the connection between public transfers and private interfamily transfers abstract this paper investigates the anti poverty effectiveness of public transfers taking private transfer responses into account widespread altruistically motivated private transfers would neutralize the distributional impact of public transfers but exchange motivated transfers can reinforce the effects of public transfers on the distribution of economic well being the common technique for gauging anti poverty effectiveness subtracting public transfers from other income and measuring the poverty rate counterfactual yields results that are close to a more complex procedure that takes private transfer responses into account and some of the empirical findings suggest an exchange rather than altruistic motive for private transfers indicating that the effects of public transfers can be magnified by private behavior this is an exact reversal of the prediction that public transfers merely supplant private ones

a hybrid seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average and quantile regression for daily food sales forecasting abstract in the retail stage of a food supply chain food waste and stock outs occur mainly due to inaccurate forecasting of sales which leads to incorrect ordering of products the time series sales in food retail industry are characterized by high volatility and skewness which vary by time so the interval forecasts are required by the retail companies to set appropriate inventory policy reorder point or safety stock level this paper attempts to develop a seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average with external variables sarimax model to forecast daily sales of a perishable food the process of fitting a sarimax model in this study involves i the development of seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average sarima model and ii combining the sarima model and the demand influencing factors using linear regression as the sarimax using multiple linear regression sarima mlr model produces only mean forecast the possibility of underestimation and overestimation is very high due to high service level peak and sparse sales in food retail industry therefore a hybrid sarima and quantile regression sarima qr is developed to construct high and low quantile predictions instead of extrapolating the quantiles from the mean point forecasts of sarima mlr model based on the assumption of normality the sarima qr model directly forecasts the quantiles the developed sarima mlr and sarima qr models are applied in modeling and forecasting of sales data i e the daily sales of banana from a discount retail store in lower bavaria germany the results show that the sarima mlr and qr models yield better forecasts at out sample data when compared to seasonal naive forecasting traditional sarima and multi layered perceptron neural network mlpnn models unlike the sarima mlr model the sarima qr model provides better prediction intervals and a deep insight into the effects of demand influencing factors for different quantiles

inter vivos transfers and intergenerational exchange the surge of interest in intergenerational transfers in the past decade has sparked a debate over the motivation for them are transfers given out of altruism or part of an exchange while each motive is probably at work to some extent we know little about whether one motive predominates the question is relevant for issues concerning public income redistribution and inequality in the family but despite its importance empirical evidence about motives is scarce because of limited data we investigate a new data set the national survey of families and households which remedies many of the shortcomings of other data sets containing private transfer information we find that empirical patterns for inter vivos transfers i e transfers between living persons are more consistent with exchange than altruism

credit markets in northern nigeria credit as insurance in a rural economy this article addresses the issues of imcomplete markets and imperfect information in the context of credit markets in rural northern nigeria in much recent theoretical literature the problems of moral hazard and adverse selection are assumed to be decisive for the organization of agrarian institutions in contrast it is found that in the four villages surveyed credit transactions take advantage of the free flow of information within rural communities information asymmetries between borrower and lender are unimportant and their institutional consequences the use of collateral and interlinked contracts are absent credit transactions play a direct role in pooling risk between households through the use of contracts in which the repayment owed by the borrower depends on the realization of random production shocks by both the borrower and the lender

risk and insurance in a rural credit market an empirical investigation in northern nigeria credit contracts play a direct role in pooling risk between households in northern nigeria repayments owed by borrowers depend on realizations of random shocks by both borrowers and lenders the paper develops two models of state contingent loans the first is a competitive equilibrium in perfectly enforceable contracts the second permits imperfect information and equilibrium default estimates of both models indicate that quantitatively important state contingent payments are embedded in these loan transactions but that a fully efficient risk pooling equilibrium is not achieved the research is based on a year long survey in zaria nigeria conducted by the author

investment and abandonment behavior of rural households an empirical investigation this article uses models of irreversible investment under uncertainty to examine the investment and abandonment behavior of poor rural households it considers the decision of ugandan coffee farming households to invest in or abandon coffee trees the observed levels of investment and abandonment are found to be consistent with models of investment that allow for irreversibility uncertainty fixed costs and liquidity constraints the findings highlight the importance of addressing volatility irreversibility fixed costs and liquidity constraints in order to increase households responsiveness to changes in the fundamentals and to enable households to recover from shocks to their capital stock

performance analysis of demand planning approaches for aggregating forecasting and disaggregating interrelated demands a synchronized and responsive flow of materials information funds processes and services is the goal of supply chain planning demand planning which is the very first step of supply chain planning determines the effectiveness of manufacturing and logistic operations in the chain propagation and magnification of the uncertainty of demand signals through the supply chain referred to as the bullwhip effect is the major cause of ineffective operation plans therefore a flexible and robust supply chain forecasting system is necessary for industrial planners to quickly respond to the volatile demand appropriate demand aggregation and statistical forecasting approaches are known to be effective in managing the demand variability this paper uses the bivariate var 1 time series model as a study vehicle to investigate the effects of aggregating forecasting and disaggregating two interrelated demands through theoretical development and systematic analysis guidelines are provided to select proper demand planning approaches a very important finding of this research is that disaggregation of a forecasted aggregated demand should be employed when the aggregated demand is very predictable through its positive autocorrelation moreover the large positive correlation between demands can enhance the predictability and thus result in more accurate forecasts when statistical forecasting methods are used

motivations to remit evidence from botswana in this article a theory of motivations to send remittances is described and tested with data from botswana altruism is one of the motivations tested and found to be an insufficient explanation for remittances among migrants in botswana a refinement of the model stipulates a modified altruism or enlightened self interest in this model the relationship between the migrant and family is tempered by an implicit understanding of mutual benefit the household strategy may be to encourage some members to migrate as a means of spreading risk and sharing gains the household strategy is similar to an insurance policy where migration is to places where market potential is high the risks incurred might be high the example is given of migration during a drought in botswana migrant remittances were greater in households with more cattle or households with more to lose drought alone was not statistically related to remittances increases in remittances were related to increased levels of education it is suggested that repayment was the motive for parents investment in migrants education migrants gains are identified as the potential for an inheritance the security of channeling investments through a trusted family member and security in having a home to return to it is pointed out that the altruism and family remittances from urban migration were strategies that bridged the simple dynamic of either urban development or rural development impacting on family welfare it is suggested that household models of economy adopt some measure to express the relationship of household wealth to remittances from urban migrants

non stationary demand forecasting by cross sectional aggregation in this paper the relative effectiveness of top down td versus bottom up bu approaches is compared for cross sectionally forecasting aggregate and sub aggregate demand we assume that the sub aggregate demand follows a non stationary integrated moving average ima process of order one and a single exponential smoothing ses procedure is used to extrapolate future requirements such demand processes are often encountered in practice and ses is one of the standard estimators used in industry in addition to being the optimal estimator for an ima process theoretical variances of forecast error are derived for the bu and td approach in order to contrast the relevant forecasting performances the theoretical analysis is supported by an extensive numerical investigation at both the aggregate and sub aggregate level in addition to empirically validating our findings on a real dataset from a european superstore the results demonstrate the increased benefit resulting from cross sectional forecasting in a non stationary environment than in a stationary one valuable insights are offered to demand planners and the paper closes with an agenda for further research in this area

forecasting with multivariate temporal aggregation the case of promotional modelling demand forecasting is central to decision making and operations in organisations as the volume of forecasts increases for example due to an increased product customisation that leads to more skus being traded or a reduction in the length of the forecasting cycle there is a pressing need for reliable automated forecasting conventionally companies rely on a statistical baseline forecast that captures only past demand patterns which is subsequently adjusted by human experts to incorporate additional information such as promotions although there is evidence that such process adds value to forecasting it is questionable how much it can scale up due to the human element instead in the literature it has been proposed to enhance the baseline forecasts with external well structured information such as the promotional plan of the company and let experts focus on the less structured information thus reducing their workload and allowing them to focus where they can add most value this change in forecasting support systems requires reliable multivariate forecasting models that can be automated accurate and robust this paper proposes an extension of the recently proposed muliple aggregation prediction algorithm mapa which uses temporal aggregation to improve upon the established exponential smoothing family of methods mapa is attractive as it has been found to increase both the accuracy and robustness of exponential smoothing the extended multivariate mapa is evaluated against established benchmarks in modelling a number of heavily promoted products and is found to perform well in terms of forecast bias and accuracy furthermore we demonstrate that modelling time series using multiple temporal aggregation levels makes the final forecast robust to model misspecification

motives for household private transfers in burkina faso abstract resource transfers among households have received considerable interest among economists in recent years two of the main reasons for the surge of interest in household transfers are the information on human nature conveyed by transfer behavior and the implication on income redistribution policy that private transfer might have empirical studies however provide mixed results on transfer behavior this is because previous inquiries were confronted with several estimation issues and have focused on data from developed countries where private transfers are already small this paper contributes to the literature on transfer behavior by using a multifaceted econometric approach to examine the motives of household transfers in burkina a low income country with a well documented tradition of gift exchanges the findings suggest that risk sharing is not central to transfers altruistic transfers are apparent for the middle income class but not at low income level the evidence implies that crowding out may be minimal at low income level suggesting that public transfers targeting poor households may be effective

social security and private transfers in developing countries the case of peru do social security systems crowd out private transfers from younger to older generations this question has generated much theoretical discussion but little empirical work exists to confirm or refute this crowding out hypothesis we investigate the connection between social security and private transfers in peru using the peruvian living standards survey and find that private transfers from young to old would have been nearly 20 percent higher without social security benefits this indicates that the peruvian social security system is less effective at delivering benefits to the elderly than a simple assignment of government expenditures would suggest social security s displacement of private transfers while significant is less than that predicted by models with widespread altruistic transfers

child health and household resources in south africa evidence from the old age pension program this paper presents nonparametric evidence on the effects of the expansion of the old age pension program in south africa on child health did this increase in household resources improve child health and nutrition does the gender of the recipient of the pension affect its impact the answers to these questions have very important policy implications there is evidence that inadequate nutrition during childhood and even in utero affects long term physical development as well as the development of cognitive skills this in turn affects productivity later in life see partha dasgupta 1993 john strauss and duncan thomas 1998 t paul schultz 1999 in the united states the evidence suggests that monetary transfers to the poor have very little impact on child welfare janet currie 1995 susan mayer 1997 however the effects of parental income and monetary transfers on child outcomes are likely to be of greater magnitude among poor households in developing countries the south african pension program provides an unusual opportunity to evaluate the possible effects of such a monetary transfer this paper exploits the rapid increase in the coverage and benefits of the old age pension program in south africa which took place in the early 1990 s anne case and angus deaton 1998 at the end of the apartheid era the government committed to achieving parity of benefits and eligibility requirements between whites and africans this was achieved mostly by increasing the benefits received by the africans in 1993 80 percent of african women above age 60 and 77 percent of african men above 65 received the pension the maximum benefit of 370 rands per month aproximately 3 per day was equal to half of the minimum wage and about twice the median income per capita in rural areas due to living arrangements inherited from the apartheid era close to onethird of african children under the age of 5 currently live with a pension recipient children who live with a pension recipient tend to come from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds as a consequence they tend to be smaller than other children their age to estimate the effect of receiving a pension on the anthropometric status of children this paper exploits the fact that height reflects accumulated investments in child nutrition the larger the proportion of her life during which a child is well nourished the taller she will be given her age due to the expansion of the program in the early 1990 s individuals of qualified age became more likely to receive a pension and the benefits became substantially larger thus children born after the expansion of the program are more likely to have spent a larger fraction of their lives wellnourished if they live with a pension recipient to the extent that the pension resulted in improved nutrition in this paper i present nonparametric evidence of the program s effect on nutrition based on this observation

motives for private transfers over the life cycle an analytical framework and evidence for peru abstract this paper tests for the motives for private income transfers we consider two motives altruism and exchange the question of private transfer motives is important because such motivation can influence the effects of public income transfers on the distribution of income using a household survey for peru we find that transfer amounts received increase with recipient pre transfer income which contradicts a key prediction of the strong form of the altruism hypothesis but is consistent with exchange we also find that capital market imperfections are likely to be an important cause of private transfers and that social security benefits crowd out the incidence of private transfers

as an economy becomes more developed do people become less altruistic abstractinter household private transfers are one of the main informal insurance mechanisms that prevalently implemented in developing countries unfortunately most of the literatures investigates

gender agricultural production and the theory of the household virtually all models of the household assume that the allocation of resources is pareto efficient within many african households agricultural production occurs on many plots controlled by different members of the household pareto efficiency implies that factors should be allocated efficiently across these plots i find in contrast that plots controlled by women are farmed much less intensively than similar plots within the household controlled by men the estimates imply that about 6 percent of output is lost because of inefficient factor allocation within the household the paper suggests a new approach to modeling intrahousehold allocation consistent with the empirical results

freely determined versus regulated prices implications for the measured link between money and inflation wiley author accepted manuscript can be posted 2 years after official publication date must acknowledge source link to publisher version and include following statement this is the accepted version of the following article dexter a s levi m d and nault b r freely determined versus regulated prices implications for the link between money and inflation journal of money credit and banking 25 2 may 1993 222 231 which has been published in final form at http www jstor org stable 2077838 policy http exchanges wiley com authors self archiving 361 html article deposited according to publisher s policy 05 25 2015

using weather variability to estimate the response of savings to transitory income in thailand this paper measures the extent to which farmers are able to use savings and dissavings to smooth consumption in response to unexpected shocks to income time series information on regional rainfall is used to construct estimates of transitory income due to rainfall shocks the relationship between these measures of transitory income and savings indicates that farm households save a significantly higher fraction of transitory income than nontransitory income jel d91 016 the incomes of farm households in developing countries are notorious for being both low and uncertain policies that increase the incomes of farmers may well be different

full insurance in the presence of aggregate uncertainty this paper tests implications of full consumption insurance the object is to determine how much mileage can be obtained from a model with complete markets with such features as private information or liquidity constraints omitted the implication exploited is that individual consumption responds to aggregate risk but not to idiosyncratic risk the test involves regressing the change in household consumption onto the change in aggregate consumption and other right hand side variables such as the change in household income and change in employment status all variables other than the change in aggregate consumption are predicted to be insignificant in explaining the change in household consumption with observations on consumption and income for 10 695 households from the consumer expenditure survey the results are mixed the results for one specification exponential utility are mostly consistent with full consumption insurance the results for the other specification power utility are not

motives for private income transfers private income transfers are becoming increasingly recognized as a key aspect of the u s economy the majority of private income transfers occur inter vivos i e between living persons but very little is known about this type of transfer behavior this paper tests alternative hypotheses concerning motivation for inter vivos transfers two motives are considered altruism and exchange evidence presented here casts doubt on the altruistic model of transfer behavior observed patterns for inter vivos transfers are more consistent with exchange related motives this finding has important implications for the effects of public transfer programs on the distribution of economic well being

a simple test of consumption insurance are consumers effectively insured against idiosyncratic shocks to income or wealth either by formal institutions such as charities private insurance and government programs or by informal mechanisms such as gifts and loans from relatives friends and neighbors under full insurance consumption growth should be cross sectionally independent of idiosyncratic variables that are exogenous to consumers this proposition is tested by cross sectional regressions of consumption growth on a variety of exogenous variables full insurance is rejected for long illness and involuntary job loss but not for spells of unemployment loss of work due to strike and an involuntary move

how responsive are private transfers to income evidence from a laissez faire economy abstract in recent years there has been burgeoning interest in how private transfers respond to household income or transfer derivatives much of it is fueled by the specter of crowding out the more responsive are private transfers the more likely they could be supplanted by expansions in public transfers weakening or destroying the latter s distributive impact yet there is also an emerging consensus that actual transfer derivatives are trivial at least for the united states suggesting that crowding out might loom larger in the minds of some economists than in the data but perhaps crowding out is a fait accompli in the united states accordingly we focus on the philippines which has a much smaller public sector we also pursue a novel theoretical angle which generates a sharp non linear relationship between private transfer receipts and income in the form of a spline our empirical work applies recently developed estimation techniques that treat the spline s threshold as an unknown parameter and they uncover transfer derivatives much larger than conventional methods reveal notably private transfers patterns are consistent with altruistic preferences effective risk sharing or both in accord with theoretical predictions however strong transfer derivatives prevail only among low income households our findings suggest that attempts to aid the poor could be thwarted by private responses which leak benefits to richer households in the form of lighter burdens of support for less fortunate kin so the problems that operative private transfers create for public redistribution policy first pointed out by becker and barro over 25 years ago do indeed matter empirically

two sided altruism and signaling abstract when donors and recipients care about each other two sided altruism asymmetry of information about the donor s income or about the donor s altruism leads naturally to a signaling game the desire to signal income or altruism puts upward pressure on transfers

parental altruism and inter vivos transfers theory and evidence this paper uses psid data on the extended family to test whether inter vivos transfers from parents to children are motivated by altruism specifically the paper tests whether an increase by one dollar in the income of parents actively making transfers to a child coupled with a one dollar reduction in that child s income results in the parents increasing their transfer to the child by one dollar this restriction on parental and child transfer income derivatives is derived for the standard altruism model augmented to include uncertainty and liquidity constraints these additional elements pin down the timing of inter vivos transfers the method used to estimate income transfer derivatives takes into account unobserved heterogeneity across families in the degree of altruism the findings strongly reject the altruism hypothesis redistributing one dollar from a recipient child to donor parents leads to less than a 13 cent increase in the parents transfer to the child far less than the one dollar increas

public goods hidden income and tax evasion some nonstandard results from the warm glow model abstract a large literature explores crowd out in situations where public goods are jointly provided work in this area typically depicts a tax system where individuals take taxes as given but in some settings such as those in developing economies efforts to evade or avoid taxes may be widespread using the canonical warm glow model this paper considers joint public good provision in a setting where individuals can evade taxes by hiding their income the model s implications change significantly in this setting with hidden income stronger warm glow will lead to greater crowd out not less using research on crowd out and inter family transfers i present suggestive evidence that the model s results may help to reconcile divergent estimates of crowd out in the literature

a model for selecting the appropriate level of aggregation in forecasting processes abstract demand forecasting is a major issue in several industrial sectors a relevant choice for companies is the proper level of forecast aggregation forecasters need to properly identify what is the object of the forecasting process in terms of time bucket e g forecasts are produced on a daily level or on weekly one set of items the demand refers to e g single item or group of items set of locations the demand refers to e g single store or chain of stores managers can follow two basic approaches on the one hand they can adopt a detailed forecasting approach i e they can forecast demand for the item at the store by simply looking at the demand for the specific item store on the other hand they can adopt an aggregated forecasting approach in this paper we aim at figuring out what is the balance between the strengths and weaknesses of these two options and to identify the contingent variables that might lead managers to adopt one approach rather than the other in this paper we study the aggregation across locations by evaluating the components of forecasting error under the assumption of stationary demand finally we suggest metrics that one can adopt to support the choice of the appropriate forecasting process thus providing help to managers in defining the proper level of aggregation for a specific situation

social norms and gift behavior theory and evidence from romania in many developing and transitional countries with limited public income redistribution inter household transfers in general and gifts in particular are sizable and very important we use unique romanian survey data that enables us to isolate pure gifts from other private transfers we explicitly focus on the importance of community wide social norms and find that they indeed play a major role for both the occurrence and the values of gifts more exactly our results suggest that the overall predominant gift motive among romanian households is a norm of reciprocity moreover this norm seems to be dominating for gifts to middle and high income households even though poor households receive to the same extent norms of both impure altruism and reciprocity tend to be important hence although the poor may not reciprocate gifts to the same extent as the rich they still receive since there is a social norm to give especially to the poor

the impact of aggregation level on forecasting performance abstract most operations decisions are based on some kind of forecast of future demand thus forecasting is definitely a very traditional area in the operations and inventory management literature while literature concerning forecast explores the adoption of various qualitative and quantitative methods this paper tries to design new solutions to improve forecasting accuracy by focusing on the forecasting process that uses such algorithms in particular when forecasting demand one should always make clear exactly what he she is trying to forecast in terms of the time bucket i e the period of time over which demand is aggregated the forecasting horizon the set of items the demand refers to e g forecasting demand for a single item can be much harder than forecasting demand for a group of items the set of locations the demand refers to e g demand at the single store level is much less predictable than the demand for a whole chain of stores traditionally these features of the final output of forecasting also influence the forecasting process indeed when one wants to forecast demand at single store single item single day level it seems natural to analyse demand and causal factors at the same level of aggregation on the contrary in this paper we aim at showing that first of all often aggregating and or disaggregating data in the forecasting process can lead to substantial improvements second the choice of the appropriate level of aggregation depends on the underlying demand generation process in addition most forecasting algorithms tend to focus on a single demand variable on the contrary we can analyse analogous time series to improve the effectiveness of the forecasting process clustering techniques can be used to identify such homologous time series such clusters of homologous time series can provide on the one hand the sample size required to gain good statistical confidence and on the other hand relatively homogeneous data in the paper we use sales data from a food retailer at a very detailed level to test our hypotheses this claims for relevance for both practitioners and researchers

imperfect commitment altruism and the family evidence from transfer behavior in low income rural areas in this paper we examine empirically whether risk pooling is more advantageous among altruistic compared to selfish agents in a framework where individuals cannot make binding commitments in particular we incorporate altuism into a model of risk sharing under imperfect commitment and use simulation methods to establish tests of the roles of both altruism and commitment problems in determining the extent of insurance and the intertemporal movements in interhousehold transfers the tests are carried out using three panel data sets from two countries of rural south asia that provide detailed information on transfers and enable the measurement of income shocks the estimates provide strong support for the notion that imperfect commitment substantially constrains informal transfer arrangements whether kin based or not but also provide evidence that altruism plays an important role in ameliorating commitment constraints and thus in increasing the gains from income pooling

natural natural experiments in economics the recent literature exploiting natural events as natural experiment instruments is reviewed to assess to what extent it has advanced empirical knowledge a weakness of the studies that adopt this approach is that the necessary set of behavioral market and technological assumptions made by the authors in justifying their interpretations of the estimates is often absent the methodology and findings from twenty studies are summarized and simple economic models are used to elucidate the implicit assumptions made by the authors and to demonstrate the sensitivity of the interpretations of the findings to the relaxation of some of these assumptions

asymmetry of information within family networks this paper studies asymmetry of information and transfers within a unique data set of 712 extended family networks from tanzania using cross reports on asset holdings we construct measures of misperception of income among all pairs of households belonging to the same network we show that there is significant asymmetry of information and no evidence of major systematic over evaluation or under evaluation of income in our data although there is a slight over evaluation on the part of migrants regarding non migrants we develop a static model of asymmetric information that contrasts altruism pressure and exchange as motives to transfer the model makes predictions about the correlations between misperceptions and transfers under these competing explanations testing these predictions in the data uncovers the active role played by the recipient our findings suggest that the recipient sets the terms of the transfers either by exerting pressure to give on the donor or by holding the bargaining power during the exchange of services with the donor