factors determining intercropping by rubber smallholders in sri lanka a logit analysis abstract variables related to farmers awareness and attitudes towards intercropping of immature rubber hevea brasiliensis stands extension contacts education level and experience with farming other crops are positively associated with the probability of adoption higher levels of off farm income are associated with reduced intercropping in immature rubber stands farmers who are sole owners of the land and engaged in full or part time rubber farming show lower adoption rates than other land ownership groups social participation family size experience with farming rubber immature and mature rubber stands size and the nature of the land flat sloped do not significantly influence adoption these conclusions were obtained from a logit model estimated by employing the results of a survey of 588 smallholder rubber farmers from five major rubber growing regions in sri lanka

bequests gifts and social security this paper analyses the very long run or stationary state impact of an unfunded social security system we use an overlapping generations model framework a key feature is that while parents care about their children and can leave non negative bequests to them children also care about their parents and can make non negative gifts to them we show that the possibility of negative net bequests may make social security less harmful to private wealth accumulation than would otherwise be the case a subsidiary finding is that risk loving behaviour may emerge for some households due to the nature of intergenerational transfers within family lines

poverty productivity and production environment a review of the evidence abstract this paper reviews the state of knowledge about the key issues needing to be understood to satisfactorily resolve a long standing debate within the consultative group for international agricultural research cgiar system the debate revolves around the effects on various populations particularly the poor of different allocations of research effort between marginal and favoured production environments this paper specifically focuses on what is known about the geographical distribution of the rural poor across agro ecological zones and over time variations in the income generating activities including non agricultural activities engaged in by the poor are examined and the ways in which specific technology packages affect the economic well being of different types of households both directly and indirectly

growth habit formation and catching up with the joneses when habits are introduced multiplicatively in a capital accumulation model the consumers objective function might fail to be concave in this paper we provide conditions aimed at guaranteeing the existence of interior solutions to the consumers problem we also characterize the equilibrium path of two growth models with multiplicative habits the internal habit formation model where individual habits coincide with own past consumption and the external habit formation or catching up with the joneses model where habits arise from the average past consumption in the economy we show that the introduction of external habits makes the equilibrium path inefficient during the transition towards the balanced growth path we characterize in this context the optimal tax policy

tax policy and aggregate demand management under catching up with the joneses this paper examines the role for tax policies in productivity shock driven economies with catching up with the joneses utility functions the optimal tax policy is shown to affect the economy countercyclically via procyclical taxes i e cooling down the economy with higher taxes when it is overheating in booms and stimulating the economy with lower taxes in recessions to keep consumption up thus models with catching up with the joneses utility functions call for traditional keynesian demand management policies but for rather unorthodox reasons

trickle down consumption financial deregulation inequality and indebtedness over the last thirty years the u s experienced a surge in income inequality coupled with increasing levels of borrowing we model an olg economy populated by two types of household that care about how their consumption compares to that of their peers in this framework individual debt to income ratios decrease with income increases in consumption of rich households lead to increases in consumption of the rest and aggregate borrowing increases with income inequality we calibrate our model to evaluate the welfare implications of the process of nancial liberalization that began in the 1980s our analysis suggests that some of the nancial developments that lead to the recent expansion of credit may have decreased rather than increased welfare

adoption and the impact of system of rice intensification on rice yields and household income an analysis for india this paper examines the determinants and impacts of the adoption of five mutually exclusive practices system of rice intensification sri on yields and household incomes using a multinomial endoge

adoption of agricultural innovations in developing countries a survey this paper reviews various studies which have provided a description and possible explanation to patterns of innovation adoption in the agricultural sector the survey points out that the tendency of many studies to consider innovation adoption in dichotomous terms adoption nonadoption may not be appropriate in many cases where the actual decisions are defined over a more continuous range more attention needs to be given to the socio cultural and institutional environment in area studies so that their interrelation with economic factors affecting adoption can be inferred the presence of several interrelated innovations is another aspect that needs to be considered more carefully in future research since a number of simultaneous decisions may be involved furthermore the possibility of regular sequential patterns in adopting components of a new technological package should be specifically addressed in future studies finally the impact of differential adoption rates on land holding distribution merits attention in future research

unpacking the meaning of market access evidence from rural kenya summary this paper critically examines the dimensions of market access using farm panel survey data from kenya we investigate changes in ten indicators of market access during the 1997 2010 post liberalization period we find major improvements in certain market access conditions and little change in others there is generally low correlation between alternative indicators of market access all purpose indicators may not accurately reflect specific market access conditions of interest distances to physical infrastructure are often not representative of farmers access to markets changes in specific market access conditions may have more to do with the behaviors of marketing agents we consider the implications of these findings for agricultural marketing policies and for research methods

hybrid seed and the economic well being of smallholder maize farmers in zambia abstractthe development and diffusion of hybrid maize in zambia since the 1970s is a major achievement in african agriculture but other than profitability studies analyses of how this process has affected the economic well being of smallholder farmers have been few we test the relationship of hybrid seed use with six indicators of economic well being after using the control function instrumental variables approach to test for the endogeneity of hybrid seed use we estimate correlated random effects cre fractional response cre tobit and fixed effects models with a panel of nationally representative data collected in 2002 3 and 2006 7 findings suggest that use of maize hybrids is associated with higher values of household income assets farm and processing equipment and livestock and less deprivation compared to other farmers in nearby villages

optimal growth when tastes are inherited we address the issue of optimal growth when standard of living aspirations are transmitted from one generation to the next we derive the condition for the optimal solution to be stable in the saddle point sense and show that this optimal solution may display damped oscillations even when the planner does not discount the utility of future generations golden rule case the decentralization of the optimal solution aims at correcting the inter generational externality by use of an investment subsidy and allows to avoid socially damaging rushes on consumption in expansion periods it also allows to stabilize output in the case of competitive economies displaying endogenous fluctuations

operative gift and bequest motives the ricardian equivalence theorem which is the proposition that changes in the timing of lump sum taxes have no effect on assumption or capital accumulation depends on the exist of operative altruistic motives for intergenerational transfers these transfers can be bequests from parents to children or gifts from children to parents in order for the ricardian equivalence theorem to hold one of these transfer motives must be operative in the sense that the level of the transfer is not determined by a corner solution resulting from a binding non negativity constraint this paper derives conditions that determine whether the bequest motive will be operative the gift motive will be operative or neither motive will be operative in a model in which consumers are altruistic toward their parents and their children this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

household consumption of cheese an inverse hyperbolic sine double hurdle model with dependent errors the dependent double hurdle model is generalized by an inverse hyperbolic sine transformation of the dependent variable the resulting specification features a flexible parameterization accommodates heteroskedastic errors and nests a range of common limited dependent variable models results for u s household cheese consumption suggest that the homoskedastic and normal double hurdle model is misspecified income elasticities are small and vary across household groups foodstamp recipients are more responsive to income changes than nonrecipients foodstamp recipients are also less likely to consume cheese but conditional on consumption spend more than nonrecipients

estate taxes consumption externalities and altruism we study how the introduction of consumption externalities affects the efficiency of the dynamic equilibrium in an economy displaying dynastic altruism when the bequest motive is inoperative consumption externalities affect the intertemporal margin between young and old consumption and thus modify the intertemporal path of consumption and capital the optimal tax policy that solves this intertemporal inefficiency consists of a tax on capital income and a pay as yougo social security system the later solves the overaccumulation of capital due to the inoperativeness of the bequest motive and the former solves the inefficient allocation of consumption due to consumption externalities when the bequest motive is operative consumption externalities only cause an intratemporal inefficiency that affects the allocation of consumption between the generations living in the same period but do not affect the optimality of the capital stock level this suboptimal allocation of consumption implies in turn that the path of bequest is also suboptimal the optimal tax policy in this case consists of an estate tax and a capital income tax the estate tax corrects the intratemporal inefficiency but generates an intertemporal inefficiency which is corrected by means of an appropriate capital income tax

the dynamics of bequeathed tastes if children inherit life standard aspirations from their parents then their savings are affected and cycles may appear in overlapping generations olg models with production at some point of an expansion aspirations grow faster than wages savings decrease and a contraction begins

optimal taxation when consumers have endogenous benchmark levels of consumption i examine optimal taxes in an overlapping generations economy in which each consumer s utility depends on consumption relative to a weighted average of consumption by others the benchmark level of consumption as well as on the level of the consumer s own consumption the socially optimal balanced growth path is characterized by the modi ed golden rule and by a condition on the intergenerational allocation of consumption in each period a competitive economy can be induced to attain the social optimum by a lump sum pay as you go social security system and a tax on capital income

linking consumption externalities with optimal accumulation of human and physical capital and intergenerational transfers abstract this paper opens a new perspective from which one can explain the presence of government intervention in education even in the absence of human capital externality it argues that consumption externalities can provide rationale for government intervention in education within the context of overlapping generations economy it has also been shown that competitive equilibrium either underaccumulates both physical and human capital or overaccumulates both thus the result rules out the possibility of competitive equilibrium deviating from the social optimum in its allocation of physical and human capital in opposite directions immediate policy issues have also been discussed

land allocation in hyv adoption models an investigation of alternative explanations microeconomic theory provides four competing explanations for partial land allocation to new and traditional seed varieties in hyv adoption decisions input fixity portfolio selection safety first behavior and learning testing a general model that contains each as a special case suggests that they are jointly most likely to explain land allocation in the hyv adoption decisions of malawian smallholders yet when each explanation is tested to the exclusion of the others as is usually the case in the literature competing hypotheses are individually significant results suggest that employing approaches based on single explanations may lead to inappropriately narrow conclusions

assessing the effectiveness of a technical assistance program the case of maize seed relief to vulnerable households in zimbabwe abstract the recent economic downturn in zimbabwe impoverished the majority of households to assist vulnerable rural households improve their food security the british department for international development implemented a seed relief program from 2003 2004 to 2005 2006 that emphasized recycling of maize open pollinated varieties opv using data collected from 597 households in six districts in 2006 this study assesses the effectiveness of the program in terms of its targeting of beneficiaries the flow of information from participating ngos to beneficiaries on the need to recycle the seeds and the level of recycling done at the end of the program the empirical results suggest that the targeting method participating ngos use inadvertently excludes relatively vulnerable households while including large proportions of relatively well endowed households in the program the choice of varieties to distribute is guided more by the ecological adaptability of available commercial seeds and less by preferences of beneficiaries notwithstanding the fact that seed selection information is critical in encouraging beneficiaries to recycle distributed seed not all of them received it in conclusion it may be stated that the program undoubtedly contributed to increased food productivity by vulnerable households but its overall effectiveness could have been enhanced through i the involvement of the beneficiaries in the choice of types of seed to be distributed ii better targeting of beneficiaries and iii improved information flow between ngos and beneficiaries

relational incentive contracts standard incentive theory models provide a rich framework for studying informational problems but assume that contracts can be perfectly enforced this paper studies the design of self enforced relational contracts i show that optimal contracts often can take a simple stationary form but that self enforcement restricts promised compensation and affects incentive provision with hidden information it may be optimal for an agent to supply the same inefficient effort regardless of cost conditions with moral hazard optimal contracts involve just two levels of compensation this is true even if performance measures are subjective in which case optimal contracts terminate following poor performance jel c73 d82 l14

two sided expropriation and international equity contracts abstract the paper considers a model in which investors in two symmetrical countries can trade equity claims on their endowments the governments of the two countries expropriate the foreign owned securities if doing so raises domestic welfare in spite of the possibility of expropriation agents may still choose to hold completely pooled portfolios depending on preferences in the two countries increases in the level of domestic output can increase or decrease the probability of expropriation in the equilibria we consider agents hold too much foreign equity a reduction in foreign investment raises welfare by reducing the probability of expropriation

state owned and privately owned firms an empirical analysis of profitability leverage and labor intensity for some it is an article of faith that governmentowned firms must be less efficient or at least less profitable than privately owned firms maxim boycko et al 1996 argue that politicians cause government owned firms to employ excess labor inputs anne o krueger 1990 suggests that such firms may be pressured to hire politically connected people rather than those best qualified to perform desired tasks more generally government owned firms are thought to forgo maximum profit in the pursuit of social and political objectives such as wealth redistribution in addition the residual cash flow claims of these firms are not readily transferable like the shares of a private corporation this impairs residual claimant incentives to monitor managers and ultimately degrades firm performance as a consequence one expects government owned firms to be technically less efficient and therefore less profitable than private firms the implication is that in competitive markets without significant externalities private ownership is the superior organizational form the view that government firms are inherently less efficient than private ones however remains controversial among economists john vickers and george yarrow 1991 among others point out that agency problems arise in private firms as well as public ones in most large private corporations managers own little of the stock because monitoring managers is costly a divergence arises between their objectives and those of private shareholders private shareholders typically hold a small stake in any one firm and it may not pay any shareholder to bear the cost of monitoring management it follows from this discussion that whether government firms are more or less efficient than private firms is primarily an empirical issue to date the body of empirical evidence is mixed in this paper we report further empirical evidence on the relative efficiency of public and private enterprises we build on previous work by studying larger samples over longer time periods and by allowing for additional factors that influence firm performance in particular our analysis controls for time series variation in the general level of economic activity that may otherwise confound performance comparisons between government and private firms 2 we approach the issue in two different ways first using accounting numbers we conduct a large sample cross sectional comparison of government owned and privately owned corporations this comparison is similar in design to that of boardman and vining 1989 but our sample is three times the size of theirs and includes three

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

the effect of political events on united states direct foreign investment a pooled time series cross sectional analysis this paper examines the effect of political events on the manufacturing direct foreign investment mdfi decisions of u s multinational corporations the relationship between political events and nonpolitical factors and mdfi is investigated through regression analysis of pooled time series 21 years and cross sectional 24 countries data and through various tests of the homogeneity of the relationship across groups of countries the study finds that the relationship between political events in mdfi is different for less developed countries as opposed to developed countries for the less developed countries both inter nation and intra nation conflict and cooperation affect mdfi in contrast u s mdfi in developed countries appears to be affected only by inter nation conflict and cooperation

fdi by firms from newly industrialised economies in emerging markets corporate governance entry mode and location previous studies emphasise that the foreign direct investment fdi strategies of firms from newly industrialised economies nies are different from the fdi strategies of firms from developed economies it has also been shown that nie firms are often controlled by founding families who make key strategic decisions and that they rely heavily on network linkages when developing their fdi strategies what is less clear however is how the corporate governance factors in nies the risk preferences of the main shareholder constituencies and the network based business culture affect the decision to undertake fdi in emerging markets this paper explores the entry mode and location choices of firms from an asian nie taiwan in an emerging market the people s republic of china it shows that the choice of equity stake in an affiliate depends upon the extent of family and institutional share ownerships in the parent company high commitment entry is found to be positively associated with the affiliate being located in areas with strong economic cultural and historic links with the parent company furthermore the entry mode and location decisions appear to be interrelated with the parent s equity stake in the affiliate depending inter alia upon the location within china and the favoured location depending inter alia upon the equity stake

capital accumulation and uncertain lifetimes with adverse selection this paper examines the implications of adverse selection in the private annuity market for the pricing of private annuities and the consequent effects on constrption and bequest behavior with privately known heterogeneous mortality probabilities adverse selection causes the rate of return on private annuities to be less than the actuarially fair rate based on population average mortality however a fully funded social security system with compulsory participation can offer an implied rate of return equal to the actuarially fair rate based on population average mortality thus since social security offers a higher rate of return than private annuities consumers cannot completely offset the effects of social security by transacting in the private annuity market using an overlapping generations model with uncertain lifetimes we demonstrate that the introduction of actuarially fair social security reduces the steady state rate of return on annuities and raises the steady state levels of average bequests and average consumption of the young the steady state national capital stock rises or falls according to the strength of the bequest motive this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the effect of household wealth on the adoption of improved maize varieties in zambia abstract production and price risks that could render input use unprofitable sometimes prevent rural households from benefiting from input technological change the household s ability to cope with such risks and hence benefit from input technological change is often positively related to its wealth or stock of productive assets empirical evidence however suggests a non linear relationship between wealth and adoption of new agricultural technologies so that within a rural community households on the lower wealth continuum behave differently from those on the higher level using farm level data collected from 300 randomly selected households in three districts of zambia in 2004 2005 crop season this paper first stratifies households into poorly and well endowed households based on their access to productive assets and estimates separate double hurdle models for the adoption of improved high yielding maize ihym varieties for each group the results show that factors influencing the adoption and use intensity of ihym varieties differ between the two groups this draws attention to the need for recommending wealth group specific interventions to increase the adoption and use intensity of such varieties and their subsequent impacts on food security and general livelihoods of the households the explicit testing for the possibility that differences in household wealth affect the way in which other variables influence adoption decisions is the paper s unique contribution to the adoption literature

consumption externalities habit formation and equilibrium efficiency we analyze the welfare properties of the competitive equilibrium in a capital accumulation model where individual preferences are subject to both habit formation and consumption spillovers using an additive specification for preferences according to which the argument in the utility function is a linear combination of present and past values of own consumption and consumption spillovers we analyze the circumstances under which these spillovers are a source of inefficiency it is shown that consumption externalities have to interact with habits in order to generate an inefficient dynamic equilibrium finally we characterize optimal tax policies aimed at restoring efficient decentralized paths

state owned mncs and host country expropriation risk the role of home state soft power and economic gunboat diplomacy expropriation risk has a binding effect on foreign direct investment fdi however state owned multinational corporations may counter the monopoly power of the host state by leveraging the political influence of their home government the magnitude of this counter force we argue may vary depending on the strength of political relations between the home and host state and the level of economic dependence of the host country on the home market we find supporting evidence of our hypotheses using chinese firm level fdi information between 2003 and 2010

can gm technologies help the poor the impact of bt cotton in makhathini flats kwazulu natal abstract the results of a two year survey of smallholders in makhathini flats kwazulu natal show that farmers who adopted bt cotton in 1999 2000 benefited according to all the measures used higher yields and lower chemical costs outweighed higher seed costs giving higher gross margins these measures showed negative benefits in 1998 99 which conflicts with continued adoption but stochastic efficiency frontier estimation which takes account of the labor saved showed that adopters averaged 88 efficiency as compared with 66 for the nonadopters in 1999 2000 when late rains lowered yields the gap widened to 74 for adopters and 48 for nonadopters

expanding access to agricultural inputs in africa a review of recent market development experience abstract this paper asks what can be done to expand input use in africa and can it be done in a manner that supports continued growth of private sector input markets the precarious food security situation in many african countries has prompted governments and donors to use input distribution or credit programs as a means of rapidly increasing food supply for the poor these efforts however often reduce the ability of input market development programs to stimulate commercial interest in input supply a review of both types of programs describes recent efforts to address constraints to expanded input use and finds that further expansion is often constrained by inadequate investment in a variety of public goods needed to stimulate input led agricultural intensification rather than continuing to invest resources in programs to provide inputs or credit directly to farmers governments with donor assistance should consider shifting their focus to the serious deficiencies in the provision of public goods roads irrigation basic education market information systems research and extension and improved institutions contract law and enforcement systems of grades and standards improvements in these areas can both lower costs of supply and increase farm level demand creating a situation where the private sector will have greater incentives to expand input distribution networks to zones and farmers who currently do not have access

dyadic military conflict security alliances and bilateral fdi flows although multinationals operate under cross border jurisdictions the relevance of interstate security relations to international business has received little attention despite the impressive accumulation of knowledge in international business and international relations the two intellectual communities have largely ignored the insights from each other in this article we seek to bridge this gap we argue that interstate military conflict and security alliances as two central features of interstate security relations often change both government policies toward international business and investor expectations of political risk from the perspectives of both states and investors military conflict should reduce bilateral investment whereas security alliances increase it our empirical analysis applies the system gmm estimator to a gravity model of bilateral investment flows for 1117 directed dyads among 58 countries from 1980 to 2000 among 18 countries whose per capita real incomes remain consistently above 12 000 constant dollars the security factors do not affect bilateral investment in the high income low income dyads interstate military conflict and security alliances significantly influence bilateral investment as expected the findings depict two separate realms in which international politics does and does not interfere with international business helping us improve political risk assessments and understand the interactions between states and firms

supermarkets and agricultural labor demand in kenya a gendered perspective abstract many developing countries are experiencing a rapid expansion of supermarkets new supermarket procurement systems could affect farming patterns and wider rural development while previous studies have analyzed farm productivity and income effects possible employment effects have received much less attention special supermarket requirements may entail intensified farm production and post harvest handling thus potentially increasing demand for hired labor this could also have important gender implications because female and male workers are often hired for distinct farm operations building on data from a recent survey of vegetable farmers in kenya a double hurdle model of hired labor use is developed and estimated farmer participation in supermarket channels increases the likelihood of hiring labor by 20 and demand for hired labor by 61 a gender disaggregation shows that positive employment effects are especially pronounced for female laborers who often belong to the most vulnerable population groups rural employment generation can be an important vehicle for poverty reduction

real exchange rate risk expectations and the level of direct investment four models of direct investment are analyzed assuming various relationships between foreign and domestic production the direct effect of risk adjusted expected real foreign currency appreciation is to lower foreign capital cost thus stimulating direct investment however when costs of other inputs are also affected induced productivity changes or output price changes may offset the direct effect reducing direct investment pooled estimation results for u s annual bilateral direct investment flows to five industrialized countries show significant reductions associated with expected appreciation of real foreign currency and significant increases associated with risk these results are consistent with the model where in response to risk the multinational firm reduces exports to the foreign country but offsets this somewhat by increasing foreign capital input and production

why cooperate public goods economic power and the montreal protocol this paper develops a correlated probit model to describe dichotomous choices that may contain a public goods component or some other forms of interdependency the key contribution of the paper is to formulate tests for interdependent behavior among agents in particular we examine the decisions by nations whether or not to ratify the montreal protocol on substances that deplete the ozone layer specifically we reject free riding as a motive for not ratifying the protocol and we find little evidence that individual nations were influenced by the behavior of their largest trading partners hence the data suggest that with respect to the montreal protocol most nations acted without regard for the actions of other nations

does storage technology affect adoption of improved maize varieties in africa insights from malawi s input subsidy program abstract to date there is limited knowledge of how having access to post harvest storage technology affects a smallholder african farmer s decision to adopt higher yielding improved maize varieties this is a key issue because higher yielding varieties are known to be more susceptible to storage pests than lower yielding traditional varieties we address this question using panel data from malawi and incorporating panel estimation techniques to deal with unobserved heterogeneity our results indicate that acquiring chemical storage protectants after the previous harvest is associated with a statistically significant and modest positive impact on the probability of adopting improved maize total area planted to improved maize varieties and share of area planted to improved maize varieties in the next planting season we also find that the storage chemical subsidy is associated with significant crowding out of commercial storage chemical purchases as farmers who acquire subsidized chemicals are more than 50 percentage points less likely to purchase commercial chemicals on average these findings have implications for maize adoption and input subsidy policies and they indicate that researchers extension staff and policy makers should consider post harvest issue when promoting adoption of improved varieties

habit persistence in overlapping generations economies under pure exchange abstract this paper analyzes the implications of habit persistence preferences for savings and equilibrium dynamics in the context of an overlapping generations model under pure exchange we show that habit persistence can convert an economy which otherwise has no role for government currency into an economy where there does exist a role for such currency further the increased saving induced by habit persistence implies that governments are able to float higher levels of deficits in such economies relative to economies without habit persistence the paper also shows that relative to standard preferences habit persistence preferences cause the savings function to become decreasing in the rate of interest at lower values for relative risk aversion this is of particular interest since the paper demonstrates that this result is closely related to the relative success of models with habit persistence in explaining the equity premium puzzle journal of economic literatureclassification numbers e21 e32

consumption externalities production externalities and efficient capital accumulation under time non separable preferences the effects of consumption and production externalities on economic performance under time non separable preferences are examined both theoretically and numerically we show that a consumption externality alone has long run distortionary effects if and only if labor is supplied elastically with fixed labor supply it has only transitional distortionary effects production externalities always generate long run distortions irrespective of labor supply the optimal tax structure to correct for the distortions is characterized we compare the implications of this model with those obtained when the consumption externality is contemporaneous while some of the long run effects are robust there are also important qualitative and quantitative differences particularly along transitional paths

targeting nominal income a closer look abstract i derive conditions under which the monetary authority should target nominal spending the relevant spending target is a weighted average of income and consumption despite sticky nominal wages under optimal policy the economy behaves as if all markets clear

aspirations habit formation and bequest motive we analyze how the presence of endogenous preferences affects the altruistic bequest motive from parents to children we will show that the existence of habits raises the threshold value of the intergenerational discount factor above which altruistic bequests are positive while aspiration formation could push this value down therefore the dynamic inefficiency of the economy with no altruism is not sufficient to prevent the bequest motive from being operative under aspiration formation we also discuss the implications of public debt when the bequest motive is inoperative and preferences exhibit habit and aspiration formation

endogenous fiscal policies environmental quality and status seeking behavior abstract this paper analyzes endogenous fiscal policy in an endogenous growth model where agents care about social status and environmental quality the quest for a higher status is assimilated to a preference for capital wealth the government uses income tax to finance infrastructure and environmental protection we find that accounting for preferences for social status and environmental quality may lead to an allocation of tax revenue in favor of a cleanup effort to the detriment of infrastructure economic growth is not necessarily and negatively affected by this allocation as it is partly explained by an excessive accumulation of capital wealth due to the quest of status status seeking can however harm economic growth and environmental quality when its motive is important enough finally we show that economic growth may be consistent with environmental preservation but is not necessarily welfare improving as in the case of absence of status seeking behavior

how does gender affect the adoption of agricultural innovations the case of improved maize technology in ghana why do men and women adopt agricultural technologies at different rates evidence from ghana suggests that gender linked differences in the adoption of modern maize varieties and chemical fertilizer result from gender linked differences in access to complementary inputs this finding has important policy implications because it suggests that ensuring more widespread and equitable adoption of improved technologies may not require changes in the research system but rather introduction of measures that ensure better access for women to complementary inputs especially land labor and extension services

love thy children abstract this paper proves that barro s 1974 debt neutrality proposition whose relevance hinges in an economy with bequest motives on bequests being operative in the economy without public debt is not applicable to a wide class of overlapping generation economies those with a weak bequest motive in particular it is shown that the bequest motive is always too weak and public debt therefore non neutral when non physical assets have a well defined function reducing oversavings in the corresponding economy without bequest motive i e when the non altruistic economy is dynamically inefficient

using a discrete choice experiment to elicit the demand for a nutritious food willingness to pay for orange maize in rural zambia using a discrete choice experiment this paper estimates the willingness to pay for biofortified orange maize in rural zambia the study design has five treatment arms which enable an analysis of the impact of nutrition information comparing the use of simulated radio versus community leaders in transmitting the nutrition message on willingness to pay and to account for possible novelty effects in the magnitude of premiums or discounts the estimation strategy also takes into account lexicographic preferences of a subset of our respondents the results suggest that a orange maize is not confused with yellow maize and has the potential to compete with white maize in the absence of a nutrition campaign b there is a premium for orange maize with nutrition information and c different modes of nutritional message dissemination have the same impact on consumer acceptance

analysis of adoption and impacts of improved maize varieties in eastern zambia summary this paper analyzes the adoption and welfare impacts of improved maize varieties in eastern zambia using data obtained from a sample of over 800 farm households using both propensity score matching and endogenous switching regression models the paper shows that adoption of improved maize leads to significant gains in crop incomes consumption expenditure and food security results further show that improved maize varieties have significant poverty reducing impacts in eastern zambia the paper concludes with implications for policies to promote adoption and impacts of modern varieties in zambia