evaluating the economic impact of international remittances on developing countries using household surveys a literature review abstract this literature review covers 50 recent empirical studies of the economic impact of international remittances on the developing world that are based on household survey data it begins by reviewing the considerable methodological problems confronting economic work on international remittances and then examines the strengths and weaknesses of various economic studies of the impact of remittances in the developing world on such outcomes as poverty and inequality health and education investment and savings labour supply and participation and economic growth it finds that while international remittances generally have a positive impact on poverty and health in the developing world remittances can have negative effects on labour supply education and economic growth

on the structure of lost sales inventory models we provide a new approach to the structural analysis of the standard lost sales inventory system this approach is we think easier to work with than the original one we also derive new bounds on the optimal policy then we show that more variable demand leads to higher cost finally we extend the analysis to several important variations of the basic model

monopoly pricing of capacity usage under asymmetric information the design of monopoly pricing strategies is examined in a general framework with an unknown population distribution of consumer characteristics and downward sloping multi unit consumer demand in addition the monopolist has increasing marginal cost three pricing strategies are shown to implement the profit maximizing allocation reference point pricing multi unit competitive bidding with variable outputs and generalized priority service the analysis of pricing also is extended to include random capacity copyright 1993 by blackwell publishing ltd

international migration the brain drain and poverty a cross country analysis the aim of the paper is threefold first it empirically investigates the effect of international migration on poverty in origin countries using data from a cross country analysis second it explores the specific part of the income distribution from which migrants are drawn by comparing the effect of international migration on different income quintiles of the population finally given that the selection of migrants depends not only on the income level of their households but also on the skill levels of movers the paper casts some light on the implications of the emigration of skilled workers on poverty this article shows that the stock of international migrants have a positive effect on the income of the poor while it does not have a significant impact on the income of the middle and top quintiles of the population in particular a 10 per cent increase in the per capita stock of migrants resident in oecd nations augments the income of the poor by 1 per cent on average and ceteris paribus finally the poverty reducing effect of migration holds even when the emigration process selects the best and the brightest

migration remittances and poverty in ecuador abstractwe analyse the influence of the recent wave of migration on the incidence of poverty among stayers in ecuador we draw our data from a survey that provides detailed information on migrants the analysis reveals a significant negative effect of migration on poverty among migrant households this effect is substantially smaller than the one that we find focusing on recipient households we explore the factors that account for this divergence our analysis entails that the existing empirical evidence on the relationship between remittances and poverty does not need to be informative about the size of the direct poverty reduction potential of migration

inventories stock outs and production smoothing if stock outs are ignored and if demand shocks are additive then optimal behaviour requires that the marginal cost of production mc be equated with the expected marginal revenue of increasing expected sales by one unit emr however with more general demand shocks and still ignoring stock outs the excess of mc over emr has the same sign as the covariance of the slope of the demand curve and the marginal valuation of inventory the equality of emr and mc is also broken by taking account of stock outs even if demand shocks are additive if there is a production lag then taking account of stock outs implies that optimal behaviour will be characterized by production smoothing even if the cost of production is linear two alternative definitions of production smoothing are presented and optimal behaviour in the presence of stock outs displays each type of smoothing it is a well known proposition that a firm producing a storable good under conditions of increasing marginal cost will tend to smooth the time profile of its production relative to the time profile of its sales the incentive to smooth production arises from the fact that the cost function is a convex function of the level of production for a given average level of production average costs can be reduced by reducing the variation in production of course if the cost function is linear in the level of production then this incentive to smooth production disappears however we will demonstrate in this paper that if the possibility of stock outs is explicitly incorporated into the firm s dynamic optimization problem i e if we impose a non negativity constraint on inventories and if there is a lag in production then optimal behaviour can be characterized by production smoothing even if the cost function is linear

an inventory model embedded in designing a supply contract to reduce lead time and its variability modern supply and transportation contracts often specify the frequency of and volume available for future deliveries in advance even when final demand is somewhat uncertain yano and gerchak yano c a y gerchak 1989 transportation contracts and safety stocks for just in time deliveries manufacturing and oper management 2 314 330 we explore the joint optimization of contract parameters and inventory control policy in such environments we first model and derive the optimal periodic review inventory policy corresponding to a given supply contract which generates piecewise linear convex ordering costs the optimal policy has two critical levels and there is a range of stock levels for which the quantity ordered equals the contract volume to numerically compute the critical levels we model consecutive inventory levels as a markov chain whose steady state distribution is used to compute the holding shortage and transportation costs we then use the

remittances and inequality in this paper the authors propose a framework and develop techniques for analyzing the impact of migrant remittances on the distribution of rural income by size and subsequently its impact on rural welfare household data are used to assign numerical coefficients to the impact of net remittances from both internal and international migrants on income inequality in 2 mexican villages the impact of migrant remittances on the distribution of rural income by size depends critically on the degree to which migration opportunities become diffused through the village population on the returns to human capital embodied in remittances and on the distribution of potentially remittance enhancing skills and education across village households our empirical findings demonstrate that in a village where many households contain internal migrants but few have experience migrating to the u s remittances from mexico to us migrants have an unequalizing impact on village incomes while remittances from internal migrants have a favorable effect on the village income distribution by contrast in a village with a long historyh of sending migrants to the us and hence a more ready access to us labor markets us to mexico remittances have an equalizing impact on incomes remittances from internal migrants in this village however embody a large human capital component and are highly correlated with household income hence internal migrant remittances account for a comparatively large share of inequalities in the 2nd village the overall effect of remittances on income inequality is favorable in both villages migration type migration stage and interaction terms all appear to play a role in this context the effects of small changes in remittances upon income inequality and rural welfare in the 2 villages are explored and some implications for migration and rural development policy are considered authors modified

livelihoods and poverty the role of migration a critical review of the migration literature this review of the literature concludes that development studies have paid insufficient attention to labour migration and makes a plea to integrate analyses of migration within those of agricultural and rural development it emphasises that population mobility is much more common than is often assumed and that this has been so throughout human history in fact available material suggests that it is as likely that population mobility has decreased as that it has increased a review of empirical studies shows that it may not be possible to generalise about the characteristics of migrants or about the effects of migration on broader development inequality or poverty the review concludes that given the importance of migration for the rural livelihoods of many people policies should be supportive of population mobility and possibilities should be explored to enhance the positive effects of migration

international migration and income distribution in the philippines the author uses data on remittances from migrants to determine the effects of migration on household income and its distribution in the philippines i briefly describe the evolution of household income distribution using fies the family income and expenditure survey and the characteristics of households that receive income from migrants and those that do not i discuss the analytical framework that is used and outline the changes in incomes and inequality that emigration causes excerpt

strong equilibrium in cost sharing connection games abstract we study network games in which each player wishes to connect his source and sink and the cost of each edge is shared among its users either equally in fair connection games fcg s or arbitrarily in general connection games gcg s we study the existence and quality of strong equilibria se strategy profiles from which no coalition can improve the cost of each of its members in these settings we show that se always exist in the following games 1 single source and sink fcg s and gcg s 2 single source multiple sinks fcg s and gcg s on series parallel graphs 3 multi source and sink fcg s on extension parallel graphs as for the quality of the se in any fcg with n players the cost of any se is bounded by h n i e the harmonic sum contrasted with the n price of anarchy for any gcg any se is optimal

the price of stability for undirected broadcast network design with fair cost allocation is constant abstract we consider broadcast network design games in undirected networks in which every player is a node wishing to receive communication from a distinguished source node s and the cost of each communication link is equally shared among the downstream receivers according to the shapley value we prove that the price of stability of such games is constant thus closing a long standing open problem raised in anshelevich et al 2008 our result is obtained by means of homogenization a new technique that in any intermediate state locally diverging from a given optimal solution t is able to restore local similarity by exploiting cost differences between nearby players in t

a comparison of the optimal costs of two canonical inventory systems we compare two inventory systems one in which excess demand is lost and the other in which excess demand is backordered both systems are reviewed periodically they experience the same sequence of identically and independently distributed random demands holding and shortage costs are considered the holding cost parameter is identical however the cost of a lost sale could be different from the per period cost of backlogging a unit sale when these costs are equal we prove that the optimal expected cost for managing the system with lost sales is lower when the cost of a lost sale is greater we establish a relationship between these parameters that ensures that the reverse inequality is true these results are useful for designing inventory systems we also introduce a new stochastic comparison technique in this paper

inventory and price behaviour the point of this paper is that inventory adjustment attenuates downward pressure on price when realized demand is low because firms accumulate inventory hold overs speculating that demand will be stronger in the succeeding period when realized demand is high the firm draws down its inventories until a stock out occurs and price rises to clear the market

international migrants remittances in the philippines after more than a decade of poor economic performance and political turmoil the philippines has experienced an increase in temporary and permanent international emigration with this has come a greater dependence on the remittances from these out migrants in 1991 more than 665 000 philippine nationals left the country 91 as contract workers nso 1992a to join a growing overseas community of more than 11 million families in the philippines 17 reported having received some sort of income from abroad in 1991 in total such income represented 8 of the country s household income nso 1992b despite the importance of these financial flows official statistics on remittances in the philippines are seriously underestimated and not clearly defined previous micro studies have also failed to use data representative of the whole country these weaknesses are overcome in this study by using previously little used microdata sets to reexamine remittances among the findings several stand out remittances are important because of their size and because of the large numbers of households relying on them more substantively multivariate analysis of the data suggests that length of stay abroad affects amounts remitted the analysis also shows that household location and regional labour market conditions influence the level of remittances the implications for policy are important unless we can influence some of these determinants permissive policies may have more success than coercive ones

production lags and price behaviour this paper explores the implications of the production lag for the firm s decisions the authors establish a significant relationship between price behavior and the length of the production lag they show that specific results in the literature are crucially dependent upon the assumption about the production lag by allowing the production time to exceed the decision period the basic framework of the earlier price inventory models is significantly extended the model thus incorporates finished goods inventories as well as goods in process inventories copyright 1992 by the london school of economics and political science

understanding the inventory cycle abstract careful examination of aggregate data from the u s and other oecd countries reveals that production and inventory behavior exhibit paradoxical features 1 inventory investment is strongly countercyclical at very high frequencies e g 2 3 quarters per cycle it is procyclical only at relatively low cyclical frequencies such as the business cycle frequencies e g 8 40 quarters per cycle 2 production is less volatile than sales around the high frequencies it is more volatile than sales only around business cycle or lower frequencies 3 unlike capital investment or gdp the bulk of the variance of inventory investment is concentrated around high frequencies rather than around business cycle frequencies these features of production and inventory behavior at the low and high frequencies provide a litmus test for inventory theories this paper shows that the stockout avoidance theory kahn j 1987 inventories and the volatility of production american economic review 77 667 679 has much better potential than other competing theories for explaining the seemingly paradoxical features of inventory fluctuations observed at different cyclical frequencies my analysis suggests that demand shocks are the main source of the business cycle

interest rate demand and input price uncertainty and the value of firms abstract in an infinite horizon inventory model an increase in interest rate uncertainty increases the value of a firm which has positive value an increase in input price uncertainty increases the value of the firm if decisions are made before the realization of demand uncertainty increased uncertainty about an additive demand shock reduces the value of a price setting firm with a concave value function and leaves unchanged or increases the value of a quantity setting firm if decisions are made after the realization of demand uncertainty an increase in the uncertainty of an additive demand shock increases the value of the firm

asymptotic optimality of order up to policies in lost sales inventory systems we study a single product single location inventory system under periodic review where excess demand is lost and the replenishment lead time is positive the performance measure of interest is the long run average holding cost and lost sales penalty cost for a large class of demand distributions we show that when the lost sales penalty becomes large compared to the holding cost the relative difference between the cost of the optimal policy and the best order up to policy converges to zero for any given cost parameters we establish a bound on this relative difference numerical experiments show that the best order up to policy performs well yielding an average cost that is within 1 5 of the optimal cost when the ratio between the lost sales penalty and the holding cost is 100 we also propose a heuristic order up to level using two newsvendor expressions in our experiments the cost of this order up to policy is 2 52 higher on an average than the best order up to policy

some empirical evidence on the production level and production cost smoothing models of inventory investment the production smoothing model of inventories has long been the basic paradigm within which empirical research on inventories has been conducted the basic hypothesis embedded in this model is that inventories of finished goods serve primarily to smooth production levels in the face of fluctuating demand and convex cost functions however once we allow for shocks to technology and the costs of producing output firms will also use inventories to shift production from periods in which production costs are relatively high to periods in which production costs are relatively low in this sense inventories can serve to smooth production costs rather production levels in this paper we examine the empirical plausibility of the production level and production cost smoothing models of inventories our basic strategy is to derive and contrast a set of unconditional moment restrictions implied by these models in a way that minimizes the role of auxiliary assumptions regarding market structure and industry demand we find overwhelming evidence against the production level smoothing model and very little evidence against the production cost smoothing mode1 we conclude that the variance of production exceeds the variance of sales in most manufacturing industries because the production cost smoothing role of inventories is quantitatively more important than the production level smoothing role of inventories this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the influence of seller learning and time constraints on sequential bargaining in an artificial perishable goods market in this paper we test some hypotheses about the formation of prices through sequential bilateral bargaining on a perishable goods market under the assumption of behavioural learning by buyers and sellers we constructed a multi agent simulation model based on a survey concerning the fruit and vegetables market in marseille france in our model the agents bargain the price of a perishable good the representation of agents rationality is inspired by a literature relative to markets of perishable goods kirman 6 7 and rouchier 18 19 20 as well as on artificial bargaining brenner 2 weisbuch 22 we study the influence of three parameters the sellers initial beliefs concerning the buyers willingness to pay the time spent by buyers on the market and the heterogeneity in the sellers limit value on the evolution of prices and of agents representations of others agents we compare our results with empirical observations and some existing literature on bargaining we find that our assumptions concerning the learning process give consistent results and lead the transactions prices to converge toward the sellers limit value

the cyclical behavior of strategic inventories this paper presents a model in which inventories are used by a duopoly to deter deviations from an implicitly collusive arrangement higher inventories allow firms to punish cheaters more strongly and can thus help to maintain collusion we show that when demand is high the incentive to deviate increases so that increases in inventories may be optimal for the duopoly this rationalizes the observed positive correlation between inventories and sales in our empirical section we show that as our model predicts this correlation is more important in concentrated industries we also provide several examples where inventories have been a factor in cartel behavior

the impact of migration on rural poverty and inequality a case study in china large numbers of agricultural labor moved from the countryside to cities after the economic reforms in china migration and remittances play an important role in transforming the structure of rural household income this article examines the impact of rural to urban migration on rural poverty and inequality in a mountainous area of hubei province using the data of a 2002 household survey since migration income is a potential substitute for farm income we present counterfactual scenarios of what rural income poverty and inequality would have been in the absence of migration our results show that by providing alternatives to households with lower marginal labor productivity in agriculture migration leads to an increase in rural income in contrast to many studies that suggest that the increasing share of nonfarm income in total income widens inequality this article offers support for the hypothesis that migration tends to have egalitarian effects on rural income for three reasons 1 migration is rational self selection farmers with higher expected return in agricultural activities and or in local nonfarm activities choose to remain in the countryside while those with higher expected return in urban nonfarm sectors migrate 2 households facing binding constraints of land supply are more likely to migrate 3 poorer households benefit disproportionately from migration

information distortion in a supply chain the bullwhip effect this article originally appeared in management science april 1997 volume 43 number 4 pp 546 558 published by the institute of management sciences consider a series of companies in a supply chain each of whom orders from its immediate upstream member in this setting inbound orders from a downstream member serve as a valuable informational input to upstream production and inventory decisions this paper claims that the information transferred in the form of orders tends to be distorted and can misguide upstream members in their inventory and production decisions in particular the variance of orders may be larger than that of sales and distortion tends to increase as one moves upstream a phenomenon termed bullwhip effect this paper analyzes four sources of the bullwhip effect demand signal processing rationing game order batching and price variations actions that can be taken to mitigate the detrimental impact of this distortion are also discussed

a dynamic inventory model with the right of refusal we consider a dynamic inventory production model with general convex order production costs and excess demand that can be accepted or refused by the firm excess demand that is accepted is backlogged and results in a backlog cost whereas demand that is refused results in a lost sales charge endogenizing the sales decision is appropriate in the presence of general convex order costs so that the firm is not forced to backlog a unit whose subsequent satisfaction would reduce total profits in each period the firm must determine the optimal order and sales strategy we show that the optimal policy is characterized by an optimal buy up to level that increases with the initial inventory level and an order quantity that decreases with the initial inventory level more importantly we show the optimal sales strategy is characterized by a critical threshold a backlog limit that dictates when to stop selling this threshold is independent of the initial inventory level and the amount purchased we investigate various properties of this new policy as demand stochastically increases the amount purchased increases but the amount backlogged decreases reflecting a shift in the way excess demand is managed we develop two regularity conditions one that ensures some backlogs are allowed in each period and another that ensures the amount backlogged is nondecreasing in the length of the planning horizon we illustrate the buy up to levels in our model are bounded above by buy up to levels from the pure lost sales and pure backlogging models we explore additional extensions using numerical experiments

exploration for petroleum and the inventory of proven reserves abstract this paper addresses the following question does the number of proven petroleum reserves on the norwegian continental shelf justify the current level of exploratory effort the paper argues that this effort should be curtailed for some time to come it also provides a framework within which the recurrent problem of selecting an appropriate level of exploratory effort can be analysed

the resurgence of inventory research what have we learned abstract recent empirical and theoretical research on business inventories is surveyed and critically evaluated while most inventory research has had macroeconomic motivations we focus on its microtheoretic basis and on potential conflicts between theory and evidence the paper asks two principal questions first how can inventories which are allegedly used by firms to stabilize production nonetheless be a destabilizing factor at the macroeconomic level second why if firms are following the production smoothing model is production more variable than sales in many industries we suggest that the so called s s model may help answer both questions

bounding the inefficiency of equilibria in nonatomic congestion games abstract equilibria in noncooperative games are typically inefficient as illustrated by the prisoner s dilemma in this paper we quantify this inefficiency by comparing the payoffs of equilibria to the payoffs of a best possible outcome we study a nonatomic version of the congestion games defined by rosenthal int j game theory 2 1973 65 and identify games in which equilibria are approximately optimal in the sense that no other outcome achieves a significantly larger total payoff to the players games in which optimization by individuals approximately optimizes the social good in spite of the lack of coordination between players our results extend previous work on traffic routing games

inventories and sticky prices note in a recent contribution to this review alan blinder provides an interesting analysis of the relationship between optimal inventory decisions and the process of price adjustment arguing that inventory permits separation of production and sale decisions and allows the firm greater flexibility in responding to anticipated demand disturbances blinder shows that the responsiveness of relative prices depends critically upon the cost of storage and the temporal structure of the demand shocks few economists would fault the intuitive substance of blinder s basic proposition and the proposition is justified with characteristic precision the analysis however is considerably less general than blinder maintains the formal argument of his paper relies upon a simple model of a monopolist capable of backlogging orders and storing unsold goods as the model is constructed order backlogs assume a role of fundamental importance in any stationary equilibrium this feature of the model vitiates blinder s extension of his result to situations in which order backlogs are prohibited the basic monopoly model developed in sections i and ii of blinder s paper places no restriction upon the sign of inventory negative inventory is interpreted as net unfilled orders while no distinction is drawn between reductions in gross inventory and additions to the order backlog as a result the cost of holding inventory is symmetric around an arbitrary minimum point the only role of inventory is to permit the time paths of production and sales to differ gross inventory allows production to antedate sales while order backlogs generate revenue before production costs are borne under these circumstances if future costs and revenues are discounted it is natural to expect any stationary equilibrium level of net inventory to be negative this can be shown to be true of blinder s model it is useful to distinguish in general between the nonstochastic stationary level of inventory n and the stochastic stationary level n the former is realized when the current expected demand disturbance eo is zero and production equals sales the latter which differs from customary usage represents the level of inventory expected to prevail when adjustment to the current nonzero expected demand disturbance is complete if the demand disturbance is not a random walk so that p 1 in blinder s 5 the two equilibria coincide relatively little attention is devoted to either stationary solution because blinder s main interest is in the optimal current solution level n1 the stochastic stationary level is crucially important however since it represents the goal toward which the current choice must provide an optimal first step to verify that both nand n are negative whenever production is strictly positive note that blinder s necessary condition 7 with the coefficient cl set equal to zero together with the definition of xa as the deviation of the shadow value of inventory q from its nonstochastic stationary value q implies

impacts of migration and remittances on ethnic income inequality in rural china summary migration is often viewed as the best option for poor rural households to exit out of poverty although the distributional effects of migrants remittances tend to be ambiguous in the literature given that increasing income inequality is a major concern and policy issue this paper examines the impacts of migration and migrants remittances on income inequality in china s rural minority areas using recent proprietary household data treating migrants remittances as a potential substitute for income the results reveal that migration significantly boosts income for all ethnic groups although the returns to ethnic minority households tend to be less than for han households decomposition analyses further reveal that migration increases inequality between ethnic groups despite reducing spatial inequality these countervailing effects imply that the continual transfer of rural urban migrants will likely lead to spatial convergence despite reinforcing ethnic inequalities in rural minority areas importantly the percentage contribution of ethnic inequality to total inequality is larger than that of spatial inequality across sampled rural locations thus highlighting the fact that the ethnic dimension is an important yet often overlooked component of inequality in china

on equilibrium in resource markets with scale economies and stochastic prices abstract in this paper i show the existence and the characteristics of equilibrium in a non renewable resource market where extraction costs are non convex and market price is subject to stochastic shocks an empirically relevant setting in my model firms may be motivated to hold inventories to facilitate production smoothing which allows them to continue producing at a smooth pace at any instant when extraction ceases e g when reserves are exhausted this aspect of the model then supports a competitive equilibrium in the presence of non convex costs casual empirical evidence is provided that supports the central features of my model for a variety of non renewable resources lending credence to the explanation for equilibrium i propose

inventories and the volatility of production a stylized fact associated with inventory behavior is that the variance of production exceeds the variance of sales this paper presents a model of production decisions with demand uncertainty that incorporates no nnegativity constraints on inventories even with no productivity shocks optimal behavior by the firm is consistent with this stylized fact either if demand exhibits positive serial correlation or if the firm can backlog excess demand the reason is that a demand shock affects both the actual inventory level given unchanged production and the desired level production must replenish the stock and adjust to the new desired level copyright 1987 by american economic association

competitive strategies for two firms with asymmetric production cost structures we model joint production marketing strategies for two firms with asymmetric production cost structures in competition the first firm called the production smoother faces a convex production cost and a linear inventory holding cost the second firm called the order taker faces a linear production cost and holds no inventory each firm is assumed to vary continuously over time both its production rate and its price in view of an unstable surge pattern of demand the underlying theoretical motivation is to investigate the temporal nature of the equilibrium policies of two competing firms one operating at or near capacity the production smoother and one operating significantly below capacity the order taker we characterize and compare the equilibrium strategies of the two competing firms among our results we show that if the duopolistic production smoother finds it optimal to hold inventory then he will begin the season by building up inventory continue by drawing down inventory until i

the new economics of labor migration this paper reviews selected theoretical and empirical developments in the field of labor migration economics the migration behavior of individuals differs in accordance with their perceived relative deprivation those who are relatively more deprived tend to have stronger incentive to migrate than those who are relatively less deprived moreover a reference group characterized by more income inequality is likely to generate more relative deprivation highly skilled workers are also more likely to migrate migration decisions are often made jointly by the migrant and nonmigrant with a contractual arrangement regarding the sharing of costs and returns the exchange of commitments to share income provides coinsurance of particular interest are the determinants of the speed of adoption of migration as an innovation and the characteristics associated with the delay in the adoption of innovation new econometric techniques including techniques for the analysis of qualitative dependent variables techniques that correct for sample selection bias and those for the analysis of longitudinal data have substantially benefited empirical research in this area new methods that can correct for the biased estimate of the wages particular individuals would receive at 2 or more locations at the same point in time allow researchers to test locational decsion making models estimates of these structural models of labor migration support the hypothesis that individuals respond to income incentives in making the decsion to migrate further research is needed on the pazzling observation that migrant workers earn less than native born workers with similar characteristics during the 1st few years after migration but more thereafter other topics that need further research include the macroeconomic effects of migration the microeconomic and macroeconomic relationships between aging and labor migration and the migration behavior of dual earner families

what causes commodity price backwardation a recently proposed explanation for futures price backwardation is examined an equilibrium model with spatial heterogeneity leads to the interpretation of backwardations as mismeasurement by the analyst however the model predicts that backwardations are more affected by the location of stocks than by their aggregate level empirical examination of the united states corn market fails to support this result

what is the impact of international remittances on poverty and inequality in latin america workers remittances have become a major source of income for developing countries however little is still known about their impact on poverty and inequality using a large cross country panel dataset the authors find that remittances in latin american and caribbean lac countries have increased growth and reduced inequality and poverty these results are robust to the use of different instruments that attempt to correct for the potential endogeneity of remittances household survey based estimates for 10 lac countries confirm that remittances have negative albeit relatively small inequality and poverty reducing effects even after imputations for the potential home earnings of migrants

the effects of international remittances on poverty and inequality in ethiopia abstractthe article studies the effects of international remittances on poverty and inequality in ethiopia using an urban household survey from 2004 counterfactual consumption in the hypothetical case of no remittance is estimated in a selection corrected estimation framework inequality and poverty values in the hypothetical and actual cases are then compared there is a significant reduction in poverty while inequality does not change the head count the poverty gap and the squared poverty gap ratios decreased from 0 41 to 0 38 0 14 to 0 13 and 0 064 to 0 057 respectively

durable goods monopoly increasing marginal cost and depreciation this paper combines increasing marginal cost and depreciation in a continuous time model of a durable goods monopolist in contrast to the case of increasing marginal cost but no depreciation analysed by kahn and the case of depreciation with constant marginal cost analysed by bond and samuelson steady state output in this model is less than in the competitive case a turnpike result shows that choice of a long enough time horizon can make the equilibrium path of output in a finite horizon game arbitrarily close to the path of the infinite horizon game

price smoothing under capacity constraints this paper examines monopolistic pricing decisions under production and storage capacity constraints which firms may well encounter in practice but which have generally been ignored in earlier price inventory analyses if these capacity constraints are present they evidently influence firms pricing decisions these constraints should therefore be formally modelled for a more complete theory of price behavior the paper addresses the issue of whether or not inventories will lead to an asymmetry in price behavior amihud and mendelson 2 and reagan 15 have noted that inventory adjustments moderate downward price adjustments in periods of low demand but do not moderate upward price adjustments in periods of high demand when stockouts occur these analyses are in contrast to blinder 4 wherein a possible symmetric role of inventories and unfilled orders in dampening price adjustments is considered blinder argues that stockouts may not be empirically significant abel 1 observes however that casual empiricism may lead one to think that stockouts are rather

pathways out of rural poverty a case study in socio economic mobility in the rural philippines exploiting unique household panel data covering a 30 year period this paper attempts to analyse the patterns of poverty exits by examining socio economic mobility in a philippines village macroeconomic growth was a major factor explaining poverty exit probabilities until the early 1980s after the 1980s poverty exit paths through agricultural ladder narrowed schooling and growth became equally important factors owing to the increased returns to schooling and labour endowments also became important for the lower but not upper social strata providing an economic incentive to have more children for the poor surprisingly we find no evidence of state dependence in poverty spells once observable factors are taken into account copyright 2007 oxford university press

inventories and risk in african manufacturing using a panel data set for zimbabwe which includes firm specific measures of contractual risk we show that contractual risk has a major effect on the holding input stocks and to a lesser extent the constitution of cash reserves this is consistent with inventories being a hedge against stockout risk by contrast firms facing more inter annual market risk hold less inventories this suggests that african manufacturers prefer adapting to long term market fluctuations as they materialise rather than building up inventories this interpretation is consistent with the finding that high market risk firms also have a low capacity utilisation rate

an analysis of the inventory behavior in a q theoretic framework this paper develops a generalized q model in which a monopolist with perfect foresight holds inventories this model permits an analysis of the dynamics of inventories in the presence of various types of deterministic demand and supply shocks the results suggest that if only positive inventories are allowed inventories are more successful in smoothing expected upward than downward variations in demand if unfilled orders are permitted then production smoothing accompanies any type of demand shock but inventories are generally negative the estimation of the linear quadratic model on data generated using the two versions of the generalized q model shows that incentives to smooth production appear only when the firm is allowed to have negative inventories

dynamic inventory rationing with mixed backorders and lost sales abstract customers may react differently when stockouts occur in this paper we investigate the rationing policy for an inventory system with a mixture of demand classes of backorder type and lost sales type since the penalty cost of backorders varies with time the priorities of demand classes also alter with time this totally changes the problem structure compared with the classic rationing models a dynamic rationing policy is studied in this paper by considering the dynamics of demand priorities a markov decision model is developed to obtain the optimal dynamic rationing levels for multiple demand classes the results indicate that between the priority switching points rationing levels often exhibit different patterns for lost sales demand classes the rationing levels always decrease as the remaining time approaches to zero for backorder demand classes the rationing levels increase in some parts due to declining of the priorities the rationing levels of all demand classes finally decline to zero to reduce the inventory holding cost the application of dynamic rationing is further extended from a single period model to a multi period s t model where unit cost has to be included the optimal ordering policy is proved to be a myopic base stock policy and the dynamic rationing policy in the single period model can still be applied with modified time independent penalty costs for lost sales classes to overcome the computational complexity a heuristic dynamic rationing policy is introduced due to its good outcome implementing such a heuristic dynamic rationing policy can be a practical solution for inventory system with mixed backorders and lost sales in order to enhance the system performance

can the production smoothing model of inventory behavior be saved the production smoothing model of inventory behavior has a long and venerable history and theoretical foundations that seem very strong yet certain overwhelming facts seem not only to defy explanation within the production smoothing framework but actually to argue that the basic idea of production smoothing is all wrong most prominent among these is the fact that the variance of detrended production exceeds the variance of detrended sales this paper first documents the stylized facts then it derives the production smoothing model rigorously and explains how the model can be amended to make it consistent with the facts finally it reviews the theoretical and empirical evidence and tries to draw some tentative conclusions

the dynamics of convenience and the brazilian soybean boom u s and brazilian soybeans are harvested on an alternating semiannual cycle that generates predictable dynamic behavior in the soybean futures market because corn and soybeans are storage substitutes their physical storage costs move together and can be isolated separately from crop specific marginal convenience yields along the futures price profile the kaldor working convenience yield hypothesis is tested for the international soybean market and storage risk is measured

financing constraints and inventories abstract this paper investigates the impact of financing constraints on firms inventory and cash management in particular it examines the extent to which the presence of such constraints may account for certain empirical regularities these include e g the excess variance of production vis a vis that of sales as well as the counter cyclicality and persistence of the inventory sales ratio we model the intertemporal decision making on production cash retention and dividends of a firm that is exposed to stochastic demand shocks in every period and faces constrained access to external sources of finance it is found that the presence of financing constraints can explain the excess variance of production in a model which otherwise would not deliver this result moreover as long as demand is positively serially correlated they also contribute to the counter cyclicality and persistence of the inventory sales ratio the paper suggests that financing constraints should not be discarded as a factor driving the cyclical behaviour of inventories