seasonal poverty in madagascar magnitude and solutions abstract seasonal reductions in food consumption pull about one million malagasy below the poverty line during the lean season there they join the nine million more who remain chronically undernourished throughout the year because the seasonality of food shortages coincides with the increased prevalence of diarrhea and other diseases during the rainy season the resulting lean season exacts a heavy toll in the form of increased rates of malnutrition and child mortality combining the results of recent field studies with a seasonal multi market model this paper measures the probable impacts of three common interventions aimed at combatting seasonal food insecurity we find the most promising interventions to be those that increase agricultural productivity of the secondary food crops such as cassava other roots and tubers and maize

monetary union price level convergence and inflation how close is europe to the usa abstract the pattern of price dispersion across european and us cities from 1990 to 2004 is documented there is a striking decline in dispersion for traded goods prices in europe most of which took place prior to the launch of the euro dispersion in the euro area is now quite close to that of the usa this evidence provides useful facts for future work assessing the importance of various developments in europe harmonization of tax rates convergence of incomes and labor costs liberalization of trade and factor markets and increased coherence of monetary policy

do mergers improve the x efficiency and scale efficiency of u s banks evidence from the 1980s a central issue currently debated among bank analysts and economists is whether mergers enhance the efficiency of surviving banks this paper investigates the postmerger performance of acquiring banks that participated in a merger during the period 1980 90 the evidence suggests that acquirers failed to improve x efficiency after the merger acquiring banks however experienced moderate gains in scale efficiency relative to a control sample the second part of the paper uses regression analysis to identify factors influencing the performance of merging banks the regression results suggest that improvements in postmerger performance depend on the ability of the bank to strengthen asset quality the author finds no evidence to support the theory that in market mergers lead to significant improvements in efficiency copyright 1997 by ohio state university press

inequality and the impact of growth on poverty comparative evidence for sub saharan africa abstract this study explores the extent to which inequality affects the impact of income growth on the rates of poverty changes in sub saharan africa ssa compared to non ssa based on an unbalanced panel of 86 countries over 1977 2004 for all three measures of poverty headcount gap and squared gap the impact of gdp growth on poverty reduction is a decreasing function of initial inequality the impacts are similar in direction for ssa and non ssa so that within both regions there are considerable disparities in the responsiveness of poverty to income growth depending on inequality nevertheless the income growth elasticity is substantially less for ssa implying relatively small poverty reduction response to growth

prices and regional variation in welfare one would expect regional differences in prices to influence conclusions concerning levels and distributions of well being although there is anecdotal evidence of significant price dispersion across regions there is no governmental source of data that measures differences in price levels in this paper i integrate estimates of regional prices with expenditure data from the consumer expenditure surveys to assess the influence of price differences on living standards in the united states while prices have little effect on inequality estimates of poverty and the standard of living change substantially with the inclusion of regional price variation

chronic poverty in the united states this paper proposes a method of measuring chronic and transitory poverty using an axiomatically sound additively decomposable index of aggregate poverty our approach is contrasted with alternative methods of measuring poverty persistence we use our method to measure chronic and transitory poverty in the united states during the 1980s and late 1970s and find that chronic poverty is a more serious problem than previously thought between the late 1970s and mid 1980s poverty not only increased it became more chronic and less transitory in nature this is true for the population as a whole and for some but not all of the subpopulations we considered the latter were defined according to race type of social unit and educational qualifications of the head of the social unit all empirical analyses are based on data from the panel study of income dynamics

the effect of income and food programs on dietary quality a seemingly unrelated regression analysis with error components this article employs new food guide pyramid servings data to measure how food intake is affected by income and two food programs the analysis uses a maximum likelihood estimator that combines the seemingly unrelated regression and one way error component models to account for two types of intrahousehold correlations participation in the food stamp program is associated with higher intake of meats added sugars and total fats participation in the special supplemental nutrition program for women infants and children is associated with lower intake of added sugars

land contingent poverty alleviation schemes abstract target groups for rural poverty alleviation schemes in south asia and elsewhere have often been identified in terms of their landholding class with landless or near landless households being the intended beneficiaries this paper offers a quantitative approach to the analysis and design of land contingent poverty alleviation schemes an application to bangladesh suggests that when income is generally unobserved landholding class is a good instrument for targeting poverty relief in that it is strongly correlated with the informationally feasible allocations which minimize aggregate poverty for a given budget it is however far from being a perfect instrument even under otherwise ideal conditions the maximum feasible reduction in poverty which is attainable by relying solely on land based targeting is substantially less than that attainable with perfect income information indeed the poverty alleviation impact of domestically financed and revenue neutral transfers across 10 landholding classes in rural bangladesh could also be achieved without targeting by simply giving every household a lump sum payment equivalent to 10 of mean rural income political restrictions on tax powers or errors made in administration will further reduce the gains from land contingent targeting greater impact on poverty for a given budgetary cost will require more precise targeting within landholding classes

china s uneven progress against poverty while the incidence of extreme poverty in china fell dramatically over 1980 2001 progress was uneven over time and across provinces rural areas accounted for the bulk of the gains to the poor though migration to urban areas helped the pattern of growth mattered rural economic growth was far more important to national poverty reduction than urban economic growth agriculture played a far more important role than the secondary or tertiary sources of gross domestic product gdp rising inequality within the rural sector greatly slowed poverty reduction provinces starting with relatively high inequality saw slower progress against poverty due both to lower growth and a lower growth elasticity of poverty reduction taxation of farmers and inflation hurt the poor external trade had little short term impact

microfinance and poverty a macro perspective we test the hypothesis that microfinance reduces poverty at the macro level using cross country and panel data which are constructed by the microfinance information exchange data on microfinance institutions mfis and the world bank data taking account of the endogeneity associated with mfis loans we show that a country with higher mfis gross loan portfolio per capita tends to have lower levels of poverty indices contrary to recent micro evidence our results suggest that microfinance significantly reduces poverty at macro level and thus reinforce the case for channeling funds from development finance institutions and governments of developing countries into mfis

how well do static indicators identify the chronically poor abstract we investigate how well the most widely used static welfare indicators perform in identifying the chronically poor we propose a normative measure of performance the cost of a given impact on chronic poverty when transfers are contingent upon a purely static indicator using longitudinal household data from rural india we find that current consumption is not always a better indicator of chronic poverty than current income both however perform much better than other common indicators such as food share and access to land

the thrifty food plan and low income households in the united states what food groups are being neglected food assistance programs in the united states provide low income households with the resources to purchase a healthy nutritious and palatable diet if they buy the market baskets of food outlined in the thrifty food plan this study compares the cost of these baskets with actual spending on food at home by low income households simulations reveal at home food spending by low income households to represent only 86 of what is needed to follow the thrifty food plan married couples with children and female headed households with children spend only 73 and 82 respectively and just 43 and 50 for at home fruits and vegetables

the welfare cost of means testing pensioner participation in income support we estimate parametric and semi parametric binary choice models of benefit take up by british pensioners and use a revealed preference argument to infer the cash equivalent value of disutility arising from stigma or complexity of the claims process these implicit costs turn out to be relatively small averaging about 3 4 per week across income support recipients using the foster greer thorbecke measure of poverty among pensioners we find that allowing for implicit claim costs incurred by benefit recipients raises the measured degree of poverty by not more than 13 copyright 2007 john wiley sons ltd

food and consumer behavior why the details matter a growing body of literature now demonstrates the importance of behavioral factors in individual food consumption however whether addressing hunger nutrition or obesity food policies are often created to target changes at the aggregate level these policies ignore such behavioral tools or effects and their potential heterogeneous effects on consumers in this article we review the most important results examining food consumption and behavioral economics and provide a thorough discussion of how such tools are now being added to the lexicon of effective policy tools in addition we discuss how traditional policy tools that ignore the individual behavioral effects can miss the mark or even backfire the implication is clear a thorough understanding of behavioral economics is necessary to create efficient food policy

why have urban poverty and income inequality increased so much argentina 1991 2001 abstract this article analyzes the trends in income inequality and poverty among argentine households during the nineties we assess the effect of changes in labor force participation unemployment educational levels and returns to individual characteristics on income inequality and poverty by using a microsimulation approach we found that unemployment accounts for a large part of the increase in income inequality and poverty experienced in the past decade changes in labor force participation had an equalizing effect over the whole period while changes in the returns to workers sociodemographic characteristics could be associated with a small increase in income inequality with respect to poverty unemployment affected negatively the proportion of households below the poverty line amplified the poverty gap and increased the severity of poverty in contrast changes in labor force participation are associated with a reduction in the poverty rate

explaining bank market to book ratios evidence from 2006 to 2009 abstract this paper examines the market price to book value ratio for 6604 bank stock observations from december 31 2006 through june 30 2009 we relate each bank s market price to book value ratio to several fundamental ratios and whether the bank took funds from the us treasury under the troubled asset relief program tarp the results of this study show that banks who took tarp funds have lower market price to book value ratios in addition lower relative costs higher non interest income and lower assets in non accrual or foreclosed status are associated with higher market price to book value ratios while controlling for size and other bank attributes

in kind benefits and household behavior the impact of snap on food away from home consumption abstract supplemental nutrition assistance program snap formerly known as the food stamp program provides in kind benefits that can generally be utilized for food at home fah only according to economic theory snap benefits are fungible with cash for inframarginal households which may allow participants to spend benefits on non fah items however empirical evidence for this theory is mixed this paper exploits an underutilized source of state level variation the early 2000 s recession to determine the impact of snap participation on household food away from home fafh consumption in a difference in difference framework i compare households in high post recession snap growth states to households in low post recession snap growth states the results show that snap participation causes a significant decrease in fafh expenditure and fafh s share of total food expenditure

much ado about two reconsidering retransformation and the two part model in health econometrics in health economics applications involving outcomes y and covariates x it is often the case that the central inferential problems of interest involve e y x and its associated partial effects or elasticities many such outcomes have two fundamental statistical properties y 0 and the outcome y 0 is observed with sufficient frequency that the zeros cannot be ignored econometrically this paper 1 describes circumstances where the standard two part model with homoskedastic retransformation will fail to provide consistent inferences about important policy parameters and 2 demonstrates some alternative approaches that are likely to prove helpful in applications

the effect of options on stock prices 1973 to 1995 i show that the effect of option introductions on underlying stock prices is best described by a two regime switching means model whose optimal switch date occurs in 1981 in accordance with previous studies i find positive abnormal returns for options listed during 1973 to 1980 by contrast i find negative abnormal returns for options listed in 1981 and later possible causes for this switch include the introduction of index options in 1982 the implementation of regulatory changes in 1981 and the possibility that options expedite the dissemination of negative information an increasingly important issue in the study of financial markets is the extent to which options interact with their underlying stocks although black and scholes 1973 view options as redundant securities ross 1976 theorizes that stock prices in incomplete markets are generally affected by the

the effects of a large discrete maize price increase on the distribution of household welfare and poverty in rural kenya1 this study estimates the effects of a large discrete maize price increase on the welfare of a sample of rural kenyan households the usual first order welfare approximation formula is extended to a second order formula that allows for supply and demand responses to the price change results show that many rural households are not affected greatly by the price change and there are about as many gainers as losers however these full sample results mask important differences across regions welfare gains generally take place in major production areas while losses are in areas where most households are net buyers of maize semiparametric methods are used to investigate the relationship between income and the size of the welfare effect and poverty dominance techniques are applied to study the impacts of the maize price increase on rural poverty

a study on long run inefficiency levels of a panel dynamic cost frontier under the framework of forward looking rational expectations abstract this paper aims to provide a theoretical underpinning of the dynamic efficiency model pioneered by ahn s c good d h sickles r c 2000 estimation of long run inefficiency levels a dynamic frontier approach econometric reviews 19 461 492 in the context of a quadratic loss function this paper formulates a multi period forward looking rational expectations model on the evolution of the technical inefficiency level which correctly produces a dynamic panel data model the model is illustrated using panel data of 112 french banks encouraging evidence of superiority in favor of the model is reached substantial cost inefficiency prevails in this industry where the constituent banks are characterized as having volatile adjustment speeds toward their long run steady states the sample banks exhibit increasing returns to scale and product mix economies

agricultural price transmission elasticity importance of controlling for unobserved common factors a voluminous amount of the literature estimates price transmission from world markets to domestic markets ignoring unobserved factors that commonly affect domestic markets this article reevaluates the long run and short run transmission elasticity of world food price shocks to domestic markets using a common factor framework that takes unobserved common factors that are correlated with regressors into consideration in the estimation annual price data for rice wheat and maize for a panel of developed and developing countries that are observed over the period of 1960 2007 are used the results from a common factor framework to those that do not account for common factors are then compared our findings suggest that ignorance of common factors is likely to result in upwardly biased elasticity estimates

poverty prices and place how sensitive is the spatial distribution of poverty to cost of living adjustments this article examines how accounting for cost of living differences across metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas affects measured rates of poverty the spatial price index used is based on the fair market rent data and was developed by the census bureau for use in its experimental poverty research program following u s federal definitions poverty in nonmetro areas has been consistently higher than it has been in metro areas using the fair market rent index to adjust for differences in cost of living results in a complete reversal of nonmetro metro rankings in terms of prevalence depth and severity of poverty for every year examined 1991 to 2002 jel i32 r1 c81

bank competition efficiency in europe a frontier approach abstract there are numerous ways to indicate the degree of banking competition across countries antitrust authorities rely on the structure conduct performance paradigm while academics prefer price mark ups lerner index or correlations of input costs with output prices h statistic these measures are not always strongly correlated within or across countries frontier efficiency analysis is used to devise an alternative indicator of competition and rank european countries by their dispersion from a competition frontier the frontier is determined by how well payment and other costs explain variations in loan deposit rate spread and non interest activity revenues overall differences in competition appear to be small

measuring regional cost of living accurate measures of regional cost of living are vital to businesses and individuals we compare a commonly used regional cost of living index produced by the american chamber of commerce research association accra to an index we calculate using consumer price index data and research from kokoski cardiff and moulton we find significant differences between the accra and the new indexes that are likely due to theoretical design data collection and sampling design the comparison of these indexes highlights sources of differences in regional cost of living measures and suggests caution in the use of accra indexes

optimal non linear income taxation for the alleviation of income poverty there has been much discussion recently of structuring tax and transfer programs to ensure that resources go to the poor with minimal leaks to the nonpoor the poor have no incentive to earn income with 100 percent marginal tax rates but how high or low the marginal rate of taxation should be and how they should vary with income is a complex issue and opinions vary social security schemes that withdraw benefits represent an extremely high effective marginal tax rate other schemes call for relatively low marginal tax rates at the bottom of the income distribution which tax transfer schedule does most to reduce poverty the issue is one of optimal nonlinear income taxation the authors show that one of the key theoretical results of the welfarist literature is overturned if it is desirable for everybody to work the optimal marginal tax rate on the very poorest individuals is strictly negative they argue that the nonwelfarist perspective points toward lower marginal tax rates in the lower part of the income distribution than does the welfarist perspective but numerical simulations suggest that the effect is of limited quantitative significance using conventional functional forms and parameter values optimal marginal tax rates on the poor are in the 60 70 percent range

the impact of diesel price on upstream and downstream food prices evidence from sao paulo abstract the literature on the transmission of oil price shocks to prices along the food supply chain has widely ignored how shocks upstream differ from downstream ones this article examines this issue by modelling upstream and downstream diesel price shocks along the nutritional high value food supply chain in sao paulo using a vector error correction approach and monthly data from july 2001 to december 2013 we estimate short run and long run dynamics in producer and retail prices of meat eggs dairy and fats oil due to changes in the average monthly price of diesel the results of the granger causality analysis show that the price of diesel cannot be used to predict the behaviour of producer prices in all the markets under study and the price of diesel predicts retail price only in the egg market this result is in line with the nature of price controls in brazil as of january 2002 the prices charged by distributors and retailers have been liberalized although wholesale prices of the derivatives including that of diesel continue to be set by the state oil company with the objective of controlling inflationary pressures the results of the response of food prices to diesel price shocks show a positive response of both upstream and downstream prices of egg and dairy products both upstream and downstream while the opposite direction occurs in the fat and meat markets albeit the initial positive shock of the producer price of meat the findings of the study show the important role of public policy in determining the nature of price transmission along the food supply chain

hierarchic demand and the engel curve for variety ahstract the usual treatment of consumer demand theory assumes a solution to the demand equations with positive quantities of all commodities this paper characterises a class called hierarchic demand systems for which only a subset of commodities are in the purchased set the hierarchic linear expenditure svstem is used to illustrate interesting properties of such systems the empirical section shows how the number of commodities purchased expands with total expenditure both in aggregate and for commodity groups the data clearly establish the empirical importance of corner solutions and of the purchase decision in demand studies

the food stamp program and food insufficiency food stamp participants have higher food insufficiency rates than eligible nonparticipants even after controlling for other factors given the food stamp program s prominent role in the alleviation of hunger this is a counterintuitive result we conjecture that these higher rates are due to adverse selection insofar as households more likely to be food insufficient are also more likely to receive food stamps we establish a theoretical framework to address this adverse selection using a simultaneous equation model with two probits we show that once one controls for this adverse selection food stamp recipients have the same probability of food insufficiency as nonrecipients copyright 2001 oxford university press

estimates of returns to scale elasticity of substitution and the thrifty food plan meal poverty rate from a direct household meal production function abstract many nutritional policies are designed to make home food production more affordable and yet very little is actually known about the home food production process a better understanding of home food production can be used to help explain shortcomings in current nutrition policies and consequently help in designing better nutrition policies this paper provides results from several home meal production function specifications that are rather robust the median returns to scale and elasticity of substitution between money and time is in the 1 2 1 9 range and 33 56 range respectively indicating increasing returns to scale but difficulty in substituting money for time in home meal production a home meal poverty rate is estimated which is the percentage of the sample that produces fewer meals at home than consistent with dietary guidelines the estimated home meal poverty rate is about 85 which is consistent with recent research taking a less rigorous approach though the approach taken here is novel the overall message is consistent with the recent literature time is a more important factor in achieving nutritional targets than money

differential impact of korean banking system reforms on bank productivity abstract we study the impact of banking system reforms during a crisis following a period of undisciplined lending regulatory changes aimed at strengthening the banks capital structure and risk management practices do not have a uniform impact on bank productivity but rather favor financially sound or strategically privileged banks we present evidence documenting the differential impact of regulatory reforms on korean commercial bank productivity over the period 1995 2005 average technical efficiency of banks decreased during the financial crisis of 1997 1998 it improved following the subsequent bank restructuring and continued to improve through 2005 the capital adequacy ratio is positively associated with banks technical efficiency the non performing loans ratio is negatively associated with technical efficiency both relationships are accentuated during the crisis but attenuated after the reforms

poverty and basic needs fulfilment in africa during structural change evidence from cote d ivoire abstract much attention is given in the literature to the evolution of social indicators during periods of structural adjustment and economic reform this paper argues that these processes are not distribution neutral from the point of view of basic needs fulfilment and that hence the focus should not be on aggregate indicators but on the distribution of beneficiaries of social services and changes in this distribution evidence is presented for cote d ivoire during the second half of the 1980s a period of intense structural change which shows that the poorest absorbed the bulk of the decline in basic needs fulfilment as a result of structural change this was the case for almost all aspects of basic needs and occurred regardless of the overall trend in the social indicators

are snap benefits adequate a geographical and food expenditure decomposition abstract the supplemental nutrition assistance program snap provides resources to supplement household food expenditures in order to achieve a nutritious diet determining the amount of support required or extent of food expenditure poverty entails comparing available resources for food to a nutrition determined threshold clearly the value of the threshold will affect the degree of food expenditure poverty if the threshold value is inaccurate the calculated degree of poverty will be inaccurate usda uses a threshold for setting snap benefits that does not vary geographically or temporally so consequently food expenditure poverty may be understated or overstated in different regions and time periods this article compares food expenditure poverty estimates for snap participants when geographical differences in the threshold are ignored versus not ignored in addition the article decomposes household food expenditures into food away from home fafh food at home fah personal funded fah and snap funded fah in order to assess the degree to which each of these contribute to reducing food expenditure poverty the general findings are that all food expenditure poverty measures are worse when geographical differences are taken into account in addition the analysis shows that fah expenditures and in particular snap fah expenditures contribute the most to reducing food expenditure poverty in snap households the policy implications are that food expenditure poverty is currently underestimated in the us by ignoring geographical differences in thresholds but the food expenditure poverty would be even worse without snap benefits geographical adjustments to the national threshold could help reduce food expenditure poverty across regions

how are snap benefits spent evidence from a retail panel we use a novel retail panel with more than six years of detailed transaction records to study the effect of participation in the supplemental nutrition assistance program snap on household spending we frame our approach using novel administrative data from the state of rhode island the marginal propensity to consume snap eligible food mpcf out of snap benefits is 0 5 to 0 6 the mpcf out of cash is much smaller these patterns obtain even for households for whom snap benefits are economically equivalent to cash in the sense that benefits do not cover all food spending we reject the hypothesis that households respect the fungibility of money in a semiparametric framework a model with mental accounting can match the facts

what can us city price data tell us about purchasing power parity abstract we study the dispersion of absolute price levels for us cities since 1918 by absolute price levels we mean price indices that measure the cost of a given consumption basket at each point in time we find strong evidence that city price levels converge over time and that the dispersion of price levels is lower for us cities than between oecd countries we argue that price level convergence for us cities will produce bilateral real exchange rate nonstationarity in this case however nonstationarity is not evidence against purchasing power parity ppp rather it is the consequence of improved market integration

concepts of poverty and the poverty line abstract various approaches adopted in developed economies to distinguishing between the poor and non poor to setting a poverty line are reviewed these include the budget standard food ratio official subjective and relative poverty line methods as well as the analysis of indicators of deprivation there has been significant progress in recent years in the degree of sophistication involved and a movement away from approaches with a quasi absolute background however all the methods face formidable problems at conceptual and empirical levels and no single approach is likely to dominate

unbiased estimation of the half life to price index convergence among u s cities estimates of the half life to convergence of prices across a panel of cities are subject to bias from three potential sources inappropriate cross sectional aggregation of heterogeneous coefficients presence of lagged dependent variables in a model with individual fixed effects and time aggregation of commodity prices this paper finds no evidence of heterogeneity bias in annual cpi data for 17 u s cities from 1918 to 2006 but correcting for the nickell bias and time aggregation bias produces a half life of 7 5 years shorter than estimates from previous studies

spatial cost of living indices and the distribution of public goods this paper develops cost of living col indices that vary across space while conventional indices adjust for differences in prices the col defined here also reflects access to public goods this analysis relies on the structure of a residential sorting model to estimate the col index for each of 226 metropolitan statistical areas msas in 1990 and 2000 in the united states empirical results show signifi cant differences in the col across the spatial landscape this paper focuses on the gini coefficient as a measure of inequality to demonstrate the distribution of public goods across the population

a short history of price level convergence in europe we study the evolution of price level dispersion in europe by combining time series information on harmonized indices of consumer prices hicps with occasional observations of absolute price levels we find that european price levels converged over much of the last 40 to 50 years in the united states our benchmark price level dispersion is more or less stable a back of the envelope calculation suggests that indirect tax rate harmonization convergence of nontraded input costs and convergence of traded input costs in the form of exchange rate stability and increased openness are all important in explaining european price level convergence

co movements in commodity prices a note based on network analysis this article analyses co movements in a wide group of commodity prices during the time period 1992 2010 our methodological approach is based on the correlation matrix and the networks inside through this approach we are able to summarize global interaction and interdependence capturing the existing heterogeneity in the degrees of synchronization between commodity prices our results produce two main findings a we do not observe a persistent increase in the degree of co movement of the commodity prices in our time sample however from mid 2008 to the end of 2009 co movements almost doubled when compared with the average correlation b we observe three groups of commodities which have exhibited similar price dynamics metals oil and grains and oilseeds and which have increased their degree of co movement during the sampled period

a note on pro poor growth this paper proposes a poverty growth curve that measures whether economic growth is pro poor or not propoor our methodology is developed based on atkinson s theorem linking the generalized lorenz curve and changes in poverty this methodology is applied to both thailand s unit record household surveys and international cross country data empirical study illustrates that our approach to measuring pro poor growth provides conclusive results in the majority of cases d 2004 elsevier b v all rights reserved

calculating rural urban food price differentials from unit values in household expenditure surveys a comparison with existing methods and a new procedure while purchasing power parity ppp between countries has received a great deal of attention ppp calculations within countries have received less attention the idea that one unit of currency has the same purchasing power in all regions in large countries is false this paper addresses this limitation by proposing a methodology for calculating rural urban ppp in india the paper introduces a concept of item specific ppp that exploits the analogy with an item specific equivalence scale the methodology relies on demographically varying preferences to estimate ppp the results underline the need to incorporate spatial differences in ppp calculations in countries with heterogeneous preferences copyright 2012 oxford university press

agricultural price transmission across space and commodities during price bubbles this article investigates agricultural price transmission during price bubbles the empirical approach concerns the horizontal transmission of cereal prices both across different market places and across different commodities the trade policy intervention put forward to mitigate the impact of price exuberance is considered the analysis is performed using italian and international weekly spot cash price data over years 2006 2010 a period of generalized turbulence of agricultural markets firstly the properties of price time series are explored then interdependence across prices is specified and estimated by adopting appropriate cointegration techniques results suggest that the bubble had only a slight impact on the price spread and the temporary trade policy measure when effective has limited this impact

value versus growth stocks book to market growth and beta 1994 value versus growth stocks book to market growth and beta financial analysts journal vol 50 no 5 pp 18 24

poverty and inequality in java examining the impact of the changing age educational and industrial structure abstract this paper uses the method of dinardo et al dinardo j fortin n m lemieux t 1996 labor market institutions and the distribution of wages 1973 1992 a semiparametric approach econometrica 64 5 sept 1001 1044 to examine the distribution of the benefits of growth in java dinardo et al s method presents the decompositions visually rather than in the form of opaque summary statistics in this paper it was modified so that changes in the cumulative distribution functions lorenz curves and generalized lorenz curves are decomposed the change in the distribution of per capita income between 1984 and 1990 is related to the aging of the population decreased reliance on agriculture increased educational attainment and changes in incomes within industry and age education categories

the impact of coffee certification on small scale producers livelihoods a case study from the jimma zone ethiopia what is the impact of product certification on small scale farmers livelihoods to what extent does the participation of ethiopian small scale coffee farmers in certified local cooperative structures improve their socioeconomic situation to answer these questions this article employs household data of 249 coffee farmers from six different cooperatives collected in the jimma zone of southwestern ethiopia in 2009 findings show that the certification of coffee cooperatives has in total a low impact on small scale coffee producers livelihoods mainly due to 1 low productivity 2 insignificant price premium and 3 poor access to credit and information from the cooperative differences in production and organizational capacities between the local cooperatives are mirrored in the extent of the certification benefits for the smallholders good cooperatives have reaped the benefits of certification whereas bad ones did not fare well in this regard the cooperative effect overlies the certification effect

problems in the measurement of consumer cost of living indexes three empirical issues in the use of cost of living indexes are examined a substitution bias b differences across demographic groups and c the importance of the reference indifference curve for true indexes when preferences are nonhomothetic using the estimated parameters of a demand system for food commodities from two microdata cross sections both true parametric and laspeyres price indexes for food are compared across both demographic groups and cross sectional cohorts

the swiss payment for milk processed into cheese ex post and ex ante analysis we make use of both an ex post and an ex ante evaluation to analyze the swiss payment for milk processed into cheese this payment for each kilogram of raw milk processed into cheese is issued to milk producers through dairy processors in the ex post evaluation by applying a vector autoregressive model we estimate the effects of reductions of the payment for prices of raw milk used to produce emmentaler gruyere and industrial cheese past declines in the payment have only been partially transmitted to raw milk prices the rate of transmission is higher for milk used for the production of industrial cheese than for artisan cheeses in the ex ante impact evaluation we use a partial equilibrium model and develop a counterfactual scenario in which the payment is removed the payment for milk processed into cheese is found to have effects on cheese production and exports but also has important indirect effects on other dairy products our findings suggest that about two thirds of the payment are benefiting milk producers at the same time the overall welfare losses resulting from the elimination of the aid are smaller than the budget allocated to this measure suggesting a net welfare gain from elimination

economic theory of spatial cost of living indices with application to thailand abstract this paper develops an axiomatic approach for constructing bilateral and multilateral spatial cost of living and welfare indices the methodology is then used to construct urban and rural cost of living and welfare indices for various regions of thailand the implications of our results for inequality and poverty measurement are discussed

geographical targeting for poverty alleviation an introduction to the special issue in the face of rising public deficits and shrinking public resources geographical targeting may be a viable way to allocate resources for poverty alleviation in developing countries efficiency can be increased and leakage to the non poor reduced substantially by targeting increasingly smaller areas this article and more generally the symposium on geographical targeting for poverty alleviation proposes several techniques for augmenting data to produce more detailed poverty maps it focuses on practical considerations in the design of geographically targeted poverty alleviation programs in particular it assesses the advantages and disadvantages of geographical targeting and describes how geographic information systems can be applied to improve poverty mapping

why have some indian states done better than others at reducing rural poverty the unevenness of the rise in rural living standards in the various states of india since the 1950s allowed the authors to study the causes of poverty they modeled the evolution of average consumption and various poverty measures using pooled state level data for 1957 91 they found that poverty was reduced by higher agricultural yields above trend growth in nonfarm output and lower inflation rates but these factors only partly explain relative success and failure in reducing poverty initial conditions also mattered states that started the period with better infrastructure and human resources with more intense irrigation greater literacy and lower infant mortality rates had significantly greater long term rates of consumption growth and poverty reduction by and large the same variables that promoted growth in average consumption also helped reduce poverty the effects on poverty measures were partly redistributive in nature after controlling for inflation the authors found that some of the factors that helped reduce absolute poverty also improved distribution and none of the factors that reduced absolute poverty had adverse impacts on distribution in other words there was no sign of tradeoffs between growth and pro poor distribution

not enough money or not enough time to satisfy the thrifty food plan a cost difference approach for estimating a money time threshold abstract food production at home requires money and time food assistance programs focus exclusively on the money cost while ignoring the time cost this one dimensional focus could undermine the effectiveness of food assistance programs in the spirit of vickery 1977 this paper uses a cost difference approach to develop a money time threshold and several related metrics to determine whether money or time is the most limiting resource in reaching the thrifty food plan tfp target in our empirical analysis we find that when time is ignored single headed households spend on average 35 more than required to meet the tfp target however when time is included these households spend on average 40 less than required to meet the tfp target in addition we find that when time is ignored 62 of single headed households on average spend enough money to reach the tfp target but when time is included only 13 of single headed households spend enough on average to reach the tfp target our empirical results suggest that time is more constraining than money in reaching the tfp target these results imply that metrics solely focusing on money could severely underestimate the gap between actual expenditures and those required to reach the tfp target

poverty transition and persistence in ethiopia 1994 2004 summary this study analyzes the persistence of poverty in both rural and urban areas in ethiopia during 1994 2004 the key finding is that households move frequently in and out of poverty but the difficulty of exiting from poverty like the chance of avoiding slipping back increases with the time spent in that state and varies considerably between male and female headed households our results imply that it is important to design anti poverty policies both to hinder households from slipping into extreme poverty and to minimize the length of the poverty spell for households once they have fallen into it

one kind of freedom poverty dynamics in post apartheid south africa abstract a 1993 south african living standards survey documented the legacy of apartheid in the form high levels of inequality and human insecurity drawing on a 1998 re survey of households in the 1993 study this paper explores whether this legacy has been superseded or whether apartheid s end has been only one kind of freedom that has left households in a poverty trap from which they cannot escape after proposing a theoretically grounded dynamic poverty typology that distinguishes stochastic from structural poverty transitions the paper goes on to estimate that significant numbers of the south african poor are potentially trapped in a structural poverty trap and lack the means to escape poverty over time

a survey of measurement biases in price indexes abstract this paper reviews the literature on measurement error in the major us price indexes the consumer price index cpi the producer price index rpi and the gross domestic product gdp deflators we take as our point of departure triplett s 1975 survey and focus on the studies of measurement error that have appeared since then we review the problems of substitution bias quality bias new goods bias and outlet substitution bias that are generally considered to be the main sources of error in price indexes the bulk of the paper is devoted to problems in the cpi and ppi as the gdp deflators tend to be based mainly on the components of these series we find that there has been surprisingly little work on the problem of overall measurement error in any of these price indexes and we conclude that there is very little scientific basis for the commonly accepted notion that measured inflation at 2 to 3 percent a year is consistent with price stability

measuring welfare poverty and inequality a class of poverty measures is identified the members of which satisfy strong monotonicity and transfer conditions these measures are closely related to indices of income inequality based on the notion of a mean equivalent income a restriction on the class of admissible measures allows poverty to be interpreted in terms of the loss in mean equivalent income resulting from the fact that some people are poor copyright 1987 by royal economic society

the time cost of food at home general and food stamp participant profiles little is known about the cost of time in food preparation at home yet this economic variable is a common thread running through recent concerns about obesity and the food stamp fs program this article provides initial estimates of the time cost in food preparation at home for the united states two standard methods of estimation are implemented and three demographic profiles are considered i the general population ii the typical fs participant and iii the typical fs participant following the united states department of agriculture thrifty food plan for the general population and averaging across methods the time cost share of total food cost is about 30 if the individual works in the market and at home but it is about 49 if the individual does not work in the market for the typical fs participant especially one following the thrifty food plan the time cost share of total food cost can be as much as 26 higher than the general population these substantial percentages provide strong i

how loan portfolio diversification affects risk efficiency and capitalization a managerial behavior model for austrian banks abstract the aim of this paper is to analyze how diversification of banks across size and industry affects risk cost and profit efficiency and bank capitalization for large austrian commercial banks over the years 1997 2003 employing a unique dataset provided by the austrian central bank we test for several different types of managerial hypotheses formalized according to a modified version of the berger and deyoung model berger a n deyoung r 1997 problem loans and cost efficiency in commercial banks journal of banking and finance 21 849 870 we find that although diversification negatively affects cost efficiency it increases profit efficiency and reduces banks realized risk finally diversification seems to have a positive impact on banks capitalization

does the law of one price really hold for commodity prices in spite of the empirical failure of the law of one price it is usually assumed that commodity prices are perfectly arbitraged at least in the long run this paper argues that this assumption is counterfactual and that much of the empirical evidence provided to support it is flawed and affected by econometric shortcomings spurious regressions nonstationarity in the data inappropriate use of first differences an alternative methodology co integration by which a long run relationship between nonstationary series can be tested is proposed tests of nonstationarity and co integration for a group of commodities show quite uniformly that the law of one price as a long run relationship fails and that deviations from the pattern are permanent

direct estimates of household production abstract using time diary and expenditure data for a set of american households in 2003 and 2004 i examine the relation between the inputs into eating time food purchasing preparation consumption and clean up and goods purchased foods goods and time expenditures are positively correlated and direct estimates of a ces household production function indicate the relative difficulty of goods time substitution in producing this commodity

event studies in economics and finance the event study is an important research tool in economics and finance the goal of an event study is to measure the effects of an economic event on the value of firms event study methods exploit the fact that given rationality in the marketplace the effects of an event will be reflected immediately in security prices thus the impact can be measured by examining security prices surrounding the event in this paper event study methods are described including some of the potential complications an example is included to illustrate the approach

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

pitfalls in testing for explosive bubbles in asset prices a number of studies e g robert j shiller 1981 olivier j blanchard and mark watson 1982 kenneth d west 1988 have argued that dividend and stock price data are not consistent with the market fundamentals hypothesis in which prices are given by the present discounted values of expected dividends these results have often been construed as evidence for the existence of bubbles or fads related arguments have been made with respect to gold bonds and foreign exchange a major problem with such arguments e g james hamilton and charles whiteman 1985 is that apparent evidence for bubbles can be reinterpreted in terms of market fundamentals that are unobserved by the researcher behzad t diba and herschel i grossman 1984 1988b and hamilton and whiteman 1985 have recommended the alternative strategy of testing for rational bubbles by investigating the stationarity properties of asset prices and observable fundamentals 1 in essence the argument for equities is that if stock prices are not more explosive than dividends then it can be concluded that rational bubbles are not present since they would generate an explosive component to stock prices 2 using unit root tests autocorrelation patterns and cointegration tests to implement this procedure diba and grossman 1988b p 529 state that the analysis supports the conclusion that stock prices do not contain explosive rational bubbles this paper shows that the above battery of tests is in fact unable to detect an important class of rational bubbles the point is demonstrated by constructing rational bubbles that appear to be stationary when unitroot tests are applied even though they are explosive in the relevant sense simulations show that when such bubbles are present stock prices will not appear to be more explosive than dividends on the basis of these tests even though the bubbles are substantial in magnitude and volatility the presence of rational bubbles in actual stock prices thus remains an open question