smallholders land access in sub saharan africa a new landscape while scholars long recognized the importance of land markets as a key driver of rural non farm development and transformation in rural areas evidence on the extent of their operation and the nature of participants remains limited we use household data from 6 countries to show that there is great potential for such markets to increase productivity and equalize factor ratios while rental markets transfer land to land poor and labor rich producers their operation and thus impact may be constrained by policy restrictions their functioning may also be constrained by ill defined or insecure rights that may arise from failure to fully compensate existing rights in cases of expropriation a failure to implement more broadly land policies or to do so in a gender sensitive manner methodological and substantive conclusions are derived

wage stagnation rising inequality and the financial crisis of 2008 the most widely embraced explanations of the financial crisis of 2008 have centered upon inadequate regulation stemming from laissez faire ideology combined with low interest rates although these widely acknowledged causal factors are true beneath them lie deeper determining forces that have received less notice wage stagnation and a dramatic increase in inequality in the u s over the preceding 35 years wage stagnation and heightened inequality generated three dynamics that made the economy vulnerable to systemic dysfunction the first is that they constrained consumption reducing profitable investment potential in the real economy and thereby encouraging an every wealthier elite to flood financial markets with credit helping keep interest rates low encouraging the creation of new credit instruments and greater indebtedness and fueling speculation the second dynamic is that consumption externalities were generated forcing individuals to struggle harder to find ways to maintain the welfare of their families and maintain their relative social status the consequence was that over the preceding three decades household saving rates plummeted households took on ever greater debt and worked longer hours the third dynamic is that as the rich took larger shares of income and wealth they gained more command over ideology and hence politics reducing the size of government cutting taxes on the rich and reducing welfare for the poor deregulating the economy and failing to regulate newly evolving credit instruments flowed out of this ideology

financialisation income distribution and aggregate demand in the usa this paper investigates the effects of financialisation and functional income distribution on aggregate demand in the usa by estimating the effects of the increase in rentier income dividends and interest payments and housing and financial wealth on consumption and investment the redistribution of income in favour of profits suppresses consumption whereas the increase in the rentier income and wealth has positive effects a higher rentier income decreases investment without the wealth effects the overall effect of the changes in distribution on aggregate demand would have been negative thus a pro capital income distribution leads to a slightly negative effect on growth i e the usa economy is moderately wage led

candidate reputations and the incumbency effect abstract a major shortcoming of the classical median voter model is that its central prediction convergence of platforms to the median voter s ideal is seldom observed one reason is that the classical model neglects the importance of voter expectations as a determinant of votes here we associate voters expectations about candidates with past as well as current candidate pronouncements and assume that incumbents whose actions are consistent with their reputations are perceived as less risky than challengers in equilibrium candidates choose distinct platforms typically neither adopts the median voter s ideal point either candidate may win depending on how well the incumbent s reputation reflects current voter tastes and how relatively risky the electorate perceives the challenger to be

are poor people credit constrained or myopic evidence from a south african panel credit constraints are an almost ubiquitous assumption in development economics yet direct evidence for credit constraints is limited and many observations consistent with credit constraints are equally compatible with myopic non forward looking consumption or precautionary saving using household panel data and a source of widely anticipated income in south africa this paper tests and rejects the standard consumption model with perfect capital markets then myopic consumption and precautionary saving are tested as alternative explanations for the observed jumps in expenditure the standard model with credit constraints cannot be rejected in favour of myopic consumption or precautionary saving

international competition income distribution and economic growth this paper shows that the neo keynesian case for wage led growth does not generally hold in an open economy model wage increases cause a loss of competitiveness that reduces the trade balance if the economy is relatively open to trade and price elasticities satisfy certain restrictions the worsening of the trade balance more than outweighs the increase in workers consumption thus reducing the growth rate the main theoretical innovation is a flexible markup pricing rule that allows changes in unit labor costs and exchange rates to affect profit margins implications for international relations and class conflict are discussed copyright 1989 by oxford university press

income distribution and current account imbalances we develop a three country stock flow consistent macroeconomic model to study the effects of changes in both personal and functional income distribution on national current account balances each country has a household sector and a non household corporate sector the household sector is divided into income deciles and consumer demand is characterized by upward looking status comparisons following the relative income hypothesis of consumption the strength of consumption emulation depends on country specific institutions the model is calibrated for the united states germany and china simulations suggest that a substantial part of the increase in household debt and the decrease in the current account in the united states since the early 1980s can be explained by the interplay of rising top end household income inequality and institutions on the other hand the weak domestic demand and increasing current account balances of germany and china since the mid 1990s are strongly related to shifts in the functional income distribution at the expense of the household sector

agricultural household models extensions applications and policy this book presents the basic model of an agricultural household that underlies most of the case studies undertaken so far the model assumes that households are price takers and is therefore recursive the decisions modeled include those affecting production and the demand for inputs and those affecting consumption and the supply of labor comparative results on selected elasticities are presented for a number of economies the empirical significance of the approach is demonstrated in a comparison of models that treat production and consumption decisions separately and those in which the decisionmaking process is recursive the book summarizes the implications of agricultural pricing policy for the welfare of farm households marketed surplus the demand for nonagricultural goods and services the rural labor market budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings in addition it is shown that the basic model can be extended in order to explore the effects of government policy on crop composition nutritional status health saving and investment and to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the effects on budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings methodological topics primarily the data requirements of the basic model and its extensions along with aggregation market interaction uncertainty and market imperfections are discussed the most important methodological issues the question of the recursive property of these models is also discussed

spatial equilibrium with entry this paper examines spatial equilibrium in political competition when established parties choose their platforms competitively while rationally anticipating entry of a vote maximizing third party the resulting equilibrium is substantially different from the hotelling median equilibrium established parties are spatially separated and third parties will generally lose the election this provides one theoretical explanation for the stability of two party systems namely that non cooperative behavior between established parties can effectively prevent third parties from winning

the contribution of wealth concentration to the subprime crisis a quantitative estimation the crisis that broke out in mid 2007 was caused by the fact that the cdo market had grown to a size sufficient to wreak general havoc when it suddenly collapsed several authors have argued that economic inequality was important to the growth of this market this paper attempts to strengthen this argument by concentrating attention on global wealth concentration after summarising recent evidence on the negative impact of investor demand on us bond yields in the pre crisis period new evidence regarding the specific contribution of high net worth individuals to this negative impact is presented the paper then goes on to show how after having helped to caused a yield problem in the major us debt markets high net worth individuals via hedge funds continued to be a major source of the pressure on us banks to resolve this yield problem through the mass production of cdos

agriculture in africa telling myths from facts a synthesis stylized facts drive research agendas and policy debates yet robust stylized facts are hard to come by and when available often outdated in a special issue of food policy 12 papers revisit conventional wisdom on african agriculture and its farmers livelihoods using nationally representative surveys from the living standards measurement study integrated surveys on agriculture initiative in six african countries at times the findings simply confirm the common understanding of the topic but the studies also throw up several surprises redirecting some policy debates while fine tuning others overall the project calls for more attention to checking and updating the common wisdom this requires nationally representative data and sufficient incentives among researchers and policy makers alike without well grounded stylized facts they can easily be profoundly misguided

elections coalitions and legislative outcomes predictions of electoral behavior in a multiparty setting should be a function of the voters beliefs about how parties will perform following an election similarly party behavior in a legislature should be a function of electoral promises and rewards we develop a multistage game theoretic model of three party competition under proportional representation the final policy outcome of the game is generated by a noncooperative bargaining game between the parties in the elected legislature this game is essentially defined by the vote shares each party receives in the general election and the parties electoral policy positions at the electoral stage parties and voters are strategic in that they take account of the legislative implications of any electoral outcome we solve for equilibrium electoral positions by the parties and final policy outcomes

post keynesian stock flow consistent modelling a survey the aim of the paper is to provide an overview of the current stock ow consistent sfc literature indeed we feel the sfc approach has recently led to a blossoming literature requiring a new summary after the work of dos santos and above all after the publication of the main reference work on the methodology godley and lavoie s monetary economics an integrated approach to credit money income production and wealth the paper is developed along the following lines first a brief historical analysis investigates the roots of this class of models that can be traced as far back as 1949 and the work of copeland second the competing points of view regarding some of its main controversial aspects are underlined and used to classify the different methodological approaches followed in using these models namely we discuss i how the models are solved ii the treatment of time and its implication and ii the need or not for microfoundations these results are then used in the third section of the paper to develop a bifocal perspective which allows us to divide the literature reviewed according to both its subject and the methodology we explore various topics such as financialisation exchange rate modelling policy implication the need for a common framework within the post keynesian literature and the empirical use of sfc models finally the conclusions present some hypotheses and wishes for the possible lines of development of sfc models

multicandidate equilibrium in american elections the united states presidential election of 1992 is anexample of a multicandidate contest involving bothdemocratic and republican candidates using a spatialmodelling approach i analyze candidate policystrategy for such elections under the assumption thatvoters choose according to the multivariate votingmodel of behavioral research this model representsvoters decisions as probabilistic functions of theirpolicy preferences and political partisanship isuggest reasons why partisan voting motivatescandidates to locate near their party s partisans inthe policy space and illustrate this argument withrespect to the 1992 presidential election the resultsof computer simulations suggest that these motivationslead to multicandidate spatial equilibria which arerobust to changes in the model s parameters partisanship appears to be an important source ofstability in multicandidate electoral competition

existence and computation of mixed strategy nash equilibrium for 3 firms location problem location problems of firms on a closed interval were introduced by hotelling 3 and later investigated by eaton lipsey 2 firms sell a homogeneous product at a fixed price customers distributed along the interval buy one unit each from the firm nearest to them and firms aim to maximize the number of their customers it is well known that where the customers are evenly distributed along the interval and the number of firms is other than 3 the location problem has a pure strategy nash equilibrium see 2 the case of 3 firms is peculiar in that no pure strategy nash equilibrium exists for in any situation one of the extreme firms not located between the other two can increase its revenue by either moving towards or away from the other two firms the existence of mixed strategies is not obvious because the payoff functions are discontinuous whenever two or more firms are located at the same point in a recent paper dasgupta and maskin 1 investigate a class of games all derived from economic problems and all with some discontinuities in their payoff functions they demonstrate that the discontinuities in the payoff functions do not prevent the existence of mixed strategies nash equilibria in the games investigated in particular location problems of the type described earlier have such weak discontinuities and hence possess a mixed strategy nash equilibrium although their proof is constructive offering a method of approaching these equilibria as a limit of equilibria of finite games the equations involved very quickly become unmanageable in this note we compute a mixed strategy nash equilibrium for the 3 firms location problem let the customers be evenly distributed along 0 1 then a mixed strategy is a probability measure over 0 1 the symmetry of the problem suggests that the solution will be doubly symmetric in that all firms choose the same mixed strategy and that this strategy is symmetric around symmetric locations are given the same probabilities dasgupta and maskin confine their analysis to doubly symmetric solutions and prove that the strategies in any doubly symmetric equilibrium are atomless given the symmetric nature of the game and following the analysis of dasgupta and maskin we shall confine ourselves here to such doubly sym

separation hypothesis tests in the agricultural household model in an agricultural household model farmers production decisions can be either separated or nonseparated from preferences since previous studies on agricultural household behavior and policy effects have shown that the model with separation yields different results than the model with nonseparation it is important to have a test to identify the correct model this paper provides new tests that extend current tests in two directions first the new tests avoid issues that current tests have to address such as simultaneity bias and the estimation of the production function second the new tests make use of more information implied from the separation hypothesis than current tests

third parties in equilibrium under standard assumptions equilibria with three parties normally do not exist in spatial models of electoral competition in this paper i show that such equilibria are possible if it is assumed that voters are uncertain about the exact policies parties will adopt once elected substantive predictions can be derived from the model explaining some features of three party competition first the least risk party will always take the most moderate position second this position is also winning third the two riskier parties are always on opposite sides of the median voter and also of the moderate party

the existence of equilibrium in discontinuous economic games ii applications in part i of this study we established two existence theorems for mixed strategy equilibrium in games with discontinuous payoff functions see theorems 4 4 and 5 5 in dasgupta and maskin 1986 hereafter d m 1986 in this second part we use the second of these two theorems to prove the existence of mixed strategy equilibrium in some wellknown discontinuous economic games that fail to have pure strategy equilibria the models we analyse are the bertrand edgeworth example of price setting duopolists with capacity constraints see section 2 2 price competition among firms producing differentiated products hotelling 1929 and d aspremont gabszewicz and thisse 1979 see section 2 3 spatial competition eaton and lipsey 1975 and shaked 1975 see section 3 and models of market dependent information rothschild and stiglitz 1976 and wilson 1977 section 4 the paper concludes section 5 with a classification of these models

stagnation income distribution and monopoly power the deceleration in the rate of industrial growth in the indian economy since the middlesixties initially interpreted by some as a temporary downward deviation from trend hasnow come to be generally accepted as reflecting long run tendencies towards stagnation several explanations for these tendencies have been offered bhagwati and desai 1970 and bhagwati and srinivasan 1975 have focused on inefficiencies and the misallocationof resources arising from industrial policies pursued by the government others chakravarty 1974 raj 1976 and vaidyanathan 1974 among them have emphasisedthe sluggishness of agricultural growth which is alleged to have retarded industrial growthby limiting markets and the supply of wage goods and raw materials a third view reflectedin srinivasan and narayana 1977 for example has put the blame on a slackening of invest ment demand due to lower public investment but does not explain why public investmentfell or why its fall restrained industrial growth finally there is the explanation put forthin bagchi 1970 1975 1982 in nayyar 1978 and in parts of mitra 1977 that inequali ties in income distribution have resulted in a limited demand for industrial goods reducedincentives for investment and therefore reduced growth this view seems to suggest apositive relation between growth and income equality which is opposed to the generallyaccepted idea derived from cambridge growth models that higher growth requires greaterinequality the purpose of this paper is to examine the last explanation by considering the inter action between growth and income distribution in an underdeveloped economy with thehelp of a simple macroeconomic model the model is a stylisation of the indian economy so that we will be able to use the model to assess the argument that a deceleration in therate of growth of the indian industrial economy could have been caused by an unequaldistribution of income the argument will not be made that this income distributional con straint is the binding constraint on industrial growth the model will merely examine theinternal consistency of the argument that a bad income distribution could explain stagnation in the sense of reduced growth and show that in the indian context as in other similarcontexts this argument can be put forward in explaining stagnation our argument is first presented with a highly simplified schematisation of the indianeconomy which we shall call the basic model the economy modelled produces only one

a synthetic stock flow consistent macroeconomic model of financialisation this article is centred around the notions of shareholder value orientation and financialisation shareholder value orientation is reflected by a high dividend payout ratio applied by firms and the reluctance of firms to finance physical investment via new equity issues financialisation is the more general development towards an increased importance of the financial sector of the economy relative to the non financial sector in this article a synthetic stock flow consistent model is developed that attempts to encompass some important recent works on the effects of financialisation this includes contributions from the fields of mainstream information economics and post keynesian economics we conduct simulations reflecting increased shareholder value orientation and show that the results are consistent with important stylised facts copyright the author 2008 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

state conditional fertilizer yield response on western kenyan farms 15 16 17 we acknowledge with gratitude support from the rockefeller foundation the united states agency for 18 international development usaid leadership enhancement in agriculture program leap and the 19 coupled natural and human systems program of the biocomplexity initiative of the national science 20 foundation through grant bcs 0215890 the world agroforestry center icraf graciously hosted 21 the lead author for part of the research and provided soil test results we are also grateful to james

asymmetric non separation and rural labor markets abstract this paper develops and implements a test that provides insight into the state of rural labor markets the test is based on a theoretical link between a shortage or surplus in the labor market and asymmetric responses to changes in household composition we develop auxiliary tests to distinguish other market imperfections from labor market imperfections and provide evidence that most changes in household composition are exogenous to local labor market conditions we implement the test using data from ethiopia malawi tanzania and uganda the overall pattern is one of excess labor supply in rural areas with heterogeneity across cultivation phases genders and agro ecological zones surplus labor is most evident during low intensity cultivation phases in ethiopia there is suggestive evidence that credit constraints create a de facto labor shortage for poorer households there is also evidence of partial gender segmentation in rural labor markets

income inequality in the united states 1913 1998 this paper presents new homogeneous series on top shares of income and wages from 1913 to 1998 in the united states using individual tax returns data top income and wages shares display a u shaped pattern over the century our series suggest that the large shocks that capital owners experienced during the great depression and world war ii have had a permanent effect on top capital incomes we argue that steep progressive income and estate taxation may have prevented large fortunes from fully recovering from these shocks top wage shares were flat before world war ii dropped precipitously during the war and did not start to recover before the late 1960s but are now higher than before world war ii as a result the working rich have replaced the rentiers at the top of the income distribution

financialisation and capital accumulation in the non financial corporate sector a theoretical and empirical investigation on the us economy 1973 2003 recent research has explored the growing financialization process in the u s and other advanced economies the term is a catch all phrase used to denote important changes in the structure of non financial corporations balance sheets including the growth of income from financial subsidiaries and investment as well as growth in the transfer of earnings to financial markets in the forms of interest payments dividend payments and stock buybacks this paper seeks to empirically explore the relationship between financialization in the u s economy and real investment at the firm level using data from a sample of non financial corporations from 1973 to 2003 i find a negative relationship between real investment and financialization first increased financial investment and increased financial profit opportunities may have crowded out real investment by changing the incentives of firm managers and directing funds away from real investment second increased payments to the financial markets may have impeded real investment by decreasing available internal funds shortening the planning horizons of the firm management and increasing uncertainty these two channels can help explain the negative relationship i find between investment and financialization

causal pathways of the productive impacts of cash transfers experimental evidence from lesotho abstract this paper has the double aim to study whether unconditional cash transfers have an impact on farm production and to look into the causal mechanisms through which government transfers produce productive impacts we use mediation analysis to identify the total effect of transfers on farm production and to isolate the influence of the labour channel from other transmission channels in particular we analyze whether changes in farm production are caused by transfer induced changes in the use of farm labour either by reallocating family labour between off and on farm work or by changes in the demand for hired labour or if other transmission channels are at work we find that cash transfers have a sizable impact on farm production but they do not lead to increased use of family or hired labour on the farm which implies that the productive impacts of cash transfers flow through other channels different from the labour one

how much of the labor in african agriculture is provided by women the contribution of women to labor in african agriculture is regularly quoted in the range of 60 to 80 percent using individual disaggregated plot level labor input data from nationally representative household surveys across six sub saharan african countries this study estimates the average female labor share in crop production at 40 percent it is slightly above 50 percent in malawi tanzania and uganda and substantially lower in nigeria 37 percent ethiopia 29 percent and niger 24 percent there are no systematic differences across crops and activities but female labor shares tend to be higher in households where women own a larger share of the land and when they are more educated controlling for the gender and knowledge profile of the respondents does not meaningfully change the predicted female labor shares the findings question prevailing assertions regarding substantial gains in aggregate crop output as a result of increasing female agricultural productivity

are current accounts driven by competitiveness or asset prices a synthetic model and an empirical test this paper analyses the emergence of current account imbalances as a result of the co existence of trade flows and financial flows the literature has tended to view these factors in isolation many post kaleckian models as well as net saving approaches assume that financial flows will adjust to trade flows models focusing on financial crises feature a strong role for financial flows but ignore drivers of trade flows similarly empirical analyses either ignore drivers of financial flows or insufficiently capture determinants of trade flows the paper first proposes a simple macroeconomic framework of the current account which gives equal emphasis to trade flows determined by price competitiveness and financial flows determined by asset prices second we test a reduced form of the model for 28 oecd countries for the period 1971 2014 our results indicate that cost competitiveness as well as asset prices play a role in the determination of current accounts but asset prices have dominated in the last two decades

inequality household debt and financial instability an agent based perspective abstract our paper contributes to the literature on the causes of the 2007 2008 financial crisis in the united states by means of an agent based model we replicate an artificial credit network economy in order to assess the impact of growing income inequality in the presence of peer effects and home equity borrowing we show that the resulting debt financed consumption boom jeopardises the stability of the economic system thus paving the way for a financial crisis our model includes a behavioural rule for consumption based on expenditure cascades a hierarchical structure of household finance an articulated credit market with collateralised consumption loans and mortgages and a simple housing market results show that the model is able to capture the economic and social pressure of inequality on low and middle income households that pushes them to increase their consumption via home equity extraction rising non performing loans lead to higher bad debt on the banks balance sheets and consequently to the emergence of a crisis as an endogenous dynamic

the budget process and the size of the budget the new congressional budget process provides members of congress with a new set of institutional mechanisms for making budget decisions this article addresses the question of whether or under what conditions rigid application of the new budget process modeled as first selection of the size of the budget and second its division produces smaller budgets than a piecemeal appropriations process in which the size of the budget is determined residually the theoretical result is that the new process sometimes results in relatively large budgets a testable implication of the theory is that given a choice of how stringently the budget process is to be employed members of congress jointly consider preferences and the expected outcomes under available institutional arrangements and select the arrangement usually a rule that yields the most favorable outcome empirical results from the budget process in the house from 1980 to 1983 are generally supportive of the theoretically derived hypothesis of rational choice of institutional arrangements

agricultural factor markets in sub saharan africa an updated view with formal tests for market failure this paper uses the recently collected living standard measurement study integrated surveys on agriculture initiative data sets from five countries in sub saharan africa to provide a comprehensive overview of land and labor market participation by agrarian households and to formally test for failures in factor markets under complete and competitive markets households can solve their consumption and production problems separately so that household factor endowments do not predict input demand this paper implements a simple theoretically grounded test of this separation hypothesis which can be interpreted as a reduced form test of factor market failure in all five study countries the analysis finds strong evidence of factor market failure moreover those failures appear general and structural not specific to subpopulations defined by gender or geography

incumbent positioning as a determinant of strategic response to entry existing research has identified different firm characteristics that determine an incumbent s reaction toward market entrants this study widens the perspective from a firm s absolute attributes to its relative positioning within its competitive environment the hypotheses for the empirical analysis are derived from game theoretic models with either vertical or horizontal product differentiation in each of the two theoretical models two incumbents initially choose very different quality and variety levels respectively and move closer to the center when faced by entry of a competitor from the vertical differentiation model we predict a stronger price reduction by high quality firms in our empirical analysis we are using a novel dataset of the high quality restaurant market in germany to test the theoretical findings while the hypotheses with respect to adjustments of prices and varieties are supported we do not find empirical evidence for the predicted quality adjustment

macroeconomic implications of financialisation a growing literature suggests that financialisation may weaken the performance of non financial corporations and constrain the growth of aggregate demand this paper uses two alternative approaches one derived from skott and one from lavoie and godley and two different settings a labour constrained setting and a dual economy setting to evaluate some of the claims that have been made our analysis which pays explicit attention to financial stock flow relations suggests that the qualitative effects of financialisation are insensitive to the precise specification of household saving behaviour but depend critically on the labour market assumptions labour constrained versus dual and the specification of the investment function harrodian versus kaleckian

functional income distribution and aggregate demand in the euro area an increase in the wage share has contradictory effects on the subaggregates of aggregate demand private consumption expenditures ought to increase because wage incomes typically are associated with higher consumption propensities than capital incomes investment expenditures ought to be negatively affected because investment will positively depend on profits net exports will be negatively affected because an increase in the wage share corresponds to an increase in unit labour costs and thus a loss in competitiveness therefore theoretically aggregate demand can be either wage led or profit led depending on how these effects add up the results will crucially depend on how open the economy is internationally the paper estimates a post kaleckian macro model incorporating these effects for the euro area and finds that the euro area is presently in a wage led demand regime implications for wage policies are discussed

peasant household behaviour with missing markets some paradoxes explained a model of peasant household behavior under varying degrees of household specific food and labor market failures is constructed to show that these structural features can explain several well known patterns of peasant response which have often been attributed to peculiar motives presumed specific to peasants the model explains sluggish response to cash crops prices and high instability in perceived food and labor scarcities the key role of manufactured consumer goods prices in stimulating peasants effort in cash crops production the effectiveness of taxation as opposed to incentives in stimulating cash crops production and the key role of technological change in food production to enhance cash crop production results are obtained analytically in the case of one market failure and by numerical simulation with more than one

farms families and markets new evidence on completeness of markets in agricultural settings the farm household model has played a central role in improving the understanding of small scale agricultural households and non farm enterprises under the assumptions that all current and future markets exist and that farmers treat all prices as given the model simplifies households simultaneous production and consumption decisions into a recursive form in which production can be treated as independent of preferences of household members these assumptions which are the foundation of a large literature in labor and development have been tested and not rejected in several important studies including benjamin 1992 using multiple waves of longitudinal survey data from central java indonesia this paper tests a key prediction of the recursive model demand for farm labor is unrelated to the demographic composition of the farm household the prediction is unambiguously rejected the rejection cannot be explained by contamination due to unobserved heterogeneity that is fixed at the farm level local area shocks or farm specific shocks that affect changes in household composition and farm labor demand we conclude that the recursive form of the farm household model is not consistent with the data developing empirically tractable models of farm households when markets are incomplete remains an important challenge

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

how does gender affect the adoption of agricultural innovations why do men and women adopt agricultural technologies at different rates evidence from ghana suggests that gender linked differences in the adoption of modern maize varieties and chemical fertilizer result from gender linked differences in access to complementary inputs this finding has important policy implications because it suggests that ensuring more widespread and equitable adoption of improved technologies may not require changes in the research system but rather introduction of measures that ensure better access for women to complementary inputs especially land labor and extension services

isolation and agricultural productivity this article examines the mechanisms that transmit isolation into productivity in particular we study the effect of isolation and transport infrastructure on welfare and agricultural productivity in the case of madagascar madagascar is a good case study given the bad shape of its infrastructure and therefore the significant variation in isolation based on comprehensive household survey data combined with a census of communes we discover a strong poverty isolation relationship further we find the inverse relationship between agricultural productivity and isolation to be surprisingly strong we isolate the following reasons why productivity might decline with isolation i transportation induced transaction costs ii the inverse relationship between plot size and productivity iii increasing price variability and extensification onto less fertile land and iv insecurity

inequality the great recession and slow recovery rising inequality reduced income growth for the bottom 95 percent of the income distribution beginning about 1980 but that group s consumption growth did not fall proportionally instead lower saving led to increasing balance sheet fragility for the bottom 95 percent eventually triggering the great recession we decompose consumption and saving across income groups the consumptionincome ratio of the bottom 95 percent fell sharply in the recession consistent with tighter borrowing constraints the top 5 percent ratio rose consistent with consumption smoothing the inability of the bottom 95 percent to generate adequate demand helps explain the slow recovery

a stagnationist model of economic growth in an economy subject to persistent excess capacity demand related factors will play a key role in determining patterns of secular change this thesis has a long history in econ omics sometimes in the underworld and occasionally at the height of fashion as recounted by rowthorn 1982 recent manifestations in the first world are the theories of monopoly capitalism of baran and sweezy 1966 and steindl 1952 who in turn follow kalecki 1971 hobson 1902 luxemburg 1951 and the marx of realisation crises and reproduction schemes in volume ii of capital other radicals such as boddy and crotty 1975 add a profit squeeze explanation of the cycle which underlays the dynamics of the growth model specified here in developing countries difficulties in both realisation and sectoral proportions are emphasised as obstacles to growth witness lustig s 1980 review of latin american structuralist theory and dutt s 1984 model which formalises an ongoing controversy in india about how income redistribution might affect prospects for industrialisation all these authors are stagnationist in assuming that both the growth rate and the level of capacity utilisation can be different under different conditions of income distribution and or macroeconomic policy their preferred policies will presumably lead to greater equality increase utilisation or step up growth they typically ask two analytical ques tions how does output respond in the short run to shifts in the income distribution how do output adjustments feed back into distributional dynamics especially under conditions when price and wage inflation rates may be influenced by employment levels productivity changes and conflicting income claims in what follows we set out a simple model to address these questions and explore the implications for macroeconomic policy of the answers that arise since the approach is not familiar to economists with a standard training a verbal description of the growth model is given first those who wish to jump directly into a formal presentation can proceed to section 1 output x is assumed to meet demand in an instantaneous short run we measure activity as the ratio of firms net cash inflow to the value of capital stock i e the rate of profit r during the short run the price level p is fixed by a mark up rule p 1 x wb where r is the mark up rate w the money wage and b the labor output ratio with this rule the share of profits or mark up income in the value of output is r l t let u stand for the output capital ratio or capacity utilization xik by simple identity

a model of electoral competition with incomplete information a model of two candidate electoral competition is developed in which voters are uncertain about the policy either candidate would implement if elected candidates simultaneously announce policy positions from which voters attempt to infer the true positions the candidates would adopt announcing a position different from the true position is costly to the winning candidate with these costs increasing as the difference between the true policy and the announced policy increases a refinement of the sequential equilibrium concept is used to describe the behavior of candidates and voters

are agricultural markets more developed around cities testing for urban heterogeneity in separability in tanzania abstract a key question for policymakers concerned about feeding sub saharan africa s ssa rapidly growing cities is whether or not nearby farms benefit from improved agricultural markets evidence from case studies and agricultural location theory suggest so but urban heterogeneity has not yet been found in a common economic test of functioning agricultural markets the separability result the test is based on a key insight of the agricultural household model which finds that a farm s profit should be maximized independently from household utility given perfect factor markets i e separability but not so if the household faces at least two market failures i e non separability in this paper i test for geographic heterogeneity in separability between rural peri urban and urban districts using 2014 15 data from the world bank s living standards measurement study and integrated surveys on agriculture lsms isa from tanzania i find strong evidence that the correlation between pre harvest labor demand and household size implying non separability in rural areas is significantly weaker in three of tanzania s five largest cities dar es salaam arusha and mbeya given certain assumptions this can be interpreted as evidence of increased agricultural market functionality around these cities relative to rural areas overall these results contribute to the debate on how to achieve urban food security in ssa and give some validity to agricultural location theory and the separability test as tools to help policymakers characterize the nature of agricultural factor markets

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

too bright for comfort a kaleckian view of profit realisation in the usa 1964 2009 this paper uses modern gross national product accounting conventions to chart the various expenditures responsible for profit realisation from 1964 to 2009 in the usa revealed are significant changes in the main drivers of profit realisation after 1982 specifically the shifting distribution of income away from median workers and the use of debt are increasingly responsible for profit realisation after 1982 this represents a significant aspect of the economy that set the environment for the recent crisis and has implications for a post crisis economy as well

gender agricultural production and the theory of the household virtually all models of the household assume that the allocation of resources is pareto efficient within many african households agricultural production occurs on many plots controlled by different members of the household pareto efficiency implies that factors should be allocated efficiently across these plots i find in contrast that plots controlled by women are farmed much less intensively than similar plots within the household controlled by men the estimates imply that about 6 percent of output is lost because of inefficient factor allocation within the household the paper suggests a new approach to modeling intrahousehold allocation consistent with the empirical results

distribution and growth reconsidered empirical results for six oecd countries we analyse the relationship between functional income distribution and economic growth in austria france germany the netherlands the uk and the usa from 1960 until 2005 the analysis is based on a demand driven distribution and growth model for an open economy inspired by bhaduri and marglin which allows for either profit or wage led growth we find that growth in france germany the uk and the usa has been wage led whereas austria and the netherlands have been profit led in the case of austria a domestically wage led economy changes to profit led when including the effect of distribution on external trade the netherlands however are already profit led without external trade our results so far only partially confirm bhaduri and marglin s theoretical conclusion that wage led growth becomes less feasible when the effects of distribution on foreign trade are taken into account

impact of sms based agricultural information on indian farmers this study estimates the benefits that indian farmers derive from market and weather information delivered to their mobile phones by a commercial service called reuters market light rml we conduct a controlled randomized experiment in 100 villages of maharashtra treated farmers associate rml information with a number of decisions they have made and we find some evidence that treatment affected spatial arbitrage and crop grading but the magnitude of these effects is small we find no statistically significant average effect of treatment on the price received by farmers crop value added crop losses resulting from rainstorms or the likelihood of changing crop varieties and cultivation practices although disappointing these results are in line with the market take up rate of the rml service in the study districts which shows small numbers of clients in aggregate and a relative stagnation in take up over the study period jel codes o13 q11 q13 the purpose of this study is to ascertain whether agricultural information distributed through mobile phones generates economic benefits to farmers we implement a randomized controlled trial of a commercial service entitled reuters market light rml offered by the largest and best established private provider of agricultural price information in india at the time of the experiment operating in maharashtra and other indian states rml distributes price weather and crop advisory information through sms messages we offered a one year free subscription to rml to a random sample of farmers to test whether they obtain higher prices for their agricultural output

on price risk and the inverse farm size productivity relationship abstract the oft observed inverse relationship between farm size and productivity has elicited several explanations having important policy and theoretical implications using advances in the analysis of price risk effects on producer behavior and a simple two period model of an agricultural household that both produces and consumes under price uncertainty at the time labor allocation decisions are made this paper demonstrates analytically that a non degenerate land distribution and price risk can together produce an inverse relationship even absent any of the more common explanations empirical evidence from madagascar confirms the plausibility of this intuitive explanation for the phenomenon

the existence of equilibrium in discontinuous economic games i theory the article presents information about the existence of equilibrium in discontinuous economic games in this paper and its sequel presents study the existence of nash equilibrium in games where agents payoff functions are discontinuous the enquiry is motivated by a number of recent studies that have uncovered serious existence problems in seemingly innocuous economic games in the sequel to this paper authors have explained the utility function in the economic games referred to earlier are neither continuous nor quasi concave however they demonstrate that the payoff functions in mildly modified versions of these constructs exhibit two weaker forms of continuity which together with the requirement of quasi concavity suffice for the existence of an equilibrium from this one may conclude that at least in the modified versions of these models discontinuities in the payoff functions are not the real source of the problem rather it is the failure of the payoff functions to the quasi concave which is responsible for the non existence of equilibrium these observations bear on the existence of nash equilibrium in pure strategies

determinants of labour s income share in the era of financialisation numerous studies have analysed the decline in the labour share of income but only few have linked it to the increase in financialisation the process of financialisation can roughly be described as an increasing importance of the financial sector that had an impact on the distribution between wages and profits on the one hand and retained earnings and financial income in the form of dividends and interests on the other hand this article seeks to explore the relationship between financialisation and labour s share of income using a time series cross sectional dataset of 13 countries over the time period from 1986 until 2007 the results suggest that there is indeed a relationship between increasing dividend and interest payments of non financial corporations and the decline of the share of wages in national income other factors that can account for the decline relate to globalisation and a decrease in the bargaining power of labour

the effects of financialization on investment evidence from firm level data for the uk this paper estimates the effects of financialization on physical investment in the uk using panel data based on balance sheets of publicly listed non financial companies supplied by worldscope for the period 1985 2013 we find robust evidence of an adverse effect of not only financial payments interests and dividends but also financial incomes on the rate of accumulation the negative impacts of financial incomes from interests and dividends are particularly strong for the pre crisis period our findings support the financialization thesis that the increasing orientation of the non financial sector towards financial activities is ultimately leading to lower physical investment hence to stagnant or fragile growth as well as long term concerns for productivity

spatial integration at multiple scales rice markets in madagascar the dramatic increase in the price of rice and other commodities over the past year has generated new interest in how these markets work and how they can be improved this article uses an exceptionally rich data set to test the extent to which markets in madagascar are integrated across space at different scales of analysis and to explain some of the factors that limit spatial arbitrage and price equalization within a single country we use rice price data across four quarters of 2000 2001 along with data on transportation costs and infrastructure availability for nearly 1 400 communes in madagascar to examine the extent of market integration at three different spatial scales subregional regional and national and to determine whether non integration is due to high transfer costs or lack of competition the results indicate that markets are fairly well integrated at the subregional level and that factors such as high crime rates remoteness and lack of information are among the factors limiting competition

what do we know about investment under uncertainty recent theoretical developments relating to investment under uncertainty have highlighted the importance of irreversibility for the timing of investment expenditures and their expected returns this has subsequently stimulated a growing empirical literature which examines uncertainty and threshold effects on investment behaviour this paper presents a review of this literature a variety of methods have been used to investigate the empirical implication of irreversibility in investment the majority focusing on the relationship between investment flows and proxy measures of uncertainty a general conclusion is that increased uncertainty at both aggregate and disaggregate levels leads to lower investment rates this suggests that there is an irreversibility effect under which greater uncertainty raises the value of the call option to delay a commitment to investment this effect appears to dominate any positive impact on investment arising from the fact that greater uncertability under certain circumstances increases the marginal profitability of capital the methods used raise a number of issues which call into question the reliability of the findings and these are addressed in the paper however if such irreversibility effects are present then their omission from traditional investment models casts doubt on the efficacy of such specifications jel classification d81 d92 e22

wage led growth in the eu15 member states the effects of income distribution on growth investment trade balance and inflation this paper estimates a multi country demand led growth model for eu15 countries a decrease in the share of wages in national income in isolation leads to lower growth in finland france germany greece italy luxembourg netherlands portugal spain sweden and the united kingdom whereas it stimulates growth in austria belgium denmark and ireland however a simultaneous decline in the wage share leads to an overall decline in eu15 gdp hence eu15 as a whole is a wage led economy furthermore austria and ireland also experience negative effects on growth when they decrease their wage share along with their trading partners the results indicate that a decline in the wage share has had significant negative effects on growth in the eu15 countries and supports the case of wage coordination we present different wage led recovery scenarios taking into account further effects of a change in the wage share on prices nominal unit labour costs investment and net exports

the financialisation offshoring nexus and the capital accumulation of us non financial firms the financialisation of the nonfinancial corporation has drawn the attention of many scholars who have identified two channels by which financialisation happens a higher proportion of financial assets compared to nonfinancial ones and a higher amount of resources distributed to financial markets one of the consequences of this is the decrease in investment parallel to financialisation many nonfinancial corporations have also engaged in an internationalization of their productive activities organizing them under global value chains surprisingly the intersections between the literature on financialisation and the literature on global value chain are still underdeveloped although for example offshoring may also explain the decrease in investment of nonfinancial firms this paper fills this gap using panel regressions for u s nonfinancial corporations between 1995 and 2011 we find evidence that both offshoring and financialisation are determinants to the decrease in investment and that financialisation occurs mainly for firms belonging to high offshoring sectors la financiarisation des societes non financieres a attire l attention de nombreux chercheurs qui ont identifie deux canaux par lesquels elle se produit les bilans des societes sont composes d une plus grande proportion d actifs financiers relativement aux actifs non financiers et une plus grande part des ressources est redistribuee vers les marches financiers l une des consequences qui en resulte est la baisse de l investissement parallelement a ce mouvement de financiarisation beaucoup de societes non financieres ont developpe l internationalisation de leur production en l organisant selon des chaines globales de valeur il est surprenant de constater que les liens entre la litterature sur la financiarisation et celle sur les chaines globales de valeur soit peu developpee bien que par exemple le transfert de la production a l etranger puisse aussi expliquer la baisse de l investissement des firmes non financieres cet article vise a combler cette lacune en menant des regressions sur un panel de firmes americaines entre 1995 et 2011 nous montrons que tant le transfert de production a l etranger que la financiarisation sont des determinants de la baisse de l investissement nous montrons egalement que la financiarisation touche surtout les firmes appartenant a des secteurs fortement inserees dans les chaines globales de valeur

modelling trends in food market integration method and an application to tanzanian maize markets abstract pushed by increasing availability of price data and extensive market liberalisation efforts in many developing countries research on food market integration has evolved rapidly over the last two decades empirical methods to measure market integration diverged in two directions on the one hand there is the parity bounds model pbm using a switching regressions technique while on the other hand the use of threshold autoregressive tar models has been proposed this article provides a discussion on the two methods and argues that tar models are better able to capture the dynamics of the arbitrage process underlying interconnected markets furthermore we extend the standard tar model to include a time trend in both the threshold and the adjustment parameter using weekly maize price data on seven selected markets in tanzania we illustrate how both transaction cost and the speed of adjustment have changed during the nineties

smallholder participation in vegetable exports and age disaggregated labor allocation in northern tanzania modern agricultural supply chains have been playing an increasingly important role in developing countries and have had significant effects on rural labor markets this article analyses the effects of smallholder farmer participation in export vegetable supply chains in northern tanzania on both household hired labor demand and off farm labor supply using an age disaggregated approach in our sample neither separability nor exogeneity of smallholder farmer participation in export supply chains can be rejected hence we apply lognormal double hurdle models and find that participation in export supply chains positively affects households decision to hire labor from all age groups we also find that it increases the unconditional overall level of hired labor demand while the age disaggregated analysis shows that these effects mostly benefit rural youth however our sample does not allow us to establish statistically significant evidence of an effect on household off farm labor supply although the point estimates point to nonnegligible positive effect sizes

multiple regime spatial price transmission with an application to maize markets in southern africa conventional threshold models of price transmission allow for different speeds of adjustment to equilibria depending on the magnitude of price differentials between markets however these models typically assume only one underlying long run equilibrium price relationship in this article we develop a framework for allowing multiple equilibria and multiple speeds of adjustment with regime separation depending on the magnitude of trade flows between regions rather than the magnitude of price differentials applying this framework to maize price transmission between south africa and zambia shows no transmission during periods of high imports when the government was heavily involved in maize importation but stronger transmission during periods of low imports when the government was not importing copyright 2012 oxford university press

financialisation and tendencies towards stagnation the role of macroeconomic regime changes in the course of and after the financial and economic crisis 2007 09

internal devaluation in a wage led economy the case of spain the aim of this paper is to use the theoretical distinction between wage led and profit led economies to consider the impact of internal devaluation policy on gdp growth for the case of spain we assess to what extent wage devaluation in spain has proven useful vis a vis triggering an exportled strategy boosting aggregate demand and overcoming the crisis for said purpose we estimate a bhaduri marglin model drawing on quarterly data from eurostat and we expand the traditional model to take into account the effect of private debt on consumption and investment our main conclusion is that the spanish economy can be characterized as a wage led economy and that therefore a wage share decrease proves counterproductive to growth according to our calculations internal devaluation policy detracted an average of 0 3 percentage points of annual economic growth during the period 2010 2016

the effects of income distribution and fiscal policy on aggregate demand investment and the budget balance the case of europe this paper develops a multi country post kaleckian model that incorporates the role of the government one key novelty of the model is that it integrates cross country effects of both changes in income distribution and fiscal policy the model is used to estimate econometrically the effects of income distribution and fiscal policy on the components of aggregate demand and the budget balance in eu15 countries the results show that a simultaneous increase in the wage share in all eu15 countries would increase demand and the primary budget balance in all countries a simultaneous increase in government spending turns out to boost economic activity in all the eu15 countries indicating the positive economic effects of expansionary fiscal policy moreover a progressive tax policy that would be implemented simultaneously at the eu level would lead to an increase in output in all countries

towards an accounting view on money banking and the macroeconomy history empirics theory in this paper three views are considered which are traditionally associated with money cranks and brave heretics the first is that the credit nature of money has macroeconomic significance the second is that financial development can be bad for economic growth the third is that macroeconomic models need to be explicitly monetary macroeconomic models it is argued that in each of these three areas there has been a recent shift in mainstream economic opinion this suggests new opportunities for meaningful debate between heterodox and orthodox schools on money and finance it is further argued following skaggs 2003 that a common meeting ground could be an accounting view of economics this is a mode of macroeconomic analysis which explicitly uses accounting definitions identities that credit is also debt or that flows of a variable affect the stock of that variable or accounting methods e g decomposing different kinds of liabilities or linking flows of liquidity to flows of transactions to structure and direct the analysis the accounting view is highly pluralist yet clearly defined i discuss its applications to each of the three views

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

rational voting and candidate entry under plurality rule we analyze a formal model of electoral competition under plurality rule that is characterized by two novel features first rather than assuming a fixed field of candidates we allow candidates to make decisions regarding entry as well as location second voters in our model are strategically rational that is they maximize utility over expected policy outcomes rather than simply voting for the ideologically closest candidate given these assumptions all equilibria in this model are such that the set of entrants locates at the median voter s ideal point this result stands in sharp contrast to earlier models of multicandidate competition in which entry is not allowed and voters vote sincerely

shadow wages allocative inefficiency and labor supply in smallholder agriculture this article introduces a method for estimating structural labor supply models in the presence of unobservable wages and deviations of households marginal revenue product of self employed labor from their shadow wage this method is therefore robust to a wide range of assumptions about labor allocation decisions in the presence of uncertainty market frictions locational preferences etc we illustrate the method using data from rice producers in cote d ivoire these data like previous studies reveal significant systematic differences between shadow wages and the marginal revenue product of family farm labor we demonstrate how one can exploit systematic deviations in the present case related to household characteristics such as the land labor endowment ratio to control for both unobservable wages and prospective allocative inefficiency in labor allocation in structural household labor supply estimation

unemployment and the real wage the economic basis for contesting political ideologies using the keynesian theory of effective demand this paper demonstrates how particular models such as that of cooperative capitalism enunciated by the left keynesian social democrats the marxian model of profit squeeze emphasizing distributive conflict and even the conservative model relying on supply side stimulus fit in as particular variants of a more general theoretical scheme through a reconstruction of the familiar is schedule the argument is weaved around the theme of the relations between unemployment and real wage in the context of both a closed and an open economy to explain the common macroeconomic basis of contesting ideologies copyright 1990 by oxford university press

financialisation and the slowdown of accumulation over the past decades financial investment of non financial businesses has been rising and accumulation of capital goods has been declining the first part of the paper offers a novel theory to explain this phenomenon financialization the shareholder revolution and the development of a market for corporate control have shifted power to shareholders and thus changed management priorities leading to a reduction in the desired growth rate in the second part the link between accumulation and financialization is tested econometrically by means of a time series analysis of aggregate business investment for usa uk france and germany extensive test of robustness are performed for the first three countries evidence that confirms the negative effect of financialization on accumulation is found author s abstract

spatial models of political competition under plurality rule a survey of some explanations of the number of candidates and the positions they take this paper surveys work that uses spatial models of political competition to explain the number of candidates and the positions that they take in plurality rule elections

party policy and campaign costs in a multi constituency model of electoral competition in this essay a multi constituency model of electoral competition was developed under the assumption that party candidates possessed no effective autonomy such a model describes the polar extreme opposite that of the more common single constituency framework in which candidates have complete autonomy the existence of a nash equilibrium to the multi constituency election game was established under the assumption that parties maximize the expected number of winning seats or behaved as pure independents under any other reasonable election goal e g maximize probability of winning a majority of constituencies this existence breaks down the nature of any equilibrium was investigated in some detail and the influence of campaign costs both statutory and non statutory on party behaviour analysed this was found to be qualitatively important in particular differingeconomic resources between parties is sufficient to prevent convergence inpolicy space

behavioural and material determinants of production relations in agriculture in this essay we develop a framework for analysing the major institutions governing the production and exchange of output and the primary factors of production in rural areas the analysis incorporates general considerations of risk and information constraints jointly with the principal material attributes of agriculture and of agricultural production factors the framework is used to analyse barriers to the existence of the major intertemporal and factor markets it is applied specifically to land scarce environments for which it provides an internally consistent explanation for many of the well documented institutional features of such settings in addition the analysis provides new implications for among other phenomena the inter relationships among ownership holdings operational scale family size and factor productivity for the scarcity of animal rental markets and use of animals as collateral for the renting out of land by small landowners and for the existence of plantations for certain crops

agricultural decisions after relaxing credit and risk constraints the investment decisions of small scale farmers in developing countries are conditioned by their financial environment binding credit market constraints and incomplete insurance can limit investment in activities with high expected profits we conducted several experiments in northern ghana in which farmers were randomly assigned to receive cash grants grants of or opportunities to purchase rainfall index insurance or a combination of the two demand for index insurance is strong and insurance leads to significantly larger agricultural investment and riskier production choices in agriculture the binding constraint to farmer investment is uninsured risk when provided with insurance against the primary catastrophic risk they face farmers are able to find resources to increase expenditure on their farms demand for insurance in subsequent years is strongly increasing with the farmer s own receipt of insurance payouts with the receipt of payouts by others in the farmer s social network and with recent poor rain in the village both investment patterns and the demand for index insurance are consistent with the presence of important basis risk associated with the index insurance imperfect trust that promised

debt driven growth wealth distribution and demand in oecd countries the paper investigates the effects of changes in the distribution of income and in wealth on aggregate demand and its components we extend the bhaduri and marglin 1990 model to include personal income inequality as well as asset prices and debt this allows for an evaluation of the wage or profit led nature of demand regimes of the expenditure cascade argument frank et al 2010 and several hypotheses regarding the effects of wealth and debt our estimates are based on a panel of 18 oecd countries covering the period 1980 2013 for the full panel the average demand regime is found to be wage led we fail to find effects of personal inequality but do find strong effects of debt and property prices which have been the major drivers of aggregate demand in the decade prior to the 2007 crisis

labor productivity and employment gaps in sub saharan africa drawing on a new set of nationally representative internationally comparable household surveys this paper provides an overview of key features of structural transformation labor allocation and labor productivity in four african economies new micro based measures of sector labor allocation and cross sector productivity differentials describe the incentives households face when allocating their labor these measures are similar to national accounts based measures that are typically used to characterize structural changes in african economies however because agricultural workers supply far fewer hours of labor per year than do workers in other sectors productivity gaps disappear almost entirely when expressed on a per hour basis what look like large productivity gaps in national accounts data could really be employment gaps calling into question the prospective gains that laborers can achieve through structural transformation these employment gaps along with the strong linkages observed between rural non farm activities and primary agricultural production highlight agriculture s continued relevance to structural change in sub saharan africa

multiparty spatial competition with probabilistic voting i develop a general model of multiparty competition in which parties model voters choices by means of probabilistic choice rules the model is specified in terms of an issue salience coefficient which varies with the importance voters attach to issues as opposed to unmeasured nonissue motivations i show that when the policy salience coefficient is sufficiently low then both vote maximizing and rank maximizing parties have a dominant strategy to adopt the most popular platform which maximizes voter utilities over the entire electorate this most popular platform therefore represents a convergent equilibrium when all parties are vote or rank maximizing numerical estimates suggest that this equilibrium result holds for degrees of issue voting which exceed the parameters behavioral researchers have estimated for various historical elections

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