the economic effects of land registration on smallholder farms in kenya evidence from nyeri and kakamega districts effects of land registration and title on security of tenure use of formal credit crop yields and land concentration are analyzed from household and plot data in four kenyan sites results indicate that the registration and titling program had a weak impact on perceived land rights of farmers credit use and terms crop yields or concentration of land holdings the conclusion is that titles are acquired for enhancing security of rights rather than for increasing agricultural production scarce government resources are best targeted towards providing better infrastructure and market opportunities which should also foster a greater demand for titling

political connection ownership structure and corporate philanthropy in china a strategic political perspective this paper investigates whether philanthropic giving decisions and amount of charitable giving are related to firms political connections and ownership type to this end chinese firms listed on either the shenzhen or shanghai stock exchange between 2004 and 2011 are examined where government interference in the business sector is prevalent state ownership structure is dominant and corporate political connections prevail our analyses show 1 a significant and positive relationship between political connections and the likelihood and extent of firm contributions 2 a significant and negative relationship between state ownership and extent of firm contributions and 3 a stronger relationship between political connections and corporate philanthropy in non state owned firms these findings with regard to the relationship between corporate giving political connections and ownership type have important implications for understanding corporate giving behavior in china and in emerging markets in general

the invisible hand and the grabbing hand evidence from a survey of 105 shop owners in moscow and warsaw shows that the reliance on private protection as well as the burden of regulation and corruption are much greater in moscow the evidence suggests that the invisible hand model of government better fits the warsaw local government and the grabbing hand model is more appropriate for moscow the evidence implies that the singular focus on the speed of economic reforms to understand the success of transition is misplaced and that the quality of government may be as essential this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

corporate social responsibility ownership structure and political interference evidence from china prior research suggests that ownership structure is associated to corporate social responsibility csr in developed countries this article examines whether and how ownership structure affects csr in emerging markets using chinese firms social responsibility ranking our empirical evidences show that for non state owned firms corporate ownership dispersion is positively associated to csr however for state owned firms whose controlling shareholder is the state this relation is reversed we attribute the reversed relationship to political interferences and further test this hypothesis by demonstrating that regional economic development is negatively related to csr for state owned firms due to decreased political interference in more developed areas this study is the first to directly examine the relationship between the dispersion of corporate ownership and csr in emerging markets and our results depict that it is important to consider ownership type in assessing csr in emerging market where state ownership is still prevalent such as china the results also reveal that firm size profitability employee power leverage and growth opportunity affect csr in china

princes and merchants european city growth before the industrial revolution as measured by the pace of city growth in western europe from 1000 to 1800 absolutist monarchs stunted the growth of commerce and industry a region ruled by an absolutist prince saw its total urban population shrink by one hundred thousand people per century relative to a region without absolutist government this might be explained by higher rates of taxation under revenue maximizing absolutist governments than under nonabsolutist governments which care more about general economic prosperity and less about state revenue

the economic lives of the poor in what turned out to be a rhetorical master move the 1990 world development report from the world bank defined the extremely poor people of the world as those who are currently living on no more than 1 per day per person measured at the 1985 purchasing power parity ppp exchange rate in 1993 the poverty line was updated to 1 08 per person per day at the 1993 ppp exchange rate which is the line we use in this paper poverty lines have always existed indeed 1 per day was chosen in part because of its proximity to the poverty lines used by many poor countries 1 however the 1 a day poverty line has come to dominate the conversations about poverty to a remarkable extent

property rights and finance which is the tighter constraint on private sector investment weak property rights or limited access to external finance from a survey of new firms in post communist countries we find that weak property rights discourage firms from reinvesting their profits even when bank loans are available where property rights are relatively strong firms reinvest their profits where they are relatively weak entrepreneurs do not want to invest from retained earnings

review of de soto s the mystery of capital in the mystery of capital hernando de soto promotes his explanation of why formal capital markets function poorly in developing countries de soto argues that much of the population of developing countries lacks access to credit not because they lack assets but because ownership of their property is secured informally which prevents the use of property as collateral the inability to convert assets into capital keeps the developing world from benefiting from capitalism

untitled a study of formal and informal property rights in urban ecuador we explore the substitutability of formal and informal property rights using new survey data from ecuador where households have both formal and informal claims to urban residential property we develop a model of property transactions that distinguishes between transferable and non transferable claims and show how this distinction affects the interpretation of hedonic price regressions the unconditional effect of title is to raise properties value by 23 5 however we also find that informal property rights can substitute effectively for formal property rights and suggest that titling programmes should be targeted at young disorganised communities if they are to benefit the recipients

experimental estimates of education production functions this paper analyzes data on 11 600 students and their teachers who were randomly assigned to different size classes from kindergarten through third grade statistical methods are used to adjust for nonrandom attrition and transitions between classes the main conclusions are 1 on average performance on standardized tests increases by four percentile points the first year students attend small classes 2 the test score advantage of students in small classes expands by about one percentile point per year in subsequent years 3 teacher aides and measured teacher characteristics have little effect 4 class size has a larger effect for minority students and those on free lunch 5 hawthorne effects were unlikely

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

do lenders favor politically connected firms rent provision in an emerging financial market corruption by the politically connected is often blamed for economic ills particularly in less developed economies using a loan level data set of more than 90 000 rms that represents the universe of corporate lending in pakistan between 1996 and 2002 we investigate rents to politically connected rms in banking classifying a rm as political if its director participates in an election we examine the extent nature and economic costs of political rent provision we nd that political rms borrow 45 percent more and have 50 percent higher default rates such preferential treatment occurs exclusively in government banks private banks provide no

property rights for the poor effects of land titling secure property rights are considered a key determinant of economic development the evaluation of the causal effects of property rights however is a difficult task as their allocation is typically endogenous to overcome this identification problem we exploit a natural experiment in the allocation of land titles in 1981 squatters occupied a piece of land in a poor suburban area of buenos aires in 1984 a law was passed expropriating the former owners land to entitle the occupants some original owners accepted the government compensation while others disputed the compensation payment in the slow argentine courts these different decisions by the former owners generated an exogenous allocation of property rights across squatters using data from two surveys performed in 2003 and 2007 we find that entitled families substantially increased housing investment reduced household size and enhanced the education of their children relative to the control group these effects however did not take place through improvements in access to credit our results suggest that land titling can be an important tool for poverty reduction albeit not through the shortcut of credit access but through the slow channel of increased physical and human capital investment which should help to reduce poverty in future generations

land titling and rural transition in vietnam abstract we examine the impact of the 1993 land law of vietnam which gave households the power to exchange transfer lease inherit and mortgage their land use rights we use household surveys before and after the law was passed together with the considerable variation across provinces in the speed of implementation of the reform to identify the impact of the law we find that the additional land rights led to statistically significant increases in the share of total area devoted to long term crops and in labor devoted to nonfarm activities however these changes are not large in magnitude and appear to be driven mainly by the increased security of tenure provided by the law rather than by increased access to credit markets or greater land market participation

land tenure security and investment incentives puzzling evidence from burkina faso abstract the commonsense logic associating higher land security and higher incentives to invest has been recently called into question in the case of african agriculture to be meaningful empirical tests have to be carefully designed so as to take account of the possible endogeneity of the land rights variable this is done in this paper by applying suitable econometric methods to the original data collected in burkina faso the results obtained cast doubt on the existence of a systematic influence of land tenure security on investment by reviewing the justifications for scepticism in the recent literature we are able to conclude that the traditional village order where it exists provides the basic land rights required to stimulate small scale investment

why do entrepreneurs enter politics evidence from china this article examines the determinants of the entrepreneur s political participation by employing a unique matched firm institution data set from china we find that the likelihood of an entrepreneur s participation can be explained by the underdevelopment of markets and market supporting institutions according to our estimates the probability of entering politics decreases by 8 20 from the mean when the institutional indices improve by one standard deviation our findings support the view that the institutional environment shapes the private entrepreneur s motivation to participate in politics they also provide an example of how private entrepreneurs respond to state market failure in developing and transition countries jel g1 h00 o10 p2 p3

land property rights and international migration evidence from mexico abstract in this paper i ask whether there is a relationship between land property rights and international migration in order to identify the impact of property rights i consider a country wide land certification program that took place in mexico in the 1990s my identification strategy exploits the staggered implementation and the households eligibility for the program i find that the program increased the eligible households likelihood of having one or more members abroad by 12 in terms of the number of migrants my coefficient estimates explain 26 of the 1994 1997 increase in migrants from ejido areas and 13 15 of the increase from all of mexico consistent with our theoretical model the impact is strongest for households without a land will this implies that land inheritance issues drive at least part of the effect

political connections and firm value in china an event study on 19 october 2013 the chinese government issued the opinions on further regulation on party and political leaders and cadres working part time holding office in enterprises also known as the 18th decree to regulate government officials employment with businesses the 18th decree is widely perceived as having had a significant impact on the use of independent directors with political backgrounds by firms given the prevalence of this business practice this paper examines the market reaction to the 18th decree to ascertain the value effect of political connections in china we note a negative relationship between the political connections of independent directors and market reaction we also note that the negative relationship between political connections and market reaction is moderated by ownership type and state of regional development specifically we find that the negative relationship holds only for private firms in less developed regions these results support our prediction that political connections add value to chinese firms and that the value effect of political connection is contingent on institutional factors

family networks and school enrolment evidence from a randomized social experiment we present evidence on whether and how a household s behavior is influenced by the presence and characteristics of its extended family using data from the progresa program in mexico we exploit information on the paternal and maternal surnames of heads and spouses in conjunction with the spanish naming convention to identify the inter and intra generational family links of each household to others in the same village we then exploit the randomized research design of the progresa evaluation data to identify whether the treatment effects of progresa transfers on secondary school enrolment vary according to the characteristics of extended family we find progresa only raises secondary enrolment among households that are embedded in a family network eligible but isolated households do not respond the mechanism through which the extended family influences household schooling choices is the redistribution of resources within the family network from eligibles that receive de facto unconditional cash transfers from progresa towards eligibles on the margin of enrolling children into secondary school

an analysis of sample attrition in panel data the michigan panel study of income dynamics by 1989 the michigan panel study on income dynamics psid had experienced approximately 50 percent sample loss from cumulative attrition from its initial 1968 membership we study the effect of this attrition on the unconditional distributions of several socioeconomic variables and on the estimates of several sets of regression coefficients we provide a statistical framework for conducting tests for attrition bias that draws a sharp distinction between selection on unobservables and on observables and that shows that weighted least squares can generate consistent parameter estimates when selection is based on observables even when they are endogenous our empirical analysis shows that attrition is highly selective and is concentrated among lower socioeconomic status individuals we also show that attrition is concentrated among those with more unstable earnings marriage and migration histories nevertheless we find that these variables explain very little of the attrition in the sample and that the selection that occurs is moderated by regression to the mean effects from selection on transitory components that fade over time consequently despite the large amount of attrition we find no strong evidence that attrition has seriously distorted the representativeness of the psid through 1989 and considerable evidence that its cross sectional representativeness has remained roughly intact

institutional investors political connections and the incidence of regulatory enforcement against corporate fraud we investigate two under explored factors in mitigating the risk of corporate fraud and regulatory enforcement against fraud namely institutional investors and political connections the role of institutional investors in the effective monitoring of a firm s management is well established in the literature we further observe that firms that have a large proportion of their shares held by institutional investors have a lower incidence of enforcement actions against corporate fraud the importance of political connections for enterprises whether in a developed market such as the united states or an emerging market such as china has been established by previous studies however we find evidence of another positive effect of political connections they may reduce the incidence of enforcement action against corporate fraud we also find that political connections play a more significant role in reducing regulatory enforcement incidents against non state owned enterprises and firms in weaker legal environments whereas institutional ownership plays a more important role in reducing regulatory enforcement incidents against state owned enterprises

property rights and investment in urban slums this paper examines the effect of changes in tenure security on residential investment in urban squatter neighborhoods to address the endogeneity of property rights i make use of variation in ownership status induced by a nationwide titling program in peru in a difference in difference analysis i compare the change in housing investment before and after the program among participating households to the change in investment among two samples of nonparticipants my results indicate that strengthening property rights in urban slums has a significant effect on residential investment the rate of housing renovation rises by more than two thirds of the baseline level the bulk of the increase is financed without the use of credit indicating that changes over time reflect an increase in investment incentives related to lower threat of eviction jel o12 o18 p25 p26

inside the family firm the role of families in succession decisions and performance this paper uses a unique dataset from denmark to investigate the impact of family characteristics in corporate decision making and the consequences of these decisions on firm performance we focus on the decision to appoint either a family or an external chief executive officer ceo the paper uses variation in ceo succession decisions that result from the gender of a departing ceo s first born child this is a plausible instrumental variable iv as male firstchild firms are more likely to pass on control to a family ceo relative to female first child firms but the gender of a first child is unlikely to affect firms outcomes we find that family successions have a large negative causal impact on firm performance operating profitability on assets falls by at least four percentage points around ceo transitions our iv estimates are significantly larger than those obtained using ordinary least squares furthermore we show that family ceo underperformance is particularly large for firms in high growth industries and for relatively large firms overall the empirical results demonstrate that professional non family ceos provide extremely valuable services to the organizations they head

the effect of overcrowded housing on children s performance at school this paper provides estimates of the causal effect of living in an overcrowded home on performance at school in france our identification strategy relies on the fact that the size and housing conditions of families vary with the sex composition of the siblings in particular large families in which the two youngest children are by descending age a boy and a girl tend to live less often in overcrowded housing than the other families french parents seem to be more reluctant about bringing up their children in the same room when they are not of the same sex especially when the youngest one is a girl we build on these results to develop several econometric analyses of the effect of overcrowding on schooling outcomes using variables describing the sex composition of the siblings as instrumental variables these different strategies reveal that the very strong statistical relationship between housing conditions and academic failure is plausibly one of cause and effect children in large families perform much less well than children in small families but our iv estimates suggest that this is mostly due to the fact that they live in more overcrowded homes

empowerment and efficiency tenancy reform in west bengal the paper analyzes the effect of agricultural tenancy laws offering security of tenure to tenants and regulating the share of output that is paid as rent on farm productivity theoretically the net impact of tenancy reform is shown to be a combination of two effects a bargaining power effect and a security of tenure effect analysis of evidence on how contracts and productivity changed after a tenancy reform program was implemented in the indian state of west bengal in the late 1970s suggests that tenancy reform had a positive effect on agricultural productivity there

are perceptions of inflation rational some evidence for sweden this survey paper argues that walrasian markets and monetary exchan ge are alternative not complementary arrangements for coordinating economic activity that if one realizes this many informational anomalies and price rigidities that appear irrational in a walrasia n context can be understood as the outcome of maximizing behavior in a monetary economy and that the precautionary approach to modelin g the demand for money takes on a particular importance in this way of looking at things empirical evidence on the demand for money is cite d in support of this point of view which tends to reinstate the quantity of money as an important economic variable in contrast to the new classical vision of the economy whi ch downgrades money s importance this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

politicians and banks political influences on government owned banks in emerging markets abstract government ownership of banks is very common in countries other than the united states this paper provides cross country bank level empirical evidence about political influences on these banks it shows that government owned banks increase their lending in election years relative to private banks this effect is robust to controlling for country specific macroeconomic and institutional factors as well as bank specific factors the increase in lending is about 11 of a government owned bank s total loan portfolio or about 0 5 of the median country s gdp per election per government owned bank

the trade off between child quantity and quality an empirical investigation of trade offs between number of children and their scholastic performance confirms that family size directly affects children s achievement though parents show no favori

tenure security and urban squatting while recent studies have shown that up to 35 of the total urban population of the third world live in squatter settlements there is a dearth of economic analysis on the phenomenon of squatting this paper attempts to fill this gap the equilibrium model argues that the difference in unit housing prices between the non squatting formal sector of a city and its squatting informal sector reflects the premium associated with a secure tenure status the empirical portion of this paper uses hedonic price techniques to derive the average premium on tenure security in a medium sized philippine city davao results show that formal sector unit dwelling prices are about 18 renters to 58 owners more than in the informal sector these equilibrium price differentials were found to be greater for lower income groups larger household sizes and households with older heads for renters and younger heads for