000 households at the same point in time in each survey year i use nonparametric as well as regression methods to examine two important relationships a the relationship between income and total calories and 2 the relationship between income and calories from cereals and other foods excluding cereals and root crops the empirical analysis finds that the income elasticity of the demand for total calories is slightly higher in february 1999 the crisis year with dramatically different relative prices compared to its level in february 1996 in addition the calorie income elasticity for cereals as a group increases while the calorie income elasticity for other food items decreases the latter finding is interpreted as behavior that is consistent with the presence of a binding subsistence constraint

can drought increase total calorie availability the impact of drought on food consumption and the mitigating effects of a conditional cash transfer program abstract this study uses the panel data of a randomized experiment from the mexican progresa program to evaluate the impact of drought on total calorie availability and the mitigating effects of progresa on food consumption in periods of drought drought reduced total expenditures and total food expenditures but increased the total availability of calories this paradox can be explained by the impact of drought on the composition of calories that is it reduced the consumption of expensive calories in such foods as vegetables fruits and animal products but increased calories consumed from cheaper sources such as grains this study finds that progresa can completely mitigate the negative effects of drought on calorie availability from vegetables fruits and other sources however progresa cannot mitigate the impact of drought on calories available from grains the analysis also shows that during drought households who increase their consumption of grains get them mainly from purchased sources rathe

determinants of food consumption in rural sierra leone abstract this paper reports the application of a quadratic expenditure system with demographic variables to the household consumption leisure choice component of a household firm model a system of seven commodities is estimated including five foods non food and leisure appropriate for such a level of disaggregation a demand system is used the quadratic expenditure system which allows for a flexible relationship between full income and commodity expenditures without sacrificing parsimony in parameters demographic data on households are explicitly incorporated into the model allowing for a richer specification than can be achieved by using per capita variables the data are from a cross section survey of households in rural sierra leone price variation exists by region permitting estimation of a complete demand system engel curves are found to be significantly non linear with marginal expenditure on rice the major staple declining with higher income most foods are found to be reasonably price responsive with sizeable own price substitution effects declining with higher income aggregate labor supply is found to be price inelastic

food price changes and household welfare what do we learn from two different approaches the use of a marginal approach can significantly distort the predicted effects of large price variations on monetary welfare over the medium to longer term this paper aims at shedding some light

are bureaucrats paid like ceos performance compensation and turnover of top civil servants abstract recent research explores the effect of financial and career incentives on public sector hiring processes and subsequent performance the reverse relation between performance and bureaucrats compensation and turnover has received only limited attention due to the distinct features of public sector organizations bureaucrats are traditionally argued to require either permanent positions and fixed wages or low powered performance incentives this article studies how the performance of top civil servants in norwegian local governments affects their compensation and turnover we thereby build on a unique new dataset over the period 1991 2014 our results indicate that better performing top civil servants obtain a higher compensation and are less likely to be replaced nonetheless these incentives remain low powered in line with agency theory prescriptions

quality disclosure and certification theory and practice this essay reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on quality disclosure and certification after comparing quality disclosure with other quality assurance mechanisms and describing a brief history of quality disclosure we address two sets of theoretical issues first why don t sellers voluntarily disclose through a process of unraveling and given the lack of unraveling is it desirable to mandate seller disclosure second when we rely on certifiers to act as the intermediary of quality disclosure do certifiers necessarily report unbiased and accurate information we further review empirical evidence on these issues with a particular focus on healthcare education and finance the empirical review covers quality measurement the effect of third party disclosure on consumer choice and seller behavior as well as the economics of certifiers jel d18 k32 l15 m31

does better nutrition raise farm productivity household level data from sierra leone are used to test whether higher caloric intake enhances family farm labor productivity this is the notion behind the efficiency wages hypothesis which has found only weak empirical support a farm production function is estimated accounting for the simultaneity in input and calorie choice instruments include prices household demographic characteristics and farm assets the latter two sets of instruments are later dropped to explore the robustness of the results to different specifications of exogeneity the exercise shows a highly significant effect of caloric intake on labor productivity providing solid support for the nutrition productivity hypothesis the marginal effect on productivity falls drastically as calorie consumption rises but remains positive at moderately high levels of intake one result is a fall in the effective price of food a decline that is larger for households that consumer fewer calories

consideration sets and competitive marketing we present a model of competitive marketing based on the notion that consumers are boundedly rational and that firms use marketing tactics in an attempt to influence consumers decision process the standard model of consumer behaviour assumes that the consumer applies well defined preferences to a perfectly perceived set of available alternatives we retain the assumption that consumers have stable preferences but relax the assumption that they have a perfect perception of what is relevant for their consumption problem thus allowing firms to manipulate that perception our aim is to explore the market implications of this departure from the standard model especially for the way firms deploy marketing strategies in competitive environments the cornerstone of our model is the observation that in the modern marketplace consumers face an overwhelmingly large variety of products and therefore often use screening criteria deliberate as well as unconscious in order to reduce the number of relevant alternatives as a result consumers apply their preferences not to the set of objectively feasible alternatives but to a potentially smaller set which they construct at an earlier stage of the decision process borrowing a term from the marketing literature we refer to this set as the consideration set the basic idea underlying this term is that consumers may be unaware of some of the feasible products and even when they become aware of a new product they still need to be persuaded to consider it as a potential substitute to their currently consumed product

regulatory behaviour under threat of court reversal theory and evidence from the swedish electricity market this paper investigates how regulators influence outcomes in regulated markets when their decisions are subject to the threat of court review we develop a theoretical model that provides a number of behavioural implications when i all regulators dislike having their decisions overturned by courts ii inexperienced regulators care more about not having their decisions overturned than experienced regulators and iii experienced regulators also care about consumer surplus the theoretical implications are tested using a database of swedish regulatory decisions from the electricity distribution sector we provide empirical evidence that inexperienced regulators are more likely to set higher regulated prices than experienced regulators and as the complexity of the case increases there are on average more overturned decisions and higher prices for inexperienced regulators the links between experience complexity and regulatory outcomes are both statistically and economically significant simulations show that if those decisions that were not appealed had been appealed then the court would have lowered the prices by 10 on average

traveling agents political change and bureaucratic turnover in india abstract we develop a framework to empirically examine how politicians with electoral pressures control bureaucrats with career concerns and the consequent implications for bureaucrats career investments unique microlevel data on indian bureaucrats support our key predictions politicians use frequent reassignments transfers across posts of varying importance to control bureaucrats high skilled bureaucrats face less frequent political transfers and lower variability in the importance of their posts we find evidence of two alternative paths to career success officers of higher initial ability are more likely to invest in skill but caste affinity to the politician s party base also helps secure important positions

the demand for food and calories we investigate nutrition and expenditure in rural maharashtra in india we estimate that the elasticity of calorie consumption with respect to total expenditure is 0 3 0 5 a range that is in accord with conventional wisdom the elasticity declines only slowly with levels of living and is far from the value of zero suggested by a recent revisionist literature in these indian data the calories necessary for a day s activity cost less than 5 percent of the daily wage which makes it implausible that income is constrained by nutrition rather than the other way around

managerial talent motivation and self selection into public management the quality of public management is a recurrent concern in many countries calls to attract the economy s best and brightest managers to the public sector abound this paper studies self selection into managerial and non managerial positions in the public and private sector using a model of a perfectly competitive economy where people differ in managerial ability and in public service motivation we find that if demand for public sector output is not too high the equilibrium return to managerial ability is always highest in the private sector as a result relatively many of the more able managers self select into the private sector since this outcome is efficient our analysis implies that attracting a more able managerial workforce to the public sector by increasing remuneration to private sector levels is not cost efficient

analyzing nutritional impacts of price and income related shocks in malawi simulating household entitlements to food the 2007 2008 food price crisis and the following global economic recession has temporarily increased the number of people to suffer from hunger while the impacts can be measured with precision only ex post for policy makers it is critical to get a sense of likely impacts ex ante in order to plan approaches to mitigate these impacts in this paper we adopt a very simple micro based simulation approach to analyze how changes in prices of specific food groups such as maize prices or prices for staple foods as well as how negative short term household level income shocks affect the entitlements to calorie consumption of individuals and how these changes affect overall food poverty we illustrate our approach using household survey data from malawi we find that food poverty is of serious concern with large within country variations we find that price shocks for staple foods have a considerable impact on food security with particularly strong effects on poor net food buyers in rural and urban areas this paper demonstrates that it is possible to estimate food security impacts of price and income shocks ex ante in a relatively straightforward fashion that can be done relatively quickly and that is suitable for cross country assessments of the likely impacts of shocks on food security and the design of appropriate response measures