government spending effects in low income countries abstract despite the voluminous literature on fiscal policy very few papers focus on low income countries lics this paper develops a new keynesian small open economy model to show analytically and numerically that several prevalent features of lics dependence on external financing public investment inefficiency and a low degree of home bias in public investment play important roles in government spending effects external financing increases the resource envelope mitigating the crowding out effects but it tends to appreciate the real exchange rate lowering traded output although capital scarcity in lics implies high returns to public capital low marginal investment efficiency can substantially dampen the output multiplier also public investment may not be effective in stimulating output in the short run as lics often rely on imports to a large extent to carry out public investment projects weakening its role as a short run demand stimulus

to build above the limit implementation of land use regulations in urban china abstract this paper studies the implementation of land use regulations in urban china in particular we investigate land developers compliance with floor to area ratio far regulations using a unique set of residential land parcel data from 30 major chinese cities matched with the corresponding residential development projects built on those parcels in our sample in more than 20 of the cases developers built above the regulatory far limits in the ex post land development and the total floor area built in those cases increased 21 5 over the regulatory limit our analysis finds that attractive land location attributes tend to induce developers to pursue upward adjustments of far moreover developers who are more likely to have special relationships with government officials tend to make larger upward adjustments our estimates suggest that there exists a significant gap between the privately optimal far that maximizes land value and the regulatory far this gap is only modestly reduced by corrupt ties with government officials implying that far regulations have imposed a highly restrictive constraint on china s urban land development even given imperfect compliance

on monoculture and the structure of crop rotations an issue when seeking to identify rotation choice is persistence in yield enhancement and input saving carry over effects focusing on carry over length and the monoculture decision we use quasi convexity of choice functions to develop price independent and price dependent principles concerning rotation structure iowa corn soybean rotation data suggest corn has one year memory for corn soybeans in the prior year is yield increasing 16 5 bu ac and nitrogen saving 51 lb ac the hypothesis that soybean has two year memory cannot be rejected corn in the prior year two years increases yield by 7 bu ac 11 6 bu ac we simulate to find price and practice subsidy levels that support different rotations

the economics of urban sprawl theory and evidence on the spatial sizes of cities many commentators believe that the phenomenon of urban sprawl which is characterized by vigorous spatial expansion of urban areas is a symptom of an economic system gone awry by transforming pastoral farmland into often unattractive suburbs sprawl is thought to disrupt a natural balance between urban and non urban land uses leading to a deplorable degradation of the landscape this sentiment is often translated into policy through zoning restrictions designed to inhibit the conversion of land from agricultural to urban use see bryant and conklin 1975 the economist s view of urban expansion stands in stark contrast to this emotionally charged indictment of sprawl economists believe that urban spatial size is determined by an orderly market process which correctly allocates land between urban and agricultural uses the model underlying this view which was originally developed by muth 1969 and mills 1972 and more completely analyzed by wheaton 1974 suggests that urban spatial size is determined in a straightforward way by a number of exogenous variables by showing empirically that urban size is related to the given variables population income agricultural rent and commuting cost in the manner predicted by the model the present paper achieves two goals first the empirical results suggest that the economist s view of urban sprawl is justified rather than being determined by a process which indiscriminately consumes agricultural land urban sizes are the result of an orderly market equilibrium where competing claims to the land are appropriately balanced 2 second by confirming the urban size predictions of the underlying model the empirical results constitute yet another piece of evidence validating the basic framework of urban economic analysis 3 the plan of the paper is as follows section ii sketches the structure of the muth mills model and presents the main comparative static results relevant to urban sprawl with the model s predictions in focus section iii discusses the sample and the data and section iv presents the empirical results section v offers conclusions

the effect of work experience on female wages and labour supply this paper develops and implements a semiparametric estimator for investigating with panel data the importance of human capital and time nonseparable preferences to females when aggregate shocks are present it provides a set of conditions for making statistical inferences about agents expectations of their correlated future choices from a short panel under the assumption that observed allocations are pareto optimal a dynamic model of female labour supply and participation is estimated in which experience on the job raises future wages and time spent off the job in the past directly affects current utility or indirectly through productivity in the nonmarket sector

causes of sprawl a portrait from space we study the extent to which u s urban development is sprawling and what determines differences in sprawl across space using remote sensing data to track the evolution of land use on a grid of 8 7 billion 30 30 meter cells we measure sprawl as the amount of undeveloped land surrounding an average urban dwelling the extent of sprawl remained roughly unchanged between 1976 and 1992 although it varied dramatically across metropolitan areas ground water availability temperate climate rugged terrain decentralized employment early public transport infrastructure uncertainty about metropolitan growth and unincorporated land in the urban fringe all increase sprawl

do land revenue windfalls create a political resource curse evidence from china abstract by analyzing a panel on the political turnovers of 4390 county leaders in china during 1999 2008 we find that the revenue windfalls accrued to these officials from land sales have undermined the effectiveness of the promotion system for government officials instead of rewarding efforts made to boost gdp growth promotion is positively correlated with signaling efforts and with corruption the robust positive relationship between land revenue windfalls and political turnover or specifically promotion suggests that those who are politically connected to their superiors and those beyond the prime age for promotion are the primary beneficiaries the case for corruption is substantiated by the evidence inferred from anti corruption crackdowns which reveals that the additional effect of land revenue on political turnover and size of bureaucracy a proxy for corruption decreases significantly in crackdowns but that land revenue has no effect on city construction expenditure a proxy for signaling

a conceptual framework of adoption of an agricultural innovation abstract in this paper we present a conceptual framework of individual farmers decisions on adoption of a new innovation using the example of a new crop species this framework overcomes the shortcomings of a number of previous studies it represents the adoption of an innovation as a dynamic decision problem spanning at least several years the model allows for generation of potentially valuable information from trialing the innovation the value of such trials is due to development of skills e g in agronomic management of a crop as well as reduction in uncertainty about the innovation s long term profitability the framework also includes the farmer s personal perceptions managerial abilities and risk preferences in order to properly represent the adoption decision process the influences of socio demographic factors within the framework are discussed

globalization and labour market adjustment how fast and at what cost in this paper we argue that the flexibility of an economy s labour market plays a role in determining the gains from trade liberalization the level of short run adjustment costs and the relative value of these two measures to do so we describe the model introduced in davidson and matusz 2000 which allows us to solve for adjustment costs when workers vary according to ability and jobs differ in terms of the skills that they require we then report results based on simulations of this model we find that economies with sluggish labour markets have the least to gain from liberalization the reason is that while the removal of trade barriers creates large benefits they are almost completely offset by large short run adjustment costs in contrast we find that with either very flexible or very slothful labour market gains from liberalization are always significantly larger than the short run adjustment costs copyright 2000 by oxford university press

lobbying political competition and local land supply recent evidence from spain abstract we analyze whether local land supply is influenced by the degree of political competition and interpret the findings as indications of the influence wielded by land developer lobbies we use a new database including both political and land supply data for more than 2 000 spanish municipalities for the period 2003 2007 in spain land use policies are largely a local responsibility with municipalities needing periodically to pass comprehensive land use plans the main policy variable in these plans and the one analyzed here is the amount of land classified for potential development we measure local political competition as the margin of victory of the incumbent government this variable is however potentially endogenous since not only do votes affect policy but also policy is expected to affect votes to deal with this problem we instrument this variable using the votes at the first national legislative elections following the re establishment of democracy and votes actually obtained regionally at the same type of election the results indicate that stiffer political competition does indeed reduce the amount of new land designated for development this effect is found to be most marked in suburbs in towns with a high percentage of commuters and homeowners and in municipalities governed by the left

modelling embedded risk in peasant agriculture methodological insights from northern malawi abstract using a linear programming model of farming systems in northern malawi the conditions under which peasant farm household models may need to allow for embedded risk are investigated tactical sequential responses to uncertainty are found to be more important to labour scarce households with limited access to capital and to credit markets compared with semi sequential programming discrete stochastic programming dsp provided more efficient solutions for problems involving embedded risk there may be intuitive advantages in presenting results from dsp models in terms of a semi sequential strategy

stochastic utility efficient programming of organic dairy farms opportunities to make sequential decisions and adjust activities as a season progresses and more information becomes available characterise the farm management process in this paper we present a discrete stochastic two stage utility efficient programming model of organic dairy farms which includes risk aversion in the decision maker s objective function as well as both embedded risk stochastic programming with recourse and non embedded risk stochastic programming without recourse historical farm accountancy data and subjective judgements were combined to assess the nature of the uncertainty that affects the possible consequences of the decisions the programming model was used within a stochastic dominance framework to examine optimal strategies in organic dairy systems in norway

stochastic rangeland use under capital constraints the stocking density on kazakhstan s extensive rangelands is well below traditional levels to analyze dynamic flock performance we develop a stochastic dynamic programming model for livestock systems with stochastic forage production the model contains continuous five state and 12 control variables allowing improved characterization of the biophysical relationships and economic tradeoffs inherent in such systems most kazakhstan herders have restricted access to capital the model indicates that the cost of capital strongly affects flock size and productivity we conclude that capital constraints are important to explaining the current low stocking density improving capital markets in rural areas warrants policy attention

services outsourcing and innovation an empirical investigation we provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of the links between international services outsourcing domestic outsourcing profits and innovation using plant level data we find a positive effect of international outsourcing of services on innovative activity at the plant level such a positive effect can also be observed for domestic outsourcing of services but the magnitude is smaller this makes intuitive sense as international outsourcing allows more scope for exploiting international factor price differentials therefore giving the establishment higher profits and more scope to restructure production activities towards innovation we also find that international outsourcing has a positive effect on profitability as predicted by theory while this is not true for domestic sourcing the results are robust to various specifications and an instrumental variables analysis

understanding china s urban pollution dynamics china s ongoing urban economic growth has sharply increased the population s per capita income lowered the count of people living below the poverty line and caused major environmental problems we survey the growing literature investigating the causes and consequences of china s urban pollution challenges we begin by studying how urban population and industrial growth impacts local pollution levels and greenhouse gas production as the urban population grows richer its demand for private transportation and electricity sharply increases such privately beneficial activity exacerbates urban pollution externalities facing these severe environmental challenges china s urbanites increasingly demand quality of life progress we survey the emerging literature investigating the demand for environmental progress in china progress in mitigating externalities hinges on whether the powerful central and local governments choose to address these issues we analyze the political economy of whether government officials have strong incentives to tackle lingering urban externalities we conclude by discussing future research opportunities at the intersection of environmental and urban economics jel o18 p25 p28 q53 r23 r41 r58

china s land market auctions evidence of corruption this paper studies the urban land market in china in 2003 2007 in china all urban land is owned by the state leasehold use rights for land for re development are sold by city governments and are a key source of city revenue leasehold sales are viewed as a major venue for corruption prompting a number of reforms over the years reforms now require all leasehold rights be sold at public auction there are two main types of auction regular english auction and an unusual type which we call a two stage auction the latter type of auction seems more subject to corruption and to side deals between potential bidders and the auctioneer absent corruption theory suggests that two stage auctions would most likely maximize sales revenue for properties which are likely to have relatively few bidders or are cold which would suggest negative selection on property unobservables into such auctions however if such auctions are more corruptible that could involve positive selection as city officials divert hotter properties to a more corruptible auction form the paper finds that overall sales prices are lower for two stage auctions and there is strong evidence of positive selection the price difference is explained primarily by the fact that two stage auctions typically have just one bidder or no competition despite the vibrant land market in chinese cities

federalism as a commitment to reserving market incentives the authors advance a new perspective in the study of federalism their approach views federalism as a governance solution of the state to credibly preserving market incentives market incentives are preserved if the state is credibly prevented from compromising on future economic success and from bailing out future failures the salient features of federalism decentralization of information and authority and interjurisdictional competition help provide credible commitment or these purposes in addition the authors suggest that some federalism are self sustaining

political competition policy and growth theory and evidence from the us this paper develops a simple model to analyse how a lack of political competition may lead to policies that hinder economic growth we test the predictions of the model on panel data for the us states in these data we find robust evidence that lack of political competition in a state is associated with anti growth policies higher taxes lower capital spending and a reduced likelihood of using right to work laws we also document a strong link between low political competition and low income growth

a mapping of labor mobility costs in the developing world abstract estimates of labor mobility costs are needed to assess the responses of employment and wages to trade shocks when factor adjustment is costly available methods to estimate those costs rely on panel data which are seldom available in developing countries we propose a method to estimate mobility costs using readily obtainable data worldwide our estimator matches the changes in observed sectoral employment allocations with the predicted allocations from a model of costly labor adjustment we estimate a world map of labor mobility costs and we use those estimates to explore the response of labor markets to trade policy

imperfect mobility of labor across sectors and fiscal transmission abstract our paper investigates the sectoral effects of government spending shocks and highlights the role of labor mobility our var evidence for sixteen oecd countries reveals that a shock to government consumption by 1 of gdp increases non traded value added by 0 7 of gdp and generates a decline in traded value added the value added share of non tradables rises by 0 35 of gdp thus implying that the reallocation of resources accounts for 50 of the sectoral fiscal multiplier consistently our estimates show that the non traded sector is highly intensive in the government spending shock and experiences a labor inflow the shift of hours worked toward the non traded sector is however subject to mobility costs which vary across countries when we explore quantitatively the sectoral effects of a shock to government consumption that is highly intensive in non traded goods we find that the model can replicate the magnitude of the rise in the share of non tradables we document empirically once we allow for both labor mobility and capital installation costs financial openness also matters as it further biases the demand shock toward non tradables to account for the cross country dispersion in the responses of sectoral shares we estimate empirically we have to let the degree of labor mobility vary across countries

an equilibrium model of sectoral reallocation this paper constructs a two period two sector model in which there are permanent sectoral shocks it analyzes the equilibrium path of individual labor supply sectoral employment and duration of unemployment in response to these shocks equilibrium allocations are shown to be easy to characterize and comparative statics results are provided

methodological aspects of a mathematical programming model to evaluate soil tillage technologies in a risky environment abstract in this work we develop a methodology for the economic evaluation of soil tillage technologies in a risky environment and to capture the influence of farmer behaviour on his technology choice the model has short term activities that change with the type of year and long term activities in which sets of traction investment activities are included although these activities do not change with the type of year they lead to different availability of resources for each type of year since the same tractor has different available fieldwork days under different weather conditions we prove that the model is sensitive to the greater income variability resulting from the use of alternative technologies and to the balance between income and risk accounting for the probability of occurrence of each state of nature and giving an investment solution that considers the best production plan for each type of year

household impacts of tariffs data and results from agricultural trade protection how do trade reforms impact households in different parts of the income distribution this paper presents a new database the household impacts of tariffs data set which contains harmonized household survey and tariff data for 54 low and lower middle income countries the data cover highly disaggregated information on household budget and income shares for 53 agricultural products wage labor income nonfarm enterprise sales and transfers as well as spending on manufacturing and services using a stylized model of the first order impacts of import tariffs on household real income this paper quantifies the welfare implications of agricultural trade protection on average unilateral elimination of agricultural tariffs would increase household incomes by 2 50 percentage points import tariffs have highly heterogeneous effects across countries and within countries across households consumers and income earners the average standard deviation of the gains from trade within a country is 1 01 percentage points

a world of cities the causes and consequences of urbanization in poorer countries historically urban growth required enough development to grow and transport significant agricultural surpluses or a government effective enough to build an empire but there has been an explosion of poor mega cities over the last 30 years a simple urban model illustrates that in closed economies agricultural prosperity leads to more urbanization but that in an open economy urbanization increases with agricultural desperation the challenge of developing world mega cities is that poverty and weak governance reduce the ability to address the negative externalities that come with density this paper models the connection between urban size and institutional failure and shows that urban anonymity causes institutions to break down for large cities with weak governments draconian policies may be the only way to curb negative externalities suggesting a painful trade off between dictatorship and disorder a simple model suggests that private provision of infrastructure to reduce negative externalities is less costly when city populations are low or institutions are strong but that public provision can cost less in bigger cities

a dynamic stochastic programming model of crop rotation choice to test the adoption of long rotation under price and production risks this article investigates the role played by both production and market risks on cash crop farmers decision to adopt long rotations considered as innovative cropping systems we build a multi period recursive farm model with discrete stochastic programming the model arbitrates each year between conventional and innovative longer rotations yearly farming operations are declined according to a decision tree so that production risk is an intra year risk market risk is considered as an inter year risk influencing crop successions simulations are performed on a specialized french cash crop farm they show that when the long rotation is subsidized by an area premium farmers are encouraged to remain in longer rotations they also show that a high level of risk aversion tends to slow down the conversion towards longer rotations

career incentives of city leaders and urban spatial expansion in china this paper develops a theoretical framework to study the critical role that politics play in shaping the spatial dimension of china s urbanization and the related welfare implications utilizing a

accounting for heterogeneity in multicrop micro econometric models implications for variable input demand modeling this article aims to show that if the farm sample under consideration is characterized by significant heterogeneity recovering output specific input uses or modeling farm level input uses may be more complicated than previously recognized the article theoretically investigates the problems implied by farm heterogeneity in input allocation equations and multicrop econometric models proposes an empirically tractable solution for overcoming these problems and assesses the empirical relevance of the theoretically identified problems the results demonstrate that heterogeneity matters but that the revealed heterogeneity bias has a limited impact on the empirical results copyright 2012 oxford university press

cities in bad shape urban geometry in india the spatial layout of cities is an important feature of urban form highlighted by urban planners but overlooked by economists this paper investigates the causal economic implications of city shape in india i measure cities geometric properties over time using satellite imagery and historical maps i develop an instrument for urban shape based on geographic obstacles encountered by expanding cities compact city shape is associated with faster population growth and households display positive willingness to pay for more compact layouts transit accessibility is an important channel land use regulations can contribute to deteriorating city shape

cyclical fluctuations and sectoral reallocation evidence from the psid abstract this paper documents the correlation between permanent sectoral reallocation and the business cycle using data from the michigan panel study of income dynamics we find that the outflow of workers from goods to services accelerates during recessions the flow from services to stable employment in surables accelerates during booms we also document the contribution of sectoral reallocation to total unemployment permanent switchers account for about a quarter of the total weeks of unemployment during booms this proportion rises to nearly 40 duing recessions

intersectoral labor mobility and the growth of the service sector one of the most striking changes in the u s economy over the past 50 years has been the growth in the service sector between 1950 and 2000 service sector employment grew from 57 to 75 percent of total employment however over this time the real hourly wage in the service sector grew only slightly faster than in the goods sector in this paper we assess whether or not the essential constancy of the relative wage implies that individuals face small costs of switching sectors and we quantify the relative importance of labor supply and demand factors in the growth of the service sector we specify and estimate a two sector labor market equilibrium model that allows us to address these empirical issues in a unified framework our estimates imply that there are large mobility costs output in both sectors would have been double their current levels if these mobility costs had been zero in addition we find that demand side factors that is technological change and movements in product and capital prices were responsible for the growth of the service sector

fiscal incentives and policy choices of local governments evidence from china abstract this paper examines how fiscal incentives affect the policy choices of local governments in the context of china based on exogenous changes in the intergovernmental revenue sharing scheme we construct a simulated instrumental variable to resolve the endogeneity problem we find evidence that local governments shifted their efforts from fostering industrial growth to urbanizing china i e to developing the real estate and construction sectors when their retention rate of enterprise tax revenue was reduced the increase from the new revenue source compensated for half of the losses in revenue that resulted from the reassignment of fiscal rights the reassignment had also the effect of retarding the industrial growth of domestically owned firms in particular

individual heterogeneity and interindustry wage differentials estimates of interindustry wage differentials are obtained using a fixed effects estimator on a long panel the national longitudinal survey of young men nls after controlling for observable worker characteristics 84 percent of the residual variance of log wages across industries is explained by individual fixedeffects only 16 percent of the residual variance is explained by industry dummies since no controls for specific job characteristics are used job characteristics that vary across industries could potentially explain this rather small residual across industry log wage variance that is not attributable to individual effects clearly then these data do not force us to resort to noncompetitive explanations of interindustry wage differentials such as efficiency wage theory furthermore efficiency wage theories predict that wages in efficiency wage paying or primary industries should be relatively rigid therefore industry wage differentials should widen in recessions however no such tendency is found in the data

an integer programming dynamic farm household model to evaluate the impact of agricultural policy reforms on farm investment behaviour abstract we develop a multi objective farm household dynamic integer programming model to simulate investment behaviour in different policy and price scenarios with a particular focus on the decoupling of the common agricultural policy cap the model takes into account the characteristics of individual assets including ageing and fixity through the explicit consideration of transaction costs a case study application in the context of arable farming in northern italy is provided as an example the results emphasise different patterns of reaction of different farm household types over time as an effect of the varying opportunity costs of resources and initial asset endowments overall this application highlights the potentialities and limits of the methodology in particular the approach proved to be effective in providing a variety of results depending on the individual features of each farm household such as the differences between a a no reaction attitude b an adaptation of farm activity and assets and c a radical reaction pattern guided by high income alternatives to farming this highlights the potential of this tool as a generator of ideas and working hypotheses we argue that in view of the further developments of the cap the use of instruments able to account for multiple objectives dynamics and investment choices will become even more relevant in the analysis of eu agricultural policy

growth population and industrialization and urban land expansion of china china is experiencing urbanization at an unprecedented rate over the last two decades the overall goal of this paper is to understand the extent of and the factors driving urban expansion in china from the late 1980s to 2000 we use a unique three period panel data set of high resolution satellite imagery data and socioeconomic data for entire area of coterminous china consistent with a number of the key hypotheses generated by the monocentric model our results demonstrate the powerful role that the growth of income has played in china s urban expansion in some empirical models the other key variables in the monocentric model population the value of agricultural land and transportation costs also matter adapting the basic empirical model to account for the environment in developing countries we also find that industrialization and the rise of the service sector appear to have affected the growth of the urban core but their role was relatively small when compared to the direct effects of economic growth we also make a methodological contribution demonstrating the potential importance of accounting for unobserved fixed effects

long term wage fluctuations with industry specific human capital exploiting long term interindustry demand shifts this article provides evidence that 1 industry level wages do not respond to industry demand conditions 2 at the industry level the employment of young workers responds more to demand shifts than does the employment of experienced workers and 3 the postdisplacement wages of displaced workers are strongly affected by demand in their predisplacement industries these findings are consistent with a model in which worker s investments in industry specific skills pose a barrier to interindustry labor mobility and wages do not respond to spot labor market conditions

trade wages and the political economy of trade protection evidence from the colombian trade reforms abstract worker industry affiliation plays a crucial role in how trade policy affects wages in many trade models yet most research has focused on how trade policy affects wages by altering the economy wide returns to a specific worker characteristic i e skill or education rather than through worker industry affiliation this paper exploits drastic trade liberalizations in colombia in the 1980s and 1990s to investigate the relationship between protection and industry wage premiums we relate wage premiums to trade policy in an empirical framework that accounts for the political economy of trade protection accounting for time invariant political economy factors is critical when we do not control for unobserved time invariant industry characteristics we find that workers in protected sectors earn less than workers with similar observable characteristics in unprotected sectors allowing for industry fixed effects reverses the result trade protection increases relative wages this positive relationship persists when we instrument for tariff changes our results are in line with short and medium run models of trade where labor is immobile across sectors or alternatively with the existence of industry rents that are reduced by trade liberalization in the context of the current debate on the rising income inequality in developing countries our findings point to a source of disparity beyond the well documented rise in the economy wide skill premium because tariff reductions were proportionately larger in sectors employing a high fraction of less skilled workers the decrease in the wage premiums in these sectors affected such workers disproportionately

sectoral shifts and interindustry wage differentials the observed differences in wages across industries may arise from a lack of worker mobility particularly among experienced workers allowing the effects of industry shocks to persist for some time although young workers arbitrage wage shocks they will have little effect on the dispersion of experienced workers wages if young and old workers are poor substitutes in production this explanation is investigated using the five censuses of population between 1940 and 1980 the evidence strongly suggests that differences in pay are not temporary phenomena the data provide some support for the role of human capital and ability