crime and poverty a search theoretic approach numerous studies document that criminal activity is positively related to unemployment and negatively related to educational attainment levels within given communities we study this phenomenon in the context of a search equilibrium model in which agents choose between formal employment and pursuing crimerelated activities theft prior to their occupational choices agents undertake costly schooling raising their productivity crime acts in essence as a tax on human capital by affecting the probability that a worker s earnings possessions are subsequently appropriated there are multiple equilibria high crime low levels of educational attainment long spells of unemployment and poverty are correlated across them

marketed surplus under risk do peasants agree with sandmo using a newly defined notion of aversion to income risk the behavior of the marketed surplus producer under price risk is characterized unlike the familiar case first examined by sandmo output depends on both ordinal preferences for goods and on risk attitudes conditions are found that yield an output level under risk that is smaller than under certainty if these conditions do not hold both risk and risk aversion may have a positive effect on output implications for econometric studies of risk attitudes are considered and illustrated with an example finally we examine the effect of uncertainty on the peasant s long run equilibrium

economic welfare evaluations for producers under uncertainty the validity of producer and consumer surplus measures of firm welfare under risk is examined under constant absolute risk aversion and output price uncertainty only these measures are an exact measure of firm welfare as defined by compensating variation equivalent variation or the change in the certainty equivalent under decreasing absolute risk aversion qualitative comparisons of various measures are discussed for example producer s surplus as measured by the area above the uncompensated risk averse supply curve overstates the compensating variation of a change in expected price of output procedures for calculating firm welfare under production uncertainty and a variety of economic environments are proposed generally these procedures are applicable only when absolute risk aversion is constant

minimum wage effects on labor market outcomes under search matching and endogenous contact rates building upon a continuous time model of search with nash bargaining in a stationary environment we analyze the effect of changes in minimum wages on labor market outcomes and welfare although minimum wage increases may or may not lead to increases in unemployment in our model they can be welfare improving to labor market participants on both the supply and demand sides of the labor market we discuss identification of the model using current population survey data on accepted wages and unemployment durations and show that by incorporating a limited amount of information from the demand side of the market it is possible to obtain credible and precise estimates of all primitive parameters we show that the optimal minimum wage in 1996 depends critically on whether or not contact rates can be considered to be exogenous and we note that the limited variation in minimum wages makes testing this assumption problematic

what accounts for the decline in crime in this article we analyze recent trends in aggregate property crime rates in the united states we propose a dynamic equilibrium model that guides our quantitative investigation of the major determinants of observed patterns of crime our main findings can be summarized as follows first the model is capable of reproducing the drop in crime between 1980 and 1996 second the most important factors that account for the observed decline in property crime are the higher apprehension probability the stronger economy and the aging of the population third the effect of unemployment on crime is negligible fourth the increased inequality prevented an even larger decline in crime overall our analysis can account for the behavior of the time series of property crime rates over the past quarter century

on the political economy of income redistribution and crime this article analyzes a general equilibrium model in which agents choose to specialize in either legitimate or criminal activities expenditures on police to apprehend criminals as well as income redistribution are determined endogenously through majority voting we investigate how crime redistribution and police expenditures depend on characteristics of the underlying distribution of income earning abilities and on the apprehension technology our model accounts for the positive correlation between inequality and crime the positive correlation between expenditures on police and redistribution and the lack of correlation between crime and redistribution observed in u s data

labour on the family farm a theory under uncertainty an extension abstract in a framework developed by p j dawson the effects of output price risk on the family labour supply and its demand for hired labour are investigated in particular the effects of changes in autonomous income expected output price family composition and farm size are studied comparative statics is used to sign these effects revealing the importance of the behavior of the measures of absolute relative and partial risk aversion in determining them it is shown that some of the effects may be determined only via empirical research

labour on the family farm a theory under uncertainty abstract this paper develops a theory of the family farm in conditions of uncertainty where attention is focussed on the labour input decisions specifically the farm family is faced with two labour decisions namely with respect to hired labour and to family labour the framework for analysis is expected utility maximisation the analysis has implications for agricultural policy since policy pronouncements of economists are typically based on models which assume perfect certainty these pronouncements do not survive the incorporation of uncertainty

crime inequality and unemployment there is much discussion of the relationships between crime inequality and unemployment we construct a model where all three are endogenous we find that introducing crime into otherwise standard models of labor markets has several interesting implications for example it can lead to wage inequality among homogeneous workers also it can generate multiple equilibria in natural but previously unexplored ways hence two identical neighborhoods can end up with different levels of crime inequality and unemployment we discuss the effects of anti crime policies like changing jail sentences as well as more traditional labor market policies like changing unemployment insurance this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

wage tenure contracts in a frictional labour market firms strategies for recruitment and retention a common assumption in equilibrium search and matching models of the labour market is that each firm posts a wage to be paid to any worker hired this paper considers the implications of firms posting contracts in a random matching model with on the job search more complex contracts enable firms to address both recruitment and retention problems by for example increasing the wage with tenure the effect on the labour market is to reduce turnover below the level required for efficient matching of workers to firms copyright 2004 wiley blackwell

broken symmetry symmetry and price uncertainty or short and long run comparative statics of the competitive firm abstract the notion of broken or hidden symmetry is applied to a long run characterization of a competitive firm operating under price uncertainty the main result of the paper is the restoration of a slutsky type symmetry of the input demand functions within an expected utility framework which does not involve any assumption about risk aversion a second conclusion is that economic relations expressed in terms of relative quantities are essential in the long run comparative statics under price uncertainty

unemployment insurance in theory and practice a hallmark of modern labor economics is the close interplay between the development of theory data sources and econometric testing the evolution of the economic analysis of unemployment insurance provides a good illustration new theoretical approaches in particular job search theory have inspired a large amount of empirical research some of it methodologically innovative and most of it highly relevant for economic policy the paper presents a broad survey and an assessment of the economic analysis of unemployment insurance as it has evolved since the 1970s

crime and economic incentives we explore the role that economic incentives particularly changes in wages at the bottom end of the wage distribution play in determining crime rates we use data on the police force areas of england and wales between 1975 and 1996 and find relative falls in the wages of low wage workers lead to increases in crime we carry out a number of experiments with different wage measures including a wage measure that accounts for the effects of changes in the composition of employment these reinforce the picture of a strong association between the low wage labor market and crime the result that incentives play a central role is reinforced further by the strong impact on crime of deterrence measures and of a measure of the returns to crime

crime and the labor market a search model with optimal contracts abstract this paper extends the pissarides pissarides christopher a equilibrium unemployment theory cambridge mit 2000 model of the labor market to include crime and punishment a la becker becker gary s crime and punishment an economic approach journal of political economy 76 1968 169 217 all workers irrespective of their labor force status can commit crimes and the employment contract is determined optimally the model is used to study analytically and quantitatively the effects of various labor market and crime policies for instance a more generous unemployment insurance system reduces the crime rate of the unemployed but its effect on the crime rate of the employed depends on job duration and jail sentences when the model is calibrated to u s data the overall effect is to decrease crime but is quantitatively small small wage subsidies reduce unemployment and crime rates of employed and unemployed workers and raise society s welfare hiring subsidies reduce unemployment but they can raise the crime rate of employed workers crime policies police technology and jail sentences affect crime rates significantly but have only negligible effects on the labor market

resettlement for food security s sake insights from a malawi land reform project in several african contexts households are unable to enhance agricultural production due to land constraints few governments have explored the use of resettlement to alleviate land scarcity and facilitate rural to rural migration we examine whether a resettlement project in southern malawi improved food security in the long term our findings indicate resettled households achieved greater long term food security owing to additional land coupled with a more diversified crop portfolio we also find the formalization of property rights improved land security for male and female household heads but resettlement jeopardized the land security of women in male headed households

on the job search and strategic bargaining abstract this paper studies wage bargaining in a simple economy in which both employed and unemployed workers search for better jobs the axiomatic nash bargaining solution and standard strategic bargaining solutions are inapplicable because the set of feasible payoffs is nonconvex i instead develop a strategic model of wage bargaining between a single worker and firm that is applicable to such an environment i show that if workers and firms are homogeneous there are market equilibria with a continuous wage distribution in which identical firms bargain to different wages each of which is a subgame perfect equilibrium of the bargaining game if firms are heterogeneous i characterize market equilibria in which more productive firms pay higher wages i compare the quantitative predictions of this model with burdett and mortensen s 1998 wage differentials employer size and unemployment international economic review 39 257 273 wage posting model and argue that the bargaining model is theoretically more appealing along important dimensions

separability and risk in the static household production model the household production model highlights the possible interdependence of consumption and production decisions in the farm household the structure of this interdependence significantly affects the analytics both theoretical and econometric of farm households singh squire and straus 20 have an excellent discussion of this interdependence and its methodological implications a particular type of interdependence called interchangeably recursiveness or separability allows production decisions to be made independently of consumption decisions although the latter depends on the former through the budget constraint this separability is of interest because it justifies a large number of well developed methodological approaches in farm household studies among these being the various duality theory approaches sasaki and maruyama 19 and jorgenson and lau 10 both and independently found the existence of perfectly competitive goods and factor markets to be sufficient for the existence of separability under deterministic conditions while there are a large number of things that can upset this result even in the deterministic setting e g nonhomogeneity of labor as in kuroda and yotopoulos 13 and lopez 14 the recognition of the role of risk appears especially threatening to separability even in a competitive setting as pointed out by barnum and squire 1 if contingent claims markets exist or if households are risk neutral separability exists under risk situations but insurance markets may not exist and for many risks faced by the farming households could not unless heavily subsidized exist furthermore households have been variously shown to be risk averse 15 7 4 roe and graham tomasi 18 utilizing a multiplicative yield risk in the context of a dynamic model concluded that on the whole independence does not hold and estimating equations from certainty theory are not appropriate thus with respect to risk one can say that the die is loaded against separability this paper aims to show that there are risk specifications which allow separability for the household production model even in the absence of the contingent claims market in section ii we introduce the standard model of the household with commercial production it involves a household that produces an output which it partly consumes and partly sells in the market risk enters the revenue function either additively or multiplicatively we then introduce two definitions of separability in the sense of efficiency and in the sense of elasticity we show in section ii that additive risk whether on yield or on monetary revenue allows sepa

empirical estimation and use of risk preferences an appraisal of estimation methods that use actual economic decisions the topic addressed in this paper concerns the conceptual basis estimation procedures and resources required for implementation of methods for estimating risk preferences by observing behavior an attempt is made to review and appraise previous literature as well as to explore some alternative approaches to begin it is important to contrast four general types of empirical settings of interest these are micro farm level macro market or other aggregations descriptive positivistic and prescriptive normative studies the prescriptive or conditionally normative studies seemingly have dominated agricultural economic studies of risk these generally have been micro in nature and have focused on

equilibrium wage tenure contracts in this study we consider a labor market matching model where firms post wage tenure contracts and workers both employed and unemployed search for new job opportunities given workers are risk averse we establish there is a unique equilibrium in the environment considered although firms in the market make different offers in equilibrium all post a wage tenure contract that implies a worker s wage increases smoothly with tenure at the firm as firms make different offers there is job turnover as employed workers move jobs as the opportunity arises this implies the increase in a worker s wage can be due to job to job movements as well as wage tenure effects further there is a nondegenerate equilibrium distribution of initial wage offers that is differentiable on its support except for a mass point at the lowest initial wage we also show that relevant characteristics of the equilibrium can be written as explicit functions of preferences and the other market parameters

compensated optimal response under uncertainty in agricultural household models abstract this study derives the qualitative properties of a household s optimal consumption family labour hired labour and non labour input choices under price and or output risk through a slutsky type compensation without imposing any restriction on risk preference structure or production technology these compensated responses provide the underpinning for welfare analysis in agricultural household models under risk the framework for the evaluation of welfare effects of product and factor price interventions in a setting of output and price risk is developed the paper also outlines an empirical model for estimation of the compensated demand and supply responses and for validation of the paper s analytical results

wage differentials employer size and unemployment the unique equilibrium solution to a game in which a continuum of individual employers choose permanent wage offers and a continuum of workers search by sequentially sampling from the set of offers is characterized wage dispersion is a robust outcome provided that workers search while employed as well as when unemployed the unique nondegenerate equilibrium distribution of wage offers is constructed for three cases 1 identical workers and employers 2 identical employers and an atomless distribution of worker supply prices and 3 identical workers and an atomless distribution of job productivities copyright 1998 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

a two season agricultural household model of output and price uncertainty abstract this paper presents a two season model of a household s production consumption labor supply and storage decisions in an environment of output and price risk the analytical results in this study are markedly different from those of models prevalent in the mainstream of the agricultural household literature the empirical analysis that uses panel data from a village in india provides support for the theoretical results and underscores the seasonal dimension of the farmers choice problems the results also show that ignoring risk or risk averse preferences may introduce substantial downward bias in optimal response estimates