socio economic characteristics and the effect of taxation as a health policy instrument abstract this paper analyses the quantitative effects of using economic instruments in health policy on the basis of price elasticities calculated from estimated demand systems the nutritional effects of various taxation schemes are compared for households in different age groups and social classes focusing on the consumption of saturated fats fibre and sugar it is generally found that the impact of price instruments is stronger for lower social classes than in other groups of the population with regard to age groups it is mostly the youngest that decrease their demand for saturated fat in response to price changes while it is mostly the middle aged who exhibit price responsiveness in their demand for sugar these groups are however not considered as key target groups for dietary regulation thus tax instruments may be effective in improving diets on average but the design of the instruments and the targeting of vulnerable groups with special needs should be done with care it should be noted that a tax on a single nutrient or food may have undesired effects on the demand for other food components though this may be avoided by introducing taxes subsidies on several food products simultaneously

demand elasticities for food products in brazil a two stage budgeting system the object of this article is to estimate demand elasticities for a basket of staple food important for providing the caloric needs of brazilian households these elasticities are useful in the measurement of the impact of structural reforms on poverty a two stage demand system was constructed based on data from household expenditure surveys pof produced by ibge the brazilian bureau of statistics in 1987 88 and 1995 96 we have used panel data to estimate the model and have calculated income own price and cross price elasticities for eight groups of goods and services and in the second stage for 11 sub groups of staple food products we estimated those elasticities for the whole sample of consumers and for two income groups

environmental regulation and location of industrialized agricultural production in europe this paper analyzes empirically the extent to which environmental regulation influences production location in the pig industry the analysis is based on a general empirical location model that captures interactions between region and sector characteristics in determining production location and data on pig production in 43 european regions we find that while environmental regulation may not have a measurable effect on the e u pig industry location per se it is a strong influence on the sectoral composition of the industry relatively highly polluting sectors of the pig industry are attracted to relatively lax jurisdictions which become pollution havens hot spots of hog waste

the finance growth nexus evidence from bank branch deregulation this paper provides evidence that financial markets can directly affect economic growth by studying the relaxation of bank branch restrictions in the united states we find that the rates of real per capita growth in income and output increase significantly following intrastate branch reform we also argue that the observed changes in growth are the result of changes in the banking system improvements in the quality of bank lending not increased volume of bank lending appear to be responsible for faster growth

food demand and savings in a complete extended linear expenditure system demand equations derived from the classical constrained utility maximization problem state that quantities demanded are functions of all prices and income an implication is that consumer purchase decisions are interrelated and should be viewed from a systems context recent economic events have focused attention on the high prices of energy medical services food and housing as well as the low level of consumer savings such concerns make it desirable that we have estimates of a set of parameters which will allow inferences to be made about the probable response of food demand and savings to changes in consumer income and a comprehensive set of consumer prices the purpose of this note is to present and compare the parameter estimates and systems projections obtained from two alternative formulations of lluch s extended linear expenditure system eles savings is explicitly introduced into both variants by the constrained maximization procedure from a practical viewpoint we delineate a set of demand categories which we feel are more relevant to the study of current economic problems than those used in most published studies

what makes stock exchanges succeed evidence from cross listing decisions despite the increasing integration of capital markets geography has not yet become irrelevant to finance between 1986 and 1997 european public companies have increasingly listed abroad especially in the u s we relate the cross listing decisions to the characteristics of the destination exchanges and countries relative to those of the home exchange and country european companies appear more likely to cross list in more liquid and larger markets and in markets where several companies from their industry are already cross listed they are also more likely to cross list in countries with better investor protection and more efficient courts and bureaucracy but not with more stringent accounting standards

inflation financial markets and long run real activity abstract empirical evidence suggests that real activity the volume of bank lending activity and the volume of trading in equity markets are strongly positively correlated at the same time inflation and financial market activity are strongly negatively correlated in the long run as are inflation and the real rate of return on equity inflation and real activity are also negatively correlated in the long run particularly for economies with relatively high rates of inflation we present a monetary growth model in which banks and secondary capital markets play a crucial allocative function we show that at least under certain configurations of parameters the predictions of the model are consistent with these and several other observations about inflation finance and long run real activity

structural change and cross country growth empirics one of the most striking features of economic growth is the process of structural change whereby the share of agriculture in gdp decreases as countries develop the cross country growth literature typically estimates an aggregate homogeneous production function or convergence regression model that abstracts from this process of structural change this paper investigates the extent to which assumptions about aggregation and homogeneity matter for inferences regarding the nature of technology differences across countries using a unique world bank dataset it estimates production functions for agriculture and manufacturing in a panel of 40 developing and developed countries for the period from 1963 to 1992 it empirically models dimensions of heterogeneity across countries allowing for different choices of technology within both sectors the paper argues that heterogeneity is important within sectors across countries implying that an analysis of aggregate data will not produce useful measures of the nature of the technology or productivity it shows that many of the puzzling elements in aggregate cross country empirics can be explained by inappropriate aggregation across heterogeneous sectors

modeling food consumption decisions as a two step process this article evaluates the suitability of tobit analysis of food consumption patterns by comparing results generated by a tobit model and a modification with a two step decision process two samples of adult women were selected from the 1977 78 nationwide food consumption survey and the 1985 continuing survey of food intakes by individuals results show strong statistical evidence for questioning tobit analysis in examining food consumption decisions determinants of the decision to consume food within a particular food group often differ from the determinants of how much to consume particularly for more highly defined food groupings analysis of u s food consumption patterns and their dietary aspects with respect to consumer behavior has a long history traditionally ordinary least squares ols or some variant has been used in many studies where ols was not appropriate the tobit method was applied tobit allows for a discrete mass point for observations as well as a continuous range of values for the dependent variable this nonlinear method has yielded good results in a variety of studies e g mccracken and brandt lane and devaney and fraker this article examines the suitability of the tobit method for analysis of food consumption patterns the tobit method assumes that the decision to consume a given food item is the same as the decision about the amount of the food to consume ignoring the two step nature of the decision process may hamper understanding of true behavioral patterns lead to erroneous conclusions and generate incorrect policy recommendations this article compares results generated by a tobit model and a modification with a two step decision process in the next section the statistical methods used to test whether food consumption is a one or two step decision process are described the following sections discuss the variables and data present the results and consider the conclusions

effects of food prices and consumer income on nutrient availability economic factors such as food prices and consumer income affect food choices with consequences for the availability of nutrients a new research model is developed to estimate how the availability of 28 nutrients would change as consumers alter their food purchases in response to changes in food prices and income through the interdependent food demand relationships

the school lunch program and nutrient intake a switching regression analysis the nutrient impact of the school lunch program is examined using the basic sample of the national food consumption survey the results clearly indicate the program s substantial positive effect on nutrient consumption by both low income and high income children moreover the nutrient impact of school lunch participation is shown to be greater for low income children

video game demand in japan a household data analysis various economic studies of the video game industry have focused on intra industry details this article complements the approach by highlighting broader budget allocation by households using the total households data of the family income and expenditure survey this article estimates the demand model for video games estimation results show the effects of household income and demographic factors and prices of goods on the expenditure share of video games these results indicate the importance of explicitly considering a households budget allocation or at least including information on households

demand systems estimation with microdata a censored regression approach demand systems estimation increasingly makes use of household level microdata mainly to measure the effects of demographic variables data based on these household expenditure surveys present a major estimation problem for any given household many of the goods have zero consumption implying a censored dependent variable techniques which do not take this censored dependent variable into account will yield biased results we utilize a censored regression approach that is computationally simple consistent and asymptotically efficient the results are then presented and compared with those obtained using an uncensored technique

a test of the habit formation hypothesis using household data numerous studies have confirmed the importance of habit formation as represented by a lagged dependent variable in demand analysis although all work to date has been based on aggregate time series data this study uses household level bls interview panel data to test the habit hypothesis an interrelated demand system for seventeen goods is estimated from cross section data and compared with a similar system based on time series data the results show that the habit component is significantly different between the two data sets and much smaller in the cross section data habit effects while not as large in cross section data as time series are still highly significant several explanations are offered concerning why the two sets of estimates differ copyright 1991 by mit press

are financial development and trade openness complements or substitutes this article studies the long and short run relationships between financial development and trade openness using the pooled mean group estimator of pesaran shin and smith 1999 for unbalanced panel data for 87 countries over the 1960 2005 period our empirical results indicate that long run complementarity between financial development and trade openness coexists with short run substitutionarity between the two policy variables but when splitting the data into oecd and non oecd country groups this finding can be observed only in non oecd countries for oecd countries financial development has negligible effects on trade in addition we find nonlinearity in the relationship in that long run responses of trade decrease with financial development the article further finds coexistence of negative trade effects of financial fragility and positive trade impacts of financial depth

socioeconomic factors affecting dietary status an appraisal this paper is to identify selected studies which have contributed to the present knowledge on socioeconomic characteristics of households and dietary status studies of the socioeconomic factors influencing dietary status have undergone significant change in recent years because of developments in statistics and household decision theory in the latter case households utilize various inputs for example food as purchased and the labor of household members to produce diets with varying features including nutrient compositions as indicated by the work of basiotis et al 1983 blanciforti green and lane davis et al 1982b sanderson and sexauer this framework provides a systematic rationale for the incorporation of socioeconomic variables into integrated statistical analyses of food consumption and dietary status more specifically the scope of traditional consumer demand theory has been significantly increased by household economic decision theory in addition permitting explicit incorporation of socioeconomic variables in engel and full demand systems this theory makes a plausible linkage between food intake and dietary status since household economics merely extends rather than refutes the intrinsic utility maximization properties of traditional demand theory the engel and demand systems relationships postulated linking socioeconomic characteristics food expenditure and dietary status are admitted by the theory stigler and b cker as will be demonstrated research results are accumulating on household size household income and expenditure nutrient levels in household food supplies and individual diets efficiency of food use away from home food consumption and use of convenience foods however studies of the relationship between socioeconomic characteristics of households and or individuals and nutrient availability and or dietary intake levels have produced varyingly conclusive results among other factors these varying results can be attributed to a different measures of diet quality and b differences in individual food intake versus food disappearance data further diet quality has been assessed directly units of nutrients available or consumed as well as indirectly expenditure levels on food the dietary components studied most frequently are food energy protein calcium iron vitamins a and c riboflavin thiamin and niacin however recently studies have given less attention to thiamin riboflavin niacin and vitamin c and instead have investigated vitamin b6 and magnesium in the near future this list of target dietary components will probably include cholesterol sodium dietary fiber zinc and copper this extension will occur for two reasons a consumer interest in these dietary components and b availability of survey data on these dietary components e g the u s department of agriculture s usda 1985 continuing survey of food intake by individuals and the 1987 88 nationwide food consumption sur

nutrient availability food costs and food stamps nutrient consumption patterns of low income households were analyzed using data from the special low income component of the 1977 78 nationwide food consumption survey a system of simultaneous equations for estimating food cost and diet component availability levels in home food supply was applied the derived reduced form showed that food stamp program participation had a positive impact on diet component availability levels impacts of other socioeconomic variables examined for diet component availability were generally larger than those for program participation and income diet component availability levels were relatively constant across households with different income and food stamp program bonus levels

on bias correction in the multivariate sample selection model heien and wessells two step estimator for the multivariate sample selection model has been used extensively during the past 15 years a modified version of it with slightly different selectivity regressors has also appeared in the empirical literature both estimators are unfounded and generally do not correct for the sample selectivity bias as intended but have continued to gain popularity in empirical applications the properties of the modified heien wessells procedure are investigated in both the bivariate and multivariate contexts and the conditions under which this estimator fails to correct for sample selectivity are examined the theoretical properties are demonstrated with a simulated random sample

financial markets the pattern of industrial specialization and comparative advantage evidence from oecd countries due to underlying technological and organizational differences industries differ in their need for external finance since services provided by the financial sector are largely immobile across countries the pattern of industrial specialization should be influenced by the level of financial development among oecd countries we find a strong causal effect of the financial sector on industrial specialization further the financial sector is a source of comparative advantage in a way consistent with the hecksher ohlin vanek model results are also presented on which aspects of financial systems are important for specialization and comparative advantage

environmental regulation and french firms location abroad an economic geography model in an international comparative study abstract in this study we re examine the pollution haven hypothesis by a fresh take on both its theoretical and empirical aspects the originality of our work is twofold first we apply an economic geography model with the aim of deriving a rigorous specification for the impact of environmental regulation on firms location choice second we test a conditional logit model using french firm level data in an international comparative study we confirm evidence of a strong pollution haven effect for our pooled sample of countries receiving french direct investments however through a sensitivity analysis we validate this finding for developed countries and most of emerging economies and central and eastern european countries but not for most countries of the commonwealth of independent states and developing countries where a more stringent environmental regulation seems to attract investments furthermore we highlight a forward looking behavior of firms in terms of their location decision making

the boundaries of multinational enterprises and the theory of international trade this paper begins with a review of empirical evidence on multinational firms conceptual underpinnings of a theory are developed relying in particular on the notion of knowledge capital as a mobile joint input into geographically separated production facilities this idea is embedded in a simple two country general equilibrium model that supports multinational production in equilibrium under conditions consistent with the empirical evidence the final section examines internalization and shows why certain properties of knowledge capital also imply a preference for transferring technologies internally within the firm rather than through arm s length markets

insecurity and the pattern of trade an empirical investigation corruption and imperfect contract enforcement dramatically reduce international trade this paper estimates the reduction using a structural model of import demand in which insecurity acts as a hidden tax on trade we find that inadequate institutions constrain trade as much as tariffs do we also find that omission of indices of institutional quality biases the estimates of typical gravity models obscuring a negative relationship between per capita income and the share of total expenditure devoted to traded goods finally we argue that cross country variation in the effectiveness of institutions and the consequent variation in the prices of traded goods offer a simple explanation for the stylized fact that high income capital abundant countries trade disproportionately with each other

finance and trade a cross country empirical analysis on the impact of financial development and asset tangibility on international trade summary this paper investigates the interplay between financial development asset tangibility and international trade using industry level data on firms dependence on external finance and firms asset tangibility for 27 industries in 42 countries we find that economies with higher levels of financial development have higher export shares and trade balance in industries with more intangible assets using the same dataset we also show that the interplay between property rights protection and asset tangibility influences the pattern of trade higher levels of property rights protection lead to higher export shares and trade balance in industries with more intangible assets

nutrient demand and the allocation of time evidence from guam this paper presents an econometric study of nutrient intake in guam which explicitly accounts for household time allocation and household capital variables the empirical framework is based on a household production model of nutrient consumption food expenditure and the allocation of time between labour leisure and food preparation activities the study finds evidence that 1 capital and wage variables have significant impacts on households nutrient demands 2 income wage and educational status have very different effects on the nutrient choices of low calorie households than on the nutrient choices of high calorie households and 3 a family s participation in the food stamp programme leads to higher levels of food expenditure but this impact is attributable to the purchase of more costly taste characteristics in food rather than to the purchase of more nutritious foods

a demand systems analysis of food commodities by u s households segmented by income using the 1987 88 nationwide food consumption survey twelve food commodity groups were analyzed according to household poverty status parameter estimates were used to obtain subsistence expenditures own price elasticities expenditure elasticities and income elasticities own price elasticities were similar between the income groups for most commodities however income elasticities were consistently higher for the lower income group the use of average estimates of price and income elasticities for the population as a whole for the projection of individual commodity demands is not likely to be successful if notable changes are evident in income distribution

footloose and pollution free in numerous studies economists have found little empirical evidence that environmental regulations affect trade flows in this paper we propose and test several common explanations for why the effect of environmental regulations on trade may be difficult to detect we demonstrate that whereas most trade occurs among industrialized economies environmental regulations have stronger effects on trade between industrialized and developing economies we find that for most industries pollution abatement costs are a small component of total costs and are unrelated to trade flows in addition we show that those industries with the largest pollution abatement costs also happen to be the least geographically mobile or footloose after accounting for these distinctions we measure a significant effect of pollution abatement costs on imports from developing countries and in pollution intensive footloose industries

demand system estimation in the absence of price data an application of stone lewbel price indices this article evaluates the feasibility of estimating a system of demand equations in the absence of price information using the approach developed by lewbel 1989 stone lewbel sl price indices for commodity groups are constructed using information on the budget shares and the consumer price indices cpis of the goods comprising the commodity groups which allows for household level prices to be recovered this study evaluates how susceptible are elasticities and marginal effects estimates from traditional parametric demand systems to the cpi used in the construction of the sl prices to do this three alternative regional cpis are considered for the construction of the sl prices monthly quarterly and a constant unity price index elasticities and marginal effect estimates are computed for eight food commodity groups using the exact affine stone index easi model as the parametric demand system and data from the united states consumer expenditure survey the estimates proved to be robust to the a

markets for risk and openness to trade how are they related if protectionist trade policies aim to insure domestic industries against swings in world market prices the development of financial markets could lead to trade liberalization likewise trade lib

fruit and vegetable consumption patterns a segmentation approach in this article we study the heterogeneity of fruit and vegetable consumption patterns in france a finite mixture of aids models is used to describe food demand patterns revealing different preferences over distinct classes we obtained six different clusters which reflect specific socio demographic characteristics and different income and price elasticities this approach is appropriate for targeting specific public nutritional policies our main results show that unlike the other clusters in which the usual price and income policy tools may be used the lowest income cluster with the lowest consumption remains insensitive to economic variables

do environmental regulations influence the location behavior of french firms this paper investigates the impact of environmental regulations on the location choices made by firms for their industrial activities using a sample of newly appeared imports of french firms from foreign industrial subsidiaries a simple static model based on the production cost minimization is developed in order to control for heterogeneous factor costs within countries distinguishing skilled labor unskilled labor and capital environmental regulations are then shown to be neither statistically nor economically a significant determinant of the location behavior of french firms

law finance and firm growth we investigate how differences in legal and financial systems affect firms use of external financing to fund growth we show that in countries whose legal systems score high on an efficiency index a greater proportion of firms use long term external financing an active though not necessarily large stock market and a large banking sector are also associated with externally financed firm growth the increased reliance on external financing occurs in part because established firms in countries with well functioning institutions have lower profit rates government subsidies to industry do not increase the proportion of firms relying on external financing the corporate finance literature suggests that market imperfections caused by conflicts of interest and informational asymmetries between corporate insiders and investors constrain firms in their ability to fund investment projects the magnitude of these imperfections depends in part on the effectiveness of the legal and financial systems because these systems differ across countries the literature implies that there should exist systematic cross country differences in firms ability to obtain external capital to finance investment in this paper we examine whether the underdevelopment of legal and financial systems does prevent firms in some countries from investing in potentially profitable growth opportunities in particular we focus on the use of long term debt or external equity to fund growth see our earlier work demirgut kunt and maksimovic 1996a which compares firms financial structures in developed and developing countries and finds the greatest difference to be in the provision of long term credit we estimate a financial planning model to obtain the maximum growth rate that each firm in our thirty country sample could attain without access to long term financing we then compare these predicted growth rates to growth rates realized by firms in countries with differing degrees of development in their legal and financial systems our approach enables us to identify specific characteristics of the legal and financial systems that are associated with long term financing of firm growth thus we provide a micro level test of the hypoth

demographic variables in demand analysis in this paper the authors discuss five procedures for incorporating demographic variables into theoretically plausible demand systems translating scaling and the gorman reverse gorman and implicit prais houthakker procedures these five procedures are used to incorporate a single demographic variable the number of children in a household into the generalized ces demand system using household budget data for the united kingdom for the period 1966 1972 excerpt

comparative advantage in manufactured goods a re appraisal japanese input coefficients are used to investigate the pattern of comparative advantage in the exportation of manufactured products in a cross country framework estimates are made for the imports of manufactured products as well as for net exports also alternative techniques of estimation are utilized and an attempt to explain the residuals in the regression equations and to indicate the predictive power of these equations is made the paper shows that patterns of comparative advantage in manufactured goods can be explained by reference to commodity characteristics and country characteristics in turn intercountry differences in the extent of trade orientation the concentration of exports and foreign direct investment explain part of the residuals of the cross country regression equations finally it has been found that the method applied permits projecting the factor intensity of trade for individual countries

the standard error of regressions statistical significance as used in economics has weak theoretical justification in particular it merges statistical and substantive significance the 182 papers using regression analysis in the american economic review in the 1980s were tested against 19 criteria for the accepted use of statistical significance most some three quarters of the papers did poorly likewise textbooks in econometrics do not distinguish statistical and economic significance statistical significance should not be the focus of empirical economics

a modified implicit directly additive demand system a recently developed demand system nicknamed aidads an implicit directly additive demand system offers an approach to capturing consumer preferences across a wide range of expenditure levels aidads generalizes the les by assuming marginal budget shares vary with utility and hence with expenditure like the les aidads includes subsistence parameters that define minimum consumption levels here we present a modified aidads maidads that replaces the constant subsistence parameters with functions that also vary with utility these transformed subsistence levels are referred to as minimum consumption quantities this model is applied to the 1996 international consumption project data as these data span a wide range of expenditure levels maidads offers a viable alternative for the estimation of a global demand system results suggest minimum consumption quantities for staple grains livestock other food products alcohol and tobacco clothing and footwear and transport and transport services vary

a new database on the structure and development of the financial sector this article introduces a new database of indicators of financial structure and financial development across countries and over time the database is unique in that it combines a wide variety of indicators that measure the size activity and efficiency of financial intermediaries and markets it improves on previous efforts by presenting data on the public share of commercial banks introducing indicators of the size and activity of nonbank financial institutions and constructing measures of the size of bond and primary equity markets this article introduces a new database the first to provide comprehensive measures of the development structure and performance of the financial sector this database is the first to define and construct indicators of the size and activity of nonbank financial intermediaries such as insurance companies pension funds and non deposit money banks it is also the first to include indicators of the size of primary equity markets and primary and secondary bond markets in constructing the database authors carefully deflate measures and match stock and flow variables

investor protection and corporate governance recent research has documented large differences among countries in ownership concentration in publicly traded firms in the breadth and depth of capital markets in dividend policies and in the access of firms to external finance a common element to the explanations of these differences is how well investors both shareholders and creditors are protected by law from expropriation by the managers and controlling shareholders of firms we describe the differences in laws and the effectiveness of their enforcement across countries discuss the possible origins of these differences summarize their consequences and assess potential strategies of corporate governance reform we argue that the legal approach is a more fruitful way to understand corporate governance and its reform than the conventional distinction between bank centered and market centered financial systems

does healthy food access matter in a french urban setting limited access to healthy food is commonly regarded as a contributing factor to poor dietary choices the objective of this article is to test this hypothesis in a french context given france s increasing obesity rates and incidence of poor dietary habits we use data on fruit and vegetable consumption frequency and different food retail availability measures for example the number of food stores food surface area and a dispersion measure based on store numbers store types and food area surface from several data sources in france we also employ different types of geographic units when measuring the food retail environment and instrumental variable model specifications to test the robustness of our results which indicate that fewer but larger retail outlets increase the odds of consuming the recommended level of fruit and vegetables we also find that an increase in food supply dispersion will improve fruit and vegetable consumption in paris but not in its suburbs

nutrient elasticities in a complete food demand system this study explores the linkage of the determinants of food choice with consumer nutrient availability by developing a procedure to measure changes in nutrient availability as the demand for food items change it uses demand elasticities from traditional demand analysis to estimate elasticities of changes in the nutritional content of consumer diets the procedure is applied to estimate nutrient elasticities for fifteen nutrients in response to changes in thirty five food prices and per capita income

food expenditures at home and away from home in the united states a switching regression analysis the results of this study showed that the decision to eat away from home was positively affected by income while the amount spent away from home was only affected by income again positively at higher levels of household income food expenditures at home were similarly affected by income only at higher levels of household income provided the household also ate away from home if the household did not eat away from home food expenditures at home were positively affected by income at all levels the effect decreasing in magnitude with the level of income a significant economic trend in recent vdecades is the declining share of consumer expenditures on food expenditures for food fell steadily from 20 0 of disposable personal income in 1960 to 16 1 in the third quarter of 1983 usda this drop occurred as a result of a decline in the share of consumer expenditures on food purchased for consumption at home the share of consumer expenditures on meals purchased at restaurants cafeterias and fast food chains remained constant at about 4 of disposable personal income hence the consumption of purchased meals away from home has become more important relative to food consumed at home a number of studies on food consumption at home and away from home have been made houthakker and taylor 1970 obtained results that indicate away from home food expenditures were more responsive to total consumption expenditures than at home expenditures based on 1960 61 household budget data time series data were also employed by houthakker and taylor to investigate the dynamics of food consumption prochaska and schrimper 1973 found that along with income the opportunity cost of time is an important factor in determining away from home food consumption fishe et al 1979 employing simple and heteroscedastic tobit models found that income and household specific circumstances are important determinants of restaurant expenditures lamm 1982 estimated a translog demand system for food consumed at home purchased meals and non food items his results indicated that consumers have been eating away from home more often primarily as a result of increases in their incomes recently huang and raunikar 1984 estimated engel equations for at home and away from home food expenditures using ordinary least squares and tobit regressions respectively in their study huang and raunikar found that in general at home food consumption is less income responsive than away from home food consumption the major objective of huang and raunikar s study was to investigate the importance to household food expenditures of consigned income for committed expenditures this study further investigates food consumption at home and away from home employing a switching regression model the same basic data analyzed by huang and rauniker hr are also analyzed here however since the hr study focused on consigned income households not reporting complete information with regard to committed expenditures e g rent or mortgage or after tax income were not included in their study in this study the emphasis is placed on the household s choice of whether to eat out and the factors affecting consequent away from home and at home food expenditures the sample includes all households that reported before tax income and is significantly larger than the sample used in the hr study

demographic effects in demand analysis estimation of the quadratic expenditure system using microdata the purpose of this paper is to estimate a complete theoretically plausible system of demand equations on microdata using the rich detail of these data to investigate the impact of demographic variables on demand behavior the system which we estimate is the quadratic expenditure system qes introduced by howe pollak and wales we evaluate four methods for incorporating demographic variables into the demand system three of these procedures imply parameter restrictions while the fourth does not tests on the restrictions imply that for our data unrestricted estimation yields significantly greater explanatory power

environmental regulations transfers and trade theory and evidence abstract this paper develops a theory of compensation of producers for the costs associated with environmental regulations we show that the existence of transfers can give counter intuitive effects of environmental policy on both output and trade flows in particular the compensation obtained by producers neutralizes the effect of environmental policy on output and consequently on trade flows this may help explain why previous empirical research has found weak evidence that environmental regulations affect trade patterns the theory is tested using agricultural sector data the evidence supports the hypothesis that environmental regulations and transfers are positively correlated

the demand for selected nutrients by greek households an empirical analysis with quantile regressions the article uses information from the 1993 1994 household consumption survey and the semiparametric quantile regression approach to analyze the demand for three macronutrients carbohydrates proteins and fats and three micronutrients minerals vitamins and cholesterol in greece according to the empirical results the age of the household head the degree of urbanization the percentage of food expenditure devoted to food away from home and the per capita consumption expenditure affect the intakes of nutrients across all the five quantiles considered the impact however of the household head s gender and the impact of his her educational achievement are located only at the lower and the higher quantiles respectively the expenditure elasticities are substantially lower than unity suggesting inelastic responses of nutrient intakes to per capita consumption expenditure

is there an intrahousehold flypaper effect evidence from a school feeding programme are public transfers targeted toward children neutralised by the household as the theory of altruism implies or is there an intrahousehold flypaper effect whereby such transfers stick to the child this paper studies the impact of a school feeding programme on child caloric intake in the philippines using a quasi experimental methodology the empirical results confirm an intrahousehold flypaper effect indeed they indicate virtually no intrahousehold reallocation of calories in response to the feeding programme in poorer households however children s gains from the programme appear to be taxed more heavily

judging factor abundance recent theory casts doubt on the frequently used interindustry regression method of inferring a country s abundant factors this paper examines the empirical importance of these theoretical qualifications by comparing regression derived estimates of factor abundance with both revealed and actual factor abundances for 35 countries and 12 resources we demonstrate the theoretical importance of trade imbalances for the reliability of the regression estimates and therefore propose and implement a theoretically consistent trade imbalance correction the results indicate that despite valid theoretical concerns the regression estimates are generally reliable indicators of revealed factor abundance therefore the innumerable regression studies conducted over the past 30 years can be considered to provide reliable evidence concerning the validity of the factor abundance theory

environmental regulation and industry location in europe this paper estimates the effect of environmental regulation on industry location and compares it with other determinants of location such as agricultural education and r d country characteristics the analysis is based on a general empirical trade model that captures the interaction between country and industry characteristics in determining industry location the johnson neyman technique is used to fully explicate the nature of the conditional interactions the model is applied to data on 16 manufacturing industries from 13 european countries the empirical results indicate that the pollution haven effect is present and that the relative strength of such an effect is of about the same magnitude as other determinants of industry location a significant negative effect on industry location is observed only at relatively high levels of industry pollution intensity

dietary fiber intake away from home and at home in the united states abstract this paper examines the impact of socio economic and demographic factors on individual intake of dietary fiber in both the away from home and at home markets empirical results generally indicated that height region sex diet status household size age and income significantly affect dietary fiber intake away from home on the other hand weight urbanization region race ethnicity sex diet status household size day of consumption age and income significantly affect dietary fiber intake at home knowledge of the influence of sociodemographic factors provides food policy makers with information necessary for the design and implementation of nutrition programs dealing with dietary fiber intake

existing food policies and their relationship to hunger and nutrition the federal government subsidizes either partially or fully 95 million meals each day through the food assistance programs u s department of agriculture usda 1984 despite the scope and cost of the food assistance programs table 1 recent studies have concluded that the incidence of hunger in the united states is increasing porter and washington chou 1 although there is general agreement that hunger reemerged in the united states during the 1980s there is much controversy regarding the extent of hunger the physician task force on hunger in america estimated that 20 million americans suffer from hunger at least some time each month but the president s task force on food assistance indicated that it is currently impossible to estimate the extent of hunger because of the absence of reliable data the objectives of this paper are twofold a to review current food programs and policies and their objectives relative to existing nutritional and hunger problems and b to appraise the existing food assistance programs based on their stated objectives this discussion is not intended to be a thorough discourse on key elements of food policy but is designed to highlight developments in food policy relating to the food assistance programs nutrition and hunger recent developments in food assistance programs

food expenditures and household demographic composition in the us a demand systems approach food expenditures and subsistence quantities of poverty status and non poverty status us households are analysed within a linear expenditure system that postulates subsistence quantities to be linear combinations of demographic variables using the us bureau of labor statistics 1992 consumer expenditure survey and detailed monthly consumer price indices this article obtains expenditure elasticities own price elasticities and subsistence quantities for each income group across nine broadly aggregated food commodity groups elasticity estimates and subsistence quantity estimates differ across income groups supporting the premise that policies targeted at specific income groups should be based on the target group s elasticity estimates rather than average population elasticities parameter estimates are then used to simulate how subsistence quantities and own price elasticities can be expected to vary according to the demographic composition of the household within a specific income group

a unified approach to incorporating demographic or other effects into demand systems a general method of introducing demographic effects into any demand system using modifying functions is described which permits complicated interactions of demographic variables with prices and expeditures theorems give properties the modifying functions must have to ensure integrability of the resulting system demand equations of the new system are given explicitly as functions of the original demand equations and the modifying functions the procedure is interpreted as altering a households technology and is shown to encompass adult equivalent scales and related methods examples of modifying functions are derived and applications of the technique to uses other than demographic variation are considered excerpt

does international integration matter for financial development in africa this article analyses the links between international financial and trade integration and financial development in sub saharan african ssa countries it is based on a panel data set using methods that tackle slope heterogeneity cross sectional dependence and nonstationarity the results do not point to a general direct robust link between trade and financial integration and financial development in ssa once we control for other factors such as gdp per capita and inflation the findings may be due to a number of factors including distortions in domestic financial markets relatively weak institutions and or poor financial sector supervision we find some indication that financial integration is more important for financial development in countries with better institutional quality stronger scores in some measures of the quality of banking regulation and supervision are also linked to a positive association between integration and financial development in some of our results thus african policy maker

linkages between financial deepening trade openness and economic development causality evidence from sub saharan africa summary this contribution tests for causality between financial deepening trade openness and economic development for 16 sub saharan african countries the hsiao granger method is used to add to the existing empirical evidence only limited support is found for the popular hypothesis of finance led growth in general the evidence indicates that financial deepening and trade openness have swayed economic development rather marginally in particular the investigated countries have failed to benefit from financial deepening development strategies prioritizing financial or trade sector development hence cannot be supported

do commodity price shocks weaken the financial sector this paper investigates the impact of commodity price shocks on financial sector fragility using a large sample of 71 commodity exporters among emerging and developing economies it shows that negative shocks to commodity prices tend to weaken the financial sector with larger shocks having more pronounced impacts more specifically negative commodity price shocks are associated with higher non performing loans bank costs and banking crises while they reduce bank profits liquidity and provisions to non performing loans these adverse effects tend to occur in countries with poor quality of governance weak fiscal space as well as those that do not have a sovereign wealth fund do not implement macroprudential policies and do not have a diversified export base these findings are robust to a battery of robustness checks

comparing heterogeneous consumption in u s and japanese meat and fish demand this article uses national quarterly data to conduct an empirical analysis of pre committed meat and fish demand by u s and japanese households using the generalized almost ideal demand system gaids pre committed demand represents the component of demand that is insensitive to both income and price adjustments u s consumers are found to hold significant positive pre committed demand for beef and pork while japanese consumers appear to possess significant positive pre committed demand for beef and fish this provides evidence to partially explain observed differences in japanese and u s consumer reactions to nonprice and nonincome effects in beef pork poultry and fish in addition based on inand out of sample performance the more general gaids is preferred to the almost ideal demand system aids for both the u s and japanese demand systems results lend to improved demand modeling efforts and more complete understanding of true market forces at hand in meat and fish markets for these culturally diverse consumer groups

estimation of complete demand systems from household budget data the linear and quadratic expenditure systems in this paper we explore two issues in empirical demand analysis the estimation of complete systems of demand equations using household budget data section i and the incorporation of demographic characteristics into such systems section ii although there are numerous studies which use time series data to estimate complete demand systems and many which estimate engel curves from household budget data there are virtually none which combine budget data from different periods to estimate complete systems since each budget study corresponds to a single price situation one might conjecture that estimation of complete systems would not be possible unless budget studies were available from a large number of periods this is incorrect in section i we argue that interesting complete demand systems can be estimated from a small number of budget studies despite the limited price variability represented in such data to demonstrate this we use budget study data for two periods to estimate a pair of related demand systems the familiar linear expenditure system les and a quadratic expenditure system qes a generalization of les in which the demand equations are quadratic in total expenditure the inclusion of demographic variables in the analysis of household consumption patterns is desirable because there are likely to be systematic differences in the consumption behavior of households with different demographic characteristics but the effects of demographic characteristics have seldom been studied within the framework of complete demand systems in section ii we propose translating as a general method for incorporating demographic variables into complete systems of demand equations this method has not previously been discussed as a general technique for bringing demographic variables into demand systems although it has been employed in several studies to improve the estimates of the les and the qes presented in section i we reestimate these two systems using translating to incorporate family size

the influence of recession and income strata on consumer demand for protein sources though meat products are considered the primary sources of protein in the u s people consume a variety of protein sources including meat fish eggs dairy products and beans this study expands

the impact of food stamps on food expenditures rejection of the traditional model for food stamp recipients whose normal food purchases exceed their coupon allotment the traditional economic model predicts that the impact of food stamps on food spending will be the same as for an equal cash transfer the tobit analysis in this study indicates that for these recipients food stamps have a substantially greater impact on at home food expenditures than an equal amount of cash income these results reject the traditional model several possible explanations of this behavior are discussed

capital account liberalization financial depth and economic growth abstract we show a statistically significant and economically relevant effect of open capital accounts on financial depth and economic growth in a cross section of countries over the periods 1986 1995 and 1976 1995 countries having open capital accounts had a significantly greater increase in financial depth and over the 20 year period greater economic growth these results however are largely driven by the developed countries included in the sample the observed failure of capital account liberalization to promote financial deepening among developing countries suggests potentially important policy implications concerning the desirability of opening up the capital account

dietary effects of the food stamp program based on data from the 1979 80 survey of food consumption in low income households this paper estimates the effects of changes in cash income and the food stamp benefit on household nutrient availability while controlling for two potential sources of selection bias the major finding of the empirical analysis is that the estimated dietary effects of changes in food stamp benefits are considerably larger than those resulting from changes in cash income with estimates of the ratios of the mpc for the food stamp benefit to the cash income mpc ranging from three to seven across nutrients no significant evidence of selection bias was found and the estimated dietary effects of food stamp benefits from the selection bias models are similar to those from the basic model estimated by ordinary least squares regression

financial development and openness evidence from panel data abstract this paper addresses the empirical question of whether trade and financial openness can help explain the recent pace in financial development as well as its variation across countries in recent years utilising annual data from developing and industrialised countries and dynamic panel estimation techniques we provide evidence which suggests that both types of openness are statistically significant determinants of banking sector development our findings reveal that the marginal effects of trade financial openness are negatively related to the degree of financial trade openness indicating that relatively closed economies stand to benefit most from opening up their trade and or capital accounts although these economies may be able to accomplish more by taking steps to open both their trade and capital accounts opening up one without the other could still generate gains in terms of banking sector development thus our findings provide only partial support to the well known rajan and zingales hypothesis which stipulates that both types of openness are necessary for financial development to take place