sustainable innovation business models and economic performance an overview sustainable development requires radical and systemic innovations such innovations can be more effectively created and studied when building on the concept of business models this concept provides firms with a holistic framework to envision and implement sustainable innovations for researchers the concept provides an analytical tool that allows them to assess the interplay between the different aspects that firms combine to create ecological economic and social value in addition the business model concept provides a link between the individual firm and the larger production and consumption system in which it operates this paper provides an introduction to the special issue which emerged from selected papers presented at the erscp emsu 2010 conference held in delft the netherlands papers in the special issue cover a broad range from a conceptual discussion resulting in a research agenda the assessment of diffusion of specific business models such as product service systems the introduction of new management tools for business transition management to case studies on how specific business models evolved in specific communities together these papers provide insight into the promise of the business model concept for understanding and advancing sustainable innovation

a survey of agricultural household models recent findings and policy implications semicommercial farms that produce multiple crops make up a large part of the agricultural sector in developing economies these farms or agricultural households combine two fundamental units of microeconomic analysis the household and the firm traditional economic theory has dealt with these units seperately but in developing economies in which peasant farms dominate their interdependence is of crucial importance researchers have developed models of agricultural households that combine producer and consumer behavior in a theoretically consistent fashion recent empirical applications of these models have extended them and expanded the range of policy issues which can be investigated using this general framework this article reports the results of empirical applications of this model in india indonesia japan the republic of korea malaysia nigeria senegal sierra leone taiwan and thailand it provides a comparative analysis of the policy implications of the approach for such matters as the welfare of farm households the size of marketed surplus the demand for nonagricultural goods and services and for hired labor and the availability of budget revenues and foreign exchange

the effects of tax policy on aggregate agricultural investment the effects of tax policies on aggregate agricultural investment are examined results from this analysis suggest that tax policies are effective in promoting agricultural investment nearly 20 percent of net investment in agricultural equipment during the period 1956 through 1978 is attributed to tax policy from 1956 to 1978 tax policy has stimulated in real dollars over 5 billion in net investment in equipment and in excess of 1 billion in structures

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

infrastructure quality and the subsidy trap abstract electricity and water are often subsidized in developing countries to increase their affordability for low income households ideally such subsidies would create sufficient demand in poor neighborhoods to encourage private investment in their infrastructure instead many regions receiving large subsidies have precarious distribution networks supplying users who never pay using a structural model of household electricity demand in colombia i predict the change in consumption and profits from upgrading low quality electricity connections i show that the existing subsidies which provide greater transfers to areas with unreliable supply deter investment to modernize infrastructure finally i analyze alternative programs with stronger investment incentives jel h23 h54 l94 l98 o12 o13

bridging sustainable business model innovation and user driven innovation a process for sustainable value proposition design with an increasing population a growing middle class and increased resource use our current ways of living and doing business are unsustainable next to the implementation of innovative technology sustainable development based on innovative business models better understating of customer needs and behavioural change are crucial this research aims at combining principles from both sustainable business model innovation and user driven innovation to develop more successful radical and user centred sustainable value propositions sustainable business model innovation entails developing value propositions that create value for multiple stakeholders at the same time including customers shareholders suppliers and partners as well as the environment and society user driven innovation allows developing solutions that are meaningful for people and profitable for business by involving potential customers users and or other stakeholders in an experimental and iterative design process the study adopts a research through design methodology a qualitative research approach that uses design practice to inform research to this end a design project in the framework of the climate kic the largest european partnership addressing the challenge of climate change was investigated as a result this paper proposes a process for sustainable value proposition design which adopts a thorough dynamic and iterative perspective talking to stakeholders thinking about the problem testing the product service that leads to an actual sustainable value proposition and to a superior problem solution fit in practice managers are provided with an initial methodological framework for mapping and understanding the stakeholders in a broad sense including and especially users identifying their needs and interests and progressively combining them into a more meaningful and enriching value proposition

corporate social responsibility theories mapping the territory the corporate social responsibility csr field presents not only a landscape of theories but also a proliferation of approaches which are controversial complex and unclear this article tries to clarify the sit uation mapping the territory by classifying the main csr theories and related approaches in four groups 1 instrumental theories in which the corporation is seen as only an instrument for wealth creation and its social activities are only a means to achieve economic results 2 political theories which concern themselves with the power of corporations in society and a responsible use of this power in the political arena 3 integrative theories in which the corporation is focused on the satisfaction of social demands and 4 ethical theories based on ethical responsibilities of corporations to society in practice each csr theory presents four dimensions related to profits political performance social demands and ethical values the findings suggest the necessity to develop a new theory on the business and society relationship which should integrate these four dimensions

the economic impacts of climate change evidence from agricultural output and random fluctuations in weather fisher et al 2012 hereafter fhrs have uncovered coding and data errors in our paper deschenes and greenstone 2007 hereafter dg we acknowledge and are embarrassed by these mistakes we are grateful to fhrs for uncovering them we hope that this reply will also contribute to advancing the literature on the vital question of the impact of climate change on the us agricultural sector fhrs main critiques of dg are as follows i there are errors in the weather data and climate change projections used by dg ii the climate change projections are based on the hadley 2 model and scenarios rather than the more recent hadley 3 model and scenarios iii standard errors are biased due to spatial correlation iv the inclusion of state by year fixed effects does not leave enough weather variation to obtain meaningful estimates of the relationship between agriculture profits and weather v storage and inventory adjustment in response to yield shocks invalidate the use of annual profit data and vi fhrs argue that a better specified hedonic model produces robust estimates unlike the results reported in dg four of these critiques have little basis and we respond to them here in the introduction specifically with respect to ii the more recent daily climate predictions were not available when we wrote dg nevertheless the most important issue is providing the reliable estimates of climate change and in this note we report estimates based on the climate model we used in dg and a more recent one that we gained access to in the meantime iii in the primary table on agricultural profits dg reports two sets of standard errors with the first clustered at the county level and the second based on a variance covariance matrix that accounts for spatial correlation using the method proposed in conley 1999 thus the claim of fhrs 2012 seems overblown nevertheless to ease comparisons of papers in this literature this note will adopt the fhrs convention of reporting estimated standard errors clustered at the county and state levels we find that inference is largely unaffected by the choice between these different assumptions about the variance covariance matrix

calculating the value of time spent collecting water some estimates for ukunda kenya abstract this article presents two procedures for estimating the value of time spent hauling water in developing countries both approaches are used to derive estimates of the value of time for households in ukunda kenya the results indicate that households in this village place a surprisingly high value on the time they spend collecting water a value approximately equivalent to the wage rate for unskilled labor these findings suggest that the economic benefits of improved water services in developing countries may be much greater than is commonly realized

water works the economic impact of water infrastructure abstract billions of hours are spent each year on water collection in developing countries this paper explores whether improvements in water technologies which decrease household distance to drinking water source and the time intensity of home production enable changes in household time allocation and thereby productivity gains in kyrgyzstan adults reallocate time to leisure and labor on the household farm average yearly household cereals production increased significantly results imply a rate of return to labor equaling 0 11 hour approximately half the hourly farm wage absent evidence of improved adult health results suggest that productivity gains were realized primarily through increased farm labor

enacting ecological sustainability in the mnc a test of an adapted value belief norm framework undoubtedly multinational corporations must play a significant role in the advancement of global ecological ethics our research offers a glimpse into the process of how goals of ecological sustainability in one multinational corporation can trickle down through the organization via the sustainability support behaviors of supervisors we asked the question how do supervisors in a multinational corporation internalize their corporation s commitment to ecological sustainability and in turn behave in ways that convey this commitment to their subordinates in response we created a theoretical framework for supervisor sustainability support behavior based on stern et al human ecology review 6 2 81 97 1999 value belief norm vbn theory we then tested our framework by performing a survey based field study of supervisors in a multinational pharmaceutical company that has publicly professed a goal of ecological sustainability

innovation process of new ventures driven by sustainability abstract since the brundtland report appeared in 1987 various approaches to realising sustainable consumption and production have come into practice while more traditional approaches like ecodesign and design for sustainability often emphasize optimizing existing products processes and businesses more radical approaches like product service systems and system innovation for sustainability emphasize developing new innovative products and services with higher environmental gains although these studies increased our understanding of sustainability in relation to product design they are criticized for failing to draw on existing theoretical frameworks in the organizational innovation literature berchicci 2005 this paper seeks to explore the innovation process within new ventures driven by sustainability since 1 conventional wisdom suggests that young and new firms have advantages in innovation acs and audretsch 1990 and as such they are the potential candidates of offering radical solutions to the challenges of sustainability and 2 there are few studies that address exploiting sustainable product ideas through new organizations the paper reports on the results of an explorative study involving the use of generative techniques during 19 individual semi structured interviews with eight entrepreneurs and seven innovation support organizations the results suggest that the relative impact of internal and external factors on the innovation process change over time as the new organization forms in addition creating new businesses from sustainability ideals is influenced by the firms ability in understanding and managing the differences between intended and created value and in finding an overlap between customer benefits and clearly defined prioritized sustainability goals

sustainable business model adoption among s p 500 firms a longitudinal content analysis study in this study we examine the diversity of sustainable business models adopted by the largest global corporations those listed in the s p 500 index over the period 2005 2014 we examine press release communications during this period which represent public data about business relevant events we expect that examining this communication can reveal longitudinal patterns in the adoption of sustainable business activities and models empirically we utilize academic and practitioner expert panels to build a set of keywords across nine sustainable business model archetypes and utilize automated content analysis to examine the breadth and nature of a firm s sustainable business activities and practices we find evidence of the increasing prominence of different types of sustainable business models over time in particular the results show that large capitalized firms have mostly adopted the environmentally oriented archetypes and to much lesser extent the societal and organizational ones

spring cleaning rural water impacts valuation and property rights institutions the brief summarizes the spring cleaning rural water impacts valuation and property rights institutions the first two rounds of spring protection occurred in january april 2005 and august november 2005 the author measure health impacts of spring protection an investment that improves source water quality the author also estimate households valuation of spring protection and simulate the welfare impacts of alternatives to the current system of common property rights in water which limits incentives for private investment spring infrastructure investments reduce fecal contamination by 66 percent but household water quality improves less due to recontamination child diarrhea falls by one quarter travel cost based revealed preference estimates of households valuations are much smaller than both stated preference valuations and health planners valuations and are consistent with models in which the demand for health is highly income elastic the author estimate that private property norms would generate little additional investment while imposing large static costs due to above marginal cost pricing private property will function better at higher income levels or underwater scarcity and alternative institutions could yield pareto improvements

property rights and water access evidence from land titling in rural peru summary insecure land tenure and property rights are an impediment to infrastructure access and services for households in many developing countries this paper explores whether alleviating this impediment through a land titling program in rural peru is associated with improvements in household water sources as well as sanitation and electricity services the economics literature on the links between property rights and investment decisions has amassed yet due to the necessity of water for life the high fixed costs associated with water infrastructure construction and the positive externalities that can result from water provision it is not obvious how water services might respond to land tenure improvements utilizing the phased in program timing in a quasi experimental design we exploit the differences in implementation timing across space in conjunction with the differences in program impact across households that held property titles prior to the project and those that did not results from this modified difference in differences method indicate that land titling is associated with small in magnitude but statistically significant increases in water access larger gains in sanitation and electricity services are found we investigate the channels through which this improved access occurs and find evidence of investments in all three services via either government or water utilities we find evidence of individual household investment only in the case of sanitation taken together these results indicate that land titles are important but not sufficient to increase access to water and other services

the effects of uncertainty and adjustment costs on investment in the almond industry a neoclassical model of investment behavior is developed wherein firms are assumed to maximize the expected present value of net revenue under leontief technology prices and yields are assumed to be stochastic this framework yields investment as a function of the expected present value of the output from one unit of capital and the variance of the expected value this theory is applied to investment in the almond industry the model outperforms both a model without uncertainty and one with neither uncertainty nor adjustment costs using in sample and out of sample tests copyright 1989 by mit press

engines of liberation electricity was born at the dawn of the last century households were inundated with a flood of new consumer durables what was the impact of this consumer durable goods revolution it is argued here that the consumer goods revolution was conducive to liberating women from the home to analyse this hypothesis a beckerian model of household production is developed households must decide whether or not to adopt the new technologies and whether a married woman should work can such a model help to explain the rise in married female labour force participation that occurred in the last century yes the housewife of the future will be neither a slave to servants nor herself a drudge she will give less attention to the home because the home will need less she will be rather a domestic engineer than a domestic labourer with the greatest of all handmaidens electricity at her service this and other mechanical forces will so revolutionize the woman s world that a large portion of the aggregate of woman s energy will be conserved for use in broader more constructive fields thomas alva edison as interviewed in good housekeeping magazine lv no 4 october 1912 p 436

multinational oil companies and the adoption of sustainable development a resource based and institutional theory interpretation of adoption heterogeneity sustainable development is often framed as a social issue to which corporations should pay attention because it offers both opportunities and challenges through the use of institutional theory and the resource based view of the firm we shed some light on why more than 20 years after sustainable development was first introduced we see neither the adoption of this business model as dominant nor its converse that is the total abandonment of the model as unworkable and unprofitable we focus on multinational corporations mncs because they were among the organizations first called to take action in order to illustrate the institutional pressures mncs face and their strategic response to these pressures we analysed four major oil and gas multinationals subject to similar sustainable development pressures climate change biodiversity renewable energy development and social investment we argue that normative and coercive isomorphism does not occur at the global level because sustainable development is largely a stakeholder driven rather than a broad social pressure that is host country interpretation of sustainable development pressures varies across an mnc s subsidiary network based on the analysis of the four major mncs annual reports from 2000 to 2005 we argue that mimetic isomorphism may occur but since it implies the use of complex and intangible resources mimetic processes are slow rare and discretionary

adjustment costs uncertainty and the behavior of the firm this paper examines the effects of demand and cost uncertainty on a firm s investment output and pricing decisions but unlike most earlier studies in which demand and cost are simply not known at the time an output or pricing decision is made here i consider uncertainties over future demand and costs it will be seen that the effects of such uncertainties depend critically on the characteristics of the firm s adjustment costs i treat demand uncertainty in a dynamic context by letting the market demand function shift randomly but continuously through time according to a stochastic process this means that today s demand is known exactly but future demand may be larger or smaller and has a variance that increases with the time horizon likewise uncertainty over factor costs is characterized by treating those variables as stochastic processes i combine this characterization of uncertainty with a dynamic model of the firm in which some factor inputs can be adjusted freely in response to stochastic demand changes but other factors are quasi fixed in that adjustment costs are incurred when they are changed in this model the firm s price and output are random processes but we can examine the firm s behavior in expected value terms of interest is whether the presence of uncertainty should cause competitive or monopolistic firms to invest and produce more or less than they would otherwise how the effects of uncertainty are influenced by the presence of risk aversion and how the use of inventories can alter the impact of uncertainty on capacity and sales of course these questions have been addressed by others in the past among the earliest studies of demand uncertainty are those of edwin mills 1959 1962 and samuel karlin and charles carr 1962 mills examined a single period monopolistic firm that sets both output and price and showed that additive demand uncertainty i e the demand function is of the form q q p u where u is a random variable leads to a lower price if marginal cost is constant so that the firm reduces the expected loss from discarding unsold production karlin and carr confirmed for both the static case and the multiperiod case with inventory carryover that additive uncertainty tends to reduce the price and increase the output of a risk neutral firm while multiplicative uncertainty does the opposite other papers have been concerned with the way in which the error term enters the demand function additively multiplicatively or nonlinearly the implications of choosing price ex ante instead of output the implications of risk aversion and the use of inventories for example agnar sandmo 1971 and david baron 1970 showed that a risk averse competitive firm will produce less when the price is a random variable or subject to an additive error term but a riskneutral firm will not alter its production hayne leland 1972 extended these results to a monopolistic firm whose demand can depend in a general way on a random error term for example q q p u and showed that uncertainty reduces the production of a

asymmetric information financing constraints and investment the results of a number of theoretical papers lead to the hypothesis that financial variables affect capital sp ending because of asymmetric information in capital markets the auth ors review the relevant theory and test this hypothesis with a large sample of firm data the results show that financial variables such a s cash flow and interest expense add significant explanatory power to investment equations based on dale jorgenson s neoclassical model w ith a capm specification for the firm s cost of capital and a sales accelerator model the analysis therefore links recent theoretical work on capital markets to long standing empirical debates in the inv estment literature copyright 1987 by mit press

a perspective on multinational enterprises and climate change learning from an inconvenient truth this paper explores whether and how an important environmental issue such as climate change can not only give multinational enterprises the opportunity to develop green firm specific advantages fsas but also help reconfigure key fsas that are viewed as the main sources of firms profitability growth and survival we examine the nature and geography of such fsa development and develop two organizing frameworks which are subsequently applied to climate change using information from global 500 firms implications and future directions for international business research are indicated

assessing the engines of liberation home appliances and female labor force participation abstract the secular rise in female labor force participation highlighted in the recent macroeconomics literature on growth and structural change has been associated with the declining price and wider availability of home appliances this paper uses a new and unique country data set on the price of home appliances to test its impact on female labor supply we assess the role of the price of appliances in raising participation by comparing it to other structural determinants such as average male income a decrease in the relative price of appliances the ratio of the price of appliances to the consumer price index leads to a substantial and statistically significant increase in female labor force participation in the united kingdom for instance the decline in the relative price of home appliances alone accounts for about 10 to 15 of the increase in female labor force participation from 1975 to 1999 this result is robust to the inclusion of additional controls such as country dummies time trend go

strategic perspectives of corporate sustainability management to develop a sustainable organization sustainable development refers to an economic environmental and social development that meets the needs of the present and does not prevent future generations from fulfilling their needs in this context businesses play an important role however progress towards sustainable development has been slow indicating the need for more concrete guidance that will allow businesses to act strategically and successfully in a sustainable way this theoretical paper connects three distinct but complementary dimensions of strategic management as viewed from the perspective of sustainability in order to encourage the integration of sustainability issues into corporate activities and strategies these three dimensions are strategy process strategy content and strategy context sixteen propositions related to these dimensions have been developed to explore the contributions of corporate sustainability management to the creation of value for businesses society and nature this theoretical discussion contributes to existing research in that it reveals relationships between strategic management and sustainable development and provides an agenda for further empirical research

water for life the impact of the privatization of water services on child mortality while most countries are committed to increasing access to safe water and thereby reducing child mortality there is little consensus on how to actually improve water services one important proposal under discussion is whether to privatize water provision in the 1990s argentina embarked on one of the largest privatization campaigns in the world including the privatization of local water companies covering approximately 30 percent of the country s municipalities using the variation in ownership of water provision across time and space generated by the privatization process we find that child mortality fell 8 percent in the areas that privatized their water services and that the effect was largest 26 percent in the poorest areas we check the robustness of these estimates using cause specific mortality while privatization is associated with significant reductions in deaths from infectious and parasitic diseases it is uncorrelated with deaths from causes unrelated to water conditions

entitled to work urban property rights and labor supply in peru this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled entitled to work urban property rights and labor supply in peru new legal rights were issued in 1996 project teams providing titling service through 2003 in peru the study observed that between 1996 and 2003 the peruvian government issued property titles to over 1 2 million urban households the largest titling program targeted at urban squatters in the developing world this paper examines the labor market effects of increases in tenure security resulting from the program pre program squatters in program neighborhoods were significantly more likely to report improved tenure security by 60 percent similarly program participants were 18 8 percentage points less likely to report a high likelihood of eviction or invasion and 18 8 percentage points more likely to report that their dwelling was currently very secure from eviction or invasion the likelihood of working inside the home significantly falls by 11 6 percentage points for the average squatter family with two program periods

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

returns to capital in microenterprises evidence from a field experiment small and informal firms account for a large share of employment in developing countries the rapid expansion of microfinance services is based on the belief that these firms have productive investment opportunities and can enjoy high returns to capital if given the opportunity however measuring the return to capital is complicated by unobserved factors such as entrepreneurial ability and demand shocks which are likely to be correlated with capital stock the authors use a randomized experiment to overcome this problem and to measure the return to capital for the average microenterprise in their sample regardless of whether they apply for credit they accomplish this by providing cash and equipment grants to small firms in sri lanka and measuring the increase in profits arising from this exogenous positive shock to capital stock after controlling for possible spillover effects the authors find the average real return to capital to be 5 7 percent a month substantially higher than the market interest rate they then examine the heterogeneity of treatment effects to explore whether missing credit markets or missing insurance markets are the most likely cause of the high returns returns are found to vary with entrepreneurial ability and with measures of other sources of cash within the household but not to vary with risk aversion or uncertainty

access to water women s work and child outcomes abstractpoor rural women in the developing world spend considerable time collecting water do women living in places where more time is needed for water collection tend to participate less in income earning market based activities do the education outcomes of their children tend to be worse we use micro data for nine developing countries to help address these questions our primary aim is to describe the patterns in the data rather than to infer causality although we do treat the household level access to water as endogenous assuming that community level access is exogenous conditional on a wide range of geographic factors better access to water is not found to be associated with greater off farm paid work but is associated with less unpaid work for women in countries where substantial gender gaps in schooling exist both boys and girls enrollments also tend to be better

dynamic factor demands and the effects of energy price shocks a dynamic model is used to understand how sharp changes in energy prices affect investment behavior employment and energy use the authors discuss the theory behind their model selection model specifications estimation methods and data list parameter estimates and elasticities for the selected model and describe the simulations they conclude that 1 the data strongly reject the hypothesis of constant returns to scale within their specification of aggregate production 2 the data indicate adjustment costs on labor are small and 3 their results help reconcile some of the conflicting estimates of energy demand elasticities appearing in recent literature 23 references 3 figures 3 tables

testing the rational expectations hypothesis in an agricultural market a recent survey on models of agricultural supply equations listed over 500 studies in which variants of nerlove s adaptive expectations model were employed one might naively assume that the scientific evidence overwhelmingly favored the adaptive expectations hypothesis but this inference would not be warranted in particular there have been very few studies which have even attempted to estimate a rational expectations version of the traditional agricultural supply models and none that have explicitly tested the rational expectations hypothesis 2 in this paper we estimate a model of agricultural supply and demand for the chicken broiler industry under the maintained assumption of rational expectations in the sense of muth 1961 and provide a series of tests of the model specification we find that in this case the hypothesis of muth rationality receives strong support in recent years there has been increasing interest in models in which economic actors are assumed to form expectations of variables rationally for the most part empirical applications of the rational expectations hypothesis have employed single equation econometric methods these methods have permitted consistent estimation of equations under the assumption of the rational expectations hypothesis but do not allow for any explicit testing of the maintained hypothesis of rationality this paper presents estimates of a simultaneous equation model of the chicken broiler industry using maximum likelihood methods and provides a joint test of the rational expectations hypothesis and the model specification our econometric procedure is related to the recent theoretical work of wallis 1980 and combines time series analysis with traditional econometric estimation techniques under the assumption of rational expectations the model can be solved for the expected price as a function of the expected values of the exogenous variables this function can then be substituted into the model leading to a specification which contains the original endogenous and exogenous variables plus the expected values of the exogenous variables in general following this substitution the model will contain overidentifying restrictions time series analysis is utilized to generate the necessary forecasts of the exogenous variables the complete system of equations is estimated by full information maximum likelihood and the constraints are tested by a log likelihood ratio test the overidentifying constraints arise in the model because the suppliers are assumed to act as if they know both the underlying structure of the model and the stochastic processes governing the exogenous variables the two requirements of rational expectations while the expected price enters only the supply equation of our model it is necessary in the econometric formulation to specify the demand equation the instrumental variable procedures of mccallum 1976 and nelson 1975b are single equation methods and do not permit a test of the rational expectations hypothesis by specifying the complete model the additional structure imposed on the problem allows us to estimate the coefficients and test the implied restrictions there has not been universal agreement that the rational expectations hypothesis is the best theoretical device to model rational behavior according to muth s original formulation economic actors forecast endogenous variables according to the true reduced form equations of the model decanio 1979 and friedman 1979 have argued that the economic actors actually received for publication august 24 1981 revision accepted for publication march 2 1982 university of new mexico and university of california davis respectively we wish to thank g king r l huntzinger r pope and l wegge for advice on this project a nelson and e shaw contributed useful research assistance i the paper by askari and cummings 1977 provides references for these studies 2 huntzinger s 1979 paper is one of the first attempts at estimatitng a rational expectations model of agricultural supply

the effects of rural electrification on employment new evidence from south africa this paper estimates the impact of electrification on employment growth by analyzing south africa s mass roll out of electricity to rural households using several new data sources and two different identification strategies an instrumental variables strategy and a fixed effects approach i find that electrification significantly raises female employment within five years this new infrastructure appears to increase hours of work for men and women while reducing female wages and increasing male earnings several pieces of evidence suggest that household electrification raises employment by releasing women from home production and enabling microenterprises migration behavior may also be affected jel h54 l94

profitability of fertilizer experimental evidence from female rice farmers in mali abstract we conducted an experiment providing fertilizer grants to female rice farmers in mali we found that women who received fertilizer used both more fertilizer and more complementary inputs s

product services as a research field past present and future reflections from a decade of research in the last decade many researchers institutes and programs in the eu paid attention to product service systems pss given this massive effort it is time to take stock is pss research a theoretical field in its own right is the pss concept indeed the road to the factor 10 world is it the road to enhanced competitiveness what is needed to really use the potential of the concept this paper discusses these questions summarizing the analysis done in the pss review book new business for old europe various eu sponsored projects and the conceptual approach chosen in a new research network on sustainable consumption and production called score 2006 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

an approach to business model innovation and design for strategic sustainable development successful business is increasingly about understanding the challenges and opportunities linked to society s transition towards sustainability and e g being able to innovate design and build business models that are functional in this context however current business model innovation and design generally fails to sufficiently embrace the sustainability dimension typically the business case of sustainability is not understood profoundly enough the planning horizon and system scope are insufficient the competence to bring together people into systematic ventures towards sustainable business is too low a unifying framework for sustainability analyses planning cross disciplinary and cross sector cooperation and cohesive use of the myriad sustainability tools methods and concepts has been developed the framework for strategic sustainable development fssd similarly a generic approach to business model design has been put forward the business model canvas bmc in this paper we explore how the fssd could inform business model innovation and design by combining it with the bmc and supplementary tools methods and concepts such as creativity techniques value network mapping life cycle assessment and product service systems the results show that the fssd bmc combination can support business model innovation and design for strategic sustainable development as well as strengthen each supplementary tool method and concept in its own primary purpose we apply the combined approach for the purpose of initial testing and presentation to a real case of business model evolution based on our findings we propose a new approach to business model innovation and design for strategic sustainable development the new approach facilitates e g business scalability and risk avoidance and clarifies the interplay between classical business model development and strategic sustainability thinking the new approach highlights the opportunity for novel business model design for future sustainable success

has rural infrastructure rehabilitation in georgia helped the poor this article proposes a research strategy to deal with the scarcity of data on beneficiaries for conducting impact assessments of community level projects community level panel data from a regular household survey augmented with a special community module are used to measure the impact of projects propensity score matched difference in difference comparisons are used to control for time invariant unobservable factors this methodology takes into consideration the purposeful placement of projects and their interactions at the community level this empirical approach is applied to infrastructure rehabilitation projects for schools roads and water supply systems in rural georgia between 1998 and 2001 the analysis produces plausible results regarding the size of welfare gains from a particular project at the village level and allows for differentiation of benefits between the poor and the non poor the findings of this study can contribute to evaluations of the impact of infrastructure interventions on poverty by bringing new empirical evidence to bear on the welfare and equity implications

tax policy and investment in major u s macroeconomic econometric models abstract in an analysis of six major u s quarterly models the predicted results of tax incentives for investment are found to vary widely differences are traced to critical specifications in investment equations when appropriately revised investment equations are reestimated the role of tax parameters is much reduced particularly among the high outliers and the variance among the models is narrowed decidedly full model simulations of revised equations suggest that current and proposed incentives such as the investment tax credit and accelerated depreciation are not cost effective increases in investment approximate only half of static tax losses and budget deficits widen

aggregate uncertainty investment and asymmetric adjustment in the uk manufacturing sector theory suggests that the level of uncertainty facing firms should affect both the rate of adjustment to and the steady state level of investment although there is ambiguity about the sign of the effect a non linear model of investment behaviour incorporating time varying adjustment speeds with threshold effects is estimated for the uk manufacturing sector the most general non linear specification is found to be most congruent with the data uncertainty has a large and significant effect on both levels and rates of adjustment

public infrastructure and private costs water supply and time allocation of women in rural pakistan the role of infrastructure in promoting development has been established it is noted that improvements in infrastructure increase the efficiency of production in this case study the authors investigated how the quality and quantity of infrastructure affect the time women in pakistan allocate to their various activities the focus is on the relationship between access to water at both the household and the community levels and the time allocation of rural women who have the primary responsibility for water collection findings indicate that changes in the availability of infrastructure affect time use both at the household and individual levels at the household level it is shown that poor infrastructure induces women to reduce their market oriented work and thus their contribution to household income moreover poor infrastructure also causes an increase in the total work burden of women and a decrease in leisure however with improved public water supply infrastructure the total time women spend in all activities would be lowered with a substitution of water collection and income generating activities in addition a public water supply system may also reduce the pathogen content of water thereby improving its quality this increase in quality will most likely to bring health and sanitary benefits

motives and performance outcomes of sustainable supply chain management practices a multi theoretical perspective many researchers believe the tremendous industrial development over the past two centuries is unsustainable because it has led to unintended ecological deterioration despite the ever growing attention sustainable supply chain management sscm has received most sscm research and models look at the consequences rather than the antecedents or motives of such responsible practices the few studies that explore corporate motives have remained largely qualitative and large scale empirical analyses are scarce drawing on multiple theories and combining supply chain and business ethics literature we purport that instrumental relational and moral motives are behind a firm s engagement in sscm practices specifically we examine the links between corporate motives sscm practices and firm performance using a sample of 259 supply chain firms in germany we empirically test five hypothesized relationships our results reveal that relational and moral motives are key drivers and that firms exhibiting high levels of moral obligations tend to outperform those primarily driven by amoral considerations findings of this study contribute to multiple literatures espousing sustainability management and can help policy makers stakeholder groups and scholars develop more robust strategies for encouraging firms to practice sscm