the demise of the rent controlled public housing programmes of ghana the story of the tema development corporation in 1952 a new town called tema was created in ghana the master plan for tema made provision for 19 planned communities each having roughly 1500 2000 homes about 6355 housing units are government owned rental housing the rental housing stock is the subject of this study this paper reports an empirical study that shows that rent controls coupled with public management have caused investment values in the rental housing stock to disappear for example this study finds that the nominal rate of return on total investment for these rentals based on replacement value has a mean value of only 3 per cent with inflation rates around 15 per cent during the study period this implies a negative real rate of return the findings provide empirical support and justification for recent attempts to privatise all rental public housing in ghana the study concludes with public policy recommendations

the performance of pivotal voter models in small scale elections evidence from texas liquor referenda abstract this paper explores the ability of pivotal voter models to explain voter behavior in small scale elections using data from texas liquor referenda the findings provide little support for the view that pivotal voter models are a reasonable theory for understanding small scale elections interestingly this is not because they cannot explain the levels of turnout in the data but rather because they cannot explain the size of the winning margins the logic of pivotal voter models implies that elections must be expected to be close even if there is a significant difference between the sizes of the groups or the intensity of their preferences with even a relatively small number of eligible voters elections that are expected to be close ex ante must end up being close ex post however in the data winning margins are often significant

activity choice labor allocation and forest use in malawi this article examines the determinants of activity choice affecting forest use among low income households in malawi data from three villages are used to estimate a system of household labor share equations for maize production forest employment and non forest employment a system estimation approach is used to identify factors influencing the competing and synergistic livelihood strategies which households undertake at the forest margin results from constrained maximum likelihood estimation indicate heightened incentives to degrade forests when returns to forest use are high factors reducing forest pressure include favorable returns to non forest employment secondary education of the household head and wealth

do parties matter estimating the effect of political power in multi party systems abstract when there are more than two parties policy outcomes are typically the result of a bargaining process we investigate whether changes in political power for various parties have an effect on tax policies we use an instrumental variable approach where close elections provide the exogenous variation in our variable of interest voting power in order to isolate close elections in a proportional election system we develop a new simulation algorithm using data from german municipalities in the state of bavaria our estimation results suggest that political power does matter for policies somewhat surprisingly the center left party spd is found to lower all three locally controlled taxes whereas the greens increase both property taxes considerably these results remain robust across a range of specifications our partisan effect for the spd is also confirmed by a simple regression discontinuity estimation using mayoral elections

unobserved variables and the elusive added worker effect consistent with recent empirical work this study finds no evidence of the added worker effect among married couples in the u s it is hypothesized that unobserved variables may be obscuring this added worker behavior this hypothesis is rejected the labor supply behavior of married women is influenced by the permanent and not the transitory nature of their spouses unemployment wives with frequently unemployed husbands have lower reservation wages yet apart from their measured human capital these same women face persistently lower wage rates and higher unemployment propensities in the labor market as a result married women with unemployed spouses are no more likely to be in the labor force and are actually less likely to be employed than observationally equivalent married women with employed spouses copyright 1991 by the london school of economics and political science

strategic interdependence in models of property rights the concept of strategic interdependence has opened a wide spectrum of explanation beyond the robinson crusoe economy this essay explores the implications of strategic interdependence for the theory of property rights and the new institutional economics schotter it attempts to clarify some of the linkages from institutional economics to micro and macroeconomic theory by considering how property institutions result from strategic interdependence confer payoffs to individual agents and reflect collective choices based on individual preferences

the added worker effect the term added worker effect usually refers to a temporary increase in the labor supply of married women whose husbands have become unemployed this paper presents a new approach to the empirical study of the added worker effect which emphasizes the role of employment uncertainty and credit constraints in generating short run participation and employment patterns the estimates are based on employment transition probabilities rather than static measures of labor supply and are used in a dynamic simulation of changes in the employment and participation rates of wives following an exogenous increase in unemployment among their husbands the results show a small but significant added worker effect at least for white families and suggest that the apparent disagreement among previous studies may stem from different approaches to measuring responses to a transitory event such as an unemployment spell

chance constrained financing as a response to financial risk the results of a recent survey suggest that many decision makers view financial risk in a safety first context imposing safety first chance constraints on potential financial ratios or flows can be difficult with traditional methods this is particularly true with financial ratios when both the numerator and denominator are random and are affected by endogenous decisions a model and numerical example are presented which enforce probabilistic or chance constraints upon potential debt asset ratios in a multiperiod linear program the model can be easily modified to probabilistically constrain alternative financial performance measures such as current ratios working ratios or cash flows

testing the stochastic structure of production a flexible moment based approach conventional production function specifications are shown to impose restrictions on the probability distribution of output that cannot be tested with the conventional models these restrictions have important implications for firm behavior under uncertainty a flexible representation of a firm s stochastic technology is developed based on the moments of the probability distribution of output these moments are a unique representation of the technology and are functions of inputs large sample estimators are developed for a linear moment model that is sufficiently flexible to test the restrictions implied by conventional production function specifications the flexible moment based approach is applied to milk production data the first three moments of output are statistically significant functions of inputs the cross moment restrictions implied by conventional models are rejected

a theory of participation in elections we analyze a model of participation in elections in which voting is costly and no vote is pivotal ethical agents are motivated to participate when they determine that agents of their type are obligated to do so unlike previous duty based models of participation in our model an ethical agent s obligation to vote is determined endogenously as a function of the behavior of other agents our model predicts high turnout and comparative statics that are consistent with strategic behavior jel d72

environmental externalities in traditional agriculture and the impact of trade liberalization the case of ghana abstract this paper provides a framework for the evaluation of trade policies that explicitly considers the effects of such policies on the environmental resources biomass in doing this we estimate the effects of biomass as a factor of agricultural production and test the hypothesis that farmers efficiently exploit biomass a resource held in common property the main findings are i biomass is an important factor of production in ghanian agriculture ii the biomass resource is exploited beyond the socially optimal level iii a deepening of trade liberalization is likely to induce further losses of biomass and deforestation and iv national income is likely to fall in response to further trade liberalization

an optimal path to extinction poverty and resource degradation in the open agrarian economy this paper constructs a model of the open agrarian economy in order to explore the tendency of many such economies to evolve along paths characterised by severe environmental degradation it pays special attention to the importance of commodity prices and the transfer system in determining agricultural activity levels in ecologically delicate systems

does gender matter for political leadership the case of u s mayors abstract what are the consequences of electing a female leader for policy and political outcomes we answer this question in the context of u s cities where women s participation in mayoral elections increased from negligible numbers in 1970 to about one third of the elections in the 2000 s a novel data set of u s mayoral elections from 1950 to 2005 was used and a regression discontinuity design was employed to deal with the endogeneity of female candidacy to city characteristics in contrast to most research on the influence of female leadership we find no effect of gender of the mayor on policy outcomes related to the size of local government the composition of municipal spending and employment or crime rates these results hold both in the short and the long run while female mayors do not implement different policies they do appear to have higher unobserved political skills as they have at least a 5 percentage point higher incumbent effect than a comparable male but we find no evidence of political spillovers exogenously electing a female mayor does not change the long run political success of other female mayoral candidates in the same city or of female candidates in local congressional elections

common property institutions and sustainable governance of resources abstract the literature on common property based resource management comprises many important studies that seek to specify the conditions under which groups of users will self organize and sustainably govern resources upon which they depend using three of the more comprehensive such studies and with an extensive review of writings on the commons this paper demonstrates that the enterprise of generating lists of conditions under which commons are governed sustainably is a flawed and impossibly costly research task for a way out the paper examines the relative merits of statistical comparative and case study approaches to studying the commons it ends with a plea for careful research design and sample selection construction of causal mechanisms and a shift toward comparative and statistical rather than single case analyses such steps are necessary for a coherent empirically relevant theory of the commons

economic development and environmental management in the uplands of southeast asia challenges for policy and institutional development using a philippine case study site the forces driving the recent evolution of economic behavior and institutional arrangements in upland and forest margin areas of southeast asia are considered in early modern development subsistence agriculture using long phase forest fallow rotations and regulated by customary law was replaced by more intensive commercially oriented farming systems a process heavily influenced by internal migration to the agricultural frontier traditional land and resource use institutions were quickly displaced during this shift both de facto through the actions of colonists and de jure through the state s assertion of ownership over forests and uplands and the introduction of private title to agricultural lands yet the effective implementation of natural resource use constraints lagged substantially behind the pace of agricultural development and forest exploitation resulting in a period in which high demand for such resources coincided with virtually open access these processes were noticeably subject to the influence of policies and reforms affecting markets prices and institutions

closeness expenditures and turnout in the 1982 u s house elections students of elections have repeatedly found that the closeness of an election is modestly correlated with turnout this may be due to a direct response of instrumentally motivated voters but recent theoretical work casts doubt on the adequacy of this explanation another possibility is that elite actors respond to closeness with greater effort at mobilization we explore the latter possibility by using fec and state data on campaign expenditures in house senate and gubernatorial races our results indicate that closeness has an effect at both the mass and elite levels we also provide quantitative estimates of the effect of senate and gubernatorial expenditure on house turnout

analyzing the turnout competition link with aggregate cross sectional data numerous papers by public choice oriented scholars and others have sought to test the hypothesis inspired by downs 1957 that ceteris paribus turnout should be higher when elections are close most look in cross sectional terms at variations in turnout at the constituency level for elections of a given type by and large the results have been disappointing see e g foster 1984 we are skeptical of these weak findings and argue that a complete portrait of the turnout competition link requires us to examine that link for at least three different types of turnout turnout among potential eligibles turnout among registrants and turnout for a given office relative to other offices such as top of the ticket and to take into account longitudinal changes in turnout for recent off year elections to the u s senate and also for off year elections to the u s house of representatives in states where there was no gubernatorial or senatorial contest on the ballot we find strong evidence for higher turnout among eligibles in close contests for these elections to the u s senate we also find evidence for an ecological effect that leads to turnout being maximized at values of competition other than 50 50 moreover when we look at turnout for office relative to top of the ticket voting in the california assembly and the u s senate in presidential years we again find some evidence for an ecological effect in which turnout is maximized at a value of republican vote share above 50 percent and find further strong evidence for a clear link between competition and turnout for office among those at the polls

economic reform structural adjustment and female labor force participation in buenos aires argentina abstract female labor force participation lfp has recently increased in the metropolitan area of buenos aires in a remarkable way this increase has been a result neither of improvements in the conditions of labor supply nor due to the diversification of the structure of occupational opportunities available for women using cross sectional and panel data i show that most of the growth in female lfp can be explained as a response to increasing unemployment and job instability associated with the implementation of structural adjustment policies since 1991 i argue that more women have decided to look for work as a way to reduce households economic uncertainty

the quiet revolution that transformed women s employment education and family the modern economic role of women emerged in four phases the first three were evolutionary the last was revolutionary phase i occurred from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s phase ii was from 1930 to 1950 phase iii extended from 1950 to the late 1970s and phase iv the quiet revolution began in the late 1970s and is still ongoing three aspects of women s choices distinguish the evolutionary from the revolutionary phases horizon identity and decision making the evolutionary phases are apparent in time series data on labor force participation the revolutionary phase is discernible using time series evidence on women s more predictable attachment to the workplace greater identity with career and better ability to make joint decisions with their spouses each of these series has a sharp break or inflection point signifying social and economic change these changes moreover coincide by birth cohort or period the relationship between the development of modern labor economics and the reality of women s changing economic role is explored the paper concludes by assessing whether the revolution has stalled or is being reversed women who graduated college in the early 1980s did not opt out but recent cohorts are too young to evaluate this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

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

economy and environment a theoretical essay on the interdependence of economic and environmental systems preface notation guide 1 introduction part i the physical economy environment system 2 closed physical systems a model 3 structure and time in the physical system 4 technological change and the environmental constraints to physical growth part ii the economic system 5 the price system 6 prices property and the environment 7 economic conflict and environmental change part iii environmental strategies in an evolutionary economy environment system 8 time uncertainty and external effects 9 the market solution 10 the stationary state 11 conclusions references index

the tragedy of the commons in cote d lvoire agriculture expansion of cultivated land diminishes the extent of forestlands or reduces the length of fallow periods and hence reduces the amount of natural vegetation the increase in land under cultivation has a direct output increasing effect at the cost of reducing natural capital and agricultural productivity the evidence for western cote d lvoire is consistent with and provides an explanation for the declining agricultural productivity observed in sub saharan africa during the past few decades this article uses a theoretical model to determine the level of land cultivation that maximizes village income using data from cote d lvoire for 1985 87 an important part of the land is under common property usually at the village level the results show that farmers do not internalize even a small fraction of the external cost of biomass in their land allocation decisions the lack of internalization of the social cost of the biomass resource leads to large income losses at the village level as much as 14 perce

a group rule utilitarian approach to voter turnout theory and evidence this paper explores a group rule utilitarian approach to understanding voter turnout inspired by the theoretical work of john c harsanyi 1980 and timothy j feddersen and alvaro sandroni 2002 it develops a model based on this approach and studies its performance in explaining turnout in texas liquor referenda the results are encouraging the comparative static predictions of the model are broadly consistent with the data and a structurally estimated version of the model yields reasonable coefficient estimates and fits the data well the structurally estimated model also outperforms a simple expressive voting model

female labor supply why is the united states falling behind abstract in 1990 the us had the sixth highest female labor participation rate among 22 oecd countries by 2010 its rank had fallen to seventeenth we find that the expansion of family friendly p

the entry of the wife into the labor force in response to the husband s unemployment a study of the added worker effect in brazilian metropolitan areas abstract the temporary participation in the labor force of wives whose husbands have become unemployed has been referred to in the literature as the added worker effect awe previous research conducted using data from the united states has found only a small awe a result that accords with life cycle models with perfect capital markets the current article uses panel data obtained using a short recall period to evaluate the awe in the six major brazilian metropolitan areas our results show a positive awe that is much more substantial than those found for the u s economy the finding of an important awe for brazil suggests that liquidity constraints may prevent brazilian households from sufficiently smoothing income and consumption in periods when the male head of the family is unemployed alternatively the significant awe may indicate that the husband s unemployment signals household members that there may be a substantial reduction in future income flow

poverty and famines an essay on entitlement and deprivation this book focuses on the causes of starvation in general and famines in particular the traditional analysis of famines is shown to be fundamentally defective and the author develops an alternative analysis

information access income distribution and the environmental kuznets curve abstract recent empirical studies have tested the hypothesis of an environmental kuznets curve ekc focusing primarily on the relationship between per capita income and certain types of pollutant emissions given the stock nature of many pollution problems emissions only partially account for the environmental impacts moreover almost all of the studies have given consideration to little more than income levels as explanatory variables this paper empirically tests the hypothesis of the ekc existence for a stock sensitive indicator that is the percentage of protected area pa within national territory it does theorize that economic growth is a necessary condition in order to better address environmental issues but it also stresses that other variables income distribution education information accessibility may play a fundamental role in determining environmental quality contrary to other studies that mainly focus on the calculation of the income level corresponding to the transition point this paper is more concerned with the calculation of environmental quality corresponding to that transition point that is the minimum level of environmental quality that a country is willing to accept this paper highlights the idea that if the transition point is determined primarily by income level social policies determine the level of environmental quality corresponding to that point

television and voter turnout i use variation across markets in the timing of television s introduction to identify its impact on voter turnout the estimated effect is significantly negative accounting for between a quarter and a half of the total decline in turnout since the 1950s i argue that substitution away from other media with more political coverage provides a plausible mechanism linking television to voting as evidence for this i show that the entry of television in a market coincided with sharp drops in consumption of newspapers and radio and in political knowledge as measured by election surveys i also show that both the information and turnout effects were largest in off year congressional elections which receive extensive coverage in newspapers but little or no coverage on television

natural resources prices export policies and deforestation the case of sudan abstract environmental destruction is often the result of price policies for primary commodities that determine how individuals will use and abuse natural resources in this paper we analyze how domestic policies under colonial and independent governments in sudan contributed to acacia senegal deforestation and the demise of the international gum arabic trade when primary commodities are produced from environmentally beneficial species such as acacia senegal trees the impact of a declining market for the primary commodity will have economic and ecological repercussions on other sectors in the economy poverty and risk are central to this process

the structure of a contract and the theory of a non exclusive resource the process of arriving at a useful concept of analysis is not only slow and painful but also may go astray and attain nothing useful someone begins with one example or observation followed by a theory which is intuitively plausible a theoretical term associated with a vague concept is coined examples of a seemingly different type emerge which call for another theory the process goes on as examples and theories continue to accumulate the different categories under the same heading of analysis serve only to confuse and each associated theory becomes ad hoc such has been the fate of the concept of externality a more useful approach i think is via contractual conditions the example chosen for illustration is marine fisheries where the fishing right is taken

the impact of closeness on electoral participation exploiting the italian double ballot system we investigate whether the degree of political competition affects electoral turnout by using italian municipal election data from 1993 to 2011 relying on elections held using a double ballot system we apply an instrumental variable technique exploiting the actual closeness between the two leading candidates in the first round as an instrument for closeness in the second round the use of this strategy to estimate the impact of closeness on turnout is new to the literature controlling for municipal fixed effects and candidates characteristics we find that expected closeness significantly increases turnout thus supporting the idea that the expected benefits of voting increase in tighter political races the estimated effect is much larger than that found when measuring closeness with ex post electoral results suggesting quite a relevant endogeneity bias in previous studies

estimating the electoral effects of voter turnout there are two undercurrents to much of the literature on voter turnout a normative belief that high rates of voter participation are desirable and an empirical expectation that variation in voter turnout will have electoral consequences to some extent these undercurrents flow together although one might argue that high turnout is preferable for purely expressive reasons the typical normative claim asserts that increased levels of voter participation improve the quality of representation by reducing any bias that might result from dissimilarities between voters and nonvoters assumed differences between those who vote and those who do not are also at the heart of the commonly hypothesized empirical relationship between aggregate turnout and partisan vote share as argued originally by the authors of the american voter campbell et al 1960 96 115 if nonvoters and occasional voters hold preferences that differ from those of habitual or core voters then variation in turnout is likely to have meaningful electoral implications higher turnout might advantage one party over another might advantage incumbents or perhaps

your vote counts on account of the way it is counted an institutional solution to the paradox of not voting when we explicitly lay out all its steps we find that the paradox of not voting since the chance of one vote s making a difference is about zero why trouble to vote rests on a false but hitherto unremarked assumption about the institutional context of elections my solution to the paradox is more conservative than others that have been proposed and it yields a rational choice model of voting whose consequence accord well with empirical findings on turnout

turnout and closeness evidence from 60 years of bavarian mayoral elections one prediction of the calculus of voting is that electoral closeness positively aects turnout via a higher probability of one vote being decisive i test this theory with data on all mayoral elections in the german state of bavaria between 1946 and 2009 importantly i use constitutionally prescribed two round elections to measure electoral closeness and thereby improve on existing work that mostly uses expost measures that are prone to endogeneity the results suggest that electoral closeness matters a one standard deviation increase in closeness increases turnout by 1 68 percentage points which corresponds to 1 of a standard deviation in this variable i also evaluate how other factors like electorate size or rain on election day aect turnout dierentially depending on the closeness of the race

economic theories of voter turnout i the voting paradox why would the rational individual bother to spend time and resources to become well informed go to the polls on the election day and maybe even wait in a queue why would a rational voter vote downs 1957 ii the paradox of indeterminacy if they vote why do they care who they vote for kirchgassner 1992 kirchgassner and pommerehne 1993 iii the paradox of ignorance to the extent that information is costly the rational voter must be ignorant about relevant aspects of his decision making downs 1957

deceleration in female labor force participation in latin america after half a century of sustained growth female labor force participation has decelerated in latin america especially among married vulnerable women based on a large database of microdata from household surveys this paper documents this recent deceleration and provides evidence on the determinants we argue that the fast economic growth experienced by the region in the 2000s was an important driving force lower unemployment and higher earnings of male partners plus increased social assistance may have reduced the pressing need for vulnerable women to take low quality jobs

property relations and economic development the other land reform abstract continued concern for development has led to the suggestion that private property rights should be created to stimulate economic development this suggestion derives from an incomplete understanding of the property relations on the public domain lands in the arid tropics and from a confusion of cause and effect between property and economic productivity a model of the private public boundary in land is developed that challenges the view that wealth would increase if land at the extensive margin were privatized the various types of property regimes in land are defined and explained

behavioural and material determinants of production relations in agriculture in this essay we develop a framework for analysing the major institutions governing the production and exchange of output and the primary factors of production in rural areas the analysis incorporates general considerations of risk and information constraints jointly with the principal material attributes of agriculture and of agricultural production factors the framework is used to analyse barriers to the existence of the major intertemporal and factor markets it is applied specifically to land scarce environments for which it provides an internally consistent explanation for many of the well documented institutional features of such settings in addition the analysis provides new implications for among other phenomena the inter relationships among ownership holdings operational scale family size and factor productivity for the scarcity of animal rental markets and use of animals as collateral for the renting out of land by small landowners and for the existence of plantations for certain crops

contracting problems and regulation the case of the fishery the inefficiencies of common property fisheries are of continuing concern to economists the early work by scott gordon 1954 and anthony scott 1955 outlined the problem and later studies by james crutchfield and giulio pontecorvo 1969 and frederick bell 1972 provided empirical estimates of the losses that result those studies were followed by the dynamic models of colin clark 1976 and james quirk and vernon smith 1970 of optimal harvest rates and the use of corrective taxes or quotas to achieve them but in spite of a large and growing literature and the persuasiveness of the outlined efficiency criteria most fisheries retain common property aspects with overcapitalization and excessive labor input why those conditions persist and the failure of the regulatory response to them are the issues addressed in this paper we examine a number of fisheries but focus on the texas shrimp industry which is one of the nation s most valuable fisheries for a single species and which shares the common property characteristics observed elsewhere it is considered overcapitalized and catch per unit of effort is falling 2 examination of the fishery reveals the many margins along which rent dissipation occurs and the nature of the regulations necessary for controlling fishing effort to avoid those losses the regulatory environment in texas is complicated by conflict within the fishery between inshore and offshore fishermen the latter assert that bay shrimping reduces the number of shrimp that successfully migrate to the gulf the inshore fishery is highlighted by another issue the recent resettlement of some 30 45 000 vietnamese refugees including many fishermen along the texas coast marine advisory service paul starr their entry has been met by hostility and violence from existing shrimpers who recognize that they are in an environment characterized by the absence of property rights bay shrimpers have lobbied the texas legislature for broad limits on new entrants yet ironically the sale of additional boats by individual shrimpers to the vietnamese has facilitated entry of the refugees into the fishery regulations in the texas shrimp and other fisheries are incomplete leaving many options for rent dissipation uncontrolled because of high contracting costs among fishermen and political factors that mold government actions contracting costs are high among heterogeneous fishermen who vary principally with regard to fishing skill 3 montana state university and texas a m university respectively we benefitted from comments by terry anderson raymond c battalio gardner brown oscar burt micha gisser wade griffin john r moroney anthony d scott peter temin and participants in workshops at texas a m university and the university of washington research assistance was provided by scott barnhart and phil mizzi funding was provided by sea grant texas a m university throughout this paper we use the terms common property and open access interchangeably here the terms describe a situation where no property rights group or individual exist s for the resource 2catch per unit of effort in the inshore texas gulf and federal gulf waters is presented for 1963 77 by w l griffin c g tydlacka and w e grant they show catch per unit of effort generally falling in inshore and offshore waters while catch per unit of effort fluctuates from year to year it falls from approximately 360 kg shrimp per unit of effort to 220 kg from 1963 to 1977 the common property nature of the fishery is reflected in the following statistics since 1975 the number of vessels has grown by 23 percent nelson swartz for fish houses the record of entry is similar between 1970 a d 1977 the number of firms grew from 259 to 287 though during that period many left the industry as others entered the number of fish houses was calculated from license data supplied by the texas parks and wildlife department the record of entry by fish houses suggests that monopsony as discussed by colin clark and gordon munro is absent in the fishery 3there may be minor differences in labor leisure choices and capital but our statistical evidence and discussions with fishermen indicate that catch variations are largely due to skill government regulations in the texas bays restrict capital and our empirical evidence shows boats to be relatively homogeneous

follow the leader theory and evidence on political participation using state by state voting data for u s presidential elections the authors observe that voter turnout is a positive function of predicted closeness to explain the strategic component of political participation they develop a follow the leader model political leaders expend effort according to their chance of being pivotal which depends on the expected closeness of the race at both state and national levels and how voters respond to their effort structural estimation supports this model for example a 1 percent increase in the predicted closeness at the state level stimulates leaders efforts which increases turnout by 0 34 percent

inferring strategic voting we estimate a model of strategic voting and quantify the impact it has on election outcomes because the model exhibits multiplicity of outcomes we adopt a set estimator using japanese general election data we nd a large fraction 75 3 80 3 of strategic voters only a small fraction 2 4 5 5 of whom voted for a candidate other than the one they most preferred misaligned voting existing empirical literature has not distinguished between the two estimating misaligned voting instead of strategic voting accordingly while our estimate of strategic voting is high our estimate of misaligned voting is comparable to previous studies

on induced economic change in precapitalist societies abstract this essay explores a number of properties of a general growth model of induced economic change in precapitalist societies which incorporates both the insights of ester boserup and thomas malthus responses to diminishing returns include changes in work intensity and population growth some important variants of the model are also examined which focus on the transfer of production to non producers and on alternative processes by which change is induced the results are used to generate some parameters influencing the political stability of non working elites to criticize some previous less general growth models and to suggest some fruitful lines fot future empirical research on economic development in the long run

ejido reforms in mexico conceptual issues and potential outcomes the evolving privatization of the ejido system in mexico represents a challenge to standard economic models of common property regimes these models tend to emphasize human interrelations while discounting the ecological conditions which form the environment for human interactions a risk spreading safety first model capturing interrelationships between nature and humans is developed to analyze the potential implications of mexico s privatization efforts recognizing that the majority of ejido lands are communal not parcelized located primarily in arid areas the model supports the prediction that privatization will occur and be most successful on irrigated ejido lands with modern social and economic infrastructure