information stochastic dominance and bidding the case of treasury auctions we explore the link between informativeness of signals stochastic dominance and equilibrium bids in a multi unit auction with risk averse bidders we show that for a particular class of signal distributions informativeness is related to conditional first order stochastic dominance so that a higher degree of informativeness in the signal fundamental distribution induces higher bids and therefore higher revenues our framework is relevant for discussing total revenues and informativeness in us treasury auctions

how efficient is maize production among smallholder farmers in zimbabwe a comparison of semiparametric and parametric frontier efficiency analyses the controversial fast track land reform programme in zimbabwe that redistributes commercially owned farmland to smallholder households has caused concerns about the efficiency of agricultural prod

the economic impact of agricultural extension a review the history of economic development shows that few countries have achieved sustained economic growth without first or simultaneously developing their agricultural sector in most developing countries agriculture is the most important economic activity providing income employment and foreign exchange without an efficient agricultural sector a country is severely constrained in its ability to feed itself or import foreign products for domestic consumption and development rapid technological advances in agriculture have occurred since world war ii these advances have induced great changes in agricultural production and also highlighted the importance of a rapid and efficient transfer of advanced knowledge to the farmer when farmers become aware of the availability of new technology they may have inaccurate perceptions of the related costs and benefits as information availability may be limited as farmers decisions are based on their perceptions their resource allocation and technology choice will deviate from the social optimum if perceptions do not coincide with the correct attributes of the technology both society and the farmers as individuals would gain from improved information and theoretically there should exist a market for information however information on improved agricultural technology is often a public good because the provider of the information cannot exclude other potential users from free access to information provided to one user and the value of the information is not directly affected by the number of users while many instances of market activities in various aspects of agricultural information are observed e g specialized information on pest man

the relationship of wages to the value of labour power in marx s labour market having explicitly rejected malthus law of population marx asserted in his early writings that it was competition that would keep wages fluctuating the value of labor power even though he did not consider the production of labor power to be a capitalist process this paper notes the inconsistency in this approach and then proposes that implicit in marx s mature works there is a consistent mechanism through which wages gravitate toward the value of labor power this uses both the flexible historical and moral element of the value of labor power and the reserve army hypothesis this combination explains why wages follow a relatively even path over time a model of the labor market is developed which appears to be consistent with marx s mature writing copyright 1991 by oxford university press

economic efficiency and supply response of women as farm managers comparative evidence from western kenya summary this paper assessed the relative economic efficiency and output supply and input demand responses of women farmers in western kenya the results showed that women are as technically and allocatively efficient as men however neither men nor women have absolute allocative efficiency women farmers are equally responsive to price incentives in terms of output supply and input demand while education and extension contact have significant effects on overall maize supply and input demand only extension contact has significant effects among women farmers the paper discusses a number of significant results and concludes with implications for policy

technical efficiency and productivity of maize producers in eastern ethiopia a study of farmers within and outside the sasakawa global 2000 project abstract this paper investigates the technical efficiency of two samples of maize producers in eastern ethiopia one involving farmers within the sasakawa global 2000 project and the other involving farmers outside this program the study uses stochastic frontier production functions in which the technical inefficiency effects are assumed to be functions of the age and education of the farmers together with the time spent by extension advisers in assisting farmers in their agricultural production operations for the cross sectional data obtained for the 1995 96 agricultural year cobb douglas stochastic frontiers are found to be adequate representations of the data given the specifications of the translog stochastic frontiers for farmers within and outside the project the empirical results indicate that farmers within the sg 2000 project are more technically efficient than farmers outside the project relative to their respective technologies the mean frontier output of maize for farmers within the sg 2000 project is significantly greater than that for the farmers outside the project

monetary analysis the equilibrium method and keynes s general theory compared with the work of his contemporaries keynes s general theory represented a radical change in theoretical method from sequence analysis to the method of equilibrium the nature of this change is discussed together with its implications for the substance of keynes s message and for the subsequent development of macroeconomics

rational expectations information acquisition and competitive bidding most rational expectations market equilibrium models are not models of price formation and naive mechanisms leading to such equilibria can be severely manipulable in this paper a bidding model is developed which has the market like features that bidders act as price takers and that prices convey information higher equilibrium prices convey more favorable information about the quality of the objects being sold than do lower prices bidders can benefit from trading only if they have a transactions motive or if they have access to inside information apart from exceptional cases prices are not fully revealing a two stage model is developed in which bidders may acquire information at a cost before bidding and for which the equilibrium price is fully revealing resolving a well known paradox

adam smith on markets competition and violations of natural liberty according to adam smith markets and trade are in principle good things provided there is competition and a regulatory framework that prevents ruthless selfishness greed and rapacity from leading to socially harmful outcomes but competition and market regulations are always in danger of being undermined and circumnavigated giving way to monopolies that are very comfortable and highly profitable to monopolists and may spell great trouble for many people in smith s view political economy as an important and perhaps even the most important part of a kind of master political science encompassing the science of the legislator has the task to fight superstition and false beliefs in matters of economic policy to debunk opinions that present individual interests as promoting the general good and to propose changing regulatory frameworks for markets and institutions that help to ward off threats to the security of society as a whole and provide incentives such that self seeking behaviour has also socially beneficial effects the paper shows that the ideas of adam smith still may resonate and illuminate the problems of today and the theories that try to tackle them

large common value auctions with risk averse bidders abstract we analyze large symmetric auctions with conditionally i i d common values and risk averse bidders our main result characterizes the asymptotic equilibrium price distribution for the first and second price auctions as an implication we show that with constant absolute risk aversion cara the second price auction raises significantly more revenue than the first price auction while this ranking seems robust in numerical analysis also outside the cara specification we show by counterexamples that the result does not generalize to all risk averse utility functions

the impact of agricultural extension on farm production in resettlement areas of zimbabwe in this paper we revisit the contested issue of the impact of agricultural extension on farm production we exploit two features of the data available to us its longitudinal nature and explicit measures of farmer ability we find that after controlling for innate productivity characteristics and farmer ability either using household fixed effects estimation or by including a measure of farmer ability and village fixed effects access to agricultural extension services defined as receiving one or two visits per agricultural year raises the value of crop production by about 15 per cent this parameter estimate is statistically significant however we also find variability in these parameter estimates across individual crop years with the impact being markedly different in drought and non drought years collectively these results suggest that although access to farm level extension visits does increase productivity even after controlling for innate productivity characteristics and farmer ability results from single year cross sectional studies should be treated with caution

factors affecting the technical efficiency among smallholder farmers in the slash and burn agriculture zone of cameroon abstract this paper estimates technical efficiency among small holder farmers in the slash and burn agriculture zone of cameroon and identifies sources of inefficiency using detailed survey data obtained from 450 farmers over 15 villages throughout 2001 2002 growing season we find that the mean levels of technical efficiency are 77 73 and 75 respectively for groundnut monocrop maize monocrop and maize groundnut farming systems suggesting existence of substantial gains in output and or decreases in cost with available technology and resources the efficiency differences are explained significantly by credit soil fertility social capital distance of the plot from the access road and extension services policy recommendations are drawn from these findings

delay and information aggregation in stopping games with private information abstract we consider equilibrium timing decisions in a model with a large number of players and informational externalities the players have private information about a common payoff parameter that determines the optimal time to invest they learn from each other in real time by observing past investment decisions we develop new methods of analysis for such large games and we give a full characterization of symmetric equilibria we show that the equilibrium statistical inferences are based on an exponential learning model although the beliefs converge to truth learning takes place too late ex ante welfare is strictly between that without observational learning and that with full information

the neo ricardians focuses on the neoclassical theory of economics in great britain calculation for the standard commodity assumptions of piedro sraffa on the cycle of production functions of the rate of return ebsco

causality and interdependence in pasinetti s works and in the modern classical approach the formal representation of economic theories normally takes the form of a model that is a system of equations which connect the endogenous variables with the values of the parameters which are taken as given sometimes it is possible to identify one or more equations which are able to determine a subset of endogenous variables priorly and independently of the other equations and of the value taken by the remaining variables of the system the first group of equations and variables are thus said to determine causally the remaining variables in pasinetti s works this notion of causality has often been emphasized as a formal property having the burden to convey some deep economic meaning in this work we will go through those pasinetti s works where this notion of causality plays a central role with the purpose to contextualize it within the econometric debate of the sixties to enucleate its economic meaning and to show its connections with other fields of the modern classical approach

the ricardo debates hollander and garegnani on natural price and output determination samuel hollander and pierangelo garegnani have debated the appropriate interpretation of david ricardo since 1973 without substantive agreement on at least one issue the interdependence of prices and output levels the debate has stalled because textual exegesis cannot solve a logical problem this paper demonstrates that such interdependence exists unless one makes one of two restrictive and un ricardian assumptions either output levels must be insensitive to wage rate changes or all industries must be subject to constant costs

the dynamics of competition a restoration of the classical analysis the main purpose of this article is to show that it is possible to construct a model of competition based on the classical perspective smith ricardo and marx an analysis of the work of the classics is presented and their views of the workings of competition is contrasted with neoclassical and keynesian approaches a simple model with two commodities is constructed in which the stability of the classical long term equilibrium is shown under certain conditions this first model is developed to include the treatments of gravitation rationing deficiency in demand choice of the technology and three commodities copyright 1987 by oxford university press

on the classical theory of competition this paper identifies some important theoretical issues remaining unresolved in the wake of piero sraffa s seminal work a central problem concerns the process of gravitation towards uniform profit rates and production prices stringent requirements for convergence and stability are discussed the issue of path dependence being regar ded as most basic other issues concern inter and intraindustry mechanisms of competition choice of technique and technical change and mechanisms of wage profit rate determination prospects for advancing a theory of differentiated profit rates that would be consistent with classical theory are examined against this background it is suggested that sraffa s contribution encompasses two theoretically distinct research programs copyright 1988 by oxford university press

on the keynesian notion of equilibrium and dynamics harrod had always maintained that keynes s treatise was much more amenable for dynamic analysis than the general theory however in much of the later work on keynesian dynamics the general theory became the foundation in this paper i argue that recent developments in neoclassical general equilibrium theory have the effect of undermining the conventional keynesian conception of dynamics based on the general theory and recasting keynes as a coarse precursor of modern general equilibrium analysis opposing this renewed orthodox reinterpretation of keynes might require a reconsideration of the treatise as the foundation for an alternative keynesian dynamics 1996 academic press limited