the adoption of reduced tillage the role of human capital and other variables this paper presents a model of adoption behavior and explains differences econometrically in farmers decisions to adopt reduced tillage practices and in the efficiency of farmers adoption decisions the empirical results obtained from microdata show that the probability of adopting reduced tillage in corn enterprises differs widely across farms and depends on soil characteristics cropping systems and size of farming operation the results also show that farmers schooling enhances the efficiency of the adoption decision

efficient responses to targeted cash transfers we estimate and test the restrictions of a collective model of household consumption using z conditional demands in the context of a large conditional cash transfer program in rural mexico the model can explain the impacts of the program on the structure of food consumption we use two plausible and novel distribution factors the random allocation of a cash transfer to women and the relative size and wealth of the husband s and wife s family networks our structure does better at predicting the effect of exogenous increases in household income than an alternative unitary structure we cannot reject efficiency of household decisions

out of the wallet and into the purse using micro data to test income pooling this paper uses an exogenous change in the intrahousehold distribution of income provided by a change in united kingdom family allowance policy to test the income pooling hypothesis implied by unitary household models expenditure shares are estimated for a wide range of goods using household level data shifts in expenditure shares suggest that children and mothers benefited at the expense of fathers when this policy change shifted income within households from men to women similar shifts are not found among married couple households with no children this paper refutes income pooling and confirms and extends results in lundberg pollak and wales 1997

the microfinance promise in the past decade microfinance programs have demonstrated that it is possible to lend to low income households while maintaining high repayment rates even without requiring collateral the programs promise a revolution in approaches to alleviating poverty and spreading financial services and millions of poor households are served globally a growing body of economic theory demonstrates how new contractual forms offer a key to microfinance success particularly the use of group lending contracts with joint liability for the most part however high repayment rates have not translated into profits and studies of impacts on poverty yield a mixed picture in describing emerging tensions the paper highlights the diversity of innovative mechanisms beyond group lending contracts the measurement of financial sustainability the estimation of economic and social impacts the costs and benefits of subsidization and the potential to reduce poverty through savings programs rather than just credit the promise of microfinance has pushed far ahead of the evidence and an agenda is put forward for addressing critical empirical gaps and sharpening the terms of policy discussion

the effect of gender targeted conditional cash transfers on household expenditures evidence from a randomized experiment this paper studies the differential effect of targeting cash transfers to men or women on the structure of household expenditures on non durables we study a policy intervention in the republic of macedonia offering cash transfers to poor households conditional on having their children attending secondary school the recipient of the transfer is randomized across municipalities to be either the household head or the mother using data collected to evaluate the conditional cash transfer program we show that the gender of the recipient has an effect on the structure of expenditure shares targeting transfers to women increases the expenditure share on food by about 4 to 5 to study the allocation of expenditures within the food basket we estimate a demand system for food and we find that targeting payments to mothers induces for different food categories not only a significant intercept shift but also a change in the slope of the engel curve

nash equilibria in models of fiscal competition abstract this paper analyzes nash equilibria in a simple model of an economy with jurisdictions engaging in fiscal competition small number nash equilibria in which tax rates are the strategic variables are shown not to coincide with nash equilibria in which public expenditure levels are the strategic variables

the short term impact of unconditional cash transfers to the poor experimental evidence from kenya we use a randomized controlled trial to study the response of poor households in rural kenya to unconditional cash transfers from the ngo givedirectly the transfers differ from other programs in that they are explicitly unconditional large and concentrated in time we randomized at both the village and household levels furthermore within the treatment group we randomized recipient gender wife versus husband transfer timing lump sum transfer versus monthly installments and transfer magnitude us 404 ppp versus us 1 525 ppp we find a strong consumption response to transfers with an increase in household monthly consumption from 158 ppp to 193 ppp nine months after the transfer began transfer recipients experience large increases in psychological well being we find no overall effect on levels of the stress hormone cortisol although there are differences across some subgroups monthly transfers are more likely than lump sum transfers to improve food security whereas lump sum transfers are more likely to be spent on durables suggesting that households face savings and credit constraints together these results suggest that unconditional cash transfers have significant impacts on economic outcomes and psychological well being

tax competition and revelation of preferences for public expenditure this paper considers a federal country composed of local jurisdictions that differ in their inhabitants tastes for public goods and which finance local public expenditure through a source based tax on capital income the taste for public goods is the private information of local governments the central government seeks an optimal policy in which grants to local governments are conditioned on local tax rates the uninformed central government seeks both to allocate capital efficiently among jurisdictions and to induce jurisdictions to provide an efficient mix of private and public consumption it is shown that there persist at this constrained optimum both some misallocation of capital and some violation of the samuelson rule for optimal public good provision in every jurisdiction c 1998 academic press

the implications of competition among jurisdictions does tiebout need politics the paper investigates whether compensation among local jurisdiction is by itself sufficient to ensure efficient provision of local public goods jurisdictions have fixed boundaries and each has an entrenched government with the power to tax and supply the public good residents can move costlessly among jurisdictions it is shown that competition among numerous jurisdictions is not sificient to guarantee public sector efficiency though residents can vote with their feet land is immobile hence governments can unsurp some land rents for their own ends increasing the number of jurisdictions limits but cannot completely eliminate the ability to exercise discretionary governmental power

a theory of interregional tax competition a general equilibrium model is constructed to study tax competition where local governments compete for capital by holding down property tax rates and public expenditure levels an exact definition of tax competition is provided and both the existence and nonexistence of tax competition are shown to be theoretically possible it is argued however that tax competition must occur under empirically reasonable conditions inefficiency in public production is also explicitly modeled the amount of capital used to produce a given level of public service output is shown to be greater than that which is required to minimize costs evaluated at the prices facing private firms

a tiebout tax competition model abstract this paper analyzes a tiebout tax competition model where heterogeneity of consumer preferences is introduced into a standard tax competition framework following the modern tiebout tradition consumer sorting in the model is achieved through the activities of profit maximizing community developers once sorting is achieved the equilibrium is equivalent to that in a standard tax competition model with immobile but heterogeneous consumers a principal lesson of the analysis is that under capital taxation consumers with high public good demands are worse off than under a head tax regime in pursuit of high levels of public spending high demand communities impose high tax rates which drive away capital the analysis also establishes a number of other results

risk schooling and the choice of seed technology in developing countries a meta profit function approach the determinants of rice seed variety choice are studied in a framework in which cultivator s variety specific profit risk preferences uncertainty and schooling affect variety choice the econometric model takes the form of a simultaneous equation switching regimes model with random profit functions the meta profit function adoption of high yielding varieties in indonesia is found to be positively associated with profitability likelihood of flooding quality of irrigation conditional on relative profit and availability of credit and negatively associated with likelihood of drought and land wealth schooling significantly affects variety specific profit and input demand but not variety choice the spread of high yielding rice varieties hyv s has ushered in an era of agricultural transformation in asia in indonesia the adoption of these new seed varieties contributed importantly to a spectacular increase in indonesia s rice production over the last decades rice output grew at an annual rate of 4 percent during the 1970 s and almost 6 percent in the 1980 s while experimental plots have demonstrated that under optimal conditions the mean yield of hyv rice far exceeds that of traditional varieties tv s many asian cultivators do not plant hyv s in indonesia the hyv revolution has been particularly slow to spread to many areas outside of java and partly as a consequence the distribution of the gains derived from hyv s has been uneven accounting for differences in adoption rates is therefore of some interest differences in prices and fixed factors of production are one explanation for inter farm differences in seed variety adoption if cultivator s seed technology choices are the result of profit maximizing behavior then varietal choice will depend on the determinants of profit variable factor prices the prices of varietyspecific output and the level of fixed factors including the agro climatic environment different profit functions exist for each variety reflecting the differences in their biological technology if seed variety choice is itself part of the cultivators profit maximization problem then there exists a single profit function the metaprofit function which treats variety choice as a variable input and from which all

a conceptual framework of adoption of an agricultural innovation abstract in this paper we present a conceptual framework of individual farmers decisions on adoption of a new innovation using the example of a new crop species this framework overcomes the shortcomings of a number of previous studies it represents the adoption of an innovation as a dynamic decision problem spanning at least several years the model allows for generation of potentially valuable information from trialing the innovation the value of such trials is due to development of skills e g in agronomic management of a crop as well as reduction in uncertainty about the innovation s long term profitability the framework also includes the farmer s personal perceptions managerial abilities and risk preferences in order to properly represent the adoption decision process the influences of socio demographic factors within the framework are discussed

productivity and land enhancing technologies in northern ethiopia health public investments and sequential adoption the adoption of more efficient farming practices and technologies that enhance agricultural productivity and improve environmental sustainability is instrumental for achieving economic growth food security and poverty alleviation in sub saharan africa our research examines the interaction between public investments community health and adoption of productivity and land enhancing technologies by households in the northern ethiopian state of tigray agricultural technology adoption decisions are modeled as a sequential process where the timing of choices can matter we find that time spent sick and opportunity costs of caring for sick family members are significant factors in adoption sickness through its impact on household income and labor allocation decisions for healthcare and other activities significantly reduces the likelihood of technology adoption our findings suggest that agencies working to improve agricultural productivity and land resource conservation should consider not only the financial status of potential adopters but also their related health situation

the spatial effects of wage or property tax differentials and local government choice between tax instruments abstract this paper considers the spatial effects on wages employment and business capital as functions of location of a localized differential in source based wage tax rates or business property tax rates between for example a central city and the surrounding suburbs a simple model is used in which business production uses only labor and capital inputs consumers have fixed residential locations but may commute to work wage and property tax differentials have effects that are similar in some ways but different in other ways if given a choice a local government would choose to set its business property tax rate equal to zero and use only a wage tax

rent seeking and tax competition abstract regional or local governments often appear to favour the interests of those who own land in the region here the implications of this sort of policy making are modelled formally people are assumed perfectly mobile between regions but are assumed to own land only in the region of their birth the nash equilibrium is shown to be efficient if and only if no migration of capital or labour is needed to achieve efficiency otherwise tax competition leads to too little migration voluntary inter regional transfers will never arise in equilibrium despite the inefficiency of the nash equilibrium when there is migration a higher level of government cannot alter the equilibrium if regional governments choose policies simultaneously after the federal government has committed to its policies

factor ownership taxes and specialization this paper examines the incentives of regions to levy source based capital taxes when the tax revenue is not needed to finance the regional public sector it is assumed that capital is completely mobile among regions but that labour is completely immobile since each region can produce the same two tradable goods using the same technology then differences in tax rates on capital will lead to some specialization if residents of one region own more of the nation s capital per person then these tax differences may be an equilibrium phenomenon regions with below average capital endowment per person will levy capital taxes to lower the cost of the capital they import even though these taxes lead to capital flight and specialization in the labour intensive good

do husbands and wives pool their resources evidence from the united kingdom child benefit common preference models of family behavior imply income pooling a restriction on family demand functions such that only the sum of husband s income and wife s income affects the allocation of goods and time testing the pooling hypothesis is difficult because most family income sources are not exogenous to the allocations being analyzed in this paper we present an alternative test based on a natural experiment a policy change in the united kingdom that transferred a substantial child allowance to wives in the late 1970s using family expenditure survey data we find strong evidence that a shift toward greater expenditures on women s clothing and children s clothing relative to men s clothing coincided with this income redistribution

optimal fiscal policy for a state or local government abstract state and local government services are enjoyed by and taxes borne by two groups residents and non residents this paper addresses the question if state and local governments maximize their residents welfare and cannot distinguish between individual residents and non residents but know the aggregate characteristics of the two groups what set of taxes subsidies and public goods should they choose some of the results obtained are i even when all commodities are taxable and equity is ignored the existence of non resident consumption makes uniform taxation non optimal ii in some cases whether a commodity should be taxed or subsidized is independent of its own price elasticity iii central cities may be subsidized by suburban residents and iv the ability of state and local governments to redistribute is inversely proportional to the openness of the economy

interjurisdictional capital mobility fiscal externality and a corrective subsidy abstract recent studies emphasize that local property taxation may result in inefficiently small amounts of local public spending this paper shows that the inefficiency can be traced to a fiscal externality when one jurisdiction increases its taxes it causes a flow of capital to other jurisdictions that increases their tax revenues the inefficiency can be corrected with a subsidy that internalizes the externality key empirical parameters determining the magnitude of the externality are identified illustrative calculations indicate that subsidy rates on the order of 40 might be required to achieve efficiency

tax competition uniform assessment and the benefit principle abstract in previous discussions it has been argued that tax competition between local governments results in a tax burden on business that is less than the cost of public services for business and in suboptimal levels of public expenditures for residents however this conclusion has never been substantiated by a full theoretical treatment here a theoretical model of tax competition is developed between metropolitan areas with labor perfectly immobile and two local public goods one for residents and one for business for plausible parameter values numerical solutions of the optimality conditions are computed by means of a nonlinear programming algorithm

women s income and boy girl anthropometric status in the cote d ivoire abstract this paper examines the effects of the intrahousehold distribution of income on children s anthropometric status in the c te d ivoire we find that increases in the proportion of cash income accruing to women increases boys height for age relative to girls and that this effect is statistically significant we suggest that this result may reflect efficiency and equity concerns which in this case reinforce each other

should land and capital be taxed at a uniform rate if jurisdictions are allowed to tax land and capital separately they tax only land because capital taxation distorts the allocation of mobile capital to exploit absentee owners however jurisdictions tax land beyond the efficient level as absentee ownership increases throughout the economy land taxation results in greater inefficiency to alleviate the inefficiency of overtaxing land the higher level government intervenes to require jurisdictions to tax both capital and land at a uniform rate because the desire to attract capital lowers the tax rate uniform taxation of land and capital or property taxation thus may be more efficient than separate taxation jel classification h21 h71 est ce que la terre et le capital devraient etre taxes d une maniere uniforme si on permettait aux diverses juridictions de taxer capital et terre separement elles taxeraient seulement la terre parce que la fiscalite imposee au capital cree des distorsions dans l allocation du capital mobile mais pour exploiter les proprietaires absents les diverses juridictions imposent un fardeau fiscal sur la terre qui va au dela de ce que l efficacite commande a proportion que la propriete absente se developpe dans l economie la fiscalite imposee a la terre devient source de plus en plus grande inefficacite pour reduire cette inefficacite attribuable a la sur taxation de la terre le niveau senior de gouvernement intervient pour forcer les juridictions juniors a taxer capital et terre au meme taux parce que le desir d attirer le capital reduit le taux de taxation il se peut donc que la taxation uniforme de la terre et du capital ou de la taxation sur la propriete soit plus efficace que des taux d imposition differents

the silver lining of red tape abstract an increasing number of international agreements require non discrimination from their participants i e the government of one country cannot treat foreign firms differently from domestic firms this is at odds with a government s desire to benefit its own citizens rather than foreign citizens i show that the use of red tape a wasteful application process can achieve de facto discrimination key to this result is firm heterogeneity since although the red tape cost is the same across firms only those sufficiently benefiting from an incentive program will find it worth the cost of applying if the benefits of targeting subsidies outweigh the burden of red tape red tape will be used

a spatial model of tax competition with multiple tax instruments abstract this paper presents a model of tax competition with two local jurisdictions in each metropolitan area located along a line segment and many metropolitan areas in the world economy the residents in each local jurisdiction are allowed to commute at a constant cost per mile to work in the other jurisdiction if a lump sum tax can be used then other taxes are not used if source based wage and business capital taxes can both be used then only the former is used in this case or if only a business capital tax can be used the local public good is underprovided

the persistence and inefficiency of property tax finance of local public expenditures abstract i both characterize and evaluate equilibrium outcomes in multiple jurisdiction economies with property and land taxation but where direct taxation of residents is not possible the model contains perfectly mobile capital and population and competitive entrepreneurial governments that choose local taxes and expenditures to maximize after tax land rent when the cost of public goods is proportional to population the property tax emerges as the sole source of local finance even though the land tax has no deadweight loss it is shown that equilibria are not constrained efficient in general hence decentralized decision making is not consistent with the best use of the available tax instruments

on the origins of gender roles women and the plough the study examines the historical origins of existing cross cultural differences in beliefs and values regarding the appropriate role of women in society we test the hypothesis that traditional agricultural practices influenced the historical gender division of labor and the evolution of gender norms we find that consistent with existing hypotheses the descendants of societies that traditionally practiced plough agriculture today have less equal gender norms measured using reported gender role attitudes and female participation in the workplace politics and entrepreneurial activities our results hold looking across countries across districts within countries and across ethnicities within districts to test for the importance of cultural persistence we examine the children of immigrants living in europe and the united states we find that even among these individuals all born and raised in the same country those with a heritage of traditional plough use exhibit less equal beliefs about gender roles today jel codes d03 j16 n30 copyright 2013 oxford university press

state and local tax competition in a spatial model with sales taxes and residential property taxes abstract this paper presents a theoretical model with a uniformly populated line that is divided into local jurisdictions and or states if one level of government imposes sales and residential property taxes and if the spatial extent of each taxing jurisdiction is positive and finite then in nash equilibrium the sales tax rate is less than residential property tax rate housing consumption is suboptimal and the public good is underprovided in each jurisdiction if a very large state or country is divided into local jurisdictions and if both levels of government choose tax rates endogenously then under some assumptions there is an efficient outcome

beyond baseline and follow up the case for more t in experiments the vast majority of randomized experiments in economics rely on a single baseline and single follow up survey if multiple follow ups are conducted the reason is typically to examine the trajectory of impact effects so that in effect only one follow up round is being used to estimate each treatment effect of interest while such a design is suitable for study of highly autocorrelated and relatively precisely measured outcomes in the health and education domains this paper makes the case that it is unlikely to be optimal for measuring noisy and relatively less autocorrelated outcomes such as business profits household incomes and expenditures and episodic health outcomes taking multiple measurements of such outcomes at relatively short intervals allows the researcher to average out noise increasing power when the outcomes have low autocorrelation it can make sense to do no baseline at all moreover the author shows how for such outcomes more power can be achieved with multiple follow ups than allocating the same total sample size over a single follow up and baseline the analysis highlights the large gains in power from ancova rather than difference in differences when autocorrelations are low and a baseline is taken the paper discusses the issues involved in multiple measurements and makes recommendations for the design of experiments and related non experimental impact evaluations

children s resources in collective households identification estimation and an application to child poverty in malawi children s resources matter but they are hard to identify because consumption is typically mea sured at the household level modern collective household models permit some identication of indi vidual household member resources but these models typically either ignore children or treat them as attributes of adults we propose a collective household model in which children are people with their own utility functions possibly assigned to them by parents extending the frameworks of browning chiappori and lewbel 2007 and lewbel and pendakur 2008 we show identication of children s resource shares within households we invoke semiparametric restrictions on individual preferences and use data on the household level consumption of assignable private goods to achieve identication of each individual s resource share within the household we show this without being able to observe consumption by individual household members of goods that are partly or wholly shared goods within the household further we obtain identication using only engel curves and so do not require ob served price variation in the data we estimate our model using data from malawi andnd that as the number of children in a household grows women s resource shares fall and children s resource shares rise and men s resource shares are basically unchanged we alsond evidence of gender bias against girls and observe that the resource shares of mothers and children are increasing in the education level of the mother finally we use our estimates to construct poverty indices at the person level andnd that per capita poverty indices understate the incidence of child poverty in malawi

asymmetric tax competition abstract the paper analyzes nash equilibrium when two jurisdictions set tax rates on a tax base which is mobile between them population differences imply tax differences the smaller jurisdiction levies a lower tax rate in equilibrium and its residents are better off than those in the larger jurisdiction the nash equilibrium is inefficient if the two jurisdictions merged the resulting allocation would be efficient however if differences in population are great enough residents of the small jurisdiction would be made worse off by such a merger

welfare consequences of food prices increases evidence from rural mexico this paper presents an analysis of the welfare consequences of recent increases in food prices in mexico using micro level data we estimate a quaids model of demand for food using data collected to evaluate the conditional cash transfer program oportunidades we show how the poor have been affected by the recent increases and changes in relative prices of foods we also show how a conditional cash transfer program provides a means of alleviating the problem of increasing staple prices and simulate the impact of such a policy on household welfare and consumer demand we contrast this policy with alternative policy responses such as price subsidies which distort relative prices and are less well targeted

oportunidades program effect on consumption low participation and methodological issues abstract in this paper we estimate the effect of the mexican conditional cash transfer program oportunidades on consumption and we explore some issues related to participation in the program and to the estimation of treatment effects we discuss the comparability of treatment and control areas provide evidence that the expected transfer may not be sufficiently high to induce many eligible households to participate and find positive effects on consumption

commodity tax competition between member states of a federation equilibrium and efficiency we first describe regional market equilibria whereupon consumers of each region allocate their purchases of private goods between domestic and nondomestic ones according to the structure of relative prices taxes and transportation costs next regional optimal tax levels and public good quantities are derived the tax of the other region being held constant fiscal competition arises from the ability of one region in choosing its tax to alter the tax base of the other

efficient tax exporting in a multijurisdiction economy with free mobility of households between communities some portion of any community s tax is incident upon nonresident landowners it is shown that when the objective of a community is taken to be the level of satisfaction of its residents a fully efficient allocation is a nash equilibrium of the decentralized game in general no local tax structure that restricts a community s tax base to residents can attain the optimum thus tax exporting is necessary for independent local government behavior to be consistent with efficiency

efficient intra household allocations a general characterization and empirical tests the neoclassical theory of demand applies to individuals yet in empirical work it is usually taken as valid for households with many members this paper explores what the theory of individuals implies for households that have more than one member we make minimal assumptions about how the individual members of the household resolve conflicts all we assume is that however decisions are made outcomes are efficient we refer to this as the collective setting we show that in the collective setting household demands must satisfy a symmetry and rank condition on the slutsky matrix we also present some further results on the effects on demands of variables that do not modify preferences but that do affect how decisions are made we apply our theory to a series of surveys of household expenditures from canada the tests of the usual symmetry conditions are rejected for two person households but not for one person households we also show that income pooling is rejected for two person households we then test for our collective setting conditions on the couples data none of the collective setting restrictions are rejected we conclude that the collective setting is a plausible and tractable next step to take in the analysis of household behavior

pigou tiebout property taxation and the underprovision of local public goods abstract pigou s proposition that the use of distorting taxes rather than neutral head taxes reduces public service levels is examined in this paper a simple model with a national system of competing local governments is utilized to demonstrate that the use of a distorting property tax on mobile capital decreases the level of residential public services the case where public services are an intermediate producer good is also considered

food and cash transfers evidence from colombia we study food engel curves among the poor population targeted by a conditional cash transfer programme in colombia after controlling for the endogeneity of total consumption and for the price variability across villages our estimates imply that an increase in consumption by 10 would lead to a decrease of 1 in the share of food however quasi experimental estimates of the impact of the programme show that the share of food increases this result is not inconsistent with the hypothesis that the programme could increase the bargaining power of women inducing a more than proportional increase in food consumption

spousal control and intra household decision making an experimental study in the philippines i elicit causal effects of spousal observability and communication on financial choices of married individuals in the philippines when choices are private men put money into their personal accounts when choices are observable men commit money to consumption for their own benefit when required to communicate men put money into their wives account these strong treatment effects on men but not women appear related more to control than to gender men whose wives control household savings respond more strongly to the treat ment and women whose husbands control savings exhibit the same response changes in information and communication interact with underlying control to produce mutable gender specific outcomes

interstate commodity tax differentials and the distribution of residents abstract this paper considers the manner in which an unequal distribution of consumers affects the commodity tax policies of neighboring jurisdictions the paper uses a spatial model in which the residents of two states are distributed non uniformly and employs a variety of assumptions about the behavior of governments and firms throughout the paper shows that at a nash equilibrium in tax levels the sparsely populated state imposes a lower tax than does its densely populated neighbor the paper also demonstrates how equilibrium state taxes differ depending on whether firms employ marginal cost or profit maximizing pricing

intra household resource allocation an inferential approach if household income is pooled and then allocated to maximize welfare then income under the control of mothers and fathers should have the same impact on demand with survey data on family health and nutrition in brazil the equality of parental income effects is rejected unearned income in the hands of a mother has a bigger effect on her family s health than income under the control of a father for child survival probabilities the effect is almost twenty times bigger the common preference or neoclassical model of the household is rejected if unearned income is measured with error and income is pooled then the ratio of maternal to paternal income effects should be the same equality of the ratios cannot be rejected there is also evidence for gender preference mothers prefer to devote resources to improving the nutritional status of their daughters fathers to sons

a three input model of the spatial effects of a central city wage tax abstract this paper considers the short run and long run spatial effects on wages employment and business capital as functions of location of a localized increase in wage tax rates the model is most applicable to a central city that has a higher wage tax rate than the surrounding suburbs the inclusion of land as a third input in production significantly reduces the long run effects of a central city wage tax on employment near the central city boundary as compared with a model in which labor and capital are the only two inputs the short run effects are significantly less than the long run effects

testing the neoclassical model of family labor supply and fertility the mcelroy horney nash bargaining model of family demand behavior relaxes the restriction that nonearned income of husband and wife has the identical effect on family labor supply and commodity demands this restriction of the neoclassical model offamily behavior is tested for the determination of husband and wife labor supply andfertility based on the 1981 socioeconomic survey of thailand the neoclassical restriction is rejected for female labor supply andfertility another unexplored limitation offamily demand studies due to the sample self selection of intact marriages is empirically treated through alternative estimation strategies in this case a more sharply focused theory of marital behavior is needed to identify family demand models

factors influencing adoption of land enhancing technology in the sahel lessons from a case study in niger abstract technical change through the introduction of land enhancing conservation technologies is essential to economic growth in the sahel tobit analysis was used to identify factors that motivate level and intensity of adoption of specific soil and water management technologies the results show that higher percentage of degraded farmland extension education lower risk aversion and the availability of short term profits are important for increasing the adoption and intensity of use of improved tassa and half crescent shaped earthen mounds age and attitudes to differential gains between farm and non farm income showed no influence on adoption three main policy implications emerge from these findings first technologies should be targeted to locations that have large percentages of degraded farmlands the probability of adoption and intensity of use are likely to be high at such locations second there is the need to provide extension education that demonstrates risk reduction capacities of conservation techniques this will make available information capable of stimulating adoption of land enhancing technologies finally policy makers should not seek to target innovations to younger farmers because age has no relationship to adoption of the improved tassa and half crescent shaped earthen mounds lessons from the case study have broad relevance to cropped areas in the sahel

elasticities in aids models in the literature a variety of approaches have been used to calculate demand elasticities in almost ideal demand system aids models of demand it is common to estimate the linear approximate almost ideal demand system la aids instead of the aids when the la aids is estimated all of the previously reported approaches to compute elasticities are theoretically incorrect this paper presents correct formulas for la aids elasticities and illustrates the potential errors from using incorrect computing the almost ideal demand system aids of deaton and muellbauer 1980a b has become popular in recent years anderson and blundell blanciforti and green 1983a b blanciforti green and king chalfant eales and unnevehr fujii khaled and mak fulponi heien and willett murray parsons ray a variety of approaches to computing elasticities has been used and some of the approaches may lead to significant errors this paper clarifies the differences between alternative approaches to estimating demand elasticities in aids models

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

conditional cash transfers adult work incentives and poverty conditional cash transfer cct programs aim to alleviate poverty through monetary and in kind benefits as well as reduce future levels of poverty by encouraging investments in education health and nutrition the success of cct programs at reducing poverty depends on whether and the extent to which cash transfers affect adult work incentives the authors examine whether the progresa program of mexico affects adult participation in the labor market and overall adult leisure time and they link these effects to the impact of the program on poverty using the experimental design of progresa s evaluation sample the authors find that the program does not have any significant effect on adult labor force participation and leisure time their findings on adult work incentives are reinforced further by the result that progresa leads to a substantial reduction in poverty the poverty reduction effects are stronger for the poverty gap and severity of poverty measures

an optimal taxation approach to fiscal federalism in a federal system of government each unit of government decides independently how much of each type of public good to provide and what types of taxes and which tax rates to use in funding the public goods in this paper we explore what types of problems can arise from this decentralized form of decision making in particular we describe systematically the types of externalities that one unit of government can create for nonresidents through both its public goods decisions and its taxation decisions the paper also explores briefly what the central government might do to lessen the costs of decentralized decision making

what s mine is yours the influence of male and female incomes on patterns of household expenditure this paper uses microdata from the 1992 statistics canada family expenditure survey to provide evidence that male and female incomes do not always exert identical influences on household expenditures the novelty of the paper lies in its demonstration that while incomes may be pooled for some categories of consumption e g housing the income pooling hypothesis must be rejected for others we also go beyond simply rejecting the pooling hypothesis to ask how male versus female income is used our results stress the on going importance of traditional gender roles for example we find that expenditures on child care increase only with women s incomes higher male income is not associated with higher expenditure on child care even when both spouses are full time full year paid workers

international tax competition and gains from tax harmonization abstract in a world economy there are two types of distortions which can be caused by capital income taxation in addition to the standard closed economy wedge between the consumer saver marginal intertemporal rate of substitution and the producer investor marginal productivity of capital i international differences in intertemporal marginal rates of substitution implying an inefficient allocation of world savings across countries and ii international differences in the marginal productivity of capital implying an inefficient allocation of world investment across countries the paper focuses on the structure of taxation for countries which are engaged in tax competition and on potential gains from a tax harmonization we show that if the competing countries are sufficiently coordinated with the rest of the world then tax competition leads each country to apply the residence principle of taxation and there are no gains from tax harmonization if however there is not sufficient coordination then tax competition leads to low capital income taxes and the tax burden falls on the internationally immobile factors the outcome is nevertheless still efficient relative to the available constrained set of tax instruments

why is capital so immobile internationally possible explanations and implications for capital income taxation the evidence on international capital immobility is extensive including the lack of international portfolio diversification real interest differentials across countries and the high correlation between domestic savings and investment the authors develop a model with asymmetric information between countries that helps rationalize all the above observations and then examine the implications of this model for optimal domestic tax policy without asymmetric information past work showed that small open economies should not impose corporate income taxes with asymmetric information the optimal policy instead involves government subsidies to capital imports some omitted factors that argue against subsidizing capital imports are explored briefly copyright 1996 by american economic association

property taxation nash equilibrium and market power abstract differences in tax policy arise from differences in the number of jurisdictions in a metropolitan area following wildasin 4 and bucovetsky 2 the tax rates in the jurisdictions are determined in a nash game in the tax rate the tax rate and public service level as well as the welfare of residents increase as the number of jurisdictions in the metropolis decreases

tax competition tax exporting and higher government choice of tax instruments for local governments abstract this paper presents a theoretical model with tax exporting due to external ownership of a fraction of the land in each local jurisdiction there are n local jurisdictions in a metropolitan area n 1 and many metropolitan areas in a world economy the paper examines the usage of business property taxes and source based wage taxes by local jurisdictions first in the presence of and then in the absence of residence based lump sum taxes and how this depends on and n the paper then examines the choice of a world national or state government as to whether to allow local metropolitan or sub metropolitan governments to use business property taxes wage taxes or both assuming that the local governments choose the actual tax rates

taxation of investment and savings in a world economy the equilibrium of capital and equilibrium market prices are derived for a world economy with a unified securities market mobile capital no uncertainty and varying tax rates on different sources of income in each country the paper then characterizes optimal tax rates for a small country in this setting focusing on the peculiar incentives created when the before tax rate of return differs among securities due to differences in their typical tax treatment copyright 1986 by american economic association

jeux sans frontieres tax competition and tax coordination when countries differ in size closer international integration is putting increasing pressure on existing national tax structures this paper uses a simple two country model to address a range of consequent policy concerns focusing particularly on the role of country size differences in size exacerbate the inefficiency from noncooperative behavior harming both countries the smaller country loses from harmonization to any tax rate between those set in the noncooperative equilibrium but both countries gain from the imposition of a minimum tax anywhere in that range the fully optimal response to freer cross border trade however may be to do nothing jel h20 h77

income and outcomes a structural model of intrahousehold allocation there is evidence from several sources that one cannot treat many person households as a single decision maker if this is the case then factors such as the relative incomes of the household members may affect the final allocation decisions made by the household we develop a method of identifying how incomes affect outcomes given conventional family expenditure data the basic assumption we make is that household decision processes lead to efficient outcomes we apply our method to a sample of canadian couples with no children we find that the final allocations of expenditures on each partner depend significantly on their relative incomes and ages and on the level of lifetime wealth

mobile labor multiple tax instruments and tax competition abstract the tax competition literature shows that local governments keep property tax rates inefficiently low to prevent capital outflows thereby underproviding local public goods this paper adds mobile labor and an alternative tax instrument to the model jurisdictions have access to a property tax levied on land and capital plus either a head tax or a labor tax scale economies in public good provision create incentives to use the property tax but these incentives are not accompanied by increased incentives to underprovide public goods in contrast underprovision is associated with the use of a distortionary labor tax

modeling multiple adoption decisions in a joint framework a multinomial probit mnp model is applied to the modeling of adoption decisions by farmers facing multiple technologies which can be adopted in various combinations this model allows for full investigation of the interactions between decisions to adopt or not adopt several technologies estimation is carried out in a bayesian framework employing gibbs sampling to circumvent past difficulties encountered in maximum likelihood estimation of the mnp model the model is estimated for a sample of u s apple growers with four possible sustainable production technology bundles the results show that adoption decisions are most significantly influenced by off farm labor supply

quadratic engel curves and consumer demand this paper presents a model of consumer demand that is consistent with the observed expenditure patterns of individual consumers in a long time series of expenditure surveys and is also able to provide a detailed welfare analysis of shifts in relative prices a nonparametric analysis of consumer expenditure patterns suggests that engel curves require quadratic terms in the logarithm of expenditure while popular models of demand such as the translog or the almost ideal demand systems do allow flexible price responses within a theoretically coherent structure they have expenditure share engel curves that are linear in the logarithm of total expenditure we derive the complete class of integrable quadratic logarithmic expenditure share systems a specification from this class is estimated on a large pooled data set of u k households models that fail to account for engel curvature are found ro generate important distortions in the patterns of welfare losses associated with a tax increase

spatial competition between jurisdictions which tax perfectly competitive retail or production centers abstract this paper examines the taxes that jurisdictions choose to impose on perfectly competitive retail centers or production centers within their boundaries retail centers are located on a line and jurisdictions are segments of the line a jurisdiction maximizes the sum of tax revenues and residents consumer surplus the tax chosen by a jurisdiction is a function of the spacing between retail centers the locations of interjurisdictional boundaries and the taxes imposed by neighboring jurisdictions an exporting jurisdiction chooses a positive tax an importing jurisdiction chooses a zero tax even if neighboring jurisdictions have taxes or subsidies if all jurisdictions with retail centers use endogenous fiscal policy then each imposes a positive or zero tax

training wages and sample selection estimating sharp bounds on treatment effects this paper empirically assesses the wage effects of the job corps program one of the largest federally funded job training programs in the u s even with the aid of a randomized experiment the impact of a training program on wages is difficult to study because of sample selection a pervasive problem in applied microeconometric research wage rates are only observed for those who are employed and employment status itself may be affected by the training program this paper develops an intuitive trimming procedure for bounding average treatment effects in the presence of sample selection in contrast to existing methods the procedure requires neither exclusion restrictions nor a bounded support for the outcome of interest identification results estimators and their asymptotic distribution are presented the bounds suggest that the program raised wages consistent with the notion that the job corps raises earnings by increasing human capital rather than solely through encouraging work the estimator is generally applicable to typical treatment evaluation problems in which there is nonrandom sample selection attrition copyright wiley blackwell