cash transfer programs with income multipliers procampo in mexico abstract cash transfer programs create multiplier effects when recipients put the money they receive to work to generate further incomes when this is the case the ultimate income effects are multiples of the amounts transferred we analyze the procampo program in mexico that was introduced to compensate farmers for the anticipated negative effect of nafta on the prices of basic crops the transfer rules and the timing of the panel data collected allow unique control of biases in this impact analysis we find that the multiplier among ejido sector recipients is in the range 1 5 2 6 multipliers are higher for households with medium and large farms low numbers of adults in the household nonindigenous backgrounds and located in the center and gulf regions high multipliers reflect income opportunities that had remained unrealized due to liquidity constraints that are relaxed by the transfers opportunities come from the asset endowments that these households received through the land reform particularly irrigated land and they are enhanced by access to technical assistance

parental benefits from intergenerational coresidence empirical evidence from rural pakistan this paper explains the negative correlation between the days of work reported by fathers in rural pakistani households and the incomes earned by their coresident adult sons thereby contributing to research on the benefits from intergenerational coresidence i find that the decline in fathers days of work that accompanies increases in sons incomes primarily results because such income is used to finance expenditures on household public goods such as consumer durables and ceremonies empirical tests reject most alternative explanations of the benefits of coresidence including the belief that sons contribute to fathers wealth

a probit latent variable model of nutrition information and dietary fiber intake nutrition information and intake data for a sample of u s household meal planners are used to estimate the effects of fiber specific information on dietary fiber intake the information variables are measured using survey questions on fiber content of foods attitude toward consuming fiber rich foods and awareness of fiber health links the evidence confirms the influence of nutrition information on fiber intake household income meal planner age smoking status vegetarian status race and ethnicity are major determinants of both information and intake education exerts a sizable intake effect by enhancing the information level direct and indirect effects of exogenous variables are reported

assessing the influence of campaign expenditures on voting behavior with a comprehensive electoral market model this paper extends previous single equation econometric modeling efforts of the sales advertising relationship in elections operating within the perspective of the general demand context of voting behavior it develops a comprehensive electoral market model that takes account of potential simultaneous relationships among votes cast campaign expenditures and voting participation turnout the model is estimated using 3sls techniques with aggregate electoral district data from each of eight canadian provincial elections the model appears to yield consistent and therefore generalizable empirical results across the eight election events chief among the empirical results is the expected relationship between campaign efforts and voting behavior own communications efforts as proxied by campaign expenditures have a positive impact on votes received while competitive communications efforts draw votes away from a candidate

do informal risk sharing networks crowd out public voluntary health insurance evidence from vietnam many governments in low income countries have promoted voluntary health insurance schemes in recent years with the principal aim of improving access to services amongst those working in the informal economy few attempts to understand demand for such schemes exist particularly in light of the importance of informal social security arrangements for many households a model of demand for health insurance is developed reflecting this context and estimated using data from vietnam the results show that informal financial networks may crowd out government promoted health insurance implications for theory and policy are discussed

election goals and the allocation of campaign resources this paper compares the equilibrium behavior and outcomes in a model of two party competition for legislative seats under two different assumptions about the parties goals 1 parties maximize the expected number of seats won and 2 parties maximize the probability of winning a majority of the seats the two goals may lead to qualitatively different behavior and studying the differences yields insights into the relationship between the goals and the role of assymetries between the parties

an economic model of representative democracy this paper develops an approach to the study of democratic policy making where politicians are selected by the people from those citizens who present themselves as candidates for public office the approach has a number of attractive features first it is a conceptualization of a pure form of representative democracy in which government is by as well as of the people second the model is analytically tractable being able to handle multidimensional issue and policy spaces very naturally third it provides a vehicle for answering normative questions about the performance of representative democracy

the impact of competition on advertising the case of political campaign expenditures this paper uses constituency level political campaign expenditures to analyze the impact of competition on advertising a theoretical model based on expected utility maximization predicts an uncertain impact of increased competition on campaign spending the direction of this impact is tested using data from the 1979 and 1980 canadian federal elections competition is found to have a positive effect on spending and several other plausible hypotheses of expenditure determination are rejected these include constant spending per voter or per constituency the random allocation of funds and spending based on incumbency ministerial status or the spending of other political parties

consumer demand for nutrition versus taste in four major food categories this study addresses the trade off between nutrition and taste in expenditure on breakfast cereal milk bread and soft drinks within each category products have similar cost and convenience but have markedly different flavor and nutritional content using annual expenditure data for a large sample of households participating in the acnielsen homescan system we regress a measure of healthiness on household demographics and market prices and find that households with college educated heads and higher incomes made significantly healthier choices in all four categories these effects are puzzling in that the nutritional differences between products were well known to consumers and there are no cost or convenience differences between them the presence of children was associated with less healthy choices especially for cereal and bread while older households made healthier choices in all categories except milk

program interventions intrahousehold distribution and the welfare of individuals modelling household behavior abstract in this essay the implications for the intrahousehold distribution of resources derived from economic models of household behavior that treat the household as maximizing a single welfare function are reviewed particular attention is paid to the within family allocation of time and food and to the effects of these resources on the schooling earnings and health status of individuals as they are affected by direct food intervention and female employment schemes and price altering policies empirical applications are provided from data sets from india indonesia and the philippines to illustrate the power and limitations of such models for illuminating household interventions and for placing restrictions on data

the family as an incomplete annuities market families can self insure against uncertain dates of death through implicit or explicit agreements with respect to consumption and interfamily transfers interfamily transfers need have nothing to do with altruistic feelings they may simply reflect risk sharing behavior of completely selfish family members although family annuity markets are incomplete even small families can substitute by more than 70 percent for perfect market annuities given adverse selection and transaction costs family risk pooling may be preferred to public market annuities in the absence of public annuities these risk sharing arrangements provide powerful incentives for marriage and family formation

credibility and policy convergence in a two party system with rational voters the traditional approach to modeling political parties behavior based upon the contribution of anthony downs 1957 assumes that the parties unique objective is to win elections thus they maximize their popularity the crucial implication of this assumption for a two party system is that if the two parties have the same information about voters preferences full convergence of policies results from electoral competition this is the crucial implication of the median voter theorem more generally it may be argued that different parties are motivated differently because they represent different constituencies parties may not care only about winning elections per se but also about the quality of the policies resulting from an election in this case the candidates of the two parties view winning an election not only as a goal per se but also as a means of implementing a better policy for their respective constituencies this paper shows that electoral competitions imply dynamic inconsistency if the voters are modeled as rational and forwardlooking agents and parties do not care exclusively about being elected but also about which policy to implement once elected the dynamic inconsistency arises as follows the parties have an incentive to announce convergent platforms to increase their chances of election however if the elected party is not committed to its electoral platform it has an incentive to follow its most preferred policy rather than the policy announced in its platform if voters are rational they account for this incentive thus in general in a one shot electoral game the only timeconsistent equilibrium is one in which no convergence is possible the two parties follow their most preferred policies and the voters rationally expect this outcome full convergence of parties platforms results only as a limiting case when the parties are completely indifferent with respect to the quality of the policies resulting from the election thus these results differ from the existing literature on ideologically motivated politicians for instance donald wittman 1977 1983 randall calvert 1985 which implicitly assumes the possibility of binding commitments to electoral platforms complete or partial policy convergence can be the outcome of political competition if the interaction between the parties and the voters is modeled as an infinitely repeated game in fact if the candidates have concave objective functions the welfare maximizing policy rule implies a complete convergence of parties policies however this cooperative and agreed upon policy may or may not be sustainable as a subgame perfect equilibrium depending on parameter values in particular it depends on the discount rates of the two parties the degree of polarization of their preferences and the relative popu graduate school of industrial administration carnegie mellon university pittsburgh pa 15213 and national bureau of economic research cambridge ma 02138 this paper is based upon a chapter of my unpublished doctoral dissertation at harvard university i am greatly indebted to jeffrey sachs for directing my attention toward these issues and for many conversations i also wish to thank andrew abel dilip abreu olivier blanchard ramon caminal andrew caplin alex cukierman morris fiorina benjamin friedman herschel grossman howard rosenthal and the referees for very useful comments the responsibilitv af anv n mtnkieis af calrirp nfnlv mine the result of policy convergence in a two party system is more general than the median voter theorem for discussions of convergence results not at the median see john ledyard 1984 peter coughlin 1984 coughlin and shmuel nitzan 1981 melvin hinich 1977 for earlier work on spatial competition see richard mckelvey 1975 hinich ledyard and peter ordeshook 1972 1973 and the references quoted therein the present paper focuses on the result of convergence rather than on the median voter theorem per se

hunger inequality ethics and aid abstractthis article considers the inequality in the cross country distribution of hunger using multiple ethical underpinnings under sovereign equality each nation state receives equal weighting leading to the conclusion that hunger should be concentrated in a few large countries under the democratic ethic individuals receive equal weighting and the global distribution of hungry people is irrelevant inequality aversion deliberately prefers equal levels of hunger across countries these ideals are presented in a general social welfare function and compared to the actual changes in hunger during 1991 2001 the distribution of food aid to reduce both hunger and hunger inequality are considered

motivations to remit evidence from botswana in this article a theory of motivations to send remittances is described and tested with data from botswana altruism is one of the motivations tested and found to be an insufficient explanation for remittances among migrants in botswana a refinement of the model stipulates a modified altruism or enlightened self interest in this model the relationship between the migrant and family is tempered by an implicit understanding of mutual benefit the household strategy may be to encourage some members to migrate as a means of spreading risk and sharing gains the household strategy is similar to an insurance policy where migration is to places where market potential is high the risks incurred might be high the example is given of migration during a drought in botswana migrant remittances were greater in households with more cattle or households with more to lose drought alone was not statistically related to remittances increases in remittances were related to increased levels of education it is suggested that repayment was the motive for parents investment in migrants education migrants gains are identified as the potential for an inheritance the security of channeling investments through a trusted family member and security in having a home to return to it is pointed out that the altruism and family remittances from urban migration were strategies that bridged the simple dynamic of either urban development or rural development impacting on family welfare it is suggested that household models of economy adopt some measure to express the relationship of household wealth to remittances from urban migrants

social security in a moral economy an empirical analysis for java private transfer payments are modeled as outcomes of a constrained social choice pro blem facing donors the approach is applied to a large household leve l data set for java and hypotheses are tested concerning the performa nce of the moral economy as a social security system transfer be havior is found to be very different between rural and urban areas w hile transfer receipts and outlays are income inequality reducing in rural areas this is not the case in urban areas there is also evidence of transfers being targeted to disadvantaged households such as the sick elderly and for urban areas the unemployed copyright 1988 by mit press

consumer knowledge and meat consumption at home and away from home we investigate the roles of consumer knowledge and sociodemographic factors in the consumption of meat products at home and away from home censored dependent variables and endogenous dietary knowledge are accommodated by developing and estimating a simultaneous equations system results suggest endogeneity of knowledge and support the system approach to demand functions for meat products dietary knowledge decreases consumption of beef and pork at home and away from home but does not affect poultry or fish consumption in either location men eat more meat and fish than women meat consumption declines with age and regional and racial ethnic differences are present published by elsevier ltd

income smoothing and consumption smoothing one way that risk averse households protect consumption levels is to borrow and use insurance mechanisms another way common in low income economies is to diversify economic activities and make conservative production and employment choices households thus tend toward limiting exposure only to shocks that can be handled with available credit and insurance typically both types of mechanisms are studied independently but much more can be learned by studying them together first we obtain a more complete picture of risks costs and insurance possibilities second it opens the way to considering biases in standard tests of credit and insurance

a strategic altruism model in which ricardian equivalence does not hold this article demonstrates that ricardian equivalence does not necessarily hold in models with altruistic transfers once one takes into account the strategic behavior of recipients as well as donors to influence the final allocation of consumption in altruistic settings potential recipients can threaten to refuse transfers the authors apply the extended nash bargaining solution to the problem of an altruistic parent and a possible altruistic child they show that when the government redistributes between the parent and child it changes their endowments and the equilibrium threats and thus the final allocation of consumption copyright 1990 by royal economic society

do private transfers displace the benefits of public transfers evidence from south africa abstract this paper investigates whether government transfer programs displace or crowd out private support focusing on a large increase in state old age pensions in south africa using data spanning the period of the expansion we find that each rand of public pension income to the elderly leads to a 0 25 0 30 rand reduction in private transfers from children living away from home however despite the large increase in income there were no significant changes in migration labor supply or household composition we also show that evaluations of the distributional effects of the pension are overstated when crowding out is ignored

factors affecting the timing of purchasing of butter margarine and blends a competing goods analysis the purchase dynamics of a subset of food fats and oils are investigated using event history analysis applied to a panel of u s households the consumer behavior examined is the switching between purchases of butter margarine and butter margarine blends across purchase occasions we find that price previous purchases seasonality and household size and composition affect product switching probability

motives for household private transfers in burkina faso abstract resource transfers among households have received considerable interest among economists in recent years two of the main reasons for the surge of interest in household transfers are the information on human nature conveyed by transfer behavior and the implication on income redistribution policy that private transfer might have empirical studies however provide mixed results on transfer behavior this is because previous inquiries were confronted with several estimation issues and have focused on data from developed countries where private transfers are already small this paper contributes to the literature on transfer behavior by using a multifaceted econometric approach to examine the motives of household transfers in burkina a low income country with a well documented tradition of gift exchanges the findings suggest that risk sharing is not central to transfers altruistic transfers are apparent for the middle income class but not at low income level the evidence implies that crowding out may be minimal at low income level suggesting that public transfers targeting poor households may be effective

the roles of destination gender and household composition in explaining remittances an analysis for the dominican sierra two non exclusive hypotheses about what motivates remittances sent by dominican migrants to their rural parents in the sierra are tested a an insurance contract taken by parents with their migrant children and b an investment by migrants in potential bequests results show that the relative importance of these two motives to remit is affected by destination us vs cities in the dominican republic gender and household composition the insurance function is mainly fulfilled by female migrants to the us only when a male is the sole migrant in his household does he play the role of insurer investment by contrast is pursued by both males and females but only among those migrating to the us d 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

incumbent performance and electoral control in the pure theory of electoral competition citizens compare the platforms of the candidates and vote for the one whose platform is preferred candidate strategies are identified with promises about future performance in office models of this sort have been developed in both static mckelvey 1975 and dynamic kramer 1977 i settings and all appear to have the property that if the set of alternatives is large enough in some sense equilibrium platforms rarely exist but these models have another feature that is quite as disturbing as their instability in the static setting discussed by mckelvey little attention is paid to the possibility that once in office the politician s preferences may diverge from those of his constituents and that he may therefore choose policies at variance from his platform instead it is simply assumed that promises will be kept whether or not such behavior is congruent with the interest of the officeholder it is sometimes argued that an enforcement mechanism may exist to discipline politicians for failing to keep promises but without a specification of the mechanism it is not obvious that it would be in the interests of the

social security and private transfers in developing countries the case of peru do social security systems crowd out private transfers from younger to older generations this question has generated much theoretical discussion but little empirical work exists to confirm or refute this crowding out hypothesis we investigate the connection between social security and private transfers in peru using the peruvian living standards survey and find that private transfers from young to old would have been nearly 20 percent higher without social security benefits this indicates that the peruvian social security system is less effective at delivering benefits to the elderly than a simple assignment of government expenditures would suggest social security s displacement of private transfers while significant is less than that predicted by models with widespread altruistic transfers

will developing country nutrition improve with income a case study for rural south india aggregate estimates of food expenditure are consistent with such a possibility implying income expenditure elasticities close to one however the high degree of aggregation at which such estimates are made means that the considerable increase in price per nutrient as income increases is ignored and the nutrient elasticities are therefore overstated estimates for a rural south indian sample indicate that this bias is considerable and that the true nutrient elasticities with respect to income may be close to zero

mutual insurance as an elusive concept in traditional rural communities during the last two decades economists have paid increasing attention to the role of informal risk sharing arrangements as a privileged way through which traditional rural communities can achieve a significant degree of protection against income fluctuations and other hazards beyond their control this article however argues that when they enter into such arrangements members of these communities are guided by a principle of balanced reciprocity they expect a return from any contribution or payment they make rather than by a true logic of mutual insurance more precisely they do not conceive of insurance as a game where there are winners and losers and where income is redistributed between lucky and unlucky individuals none the less traditional agrarian societies have proven able to develop a restricted range of sustainable forms of mutual insurance that avoid the aforementioned problem

motives for private transfers over the life cycle an analytical framework and evidence for peru abstract this paper tests for the motives for private income transfers we consider two motives altruism and exchange the question of private transfer motives is important because such motivation can influence the effects of public income transfers on the distribution of income using a household survey for peru we find that transfer amounts received increase with recipient pre transfer income which contradicts a key prediction of the strong form of the altruism hypothesis but is consistent with exchange we also find that capital market imperfections are likely to be an important cause of private transfers and that social security benefits crowd out the incidence of private transfers

health and wage a simultaneous equation model with multiple discrete indicators in this article we propose all econometric approach for estimating the simultaneouls effects of health and wages in a structural equations framework in the theoretical works of grossmana 1972a 1972b health is viewed as anl elldogen1oulsly determined capital stock the demand for health should rise with the wage rate as the rate of return to health investment increases with wage onl the other hand better health should raise market productivity and hence wages since health capital is an abstract theoretical concept it can hardly be measured quantitatively however most population surveys include various health indicators these indicators are usually discrete variables in the empirical work of grossman and benham 1974 these qualitative indicators are treated as continuous variables and two stage least squares estimation techniques are used this specification raises various econometric problems see e g goldberger 1964 pp 248 255 domencich and mcfadden 1975 and nerlove and press 1973 a satisfactory specification should take into account the discrete nature of the indicators our specification generalizes the dummy variables simultaneous equations system of heckman 1978 the measurement models of joreskog and goldberger 1975 and is closely related to the models of muthe n 1976 1979 muthen studies full information maximum likelihood procedures for estimation except for very simple cases this does not generally yield feasible or tractable procedures in this article we introduce a tractable procedure for statistical estimation and testing this specification and the estimation procedure is then applied to study the joint dependence of health and wages another departure of our approach from others is that we will test and correct the possible incompatibility of the various health capital indicators in the population surveys one may have subjective health indicators such as self evaluation of health which may reflect different populations perception of health we propose a statistical procedure for testing measurement compatibility and if required for correcting this problem this article is divided into two parts initially we describe the model specification estimation and statistical tests in a general simultaneous equation model with multiple discrete indicators in the second part of the paper we consider specification of a simultaneous equation model for health and wages the model

as an economy becomes more developed do people become less altruistic abstractinter household private transfers are one of the main informal insurance mechanisms that prevalently implemented in developing countries unfortunately most of the literatures investigates

a model of candidate location when one candidate has a valence advantage that under some fairly weak assumptions for all levels of the valence advantage the advantaged candidate chooses a more moderate position than the disadvantaged candidate empirical studies of congressional elections by fiorina 1973 and ansolabehere snyder and stewart 2001 support this result d owns 1957 seminal work presents a puzzle for scholars of u s elections why do candidates not converge to the median voter one of the best explanations is that the candidates themselves have ideological preferences as calvert 1985 and wittman 1977 1983 have shown when candidates have such preferences and they are sufficiently uncertain about the preferences of the median voter then they do not converge although they may moderate their positions from their ideal point the basic version of the calvert wittman model however does not account for another basic fact of u s elections often one of the candidates has an advantage due to a nonpolicy factor such as incumbency greater campaign funds better name recognition superior charisma superior intelligence and so on stokes has dubbed such factors valence factors and he has noted their importance in u s elections stokes 1963 1992 1 in this article i extend the basic calvert wittman model by giving one candidate a valence advantage over the other i show that if the valence characteristics of the candidates are approximately equal then when a candidate s valence advantage increases this causes her to move toward the

family economics and macro behavior in this 1987 presidential address to the american economic association the author explores the contributions of the field of family economics to macroeconomic analysis the focus is on family behavior as an active endogenous factor that both affects and is affected by the evolution of the economy much of the time is spent on long term economic growth although i also discuss short and long cycles in economic activity and the interaction between overlapping generations through social security transmission of inequality and in other ways many conclusions in these and presumably other macro areas change radically when family choices get the attention they deserve excerpt

election campaign resource allocation this paper examines an electoral competition model where a candidate allocates his campaign efforts resources on two competing projects prior to election a candidate is congruent if his objective is consistent with the wishes of his constituents and there is no potential political shirking we show that a congruent candidate needs not exert any efforts towards successful implementation prior to election however a less than perfectly congruent candidate must exert efforts prior to election in equilibrium two campaign resource allocation strategies emerge 1 concentrate resources on one project and 2 allocate resources evenly across both projects we discuss potential inefficiencies that are resulted by these allocation strategies

does public welfare crowd out informal safety nets ethnographic evidence from rural latin america abstract the researchers compare ethnographic data from two neighboring countries suriname and french guiana to investigate whether public welfare systems displace informal risk sharing arrangements the results suggest that the informal safety nets of poor rural households are deficient when shocks are extreme irreversible cumulative and co variate public welfare can reduce poverty by strengthening informal insurance systems distributing cash enabling new risk management strategies and promoting human capital development it remains a challenge for policy makers to implement welfare systems that cover society members with the lowest levels of human and social capital and that minimize adverse consequences of economic change

price and advertising signals of product quality we present a signaling model based on ideas of phillip nelson in which both the introductory price and the level of directly uninformative advertising or other dissipative marketing expenditures are choice variables and may be used as signals for the initially unobservable quality of a newly introduced experience good repeat purchases play a crucial role in our model a second focus of the paper is on illustrating an approach to refining the set of equilibria in signalling games with multiple potential signals

legislator voting and shirking a critical review of the literature we set out to critically review the progress in answering two related questions what determines how legislators vote and how can shirking by legislators be measured in the first category the hypothesis that legislators shirk in order to indulge their personal ideological preferences has led researchers astray the theoretical underpinning is shaky on two counts first legislators who indulge their preferences at the expense of their constituents preferences put themselves at a competitive electoral disadvantage second the original two stage procedure used to measure ideological shirking is severely flawed among many other problems the residual measure of shirking implicitly assumes that the median voter is the relevant constituent principal for the legislator agent

consumer attitudes and voluntary rate schedules for public utilities attitudes enter as latent explanatory variables in a model of consumers choice among optional rate schedules offered by a public utility a consistent estimator of the choice model is described that utilizes the distribution of the latent attitude variables conditional on manifest indicator variables the model is applied to households choice between time of use and non time differentiated rates for electricity to determine the impact of attitudes about energy conservation copyright 1987 by mit press

the theory and econometrics of health information in cross sectional nutrient demand analysis understanding the role of health information in food and nutrient demand has become an important issue over the last decade endogeneity and measurement error are two empirical problems that are inherent in this type of analysis while some type of instrumental variables estimation would appear the obvious solution this article provides several theoretical and empirical reasons why this is not the case in cross sectional analysis an alternative estimation strategy is pursued an empirical example is given and the implications are discussed copyright 2001 oxford university press

information endogeneity and consumer health behaviour application to dietary intakes due to heightened public health interest a growing number of consumer health behaviour studies are focusing on the effect of health information on the demand for health inputs and outcomes many of these studies however have overlooked the potential endogeneity of information variables stemming from unobserved individual heterogeneity due to simultaneity bias ignoring endogeneity may lead to inaccurate estimates of informational effects on health behaviour using dietary intake data for fat saturated fat cholesterol and fibre this paper illustrates the pitfalls of treating health information related to these nutrients as exogenous variables in their demand equations in most of the estimated models the exogeneity of information is statistically rejected when the information variables are treated as exogenous variables their effects on dietary intakes are underestimated the estimated effects of key intake determinants such as income education ethnicity and race are also different in such a

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

the effect of social entitlement programs on private transfers new evidence of crowding out working paper 2010 15 september 2010 abstract this paper exploits a natural policy experiment to directly identify the crowding out effects of public transfers on the incidence and level of private transfers the introduction of a large social security program in taiwan is used to estimate the effect of an exogenous increase in government transfer payments to the elderly on the private transfer behavior of their adult children using an instrumental variables strategy that accounts for the endogeneity of receiving public transfers the empirical results show strong evidence of crowding out on the extensive margin the probability of providing a positive transfer and weaker evidence of crowding out on the intensive margin the amount of the transfer conditional on it being positive jel classification h53 h55 h31 key words private transfers crowding out 1 introduction determining the impact of public transfer programs on private transfer behavior is a key issue from both a research and policy perspective if public transfers largely crowd out private transfers then the welfare impact of social redistributive programs will be smaller than perceived economic theory is ambiguous in its predictions about crowding out the altruism model developed in the seminal papers of barro 1974 and becker 1974 predicts essentially complete crowding out the model focuses on transfers from parents to children but can be applied equally well to transfers from adult children to their elderly parents in the model the child s utility is included in an altruistic parent s utility function which gives the parent an incentive to support the child the core of the altruism model is the prediction of redistribution neutrality which posits that the parents will adjust their transfer behavior in response to changes in the child s income for example an increase in the child s income due to welfare subsidies from the government will lower the amount of parental transfers if ricardian equivalence holds and the government subsidy is financed by a tax on the parents income then the parents will reduce their transfer exactly by the tax amount implying complete crowding out in contrast to the altruism model the exchange model of bernheim et al 1985 and cox 1987 argues that a child s services to the parents such as contacts and visits are at least in part financially motivated as the child expects monetary compensation in this model the amount of transfers could be a positive or negative function of the child s income as the child s income increases the opportunity cost of services increases and thus the amount of expected compensation for the services increases in such a setting the relationship between the child s income and the amount of parental transfers is not clear it could be positive if the parents demand for services is inelastic as they would need to increase transfer payments to the child in order to receive the same level of services if this were the case government subsidies would increase the amount of private transfers received and thus there would be no crowding effect on the other hand if the demand for services is highly elastic then parents demand would fall along with monetary compensation which would lead to crowding out 1 as a result of the ambiguous effect of crowding out predicted by theory a relatively large empirical literature has focused on the estimation of both the sign and magnitude of the crowding out effect of public transfer programs however due to data limitations most empirical studies have not been able to directly measure the crowding out effect of public redistribution programs most studies in this literature have attempted to indirectly measure the impact of such programs on beneficiaries by studying the response of private transfers to changes in the recipient s level of income the results from these papers however are not consistent

public goods hidden income and tax evasion some nonstandard results from the warm glow model abstract a large literature explores crowd out in situations where public goods are jointly provided work in this area typically depicts a tax system where individuals take taxes as given but in some settings such as those in developing economies efforts to evade or avoid taxes may be widespread using the canonical warm glow model this paper considers joint public good provision in a setting where individuals can evade taxes by hiding their income the model s implications change significantly in this setting with hidden income stronger warm glow will lead to greater crowd out not less using research on crowd out and inter family transfers i present suggestive evidence that the model s results may help to reconcile divergent estimates of crowd out in the literature

political connections and social networks in targeted transfer programs evidence from rural ethiopia abstractdespite increasingly large scale social protection programs in africa we have limited evidence on the local political economy of their allocation we investigate community based processes for food aid allocation and the role of political and social networks using the case of ethiopia in the aftermath of a serious drought in 2002 local political authorities are in charge of food transfers in terms of free food aid or food for work programs we find that although targeting is clearly imperfect free food aid is responsive to need as well as targeted to households with less access to support from relatives or friends we also find a strong correlation with political connections households with close associates in official positions have more than a 12 higher probability of obtaining free food than households that are not well connected this effect is large someone without political connections has the same probability of getting food aid as someone more than twice as rich but with these conne

campaign advertising and voter welfare this paper investigates the role of campaign advertising and the opportunity of legal restrictions on it an electoral race is modeled as a signalling game with three classes of players many voters two candidates and one interest group the group has non verifiable insider information on the candidates quality and on the basis of this information offers a contribution to each candidate in exchange for a favorable policy position candidates spend the contributions they receive on non directly informative advertising this paper shows that 1 a separating equilibrium exists in which the group contributes to a candidate only if the insider information about that candidate is positive 2 although voters are fully rational a ban on campaign advertising can be welfare improving and 3 split contributions may arise in equilibrium and if they arise too often they are detrimental to voters

data watch the world bank s living standards measurement study household surveys since 1985 the world bank has been collecting household survey data in developing countries that provide a rich source of information for assessing household welfare understanding household behavior and evaluating the impact of government policies this article describes these household surveys known as living standards measurement study lsms surveys and explains how to obtain their data lsms surveys have been implemented in over twenty developing countries and have been used to analyze poverty labor markets health and education pricing policies determinants of school performance savings and consumption smoothing health and nutrition policies and gender and fertility issues

economics food choices and nutrition abstract our goal in this paper is to examine the role and influence of economic factors defined rather broadly on consumer food choices and hence nutritional outcomes we attempt to do this in a non technical fashion we examine the role of prices especially as they relate to the affordability of food in the united states and as a policy lever income is analyzed as a driving force behind changes in eating habits in particular increasing the demand for convenience the role of time constraints as well as time preference are examined as links to healthy eating habits and as forces behind current trends in eating patterns information and knowledge are given prominent play as counter balances to economic forces driving eating habits we conclude with and examination into maternal nutrition knowledge and children s dietary quality

schooling health knowledge and obesity the connection between schooling and health is well documented an important empirical issue that needs to be examined however is whether schooling s effects are due to individual health knowledge differences this empirical study examines this issue with an increasingly important health indicator obesity since provision of health knowledge is a major tool of public agencies promoting health this empirical study uses a new direct measure of health knowledge to test this hypothesis the results show that knowledge is inversely related to the probability that an individual is obese schooling s effects on relative weight and the probability of being obese are explained by differences in knowledge this result may imply that schooling s effect on the allocative efficiency of the household production of health is the main reason schooling is linked to health behaviour the result also may imply that the most effective method of health education is to highlight the disease element of poor dietary habits a

campaign spending with office seeking politicians rational voters and multiple lobbies abstract i introduce a microfounded model of campaign finance with office seeking politicians a continuum of voters and a large number of heterogeneous lobbies lobbies make contributions to politicians according to a common agency framework politicians use contributions to finance their electoral expenditures voters are not fooled by electoral expenditures they are influenced in a way that is consistent with the equilibrium behavior of lobbies and politicians the model is used to i determine the relation between campaign spending and the deviation from the median voter s preferred policy ii show the informational value of lobbies contributions iii evaluate the welfare implications of restricting campaign spending and iv interpret the empirical finding that campaign expenditures have a very low effect on election outcome although in equilibrium advertising provides voters with useful information under reasonable parameter values a ban on campaign contributions makes the median voter better off journal of economic literature classification numbers d72 d82 m37

a model of political competition with citizen candidates the authors develop a model of electoral competition in which citizens choose whether or not to run as candidates a winner implements her favorite policy the equilibrium number of candidates depends negatively on the cost of running and positively on the benefits of winning for some parameter values all equilibria under plurality rule have exactly two candidates whose positions are distinct two candidate elections are more likely under plurality rule than under a runoff system the candidates positions are less differentiated under a runoff system there exist equilibria under both systems in which some candidates have no chance of winning

did public transfers crowd out private transfers in korea during the financial crisis abstract how effective are public transfers in protecting households facing financial crisis induced negative shocks existing studies have not yet carefully considered the inter relationship between public transfers and the existing private transfer network in the context of the financial crisis in korea this paper investigates the possible crowding out effect of public transfers on private transfers by explicitly considering the endogenous responses of private transfers against public transfers by using two korean household level panel data sets for the periods of 1995 1998 and 1998 2003 we found a post crisis but not pre crisis crowding out effect of public transfers more importantly a crowding in effect is observed during the crisis the results suggest that private transfer networks were strengthened under the initial phase of the financial crisis which possibly complemented public transfers due to the lack of effective formal safety nets while public transfers became effective after the cri