women s property rights and gendered policies implications for women s long term welfare in rural tanzania this paper evaluates effects of community level women s property and inheritance rights on women s economic outcomes using a 13 year longitudinal panel from rural tanzania in the preferred model specification inverse probability weighting is applied to a woman level fixed effects model to control for individual level time invariant heterogeneity and attrition results indicate that changes in women s property and inheritance rights are significantly associated with women s employment outside the home self employment and earnings results are not limited to sub groups of marginalised women findings indicate lack of gender equity in sub saharan africa may inhibit economic development for women and society as a whole

promotion of the agricultural sector and political power in austria in most industrialized countries farmers as a small and well orgnized group are ableto influence government decisions to get rent creating proposals enacted two different viewsare presented to explain why the chicagoan view efficient redistribution hypothesis and the virginian view inefficient outcome of political bargaining a vertically structuredempirical model of the austrian farm sector is employed to test both hypotheses quantitativeresults of the welfare transfers from consumers taxpayers to farmers and agribusiness firmsare derived and the political weights of these groups are presented

new roles for marriage in urban africa kinship networks and the labor market in kenya abstract this paper explores new roles that traditionally rural kinship networks organized around the marriage institution might play in improving labor market outcomes in urban africa using new data from kisumu kenya and controlling for selection into marriage we find that marriage significantly increases employment levels and incomes in our sample of migrants at the same time marriage increases the remittances that migrants send to the extended family consistent with the view that the benefits of the network come with additional social obligations these obligations appear to be borne disproportionately by high ability individuals who consequently defer marriage the negative selection into marriage that we uncover has consequences for the future viability of the urban networks with implications for long term growth and distribution in this economy

a game theoretic model of endogenous public policies public policies are the equilibrium outcome of a cooperative game among interest groups and the policy maker this study stresses the interdependence between policies and players bargaining strengths and derives their comparative statics with respect to a changing economic environment it also provides a specification of behavioral equations consistent with the underlying bargaining process an analysis of the political economy of food and agricultural price policies in senegal illustrates the proposed framework

winners and losers among a refugee hosting population abstractthe impact of a sudden mass influx of forced migrants on the hosting economy is understudied and not well understood using a household panel data set for the kagera region in tanzania we test the impact of the mass refugee presence on the welfare of the local population our identification strategy exploits variations in the timing of arrival as well as the spatial distribution of rwandese and burundi refugees we find a positive and aggregate effect but households are affected differently depending on their main initial occupation

the spatial effects of wage or property tax differentials and local government choice between tax instruments abstract this paper considers the spatial effects on wages employment and business capital as functions of location of a localized differential in source based wage tax rates or business property tax rates between for example a central city and the surrounding suburbs a simple model is used in which business production uses only labor and capital inputs consumers have fixed residential locations but may commute to work wage and property tax differentials have effects that are similar in some ways but different in other ways if given a choice a local government would choose to set its business property tax rate equal to zero and use only a wage tax

women empowerment and economic development women empowerment and economic development are closely related in one direction development alone can play a major role in driving down inequality between men and women in the other direction empowering women may benefit development does this imply that pushing just one of these two levers would set a virtuous circle in motion this paper reviews the literature on both sides of the empowerment development nexus and argues that the interrelationships are probably too weak to be self sustaining and that continuous policy commitment to equality for its own sake may be needed to bring about equality between men and women

the determinants of municipal tax rates in british columbia in this paper we study the regional pattern of municipal business property tax rates in the province of british columbia reduced form tax setting equations produce some evidence that municipal governments respond to tax changes in neighbouring jurisdictions a joint investigation of the determinants of tax base and municipal taxation decisions however reveals that it is difficult to interpret this response as arising primarily out of competition over tax base there is also some evidence that municipal tax rates are sensitive to taxes set on the same base by super municipal bodies jel classification c33 h71 les determinants des taux d imposition municipale en colombie britannique dans ce memoire les auteurs etudient le pattern regional des taux d imposition municipale sur la propriete fonciere commerciale dans la province de la colombie britannique on montre a l aide d un modele en forme reduite d equations de definition des taux d imposition que les gouvernements municipaux reagissent aux changements dans les taux d imposition dans leur voisinage cependant un examen conjoint des determinants de la base d imposition et des decisions municipales montre qu il est difficile d interpreter cette reaction comme emanant d une concurrence fiscale on montre aussi que les taux d imposition municipale sont sensibles aux niveaux de fiscalite imposes sur la meme base par les autorites supra municipales

adult mortality and consumption growth in the age of hiv aids the authors use a 13 year panel of individuals in tanzania to assess how adult mortality shocks affect both short and long run consumption growth of surviving household members using unique data which tracks individuals from 1991 to 2004 they examine consumption growth controlling for a set of initial community household and individual characteristics the effect is identified using the sample of households in 2004 which grew out of baseline households the authors find robust evidence that an affected household will see consumption drop 7 percent within the first five years after the adult death with high growth in the sample over this time period this creates a 19 percentage point growth gap with the average household there is some evidence of persistent effects of these shocks for up to 13 years but these effects are imprecisely estimated and not significantly different from zero the impact of female adult death is found to be particularly severe

a spatial model of tax competition with multiple tax instruments abstract this paper presents a model of tax competition with two local jurisdictions in each metropolitan area located along a line segment and many metropolitan areas in the world economy the residents in each local jurisdiction are allowed to commute at a constant cost per mile to work in the other jurisdiction if a lump sum tax can be used then other taxes are not used if source based wage and business capital taxes can both be used then only the former is used in this case or if only a business capital tax can be used the local public good is underprovided

local fiscal competition an application to sales taxation with multiple federations abstract local sales tax rates influence the location of retail activity this paper develops a theory and empirical identification strategy for studying sales tax competition with multiple federations as exemplified by multiple counties each containing several cities in addition to strategic interactions with nearby cities and a city s own county city tax rates are influenced by the tax rates of neighboring counties cities react heterogeneously to own county sales tax rates depending on distance to the county border using data on the driving time to county borders and a comprehensive cross section of local sales tax rates i exploit variation in proximity to county borders to identify vertical fiscal competition cities located near county borders react more intensely to their county s tax rate in comparison to towns at the interior an increase in the neighboring county tax rate raises city tax rates in nearby counties

estimating statistical properties of political economic decisions revelation of criteria implicit in setting policy is addressed in a political economic framework that includes identification and estimation of unknown parameters in the presence of multiple sources of uncertainty policy formation is viewed as an optimization process under which the government maximizes a criterion function subject to market constraints a method for estimating political criterion function weights and their associated standard errors over multiple time periods is presented the approach is illustrated with an empirical example from japanese rice and wheat trade policy

temperature changes household consumption and internal migration evidence from tanzania large rural urban wage gaps observed in many developing countries are suggestive of barriers to migration that keep potential migrants in rural areas using long panel data spanning nearly two decades i study the extent to which migration rates are constrained by liquidity constraints in rural tanzania the analysis begins by quantifying the impact of weather variation on household welfare the results show how household consumption co moves with temperature rendering households vulnerable to local weather events these temperature induced income shocks are then found to inhibit long term migration among men thus preventing them from tapping into the opportunities brought about by geographical mobility

state and local tax competition in a spatial model with sales taxes and residential property taxes abstract this paper presents a theoretical model with a uniformly populated line that is divided into local jurisdictions and or states if one level of government imposes sales and residential property taxes and if the spatial extent of each taxing jurisdiction is positive and finite then in nash equilibrium the sales tax rate is less than residential property tax rate housing consumption is suboptimal and the public good is underprovided in each jurisdiction if a very large state or country is divided into local jurisdictions and if both levels of government choose tax rates endogenously then under some assumptions there is an efficient outcome

competing premarital investments this paper studies premarital parental investments in children s wealth where spousal wealth is a public good in marriage by investing in their children s wealth parents increase the wealth of their children and the quality of the spouses that their children can marry in large marriage markets the hedonic return to investment internalizes all the external benefits of premarital investment in wealth so that the competitive equilibrium is efficient marriage market competition also increases investments in small marriage markets relative to no competition but equilibrium investments are not efficient

political criterion functions and the analysis of wealth transfers agricultural economics devotes much attention to analyzing market interventions and their distributional implications recent research emphasis has shifted from the analysis of policy effects toward explaining the underlying causes of farm policy gardner 1983 one popular research tool in analyzing the latter issue is the metaphor of aggregate rationality policies are the outcome of a single optimization problem that balances the welfare of conflicting pressure groups the criterion function that rationalizes policies is often called a political preference function e g rausser and freebairn in the present paper we investigate two assumptions underlying agricultural economic models of the political economy of wealth transfers that the political process is indeed characterized by aggregate rationality as questioned by bates 1989 and that governments objectives are limited to fiscal concerns and political rewards from pressure groups many studies posit that individual rationality in rent seeking leads to a form of aggregate rationality in policy outcome gardner 1983 rausser and freebairn other studies describe policy formation as a bargaining game leading to the maximization by a single policy maker of a criterion function of groups welfare measures zusman rent seeking activities by interest groups determine the weights given individual surplus measures in the criterion function roe and graham tomasi rausser and de gorter a surplus possibility or transformation set constrains this maximization of a weighted sum of surpluses one infers the relative weights on group s welfare from the marginal rates of transformation of one surplus measure into another why might this model of aggregate rationality make sense the political process often leads to enforceable contracts e g the u s farm bill which are outcomes of a recurring and predictable process e g five year farm bill cycle enforcement mechanisms and the repeated nature of the political economic process make plausible the use of cooperative game theoretic arguments i e the assumption of a pareto efficient political equilibrium shubik studies typically treat the government as a monolithic actor fafchamps sadoulet and de janvry lopez oehmke and yao and some studies additionally posit cooperation of all players in the political economic game love rausser and burton the aggregation of individual rational behaviors of rent seekers and government agencies may not lead to a cooperative game equilibrium bates 1990 north 1991 the folk theorem admits many solutions to a bargaining game and does not necessarily lead to pareto optimality fudenberg and maskin by contrast the original rent seeking literature as opposed to the cooperative efficient view of government choice posits government inefficiency as a cornerstone tullock the existence of deadweight losses associated with transfers is prima facie evidence of inefficiency in addition enforcement mechanisms are often incomplete and costly north 1990 and governments may have a vested interest in incompletely enforced property rights which exacerbate rent seeking and inefficient outcomes this problem of aggregate rationality we term the integrability problem of policy choice that is can one recover a well behaved criterion function from a set of equations describing observed policy outcomes the second assumption regarding government behavior has a strong and weak form the strong assumption excludes government as a fullfledged player in the political economic game algebraically speaking the government s objohn beghin and william foster are assistant professors department of agricultural and resource economics north carolina state university the authors thank d s bullock for his comments d burton l karp a love and g rausser for helpful discussions

technology and tax systems abstract technological innovations facilitating e commerce have had major effects on consumer behavior and firm organization in the retail sector but the effects of these new transaction technologies on fiscal systems remain unknown we extend models of commodity tax competition to include multiple types of commodities trade and remote commerce assuming in accordance with current policy that e commerce is taxed at destination while cross border shopping is taxed at origin when the cost of online shopping falls we show that equilibrium tax rates and revenues decrease in large core jurisdictions but increase in small peripheral ones reducing tax differentials policy commentators warn that e commerce erodes tax revenue true enough for some governments but more accurately changing transaction costs can generate entirely new commercial and fiscal equilibria that ultimately redistribute tax revenues from jurisdictions with concentrations of traditional vendors toward others with some reinterpretation the model is also adapted to analyze profit tax competition when firms can respond to high taxes both through profit shifting and through relocation each dependent on transactions costs changes in technology may again redistribute tax revenues from high tax to low tax jurisdictions

spatial competition between jurisdictions which tax perfectly competitive retail or production centers abstract this paper examines the taxes that jurisdictions choose to impose on perfectly competitive retail centers or production centers within their boundaries retail centers are located on a line and jurisdictions are segments of the line a jurisdiction maximizes the sum of tax revenues and residents consumer surplus the tax chosen by a jurisdiction is a function of the spacing between retail centers the locations of interjurisdictional boundaries and the taxes imposed by neighboring jurisdictions an exporting jurisdiction chooses a positive tax an importing jurisdiction chooses a zero tax even if neighboring jurisdictions have taxes or subsidies if all jurisdictions with retail centers use endogenous fiscal policy then each imposes a positive or zero tax

optimal fiscal regime in a spatial duopoly abstract we investigate a horizontally differentiated duopoly in which a public authority can either tax or subsidize firms in order to induce duopolists to choose the socially optimal locations the policy proposed here is such that welfare maximization is achieved by directly affecting firms location without explicitly modifying their price behavior

u s trade threats rhetoric or war working paper 95 7 the international agricultural trade research consortium is an informal association of university and government economists interested in agricultural trade its purpose is to foster interaction improve research capacity and to focus on relevant trade policy issues it is financed by united states department of agriculture ers fas and csrs agriculture canada and the participating institutions

unit tax versus ad valorem tax a tax competition model with cross border shopping abstract within the framework of spatial tax competition with cross border shopping we examine the choice of tax method between ad valorem tax and unit specific tax this study shows that governments endogenously choose the ad valorem tax method not because of a classic welfare reason but because it is a good strategy to compete for mobile consumers another key finding is that while governments are committed to the ad valorem tax method the choice leads to inferior outcome tax cutting competition becomes more serious when countries adopt ad valorem tax and competition in ad valorem tax results in smaller tax revenue than competition in unit tax

interstate commodity tax differentials and the distribution of residents abstract this paper considers the manner in which an unequal distribution of consumers affects the commodity tax policies of neighboring jurisdictions the paper uses a spatial model in which the residents of two states are distributed non uniformly and employs a variety of assumptions about the behavior of governments and firms throughout the paper shows that at a nash equilibrium in tax levels the sparsely populated state imposes a lower tax than does its densely populated neighbor the paper also demonstrates how equilibrium state taxes differ depending on whether firms employ marginal cost or profit maximizing pricing

migration and economic mobility in tanzania evidence from a tracking survey this study explores the extent to which migration has contributed to improved living standards of individuals in tanzania using longitudinal data on individuals the authors estimate the impact of migration on consumption growth between 1991 and 2004 the analysis addresses concerns about heterogeneity and unobservable factors correlated with both income changes and the decision to migrate the findings show that migration adds 36 percentage points to consumption growth during a period of considerable growth in consumption these results are robust to numerous tests and alternative specifications unpacking the findings the analysis finds that moving out of agriculture is correlated with much higher growth than staying in agriculture although growth is always higher in any sector if one physically moves economic mobility is strongly linked to geographic mobility the puzzle is why more people do not move if returns to geographic mobility are high the evidence is consistent with models in which exit barriers are set by home communities through social and family norms that prevent migration of certain categories of people

descent rules and strategic transfers evidence from matrilineal groups in ghana abstract traditional descent systems can roughly be divided into patrilineal and matrilineal in the latter a man s heir is not his own child but rather his sister s son the paper examines the implications of this social norm for the pattern of inter vivos transfers using household level data from rural ghana where the largest ethnic group is traditionally matrilineal in particular it tests the predictions of a model of strategic behavior according to which children should respond to the threat of disinheritance by increasing transfers to their parents during lifetime to induce a donation of land before the default matrilineal inheritance is enforced i find that the credibility of customary norms enforcement as proxied by the presence of a nephew in the father s household significantly increases the probability of receiving transfers from children for akans but not for the other groups the effect is specific to nephews and not to other co resident boys this pattern of behavior can affect asset accumulation decisions across generations

female migration for marriage implications from the land reform in rural tanzania summary using the longitudinal household panel data drawn from rural tanzania 1991 2004 this study investigates impacts of the land reform on women s marriage motivated relocation during the period under study several villages that initially banned a widow s land inheritance abolished this discrimination taking a differences in differences approach this study finds that the probability of males marrying in a village increased by altering its customary land inheritance rule in favor of widows in the light of the traditional system favoring exogamous and patrilocal marriage this finding indicates that females relocate at marriage in response to the favorable land tenure system at the destination

land markets and land access among female headed households in northwestern tanzania summary land markets can potentially improve land access for female headed households if markets exhibit less restrictive gender norms around land ownership as compared with non market based systems of allocation at the same time land markets may not operate in a gender neutral manner with restrictions beyond the market continuing to influence the options of female headed households using both qualitative data and household survey data collected in 2014 and 2015 this paper explores the extent and manner in which female heads participate in the sales and rental markets in northwestern tanzania a qualitative analysis reveals that female heads do engage with the market although they find it most difficult to mobilize the necessary capital to participate as buyers or renters women also seem to face unique restrictions on selling land regression results show that female heads use the market to augment a small land endowment left from their marriage and this is particularly true for divorced or separated women however female headed households remain somewhat marginalized in terms of market participation our study shows that female heads in tanzania are far from sidelined in the land market though the rules of market engagement are decidedly nuanced

women as agents of change female income and mobility in india economic globalization will give many women in developing countries access to steady and relatively remunerative employment for the first time potentially shifting bargaining power within their households and changing the choices that are made for their children this paper exploits a unique setting a group of tea plantations in south india where women are employed in permanent wage labor and where incomes do not vary by caste to anticipate the impact of globalization on mobility across social groups in the future the main result of the paper is that a relative increase in female income weakens the family s ties to the ancestral community and the traditional economy but these mobility enhancing effects are obtained for certain historically disadvantaged castes alone although the paper provides a context specific explanation for why the women from these castes emerge as agents of change the first general implication of the analysis is that the incentive and the ability of women to use their earnings to influence household decisions depends importantly on their social background the second implication is that historically disadvantaged groups may in fact be especially responsive to new opportunities precisely because they have fewer ties to the traditional economy to hold them back

tax competition tax exporting and higher government choice of tax instruments for local governments abstract this paper presents a theoretical model with tax exporting due to external ownership of a fraction of the land in each local jurisdiction there are n local jurisdictions in a metropolitan area n 1 and many metropolitan areas in a world economy the paper examines the usage of business property taxes and source based wage taxes by local jurisdictions first in the presence of and then in the absence of residence based lump sum taxes and how this depends on and n the paper then examines the choice of a world national or state government as to whether to allow local metropolitan or sub metropolitan governments to use business property taxes wage taxes or both assuming that the local governments choose the actual tax rates

eu agri environmental programs and the restaurant table effect the share of agricultural area enrolled in eu agri environmental programs varies significantly between eu member states these national differences are explained based on a model that reflects both that these programs internalize externalities and the political economy we identify six factors that affect the extent to which agri environmental programs are implemented environmental benefits opportunity costs of participation budgetary pressure the share of program expenditures financed by the eu the political weight attributed to farmers at the national and the political influence of each country at the eu level in addition we demonstrate that if the policy decision making process is noncooperative at the eu level countries that contribute less to the eu budget will ceteris paribus implement more programs using data of four years and feasible generalized least square methods we are able to confirm our theoretical results including a noncooperative behavior of eu member states

consumption smoothing migration and marriage evidence from rural india a significant proportion of migration in low income countries particularly in rural areas is composed of moves by women for the purpose of marriage we seek to explain these mobility patterns by examining marital arrangements among indian households in particular we hypothesize that the marriage of daughters to locationally distant dispersed yet kinship related households is a manifestation of implicit interhousehold contractual arrangements aimed at mitigating income risks and facilitating consumption smoothing in an environment characterized by information costs and spatially covariant risks analysis of longitudinal south indian village data lends support to the hypothesis marriage cum migration contributes significantly to a reduction in the variability of household food consumption farm households afflicted with more variable profits tend to engage in longer distance marriage cum migration the hypothesized and observed marriage cum migration patterns are in dissonance with standard models of marriage or migration that are concerned primarily with search costs and static income gains

a three input model of the spatial effects of a central city wage tax abstract this paper considers the short run and long run spatial effects on wages employment and business capital as functions of location of a localized increase in wage tax rates the model is most applicable to a central city that has a higher wage tax rate than the surrounding suburbs the inclusion of land as a third input in production significantly reduces the long run effects of a central city wage tax on employment near the central city boundary as compared with a model in which labor and capital are the only two inputs the short run effects are significantly less than the long run effects

provision of a pure local public good in a spatial model with many jurisdictions abstract this paper examines the provision of a pure local public good in jurisdictions that are spaced evenly along an infinite line each jurisdiction either supplies the local public good or else its residents travel to another jurisdiction to consume the local public good the equilibrium spacing between jurisdictions which supply the local public good which can be uneven varying between a minimum spacing and a maximum spacing for given exogenous parameters can be greater than equal to or less than the socially optimal spacing

reprint of migration and development research is moving far beyond remittances summary research on migration and development has recently changed in two ways first it has grown sharply in volume emerging as a proper subfield second while it once embraced principally rural urban migration and international remittances migration and development research has broadened to consider a range of international development processes these include human capital investment global diaspora networks circular or temporary migration and the transfer of technology and cultural norms for this special issue we present a selection of frontier migration and development research that instantiates these trends