bequests gifts and social security this paper analyses the very long run or stationary state impact of an unfunded social security system we use an overlapping generations model framework a key feature is that while parents care about their children and can leave non negative bequests to them children also care about their parents and can make non negative gifts to them we show that the possibility of negative net bequests may make social security less harmful to private wealth accumulation than would otherwise be the case a subsidiary finding is that risk loving behaviour may emerge for some households due to the nature of intergenerational transfers within family lines

the environment and emerging development issues development economics for the most part has failed to recognize renewable environmental resources as economic goods yet the lives of the poor in developing countries are intimately tied to the fate of their local common property resources soil fuel wood water and so on ignoring the loss of common property renewable resources via degradation centralization or privatization in calculations of net national product can mask the destruction of resources available to a country s poor behind the false appearance of a growing national economy this paper describes the difference between the problem of managing local common property resources in developing countries and the problem of protecting the global commons such as the atmosphere and oceans it outlines the calculations that would include the local commons in the national income accounting of capital assets and argues that the interests of those most dependent on the increasingly scarce local commons will be best served by placing control in their hands while the central government provides infrastructure and educational support to control the pollution of the global commons on the other hand the paper sketches a plan in which most countries would have a high incentive to participate a global allocation of limited tradable permits to discharge defined pollutants

bequests and informal long term care evidence from hrs exit interviews informal long term caregiving for frail elderly individuals by their children may induce parents to compensate their children for their help to test this hypothesis i use the exit interview from the health and retirement study hrs my results show that the decision to care for one s parents has a significant positive impact on the incidence and amount of bequests received in addition increasing the amount of care relative to one s siblings significantly increases the proportion of bequest within a family furthermore i find that the positive nexus of caregiving and bequest requires a written will as a contract between the parent and the helping child

soil conservation as an investment in land abstract most studies on the problem of optimal soil conservation have analyzed soil conservation measures as being time limited in their effect this paper extends previous analyses of the soil conservation decision by allowing farmers to make investments in soil conservation structures such as terraces bundles and ditches it shows that the main conclusions arrived at in previous studies remain valid the long term effects of unanticipated permanent changes in prices and discount rates may go either way independent of whether conservation measures are time limited or have lasting effects on the soil base

an economic model of soil conservation by introducing soil depth and soil loss into a simple model of agricultural production this paper seeks to determine when the private path of erosion differs from the socially optimal path considering the depletion of soil only and abstracting from the environmental disruption caused by erosion the paper argues that under most institutional arrangements the social and private rates of erosion are the same the paper concludes that public policy should be directed toward reducing erosion only when it leads to significant pollution externalities

distributional effects of public education in an economy with public pensions we study how the allocation of government expenditures between two major outlays education and pay as you go social security affects human capital distribution in an economy with heterogeneous agents we consider an overlapping generations economy where the government maintains both programs and allocates tax revenues to finance them in our model human capital is one of the factors of production it is itself produced as a combined result of public inputs and private inputs parents decisions to invest time and material resources in education of their children are motivated by altruism heterogeneous in its strength across the population which leads to heterogeneity of incomes we investigate the effect of an increase in public funding for education on the human capital distribution we show that in this framework contrary to some earlier results increased spending on public education may lead to higher inequality our results depend crucially on the interaction of education funding with the social security budget and on the elasticity of substitution in the learning technology

is everything neutral in his well known analysis of the national debt robert barro introduced the notion of a dynastic family this notion has since become a standard research tool particularly in the areas of public finance and macroeconomics in this paper we critique the assumptions on which the dynastic model is predicated and argue that this framework is not a suitable abstraction in contexts in which the objective is to analyze the effects of public policies we reach this conclusion by formally considering a world in which each generation consists of a large number of distinct individuals as opposed to one representative individual we point out that family linkages form complex networks in which each individual may belong to many dynastic groupings the resulting proliferation of linkages between families gives rise to a host of neutrality results including the irrelevance of all public redistributions distortionary taxes and prices since these results are not at all descriptive of the real world we conclude

poverty consumption risk and soil conservation abstract this paper studies the impact of poverty and uninsured consumption risk on incentives to invest in soil conservation a stochastic dynamic model is used to show how consumption risks and costs of investment influence incentives to adopt soil conservation measures on low income farms the model is calibrated using production data from hillside farms in the philippines simulations with the model demonstrate how the value of soil conservation depends on the cost of investing the risk characteristics of the soil conservation method and differences among households in capacity to bear risk model predictions are compared with empirical adoption patterns as described by a probit model and nonparametric kernel regressions of adoption probability empirical findings show how differences in farm size tenure security risk exposure and access to credit help to explain patterns of soil conservation adoption implications for policy are discussed

chinese institutional innovation and privatization from below one of the most distinctive features of china s transition to a market economy has been the role played by rural township and village enterprises tve s in the face of sustained rapid growth of tve s the share of total industrial output produced by state owned enterprises soe s has fallen below half despite steady state sector growth and the absence of significant privatization yet most tve s are collectives a form of publicly owned enterprise this feature seems to make them unique in no other transitional economy has public ownership played such a dynamic role china presents the unusual picture of an economy that has made a transition to a primarily market economy but in which publicly owned enterprises still produce the bulk of manufacturing output surprisingly also the collective ownership form does not have a precise legal definition in china leading to some uncertainty about ultimate property rights martin weitzman and chenggang xu 1993 point out that public ownership with vaguely defined ownership ought to represent a recipe for economic disaster to them tve success suggests instead advantages to the internal institutional form of tve s which are seen to facilitate cooperation through implicit contracts among community members locked into an ongoing relationship victor nee 1992 advances a similar interpretation arguing that long time community residents create forms of income sharing that may be optimal in the absence of an independent legal system an alternative perhaps complementary view is presented here the success of tve s i argue is due largely to a set of external conditions to which tve s are an effective adaptation tve s are responses to one of the most distinctive characteristics of the chinese transition as a whole the early creation of product markets which exist for a prolonged period without well developed markets for factors of production or assets tve s are a flexible and effective but basically ordinary adaptation to this environment

engaging simplifications community based resource management market processes and state agendas in upland southeast asia abstract in the struggle to secure resource rights for rural populations who gain their livelihoods from state claimed lands advocacy agendas highlight community interest in and capacity for sustainable resource management in the uplands of southeast asia the strategic simplifications of community based natural resource management cbnrm advocacy are being translated into legal frameworks and program initiatives which make rights conditional upon particular forms of social organization and livelihood as well as conservation outcomes when set in the context of agricultural intensification among both indigenous and migrant populations and the desire of many upland dwellers to claim the benefits of a fuller citizenship cbnrm offers a problematic basis for justice

growth effects of an unfunded social security system when there is altruism and human capital abstract we investigate the relationship between growth and an unfunded social security system in an overlapping generations model with joy of giving altruism where endogenous growth is driven by the accumulation of human capital we show that an unfunded social security system financed with a tax on labor income can increase growth

tenants landlords and soil conservation it has long been argued that tenants tend to overexploit land but this conventional wisdom has been derived largely without consideration of landlords actions we examine what happens when landlords can invest in durable conservation measures in addition to choosing rental contract terms when tenants are risk neutral landlords overinvest in conservation under cash rental contracts but can achieve first best levels of output and protection against land degradation when conservation investment is combined with share rental when tenants are risk averse the first best is unattainable in this case conservation investment combined with share rental results in output levels below the first best while equilibrium conservation investment may be greater or less than the first best these results suggest that contract form and conservation investments are likely made simultaneously so that econometric studies of conservation practice adoption that treat rental status as exogenous are likely subject to bias

tenure security human capital and soil conservation in an overlapping generation rural economy we develop an overlapping generation model of rural agricultural households to examine whether tenure security and subsistence needs influence the choice between unexploited topsoil and investment in children s human capital as the mode of transfer of wealth a unique dataset from bangladesh finds that tenure security is associated with greater topsoil conservation and lower human capital investment therefore there exists a tradeoff between these two modes of transfer we suggest that increased public expenditure on schooling which substitutes private expenditure may lower the pressure on land and soil resources

on the past and future of china s township and village owned enterprises abstract this paper proposes an explanation of the historical success of industrial enterprises owned by township and village governments in china i argue that conditions peculiar to china s prereform economy fostered the growth of a skilled workforce and high savings created unusual market niches and encouraged entrepreneurial undertakings by local political elites especially in areas adjacent to certain cities i then discuss the allocative and technical efficiency of local public enterprises in china from a theoretical standpoint and review some relevant econometric findings finally i consider proposals for reform of town and village enterprise tve ownership and discuss the possible advantages of cooperative forms

ricardian equivalence revisited deficits gifts and bequests barro 1974 shows that operative altruistic transfer motives are key for ricardian equivalence to hold this paper evaluates the importance of this mechanism quantitatively by studying deficit financed tax cut experiments i use a heterogeneous agents overlapping generations economy with endogenously operative transfer motives to capture the fact that empirically transfers occur in some but not in all families altruism is calibrated to match aggregate transfer statistics i find that the response of aggregate consumption to a tax cut is in the ballpark of a standard overlapping generations economy that is an economy without altruistic family links welfare implications of this economy however move closer to a dynastic economy

property rights and efficiency in olg models with endogenous fertility is there an economic rationale for pronatalist policies we propose and analyze a particular market failure that leads to inefficiently low fertility in equilibrium the friction is caused by the lack of ownership of children if parents have no claim on their children s income the private benefit from producing a child can be smaller than the social benefit we analyze an overlapping generations model with fertility choice and parental altruism ownership is modeled as a minimum constraint on transfers from parents to children using the efficiency concepts proposed in golosov jones and tertilt 2007 we find that whenever the transfer floor is binding fertility choices are inefficient second we show that the usual conditions for efficiency are not sufficient in this context third in contrast to settings with exogenous fertility a payg social security system cannot be used to implement efficient allocations to achieve an efficient outcome government transfers need to be tied to fertility choice

estate taxes consumption externalities and altruism we study how the introduction of consumption externalities affects the efficiency of the dynamic equilibrium in an economy displaying dynastic altruism when the bequest motive is inoperative consumption externalities affect the intertemporal margin between young and old consumption and thus modify the intertemporal path of consumption and capital the optimal tax policy that solves this intertemporal inefficiency consists of a tax on capital income and a pay as yougo social security system the later solves the overaccumulation of capital due to the inoperativeness of the bequest motive and the former solves the inefficient allocation of consumption due to consumption externalities when the bequest motive is operative consumption externalities only cause an intratemporal inefficiency that affects the allocation of consumption between the generations living in the same period but do not affect the optimality of the capital stock level this suboptimal allocation of consumption implies in turn that the path of bequest is also suboptimal the optimal tax policy in this case consists of an estate tax and a capital income tax the estate tax corrects the intratemporal inefficiency but generates an intertemporal inefficiency which is corrected by means of an appropriate capital income tax

dynamic efficiency in the gifts economy abstract in the standard analysis of overlapping generations economies with gifts from children to parents each generation takes the actions of other generations as given the resulting equilibrium is dynamically inefficient in reality however parents realize that children will respond to higher parental saving by reducing gifts for a broad class of gift economies this implicit tax on saving pushes the equilibrium to dynamic efficiency this result reestablishes the potential relevance of the gift model to the us economy renders moot an important part of the ricardian equivalence debate and provides a motivation for a type of social security system

a theory of market transition from redistribution to markets in state socialism state socialist redistributive economies are characterized by the allocation and distribution of goods through central planning this paper develops a theory of market transition which argues that in reforming socialist economies the transition from redistributive to market coordination shifts sources of power and privilege to favor direct producers relative to redistributors the shit improves incentives for direct producers stimulates the growth of private markets and provides to entrepreneurs an alternative path for socioeconomic mobility a set of hypotheses test the market transition theory with householdand village level data

from privatization to deindustrialization implications of chinese rural industry and the ownership debate revisited summary this paper examines the evolution of chinese rural industry since the rural reform in the late 1970s and revisits the debate on the role of ownership based on a case study of w county in southern jiangsu province as well as drawing on national data the author shows that the community based market dynamic had been a key factor in the expansion of rural enterprises and that its weakening in recent years has led to the closing of village enterprises and deindustrialization of the countryside large scale land expropriation sponsored by local government is the principal factor responsible for the change

random earnings differences lifetime liquidity constraints and altruistic intergenerational transfers abstract this paper develops a model of private savings behavior in which households care about their descendants cannot have negative net worth and have lifetime earnings depending on random draws from an exogenous distribution of abilities the elements interact very lucky parents are likely to leave large estates constrained children are unusually likely to receive intergenerational transfers the paper proves the existence of a stationary cross sectional distribution of wealth endogenously determines where liquidity constraints will bind and shows that the long term interest rate must be such that ricardian neutrality fails its last section generates several illustrative numerical simulations

how to reform a planned economy lessons from china the countries of eastern europe and the former soviet union have been flooded with advice from the west on how to liberalize their planned econo mies this advice is unfortunately offered in an empirical vacuum no one knows how these econo mies will react to the proposed liberalization meas ures there exists however a neglected source of information china offers a long time series of data over a decade s worth on the effects of reforms on a planned economy china s reforms were gradual but their cumulative effect has been large and they have been remarkably successful china s experiments provide some practical les sons on what kinds of reforms can work elsewhere the dominant school of thought among economists favours the big bang policy of reforming quickly and according to a comprehensive plan partial reforms in this view are useless they will be negated by the remnants of the planning system the proponents of big bang reform have been influential with poland czechoslovakia and rus sia announcing plans for a rapid transition to capi talism

the decline of township and village enterprises in china s economic transition summary a paradoxical phenomenon in china s transitional economy is that markets developed under predominant public ownership which nevertheless has declined with the development of markets previous studies reveal that initial political and economic conditions of reform and fiscal decentralization gave rise to local public enterprises leading role in early marketization this paper explains the subsequent fall of such a role building and expanding on recent studies of privatization we argue that market development and competition have constrained the abilities of local public enterprises to address revenue and employment imperatives whereas local governments sales oriented growth strategies have exacerbated governance problems panel data are analyzed to provide provisional test of pertinent hypotheses

optimal soil conservation and the reform of agricultural pricing policies abstract soil degradation is often blamed for the poor performance of agriculture in developing economies so too are policies which keep the prices of both outputs and inputs artificially low some economists have argued that pricing reforms will encourage soil depletion others say that such reforms will encourage soil conservation to evaluate these claims this paper develops models of the optimal control of soil erosion and soil fertility it is shown that the effect could go either way but that there are strong reasons for suspecting that pricing reforms will not affect soil conservation dramatically

social security and private saving new time series evidence in an important article in the journal of political economy martin feldstein 1974 estimated that the introduction of the social security system had reduced personal saving by 50 percent with serious consequences for capital formation and output his conclusion was based on a consumer expenditure function estimated with u s time series data and incorporating a social security wealth variable of his construction this paper presents new evidence that casts considerable doubt on feldstein s conclusion first the social security wealth variable used by feldstein was seriously flawed as a result of a computer programming error simply correcting this error substantially changes the estimated effect of social security on saving second the statistical evidence depends upon assumptions which are embedded in the construction of the social security wealth variable assumptions that are not demonstrably preferable and are in some cases inferior to alternative assumptions these assumptions relate first to how individuals form their expectations about the social security benefits they expect to receive and the social security taxes they expect to pay and second to estimates of the number of workers dependent wives and surviving

education social security and growth abstract we study the role of government s allocation of tax revenues between two outlays public investment in education a transfer to the young generation and social security benefits to the older generation in an overlapping generations economy with pay as you go social security and altruistically motivated transfers from parents to children we analyze how the allocation of the tax revenues between the two outlays affects growth and welfare in competitive equilibria a we obtain comparative dynamics results for nonstationary equilibria subject to a change in the allocation profile b for stationary equilibria we show that for a given allocation profile of the tax revenues educational subsidies can either increase the growth rate or decrease it depending on the parameters of the model preferences production function and the tax rate c if government seeks to allocate funds in a way that maximizes the growth rate we demonstrate that under some plausible conditions it is not optimal to maintain pay as you go social security however if parents preferences combine strong concern for their retirement with significant degree of altruism towards their children then pay as you go social security system does enhance growth and welfare

joint liability lending and the rise and fall of china s township and village enterprises abstract we present a new explanation for the rise and fall of collectively owned enterprises based on the changing lending preferences of banks until the mid 1990s bank loans to collective firms exhibited the key features of joint liability lending supported by the sanctioning ability of local government leaders however subsequent changes in collateral firm performance interest rates and financial competition led banks to prefer individual lending to private firms this explanation is supported by empirical analysis of the determinants of bank lending preferences the involvement of township leaders in lending and the ability of firms to obtain loans

kinship networks and entrepreneurs in china s transitional economy1 this research draws insights from two theoretical traditions one is new institutionalism which emphasizes the role of institutions both formal and informal in economic growth the other is social network analysis which highlights the role of interpersonal relations in producing and enforcing informal norms integrating these two approaches yields the thesis that social networks affect economic growth via enforcing informal institutions the article focuses on the economic payoff of kinship networks in the context of china s rural industrialization to argue that kin solidarity and kin trust played an important role in protecting the property rights of private entrepreneurs and reducing transaction costs during the early stages of market reform when formal property rights laws were ineffective and market institutions underdeveloped data from 366 villages show that the strength of kinship networks has large positive effects on the count and workforce size of private rural enterprises and insignificant

two tier land tenure system and sustained economic growth in post 1978 rural china abstract the two tier land tenure system has been widely blamed for the problems in land allocation and in land specific investment observed in the postreform rural china greater privatization of property rights in land has been proposed to enable productive farmers to acquire more land to promote land circulation to improve farmers access to credit and to encourage farm investment it is argued here that in the presence of multiple market distortions land privatization is unlikely to provide a solution to the agricultural problems rather an approach which refines the existing framework of the two tier ownership system offers more promise

chinese industrial reform accomplishments prospects and implications why has china grown so fast when conditions thought to be necessary for growth were absent nowhere is this dissonance greater than in china s industrial sector which has recorded big gains in output employment and exports in the absence of privatization effective bankruptcy legislation and other policy innovations widely seen as prerequisites for successful reform this essay reviews the accomplishments of chinese industry since the start of reform in 1978 focusing on the internal dynamics of the development process considers the future of partial reform and discusses the implications of china s industrial reform experience

altruism in networks we provide the first analysis of altruism in networks agents are embedded in a fixed network and care about the well being of their network neighbors depending on incomes they may provide financial support to their poorer friends we study the nash equilibria of the resulting game of transfers we show that equilibria maximize a concave potential function we establish existence uniqueness of equilibrium consumption and generic uniqueness of equilibrium transfers we characterize the geometry of the network of transfers and highlight the key role played by transfer intermediaries we then study comparative statics a positive income shock to an individual benefits all for small changes in incomes agents in a component of the network of transfers act as if they were organized in an income pooling community a decrease in income inequality or expansion of the altruism network may increase consumption inequality

altruism the samaritan s dilemma and government transfer policy this paper shows that altruism provides an efficiency rationale for public provision of insurance to the poor the framework is one in which there are rich altruists and risk averse poor who face some possibility of loss the government represents the rich and makes transfers on their behalf with unconditional transfers the poor may forgo insurance and rely on private charity to bail them out in the event of loss this reliance on private charity has adverse efficiency effects these may be avoided if the government makes in kind transfers of insurance copyright 1995 by american economic association

on the economics of the optimal fallow cultivation cycle abstract this paper considers the so called fallow cultivation problem in traditional agriculture the paper specifies the problem and determines the optimal duration of the fallow cultivation cycle we study and deduce results on the impact of the switching costs and the output price on this cycle finally we discuss the relation between soil fertility and the output price the fallow cultivation problem is an important economic problem since traditional farming provides the food in most low income countries however it is also worth studying since it is an interesting specimen case in a class of dynamic models in which sensible controls split process variables in distinctive phases

the impact of regional and institutional factors on labor productive performance evidence from the township and village enterprise sector in china this paper investigates the determinants of township and village enterprise tve labour productivity in china examining behaviour at both the national and regional levels the results suggest that human capital the real wage level foreign intensity export intensity capital investment and firm size are the most important factors affecting labour productivity at the national level but their relative importance varies significantly between the regions the results also indicate that government privatization reforms had a major impact on labour productivity in the tve sector across the regions

equilibrium existence in an overlapping generations model with altruistic preferences abstract we prove the existence of a competitive equilibrium in an overlapping generations model with altruistic preferences and nonnegative bequests in equilibrium some sequences of agents of successive generations may be continually linked by positive bequests and act as infinitely lived agents other sequences of agents may not be so linked and therefore behave as sequences of finite lived agents thus this paper adds to the literature on competitive equilibrium in dynamic models by endogenising the mix of finite and infinitely lived agents we also discuss optimality and provide some examples which exhibit interesting equilibria

parental altruism and inter vivos transfers theory and evidence this paper uses psid data on the extended family to test whether inter vivos transfers from parents to children are motivated by altruism specifically the paper tests whether an increase by one dollar in the income of parents actively making transfers to a child coupled with a one dollar reduction in that child s income results in the parents increasing their transfer to the child by one dollar this restriction on parental and child transfer income derivatives is derived for the standard altruism model augmented to include uncertainty and liquidity constraints these additional elements pin down the timing of inter vivos transfers the method used to estimate income transfer derivatives takes into account unobserved heterogeneity across families in the degree of altruism the findings strongly reject the altruism hypothesis redistributing one dollar from a recipient child to donor parents leads to less than a 13 cent increase in the parents transfer to the child far less than the one dollar increas

local governments as industrial firms an organizational analysis of china s transitional economy despite widespread skepticism about government ownership in transitional economies china s rapid industrial growth has been led by public enterprises kornai s theory of soft budbet constraints born of the failure of earlier hungarian reforms fosters such skepticism but it assumes as fixed organizational characteristics that in fact vary widely across government jurisdictions local governments with smaller industrial bases have clearer financial incentives and constraints fewer nonfinancial interests in enterprises and a greater capacity to monitor them in china s vast public sector the fastest growth in output and productivity has occurred where government ownership rights are clearest and most easily enforced which enables officials to manage public industry as a diversified market oriented firm

aspirations habit formation and bequest motive we analyze how the presence of endogenous preferences affects the altruistic bequest motive from parents to children we will show that the existence of habits raises the threshold value of the intergenerational discount factor above which altruistic bequests are positive while aspiration formation could push this value down therefore the dynamic inefficiency of the economy with no altruism is not sufficient to prevent the bequest motive from being operative under aspiration formation we also discuss the implications of public debt when the bequest motive is inoperative and preferences exhibit habit and aspiration formation

a model of shifting cultivation can soil conservation reduce deforestation shifting cultivators manage soil not only by adjusting soil use on already cleared lands as in continuous cultivation but also by clearing forests to obtain new fertile soils this study examines the crucial link between on farm soil conservation and deforestation in shifting cultivation by modeling forest clearing as an investment in soil for a private farmer more generally by doing so the study attempts to integrate deforestation and soil conservation models which have been separately developed in the literature our policy goal is to arrest tropical deforestation as destruction of global commons caused by land degradation in shifting cultivation while improving the well being of poor shifting cultivators our integrated approach enables joint policy analyses of deforestation and land degradation three welfare enhancing policies are considered the first is agricultural and nonagricultural subsidies affecting farm and nonfarm income opportunities the second is fiscal and tenure policies affecting discount rates our question is whether the link between forest clearing and soil fertility alters the outcomes of these two standard macroeconomic policies commonly found in the literature the third policy or program is various soil conservation measures affecting soil regeneration and erosivity on already cleared lands this article examines a very important question which has received little attention in previous theoretical works can soil conservation reduce deforestation this study confirms anti deforestation effects of the promotion of nonfarming activities a common and often emphasized finding in previous works among shifting cultivators more importantly it also demonstrates that improving various soil conservation measures not only discourages forest clearing among shifting cultivators but also tends to have greater effects on forest protection than promoting nonfarming activities contrarily agricultural price subsidy or technological progress gives rise to the opposite outcome and lowering the farmer s discount rate or improving tenure security encourages him her to clear more forests just to accumulate soil

economic development on a finite planet with stochastic soil degradation abstract world economic development is associated with growing food consumption agricultural land however suffers from over exploitation and is subject to environmental shocks which are projected to become more severe due to climate change we present a stochastic model of a dynamic economy where soil is an essential input and natural disasters are sizeable multiple and random expansion of economic activities raises effective soil units but contributes to an aggregate loss of soil protective ecosystem services which exacerbates soil degradation at the time of a shock we provide closed form analytical solutions and show that optimal development is characterized by a constant growth rate of stocks and consumption until an environmental shock arrives causing all variables to jump downwards optimal soil management consists of spending a constant fraction of output on preservation measures which is an increasing function of the shocks hazard rate degradation intensity of agricultural practices and the damage intensity of environmental impact we derive the optimal propensity to save and discuss the impact of human pressure and risk exposure on soil and output we also discuss quantitative impacts of climate change on optimal soil management

a note on soil depth failing markets and agricultural pricing comment abstract bulte and van soest bulte e van soest d 1999 a note on soil depth failing markets and agricultural pricing journal of development economics 58 245 254 argue that higher agricultural output prices result in greater soil conservation when labor markets function well but have ambiguous effects when labor markets are absent the latter result is not attributable to labor market failure but rather occurs whenever labor supply is less than perfectly elastic consistent with the more general model presented here empirical evidence from a number of developing countries suggests that well functioning labor markets are associated with decreases in investment in soils

bequest motives a comparison of sweden and the united states this paper reviews four well known theoretical models of private bequest behavior notes their differing implications for public policy and discusses a way of empirically dis criminating among them then it implements the test with micro data from sweden lls and the u s psid the so called altruistic or dynastic model which among the four models has perhaps the most wide ranging implications for policy receives some support the sign pattern is as the model predicts while the magnitude is much smaller than the altruistic theory implies there is evidence of a potential complication due to a dependence of children s education on parents financial status in the case of the u s 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

social security intergenerational transfers and endogenous growth in this paper the effects of social security in a simple model of endogenous growth with alternative motives of having children are analyzed it shows how the effects of social security depend on the size of the social security tax the motive to have children and the pattern of intergenerational transfers the pattern of intergenerational transfers itself however is shown to change with the social security tax rate when the social security tax is not too high social security increases per capita income growth and tends to enhance welfare

public versus private ownership of firms evidence from rural china why are many of china s successful rural enterprises publically owned by local communities using a set of provincial data we find that the share of community public firms township village enterprises or tves relative to private enterprises is higher where the central government s influence is greater the community government s power is stronger and the level of market development is lower we also find that tves help achieve the community government s goals of increasing government revenue rural nonfarm employment and rural income however tves do not increase rural income given the levels of nonfarm employment and local public goods provision indicating possible inefficiency as compared with private enterprises