farmer groups and input access when membership is not enough this paper explores the efficiency of a targeted fertilizer subsidy program administered differently in two nigerian states in 2009 an important dimension along which the otherwise similar programs differed was the fertilizer distribution strategy fertilizer distribution among program participants was done at the individual level for one set of farmers while the fertilizer was given indirectly through a group representative for the other set where fertilizer was given to a group representative for further distribution to members relatives of the farm group s president received more bags of fertilizer than others where fertilizer was given directly to farmers such results did not obtain this differential outcome suggests that while groups may facilitate the process of farmer identification and coordination elite capture and intra group dynamics may affect their efficacy for providing equal access to inputs for members two tier models enable us to model the potentially separate processes that determine participation in the voucher program and the amount of fertilizer received upon deciding to participate with intentions to adopt and scale up voucher programs in various food security and poverty alleviation programs across developing countries it is important to understand when and how farmer groups can affect the successful implementation of such programs

broadcast advertising and u s demand for alcoholic beverages quarterly data for 1977 1994 on alcohol consumption and advertising are used to estimate a differential demand system including explanatory variables for broadcast advertising and print advertising the model explains the growth rate of per capita consumption dependent on explanatory variables for prices real income demographic changes and real advertising by media and beverage empirical results also are reported for total consumption of pure alcohol the results for the three beverages and total alcohol indicate that advertising has little or no effect on demand the empirical evidence thus supports the notion that regardless of media advertising affects mainly brand shares

old problems in the new solutions politically motivated allocation of program benefits and the new fertilizer subsidies summary fertilizer subsidies have been reinstituted in many african countries with innovations seeking to avoid the downsides of past programs the new subsidy paradigm however does not address how to curtail political manipulation which exacerbated inefficiencies of previous programs this paper analyzes whether politics affected voucher allocations in ghana s 2008 fertilizer subsidy program we find that more vouchers were targeted to districts that the ruling party had lost in the previous presidential elections and more so in districts that had been lost by a higher percentage margin this evidence shows that a significant threat to the efficiency of fertilizer subsidies remains

dis incentivizing sustainable intensification the case of zambia s maize fertilizer subsidy program abstract poor and declining soil fertility is a major constraint to increased cereal yields in sub saharan africa while input subsidy programs isps for inorganic fertilizer are a popular and expensive tool used by african governments to increase smallholder farmers cereal yields far fewer resources are devoted to promoting other soil fertility management sfm practices that can improve soil health increase cereal yield response to inorganic fertilizer and support sustainable agricultural intensification moreover little is known about how isps affect farmers use of such sfm practices we examine whether and to what extent household participation in zambia s maize fertilizer subsidy program affects the household s use of fallowing intercropping crop rotation and animal manure using nationally representative panel survey data from zambian smallholder farm households we find that zambia s maize fertilizer subsidy program reduces the probability and extent of fallowing and intercropping of maize with other crops in addition we find some evidence that the program induces an increase in continuous maize cultivation on the same plot over time however the weight of the evidence suggests no statistically significant isp effects on the use of animal manure the analysis uses the mundlak chamberlain device to control for time invariant unobserved heterogeneity and addresses concerns related to the endogeneity of selection into the subsidy program with an instrumental variables control function approach overall our results suggest that zambia s maize fertilizer subsidy program may have dis incentivized sustainable intensification rather than promoted it

estimating dynamic demand for cigarettes using panel data the effects of bootlegging taxation and advertising reconsidered abstracct a dynamic demand for cigarette consumption is estimated using pooled data of 46 states over the period 1963 to 1980 a price elasticity of 0 2 and an insignificant income elasticity is found using pooled estimation techniques the bootlegging effect is modeled explicitly using neighboring price the effect is found to be significant two major policy issues are analyzed in light of these new estimates 1 cigarette taxation is found to be an effective tool for generating revenues even though there may be spillover effects to neighboring states where bootlegging is significant 2 the effects of the fairness doctrine act and the advertising ban on cigarette consumption are re examined we find mild support for the effectiveness of subsidized anti smoking messages in reducing cigarette consumption and no support for the thesis that the ban on advertising helps to increase per capita consumption

fertilizer subsidies and private market participation the case of kano state nigeria this article estimates the effect of a fertilizer voucher program on farmer participation in the private fertilizer market in nigeria using a double hurdle model to address corner solution challenges with estimating input demand and a control function approach to account for the endogeneity of subsidized fertilizer acquired the study finds evidence that receiving subsidized fertilizer in kano nigeria increased both the probability and extent of participation in the private fertilizer market findings demonstrate that under certain circumstances e g where input dealers links to farmer are weak there could be significant gains from the temporary use of voucher programs to strengthen such links

great expectations the subjective well being of rural urban migrants in china summary this paper is among the first to link the literatures on migration and on subjective well being in developing countries it poses the question why do rural urban migrant households settled in urban china have an average happiness score lower than rural households three basic hypotheses are examined migrants had false expectations about their future urban conditions or about their future urban aspirations or about their future selves estimated happiness functions and decomposition analyses based on a 2002 national household survey indicate that certain features of migrant conditions make for unhappiness and that their high aspirations in relation to achievement influenced by their new reference groups also make for unhappiness although the possibility of selection bias among migrants cannot be ruled out it is apparently difficult for migrants to form unbiased expectations about life in a new and different world

understanding the process of agricultural technology adoption mineral fertilizer in eastern dr congo summary we analyze the adoption of mineral fertilizer in south kivu we model technology adoption as a three step process including awareness tryout and adoption and empirically analyze these steps using cross sectional farm household data and bivariate and heckman selection probit models we find that awareness about fertilizer is high 57 and mainly determined by education and social capital tryout is low 13 of aware farmers but positively influenced by extension interventions continued adoption is high 70 of tryout farmers but capital constraints are important and not all extension interventions are effective for continued adoption our results entail implications for extension policies in poor areas

who is vouching for the input voucher decentralized targeting and elite capture in tanzania input subsidy programs carry support as instruments to increase agricultural productivity provided they are market smart this requires especially proper targeting to contain the fiscal pressure with decentralized targeting of input vouchers currently the instrument of choice nonetheless despite clear advantages in administrative costs the fear of elite capture persists these fears are borne out in the experience from the 2008 input voucher pilot program in kilimanjaro tanzania examined here elected village officials received about 60 percent of the distributed vouchers a factor that significantly reduced the targeting performance of the program especially in more unequal and remote communities when targeting the poor greater coverage and a focus on high trust settings helped mitigate these concerns the findings highlight the continuing need for scrutiny when relying on decentralized targeting a clearer sense of purpose increasing productivity among poorer farmers versus increasing aggregate output could also enhance the targeting performance

input subsidy programs in sub saharan africa a synthesis of recent evidence input subsidy programs have once again become a major plank of agricultural development strategies in africa ten african governments spend roughly us 1 billion annually on input subsidy programs isps amounting to 28 6 of their public expenditures on agriculture this article reviews the microlevel evidence on isps undertaken since the mid 2000s we examine the characteristics of subsidy beneficiaries crop response rates to fertilizer application and their influence on the performance of subsidy programs the impacts of subsidy programs on national fertilizer use and the development of commercial input distribution systems and finally the impact of isps on food price levels and poverty rates the weight of the evidence indicates that the costs of the programs generally outweigh their benefits findings from other developing areas with a higher proportion of crop area under irrigation and with lower fertilizer prices factors that should provide higher returns to fertilizer subsidies than in africa indicate that at least a partial reallocation of expenditures from fertilizer subsidies to r d and infrastructure would provide higher returns to agricultural growth and poverty reduction however because isps enable governments to demonstrate tangible support to constituents they are likely to remain on the african landscape for the foreseeable future hence the study identifies ways in which benefits can be enhanced through changes in implementation modalities and complementary investments within a holistic agricultural intensification strategy among the most important of these are efforts to reduce the crowding out of commercial fertilizer distribution systems and programs to improve soil fertility to enable farmers to use fertilizer more efficiently the challenges associated with achieving these gains are likely to be formidable

competition and the cigarette tv advertising ban competition and the cigarette tv advertising ban i introduction whether advertising increases or decreases competition has been debated for decades on one hand kaldor 1949 50 bain 1956 and others argue that advertising reduces competition by enabling the leading firms in an industry to increase product differentiation this lowers the existing elasticity of demand for the firm s output and erects barriers to the entry of new firms into the industry on the other hand telser 1964 nelson 1975 and others argue that advertising increases competition by disseminating information about the price and other product attributes more widely among consumers this increases the demand elasticities facing the existing firms and facilitates the entry of new firms the results of empirical studies of these alternative theories conflict and so the debate continues 1 empirical studies generally focus on large cross sectional industry samples and compare various measures of competition e g profits industrial concentration or market share stability between high advertising consumer goods industries and low advertising producer goods industries the principal drawback of this approach is that one must control for the many differences among industries in addition to advertising which might affect the proxies for competition the present paper takes a different approach to test the same hypotheses the 1970 ban of cigarette advertising on television can be viewed as a quasi experiment i assume that it substantially reduced the efficacy of cigarette advertising whatever its effects on competition and test for these effects by comparing industry performance measures before and after the ban the results on balance indicate that the ban reduced competition in the cigarette industry ii background in 1970 federal legislation was passed banning the advertising of cigarettes on television and radio effective 2 january 1971 the ban was the result of increasing evidence assumulated during the previous two decades regarding the adverse effects of smoking on health and was not related to considerations of industry competition prior to the ban the cigarette industry was a heavy user of television advertising see table i from 1963 to 1970 the industry s television plus radio advertising to sales ratio averaged 7 4 percent 2 the industry s total advertising to sales ratio during this period averaged 9 8 percent which was among the highest of all industries 3 television advertisements accounted for 76 percent of this total in effect the ban forced the industry to drop its principal advertising medium virtually overnight of course the industry could and did substitute advertising in other media for the lost television advertising however during the first five years after the ban increased spending in other media did not offset the elimination of television advertising expenditures consequently the mean total advertising to sales ratio fell to 6 7 percent during 1971 75 4 these advertising substitutes were qualitatively inferior exacerbating the impact of the spending reductions on efficacy advertising intensity did not approach pre ban levels again until 1976 during 1976 80 the advertising to sales ratio averaged 11 0 percent higher than the mean for the pre ban years 1963 70 5 because the substitutes were inferior to television advertisements the increased advertising expenditure per dollar of sales does not mean that the market impact of advertising was necessarily greater than for the pre ban period 6 it should also be noted that the ban did not cause a decline in industry sales it it had this might have generated its own confounding effects on the performance measures analyzed below total cigarette sales rose from about 470 billion units in 1960 to about 533 billion units in 1970 and about 620 billion units in 1980 a 32 percent increase over 1960

on measuring child costs with applications to poor countries the theoretical basis for measuring child costs is discussed and detailed consideration is given to two straightforward procedures for calculation engel s food share method and rothbarth s adult good method each of these methods embodies different definitions of child costs so that the same empirical evidence can generate quite different estimates depending on the method used it is shown that true costs are generally overstated by engel s method and understated by rothbarth s procedure although the latter unlike the former can provide a sensible starting point for cost measurement our estimates from sri lankan and indonesian data suggest that children cost their parents about 30 40 percent of what they spend on themselves

nonparametric estimation of the effects of advertising the case of lydia pinkham this article reexamines some of the issues raised subsequent to the classical research by palda 1964 we use a nonparametric estimation method that allows us to incorporate both seasonal and smoothness constraints to estimate the parameters of a demand function using monthly data on lydia pinkham s vegetable compound the analysis indicates that the parameters of the estimated demand equation are not constant throughout the long period of the data which covers the whole life cycle of the product

recovering measures of advertising carryover from aggregate data the role of the firm s decision behavior data interval bias the biased estimation of advertising carryover in aggregate data can be viewed as a misinterpretation of the aggregate advertising sales relationship due to missing micro advertising data this paper argues that if the researcher does not explicitly model the firm s advertising decisions he will incorrectly interpolate the missing data and thereby allow the firm s decision behavior to influence inferences about advertising carryover drawing upon a general model of advertising decision behavior the expected aggregate form of the koyck relationship is developed and compared to existing bias correction methodologies although it is difficult to find any parsimonious procedure which is robust with respect to all types of decision behavior allowing lagged advertising to enter the classical koyck equation emerges as a simple method of obtaining a reasonable estimate of advertising carryover in aggregate data

the effect of standardized information on firm survival and marketing strategies we argue that standardized information disclosure information using a common format and uniform metrics creates asymmetric opportunities for firms which affects their strategies and survival we test our predictions using a longitudinal quasi experimental field study involving the nutrition labeling and education act of 1990 nlea and we focus on firm market share within a category as a key asymmetry findings indicate that in general the nlea had no effect on firm responses however when accounting for firm differences we observe that the nlea led to 1 an increase in small share firm exits and 2 a greater increase in distribution for large share firms no concurrent increase in price by large share firms following the nlea was observed we conclude by discussing the implications of these effects for firm strategy the design of public policy and theories regarding the impact of information on markets

on the vote purchasing behavior of incumbent governments a couple of months before the swedish election in 1998 the incumbent government distributed 2 3 billion sek to 42 out of 115 applying municipalities this was the first wave of a four year long grant program intended to support local investment programs aimed at an ecological sustainable development this temporary grant program differs from traditional intergovernmental grants in several aspects most importantly in the sovereign decision making power given to the incumbent central government in this paper we investigate whether there were any tactical motives behind the distribution of these grants we find support for the hypothesis that the incumbent government used the grant program under study in order to win votes in particular we find strong support for the lindbeck weibull dixit londregan model in which parties distribute transfers to regions where there are many swing voters this result is statistically as well as economically significant we do however not find any support for the model that predicts that the incumbent government transfer money to its own supporters

the fleeting effect of advertising abstract this paper adds to the evidence that advertising effects depreciate rapidly inclusion of lagged advertising in empirical models may be unnecessary in addition the notion that accumulated advertising effects may be a barrier to entry is called into question

a model of political equilibrium in a representative democracy abstract this paper studies political equilibrium in a two party representative democracy in which the political parties are policy motivated and voters trade off their policy preferences against their party identity it is shown that the parties will in general adopt differing policy positions in equilibrium and that under certain qualifications the winning policy will lie between the more popular party s preferred policy and a certain utilitarian optimum the winning policy will be closer to this utilitarian optimum the less biased the electorate is in terms of party identification

community comparisons and subjective well being in a divided society using a south african data set the paper poses six questions about the determinants of subjective well being much of the paper is concerned with the role of relative concepts we find that comparator income measured as average income of others in the local residential cluster enters the household s utility function positively but that income of more distant others others in the district or province enters negatively the ordered probit equations indicate that as well as comparator groups based on spatial proximity race based comparator groups are important in the racially divided south african society it is also found that relative income is more important to happiness at higher levels of absolute income potential explanations of these results and their implications are considered

does delegation of fiscal policy to an independent agency make a difference evidence from intergovernmental transfers in india abstract one area of fiscal policy in which several countries have delegated responsibility to an independent agency is the distribution of national resource transfers across regional and local governments such delegation is expected to promote equity and efficiency and mitigate distortions created by political incentives this paper tests whether delegation to an independent agency indeed makes a difference by contrasting the impact of partisan politics on two types of fiscal transfers to states in the indian federation over a period of time 1972 1995 the pattern of evidence shows that while the transfers that are determined by the central political executive are indeed distributed to favor particular states that are politically important for the central ruling party the transfers that are delegated to an independent agency serve to constrain such partisan impact

the red queen in action the longitudinal effects of capital investments in the mobile telecommunications sector organizations undertake capital investments in technology to generate revenues or decrease costs and thereby enhance profitability however red queen type responses by competing organizations in the form of rapid imitation and escalating of technology investments erode the ability of the investing organizations to sustain gains in profitability productivity gains from these investments may persist but they may not translate into sustained profitability gains owing to declining prices brought about by a hypercompetitive environment the emergence and erosion of benefits attributable to capital investments is examined by decomposing profitability into productivity price recovery product mix and capacity utilization and by regressing each performance measure on past technology investments a polynomial distributed lag model is estimated with quarterly data for 30 firms in the mobile telecommunications services sector from 1996 to 2005 the results indicate that capital investments are positively associated with productivity of current and future periods and their association with profitability is only positive in the future after six quarters these results highlight a unique outcome of the red queen hypothesis simply by imitating learning and investing in technology due to competition is beneficial to all firms in the industry

bricks and mortar vs clicks and mortar an equilibrium analysis abstract the internet has provided traditional retailers a new means with which to serve customers consequently many bricks and mortar retailers have transformed to clicks and mortar by incorporating internet sales examples of companies making such a transition include best buy wal mart barnes noble etc despite the increasing prevalence of this practice several fundamental questions remain 1 does it pay off to go online 2 which is the equilibrium industry structure 3 what is the implication of this business model for consumers we study these issues in an oligopoly setting and show that clicks and mortar arises as the equilibrium channel structure however we find that this equilibrium does not necessarily imply higher profits for the firms in some cases rather it emerges as a strategic necessity consumers are generally better off with clicks and mortar retailers if firms align with pure e tailers to reach the online market we show that a prisoner s dilemma type equilibrium may arise

fertilizer market development a comparative analysis of ethiopia kenya and zambia abstract this article synthesizes case studies from kenya zambia and ethiopia to assess how differences in the implementation of fertilizer marketing policies have affected the costs and risks borne by marketing actors the investment response by private traders and fertilizer consumption financial cost accounting techniques indicate that domestic marketing costs account for 50 or more of farm gate prices the sum of importer wholesaler and retailer profit margins generally account for less than 10 there are opportunities to reduce domestic marketing costs through the following reducing port fees coordinating the timing of fertilizer clearance from the port with up country transport reducing transport costs through port rail and road improvements reducing high fuel taxes and reducing the uncertainty associated with government input distribution programs that impose additional marketing costs on traders estimated reductions in the farm gate price of fertilizer from implementing the full range of options identified in each country range from 11 to 18 price reductions of this magnitude if passed along to farmers would increase farmers effective demand for fertilizer investments in selected publically provided goods often considered outside the scope of fertilizer marketing policy per se strongly affect the costs of fertilizer farmers willingness to pay for it and hence the performance of markets

advertising quality and sales this paper investigates claims that firm specific effects in advertising sales models can be attributed to a positive correlation between advertising and product quality using a standard koyck transformation on an unbalanced panel dataset of uk firms the implied long lasting effects of advertising disappear when firm specific effects are taken into account this conclusion is robust to various econometric approaches however when the firm specific effects are retrieved they are found to correlate strongly with mean advertising there is no discernible link between the firm specific effects and whether a firm perceives quality to be an important form of competition in its market the results give no support to the idea that advertising affects sales through associated product quality they are consistent with the persistence of advertising within firms over time

a strategic analysis of dual channel supply chain design with price and delivery lead time considerations abstract this paper extends the work of chiang et al 2003 by investigating how price and delivery lead time decisions affect channel configuration strategy under either the manufacturer owned or the decentralized mode we show the choice of channel structure depends on customer acceptance of the online channel and the cost parameters following a threshold policy in both forms of ownership we prove that the strategic use of direct marketing to mitigate the double marginalization the major finding in chiang et al 2003 still holds even in this general situation moreover pareto zone exists where both manufacturer and retailer outperform their counterparts in the traditional indirect channel only case thus indicating that mitigating double marginalization may bring mutual benefits we also compare pricing and delivery lead time decisions between different forms of ownership or between different channel structures under the same form of ownership the manufacturer adopts a slow down deliver later approach and speeds up delivery to serve customers with a higher sensitivity to delivery lead time when he owns the whole indirect channel but chooses to stay fast and brag about better services and surprisingly slows down the speed of service when customers are more sensitive to delivery lead time due to the internal competition between two channels in the decentralized mode

intertemporal aggregation of heterogeneous consumers abstract this paper deals with a relatively unexamined facet of stochastic brand switching models their connection to market share models we derive a composite market share model based on aggregation of heterogeneous markovian type individuals each purchasing a brand from the product class several times during the period of analysis the characteristics of this composite model are examined and interestingly suggest a markov type market share model moreover this examination sheds some light on a phenomenon uncovered in econometric studies of market share response to advertising the slow decay of the lagged market share term as the length of the measurement period is increased

the length of the effect of aggregate advertising on aggregate consumption abstract we investigate the longevity of aggregate advertising effects on aggregate consumption over the period 1947 1988 using updated methods the effects appear to linger for nine years raising further questions perhaps a return to this near dormant area of research could be productive

life satisfaction dynamics with quarterly life event data using life satisfaction responses from australian panel data we examine the questions of when and to what extent individuals are affected by major positive and negative life events including changes in financial situation marital status death of a close relative and being the victim of crime the key advantage of our data is that we are able to identify these events on a quarterly basis rather than on the yearly basis used by previous studies we find evidence that life events are not randomly distributed that individuals anticipate major events to a large extent and that they fully adapt to many events within 12 months the estimates can be used to calculate monetary values needed to compensate individuals for life events using a new valuation methodology that incorporates these dynamic factors produces considerably smaller compensation valuations than those calculated using the standard approach

viewpoint replication in economics this examination of the role and potential for replication in economics points out the paucity of both pure replication checking on others published papers using their data and scientific replication using data representing different populations in one s own work or in a comment several controversies in empirical economics are used to illustrate how and how not to behave when replicating others work the incentives for replication are examined and proposals aimed at journal editors and authors are advanced that might stimulate an activity that most economists applaud but few perform

advertising as a predictor of investment the collapse of iceland s financial system in october 2008 is used as a natural experiment to test whether advertising decisions have a forward looking component the results show that changes in the volume of advertisements precede changes in investment

do vouchers improve government fertilizer distribution evidence from nigeria government distribution of subsidized fertilizer in sub saharan africa is often characterized by cumbersome administrative processes and diversion of the product from the proclaimed beneficiaries this study uses propensity score matching techniques to analyze an input voucher program in nigeria that was meant to demonstrate an alternative and more efficient distribution mechanism for subsidized fertilizer we find that participants in the 2009 voucher program received more bags of subsidized fertilizer than nonparticipants and also paid significantly lower prices compared to those who purchased directly from the market on average however participating in the voucher program did not improve the timeliness of fertilizer receipt or the quality of the product where statistically significant participating in the program increased the likelihood that the product was received late and that some complaint about the product s quality was made as many developing countries particularly in sub saharan africa adopt the use of input vouchers or scale up already existing programs this study demonstrates when the distribution of subsidized fertilizer via vouchers improves farmers timely access to good and more affordable fertilizer it highlights some key issues to be considered in order to expand the dimensions of success of well targeted input voucher programs

impacts of subsidized hybrid seed on indicators of economic well being among smallholder maize growers in zambia we test the hypotheses that subsidies on hybrid seed change maize production total household income the severity of poverty and relative deprivation among smallholder maize growers in zambia the analysis contributes to the literature by measuring the quantitative effects of seed as compared to fertilizer subsidies on indicators of household well being rather than input demand we apply a combination of econometric approaches to a nationally representative balanced panel of smallholder maize growing households and invoke the chain rule to generate quantitative estimates of impacts per kilogram of subsidized seed our findings demonstrate that in the initial years of the program subsidized seed enhanced the well being of smallholder maize growers according to each indicator but by small magnitudes simple calculations suggest high private and social benefit cost ratios when benefits are measured in terms of household income although magnitudes are sensitive to seed price and administrative costs

are wages habit forming evidence from micro data although utility functions play a central role in economics the axiom that utility depends only on the absolute levels of its arguments is rarely tested this paper uses panel data on 2000 british employees who remain with the same employer and who are not promoted from one wave to the next it is shown that one important measure of well being overall job satisfaction is strongly positively correlated with the change in the worker s pay between waves but is unrelated to the current level of pay empirical tests suggest that a reference dependent satisfaction function where individual well being depends on current pay relative to past pay is more consistent with these regression results than are productivity or agency explanations of increasing wage profiles some evidence is presented of greater job satisfaction effects of pay rises for lower paid less well educated and younger workers these results provide some micro evidence consistent with the theory widespread in social science of habituation individuals may become used to any given level of consumption or income as such they tie in with the finding that a country s well being as measured by the average happiness of its citizens is only weakly correlated with its per capita gnp

fast food restaurant advertising on television and its influence on childhood obesity childhood obesity is an escalating problem around the world that is especially detrimental as its effects carry on into adulthood to estimate the effects of television fast food restaurant advertising on children and adolescents with respect to being overweight this paper employs the 1979 child young adult national longitudinal survey of youth and the 1997 national longitudinal survey of youth to estimate the effects of television fast food restaurant advertising on children and adolescents with respect to being overweight a ban on these advertisements would reduce the number of overweight children ages 3 11 in a fixed population by 18 percent and would reduce the number of overweight adolescents ages 12 18 by 14 percent the elimination of the tax deductibility of this type of advertising would produce smaller declines of between 5 and 7 percent in these outcomes but would impose lower costs on children and adults who consume fast food in moderation because positive information about restaurants that supply this type of food would not be completely banned from television

a meta analysis of marketing communication carryover effects abstractto optimally set marketing communication marcom budgets reliable estimates of short term elasticities and carryover effects are required empirical generalizations from meta analyses of prior field studies can help guide these decisions however the last such meta analysis of marcom carryover effects was performed on koyck model based estimates collected before 1984 and was confined to mass media advertising the authors update and extend extant empirical generalizations via two meta analyses of carryover estimates compiled from studies encompassing personal selling targeted advertising and mass media advertising using diverse model forms until 2015 the first is focused on and utilizes 918 estimates of the carryover proportion of the total effect termed long term share of the total effect and the second focuses on 863 derivable estimates of 90 implied duration intervals the authors find the mean long term shares of the total effect for personal selling 687 and targeted advertisin

relative income effects on subjective well being in the cross section abstract recent work suggests that a person s subjective well being swb depends to a large degree on relative income focusing on the underlying identification this paper makes four contributions to this literature it describes the aggregation problem with past studies implements an estimation strategy to overcome this problem finds micro level evidence in support of the hypothesis that relative income does matter in individual assessments of swb and uses cross section estimates to replicate the aggregate time series the evidence further indicates that relative income effects may be smaller at low income levels the results are obtained from ordered probit techniques and the general social survey gss

when information dominates comparison abstract we propose a micro econometric evaluation of the relation between life satisfaction and income distribution using a balanced panel survey of the russian population russian longitudinal monitoring survey rlms running from 1994 to 2000 covering 4685 individuals we show that in the context of the very volatile russian environment hirschman s q j econ 87 1973 544 tunnel effect conjecture seems to be confirmed variables reflecting income distribution do not influence satisfaction through social comparisons individuals rather seem to use their informational content in order to form their expectations the reference group s income thereby exerts a positive influence on individual satisfaction which contrasts with other studies on the subject inequality indices do not affect individual welfare

zambia s input subsidy programs over the last decade subsidies for fertilizer and hybrid maize seed have re emerged as a cornerstone of the government of the republic of zambia s grz s agricultural development and poverty reduction strategies this article reviews the farmer input support programme fisp and other grz input subsidy programs since structural adjustment it then synthesizes existing and presents new empirical evidence on the programs targeting outcomes and effects results suggest that although 73 of smallholder households cultivate less than 2 hectares of land and that these households constitute 78 of the smallholder farms below the us 1 25 capita day poverty line the majority 55 of fisp fertilizer goes to households that cultivate larger areas other factors constant wealthier households receive more subsidized inputs subsidized fertilizer promotes maize intensification and extensification at the expense of fallow land but an additional kg of subsidized fertilizer only raises maize output by 1 88 kg on average as a result of low maize fertilizer response rates poor targeting crowding out and diversion of fertilizer intended for the program financial benefit cost ratios for fisp fertilizer are well below one the article concludes with recommended reforms to fisp including that it be downsized and the savings invested in known drivers of pro poor agricultural growth

electoral motives and the subnational allocation of foreign aid in sub saharan africa abstract this paper examines how electoral motives shape the subnational allocation of foreign aid commitments by employing a newly constructed geocoded dataset for 14 sub saharan african countries over the period 2000 2012 our results provide strong evidence of a core voter strategy african leaders diverting chinese aid towards regions with a high concentration of political supporters however no evidence of such preferential treatment is found for world bank aid suggesting that aid from traditional donors is less vulnerable to political manipulation our results also reveal that checks and balances in recipient countries are an important mediating factor of aid misallocation while copartisan regions receive larger amounts of chinese aid in environments with weak checks and balances these effects disappear when stronger checks and balances are in place this paper also offers case study evidence from ghana exploiting the 2009 regime change in ghana and using a difference in differences framework we provide further support of copartisan targeting and confirm that chinese aid is more manipulable than world bank aid in this respect

election goals and income redistribution recent evidence from albania this paper examines the impact of political competition on block grants from federal to sub federal levels of government we model the extent and direction of income redistribution as determined proximately by the political agendas of central decision makers and at a deeper level by the institutions within which they nd themselves operating we contrast two political objective functions that yield di erent empirical predictions of the ways in which politics should a ect scal policy lessons learned here may prove important in understanding limits on the types of redistribution possible via block grants given the institutional framework in both developing and developed countries 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved jel classixcation h1 h7 o1

carryover effects and temporal aggregation in a partial adjustment model framework this paper discusses the impact of aggregating time series observations on the specification of an econometric model in the framework of a familiar sales response model temporally aggregated specifications are derived it is illustrated that different aggregation schemes provide different models each of them having appealing characteristics furthermore the derived specifications illustrate that frequently calibrated models are misspecified and as such provide biased estimates which significantly affect the interpretation of the results some suggestions are provided for estimating the exact specifications in such a way that the obtained parameter estimates provide correct insights into the underlying response process

a puzzle for adaptive theory abstract over the life cycle aspirations for material goods grow commensurately with consumer wealth but aspirations for marriage and the number and quality of children do not change much the puzzle is why there is this difference between life domains in the extent to which aspirations adapt to actual circumstances the findings come from a cohort analysis of 1978 and 1994 survey responses on the good life

adaptation anticipation and social interaction in happiness an integrated error correction approach abstract adaptation anticipation and social reference effects on happiness are strongly interrelated phenomena however in the existing empirical literature these phenomena are mainly studied in isolation from each other therefore using soep panel data for the years 1984 2007 this study offers an integrated investigation of the implications of these three phenomena for the dynamics of individual life satisfaction i focus on the short and long run effects of income and social reference income but i control for similar dynamics with respect to a large set of control variables gmm estimates for instrumented income variables in an error correction model indicate an insignificant future income effect a significant and positive current income effect and an insignificant long run income effect on life satisfaction with significant hedonic adaptation social reference income has a significant negative and strong impact in the long run but not in the short run consequently increasing own income and reference income by the same percentage tends to have an insignificant effect in the long term but a significant and positive effect in the short term adaptation to an income shock and reinforcement of a reference income shock take place for more than 90 within three years on the basis of these results a more comprehensive explanation of the easterlin paradox than those given in the literature is presented

disrupting demand for commercial seed input subsidies in malawi and zambia summary this study uses nationally representative household level panel data from malawi and zambia to identify the determinants of subsidized maize seed and fertilizer receipt and to estimate how input subsidies affect households commercial purchases of improved maize seed varieties in both countries we find that households in areas where the ruling party won the last presidential election acquire significantly more subsidized inputs than other households results also indicate that each additional kilogram of subsidized maize seed acquired by a household reduces its commercial improved maize seed purchases by 0 58 kg in malawi and by 0 49 kg in zambia on average

how do fertilizer subsidy programs affect total fertilizer use in sub saharan africa crowding out diversion and benefit cost assessments a major determinant of input subsidy programs effects on the achievement of national policy goals is the extent to which they raise total fertilizer use this study synthesizes recent literature on how the new generation of targeted input subsidy programs has affected national fertilizer use after accounting for crowding effects and derives benefit cost bc estimates of the fertilizer subsidy programs for kenya malawi and zambia after accounting for crowding out and diversion we highlight two major findings first accounting for the illicit diversion of program fertilizer can profoundly influence estimates of how fertilizer subsidy programs affect total fertilizer use and program impacts given recent evidence that 33 or more of total program fertilizer may be diverted before being received by intended beneficiary farmers the failure to account for program diversion is shown to overestimate the contribution of the subsidy programs to national fertilizer use by 67 3 in the case of malawi by 61 6 for zambia and by 138 0 for kenya the second major finding is that the incremental value of maize output produced from these subsidy programs is considerably less than their costs in most years except under unusually high maize price assumptions conventional bc analyses that do not account for crowding out and diversion may seriously overestimate the benefits of input subsidy programs greater attention to program design and implementation details to reduce problems of crowding out and diversion can substantially raise the returns to such programs

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

estimating micro relationships from macro data a comparative study of two approximations of the brand loyal model under temporal aggregation the data interval bias issue in econometric studies of the relationship between advertising and sales first was discussed in jmr by clarke in 1976 within the last few years several studies report

advertising and the aggregate c 0 onsumption function the economic effects of advertising have been a much studied and hotly debated topic for a number of years by now there is fairly general agreement that inter alia advertising is important as a barrierto entry see joe bain william comanor and thomas a wilson leonard weiss and that advertising does succeed in shifting demand for individual products see neil borden nicholas kaldor robert dorfman and peter steiner lester telser 1962 kristian palda but there is little agreement as to the effect of advertising on aggregate consumption john kenneth galbraith would have us believe that much of consumers spending is managed from madison avenue but such a view has still to find universal acceptance 2 what is surprising however is that no one who has been party to the rather spirited debate generated by the tall gentleman s thesis has seen fit to examine by econometric methods the proposition that advertising has an impact on the aggregate consumption function to undertake this is the purpose of this paper in a modest yet not insignificant way we feel that we have made some progress based on an analysis of advertising expenditures in the aggregate our results suggest that advertising does in fact tend to increase consumption at the expense of saving but as to what the causal mechanism underlying this is we unfortunately cannot say it may be that advertising actually succeeds in altering tastes a la galbraith but then again it may be that advertising is simply serving to bring new goods and services to the attention of consumers as already noted our analysis concentrates on the effects of advertising in the aggregate and is conducted in the framework of the state adjustment model of hendrik houthakker and lester taylor as applied to aggregate consumption following houthakker and taylor two variants of the model have been employed the first focuses on consumption and the second on personal saving section i presents a brief description of the houthakker taylor h t model and discusses the ways that it can be extended to accommodate advertising this section also provides a short description of the data and methods of estimation sections ii and iii are empirical section ii being devoted to a presentation of results and section iii to their critical evaluation the paper is then concluded with some final observations in section iv

the political effects of agricultural subsidies in africa evidence from malawi across sub saharan africa agricultural subsidy programs have again become a common strategy for combatting rural poverty increasing agricultural production and reducing food insecurity despite a large literature examining subsidies effects on output and welfare little is known about their political effects this paper examines malawi s agricultural input subsidy programme one of the largest and most expensive programs implemented which was launched by the government in 2005 we examine whether the incumbent party the democratic progressive party headed by president bingu wa mutharika benefited from malawi s subsidy program by examining a longitudinal dataset of 1 846 rural malawians interviewed in 2008 and again in 2010 the individual level data show no evidence that the subsidy program was targeted to mutharika s co ethnics or co partisans our analysis further demonstrates that the subsidy program increased support for the incumbent party these results suggest that even when parties are unable or unwilling to target distributional programs at the local level they may nonetheless derive political benefits as anti poverty programs including agricultural subsidies to small scale farmers become increasingly common across the continent our results suggest that they may help to explain patterns of party affiliation and vote choice particularly where traditional patterns of partisan affiliation related to ethnic or regional identities weaken

advertising and aggregate consumption a bayesian dsge assessment aggregate data reveal that advertising in the u s absorbs approximately 2 of gdp and has a well defined pattern over the business cycle being strongly procyclical and highly volatile because the purpose of brand advertising is to foster sales we ask whether such spending has an appreciable effect on the pattern of aggregate consumption and through this avenue on economic activity this question is addressed by developing a dynamic general equilibrium model in which households preferences for differentiated goods depend on the intensity of brand advertising which is endogenously determined by profit maximizing firms once the model is estimated to match the u s economy it argues that the presence of advertising in the long run raises aggregate consumption and hours worked eventually fostering economic activity we also find that advertising has a relevant impact on fluctuations in consumption investment and markup over the business cycle all of the abovementioned effects are proven to epend crucially on the degree of competitiveness of advertising at the firm level

ideology tactics and efficiency in redistributive politics we model the electoral politics of redistribution when voters and parties care about inequality in addition to their private concerns for consumption and votes respectively ideological concerns about income redistribution lead each party to adopt a general proportional income tax adjusted to appeal to the ideological leanings of high clout groups with disproportionately many swing voters which the parties also ply with pork barrel projects our results relate to director s law which says that redistributive politics favors middle classes at the expense of both rich and poor

a time of agric rethinking the failure of agricultural programs in 1970s ghana summary recent interest in a new green revolution in africa has revived debate about state intervention in agricultural markets and biotechnology these debates take for granted that the first wave of green revolution interventions in africa failed to influence small scale food farmers this essay uses oral historical and documentary evidence from ghana s northern region to revisit the evidentiary basis of this assessment tracing how the production of aggregate data and changing interpretive frameworks in the 1970s and 1980s allowed policymakers to ignore the experiences of farmers the essay advocates for the role of micro historical analysis in assessing africa s recent agricultural past

advertising in consumer goods industries durability economies of scale and heterogeneity hree prominent explanations can be offered for the large and persistent recorded profit rates of firms in heavily advertised consumer goods industries these explanations are based on durability scale economies and heterogeneity for advertising respectively the first explanation posits a prolonged durability for advertising as a consequence recorded profit rates are overstated because accounting convention expenses advertising rather than properly treating it as an investment in durable assets 2 when the durability of advertising is sufficiently prolonged normal returns on the unreported advertising assets fully account for apparent windfall profits a second explanation rests on the presumed collusion

the electoral benefits of unemployment clientelism and distributive politics abstract we show that in the month prior to the 2003 argentine presidential election the expenditures of an argentine poverty relief program exhibit a partisan bias taking into consideration the number of potential recipients the unemployed with children 18 years old or less the counties that were ideologically against the incumbent received a disproportionately large amount of the spending hence instead of targeting swing or core districts as established in the distributive politics literature in argentina the incumbent targeted opposition strongholds to identify these effects and to classify districts into swing core and opposition ones we exploit the 2001 crises in argentina in particular we use the 2001 political discontent that led to 15 of blank and null votes to estimate swing districts finally we also show that this tactical spending had an electoral purpose in counties where it was arguably cheaper to monitor the recipients voting behavior the spending was significantly larger in return the clientelist exchange took place in districts with greater spending and monitoring thus the politicians incentives to design an appropriate poverty relief program may be at odds with their electoral motivation

an empirical analysis of dynamic nonprice competition in an oligopolistic industry this article develops a dynamic model of nonprice competition in an oligopolistic industry and uses it to analyze advertising competition in the u s cigarette industry the model generalizes existing studies by allowing advertising to affect both firm market shares and the total size of the market the model also allows dynamic conjectural variations to arise from the intertemporal links created by the durability of advertising we use these dynamic conjectural variations to distinguish alternative models of competitive interaction we estimate the complete model of firm production demand and advertising choice by using data for u s cigarette producers the results indicate that firm advertising primarily affects the level of market demand with a firm s effect on rival firms market shares arising through variations in the number of brands sold empirical results on firm behavior suggest that firms act as if their advertising choices will alter the future advertising choices of rival firms in both the high tar and low tar cigarette markets

the stability of cigarette demand the relative effects of various governmental interventions upon cigarette consumption is important to policy makers historically the demand for cigarettes has been quite unstable previous studie

temporal aggregation the data interval bias and empirical estimation of bimonthly relations from annual data in an important study reviewing the literature on econometric studies of the relationship between advertising and sales clarke clarke darral g 1976 econometric measurement of the duration of advertising effects on sales j marketing res 13 november 345 357 concluded that the implied duration interval of the effects of advertising on sales were too long when the studies used annual data a theoretical explanation is provided here for the observation of parameter estimates which vary with the data interval employed in the analysis parameter estimates are developed on the basis of data aggregated at various levels of temporal aggregation and compared with theoretical values it is demonstrated that it is possible to recover bimonthly parameters when only annual data are available

the durability of advertising revisited recent cross section studies find that advertising is relatively long lived providing support for treating advertising as capital this paper models the firm s advertising decision treating advertising and product quality as complements the model predicts that failing to control for differences in firm specific factors positively correlated with the return to advertising will understate advertising s direct effect on sales and overstate its durability the authors empirical study using several years of data for over four hundred firms confirms these predictions advertising s apparent life shrinks dramatically when firm specific factors are held constant they also find no support for the steady state assumptions critical to intangible assets models copyright 1994 by blackwell publishing ltd

fertilizer subsidies political influence and local food prices in sub saharan africa evidence from nigeria abstract the last decade has seen a resurgence in the use of fertilizer subsidies in sub saharan africa however there is limited empirical evidence on the effects of fertilizer subsidy programs on local food prices using an instrumental variables approach we explore the effect of a fertilizer subsidy program on the seasonal growth rates of grain prices in nigeria our results suggest that the fertilizer subsidy program had very small effects on the growth rates of grain prices between the post planting and post harvesting seasons we also find that political influence played a role in the distribution of subsidized fertilizer we discuss how the weak effects on the price growth rates may be caused by low market orientation output market structures greater focus on farmers incomes low marginal productivity of fertilizer and politically influenced targeting

innovation grants to smallholder farmers revisiting the key assumptions in the impact pathways grant funds specifically targeted to smallholder farmers to facilitate innovation are a promising agricultural policy instrument they stimulate smallholders to experiment with improved practices and to engage with research extension and business development services providers however evidence on impact and effectiveness of these grants is scarce partly because attribution of changes in practices and performance to the grant alone is challenging and the grant is often invested in innovation processes that benefitted from other support in the past we discuss three modalities vouchers business development matching grants and farmer driven innovation support funds our review points to an important and transversal outcome area of innovation grant systems the creation of human and social capital to sustain creative thinking and innovative practices harmonising measurement on these outcomes could enhance the usefulness and comparability of impact studies and facilitate benchmarking of different policy options for smallholder innovation

wearout effects of different advertising themes a dynamic bayesian model of the advertising sales relationship models of advertising response implicitly assume that the entire advertising budget is spent on disseminating one message in practice managers use different themes of advertising for example price advertisements versus product advertisements and within each theme they employ different versions of an advertisement in this study we evaluate the dynamic effects of different themes of advertising that have been employed in a campaign we develop a model that jointly considers the effects of wearout as well as that of forgetting in the context of an advertising campaign that employs five different advertising themes we quantify the differential wearout effects across the different themes of advertising and examine the interaction effects between the different themes using a bayesian dynamic linear model dlm such a response model can help managers decide on the optimal allocation of resources across the portfolio of ads as well as better manage their scheduling we develop a model to show how our response model parameters can be used to improve the effectiveness of advertising budget allocation across different themes we find that a reallocation of resources across different themes according to our model results in a significant improvement in demand

people do not adapt new analyses of the dynamic effects of own and reference income on life satisfaction abstract do people adapt to changes in income in contradiction to much of the previous literature i find no evidence of adaptation to income in gsoep 1984 2015 and ukhls 1996 2017 data furthermore i find that people also do not adapt to changes in reference income instead reference income effects may be subject to reinforcement over time following the empirical approach of vendrik 2013 i obtain these findings by estimating life satisfaction equations in which contemporaneous and lagged terms for a respondent s own household income and their estimated reference income are simultaneously entered additionally i instrument for own income and include lags of a large set of controls what was found to be adaptation to raw household income in previous studies turns out to have been driven by reinforcement of an initially small negative effect of household size that grows large over time implications of this result for the estimation of equivalence scales with subjective data are discussed

the political economy of fertilizer subsidy programs in africa evidence from zambia fertilizer subsidy programs have re emerged as popular policy tools in sub saharan africa despite a burgeoning body of literature on program impacts the political economy of the programs remains poorly understood in particular there is a dearth of empirical evidence to support or refute the conventional wisdoms that governments systematically target subsidized inputs to certain areas based on past voting patterns and that fertilizer subsidies win votes this article discusses the theoretical links between government targeting of subsidized fertilizer and voter behavior then uses panel data from zambia to empirically test these conventional wisdoms results suggest that zambia s movement for multi party democracy governments targeted more subsidized fertilizer to households in areas where it had strong support in the previous presidential election however contrary to conventional wisdom marginal changes in the scale or coverage of the fertilizer subsidy program had no statistically significant effect on the share or number of votes won by incumbent presidents

rejoinder to the comment by andrew dorward and ephraim chirwa on jayne t s d mather n mason and j ricker gilbert 2013 how do fertilizer subsidy program affect total fertilizer use in sub saharan africa crowding out diversion and benefit cost assessments agricultural economics 44 6 687 703

living in the shadow of the past financial profiles and well being we here consider the link between individual financial profiles over time and well being as measured by life satisfaction we in particular look at annual self reported financial worsening and improvement information for over 25 000 individuals in australian panel data from 2002 to 2017 we first find that satisfaction falls rises with a contemporaneous major financial worsening improvement with worsening having the larger influence second the experience of these financial events in the past continues to be linked to current well being last only the order of financial improvement spells relates to well being a given number of past years where finances deteriorated has the same association with current well being whether the deterioration occurred in one continuous spell or was interrupted we last show that these associations are heterogeneous over the distribution of well being

individual well being in a dynamic perspective this paper explores the determinants of individual well being as measured by self reported levels of satisfaction with income making full use of the panel data nature of the german socio economic panel we provide empirical evidence for well being depending on absolute and on relative levels of income in a dynamic framework this finding holds after controlling for other influential factors in a multivariate setting the main novelty of the paper is the consideration of dynamic aspects individual s own history as well as the relative income performance with respect to the others living in the society under analysis do play a major role in the assessment of well being