adoption of new tobacco varieties in greece impacts of empirical findings on policy design abstract greece is a major international tobacco producer flue cured tobacco varieties constituted the major alternative crop to greek farmers growing certain oriental tobacco varieties diffusion of flue cured tobacco was rapid due to its high yields and the depressed market for certain oriental tobacco varieties currently the common organisation of the tobacco market is undergoing substantial changes and the farmers response will be a vital factor of success a portfolio selection model reveals that the major factors influencing the adoption decision of tobacco growers are the size of the farm measured in annual work units the farm s proximity to urban centres the farm s diversification and the farmer s age the number of contacts with institutions is surprisingly inversely related to adoption future tobacco policies impinging on factors influencing decisions to adopt new varieties or production practices may be more cost effective

is there a penalty for registered women is there a premium for registered men evidence from a sample of transsexual workers abstract in this paper we study the earnings of transsexual workers using a large administrative sample drawn from the dutch labor force in particular we make two comparisons first we compare transsexual workers to other women and men and find that they earn more than women and less than men second we compare transsexual workers before and after their administrative gender transition and find that male to female transsexual workers earn less as registered women and female to male transsexual workers earn as much if not marginally more as registered men these patterns hold for annual and hourly earnings and do not change when we account for individual fixed effects together our results are consistent with a labor market model in which transsexual workers are discriminated against as a registered female as well as a lgbt worker

sexual orientation and labour supply this is the first study of the effects of sexual orientation on labour supply after discussing various reasons to expect that labour supply could differ by sexual orientation the 2001 current population survey is used to test for differences in both labour supply and labour market status part time full time and not employed it is found that gay men supply less labour than married and unmarried heterosexual men with regard to women it is found that lesbians supply more labour and are more likely to be employed full time than either married or unmarried heterosexual women extensive controls are used and links to the discrimination literature are found

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

can fao s measure of chronic undernourishment be strengthened abstract in its sixth world food survey released at the 1996 world food summit the food and agriculture organization of the united nations fao reported that 841 million people in developing countries are chronically undernourished this number and its country and regional level disaggregations have proved tremendously useful to countless development aid agencies and researchers in the context of a recent wave of new nationally representative household food consumption and expenditure surveys this paper examines the estimation methodology underlying the food insecurity measure which relies on national aggregate measures of food availability and distribution the paper finds that the measure largely reflects national food availabilities and does not adequately capture people s ability to gain access to food the ultimate key to food security the implications for the indicator s use by policy makers in geographical targeting and tracking changes in food insecurity over time are drawn out the paper concludes by arguing that the time has come to review the potential for employing the new household survey data along with new methods to strengthen the empirical foundations of fao s measure

modeling and forecasting tourism demand for arrivals with stochastic nonstationary seasonality and intervention abstract this paper presents the use of time series sarima and marima with interventions in forecasting tourism demand using ten arrival series for hong kong augmented dickey fuller tests indicated that all the series were seasonal nonstationary significant interventions such as relaxation of the issuance of out bound visitors visas the asian financial crisis the handover and the bird flu epidemic were all empirically identified with significant test results and expected signs the forecasts obtained using models that capture stochastic nonstationary seasonality and interventions sarima and marima with intervention analysis are compared with other eight time series models and were found to have the highest accuracy

anti discrimination or reverse discrimination the impact of changing demographics title vii and affirmative action on productivity this study estimates the changes over time in the relative productivities of minorities and females i find no significant evidence that the productivity of minorities or females decreased relative to that of white males as relative minority and female employment increased during the 1960s and 1970s this study also compares the impact of title vii and affirmative action and presents evidence that title vii litigation has played a significant role in increasing black employment this suggests that the employment of minorities and females has not entailed large efficiency costs and that title vii litigation has had some success in fighting racial discrimination the eeoc has sometimes been credited with opening up new pools of labor that corporations somehow contrived to ignore and occasionally with hastening the breakdown of traditional barriers to labor mobility but in the context of the market s endless search for efficiency these anomalies would have been eliminated anyway leaving only the question of whether they were worth the expenditures compelled by law affirmative action is a net cost to the economy and the true dynamic effects the opportunity cost of all this expense and effort the diminution of competition inefficiencies due to the employment and promotion of marginal labor and the consequent demoralization of good workers can only be a matter of conjecture although they are clearly the most important of all senator orrin hatch 1980

labor supply differences between married heterosexual women and partnered lesbians a semi parametric decomposition approach i introduction partnered lesbian women have substantially higher labor supply than married women leppel 2008 tebaldi and elmslie 2006 what might account for the sexual orientation gap in partnered female labor supply everyday conversation and casual empiricism suggests that partnered lesbian women have a stronger attachment to the labor market relative to married women because of their choice to have fewer children than their married counterparts yet this has not been formally analyzed the primary goal of this study is to determine the role observable characteristics particularly children play in explaining the differences in labor supply between partnered lesbian women and married women while empirical research on the determinants of partnered lesbian women s labor supply is limited 1 the determinants of married women s labor supply have been studied in great detail see blundell and macurdy 1999 for a survey of the literature in general married women s labor supply is found to be positively related to own wages negatively related to spouse wages and nonlabor income and negatively related to the presence of children particularly young children in the household 2 importantly the same control variables are not found to have the same effect on married men s labor supply in particular men are not responsive to their wife s earnings and tend to have higher labor supply because of the presence of children these findings are consistent with a traditional division of labor into market and household work which results in married men being viewed as the primary earners and married women being viewed as the secondary earners 3 in particular becker 1981 argues that increasing returns from investments in specific human capital encourages a division of labor in market work and household work among household members the sexual division of labor however arises from intrinsically different comparative advantages of men and women e g in the production of children which would determine the direction of the division of tasks by gender this in turn leads to differences in specific human capital accumulation which reinforces the intrinsically different comparative advantages of men and women even in the face of rising female labor force participation increased divorce rates and lower fertility male and female earnings would not be equalized becker 1985 specifically becker argues that married women with household responsibilities e g child care and food preparation would expend less energy on market work make lower investments in market oriented human capital face lower hourly earnings and choose less demanding jobs occupations than married men even when they work the same number of hours because household responsibilities are time and effort intensive relative to leisure and other nonmarket uses of time by men moreover married women would have lower labor force participation than their husbands because of the lower earnings they would face because of less energy expended on market work and lower investments in market oriented human capital and a full equilibrium could involve complete specialization by married women in household production although married men have increased their time spent on child care production there is strong evidence that married women continue to spend more time on child care production than their spouses bianchi robinson and milkie 2006 drago and lee 2008a 2008b kalenkoski ribar and stratton 2005 2007 lundberg pabilonia and ward batts 2007 in addition the sociology literature argues that married women are more likely to identify themselves in the context of family and market work while married men are more likely to identify themselves in the context of market work alone see e g bielby and bielby 1989 finally there is a large literature that tests the specialization hypothesis bardasi and taylor 2008 daniel 1992 gray 1997 hersch and stratton 2000 kenny 1983 loh 1996 stratton 2002

early career work experience and gender wage differentials we estimate a wage model that includes an array of variables measuring the fraction of time worked during each year of the career this array fully characterizes past employment experience regardless of how sporadic it has been our model yields substantially higher estimated returns to experience and lower returns to tenure than do models that measure experience cumulatively and use the standard quadratic functional form we find that the data reject the standard model but fail to reject our model furthermore we find that 12 of the male female wage gap is due to differences in the timing of work experience

explaining personality pay gaps in the uk using the british household panel survey we estimate the effect on pay of each of the big five personality traits for employed men living in the uk we add to the existing literature by estimating the role of factors such as education and occupation in explaining personality pay gaps by allowing the personality traits to affect wage differently across occupations education levels and other workers characteristics and by investigating personality pay gaps for high and low paid workers we find that openness to experience is the most relevant personality trait in explaining wages followed by neuroticism agreeableness extroversion and conscientiousness openness and extroversion are rewarded while agreeableness and neuroticism are penalized but the openness pay gap is totally explained by differences in worker characteristics particularly education and occupation

the disappearing gay income penalty abstract since 1995 labor economists have reported on the income disparities between individuals who engage in same sex behavior and those that do not many of these papers report a significant wage penalty while others find no effect but few look at the trend over time we find using national health and examination survey nhanes data from 1988 to 2007 that the income gap has reversed over time from a penalty to a premium

the sexual orientation wage gap the role of occupational sorting and human capital using data from the 2000 u s census the authors explore two alternative explanations for the sexual orientation wage gap occupational sorting and human capital differences they find that lesbian women earned more than heterosexual women irrespective of marital status while gay men earned less than their married heterosexual counterparts but more than their cohabitating heterosexual counterparts results of a oaxaca blinder decomposition indicate that the relative wage advantages observed for some groups of lesbians and gay men were mainly owing to greater levels of human capital accumulation particularly education while occupational sorting had little or no influence the relative wage penalties that were observed in other cases however cannot be attributed either to differences in occupational sorting or to human capital an analysis employing a dinardo fortin and lemieux decomposition which allows for variation in the wage gap at different points along the wage distribution broadly confir

small ruminant marketing in southwest nigeria abstract this paper describes the structure of the small ruminant trade in southwest nigeria analyses the factors determining the price of animals and examines the relationship of prices between markets animals imported from the north dominate the sheep and goat trades and supply and prices are highly seasonal however multiple regression shows animal prices to be largely predictable in terms of the characteristics of the animal breed sex and live weight and the market in which it is sold location and month of sale prices are relatively closely correlated between markets over time and price relationships between markets reflect the respective structures of the trade in northern and southern animals price margins between markets reflect the level of traders commission and storage costs in addition to the direct costs of transport the study concludes that there is no evidence for market inefficiency or segregation and that there is considerable market potential for increased local production of sheep and goats in policy terms the market s efficiency implies that government involvement beyond its present limited facilitative role would not be justified

the impact of psychological and human capital on wages historically economists have taken the position that psychological capital is either unobservable or immeasurable thus heretofore little evidence has been available on the contribution of psychological capital to wages using data drawn from two different waves of the national longitudinal survey of youth we offer evidence that psychological capital has both a direct effect via self esteem and an indirect effect through locus of control on an individual s real wage we find a person s wage is more sensitive to changes in self esteem than to comparable alterations in human capital both relative wages and human capital contribute to self esteem

how widespread is undernourishment a critique of measurement methods and new empirical results abstract programmes against hunger require the identification of the undernourished for this purpose a cutoff point is fixed which partitions the population of a region into two groups those with insufficient access to food and those whose food needs are satisfied we describe the standard method used to set the cutoff point we explain how the choice of a unique cutoff point for a group of people may underestimate or overestimate undernourishment when requirements vary between people furthermore we present corrected estimates of the proportion of the undernourished for a large sample of developing countries our results reveal that the estimation error of the standard method can be large

nutritional adaptations of linear programming for planning rural development linear programming can help plan rural development if the income maximization and least cost diet models are integrated within the resource and management limitations of small scale representative farms seven modifications adapt linear programming to subsistence households caveats in this context include risk level of nutritional awareness production scale and result sensitivity through six model formulations for a representative nepalese farm linear programming identifies the most nutritious and profitable production patterns trade offs between nutrition and income and the costs of constraints relating to levels of credit market availability and human capital development

leading indicator tourism forecasts leading indicators have been widely used in general business forecasting situations but only rarely in a tourism context in this study leading indicator transfer function tf models are developed to generate forecasts of international tourism demand from the uk to six major destinations the out of sample forecasting accuracy is compared with the accuracy of forecasts generated by univariate arima and error correction models ecms the inclusion of a causal input within an arima time series framework tf model does not result in an improvement in forecasting performance the time series models outperform the ecm for short term forecasting but the ecm generates more accurate longer term forecasts

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

why development fails the evaluation gap in nepal s subsistence agriculture abstract the rationality of farmer decision making within traditional environments is widely accepted this paper introduces a conceptual model for delineating interactions among income employment and nutrition that explain in large part the living standards in a developing agricultural economy given farmer rationality any development effort requires intervention to remove barriers among these components of the standard of living a case study of nepal shows that promotion of horticultural crops and government investment in infrastructure and education could dramatically improve living standards even under traditional agricultural production technology however the government did not correctly identify barriers to the long run realization of these goals until recently the study concludes that the rationality of government programmes themselves must be subjected to additional scrutiny

empirical age earnings profiles the human capital earnings function in which earnings are expressed as a quadratic in potential experience is probably the most widely accepted empirical specification in economics in spite of its widespread acceptance the human capital earnings function provides a very poor approximation of the true empirical relationship between earnings and experience the standard formulation understates early career earnings growth by about 30 50 and overstates midcareer growth by 20 50 however simple alternative specifications that fit the data are available

an analytical framework for making long term projections of undernourishment a case study for agriculture in mali abstract a framework is developed for projecting the effects of policy technological and environmental change on the prevalence of undernourishment in a country this is done by integrating the food and agriculture organization fao methodology for estimating the proportion of undernourished population in a country into a stochastic economic agricultural sector modeling framework the resultant framework considers the implications of climatic fluctuations resource limitations and degradation demographic pressure market dynamics adoption of improved cultivars and cropland expansion such a unified framework provides a rich accounting of the factors surrounding macro level food supply and undernourishment as well as results on the regional distribution of undernourishment in face of climatic risk and regional characteristics the framework is applied to mali evaluating a number of alternative options for reducing undernourishment we find that the malian agriculture does have a significant potential for reducing undernourishment by 2015

an investigation into sexual orientation discrimination as an explanation for wage differences this study explores the effects of sexual orientation on earnings it is found that ceteris paribus men living with male partners tend to earn less than other men and women living with female partners tend to earn more than other women these earnings differentials tend to vary by region they also vary by education and occupation for men and with the presence of minor children for women in addition the age earnings profiles of women living with female partners tend to be higher flatter and less concave than those of other women

pay differences among the highly paid the male female earnings gap in lawyers salaries this article uses very detailed information on graduates of the university of michigan law school to examine male female pay differences in that population men and women in this population have virtually identical human capital on graduation from law school allowing us to examine carefully the different impact of children and work history on men s and women s careers and earnings taking time from work in order to care for children reduces wages significantly but a rich set of controls including childcare work history school performance and job setting measures still leave one fourth to one third of the earnings gap unexplained

employers discriminatory behavior and the estimation of wage discrimination this paper considers the linkage of empirical estimates of wage discrimination between two groups introduced by oaxaca 1973 to a theoretical model of employers discriminatory behavior it is shown that conditional on different assumptions about employers discriminatory tastes oaxaca s estimators of wage discrimination can be derived that the approach is more generally useful is demonstrated by deriving an alternative estimator of wage discrimination based on the assumption that within each type of labor e g unskilled skilled the utility function capturing employers discriminatory tastes is homogeneous of degree zero with respect to labor inputs from each of the two groups the estimators are compared empirically in an application to male female wage differentials

an empirical analysis of homosexual heterosexual male earnings differentials unmarried and unequal using data from the 1990 u s census pums 5 the authors present the first large scale study of wage differentials between heterosexual and homosexual men the homosexual sample consisting of gay men in unmarried partnered relationships are estimated to have earned 15 6 less than similarly qualified married heterosexual men and 2 4 less than similarly qualified unmarried partnered heterosexual men the authors interpret these two figures as upper and lower bound estimates of the differential between homosexual and heterosexual men the dual comparison enables the authors to disentangle the penalty to being unmarried from other determinants of the wage differential estimated at 14 1 this variable appears to be the main source of the wage gap

biological technology and agricultural policy an assessment of azolla in philippine rice production concerns about external debt and energy security have motivated several developing countries to develop biological technologies to substitute for petrochemical inputs this paper examines the economic feasibility of azolla as a source of nitrogen in philippine rice production green manuring with azolla is found not to be cost effective substantial savings from intercropping with azolla can be realized only if the cost of nitrogen from azolla is compared with the price of nitrogen from ammonium sulfate but not if urea is used as the basis of comparison farmers would benefit more from liberalization of import controls on urea additional research is needed to develop appropriate chemical saving systems before investing heavily in extension

biotechnology for rural nutrition abstract this article evaluates the introduction of algal biotechnology as a nutrition intervention in rural south india in terms of its benefits costs and acceptability to the tastes and income of rural households data were collected from a whole village study and developments in the theory of the economics of tastes are used to analyse the socioeconomic acceptance of algal supplements among the study households the results indicate that the algal food supplement is highly cost effective in providing adequate protein and other micronutrients however the absolute deviation between actual and optimal intake of algal food increased with higher income class several policy implications for food and nutrition interventions in developing countries are derived

back propagation learning in improving the accuracy of neural network based tourism demand forecasting abstract traditional tourism demand forecasting techniques concentrate predominantly on multivariate regression models and univariate time series models these single mathematical function based forecasting techniques although they have achieved a certain degree of success in tourism forecasting are unable to represent the relationship of demand for tourism as accurate as a multiprocessing node based feed forward neural network previous research has demonstrated that using a feed forward neural network can accomplish a higher forecasting accuracy than the regression and time series techniques for a set of linearly separable tourism demand data this research extends the applicability of neural networks in tourism demand forecasting by incorporating the back propagation learning process into a non linearly separable tourism demand data empirical results indicate that utilizing a back propagation neural network outperforms regression models time series models and feed forward neural networks in terms of forecasting accuracy

impacts of capital and land constraints on the economics of new livestock technology in western kenya abstract the introduction of new forages and milk marketing improvements was projected to permit even the smallest modeled farms in a western kenya region to adopt dual purpose goats and thereby improve family income and nutrition expanded credit permitted modeled medium and large farms especially to vigorously exploit these innovations credit also expanded income more than did goat management improvements because credit extension assistance marketing improvements and new forages will leave projected incomes of small farmers below those of medium and large farmers in the study region development of off farm jobs may still be necessary to supplement the incomes of this fast growing group the marginal value of capital for medium and large farmers with new livestock technology was high this suggests that government subsidized credit might be unnecessary with proper infrastructural and legal support private capital markets might develop as new livestock technology and marketing improvements expand the demand for borrowing

male female wage differentials and policy responses without implicating them for any of the contents of the paper i am grateful to the following for helpful discussions or comments andrea beller university of illinois david bloom harvard and columnbia glen cain university of wisconsin ron ehrenberg cornell victor fuchs stanford bob gregory australian national university jonathan leonard university of california berkeley roberta robb brock university and paul weiler harvard financial support of the humanities and social sciences committee of the research board of the universitu of toronto is eratefullu acknowlede ed

bayesian models for tourism demand forecasting abstract this study extends the existing forecasting accuracy debate in the tourism literature by examining the forecasting performance of various vector autoregressive var models in particular this study seeks to ascertain whether the introduction of the bayesian restrictions priors to the unrestricted var process would lead to an improvement in forecasting performance in terms of achieving a higher degree of accuracy the empirical results based on a data set on the demand for hong kong tourism show that the bayesian var bvar models invariably outperform their unrestricted var counterparts it is noteworthy that the univariate bvar was found to be the best performing model among all the competing models examined

tourism demand for italy and the business cycle this study provides a strategy for modelling the effect of the business cycle on tourism demand under the rationale that tourism cycles are heavily influenced by lagged effects of the overall business cycle using quarterly data on overnight stays in italian hotels both domestic and inbound between 1985 and 2004 we adopt a structural time series approach to evaluate two alternative models the first with a latent cycle component lcc and the second based on specific economic explanatory variables xcv the two models are compared in terms of explanatory power best fit residual diagnostics and forecasting ability the results show similar performances the policy implication is that the xcv model can be used for calibrating countercyclical interventions in tourism policy

sexual orientation and labour relations new evidence from athens greece we use data from the 2008 2009 athens area study aas to provide the first evidence on the relationship between men s sexual orientation and wages in the greek capital athens gay and bisexual men are found to receive significantly lower monthly wages than heterosexual male workers after accounting for demographic and occupational characteristics the estimations reveal that educated gay and bisexual workers face lower wage differentials than less educated gay and bisexual workers which is consistent with the statistical theory of discrimination however wage gaps are significant at all educational attainment levels suggesting that these workers face strong prejudices in the athenian labour market the same pattern holds also across all occupations and sectors furthermore to better understand the determinants of the wage gaps we compare gay bisexual men with both married and unmarried heterosexual men by making these comparisons we are able to disentangle the penalty associated with being unmarr

on the decomposition of wage differentials the often used method for decomposing wage differentials into human capital and discrimination components is reformulated so that both t he disadvantage or cost discrimination it imposes on a black or minority wage earner and the advantage or benefit it bestows on a white or majority wage earner can be estimated copyright 1988 by mit press

the relevance of business cycles in forecasting international tourist arrivals abstract casual empiricism suggests that there may be a cyclical trend associated with international tourist arrivals in which variation around the linear trend can be formed by the interaction with other cyclical phenomena this paper employs a simple model that incorporates a linear trend and sine function to capture these two characteristics in forecasting international tourist arrivals in hong kong the model is extended to include a set of sine functions through the application of fourier analysis to account for situations in which more than one phenomenon may be present in the time series the forecasting accuracy of the model is compared with other forecasting approaches evaluation of the results using the mean absolute percentage error measure show that the forecasting performance of the extended model with a linear trend and two sine functions is superior in terms of accuracy when compared with other forecasting models

the determinants of nutrient intake results from western india abstract this paper presents and tests a model of the determinants of nutrient intake the model is based on an identity whereby calorie intake per adult equivalent can be expressed as a function of total expenditure the share of food in the budget a unit value index an expenditure efficiency index and household composition these endogenous variables are in turn expressed as a function of exogenous variables such as assets demographic factors and agricultural technology the results help to explain the large variance in calorie intake at a given level of income and suggest that interesting compensatory behavior occurs by households

is tolerance good or bad for growth we investigate how tolerance as measured by attitudes toward different types of neighbors affects economic growth in a sample of 54 countries unlike previous studies by richard florida and others we find that tolerance toward homosexuals is negatively related to growth for tolerance toward people of a different race we do not find robust results but the sign of the estimated coefficients is positive suggesting that inclusion of people irrespective of race makes good use of productive capacity we propose mechanisms to explain these divergent findings which clarify why different kinds of tolerance may be of different economic importance