the effects of real exchange rate depreciation on stochastic producer prices in low income agriculture abstract this paper considers the effects of real exchange rate depreciation on stochastic agricultural producer prices in low income agriculture conventional wisdom that real depreciation achieved through nominal currency devaluation stimulates tradables production does not universally hold in the presence of stochastic prices in fact real depreciation is only stimulative in two cases importables that remain importable and nontradables that become exportable garch estimation of time series price data on several commodities from madagascar support the hypotheses generated by the analytical model

infrastructure and aggregate agricultural productivity international evidence a relationship has long been recognized between a country s agricultural development and its investment in infrastructure capital such as transportation and communication facilities that is not directly related to the agricultural production process the relevant literature spans adam smith s proposition that the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market the work of von thtinen numerous studies by historians and economic historians and the work of economists such as schultz kuznets wharton owens and johnston and kilby to mention a few despite the apparently widespread recognition and acceptance that a relationship exists between agricultural development and infrastructural development few if any empirical studies test this as a hypothesis and provide estimates of the magnitude of such a relationship 2 the aim of this paper is to utilize 1965 aggregate agricultural production data and the concept of the aggregate production function to study the effects of transportation and communication infrastructure on aggregate agricultural productivity the aggregate data come from 47 less developed countries ldcs and 19 developed countries dcs the sample countries are listed in the appendix the use of intercountry comparisons for development studies dates to clark and the pioneering work of kuznets and it has been exploited econometrically by chenery 3 an important contribution to the study of international agricultural productivity was made by hayami and ruttan who showed that an aggregate agricultural production function that accounts for intercountry differences in resource endowments technical modern inputs and human capital can explain a large proportion of the variation in aggregate agricultural output across more and less developed agricultures 4 evenson and kislev modified hayami and ruttan s model by including a variable measuring each country s investment in agricultural research 5 essentially the same

fertilization under uncertainty an analysis based on producer yield expectations optimal nitrogen fertilizer levels are computed for a sample of texas coastal bend grain sorghum producers based on their assessed subjective conditional yield and price probabilities utility measures and cost information producers mean yield expectations were substantially greater than experimental yield response and their perceptions of the effects of nitrogen on yield variability were contrary to usual characterization of nitrogen as a risk increasing input optimal fertilizer levels based on expected utility maximization represent actual fertilizer use somewhat better than those based on expected profit maximization however both calculated levels were high relative to actual fertilizer use

governance and agricultural productivity a cross national analysis abstract in this study we examine the relationship between governance and agricultural performance by employing the world bank s aggregate governance indicators based on a cross country panel sample two methods are employed to test the hypothesis that better governance fosters agricultural productivity the empirical results of both methods support the hypothesis as for the first method the estimation results of the widely used inter country aggregate agricultural production function show that a country with better governance can produce more agricultural outputs given the same amounts of agricultural inputs the same education level and the same climate condition as for the second method the empirical results of a structural equation model reveal that given the same amounts of agricultural capital stock and land an agricultural worker in a country with better governance produces more better governance can indirectly improve agricultural productivity by driving agricultural capital accumulation our empirical work lends support to the claim of hayami and ruttan hayami y ruttan v 1985 agricultural development an international perspective john hopkins university press baltimore that governance is a basic factor explaining the poor economic performance of many developing countries in order to improve the agricultural performance of many developing countries apart from physical and education investments more emphasis should be placed on improving the governance infrastructure of these countries

are ghettos good or bad spatial separation of racial and ethnic groups may theoretically have positive or negative effects on the economic performance of those groups we examine the effects of segregation on outcomes for blacks in schooling employment and single parenthood we find that blacks in more segregated areas have significantly worse outcomes than blacks in less segregated areas we control for the endogeneity of location choice using instruments based on political factors topographical features and residence before adulthood a one standard deviation decrease in segregation would eliminate one third of the black white differences in most of our outcomes

pitfalls in the measurement of real exchange rate effects on agriculture abstract studies of the effects of real exchange rates on agriculture commonly assume that these effects can be identified as those which pertain to traded goods in the standard australian model of an open economy further it is common to assume that the indirect effects of changes in the real exchange rate have the same impact on the various production activities within agriculture this paper discusses the extent to which these stylized facts reflect reality focusing in particular on the extent of tradibility in agricultural markets the irrelevance of results based on free trade equilibria to policy analyses and the importance of the characteristics of crop production functions in estimating the effects of real exchange rate changes ignoring these considerations can cause errors in the measurement of policy effects on agricultural incentives

the elasticity of substitution in india s manufacturing sector abstract using cross section data and the translog cost function this paper examines the substitution possibilities between capital and materials and labor and materials since raw materials might be used to overcome the bottlenecks caused by shortages of physical capital and skilled labor three significant conclusions are a since materials are substitutable for both capital and labor to a considerable extent capital and skilled labor may not be a binding constraint on growth agricultural materials expansion may substitute for these inputs and lead to expansion in the industrial sector b fixed proportion models are not warranted in india without modification and c separability tests showed that materials must be included in the production function

transportation costs agricultural productivity and cross country income differences i document large difierences in domestic transport costs and transportation infrastructure across nations the richest countries have 5 times lower transport costs and 32 times more infrastructure per capita than the poorest countries of the world are these difierences a source of aggregate labor productivity difierences across nations using a three sector two region general equilibrium model i show that high transport costs can distort the allocation of resources not only across geographically dispersed production units within sectors but also between agriculture and non agriculture taking as given the observed difierences in transportation costs and transportation infrastructure per capita i quantify the role of transportation for cross country income difierences the calibrated model produces an income disparity of 7 5 between the 5 rich and 5 poor countries this corresponds to an improvement of 50 relative to the disparity predicted by a two sector model of agriculture and non agriculture furthermore the efiects of advancements in transportation are non linear the elasticity of aggregate labor productivity with respect to transport labor productivity in the poorest nations is 6 times higher than in the richest ones the efiects of transport frictions are even more pronounced when restrictions to regional migration are introduced

unpacking the meaning of market access evidence from rural kenya summary this paper critically examines the dimensions of market access using farm panel survey data from kenya we investigate changes in ten indicators of market access during the 1997 2010 post liberalization period we find major improvements in certain market access conditions and little change in others there is generally low correlation between alternative indicators of market access all purpose indicators may not accurately reflect specific market access conditions of interest distances to physical infrastructure are often not representative of farmers access to markets changes in specific market access conditions may have more to do with the behaviors of marketing agents we consider the implications of these findings for agricultural marketing policies and for research methods

moving to opportunity in boston early results of a randomized mobility experiment this paper examines the short run impacts of a change in residential neighborhood on the well being of low income families using evidence from a program in which eligibility for a housing voucher was determined by random lottery we examine the experiences of households at the boston site of moving to opportunity mto a demonstration program in five cities families in high poverty public housing projects applied to mto and were assigned by lottery to one of three groups experimental offered mobility counseling and a section 8 subsidy valid only in a census tract with a poverty rate of less than 10 percent section 8 comparison offered a geographically unrestricted section 8 subsidy or control offered no new assistance but continued to be eligible for public housing our quantitative analyses of program impacts uses data on 540 families from a baseline survey at program enrollment a follow up survey administered l to 3 5 years after random assignment and state administrative data on earnings and welfare receipt 48 percent of the experimental group and 62 percent of the section 8 comparison group moved through the mto program one to three years after program entry families in both treatment groups were more likely to be residing in neighborhoods with low poverty rates and high education levels than were families in the control group however while members of the experimental group were much more likely to be residing in suburban communities than were those in the section 8 group the lower program take up rate among the experimental group resulted in more families remaining in the most distressed communities households in both treatment groups experienced improvements in multiple measures of well being relative to the control group including increased safety improved health among household heads and fewer behavior problems among boys experimental group children were also less likely to be a victim of a personal crime to be injured or to experience an asthma attack there are no significant impacts of either mto treatment on the employment earnings or welfare receipt of household heads in the first three years after random assignment

the intercountry agricultural production function another view factor productivity in agriculture is estimated from repeated observations on a sample of fifty eight countries under the assumption that all countries have access to the same technology technology is viewed as a collection of techniques each technique is represented by a production function the choice of the implemented techniques is determined by the state variables which represent the physical and economic environment within which the firms operate the statistical model is that of varying coefficients and it is estimated by a method which utilizes principal components and multiple comparisons

sorting and inequality in canadian schools abstract a student s peers are often thought to influence his or her educational outcomes if so an unequal distribution of advantaged and disadvantaged students across schools sorting in a community will amplify existing inequalities this paper explores the relationship between the degree of sorting across schools within a community and educational inequality as measured by the variance of standardized high school exam scores within the community cross sectional ols estimates suggest that the variance of test scores is related to sorting by ethnicity but not to sorting by income or parental education we then implement two strategies for addressing endogeneity in the degree of sorting a standard unobserved effects first difference approach and a first difference instrumental variables approach in which the structure of school choice number and relative size of schools is used to construct instruments for the degree of sorting the results from both approaches indicate that the variance of test scores is related to sorting by home language and parental education but not to sorting by income our results also suggest that reducing sorting would have little effect on inequality of outcomes in the typical alberta community but would have substantial effects in the larger cities

does school choice lead to sorting evidence from tiebout variation a question commonly raised about school choice is whether it would result in sorting or stratification previous research has asked this with respect to inter district or tiebout choice but has generated no consensus in part because areas district concentrations may be endogenous this paper addresses this by exploiting the fact that some metropolitan areas mas have different numbers of districts operating at the primary and the secondary level the resulting within ma between educational level variation in district concentration suggests that increases in district availability do affect children s district and school level peer groups and that they lower private enrollment jel h1 h7 i2

crime and social interactions the high variance of crime rates across time and space is one of the oldest puzzles in the social sciences this variance appears too high to be explained by changes in the exogenous costs and benefits of crime we present a model where social interactions create enough covariance across individuals to explain the high cross city variance of crime rates this model provides an index of social interactions which suggests that the amount of social interactions is highest in petty crimes moderate in more serious crimes and almost negligible in murder and rape

endogenous structural breaks public investment in agriculture and agricultural land productivity in taiwan using time series data for taiwan s agricultural sector and with the government s public investment in the agricultural sector serving as a proxy variable for nonfarm current inputs aside from the original labour and capital input variables usually taken into consideration this article examines the relationship between public investment in agriculture public investment land and agricultural land productivity output land in taiwan our main findings are as follows first the cointegration test reveals that public investment in agriculture and the productivity of agricultural land exhibit a significant positive relationship in the long run where the elasticity of land productivity in relation to public investment in agriculture is 0 55 second when controlling for endogenous structural breaks the long run equilibrium relationship for the productivity of the agricultural land model is still supported third the results of the weak exogeneity test indicate that a causal relationship exists in the lo

biological technology and land productivity fertilizers and food production in india abstract this paper attempts to develop for the first time a rigorous and innovative definition of biological technical change btc btc for which fertilizers are used as proxy and land labor substitution are quantified by the method of indirect least squares from aggregate time series data on wheat and rice production in india the conclusion that emerges from this analysis is that the contribution of btc more specifically fertilizers to foodgrain production in india is quite low this raises important policy questions related to finding alternatives to widely held beliefs on how to increase food production and alleviate world hunger

tax reform unraveling the tax reform act of 1986 was widely heralded as the most significant change in our nation s tax law since the income tax was extended to the masses during world war ii it was the crowning domestic policy achievement of president ronald reagan who proclaimed it the best antipoverty measure the best pro family measure and the best job creation measure ever to come out of the congress of the united states the law s rate reductions and base broadening reforms were mimicked throughout the countries belonging to the oecd even at the time however reading the paeans to this legislation was like watching a tennessee williams play something was terribly wrong but nobody was talking about it two decades later the changes wrought by the 1986 act have proven neither revolutionary nor stable tax experts now regard the 1986 act as a promise failed the public seems to agree and considerable public support exists for a flat tax or a national sales tax to replace the income tax i shall examine the most important individual and corporate income tax changes since 1986 before turning to proposals for restructuring the nation s tax system

the philippines roll on roll off policy and its impact on household income abstractour paper captures the immediate impact of the roll on roll off policy that offered an alternative system of inter island transfer within the philippines it provides evidence on the effect

international productivity patterns accounting for input quality infrastructure and research in this paper we present measures of land and labor productivity for a group of ninety eight developed and developing countries using an entirely new data set with annual observations spanning the past three decades the substantial cross country and intertemporal variation in productivity in our sample is linked to both natural and economic factors we extend previous work by dealing with multiple sources of systematic measurement error in conventional agricultural inputs the mix of conventional inputs indicators of quality of agricultural inputs and the amount of publicly provided infrastructure are all significant in explaining observed cross sectional differences in productivity patterns

choice of ontario high schools and student sorting by ability to what extent can offering more choice in schooling lead to cream skimming or the sorting of students by ability i study whether increased choice leads to student sorting by ability into high schools in the greater toronto area on average 41 of students opt out of the high school to which they would normally be assigned based on their residence students are more likely to opt out in areas where accessibility to other schools is greatest due to population density and explicit open enrolment policies while students of higher ability are generally more likely to opt out an interaction term between school choice and ability is insignificant suggesting that increased choice does not have differential impacts by student ability findings are robust to changes in assumptions about instrument exogeneity

the structure of the tax system versus the level of taxation an evaluation of the 1986 act in this paper i assess the 1986 tax reform act relative to the tax system that might have evolved over the several years following 1986 had that particular tax reform not been enacted had tax reform not been enacted i believe that the pattern of steady tax increases particularly corporate tax increases and tax increases on high income individuals such as occurred in the 1982 and 1984 tax acts would have continued i also believe that the 1986 tax reform act introduced an income tax system that will be quite stable broad changes in particular changes that raise a large amount of income tax revenues are unlikely for many years so i am comparing the tax structure of the 1986 tax reform act to a system that in part has an inferior structure but that provides more revenues since i believe that the most important tax policy goal in 1986 and later should have been to raise revenues not to revise the structure of the tax system i believe that the 1986 tax reform act was harmful tax reform not only did not raise revenues it has made it more difficult to raise revenues in the future without providing significant offsetting benefits

the meta production function approach to technological change in world agriculture abstract an alternative meta production function for agriculture is estimated with the cross section data for 43 countries and three years 1960 1970 and 1980 constructed and used by kawagoe hayami and ruttan and hayami and ruttan in their studies by allowing for country specific efficiency factors and using a flexible functional form the transcendental logarithmic production function strikingly different results from those of kawagoe hayami and ruttan are obtained in particular it is found that elasticity of output with respect to machinery is variable and the degree of local returns to scale is not constant and increases with the usage of machinery

income taxation uncertainty and stability abstract this paper develops a political model to analyze the stability of income tax schedules it is assumed that agents perceive any proposed alternative tax policy as more uncertain than the status quo a tax policy is stable if it is a condorcet winner it is well known that in a model without uncertainty the existence of such a policy is very rare we show however that in real cases this might not be a serious problem since small amounts of uncertainty can bring stability to the status quo it is also shown that linear tax functions can only be stable in economies with very egalitarian income distributions and high taxation levels

evaluating effective income tax progression abstract an algorithm to compute effective income tax progression is devised for use when taxes are a function of both money income and other socioeconomic attributes and the data is in grouped summary form suppressing non income information effective progression can be evaluated at percentiles in the distribution of either money or equivalent income the normative significance of the new measures is explained in both cases the methodology is illustrated by application to u s individual income tax annual data for 1950 1987 yielding contour plots which show how effective progression has varied across the income distribution and with the passage of time

the intercountry agricultural production function and productivity differences among countries abstract the sources of differences in labor productivity in agriculture between developed countries dc s and less developed countries ldc s are identified by estimating an aggregate agricultural production function based on cross county data for 1960 1970 and 1980 the production function was found to be stable over the entire period agriculture in the dc s was characterized by increasing returns and in the ldc s by constant returns to scale the results imply that unfavorable man land ratios do not represent an immediate barrier to rapid agricultural development in the low income ldc s but they may create a serious agricultural adjustment problem as those countries advance into the middle income range

structure of public support for national agricultural research systems a political economy perspective abstract this paper initiates development of a set of stylized facts concerning the structure of public support for national agricultural research systems nars within a neoclassical political economy framework the aim is to place public funding of nars in the broader context of the overall level of direct government assistance to agriculture using a newly constructed data set on nars expenditures over the 1970 1985 period we observe a growing disparity in agricultural research intensity ratios which measure the level of public support for nars in relation to agricultural gross domestic production aggdp between low and high income countries this growing disparity appears to be driven by much larger increases in support for agricultural research by high income countries coupled with a significantly slower growth in the size of their agricultural sector despite the propensity of low and middle income countries to increase real support to agricultural research as per capita incomes rise the public agricultural expenditure ratio which measures public expenditures on agriculture relative to the size of the agricultural sector aggdp increases substantially public expenditures on agriculture were indexed on agricultural and non agricultural populations to give a rough indication of the increasing incentives for rural distributional coalitions to seek a redistribution of public expenditures in their favor a relative research expenditure rre ratio is developed which measures the proportion of total public expenditure on agriculture spent on agricultural research it provides an indication of the relative importance given to research on agriculture within the constraints imposed by overall public spending on agriculture in contrast to the agricultural research intensity ratios the rre ratios suggest that agricultural research appears to command as large a share of the public purse devoted to agriculture in low and middle income countries as it does in high income countries expectations derived from the neoclassical political economy literature that research may have fared relatively better in high compared with low income countries were not supported by the data

the social multiplier aggregate data is often used to make inferences about individual level behavior if there are social interactions in which one person s actions influence his neighbor s incentives or information then these inferences are inappropriate the presence of positive social interactions or strategic complementarities implies the existence of a social multiplier where aggregate relationships will overstate individual elasticities we present a brief model and then estimate the size of the social multiplier in three areas the impact of education on wages the impact of demographics on crime and group membership among dartmouth roommates in these contexts there is a significant social multiplier jel ho jo co

identification of endogenous social effects the reflection problem this paper examines the reflection problem that arises when a researcher observing the distribution of behaviour in a population tries to infer whether the average behaviour in some group influences the behaviour of the individuals that comprise the group it is found that inference is not possible unless the researcher has prior information specifying the compisition of reference groups if this information is available the prospects for inference depend critically on the population relationship between the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes inference is difficult to implossible if these variables are functionally dependent or are statistically independent the prospects are better if the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes are moderately related in the population

agricultural incentives in developing countries measuring the effect of sectoral and economywide policies the impact of sector specific direct and economywide indirect policies on agricultural incentives for 18 developing countries for the period 1975 84 are estimated the direct effect is measured by the proportional difference between the producer price and the border price adjusting for distribution storage transport and other marketing costs the indirect effect has two components 1 the impact of the unsustainable portion of the current account deficit and of industrial protection policies on the real exchange rate and thus on the price of agricultural commodities relative to nonagricultural nontradables and 2 the impact of industrial protection policies on the relative price of agricultural commodities to that of nonagricultural tradable goods the authors found that a in almost all cases the direct effect is equivalent to a tax on exportable goods and to a subsidy for importables b the indirect effect also taxes agriculture and dominates the direct effect and c the direct policies for both importables and exportables stabilize domestic producer prices

how much does sorting increase inequality some commentators argue that increased sorting into internally homogeneous neighborhoods schools and marriages is radically polarizing society calibration of a formal model however suggests that the steady state standard deviation of education would increase only 1 7 percent if the correlation between neighbors education doubled and would fall only 1 6 percent if educational sorting by neighborhood disappeared the steady state standard deviation of education would grow 1 percent if the correlation between spouses education increased from 0 6 to 0 8 in fact marital and neighborhood sorting have been stable or even decreasing historically sorting has somewhat more significant effects on intergenerational mobility than on inequality

short of euphoria abstract the tax reform act of 1986 is the most sweeping reform since the early 1940s when the pressures of war finance forced the transformation of the income tax into a mass tax and made it the core of the federal tax system since then many adjustments have been made but the basic structure of the tax has remained unchanged behind this nominal stability however a slow erosion of the tax base appears to have been at work the widening of loopholes and emergence of high income shelters gained momentum in recent years and undermined the public s faith in the income tax the compounding of the investment tax credit and accelerated depreciation diluted and distorted the base of the corporation tax the current reform reverses these trends a major accomplishment that all reformers will welcome but the reform is far from complete its base broadening goes only part of the way and though substantial gains have been made they have not come without a price the pattern of rate reduction involving a dra

racial segregation and the black white test score gap abstract racial segregation is often blamed for some of the achievement gap between blacks and whites we study the effects of school and neighborhood segregation on the relative sat scores of black students across different metropolitan areas using large microdata samples for the 1998 2001 test cohorts our models include detailed controls for the family background of individual test takers school level controls for selective participation in the test and city level controls for racial composition income and region we find robust evidence that the black white test score gap is higher in more segregated cities holding constant family background and other factors a shift from a highly segregated city to a nearly integrated city closes about one quarter of the raw black white gap in sat scores specifications that distinguish between school and neighborhood segregation suggest that neighborhood segregation has a consistently negative impact while school segregation has no independent effect though we cannot reject equality of the two effects additional tests indicate that much of the effect of neighborhood segregation operates through neighbors incomes not through race per se data on enrollment in honors courses suggest that within school segregation increases when schools are more highly integrated potentially offsetting the benefits of school desegregation and accounting for our findings

statistical significance of indicators of efficiency and incentives examples from west african agriculture indicators of efficiency and incentives derived from trade theory such as the domestic resource cost coefficient drc and effective protection ep are generally presented as simple means analysis of their distributions using farm data on millet and sorghum production from west africa shows them to be highly variable and in some cases to be significantly skewed the analysis also shows the indicators to be highly elastic to changes in such parameters as input and output prices if this variability is not considered when making inferences from such data policy recommendations can be seriously misleading because they are based on different farming populations

measuring exchange rate misalignment inflation differentials and domestic relative prices abstract empirical studies of exchange rate misalignment generally use crosscountry differences in overall inflation as proxy measures for a country s real exchange rate rer this paper shows that using such differential inflation proxies introduces two systematic biases in model results understatement of rer movements and a spurious trend towards depreciation these biases can be corrected only with disaggregated data on domestic relative prices of tradable and nontradable products using a standard model with disaggregated data for zimbabwe it is found that proxy based results understate misalignment by almost 25 and exaggerate depreciation by 4 per year

the effect of barge and ocean freight price volatility in international grain markets this paper looks at the potential role of time varying volatility of mississippi river barge and ocean freight prices on commodity prices in illinois at the us gulf and in rotterdam using a vector error correction garch in mean model the model is used to infer the extent to which transportation price risk affects price dynamics in international grain markets results from a simulation exercise indicate that both barge and ocean price volatility influence grain prices but barge price volatility tends to have a greater impact on grain prices and marketing margins than that arising from ocean price volatility consistent with most studies that evaluate the role of risk in marketing channels results here suggest that a reduction in barge rate risk would reduce marketing margins between illinois and the us gulf and between the us gulf and rotterdam the existence of an ocean freight futures contract coupled with the lack of a futures contract for barge rates may be partially responsible for the finding that barge rates have a significant influence on grain prices and contribute most to wide marketing margins found throughout the international grain marketing system

exploring the widening food gap an international perspective using data for a long panel of 90 developed and developing countries this article explores the effects of research and development r d and fixed capital stock on agricultural land productivity over the period 1961 2012 instruments are used for r d to deal with feedback effects and measurement errors the results show very high social returns to investment in r d and to fixed capital stock suggesting that increasing investment in these factors are promising ways of arresting the increasing food prices due to increasing demand for animal protein population growth desertification salinization soil erosion climate change and decreasing growth in land productivity