land tenure investment incentives and the choice of techniques evidence from nicaragua the choice of cultivation techniques is a key determinant of agricultural productivity and has important consequences for income growth and poverty reduction in developing countries household data from nicaragua are used to show that the choice of cultivation technique depends on farmers tenure status even when techniques are observable and contractible in particular tree crops are less likely to be grown on rented than on owner cultivated plots further evidence indicates that the result follows from landlords inability or unwillingness to commit to long term tenancy contracts rather than from agency costs due to risk aversion or limited liability

landlords tenants and technological innovations abstract there is a long standing belief that landlords and capitalists have used their control over the means of production to direct the development and adoption of technologies which have increased their welfare at the expense of workers there is also a wide spread belief that the interlinkage between credit and tenancy markets which seems so prevalent in ldcs provides further impetus to the resistance of innovations innovations which make tenants better off reduce their demand for loans and thus make landlords qua creditors worse off these contentions have typically been dismissed out of hand by standard welfare economics arguments the rural environment of most ldcs may not however be adequately described by the standard economic model on which this welfare analysis is based in particular in many ldcs sharecropping contracts are widely employed there is evidence of widespread unemployment and there is not the full set of risk and capital markets required by the competitive paradigm the objective of this paper is to show under quite general conditions that the institutional structure of the economy may indeed be an important determinant of whether a particular innovation will or will not be adopted we show that 1 i landlords may wish to and can resist innovations which unambiguously increase production whenever sharecropping contracts are employed 2 ii conversely landlords may adopt innovations which not only lower the welfare of workers but even lower net national product 3 iii the presence of interlinkage may indeed affect the adoption of a new technology however the reason for this is only partly related to the effect of innovations on tenants borrowing indeed we show that innovations may increase as well as decrease the tenants demand for borrowing

parents discount rates for child quality contemporary discussions of economic growth make human capital or knowledge accumulation its primary engine 25 human capital as the lead component of the stock of wealth defines a developed economy becker and murphy 4 show that human capital both increases and is increased by the scope of the market its rate of return rises with the size of its stock 5 human capital also plays significant roles in models of human fertility choice 40 population and environmental degradation 11 34 capital mobility 3 and endogenous technological progress 33 a substantial portion of an adult s human capital is accumulated during childhood children as children however cannot independently contract for the resources required to support investments in this human capital though nearly every society grants parents wide discretion about the nurture they provide their children little is understood about what motivates investment by one generation in another the relative importance of different investment modes or the discount rates which parents apply whatever the motivation and the mode because of the long time span between birth and adulthood parents discount rates potentially exert great leverage upon the investment decisions they make for their children knowledge of these discount rates is a prerequisite to acquiring an improved understanding of the internal decision processes of the household a collective decision unit which economics mostly treats as a black box 1 important policy questions as well as scientific accuracy and logical consistency demand knowledge of the discount rates parents apply to investments in their children healthier better educated and wealthier children have a better chance in life but there is no evident reason to suppose that intrafamily discount rates are socially optimal 2 many of the private reactions and behaviors which reinforce or temper the intended effects of public policies are internal to the household when these intended effects have a substantial temporal dimension parental discount rates will be influential for example increased public investments in children can be neutralized

understanding heterogeneous preferences in random utility models a latent class approach a finite mixture approach toconditional logit models is developed in whichlatent classes are used to promoteunderstanding of systematic heterogeneity the model is applied to wilderness recreationin which a branded choice experiment involvingchoice of one park from a demand system wasadministered to a sample of recreationists the basis of membership in the classes orsegments in the sample involved attitudinalmeasures of motivations for taking a trip aswell as their stated preferences overwilderness park attributes the econometricanalysis suggested that four classes of peopleexist in the sample using the model toexamine welfare measures of some hypotheticalpolicy changes identified markedly differentwelfare effects than the standard singlesegment model and provided insight into thedifferential impact of alternative policies

going digital credit effects of land registry computerization in india digitization of land records represents a unique way to test for credit supply effects of improved land administration information over time the authors exploit variation in the timing of the shift from manual to digital operation of andhra pradesh s 387 sub registry offices during the state wide rollout of this intervention from 1999 to 2005 data on credit disbursement and registered mortgages for the 1995 2007 period point to significant though quantitatively modest increases in credit access in urban areas institutional factors allow the authors to explain these results

constrained pareto optimal taxation of labour and capital incomes abstract with the pareto principle as the sole normative criterion necessary conditions for optimal tax rates on labour and capital incomes are established in an overlapping generations model the individuals in the economy have differing earning abilities and their labour supply is endogenous the analysis focuses on intragenerational aspects and is restricted to linear taxation in steady state

back to basics the comanor wilson mes index revisited the present article attempts to investigate the validity of the comanor wilson minimum efficient size mes measure the basic assumption is that firms that have exhausted scale economies are in non increasing returns to scale the same firms are also assumed to have a size greater than mes estimated on sales total turnover employment or fixed assets data envelopment analysis dea is used on a sample of firms in three greek manufacturing industries to classify firms in operation according to increasing or non increasing returns to scale on the basis of the results of the dea input oriented model the mes measure correctly predicts over 85 of the cases a probit model is applied to those cases that are not identically predicted by mes concerning returns to scale results indicate that technical efficiency size and age are the factors that compel mes to yield the same prediction as the dea approach

household welfare effects of agricultural productivity a multidimensional perspective from ghana abstractalthough poverty reduction policies in developing countries hinge on the link between smallholder productivity and welfare micro level empirical evidence on this is limited in sub saharan africa and neglects the multidimensionality of welfare this article contributes through investigating the productivity poverty relationship using a number of welfare measures with a three period panel dataset for ghana the findings are that welfare is increasing with labour productivity irrespective of the measure used but that dramatic increases in productivity would be required to achieve meaningful poverty reduction

the takeover deterrent effect of open market share repurchases this paper examines whether open market share repurchases deter takeovers we model pre repurchase takeover probability as a latent variable and examine its impact on the firm s decision to repurchase shares given specification tests reject the tobit model we turn to the censored quantile regression method of powell 1986 journal of econometrics 32 143 155 we find a significantly positive relation between open market share repurchases and takeover probability and we reconcile empirical findings in previous studies that contradict predictions repurchase activity is inversely related to firm size consistent with smaller firms having greater information asymmetry and is related to temporary but not permanent cash flows

the energy efficiency paradox revisited through a partial observability approach the present paper examines the energy efficiency paradox demonstrated in greek manufacturing firms through a partial observability approach the data set used has resulted from a survey carried out among 161 energy saving technology firm adopters maximum likelihood estimates that arise from an incidental truncation model reveal that the adoption of the energy saving technologies is indeed strongly correlated to the returns of assets that are required in order to undertake the corresponding investments the source of the energy efficiency paradox lies within a wide range of factors policy schemes that aim to increase the adoption rate of energy saving technologies within the field of manufacturing are significantly affected by differences in the size of firms finally mixed policies seem to be more effective than policies that are only capital subsidy or regulation oriented

do property rights promote investment but cause deforestation quasi experimental evidence from nicaragua abstract many policymakers argue that property rights decrease deforestation some theoretical papers also make this prediction arguing that property rights decrease discount rates applied to a long term investment in forestry however the effect is theoretically ambiguous the paper takes a novel instrumental variables approach based on nicaragua s agrarian reform to test for the effect using a new dataset nicaragua s 2001 agricultural census it finds that property rights significantly increase deforestation the model supported by the data suggests a likely mechanism for this relationship property rights increase investment increasing agricultural productivity and therefore the returns to deforestation

do overlapping property rights reduce agricultural investment evidence from uganda the need for land related investment to ensure sustainable land management and increase productivity of land use is widely recognized however there is little rigorous evidence on the effects of property rights for increasing agricultural productivity and contributing toward poverty reduction in africa whether and by how much overlapping property rights reduce investment incentives and the scope for policies to counter such disincentives are thus important policy issues using information on parcels under ownership and usufruct by the same household from a nationally representative survey in uganda the authors find significant disincentives associated with overlapping property rights on short and long term investments the paper combines this result with information on crop productivity to obtain a rough estimate of the magnitudes involved the authors make suggestions on ways to eliminate such inefficiencies

factors determining participation of the elderly in supplemental security the same low participation rates which plague many welfare programs have been observed among the elderly eligible for supplemental security income ssi a number of hypotheses have been offered to explain the low enrollment but none has attracted universal acceptance in this paper i use the survey of income and program participation sipp to examine the participation of the elderly in ssi because of the high quality of the data i am able to determine eligibility more accurately than in most previous studies in this sample only 56 percent of those whom i determine to be eligible for ssi are presently receiving benefits i model the decision to participate as a probit equation but modify the likelihood function to account for measurement error in the expected benefit the results indicate that participation is primarily determined by the financial situation of the eligible individuals although all those eligible for ssi are poor those with little in the way of other resources are significantly more likely to participate this finding differs from widespread beliefs that eligible individuals are discouraged by the difficulty of the application process or that many are uninformed about the program

tax effects versus budget effects on labor supply this paper analyzes the effects on labor supply of parallel changes in taxes and public spending of various types a number of important recent developments in the labor supply behavior of households are highlighted by such a study of various types of budget effects rather than isolated tax effects this comes out in particular when considering cross substitution effects on labor supply of changes in public spending on goods and services or of the subsidization of goods and services provided by private markets moreover the income effects of tax changes are often mitigated or possibly even removed by the income effects of the accompanying expenditure changes

information power and war ultimatum bargaining models of international interactions suggest that when conflict is costly and the actors are fully informed the probability of conflict goes to zero however conflict occurs with some positive probability when the challenger is uncertain about the defender s reservation value i employ a simple ultimatum game of bargaining to evaluate two traditional power centric theories of world politics balance of power and power transition theory the formal and empirical analyses demonstrate that as states approach power parity information asymmetries are greatest thus enhancing the probability of militarized conflict uncertainty is a central cause of conflict emergence and is correlated with the distribution of observable capabilities recognizing the relationship between the distribution of power and the uncertainty offers a more sophisticated interpretation of power centric explanations of world politics

welfare effects of alternative forms of public spending the paper analyzes welfare effects in a second best world of public spending of three different types transfer payments public consumption and public investment it is shown how these effects d

environmental and gender impacts of land tenure regularization in africa pilot evidence from rwanda although increased global demand for land has led to renewed interest in african land tenure few models to address these issues quickly and at the required scale have been identified or evaluated the case of rwanda s nation wide and relatively low cost land tenure regularization program is thus of great interest this paper evaluates the short term impact some 2 5 years after completion of the pilots undertaken to fine tune the approach using a geographic discontinuity design with spatial fixed effects three key findings emerge from the analysis first the program improved land access for legally married women about 76 percent of married couples and prompted better recordation of inheritance rights without gender bias second the analysis finds a very large impact on investment and maintenance of soil conservation measures this effect was particularly pronounced for female headed households suggesting that this group had suffered from high levels of tenure insecurity which the program managed to reduce third land market activity declined allowing rejection of the hypothesis that the program caused a wave of distress sales or widespread landlessness by vulnerable people implications for program design and policy are discussed

intergenerational aspects of public transfers borrowing and debt the paper analyzes intergeneration distributional effects of taxes transfer payments public borrowing and debt a two period life cucle model with overlapping generations is constructed the model has two specific features private wealth in both periods enter as arguments in the preference function and the individuals inelastically supply labor in both periods it turns out that some fiscal policy actions favor both of the currently lliving generations possibly at the expense of future generations while other actions generate conflicts between the currently living generations the analysis also shows that it makes considerable difference whether the burden of public spending debt and borrowing is defined in terms of wealth consumption and utility the different implications of foreign vs domestic debt are examined

tenure security human capital and soil conservation in an overlapping generation rural economy we develop an overlapping generation model of rural agricultural households to examine whether tenure security and subsistence needs influence the choice between unexploited topsoil and investment in children s human capital as the mode of transfer of wealth a unique dataset from bangladesh finds that tenure security is associated with greater topsoil conservation and lower human capital investment therefore there exists a tradeoff between these two modes of transfer we suggest that increased public expenditure on schooling which substitutes private expenditure may lower the pressure on land and soil resources

output effects of government purchases the theoretical analysis focuses on the distinction between temporary and permanent movements in government purchases under plausible conditions the temporary case involves an output response that is positive less than one to one with the change in government purchases and larger than that generated by an equal sized but permanent shift in purchase the equilibrium real rate of return rise in the temporary case but changes little in the permanent one defense purchases are divided empirically into permanent and temporary components by considering the role of temporary wars no temporary shifts in nondefense purchases were isolated empirical results verify an expansionary output effect for temporary purchases that exceeds that of permanent purchases the results for some other expectational hypotheses are found to be generally supportive of the theory

ethnic enclaves and immigrant labor market outcomes quasi experimental evidence i examine the effects of the ethnic enclave size on labor market outcomes of immigrants i account for ability sorting into enclaves by exploiting a danish spatial dispersal policy under which refugees were randomly dispersed across locations first i find strong evidence that refugees with unfavorable unobserved characteristics self select into ethnic enclaves second a relative standard deviation increase in the ethnic enclave size increases annual earnings by 18 on average irrespective of skill level third further findings are consistent with the explanation that ethnic networks disseminate job information which increases the job worker match quality and thereby the hourly wage rate

specificity of control the case of mexico s ejido reform abstract an important aspect of property rights is specificity the ability of a third party to enforce rights the empirical literature rarely isolates the effect of specificity because exogenous changes due to land reforms either simultaneously change both control and specificity or exclusively change control we investigate the effect of specificity in the context of the 1992 salinas land reforms in mexico which constitutionally changed individual control rights for all communal landholders but reserved changes to specificity for a subsequent voluntary land certification program we are able to address selection into the program by taking advantage of the peculiarities in the certification process using agricultural production data from before and after the reform we demonstrate that land certification significantly increases agricultural investments but only for investments directly affected by the changes in control we explain the results using a simple model that shows how specificity can better coordinate landholders beliefs about the implementation of changes in control

is there an energy paradox in fuel economy a note on the role of consumer heterogeneity and sorting bias abstract from the previous literature it can be found that consumers tend to undervalue discounted future energy costs in their purchase decisions for energy using durables we show that this finding could in part result from ignoring consumer heterogeneity in empirical analyses as opposed to true undervaluation

dual labor market hypothesis and long run income distribution abstract we construct a dynamic model of dual labor market incorporating firm investment behavior and household investment behavior on education education enhances the trainability of individuals and thus provides qualifications for entry into the primary market two specifications of the model differing in the nature of the new entrants market are presented one admitting competitive adjustment in the scarcity premium of qualified entrants while the other a generalization of thurow s job competition model allocates employment through rationing we obtain sharply different long run determinants of income distribution between these alternative models the result extends and qualifies existing interpretations on the schooling paradox observed in the u s

the impact of collective bargaining legislation on disputes in the u s public sector no legislation may be the worst legislation this article estimates the impact of collective bargaining legislation on disputes during labor negotiations in the u s public sector we use a large national sample of u s state and local government contracts to compare the incidence and intensity of disputes by similar workers under different forms of collective bargaining legislation the breadth of our data allows us to examine the impact of five different forms of legislation our principal finding is that dispute costs are highest in jurisdictions that provide no explicit framework for bargaining or dispute resolution strikes are as frequent and as long when they are illegal and employers are not required to bargain with employees as when they are legal but employers are required to bargain arbitration is most frequently used when formal institutions for arbitration have been provided

the impact of attribute preferences on adoption timing the case of photo voltaic pv solar cells for household electricity generation we are concerned with micro generation individual households generating electricity using a renewable technology we focus on modeling the adoption probability of photo voltaic solar panels by households using data from ontario canada where a generous feed in tariff is available to households generating electricity from solar panels we measure household level preferences for panels and use these preferences along with household characteristics to predict adoption time intentions we use discrete choice experiments to measure household level preferences and establish a causal link between the attributes of the technology and adoption time intentions using discrete time survival mixture analysis significant preferences included lower cost greater energy savings and lower fossil fuel inflation the conditional hazard probability of adoption at a particular time given no previous adoption showed that the attribute preferences had intuitively reasonable effects the hazard probabilities allow us to compute the cumulative probability of adoption over a 10 year period per household technology awareness has a significant effect on the adoption probability reinforcing the need for effective education our approach indicates the level of heterogeneity in preferences particularly high for investment criteria and co2 emissions these findings suggest that education campaigns should explain more about investment criteria feed in tariffs and environmental effects

endogenous matching and the empirical determinants of contract form empirical work on contracts typically regresses contract choice on observed principal and agent characteristics if i some of these characteristics are unobserved or partially observed and ii there are incentives whereby particular types of agents end up contracting with particular types of principals estimated coefficients on the observed characteristics may be misleading we address this endogenous matching problem using a data set on agricultural contracts between landlords and tenants in early renaissance tuscany controlling for endogenous matching has an impact on parameters of interest and tenants risk aversion appears to have influenced contract choice

american ambivalence towards abortion policy development of a heteroskedastic probit model of competing values theory using elaboration likelihood models and insights from the recent core beliefs literature we show that conflicting core beliefs lead to ambivalence about policy choices hypotheses policy choices about abortion are heterogeneous this heterogeneity across individuals is a function of the underlying conflict in their beliefs about the role of women and the sanctity of human life methods a heteroskedastic probit model is developed to test the hypotheses results heterogeneity is observed for six of seven abortion policy choices when core values conflict respondents are more ambivalent in their policy responses and more difficult for our standard models to predict

takeover activity among financial mutuals an analysis of target characteristics abstract this paper presents an empirical investigation of the merger process among mutuals using a large pooled cross section time series sample of uk building societies between 1981 and 1993 the financial services industry is probably unique in having a substantial mutual sector coexisting with and competing against joint stock firms however given the severely attenuated system of ownership claims in the financial mutual it has been widely predicted that this form will exhibit strong behavioural differences from the stock sector it is surprising therefore that despite the important governance role accorded to mergers in the corporate literature the merger process among financial mutuals has been almost totally ignored this paper explores the mutual merger process via an examination of the targets characteristics it finds little support for the natural selection view of mutual acquisitions but it does reveal the importance of the regulatory process above all the results show a surprising similarity to those from studies of the merger process in joint stock firms

taxes and the timing of births because the tax savings of having a child are a realized only if the birth takes place before midnight january 1 the incentives for the marginal birth are substantial using a sample of children from the national longitudinal survey of youth we find that the probability that a child is born in the last week of december rather than the first week of january is positively correlated with tax benefits we estimate that increasing the tax benefit of having a child by 500 raises the probability of having the child in the last week of december by 26 9 percent

willingness to pay for agricultural land preservation and policy process attributes does the method matter this article examines relationships between willingness to pay for land preservation and policy process attributes the approach departs from traditional welfare assessments in that it does not constrain attributes of the policy process to be utility neutral results indicate policy process attributes may influence utility in some circumstances even after controlling for the influence of land use outcomes often correlated with specific policy techniques results further imply that in some cases even comprehensive specification of land use outcomes by stated preference instruments may be insufficient to prevent systematic shifts in willingness to pay related to unspecified yet assumed policy process attributes

testing between competing models of sharecropping the marshallian approach assumes a prohibitively high cost of monitoring the sharecropper s activities while the monitoring approach argues that landlords stipulate and effectively monitor sharecroppers activities i present new evidence using detailed data collected from eight indian villages most tenants own some land of their own this provides a controlled environment in studying the impact of contractual arrangements the differences in input and output intensities on owned minus sharecropped land of the same household are found to be sizable and significant suggesting a rejection of the monitoring approach and supporting the notion of the marshallian productive inefficiency of sharecropping

impacts of land certification on tenure security investment and land market participation evidence from ethiopia this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled impacts of land certification on tenure security investment and land market participation evidence from ethiopia conducted between 2006 and 2011 in ethiopia the study observed the impact of land registration on tenure security land related investment and rental market participation using 900 randomly selected households and 4000 plots cultivated by the households on the household and land plots level certification resulted in significant reduction of tenure insecurity and an increase in land related investment the propensity to invest in water conservation increased between 20 and 30 percent from panel estimates the increased investment appears to be sustained over the long term the propensity to rent land increases by 9 to 13 percent the titling had significant positive impacts on the rate at which female headed households rented their land funding for the study derived from the gender action plan global land tools network and norwegian environmentally and socially sustainable development essd trust fund

growth welfare and the size of government i introduction given the current state of political debate within the u s it would appear that making the claim a smaller government is a better government is just a mere statement of a simple fact president clinton the head of the political party which has traditionally supported a larger government has now proclaimed that the era of big government is over and has proposed fiscal programs to cut both taxes and the growth of government spending in a very real sense it has been economists who have been consensus makers on this issue numerous studies have been conducted recently estimating the growth and welfare costs of distortionary taxation 1 these studies have generally found that income and capital taxation have large welfare effects and also significant effects on growth however the potential benefits of the government purchases financed with distortionary taxes are very limited in these supply side models most often being simply ignored in these aforementioned studies government purchases do not directly provide utility to households and do not affect the productivity of firms as a result the optimal size of government in these models is zero which is a troubling property of any model being used to evaluate the effects of changes in fiscal policy in terms of cost benefit analysis by ignoring these effects previous studies have only considered the costs of a larger government but not the benefits 2 this paper develops an endogenous growth model of the u s economy in which government purchases directly affect both the utility of individuals through the provision of public consumption goods and services and the productivity of firms through the provision of public capital in a manner which is consistent with existing empirical work by aschauer 1985 1989 and munnell 1990a b among others by incorporating the full benefits of government purchases into our model the growth and welfare effects of a smaller government can be more realistically evaluated this paper proceeds as follows in section ii the endogenous growth model with human capital accumulation used in this study is described the competitive equilibrium of the model is described and calculated in section iii and the calibration of the parameters in the model is discussed in section iv in section v various fiscal policy experiments are conducted investigating the growth and welfare effects of government downsizing although this is a macroeconomic model and as such is too general to investigate the effects of specific government spending and taxation programs the results presented here do provide some broad fiscal policy guidelines 1 the effects of a smaller government depend as much on the mix of spending cuts as on the mix of tax cuts and government downsizing is not necessarily growth and welfare enhancing 2 while tax reductions by themselves can significantly increase growth and welfare simultaneous reductions in government spending and taxation are not likely to lead to large positive or negative changes in growth or welfare regardless of the exact form of the spending and tax cuts 3 reducing the size of government is less likely to increase growth and welfare if the reductions in public investment are large especially reductions in public investment which directly affect the accumulation of human capital 4 government downsizing is most likely to increase growth and welfare if the proceeds from spending cuts are used to finance reductions in capital tax rates 5 across the board spending cuts fail to maximize the potential growth and welfare benefits of government downsizing although downsizing is more likely to increase growth and welfare if the cuts pertain to all forms of government spending including transfer payments and not just government purchases ii description of the model the model developed here is similar to the well known two sector endogenous growth model used by rebelo 1991 and king and rebelo 1990 with endogenous labor supply

islamic economics and islamic finance in the world economy this paper places the articles in this special issue in the contexts of islamic economics and finance research it highlights the foundations of islamic economics which are in practice manifested in islamic finance then the paper brings up three key issues in islamic finance today the islamicity of islamic banking real contributions of islamic finance and islamic finance in the present monetary framework while there are some promising theoretical and empirical findings pointing to positive contributions of islamic finance there is still a need for islamic finance to distinguish itself from the conventional finance and to further demonstrate its real effect

taking a new look at empirical models of adoption average treatment effect estimation of adoption rates and their determinants this article shows that the observed sample adoption rate does not consistently estimate the population adoption rate even if the sample is random it is proved that instead the sample adoption rate is a consistent estimate of the population joint exposure and adoption rate which does not inform about adoption per se likewise it is shown that a model of adoption with observed adoption outcome as a dependent variable and where exposure to the technology is not observed and controlled for cannot yield consistent estimates of the determinants of adoption the article uses the counterfactual outcomes framework to show that the true population adoption rate corresponds to what is defined in the modern policy evaluation literature as the average treatment effect ate which measures the effect or impact of a treatment on a person randomly selected in the population in the adoption context a treatment corresponds to exposure to the technology the article uses the ate estimation framework to derive consistent nonparametric and parametric estimators of population adoption rates and their determinants and applies the results to consistently estimate the population adoption rates and determinants of the nerica new rice for africa rice varieties in c ote d ivoire the ate methodological approach developed in the article has significant policy implications with respect to judging the intrinsic merit of a new technology in terms of its potential demand by the target population independently of issues related to its accessibility and in terms of the decision to invest or not in its wide scale dissemination

the distribution of income shocks during crises an application of quantile analysis to mexico 1992 95 moving beyond the simple comparisons of averages typical of most analyses of household income shocks this article employs quantile analysis to generate a complete distribution of such shocks by type of household during the 1995 crisis in mexico it compares the distributions across normal and crisis periods to see whether observed differences were due to the crisis or are intrinsic to the household types alternatively it asks whether the distribution of shocks during normal periods was a reasonable predictor of vulnerability to income shocks during crises it finds large differences in the distribution of shocks by household types both before and during the crisis but little change in their relative positions during the crisis the impact appears to have been spread fairly evenly households headed by people with less education poor single mothers or people working in the informal sector do not appear to experience disproportionate income drops either in normal times or during crises

flexible mixture distribution modeling of dichotomous choice contingent valuation with heterogenity abstract this paper considers the performance of a model of mixture normal distributions for dichotomous choice contingent valuation data which allows the researcher to consider unobserved heterogeneity across the sample the model is flexible and approaches a semi parametric model since the normality assumption can be removed by augmenting the number of mixture distributions bayesian inference allows for simple estimation of the model and is particularly appropriate for conducting inference with finite data sets the proposed model is compared with other semi parametric and parametric approaches using monte carlo simulation under alternative assumptions regarding heteroskedasticity and heterogeneity in sample observations it is found that the mixture normal model reduces bias and improves performance with respect to an alternative semi parametric model particularly when the sample is characterized by heterogeneous preferences the application of the model to empirical data on the recreational value of natural areas in the canary islands confirmed the expected results

taxes and transfers their effects on the decision to end a marriage abstract the transfer system typically has large marriage disincentives while the income tax system is likely to subsidize marriage for many low income families in other words the tax system may offset an increase in transfer benefits associated with marital separation the interaction of the transfer system with the income tax system has largely been overlooked the income tax system has become more relevant for low income families with the recent expansion of the earned income tax credit which filers may be eligible for even if their tax liability is zero this paper uses family level measures of the change in transfer benefits and tax liability associated with a change in family structure to consider the effect of these financial incentives on separation decisions

current account effects of a temporary change in government expenditure a perfect foresight model of intertemporal utility maximization is used to analyze the current account effects of a temporary increase in government spending the relationship between the marginal utility of private consumption and the supply of public goods in the economy is shown to play a crucial role in determining the qualitative nature of the optimal current account response the link between the timing of the policy change and the magnitude of the current account effect is also examined

tenure insecurity and investment in soil conservation evidence from malawi tenure insecurity can have important consequences for the conservation of natural resources this paper focuses on two main sources of tenure insecurity informal short term tenancy contracts and customary gender biased inheritance practices using a large plot level dataset from malawi the analysis employs a linear probability model with household fixed effects and finds that both sources of insecurity have a negative effect on soil conservation investments these findings suggest that future land reforms should deal with the informality of the land rental market and address the gap between users and owners of land created by existing customary practices

land property rights and resource allocation abstractin this paper we review the most significant empirical literature on the causal effects of land property rights the literature indicates that secure property rights boost investment in both rural and urban areas these effects however do not appear to be the result of improved credit conditions in rural areas clear land rights also lead to increases in productivity and farm earnings in contrast for urban areas the evidence for an effect on earnings is mixed we find little empirical evidence to suggest that land titling programs enhance the development of land markets finally some evidence suggests that land titling induces changes in household structure that foster human capital accumulation and may help to increase the incomes of future generations

second moments in speculative attack models panel evidence abstract the paper tests two popular asset based models of speculative attacks and in particular their emphasis on the second moments of monetary aggregates analyzing monthly panels of appropriate countries in three regions it finds evidence for the importance of money reserve ratios predicted by both models as well as the variance of the ratio of m2 to reserves

employment based health insurance and job mobility is there evidence of job lock the majority of privately insured americans obtain their health insurance through their own or a family member s employment the rationale for employers to provide health insurance is straightforward by pooling the risks of individuals employers can reduce adverse selection and lower administrative expenses in addition they benefit from tax laws allowing businesses to deduct their health insurance costs these advantages of employer provision however must be weighed against the distortions they may generate in individual labor market decisions in particular health insurance may distort job mobility if employees decide to keep jobs they would rather leave for fear of losing coverage for preexisting conditions a possibility that has been termed job lock this paper attempts to quantify the effect of employer provided health insurance on the labor market mobility of individuals the link between employer provided health insurance and

household specific food price differentials and high value crop production in rural ghana using panel data from ghana we have examined the relationship between household specific producer consumer price differentials and rural household cropland allocation between food and high value crops we test the hypothesis that cereal price bands induce a shift of resources away from high value crop production making smallholders appear unresponsive to price incentives our results lend support to this hypothesis implying that a policy aiming at increasing farmers income through high value crop production may fail if hard and soft infrastructure does not improve in rural areas and if staple crop productivity does not increase significantly

how sukuk shapes firm performance with the large expansion of islamic finance in the recent years sukuk which are the sharia compliant substitute to conventional bonds are now becoming more prominent the aim of this study was to examine the impact of sukuk issuance on firm performance to do so we analyse how stock market performance and operating performance op are influenced by issuance of sukuk and bonds on a sample of malaysian listed companies we consider the short term and medium term stock market reaction through the computation of cumulative abnormal returns and buy and hold abnormal returns we investigate the impact on op by performing regressions and by calculating abnormal operating performance aop so that we can compare how issuance affects similar firms we find that sukuk issuance generates a negative stock market reaction both in the short term and in the medium term we also find evidence that issuing sukuk hampers op the analysis of aop shows that sukuk issuers have better performance than their matched bond issuers but that sukuk contributes to reduce the gap in performance over time overall our results support the view that sukuk issuance hampers stock market performance but that it is not attributable to a signalling effect on the bad financial situation of the issuer we interpret our findings as evidence of adverse selection taking place on the financed projects and agency problems stemming from the specific sukuk structuring with stock market investors more reluctant to invest in sukuk issuers

how oil price changes affect car use and purchase decisions survey evidence from chinese cities abstract china s automobile sector has entered a period of rapid development and has resulted in huge oil consumption oil price fluctuation will change consumers behavior understanding how changes in oil price affect the use and purchase of private cars is valuable to formulating price and emissions mitigation policies in this paper we use survey data from four cities beijing shanghai guangzhou and shenzhen and a total of 715 responses were deemed used for the analyses the results show that the sensitivity of low income consumers to oil price is significantly higher than high income consumers compared with low income consumers high income consumers would drive less only when oil price rise to a higher level in addition for the high income consumers with a potential purchase intention only when oil price rise to more than 10 yuan will they change the purchase intension and choose a lower emission car or as we called purchase lower

long term effects of temporary income shocks on food consumption and subjective well being abstracta national level unconditional cash transfer programme bantuan langsung tunai blt in indonesia allows an empirical assessment on whether there are long term benefits in terms of food consumption and overall well being the results show that a positive albeit temporary income shock increases the quantity of food consumed by the poorest households and the overall subjective well being among the poorest recipients it is also found that poor households are more likely to invest in farm and non farm businesses which in turn helps them sustain a higher level of food consumption and overall satisfaction months after the end of the programme

tax revenue and the marginal cost of public funds in sweden abstract we assess the welfare cost of raising a marginal unit of tax revenue in a balanced budget general equilibrium framework the calculated social cost of an increment of public funds is sensitive to both the specific type of tax increase and the type of public spending used on the margin best guess assumptions on labor supply elasticities yield marginal costs of public funds for different fiscal mixes of between 0 67 and 4 51 at prevailing tax rates in sweden alternative labor supply assumptions well within the range of current estimates substantially affect the results and can imply infinite marginal welfare costs marginal welfare costs are also sensitive to assumptions about both the income and substitution effects of labor supply

village political economy land tenure insecurity and the rural to urban migration decision evidence from china this paper investigates the impact of land tenure insecurity on the migration decisions of china s rural residents a simple model first frames the relationship among these variables and the probability that a reallocation of land will occur in the following year after first demonstrating that a village leader s support for administrative land reallocation carries with it the risk of losing a future election the paper exploits election timing and village heterogeneity in lineage group composition and demographic change to identify the effect of land security in response to an expected land reallocation in the following year the probability that a rural resident migrates out of the county declines by 2 8 percentage points which accounts for 17 5 percent of the annual share of village residents aged 16 to 50 who worked as migrants during the period this finding underscores the potential importance of secure property rights for facilitating labor market integration and the movement of labor out of agriculture

testing for misspecification in the referendum contingent valuation approach binary choice models are frequently used in the analysis of referendum contingent valuation data because omitted regressors heteroskedasticity and distribution asymmetry in these models result in inconsistent parameter estimates it is important that misspecification tests be undertaken in this article conditional moment tests for these problems are presented and applied to data from two referendum contingent valuation studies results show that some models have misspecification problems and that these problems affect the estimation of welfare measures

limited liability wealth differences and tenancy contracts in agrarian economies abstract an explanation is provided for two observations concerning variations in the choice of tenants and their welfare differences in tenants wealth imply corresponding differences in liability when default is possible on fixed rental commitments in this context the inability of landlords to specify their tenants effort lead to effort choices that vary with the type of contract offered the selection of tenants and the contract terms they receive thus depend on wealth with wealthier tenants being preferred and receiving fixed rent contracts these results also predict that wealthier tenants earn higher profits on their leased plots

supersized votes ballot length uncertainty and choice in direct legislation elections voters in polities that make heavy use of direct democracy are frequently confronted with ballots that contain a multitude of propositions claims that direct legislation elections overwhelm voters with choices they are not competent to make should particularly apply to such demanding settings yet evidence on the effects of lengthy ballots on voting behavior is scant this study reviews theories of decision making under uncertainty and tests their predictions in a mixed heteroscedastic model of vote choice that is fitted to a unique collection of survey and contextual data on swiss referendums increasing ballot length is demonstrated to interfere with the voters ability to translate their political preferences into consistent policy choices

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

factors influencing the privatisation of urban solid waste collection in spain this paper analyses some of the organisational aspects of urban solid waste collection it starts by discussing some of the theoretical issues of contracting out then an explanatory model is spec

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

semiparametric distribution free testing of the expectations hypothesis in a parimutuel gambling market the expectations hypothesis maintains that a current forward or futures price should be an unbiased forecast of the expected future price this article tests the expectations hypothesis in the parimutuel gambling market for greyhound racing using parametric and semiparametric estimators parimutuel gambling markets are similar to speculative asset markets in many regards conventional maximum likelihood tests of asset pricing require a priori specification of the statistical distribution governing agents expectations distributional misspecifications may bias conventional tests the semiparametric estimators applied in this article overcome these problems and in addition maintain consistency under heteroscedasticity the results reject the expectations hypothesis

the evolution of internal market structure we present a dynamic factor analytic choice model to capture evolution of brand positions in latent attribute space our dynamic model allows researchers to investigate brand positioning in new categories or mature categories affected by structural change such as entry we argue that even for mature categories not affected by structural change the assumption of stable attributes may be untenable we allow for evolution in attributes by modeling individual level time specific attributes as arising from dynamic means the dynamic attribute means are modeled as a bayesian dynamic linear model dlm the dlm is nested within a factor analytic choice model our approach makes efficient use of the data by leveraging estimates from previous and future periods to estimate current period attributes we demonstrate the robustness of our model with data that simulate a variety of dynamic scenarios including stationary behavior we show that misspecified attribute dynamics induce temporal heteroskedasticty and correlation between the preference weights and the error term applying the model to a panel data set on household purchases in the malt beverage category we find considerable evidence for dynamics in the latent brand attributes from a managerial perspective we find advertising expenditures help explain variation in the dynamic attribute means