the role of consumption credit in agricultural tenancy abstract in traditional agriculture it is common practice for landlords to give consumption loans to their own tenants if the tenant derives all his income from the landlord it is puzzling that the landlors needs another means of expropriating the surplus he could just raise the rent the paper suggests that consumption credit may be a side payment designed to enable the landlord to absorb the tenant s risk due to weather uncertainty without weakening his incentive to work tenancy is modelled as an agency contract designed in terms of information may be available to the landlord

agriculture in recent development theory abstract this paper is a critical review of recent contributions to the literature on agriculture in development theory it considers and compares the main lines of advance made within neoclassical neo marxian and structuralist approaches recent neo marxian and structuralist studies of agrarian development reveal that traditional agriculture is neither stationary nor efficient that resource allocation cannot be separated from wealth distribution or production organization that forms of surplus appropriation do not necessarily follow the dictates of efficiency that the social relations of production may inhibit accumulation and determine the forms of technological change that the state s role in primitive accumulation is more economic than explicitly coercive political and that political and macroeconomic constraints preclude a simple get the prices right view of the intersectoral terms of trade the thrust of these developments is to challenge both neoclassical and some orthodox marxian formulations of agrarian development issues and add to the insights to be gleaned from a political economy of development

theories of share tenancy a critical survey for the past 2 decades the problems of agricultural tenancy have attracted a great deal of attention not only from agricultural economists but also from economists in general as a typical example of agencyprincipal contract relations despite the prolific growth of literature both theoretical and empirical there has been little convergence in opinions on tenancy contracts the divergence has been especially great on the understanding of the causes and the effects of sharecropping tenancy much confusion underlying the widely divergent perspectives has stemmed from partial treatments of contractual choice which unduly limit the optimizing behavior of contracting parties and the options of contract forms this essay aims at clarifying the sources of the confusion by reviewing the past literature in light of the more general theory of agency principal relations the agency theory in order to examine the problems of various theoretical models in a unified framework in section ii we first develop the basic framework of a general model of tenancy contract in section iii we clarify in terms of the general model contradictions latent in the traditional marshallian theory which asserts that share tenancy is inefficient because of the disincentive effect of cropsharing on the tenant s work effort in section iv we attempt to show that recent efforts to reconstruct the theory based on the traditional assumption have not yet been quite successful section v draws implications and testable hypotheses from more general theories incorporating the aspects of risk and uncertainty section vi tests allocational and distributional implications of those alternative hypotheses based on the summary of evidence col

what does she see in him the effect of sharing on the choice of spouse all husbands and wives share in the spoils of marriage sharing makes each partner a residual claimant and encourages spouses to provide marital inputs however because each spouse is only a partial residual claimant each may be inclined to provide a suboptimal level of marital inputs the choice of spouse influences the level of distortion and under some circumstances the eficient mating is between individuals of equal value people tend to end up choosing partners of approximately their own social worth romantic choices appear to be a delicate compromise between one s desire to capture an ideal partner and one s realization that he must eventually settle for what he deserves

how elastic is the government s demand for weapons abstract we estimate the elasticity of the government s demand for specific weapons by econometric analysis of the relationship between quantity and cost revisions across the population of major weapon systems the cost revisions are due in part to technological information generated in the course of research and development the elasticity of demand is 0 55 and is significantly different from both zero and unity thus the government s demand for specific weapons is inelastic but not perfectly inelastic weapons acquisition is evidently characterized by increasing returns the elasticity of total cost with respect to quantity is about 0 75

land reforms poverty reduction and economic growth evidence from india recognition of the importance of institutions that provide security of property rights and relatively equal access to economic resources to a broad cross section of society has renewed interest in the potential of asset redistribution including land reforms empirical analysis of the impact of such policies is however scant and often contradictory this paper uses panel household data from india together with state level variation in the implementation of land reform to address some of the deficiencies of earlier studies the results suggest that land reform had a significant and positive impact on income growth and accumulation of human and physical capital the paper draws policy implications especially from the fact that the observed impact of land reform seems to have declined over time

vertical integration and firm boundaries the evidence since ronald h coase s 1937 seminal paper a rich set of theories has been developed that deal with firm boundaries in vertical or input output structures in the last twenty five years empirical evidence that can shed light on those theories also has been accumulating we review the findings of empirical studies that have addressed two main interrelated questions first what types of transactions are best brought within the firm and second what are the consequences of vertical integration decisions for economic outcomes such as prices quantities investment and profits throughout we highlight areas of potential cross fertilization and promising areas for future work

agency theory and franchising some empirical results this article provides an empirical assessment of various agency theoretic explanations for franchising including risk sharing one sided moral hazard and two sided moral hazard the empirical models use proxies for factors such as risk moral hazard and franchisors need for capital to explain both franchisors decisions about the terms of their contracts royalty rates and up front franchise fees and the extent to which they use franchising in this article i exploit several new sources of data on franchising to construct a cross section of 548 franchisors involved in various business activities in the united states in 1986 the data are most consistent with a model based on two sided moral hazard the empirical models are also more successful at explaining the extent to which franchisors choose to franchise stores than at explaining the terms of franchise contracts finally contrary to the predictions of several theoretical models i find that royalty rates and franchise fees are not negatively related

choice of contracts in turkish agriculture sharecropping and fixed rent tenancy have coexisted under extremely diverse settings for centuries from labor abundant south and east asia to land abundant west africa and the americas this fact has intrigued generations of economists since adam smith marshall s lucid exposition of the productive inefficiencies of sharecropping in the principles paved the way for a major effort to reconcile neoclassical theory with the reality of coexistence 1 another substantial segment of the literature condemned sharecropping as an exploitative mechanism in semifeudal societies and predicted its downfall 2 more recent theoretical treatments however hail the share contract as a simple yet ingenious arrangement that guarantees the second best outcome in environments characterized by risk input market imperfections and moral hazard 3 the intuition underlying this argument is widely accepted but has yet to yield a general explanation of the real world coexistence phenomenon nor should we expect such an explanation each country and historical episode has its unique climatic technological and institutional characteristics and different motives for the adoption of share contracts may dominate in different settings 4 it is troublesome in fact that our empirical knowledge is so thin given that our theory of agricultural contracts is so rich 5 one reason of course is that appropriate data are costly and difficult to collectfor contractual choice is stubbornly complex and is best observed at the individual agent or household level there has been empirical work but much of it has examined the well worn marshallian theme is sharecropping less efficient than self cultivation 6 our knowledge of the conditions under which different contracts are likely to arise is limited to a handful of studies on the indian subcontinent or the united states in this article i examine the determinants of contractual choice during the 1970s for samples of individual turkish landlords and tenants the data were drawn from a 1973 survey that was national in

market failure and control of labour power towards an explanation of structure and change in indian agriculture part 1 1 although existing approaches do on occasion shed light on certain specific aspects of indian agriculture in general they run into problems of methodology or content or more frequently both in particular it is misleading to treat indian agri culture in peasant economy no markets or neoclassical perfect market terms and problematic to view it as semi feudal markets subordinate to extra economic factors 2 analysis of the relationships between farm size land productivity sharecropping and mechanisation suggest the need for an integrated model which emphasises both the unemployment and poverty of poor peasants and the problems of supervision and control of wage labour and tenants 3 proper appreciation of the interlinked role of these factors can help to explain the system s inability to combine the abundant labour of the poor with resources owned largely by the rich it can also go on to explain institutional responses like sharecropping as partial solutions to the problem of intensifying labour use and technological ones such as mechanisation as a means of delinking large farm growth from the need to intensify labour use 4 the tensions and choices between these responses underlie both the problem of stagnation and the phenomenon of switches from sharecropping to mechanisation 5 for associated reasons more rapid growth in indian agriculture is unlikely without major institutional changes to create much new employment and is likely to be more capital intensive than is usually assumed

share tenancy as strategic delegation abstract the paper develops a new explanation of sharecropping based on the idea of an incentive equilibrium it considers a set up in which a few landlords in a village confront the choice of cultivating their farms by adopting different tenurial arrangements ranging from owner operation through the fixed rental system to sharecropping these landlords are the only sources of employment in the village and compete in the wages they pay to their workers in such an environment sharecropping is explained as a form of strategic delegation where a landlord gets extra benefit by having a share tenant and giving him suitable incentives

on the existence of share contracts under limited liability abstract in a principal agent relationship under limited liability the agent in general receives the full share of revenue we show that when the agent exerts effort in multiple tasks the effort substitution effect helps explain the existence of share contracts even under limited liability

make buy or ally a transaction cost theory meta analysis since the publication of williamson s markets and hierarchies many empirical articles have investigated the tenets of transaction cost theory using meta analytic techniques we quantitatively syn

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

monitoring of performance in organizational contracting the case of defense procurement this paper contains an agency theoretic analysis of procurement contracts in which the government designs optimal linear contracts for a risk averse supplier in the presence of moral hazard private information and imperfect monitoring optimal contracts deviate from first best risk sharing the direction of the deviation depends on the relative severity of the moral hazard and private information problems and on the precision of the monitor in contrast to the usual result in the moral hazard literature the government may in some cases prefer that the effort of the supplier be taxed choice of the precision of the monitor and the categories of costs covered by the monitor are also studied

land acquisition for industrialization and compensation of displaced farmers this paper addresses the question of how farmers displaced by acquisition of agricultural land for the purpose of industrialization ought to be compensated prior to acquisition the farmers are leasing in land from a private owner or local government with a legally mandated sharecropping contract compensation rules affect the decision of the landlord to sell the land ex post to an industrial developer and ex ante incentives of tenants and landlord to make specific investments in agricultural productivity efficiency considerations are shown to require farmers be over compensated in the event of conversion

does supervision matter some hypothesis tests using indian farm level data abstract a model is developed and estimated to test for heterogeneity of family and hired labor in agricultural production and to estimate the impact of employer supervision on the productivity of hired labor plot level data are used from a rice growing village in semi arid tropical india the hypothesis that family and hired labor are homogeneous inputs was rejected results indicate that family member supervision is required to increase hired labor productivity output loss attributable to operating at reduced supervision intensity was greater than 10 on over 40 of the plots

moral hazard asset specificity implicit bonding and compensation the case of franchising i introduction there is a large and growing interest in the structuring of compensation to deal with the moral hazard problem much of this literature treats various forms of income sharing such as piece rates and sharecropping as a means for a principal to provide incentives to an agent this literature has been extended to the case of two sided moral hazard where both parties to an exchange may shirk another mechanism to induce effort discussed in the literature is bonding where workers post a bond that is forgone if effort is inadequate klein 1980 and klein and leffler 1981 treat the possibility of specific assets as constituting an implicit bond where poor performance by a firm is penalized by bankruptcy and sale of assets at a loss this paper studies a situation where these issues coalesce the case of compensation arrangements in franchising the typical franchise contract calls for the sharing of franchise income between franchisee and franchisor additionally franchisees may be terminated for poor performance if franchise assets have a degree of specificity the ensuing sale of assets at a loss provides a penalty for poor performance we examine the determinants of franchise royalty rates and fees in this setting while there is a literature on two sided moral hazard and some empirical work on franchising based on this idea none incorporates the potential influence of asset specificity we explicitly consider the role of implicit bonding and asset specificity in conjunction with moral hazard on the part of both trading parties we go beyond previous work in franchising by estimating the effects of asset specificity and other influences on the royalty rate further part of our empirical work utilizes improved micro data on actual franchise contracts our approach and its implications are discussed in section ii consistent with previous work we expect the royalty rate to decrease increase as the importance of the franchisee s franchisor s input increases however more specific capital with the threat of termination acts as an implicit bond and substitutes for a reduced royalty rate in inducing franchisee effort thus we expect royalty rates to increase with asset specificity also unlike other approaches we do not necessarily expect an inverse relationship between the royalty rate and the franchise fee for example the greater the importance of franchisor effort the higher the royalty rate but the franchise fee may also increase if franchise revenue rises by enough our hypotheses are tested using two different data sets an original firm level data set is taken from federal trade commission ftc required uniform franchise offering circulars ufoc 1 in addition data are obtained from bond s 1989 the source book of franchise opportunities the data are discussed and the results presented in section iii we find substantial support for our approach for example factors that increase the importance of the franchisee s effort such as the number of employees supervised lower the royalty rate and increase the franchise fee also a reduction in the specificity of the franchisee s investment due to leasing lowers the royalty rate and raises the franchise fee 2 section iv summarizes our findings and concludes the paper ii the approach and the hypotheses the typical franchising contract consists of a two part payment by the franchisee to the franchisor the franchisee pays an up front nonrefundable franchisee fee and a continuing royalty payment usually a percentage of sales in return the franchisee receives the right to use the franchisor s brand name capital and a method of operation in addition the franchisor provides on going support to the franchisee however the franchisor maintains the right to unilaterally terminate the contract if the franchisor determines that the franchisee is not delivering a product consistent with the quality guaranteed by the brand name

sharing monitoring and incentives marshallian misallocation reassessed a general equilibrium model is presented wherein wage labor requires monitoring in order to extract effort landlords may also elect to adopt sharetenancy contracts in which workers have an incentive to supply unsupervised effort two distortions exist monitoring costs in one sector and a share tax in the other efficiency statements require second best comparisons adopting more specific functional forms this mixed wage sharetenancy economy is technically efficient and provides greater benthamite social welfare than a wage only economy when private incentives lead to mixing the incidence of sharetenancy is hypothesized to increase with monitoring costs density of tenants per landlord and labor intensity of production

procurement and renegotiation parties bound by an incomplete contract have an incentive to renegotiate after acquiring new information the issue of the parties investment in the relationship before renegotiation is analyzed in a simple two period procurement model the firm invests in the first period it then learns its production cost and the sponsor learns its value for the project williamson s underinvestment presumption is shown to hold under very general assumptions about bargaining and about the ex post asymmetry of information as long as the firm s investment is not observable by the sponsor the introduction of a cancellation fee may well lead to even less investment contrary to what is sometimes argued the role of ex ante price fixing as an alternative way to reintroduce some form of commitment and the problem of cost overruns are discussed last it is shown that if investment is observable by the sponsor andthus may become a joint decision variable the two parties may choose to under or overinvest

contributions to federal election campaigns by government contractors the author develops a theoretical model that determines whether or not a firm sponsors a political action committee and if it does the quantity of funds that the political action committee will disburse the firm is assumed to face supply and demand schedules for political action committee receipts whose positions depend on attributes of the firm such as firm size government sales intensity and market structure two related equations derived from the theoretical model a probit equation for political action committee sponsorship and a disbursements equation are estimated using pooled data on 226 government primarily defense contracting firms during the 1979 80 and 1981 82 election cycles copyright 1989 by blackwell publishing ltd

the private r d investment response to federal design and technical competitions it is the federal government s role to promote investment in research and development rd and 2 contracting with private firms and nonprofit organizations such as universities to perform rd the winning firm recovered its development costs in the form of profits on the sale of the airplanes and the losing firms did not recoup their r d investment mansfield 1971 p 122

a hierarchy model of associative farming abstract acceptance of the need for complementary services when agrarian reform is introduced such as credit and technical assistance has led many countries in latin america to organize land reform projects into collectives or production cooperatives but the disincentives to effort inherent in group farming have been a continual source of underproduction and disappointment with cooperative farming experiments the paper suggests an intermediate farming structure currently successful in the dominican republic in the framework of an agency contract incorporating the hierarchical relations between beneficiary administrator and governing agency the advantages of the associative over either individual or collective farming are illustrated

the nature of the agricultural firm abstract models explaining the choice between rent wage and share contracts in agriculture abstract from the large variations within the classes of rent share and owner managed forms of organization regarding the extent to which a specific form accommodates specialization between labor and management as a result modern explanations of agricultural organizations are misleadingly dependent on risk aversion or the assumption that landowners have an absolute advantage in production decisions viewing the agricultural firm as a constitution instead of as a nexus of contracts facilitates an agency explanation of alternative organizational forms and their amenability to specialization

contractual structure in agriculture abstract this paper develops a generalized double sided moral hazard model of contract choice in agricultural production with mutual monitoring of each other by the landlord and the tiller who generally have different levels of farming efficiency and are risk averse using this model we formally prove that the optimal contract maximizes the output net of the risk bearing and agency costs of both the parties and carry out a simulation exercise which helps explain many of the tenancy related issues the difference in the farming efficiency of the two sides often ignored in previous analysis turns out to be the principal determinant of the contract offered to a tiller

price uncertainty and trader farmer linkage abstract we show that the pareto superiority of loan repayment in kind within a tied credit arrangement to a cash for cash scheme under uncertain output price depends crucially on the farmer loan demand elasticity and his risk aversion for the risk neutral trader the cash for cash scheme is shown to be pareto dominated by credit tying and the price premium he offers depends on farmer loan demand elasticity

a dynamic model of the choice of mode for exploiting complementary capabilities this paper examines the choice of mode for a multinational enterprise and a local firm to exploit their complementary capabilities we develop a combined real options and game theoretic model of modal choice by incorporating a range of factors drawn from the dynamic capabilities theory and transaction cost or organizational economics the factors scrutinized in the model include the parties absorptive capacities frictions in knowledge and asset markets and associated incentive problems cost of switching from one mode to another and cost associated with power jockeying the model uses simulation to examine how these factors interact to influence the choice of mode the results identify a number of conditions for one factor to dominate another and help to reconcile different theories that have made contradicting predictions with regard to the effects of such factors as uncertainty and capability divergence on the optimal choice of mode

tenancy and family resources a model and some empirical analysis abstract in this paper we discuss with the help of a simple model the role of family resource endowments in determining the extent of land leased in or leased out by a household this becomes important when the market for some of these resources is either not functioning at all or is functioning imperfectly we focus on three such resources which have some relevance in indian agriculture these are 1 the family s managerial skill 2 its endowment of human labour and 3 its endowment of draft animal labour household level data from six villages of maharashtra and andhra pradesh are also utilized to test some of the hypotheses

labor markets and poverty in village economies we study how women s choices over labor activities in village economies correlate with poverty and whether enabling the poorest women to take on the activities of their richer counterparts can set them on a sustainable trajectory out of poverty to do this we conduct a large scale randomized control trial covering over 21 000 households in 1 309 villages surveyed four times over a seven year period to evaluate a nationwide program in bangladesh that transfers livestock assets and skills to the poorest women at baseline the poorest women mostly engage in low return and seasonal casual wage labor while wealthier women solely engage in livestock rearing the program enables poor women to start engaging in livestock rearing increasing their aggregate labor supply and earnings this leads to asset accumulation livestock land and business assets and poverty reduction both accelerating after four and seven years these gains do not come at the expense of others non eligibles livestock rearing businesses are not crowded out and wages received for casual jobs increase as the poor reduce their labor supply in such labor activities our results show that i the poor are able to take on the work activities of the non poor but face barriers to doing so and ii one o interventions that remove these barriers lead to sustainable poverty reduction

credit and sharecropping in agrarian societies this paper considers a model of linkage between land labor and credit transactions in the context of sharecropping the paper s objectives are a to derive and characterize the equilibrium in a model of a land scarce labour abundant economy under sharecropping given an infinitely elastic supply of identical sharecroppers at a reservation utility and b to demonstrate that in an imperfect market a landlord may offer credit to his tenant sometimes even at a subsidized rate of interest without necessarily insisting that the sharecropper borrow only from him precluding an involuntary linkage between credit and land transations it has been demonstrated that regardless of the presence or absence of linkage or any other control by the landlord as long as he can vary the size of the plot given to a tenant and there are enough potential tenants in equilibrium contracts a tenants utility under sharecropping will be the same as that which he could have obtained as a full time wage laborer this result implies that policies other than land reform will not affect the welfare of tenants

double sided moral hazard and the nature of share contracts contractual arrangements involving revenue profit sharing are often based on fairly simple often linear rules in addition in many contexts these contracts are not finely adjusted to the particular circumstances of individual agents or markets nor do they vary over time to the extent current theories based on optimal contracting suggest they should we develop a simple model of such revenue or profit sharing arrangements based on double sided moral hazard and show that this model can account for many of these stylized facts more specifically the model shows that linear contracts can be optimal and that benefits from customizing terms can in some cases be quite limited if not zero

economic interests and sectoral relations the undevelopment of capitalism in fifteenth century tuscany1 many preconditions for a rapid transition to industrial capitalism existed in tuscany in the late medieval early modern period including relatively efficient agricultural production a well developed commercial manufacturing sector the absence of a powerful feudal nobility and feudal obligations a large precocious urban economy and the development of a territorial state no such transition occurred however previous explanations for this are inadequate because they discount the strength of the tuscany economy or downplay the presence of these preconditions to explain the tuscan outcome this article draws on sectoral theories agriculture vs manufacturing from the neoclassical and marxist literature since these theories often give the wrong prediction because they are based on formal attributes of actors the author combines them with a weberian conceptualization of substantively specific economic interests

tenure systems in traditional china i a general equilibrium model of tenure preference classical marginalists at least after john clark provide an unequivocal solution for the conventional factor market where people sell the productive services of their resources to producers the productexhaustion theorem says that if factors are priced according to their marginal products incomes of all resource owners will exactly exhaust the value of total products in the long run competitive equilibrium this holds true regardless of which factor is variable and which is fixed and regardless of which group of resource owners perform as producers who buy productive services of other resources in the market and claim residuals for themselves in an agrarian economy with land and labor as the inputs a land owner may cultivate his land and purchase the labor input from outside paying a wage rate in accordance with labor s marginal product the land owner is then the residual claimant alternatively he may lease out his land and receive a fixed rental rate per unit of area equal to the marginal product of land in this case the tenant is the producer and claims the residual income distribution between the two parties remains the same under each land arrangement wage and rent are therefore identical conceptually the classical marginal analysis has not presented a satisfactory theory of share tenancy which instead of being a seller buyer transaction in a conventional factor market is essentially a partnership arrangement between two persons who own complementary factors hence the term land renting will hereafter denote the fixed rent system exclusively in fact the direct application of marginal analysis to share tenancy has created considerable confusion in early economic literature only recently some general equilibrium models of land tenure systems have been developed for better understanding of the

contract choice in modern agriculture cash rent versus cropshare e conomists have expended enormous effort examining the rationale for various contractual arrangements in agriculture particularly sharecropping while economists have made considerable theoretical efforts to understand agricultural contracts few empirical studies have been undertaken the dearth of empirical analyses of agricultural contracts is particularly striking for modern western agriculture this is an important omission not only because the existing empirical work tends to focus on the question of efficiency but also because the theoretical models tend to examine contracts that bear little resemblance to those found in the united states today

credit layering in informal financial markets abstract informal lenders with access to markets or capital often find it attractive to delegate loan provision to downstream lenders who have an information or enforcement advantage in dealing with particular borrowers in this paper we examine the conditions under which such an arrangement is preferred by two informal lenders a landlord and a merchant who compete in loan provision to tenant farmers differentiated by wealth we show that credit layering is preferred only when tenants are sufficiently poor in this case the trader lends to tenant farmers via a contract with their landlord otherwise only the trader lends as a consequence a pattern of borrowing emerges in which relatively wealthy tenants borrow from merchants while poor tenants borrow mainly from their landlords interlinkage between land and credit thus arises only for a subset of tenants and purely as a consequence of credit layering this pattern is shown to be supported empirically

double moral hazard and resale price maintenance incentives for resale price maintenance rpm are studied in a wholesaler retailer relationship in which both firms make a nonprice choice subject to moral hazard the best attainable contract has vertical externalities in both nonprice choices and the choice of consumers price if delegated to the retailer rpm controls the latter externality but interacts with the other externalities as well as a consequence either minimum or maximum vertical price fixing can be optimal in spite of a successive monopoly specification similar incentives exist for writing other variables into contract such as the capital input of the retailer

contract choice in agriculture with joint moral hazard in effort and risk we analyze optimal contract choice in agriculture when there is joint moral hazard on the part of the farmer in the supply of effort and the riskiness of the technique of cultivation in the presence of limited liability high powered incentive contracts such as fixed rental contracts will induce the farmer to adopt techniques of cultivation that are too risky from the point of view of the landlord on the other hand low powered incentive contracts such as fixed wage contracts will induce the farmer to supply too little effort we show that sharecropping contracts emerge as a natural solution to balance these two conflicting considerations

the long reach of cotton in the us south tenant farming mechanization and low skill manufacturing abstract this paper examines the long run impact of cotton agriculture on local development in the us south focusing on a novel aspect of structural change exploiting climate based variation in cotton production i show that cotton specialization in the late 19th century had a negative impact on local development that lasts through 2010 this negative relationship however only became evident in the second half of the 20th century i argue that the change was caused by the mechanization of cotton production which began in the 1950s after the mechanization local manufacturing absorbed displaced cotton tenants with low human capital in response to the inflow of cotton tenants labor productivity in manufacturing began to decline and the effects persisted in the long run the persistent decline in manufacturing productivity is explained by directed technical change that reduced demand for skills in manufacturing these results indicate that depending on the agricultural background structural change can negatively affect the evolution of technology and productivity in the industrial sector

investment and industrial expansion a corporate variables framework abstract the article proposes that firm investment and in turn industry expansion are determined by firm specific corporate variables in addition to the typically considered variables characterizing the firm s experience and expected conditions in a given market such as rate of growth of demand price and cost of capital defined to represent the internal characteristics of firms the particular corporate variables hypothesized to affect investment behavior include cash flow firm specific assets internal firm structure and corporate strategy the choice of the postulated corporate variables is motivated by the presence of factors associated with the failure or absence of markets an uncertain and complex environment the irreversibility of much capital investment information asymmetry and organizational boundaries

effects of technology on incentive design of share contracts do observed contracts have the properties predicted by the principal agent model with moral hazard in contract theory this paper tests the predictions of such an agency model in the context of sharecropping in north india the most well known explanation for sharecropping is based on the principal agent model with a trade off between risk and incentives even though sharecropping contracts are quite prevalent in rural areas of developing countries there is very little evidence on factors determining the instruments used to provide incentives in such contracts using information in the data giving rise to exogenous variation in technology across regions this paper tests for the effect of cultivation technology on the incentive structure of share contracts as predicted by the agency model existing empirical evidence on sharecropping seems to indicate that yield on sharecropped plots is lower than on owner operated plots i e there is an incentive problem or moral hazard radwan a shaban 1987 jean jacques laffont and mohamed s matoussi 1995 there is some informal evidence that landowners use various mechanisms to improve efficiency in sharecropping by participating in cost sharing and by repeating contracts robert m townsend and rolf a mueller 1994 examine the nature of these mechanisms in detail but their data do not permit econometric tests more generally though the principal agent model has been widely studied there is little existing empirical evidence for it michael c jensen and kevin j murphy 1990 find that executive compensation is only weakly sensitive to firm performance in recent work rajesh k aggarwal and andrew a samwick 1999 find that executive s pay performance sensitivity is decreasing in the volatility of firm s performance however their results are sensitive to the inclusion of other characteristics of the firms in the regressions as pierre a chiappori and bernard salanie 2003 note in a recent survey empirical work on contract theory using nonexperimental data needs to be careful in adequately correcting for underlying heterogeneity across agents otherwise the parameters of interest would be hard to interpret if such heterogeneity affects contract choice for example douglas w allen and dean lueck 1995 find no role for risk in the choice between share contract and fixed rent contracts but they do not take the heterogeneity across agents into account in a recent paper addressing the issue of heterogeneity across agents ackerberg and botticini 2002 find a significant role for risk in the choice between share contract and fixed rent contract after correcting for endogenous matching between landowners and tenants they find that wealthier tenants are more likely to be in fixed rent contracts in this paper we are able to address such estimation issues and check for the robustness of our results regarding the relationship between technology and the design of share contracts department of economics pennsylvania state university university park pa 16801 e mail pxp22 psu edu this paper derives from related work done earlier in my dissertation i am grateful to two anonymous referees for very helpful suggestions i thank james heckman lars stole robert townsend kala krishna and seminar participants for useful comments financial support from the andrew mellon foundation for both rounds of fieldwork is gratefully acknowledged any errors remain my own 1 see nirvikar singh 1991 for a survey of various theories of sharecropping including steven n cheung 1969 c h hanumantha rao 1971 joseph e stiglitz 1974 david newbery and stiglitz 1979 avishay braverman and stiglitz 1982 mukesh eswaran and ashok kotwal 1985 and sudhir shetty 1988 a common feature of the different theories is an emphasis on uncertainty and asymmetric information 2 an exception is daniel a ackerberg and maristella botticini 2002 ackerberg and botticini differ from our paper in that they examine the role of tenant s risk aversion in the choice between fixed rental contract and share contract they do not examine share contracts per se 3 see john e core and wayne guay 2000

revenue sharing in movie exhibition and the arrival of sound i introduction at least since adam smith economists have been intrigued by share contracts there has been a proliferation of models most of which tend to explain the share contract as resulting from some mix of optimal risk bearing and optimal effort motivation 1 a large number of researchers have attempted to test these models empirically sharecropping contracts not surprisingly are the most intensively examined the bibliography in knoeber 2000 but similar studies have been conducted in many other areas for example martin 1988 and lafontaine 1992 examine franchise arrangements hallagan 1978 investigates contracts used to lease gold claims leffler and rucker 1991 analyze a sample of private timber sale contracts goldberg and erickson 1987 study long term contracts for the sale of petroleum coke aggarwal and samwick 1999 investigate incentive contracts between firms and their executives and chisholm 1997 goldberg 1997 and weinstein 1998 all examine profit sharing contracts between fi lm companies and the talent this article differs in an important respect from most previous studies which analyze a cross section of contracts in an attempt to determine how or whether they vary according to the attributes of the contracting parties or the products being contracted for instead it investigates an area where a sudden technology shock led to the rapid and widespread replacement of one form of contracting by another the industry is the motion picture business and the shock was the arrival of sound during the silent film era the vast majority of first run feature films were rented to cinemas for flat daily or weekly payments within two years of the release of the first sound picture revenue sharing contracts were the norm and they remain the norm to this day 2 my goal is to investigate the degree to which the standard economic concerns moral hazard risk sharing and measurement problems can explain this change because the contracting parties remained the same the question becomes what was altered in the nature of the product or in its provision so as to have altered correspondingly the incentives faced i conclude the following first the advent of sound fundamentally changed the inputs live music and other acts supplied by the exhibitor and central to the show were replaced by a soundtrack and short sound films supplied by the film company the benefit of deterring exhibitor shirking through the use of flat rental fees which made the exhibitor full residual claimant declined accordingly the party whose effort makes the largest contribution to marginal product generally receives the largest proportion of the residual claims and in the decades following the arrival of sound the proportion of residual claims collected by film companies rose steadily in addition average revenue per film increased with sound whereas the cost of ensuring that exhibitors reported attendance revenue honestly done by locating a film company s representative in the theater remained the same the ex post division of revenue necessary for revenue sharing thus became cheaper on a per film basis finally uncertainty ab out the value in terms of expected attendance revenue of the early sound films appears to have raised the cost of negotiating lump sum rental fees and thus promoted experiments with revenue sharing however although this may have contributed initially it cannot explain the practice s persistence uncertainty about film values declined as talking films became better known ii the nature of the problem a film company contracts with an exhibitor so that they may jointly produce the final good a movie presentation 3 to that end each supplies essential inputs the film company provides the movie itself assembled from a variety of inputs and some sort of national advertising support the exhibitor provides the theater which consists of seating projection equipment a refreshment stand and other support activities and some form of local advertising

the value of the revolving door political appointees and the stock market abstract we analyze stock market reactions to announcements of political appointments from the private sector and corporate appointments of former government officials using unique data on corporate affiliations and announcements of all senate confirmed u s defense department appointees of six administrations we find positive abnormal returns for political appointments these estimates are not driven by important observations volatile stocks industry wide developments or the omission of further commonly used return predictors placebo events for close competitors and alternative dates yield no effects effects are larger for top government positions and less anticipated announcements we also find positive abnormal returns for corporate appointments and positive effects of political connections on procurement volume our results suggest that concerns over conflicts of interest created by the revolving door seem justified even in a country with strong institutions

agricultural workers credit rationing and family networks in rural mexico abstractwe use mixed methods and first hand household data in mexico to investigate credit practices by households engaged in agricultural wage employment quantitative analysis shows evidence of rationing in the formal sector but also suggests the existence of mitigating mechanisms qualitative analysis provides additional insights first income patterns associated with agricultural wage generate income smoothing needs that are sometimes better met by the informal sector second family networks can perform key functions as gateways to the formal sector through specific informal arrangements that inject flexibility into formal rules and procedures

credit and land contracting a test of the theory of sharecropping author s das n de janvry a sadoulet e abstract 2019 the author s 2019 published by oxford university press on behalf of the agricultural and applied economics association all rights reserved for permissions please email journals permissions oup com choice of a share vs fixed rent land rental contract has figured prominently in the theory of industrial organization this theory tells us that while a share contract is inefficient in a first best world it may be the preferred option under second best conditions it has thus predicted the existence of sharecropping as the potentially preferred contract under conditions of liquidity constraint rigorous empirical evidence is however still lacking on this basic contribution of theory we use a randomized experiment in a credit program for landless workers and marginal farmers organized by brac in bangladesh to show that increased access to credit has a large positive effect on the choice of fixed rent over share rent contracts both in terms of number of contracts and area contracted as predicted by theory the magnitude of this shift away from sharecropping is enhanced when the tenant is less exposed to risk development programs that facilitate access to credit to potential tenants can thus help them take more efficient land rental contracts

the response of peasant farmers to price incentives the use and misuse of profit functions recent famines in chad ethiopia and the sudan have highlighted a major problem facing less developed countries how does an ldc become self sufficient in food production the answers to this question range from the narrowly defined economic one or economistic approach to the more widely based institutional reforms approach the former approach typified by say schultz 1964 or the world bank 1982 would emphasise the importance of mainly price incentives the latter approach as typified by myrdal 1968 in his monumental work asian drama would emphasise the importance of land reforms as a pre condition for agricultural development the debate has sometimes followed a misleading path and discussed whether peasants are rational or whether they are lazy inert tradition bound etc the aim of this article is to show that the use of profit functions to model peasant behaviour in ldcs is seriously flawed neo classical economic theory within which profit functions are embodied ignores the historical social institutional and political context within which peasant farmers operate peasant farmers do not operate in full blooded capitalist impersonal competitive input and output markets the article is structured as follows section ii outlines the profit function approach and section iii provides a survey and critique of applications of the profit function to ldc agriculture section iv concludes with some general remarks on analysing peasant behaviour in an alternative paradigm

productivity and distribution under cropsharing tenancy abstract this paper develops a model of sharecropping assuming tenant autonomy competitive behavior of landlords and laborers and endogenously determined wage and share rental rates the coexistence of wage labor and sharecropping is explained in terms of their incentive labor process and risk sharing characteristics sharecropping serves as a surrogate for the direct supervision of the labor process its incidence is shown to rise in the presence of unemployment at a subsistence wage the model implies that the abolition of tenancy will raise output raise labor income and reduce land income

vertical integration and profitability in the oil industry abstract several economists have argued that considerations of efficiency in production and transactions favor vertical integration in the oil industry others maintain the vertical integration enhances market power to simultaneously test the implications of both arguments data are assembled on the structure and performance of a sample of the large u s in companies over a twenty five year period no support is found for the hypothesis that profit rates are increased by the degree of vertical integration between crude oil production and refining but there is weak evidence that the variability of profits is reduced the paper goes on to examine evolutionary evidence concluding that the present pattern of vertical integration was largely shaped by adaptations to unique circumstances during historical periods when vertical integration was temporarily favored on efficiency grounds

the economics of polygyny in sub saharan africa female productivity and the demand for wives in cote d ivoire polygyny is still practiced throughout much of sub saharan africa with important social consequences this paper makes the first attempt to link african polygyny directly to the productivity of women in agriculture using micro data i develop a structural model of the demand for wives that disentangles wealth and substitution effects using a large household survey from cote d ivoire i find that marked geographic diversity in cropping patterns leads to regional variation in female labor productivity i also find that conditional on wealth men do have more wives when women are more productive that is cheaper this substitution effect may explain why polygyny declined in rural areas of cote d ivoire during agricultural development

leaders managers and the organization of township and village enterprises in china abstract the managerial contractual form in china s township and village enterprise tve sector has evolved rapidly during the past 10 years our paper uses descriptive data and a theoretical model to demonstrate that these changes may be occurring in response to the rapid development of markets in transitional rural china we econometrically test the model s main hypotheses showing that the driving force behind the movement from a leader run fixed wage contract to a fixed payment contract with better incentives for the manager is the relative value of non marketed inputs owned by local leaders and firm managers firm technical structure and local market setting also plays a role in the determination of firm contractual form

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

the spread of sharecropping in tuscany the political economy of transaction costs land tenure is central to many agricultural transformations the author examines one of these transformations the spread of sharecropping in late medieval and early modern tuscany previous research suggested that sharecropping spread as agricultural relations were refeudalized in contrast the author s analyses of fixed term and share term leasing sharecropping show that landlords used sharecropping when it lowered their overall costs of labor supervision and land management however to explain the spread of sharecropping the florentine political economy which created particular patterns of land management costs and labor supervision costs must also be considered florence was a well developed center for urban manufacturing landlords were frequently urban merchants and they resided in florence these factors were crucial in shaping agricultural relations landlords use of sharecropping to reduce the overall costs of land management and labor supervision increased as the distance from florence the site of landlords principal activities increased as the size of farms increased and when crops had high costs of labor supervision and land management thus the use of sharecropping to lower costs associated with agricultural production must be considered in the context of the tuscan political economy

collective agricultural production a solution for transition economies abstract the paper examines theoretical reasons and provides examples for productivity differences between agricultural service cooperatives and collectives service cooperatives can utilize economies of scale enhance competitiveness and provide technical information advantages that often outweighed problems of free riding low investment and excessive political intervention agricultural collectives while not adding substantial advantages are in addition associated with problems of supervision and effort supply tendencies to substitute casual workers or mechanization for regular members and low investment incentives while collective forms of organization in transition economies respond to high risk and market imperfections they do so inefficiently policies that create conditions for service cooperatives to compete may lead to large productivity gains

complementarity and evolution of contractual provisions an empirical study of it services contracts an increasing volume of business activity appears to be occurring via alliances or other interfirm arrangements in which complex contracts are featured yet there has been relatively little study of contract design in the strategy or management literatures the economics literature on contracting has been extensive but it has been less concerned with learning and evolution phenomena in which strategy and organization scholars are deeply interested in this paper we investigate the relationship between two types of contractual provisions that are important in high technology contracts or contracts for which environmental uncertainty or technological complexity are significant namely contingency planning and task description previous research suggests that contracts can vary significantly in the degree of detail with which such key provisions are written and that they are each subject to learning in this paper we find evidence from a sample of 386 contracts that contingency planning and task description behave as complements in contractual design we argue that this complementarity reflects patterns of learning to contract we also find that repeated exchange between two firms leads to greater effort at contingency planning in subsequent contracts a finding that is also consistent with learning effects but not with frequently made claims that contracts and trust are substitutes

off farm work technical efficiency and rice production risk in taiwan this article investigates the differences in yield production production efficiency and yield risk for farmers both with and without off farm work using a nationwide survey of rice farmers in taiwan we estimate two stochastic production frontier models that accommodate technical inefficiency and production risk simultaneously for farmers both with and without off farm work the stochastic dominance criterion is then applied to compare the differences in the distributions of the estimated technical efficiency and yield risk between groups the empirical results indicate that these two groups of farmers use resources in different ways and off farm work is not necessarily associated with lower technical efficiency for farmers in the lower percentiles of the efficiency distribution those with off farm work are more efficient than their counterparts without off farm work in addition farmers with off farm work face higher production risk and this result is robust for the entire distribution