the dynamic cost and persistence of asset inequality in an agrarian economy abstract a growing literature suggests that asset inequality can be economically costly in the presence of agency costs that constrain labor and capital markets unclear in this literature is whether asset markets and optimal individual accumulation of self finance capacity suffice to eliminate costly inequality over time this paper uses numerical dynamic programming methods to explore this question with a model of an initially inegalitarian agrarian economy while an egalitarian asset distribution emerges over time the process involves sufficiently great productivity losses along the way that a redistributive policy could improve on the market s performance by both equity and efficiency criteria

risk private information and the family in the last fifteen years our understanding of the behavior of households in both highand low income countries has increased significantly econometric studies contributing to this body of knowledge concerned with the determinants of such behavior as labor supply fertility health and food consumption however have generally taken the structure of the household as exogenously given while some progress has been made concerning how changes in the legal structure alter patterns of family formation and breakup the wide variety of family organizations observed across countries of the world or the evolution of family structure within countries cannot be readily explained by existing models while some economists have suggested that organizations based on kinship can be understood in terms of transaction economies yoram ben porath 1980 robert pollak 1985 there are now few precise implications of this approach and little or no evidence of its usefulness for predicting or explaining the existence of any particular family structure in specific settings characterized by their natural endowments and or legal structure in this paper i discuss some recent studies of family and household organization in one specific context rural india that have sought to formulate a model of household structure based on the need for individuals in lowincome private information settings to protect themselves against intertemporal fluctuations in resources arising from the natural vagaries of water supply i also present some new evidence on the relationship between family arrangements and measured risk characteristics of the agricultural environment in these settings while many economists have highlighted risk and information consideration in the study of such formal rural institutions as sharecropping permanent servitude and contractual interlinking studies of these individual contractural arrangements have ignored the family itself as a risk mitigating institution moreover much of this literature has been solely concerned with ex ante measures to reduce risk contractual instruments or production factors that reduce the effects of variability in the exogenous production input rainfall on income mechanisms serving to preserve consumption stability ex post in the face of variability in realized income have been neglected

indirect effects of an aid program how do cash transfers affect ineligibles consumption cash transfers to eligible households indirectly increase the consumption of ineligible households living in the same villages this effect operates through insurance and credit markets ineligible households benefit from the transfers by receiving more gifts and loans and by reducing their savings thus the transfers benefit the local economy at large looking only at the effect on the treated underestimates the impact one should analyze the effects of this class of programs on the entire local economy rather than on the treated only and use a village level randomization rather than selecting treatment and control subjects from the same community

specific experience household structure and intergenerational transfers farm family land and labor arrangements in developing countries data from indian rural household survey was used to test th hypothesis that the coexistence in traditional rural societies of extended intergenerational families infrequent land sales and high reliance on family members as farm laborers is the result of the economic advantages which accrue from the knowledge gained by farming a particular ploy of land over a long period of time the land specific experience of elderly members of a intergenerational household who farmed the land as a child and then as an adult are expecially critical in adverse weather years most previous investigators attributed the existence of multigenerational households the use of family members rather than hired laboreds and the infrequency of land sales to deficiencies in the market i e labor market imperfections and an absence of capital insurance and asset markets in the present investigations these same characteristics are viewed as having an economic advantages a model for estimating the contribution of the experience of the elderly household members to agricultural profits was developed and applied to data from a 3 year panel study of 2900 indian rural farm households the data was collected between 1968 71 by the national council of applied economic research the survey collected information on farm profits farm inputs demographic characteristics and the effects of weather conditions on profits a major limitation of the study was a lack of information on the duration of land ownership age of household members was substituted as a proxy for duration of ownership findings were consistent withe the hypothesis in poor agricultural years gross returns for households which contained an elderly household member were greater than the gross returns for comparable households which did not contain an elderly member the economic advantages of specific knowledge embodied in the experienced elderly farmer were comparable to the economic advantages which accrued to households whose members were more educated the hypothesis cannot fully explain the existence of intergenerational families since there is a relatively large proportion of such families among nonfarm families in many countries including india findings suggest that intergenerational families may provide for more occupational diversity and thereby reduce income risks the specific experience hypothesis has policy implications if technological changes are introduced the value of specific experience may be lost and the frequency of intergenerational households may decline the hypothesis may also explain why farmers are reluctant to agree to land redistribution and consolidation schemes this reluctance may disappear after sufficient technological change has occurred

ex ante and ex post labor supply response to risk in a low income area abstract this paper tests for ex ante and ex post labor supply responses to weather risk for rural indian farm households the analysis uses panel data on 2115 households spanning 13 states in rural india merged with a 22 year series of district level rainfall data ex ante households facing riskier distributions of rainfall are more likely to participate in the labor market ex post unexpectedly bad weather and low rainfall increase labor force participation

monitoring costs in chinese agricultural teams large productivity gains have been observed in chinese agriculture following the transition from collective farming to household contracting using a model of mutual monitoring in an egalitarian production team we estimate that labor supervision absorbed about 10 20 percent of total labor time for a sample of chinese agricultural teams during 1970 76 these agency costs are lower than comparable estimates derived from aggregate data

is there a trade off between supervision and wages an empirical test of efficiency wage theory abstract the logic of efficiency wage theory suggests a trade off between wages and supervision this paper reports evidence that high levels of supervision are indeed associated with lower wage levels the empirical investigation centers on the effect that safety supervision by host employers has on the wages of contract maintenance workers in the petrochemical industry this narrow focus is important special institutional features of the contract employment relationship in petrochemicals make it possible to ameliorate econometric problems that may have influenced earlier studies

inequality of opportunity in egypt the article evaluates the contribution of inequality of opportunity to earnings inequality in egypt and analyzes its evolution across three time periods and different population groups it provides parametric and nonparametric estimates of a lower bound for the degree of inequality of opportunity for wage and salary workers on average the contribution of opportunity shaping circumstances to earnings inequality declined from 22 percent in 1988 to 15 percent in 2006 levels of inequality of opportunity were fairly stable while earnings differentials widened markedly leading to a decline in the share of inequality attributable to opportunities father s background and geographic origins had the largest effect on earnings although the impact of mother s education has risen in recent years the degree of inequality of opportunity did not differ significantly by gender or rural urban area although the incidence was lower for men and for rural areas the results indicate an increase in inequality of opportu

sons as widowhood insurance evidence from senegal exploiting original data from a senegalese household survey we provide evidence that fertility choices are partly driven by women s needs for widowhood insurance we use a duration model of birth intervals to show that women most at risk in case of widowhood intensify their fertility shortening birth spacing until they get a son insurance through sons might entail substantial health costs since short birth spacing raises maternal and infant mortality rates

portfolio behaviour in a flow of funds model for the household sector in india we estimate a flow of funds model for the household sector in india within the almost ideal demand system aids framework and examine the demand for money and the substitution effects between money and other financial assets the restricted long run model obtained using cointegration techniques provides stable equilibrium relationship between i 1 variables and broadly satisfies the axioms of rational choice in consumer demand theory we find that financial sector reform exerts a significant impact on the interest rate structure and household portfolio preferences specifically there is strong substitutability among risk free assets and a possible speculative effect in the stock market while the exchange rate strongly influences the demand for money these findings all have important policy implications

labor contracting and a theory of contract choice in california agriculture we present a model of labor contracts where seasonality the sensitivity of output to labor quality and work intensity and the relative advantages of labor contractors in recruitment and growers in supervision of seasonal farm workers determine the choice of employment contract differences in the optimal means of extracting work result in lower wages paid under labor contracting than direct hiring we derive and estimate the probability of labor contracting and wages as functions of worker and job characteristics using data on california farm workers and employers from estimated expected wages our results indicate that successful unionization or reducing the flow of undocumented workers into california agriculture both would reduce contracting and increase wages

fiscal policy monetary targets and the price level in a centrally planned economy an application to the case of china this paper presents a planned economy monetary model of china a money supply equation links changes in broad money to government transactions evaluated at official prices the demand for real money balances by consumers equals the nominal demand for money deflated by an unobserved true price index the model explains money demand as the divergence between the then official and true price indices changes in the money supply are explained by government transactions while money demand is explained by real income and the anticipated true rate of inflation the true rate of inflation is 2 5 times the official rate copyright 1987 by ohio state university press

insurance market efficiency and crop choices in pakistan this paper tests the efficiency of insurance markets in the pakistan punjab by examining how crop choices are affected by the presence of price and yield risk we estimate reduced form and structural models of crop choices although we cannot reject the hypothesis that village members efficiently share risk among themselves production choices are shown to depend on risk existing risk sharing and selfinsurance mechanisms thus imperfectly protect punjab farmers against village level shocks results also indicate that households respond to consumption price risk thereby suggesting that empirical and theoretical work on risk should avoid putting an exclusive emphasis on yield and output price risk

agrarian structure and agricultural practice typology and application to western sudan a typology of models that explain patterns of variation in farm endowments and farm practices and yields shows that insecurity in renting land financing constraints and the absence of insurance generate patterns of factor use quite different from the famous inverse relationship caused by labor supervision problems one might expect to observe positive relationships between wealth and yields village level data from western sudan confirm that such positive relationships are not a theoretical curiosity wealthy farmers have higher levels of output per hectare because they use more labor per hectare insurance and financing constraints appear to be the crucial market failures

money demand in china in the reform period an error correction model based on integration and cointegration test findings this paper constructs an error correction ecm model to evaluate the dynamic adjustment process of money demand in china in the reform period 1979 to 1990 the cointegration tests suggest that some long run relationship exists among money demand real income price and the real interest rate the ecm model shows that the dynamic adjustment process of money demand maintains stable and significant relationships to most of its determinants

access to capital and agrarian production organisation there are two problems both universal that entrepreneurs in any economy must contend with firstly an agent generally has access only to a limited amount of working capital secondly workers hired by an agent are subject to moral hazard and this necessitates their supervision this paper models for an agrarian economy the constraints imposed on entrepreneurs activities by these two problems and endogenously determines the various organisational forms of production as well as the allocation of resources that will obtain with a simple model we endeavour to explain a diverse set of empirical observations pertaining to the less developed countries in terms of the general processes that determine the distribution of income among the various agents and the hierarchical relationships that develop among them agricultural production typically involves a period of several months between the time the inputs are purchased and the time the output is marketed access to working capital and hence to the credit market thus plays an important role in a farmer s production decisions the distribution of access to credit in turn tends to be an important determinant of income distribution in poor agrarian economies credit is invariably rationed according to the ability to offer collateral the amount of working capital a farmer can mobilise therefore depends on the amount of land he owns which is often a good proxy for his overall wealth and thus his ability to offer collateral further since hired hands have a propensity to shirk they need to be supervised and therefore the

group size and the efficiency of informal risk sharing this paper seeks to understand and test empirically the relationship between group size and informal risk sharing models of informal risk sharing with limited commitment and grim trigger punishments upon deviation imply that larger groups provide better insurance however when subgroups of households can credibly deviate so that sustainable informal arrangements ought to be coalition proof the relationship between group size and the amount of insurance is unclear building on genicot and ray 2003 we show that this relationship is theoretically ambiguous we then investigate it empirically using data on the size of the sibships of the household head and spouse in rural malawi to identify the relevant potential risk sharing group we exploit a social norm among the main ethnic group in our sample that the wife s brothers play a key role in ensuring her household s wellbeing we find that households where the wife has many brothers are poorly insured against crop loss events we fail to uncover a similar relationship for the wife s sisters ruling out that our findings are driven by wives with many siblings e g brothers simply having poorer extended family networks a simple calibration exercise indicates that the threat of coalitional deviations can explain our empirical findings

inequality of opportunity in sub saharan africa in the last decades inequality of opportunity has been extensively studied by economists on the assumption that in addition to being normatively undesirable it can be related to low potential for growth this paper evaluates inequality of opportunity and the different sources of unequal opportunities in 11 sub saharan africa countries the results indicate that the portion of total inequality that can be attributed to exogenous circumstances that is circumstances outside the control of individuals control is between 30 percent and 40 percent in the countries considered the results also indicate a positive association between total consumption inequality and inequality of opportunity finally this paper addresses a number of methodological issues that typically arise when measuring inequality of opportunity with imperfect data which is the typical case in developing countries

economic inequality in the arab region the paper uses harmonized household survey micro data to assess the levels and determinants of economic inequality in 12 arab countries it focuses on the sources of rural urban as well as metropolitan nonmetropolitan inequalities and applies the unconditional quantile regression decomposition technique to analyze the welfare gaps across the entire distribution the analysis finds moderate inequality levels with the gini coefficient for the distribution of household real per capita total expenditures ranging between 30 7 in libya and 45 in mauritania differences in households endowments such as demographic composition human capital and community characteristics appear as the main sources of the urban rural welfare gap there is inequality between metropolitan and non metropolitan regions in many countries mainly because of differences in returns to households characteristics and particularly returns to human capital

does supervision matter some hypothesis tests using indian farm level data abstract a model is developed and estimated to test for heterogeneity of family and hired labor in agricultural production and to estimate the impact of employer supervision on the productivity of hired labor plot level data are used from a rice growing village in semi arid tropical india the hypothesis that family and hired labor are homogeneous inputs was rejected results indicate that family member supervision is required to increase hired labor productivity output loss attributable to operating at reduced supervision intensity was greater than 10 on over 40 of the plots

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

sharing monitoring and incentives marshallian misallocation reassessed a general equilibrium model is presented wherein wage labor requires monitoring in order to extract effort landlords may also elect to adopt sharetenancy contracts in which workers have an incentive to supply unsupervised effort two distortions exist monitoring costs in one sector and a share tax in the other efficiency statements require second best comparisons adopting more specific functional forms this mixed wage sharetenancy economy is technically efficient and provides greater benthamite social welfare than a wage only economy when private incentives lead to mixing the incidence of sharetenancy is hypothesized to increase with monitoring costs density of tenants per landlord and labor intensity of production

supervision and wages across industries this paper uses supervision data from a supplement to the 1977 wave of the panel survey of income dynamics to examine differences in supervision and wages across industries and to evaluate relationships between supervision practices and interindustry wage differentials the results demonstrate that workers in high wage industries are supervised with equal or greater stringency than secondary sector workers further the results offer no evidence that interindustry differences in monitoring contribute to interindustry wage differentials such findings appear to contradict explanations for industry wage premiums that are motivated by efficiency wage models of shirking copyright 1993 by mit press

income transfers of chinese rural migrants some empirical evidence from jinan this paper explores the determinants of migrant remittances to rural households using data on male migrant workers drawn from the jinan municipality in shandong province in the summer of 1995 the majority of migrants are found to retain close links with their rural households with 85 remitting some income in the 12 months preceding the survey date the transfers accounted for over a third of urban labour earnings a number of models are used to undertake the estimation of remittance functions no evidence of altruistic behaviour is uncovered and evidence for exchange and coinsurance theories is mixed labour earnings proved the most robust determinant of the level of remittance and the remittance wage elasticity calculated is found to be at the top end of the range of estimates obtained in the literature

inequality of opportunity in earnings and assets in egypt by most available measures the level of inequality in the mena region including egypt is considered relatively low this regularity applies to both inequality of outcomes as well as inequality o

labor supervision and institutional conditions evidence from bicol rice farms this article analyzes labor supervision activities reported in a survey of rice farmers in the bicol region of the philippines we present a theoretical model that relates supervision intensity to institutional conditions we estimate a supervision intensity equation and control for the decision to hire labor the decision to supervise hired labor and the type of the labor contract the empirical estimates use different village level spatial and demographic indicators as proxies for institutional conditions the results are consistent with the prediction of the theoretical model that supervision increases with weaker institutional conditions

using shadow wages to estimate labor supply of agricultural households with few exceptions most studies of the labor demand and supply decisions of agricultural households in developing countries have relied on the empirical advantages of separability given the questionable nature of some of the assumptions sufficient for separability i apply a recent methodology that accounts for the simultaneity between the production and consumption decisions of a farm household using data from rural india direct estimates of the marginal productivities shadow wages of family male and female labor are derived from a cobb douglas agricultural production function the estimated shadow wages and income are then used as regressors in a structural model of labor supply

information and the operation of markets tests based on a general equilibrium model of land leasing in india abstract this paper develops an estimable general equilibrium model of land leasing to test the extent to which information is commonly held in a village and whether village markets are efficient information regarding the relative farming skill of households is found to be widespread but the assumption of perfectly efficient markets within the village is rejected these results have ramifications for the estimation of agricultural household models and for our understanding of rural institutions the model is derived from the primitives of the production technology the extent of information and the distributions of assets and several household unobservables simultaneity and selection issues are dealt with explicitly in a two stage maximum likelihood estimation procedure using panel data from india

technology market and community in contract choice rice harvesting in the philippines an attempt to incorporate institutional change as an endogenous factor in the economic system is a frontier of economics a perspective from new institutional economics is to view the evolution of institutions as having emerged from the efforts of individuals and groups who aimed to achieve more efficient resource allocation and to establish claims for larger income shares these efforts are mobilized in response to changes in economic variables such as resource endowments and technology under the constraints of existing social and cultural norms a massive body of literature has been accumulating in this field of research including game theories collective action principal agent contracting and transaction costs however the theoretical developments have not been paralleled by empirical analysis constrained by the difficulty of testing on purposively collected microeconomic data empirical studies have largely been based on broad historical observations with the results being rather conjectural in this article we attempt to fill this gap by a case study on changes in labor contracts that have been used for rice harvesting in the philippines for the three decades since the advent of the green revolution in the late 1960s the major hypotheses we test are as follows a dramatic changes in the labor contract arrangements were induced in order to reduce disequilibrium between labor s marginal costs and returns created by changes in rice production technology and market wage rates b villagers chose specific labor contract arrangements that were consistent with the norms of the particular rural village communities and c contract forms changed according to changes in community norms some results that pertain to the first decade of the green revolution had

measurement of repressed inflation in china abstract we estimate a measure of the repression of the chinese price level by developing a simple analytical model which derives a true rate of inflation on the basis of the different rates of change of the stock of money in circulation and the nominal value of retail sales this true rate of inflation is then used to explain changes in quasi money balances we estimate this model for the period 1979 1988 using quarterly data the results strongly support the hypothesis of repressed inflation the annual rate of inflation of the true price index is approximately 12 4 percent higher than that of the official price index over the 10 year period

a theory of dual labor markets with application to industrial policy discrimination and keynesian unemployment this paper develops a model of dual labor markets based on employers need to motivate workers in order to elicit effort from their workers employers may find it optimal to pay more than the going wage this changes fundamentally the character of labor markets the model is applied to a wide range of labor market phenomena it provides a coherent framework for understanding the claims of industrial policy advocates it also can provide the basis for a theory of occupational segregation and discrimination that will not be eroded by market forces finally the model provides the basis for a theory of involuntary unemployment

household composition labor markets and labor demand testing for separation in agricultural household models this paper tests the separation of farm labor supply and labor demand decisions using the observation that household composition is an important determinant of farm labor use with nonseparation after assessing the conditions under which the test has power against several alternatives an empirical model is developed to test the proposition that farm employment is independent of family composition the model is estimated on a data set from rural java the null hypothesis that farm labor allocation decisions are independent of household structure is not rejected the results are robust to different specifications of the labor demand function copyright 1992 by the econometric society

stability of money demand function revisited in china as china s economic reforms have undergone significant structural changes after 1979 it has been rather difficult to formulate a stable money demand function over the period following that year while previous literature on the long run relationship of money demand in china shows the existence of stable money demand this article revisits the stability of the china money demand function over the period after 1979 to employ the unit root tests and the cointegration tests with structural break the empirical evidence demonstrates that economic and financial deregulation did affect the stability of demand for money in china over the period 1977 to 2002 moreover the estimated long run income and interest elasticity are respectively 1 01 1 11 and 0 14 0 08 using the real m1 m2 equation in addition real income and the interest rate are found to be weakly exogenous we overall do find structural breakpoints mainly in 1980 and 1993 and they look to match clearly with corresponding critical financia

demand for money in sri lanka during the post 1977 period a cointegration and error correction analysis this paper investigates the long run demand for money and short run dynamics of the long run money demand function for sri lanka during the post 1977 period while m1 is cointegrated with real income nominal interest rate short term foreign interest rate and real effective exchange rate m2 is not this suggests that monetary authorities should emphasize the narrow definition of money for monetary control the one year fixed deposits rate is cointegrated with m1 indicating the opportunity cost of holding money although the inflation rate is not cointegrated with m1 it seems to be an important determinant of the demand for m1 in the short run results also suggest that the short term foreign interest rate and the exchange rate can have important implications for the effectiveness of monetary policy monetary authorities must consider the response of domestic money demand to these external factors when formulating future monetary policies

measuring long term inequality of opportunity abstract in this paper we introduce a new family of rank dependent measures of inequality and social welfare consistent with the equality of opportunity eop principle the proposed framework can be used to measure long term as well as short term eop depending on whether we let permanent income or snapshots of income form the basis of the analysis furthermore it allows for both an ex ante and an ex post approach to eop there is long term ex post inequality of opportunity if individuals who exert the same effort have different permanent incomes in comparison the ex ante approach focuses on differences in the expected permanent income between groups of individuals with identical circumstances to demonstrate the empirical relevance of a long run perspective on eop we exploit a unique panel data from norway on individuals incomes over their working life span this allows us to examine how well analysis of opportunity inequality based on snapshots of income approximate the results based on permanent income

shadow wages and peasant family labour supply an econometric application to the peruvian sierra a striking feature of developing economies is the large proportion of the work force that is self employed lack of widespread labor market participation in the agricultural sector can pose a major obstacle to the empirical implementation of economic models of the peasant household whether because wage data are simply not available or because the assumptions required to make use of wage data stretch the bounds of credulity this paper develops a methodology for estimating a structural labor supply model for primarily self employed peasant households which holds under a general agricultural technology and set of labor market conditions the unique feature of the approach is that the opportunity cost of time or shadow wage of household workers is explicitly estimated from an agricultural production function and is subsequently used to identify a set of structural labor supply parameters recent household survey data from rural peru is employed to estimate and perform various diagnostic tests on the model the empirical findings lend support to the hypothesis that peasant households allocate their members time as if to maximize a family utility function and moreover demonstrate the tractability of the shadow wage methodology and its usefulness in estimating more elaborate time allocation models

contingent loan repayment in the philippines abstract using data from the philippines this article seeks to understand how households in the study area apparently manage to avoid falling into a debt trap in spite of frequent borrowing findings suggest that this is achieved via three institutional features first most informal debt carries no interest second for all debts repayment is postponed in case of a borrower s difficulty this is the only insurance feature of debt repayment third while debt principal is seldom forgiven or reduced interest bearing debt does not carry additional interest if debt repayment is delayed this prevents interest charges from accumulating and debt from snowballing

the trade off between supervision and wages evidence of efficiency wages from the nlsy standard efficiency wage models suggest that workers employed in places with lower probabilities of identifying shirking will earn more as will workers who have better alternative opportunities this paper provides new empirical evidence in support of efficiency wage theory using the national longitudinal surveys of youth data the empirical results support the prediction of the model that workers employed in larger work groups are paid more a finding consistent with a supervision wage trade off additional evidence supports the prediction that workers with better alternative opportunities earn more the classical competitive theories of wage determination predict that workers will be paid the value of their marginal product these theories suggest that after accounting for differences in working conditions there should be no variation in wages among homogeneous workers recent findings that industry affiliation and firm size affect wages suggest that part of the explanation of wage structure is missing these results call into question the view that industry wage differentials can plausibly be rationalized with textbook competitive models krueger and summers 1988 p 280 this paper follows the efficiency wage literature by assuming that one important determinant of wage differences is variation in employers ability to monitor workers efforts 2 this paper provides new empirical evidence in support of efficiency wage theory using data from the national longitudinal surveys of youth nlsy a data set that is noticeably absent from the efficiency wage literature efficiency wage models attempt to complete the explanation of wage structure by focusing

ex ante versus ex post equality of opportunity we study the difference between the ex post and ex ante perspectives in equality of opportunity we show that the well documented conflicts between compensation and reward are but an aspect of a broader conflict between ex ante and ex post perspectives the literature that takes the goal of providing equal opportunities as the guiding principle generally considers that this is implemented only when ex post all individuals with the same effort obtain equal success it is easy to believe that ex ante compensation is another natural embodiment of the same idea we show that this is not true

land taxes output taxes and sharecropping was henry george right economists have generally argued that if a land tax is administratively feasible then to increase efficiency it should be used to the exclusion of output taxes this article shows that underlying this policy prescription is the assumption that institutions for pooling and spreading production risks are perfect when account is taken of the imperfections in those institutions some use of output taxes will be pareto superior to a pure land tax regime and may induce higher output as well henry george was wrong these results generally apply even when the land tax is indexed to regional output and when land is farmed under sharecropping even in these cases a move from a pure land tax to a mix of land and low output taxes will reduce pre existing distortions in both consumption and production arising from the imperfection in risk markets

to what extent do fiscal regimes equalize opportunities for income acquisition among citizens to what extent do fiscal regimes equalize opportunities for income aquisition among citizens journal of public economics

has the development gap between the ethnic minority and majority groups narrowed in vietnam evidence from household surveys using household data for rural northern vietnam between 1993 and 2014 we find that the ethnic minority group continued to lag behind the majority group in various development indicators despite the overall improvement in living standards our regression and decomposition analyses show that the structural differences between the two groups are an important cause of persistent development gap however the nature of structural differences changed over time and no single source of structural difference explains the persistent gap we argue that more minority appropriate policies are needed to lift poor minority households out of poverty further and reduce the development gap

tenancy choice in a competitive framework with transactions costs the choice between wage labor and sharecrop contracts is analyzed in a model that avoids both the pitfalls of previous models inefficiency of sharecropping and indeterminacy by introducing transactions costs with appropriate nonlinearities plantation data from the american south provide empirical support for the hypothesized nonlinearity in transactions costs and simultaneous determination of direct supervision and contractual choice

a two season agricultural household model of output and price uncertainty abstract this paper presents a two season model of a household s production consumption labor supply and storage decisions in an environment of output and price risk the analytical results in this study are markedly different from those of models prevalent in the mainstream of the agricultural household literature the empirical analysis that uses panel data from a village in india provides support for the theoretical results and underscores the seasonal dimension of the farmers choice problems the results also show that ignoring risk or risk averse preferences may introduce substantial downward bias in optimal response estimates

input management ability occupational patterns and farm productivity in bangladesh agriculture agricultural production involves the use of certain difficult to measure resource endowments of farmers in addition to observable physical inputs this article proposes integrating a behavioural component input management ability into a production framework that can then be used to analyse the impact of farmers supervisory skills and efforts on farm productivity the empirical analysis suggests that extension programmes may need to be broadened to teach more effective use of traditional as well as modern inputs and that extension services and delivery of modern inputs need to be directed more at traditional farmers than at those in touch with the modern sector

off farm work technical efficiency and rice production risk in taiwan this article investigates the differences in yield production production efficiency and yield risk for farmers both with and without off farm work using a nationwide survey of rice farmers in taiwan we estimate two stochastic production frontier models that accommodate technical inefficiency and production risk simultaneously for farmers both with and without off farm work the stochastic dominance criterion is then applied to compare the differences in the distributions of the estimated technical efficiency and yield risk between groups the empirical results indicate that these two groups of farmers use resources in different ways and off farm work is not necessarily associated with lower technical efficiency for farmers in the lower percentiles of the efficiency distribution those with off farm work are more efficient than their counterparts without off farm work in addition farmers with off farm work face higher production risk and this result is robust for the entire distribution

the relation between farm size and farm productivity the role of family labor supervision and credit constraints abstract the paper shows that if the performance of hired farmhands is affected by supervision from family members and if the availability of credit is dependent on the amount of land owned then a systematic positive or negative relationship between per acre yields and farm size will prevail a model with no supervision effects on labor productivity would predict that yields are unaffected by farm size the paper also investigates the relation between land utilization and owned holding size when land rental possibilities are limited results are shown to be compatible with various observed patterns in ldcs