optimal dynamic pricing of inventories with stochastic demand over finite horizons in many industries managers face the problem of selling a given stock of items by a deadline we investigate the problem of dynamically pricing such inventories when demand is price sensitive and stochastic and the firm s objective is to maximize expected revenues examples that fit this framework include retailers selling fashion and seasonal goods and the travel and leisure industry which markets space such as seats on airline flights cabins on vacation cruises and rooms in hotels that become worthless if not sold by a specific time we formulate this problem using intensity control and obtain structural monotonicity results for the optimal intensity resp price as a function of the stock level and the length of the horizon for a particular exponential family of demand functions we find the optimal pricing policy in closed form for general demand functions we find an upper bound on the expected revenue based on analyzing the deterministic version of the problem and use this bound to prove that simple fixed price policies are asymptotically optimal as the volume of expected sales tends to infinity finally we extend our results to the case where demand is compound poisson only a finite number of prices is allowed the demand rate is time varying holding costs are incurred and cash flows are discounted the initial stock is a decision variable and reordering overbooking and random cancellations are allowed

the hotel yield management with two types of room prices overbooking and cancellations abstract we consider a problem for hotel room allocations with early discount cancellations and overbooking in our model customers can book a room in discounted price if they reserve before a certain deadline the model takes overbooking into account we have expressed the expected total sale function proved it is unimodal on the number of allocated rooms for early discount and for overbooking respectively under a condition and clarified the range where the optimal solution exists we have derived an optimal allocation for early discount in a specified model without cancellations and overbooking

labor supply of husbands and wives a simultaneous equations approach labor supply functions for married men and women are formulated as a dynamic simultaneous equations system which is estimated using panel data controlling for fixed individual effects allows marginal labor supply responses to be disentangled from permanent patterns in hours worked due to assortative mating the results suggest that the labor supply of husbands and wives without pre school children is not jointly determined in the short run while families with young children exhibit strong interactions in work hours and negative cross earnings effects neither the joint utility model of family labor supply nor an ad hoc traditional family model is supported by these results the data are for the united states and concern 381 couples from the denver income maintenance experiment excerpt

rural nonfarm employment and incomes in latin america overview and policy implications abstract rural nonfarm employment rnfe and incomes rnfi are crucial to latin american rural households the 11 rural household income studies in this volume reviewed in this paper use 1990s data and show that rnfi averages 40 of rural incomes rnfi and rnfe have grown quickly over the past three decades the review of evidence provided some surprising departures from traditional images of nonfarm activities of latin american rural households in terms of shares of rural incomes 1 nonfarm wage incomes exceed self employment incomes 2 rnfi far exceeds farm wage incomes 3 local rnfi far exceeds migration incomes 4 service sector rnfi far exceeds manufactures rnfi these findings suggest the need for more development program attention to wage employment in the service sector versus the traditional focus on small enterprise manufactures moreover poor households and zones tend to have higher shares in their incomes but lower absolute levels of rnfi as compared to richer households and zones the rnfe of the poor tend to be the low paid nonfarm equivalent of semi subsistence farming raising the capacity of the poor to participate in the better paid types of rnfe is crucial via employment skills training education infrastructure credit finally rnfe has grown fastest and been most poverty alleviating where there are dynamic growth motors in particular in the agricultural sector but also in tourism links to urban areas mining and forestry this means that developing rnf jobs cannot be done at the expense of programs promoting agricultural development

intersectoral transfer growth and inequality in rural ecuador abstract in this paper we study intersectoral transfer and its impact on the distribution of income in ecuador we find that income shares between farm and nonfarm activities are roughly equal on average although the rich in rural areas typically receive a greater share of income from nonfarm sources thus decomposing inequality by income source reveals that a rise in nonfarm incomes increases inequality drawing on a new method to estimate local level distributional outcomes growth of the high productivity nonfarm sector is observed to have a strong and positive association with average consumption and inequality growth of the low productivity nonfarm sector is associated with little change in either average income or income inequality irrespective of subsector growth of the nonfarm sector is associated with a substantial fall in poverty

modeling individual preferences for energy sources the case of iv generation nuclear energy in italy the planned re introduction of nuclear energy in italy was abandoned in the aftermath of the fukushima nuclear accident twenty years earlier soon after the chernobyl accident italians had also voted against nuclear energy however a new nuclear energy technology i e fourth generation is under research and development this paper investigates its social acceptance by means of a robust methodology employing 1 choice experiments 2 structural equation modeling and 3 information treatments within an online nation wide survey results show a great deal of preference heterogeneity the majority of the sampled respondents oppose new nuclear plants in italy with some not willing to accept any monetary compensation at all however another segment of respondents more confident that fourth generation nuclear energy goals will be achieved show a modest support towards the implementation of new nuclear projects additional variables were found to affect opposition

ethics and incentives a political approach understood within an economic framework as a form of trade incentives appear inherently ethical understood as a form of power incentives seem ethically suspect incentives along with coercion and persuasion are among the ways in which some people get others to do what they want them to do this paper analyzes incentives as a form of power in order to develop criteria for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate uses of them whereas an economic approach focuses on voluntariness as the sole criterion in judging incentives this political approach yields three standards purpose voluntariness and effect on the character of the parties involved the paper explores issues that arise in applying these standards framing the problem of incentives as a problem of power reveals the ethical issues with greater depth and complexity than placing incentives in an economic frame of reference

off farm work decisions of husbands and wives joint decision making theoretical and econometric models are developed to examine joint wage labor participation and hours decisions of a husband and wife in farm households the econometric model is multiple equation and recursive the specification of the off farm labor supply equation of the husband wife depends on whether his her wife husband does or does not work off the farm and this structure is endogenous the model is fitted to data for iowa farm households the main conclusion is that the off farm labor supply equation of a married individual differs significantly depending on whether his or her spouse also works for a wage copyright 1989 by mit press

income risk and allocation of labour time an empirical investigation this study investigates the behaviour of risk averse farm operators in response to farm income and employment variability economic theory maintains that greater farm income variability should incr

ex ante and ex post labor supply response to risk in a low income area abstract this paper tests for ex ante and ex post labor supply responses to weather risk for rural indian farm households the analysis uses panel data on 2115 households spanning 13 states in rural india merged with a 22 year series of district level rainfall data ex ante households facing riskier distributions of rainfall are more likely to participate in the labor market ex post unexpectedly bad weather and low rainfall increase labor force participation

off farm work decisions of farm couples estimating structural simultaneous equations with ordered categorical dependent variables we estimate a full system of structural farm and off farm labor supply equations of farm couples as a set of simultaneous equations with categorical dependent variables in a first step the reduced form is estimated by ordered probit with unknown thresholds then the identified structural coefficients are recovered from the reduced form coefficients through minimum distance estimation using census data from israel we find that for men a one hour increase in farm labor supply causes a one hour decrease in off farm labor supply but not for women this could not have been found without estimating structural coefficients

how valuable is on farm work to farmers in this article we estimate a rural household model that allows specific tastes for working on farm and can fit the data as well as the general model of lopez we use two samples that are matched by individual characteristics and adopt the method for matched surveys proposed by arellano and meghir we replicate using french data the empirical finding of elhorst who reports evidence that implicit wages of on farm family labor are significantly below off farm wages we then provide estimates of the lower bounds for preferences for on farm work for males and females which are significant and positive

using evidence of household income diversification to inform study of the rural nonfarm labor market in africa abstract the labor market literature in developing countries has seldom drawn on the studies of rural household income diversification this paper draws on such studies to inform future study of the rural nonfarm labor market in africa the review of evidence provides some surprising departures from traditional images of nonfarm activities of rural households among the most striking is the dominant importance in the majority of case study areas of nonfarm wage labor as compared to self employment of nonfarm sector earnings as compared to farm sector wage earnings and of local nonfarm earnings as compared to migration earnings the most worrying finding was the poor distribution of nonfarm earnings in rural areas despite the importance of these earnings to food security and farm investments this poor distribution implies significant entry barriers and market segmentation it is probable that this will lead over time to an increasingly skewed distribution of land and other assets in rural africa

property rights protest and the siting of hazardous waste facilities ture since that time no major hwf has been sited anywhere in the united states the epa had anticipated that local opposition would make finding these sites an exceptionally difficult task their pessimism was well founded and if anything understated according to the hazardous waste counsultant s latest state by state review the outlook for siting hwfs in the future is even more bleak than in the past due in large part to what they term a worsening of the emotional atmosphere surrounding siting efforts this failure to site any new hwf has come about in spite of assurances by government and company officials that new facilities built according to the present standards would pose negligible risks to the local residents attempts have been made to break the deadlock by instituting extensive public participation procedures establishing state siting boards with the power to overrule local decision makers and requiring facility owners to compensate local governments for safety services the latter provided in this paper we argue that the ambiguous nature of the present property rights governing the siting of hwfs is an important cause of the stalemate we offer a new approach to siting which recognizes the de facto property rights assumed by local communities we propose a political market via a referendum

wage labour activities by agricultural households in nicaragua this article considers wage labour activities by agricultural households in nicaragua it analyses the role of 1 comparative advantage as determined by individual and household characteristics and 2 agricultural conditions and market imperfections in shaping wage labour supply an econometric specification is developed which allows for random household specific effects results reveal that non agricultural wage work is largely determined by comparative advantages whereas agricultural wage work is used to deal with a number of agricultural conditions and market imperfections

an optimal dynamic policy for hotel yield management abstract most research into the yield management problem has generated variations on the marginal seat revenue models that are based on simplifying assumptions about the demand process and heuristic decision rules in this paper a dynamic programming formulation of the problem is given allowing for general demand patterns and a policy that is based on time and the number of vacancies furthermore this policy incorporates both revealed price and hidden price market behavior it is shown that this formulation has a simple closed form solution that can be efficiently computed as a result a more general formulation of the problem with an optimal solution is available to hotels and airlines the particular application that motivated this model development is that of yield management for small hotels

individual preferences regarding environmental offset and welfare compensation a choice experiment application to an offshore wind farm project this paper uses the choice experiment method to investigate the preferences of local communities with respect to various compensatory measures in connection with a development project a survey was conducted among recreational users of the bay of saint brieuc where an offshore wind farm is currently planned the goal is to identify the preferences of the bay s users with respect to various compensation possibilities monetary compensation investment in publicly owned assets or the ecological restoration two multinomial logit mnl models and a latent class lc model are used to explore the preferences and some sources of heterogeneity within the community the results of this study show that form of compensation is an important determinant of preferences and has an effect on the acceptability towards the compensation principle more precisely results shows that compensation is better accepted if it obeys the principle of strong sustainability which includes ecological restoration for the gain of the population as a whole and which excludes monetary transactions associated with the bribe effect the study also highlights the naturalists specific attitude for who compensation should be determined within a regulatory framework one which imposes compensatory measures related to objectively determined ecological impacts c 2016 published by elsevier b v

the supply of off farm labor a random coefficients approach a joint model of off farm labor decisions for farm operator and spouse is presented attention is given to operator and spouse participation decisions as well as associated problems of multiple sample selectivity biases two stage fixed and random coefficient methods corrected for possible selectivity biases are used to estimate supply function parameters results indicate that supply function parameters are random variation in important supply parameters is investigated results also illustrate the importance of spouse decisions on off farm labor supply function structure

an economic model of welfare stigma perhaps the most basic assumption of the economic theory of consumer demand is that more is better than less virtually all of the major propositions of consumer theory can in a certain sense be derived from the assumption that goods are good interestingly however this tenet seems to be violated by the behavior of many individuals in the low income population for many turn out to be eligible for a positive welfare benefit but do not in fact join the welfare rolls for example it has been estimated that in 1970 only about 69 percent of the families eligible for afdc aid to families with dependent children participated in the program see richard michel 1980 the corresponding percentage for afdc u the program for which families with an unemployed male are eligible was only 43 percent and the participation rate in the food stamp program was only 38 percent see maurice mcdonald 1977 this phenomenon has puzzled many investigators because such individuals do not locate on the boundaries of their budget sets consequently most investigators ignore the problem when studying the effects of welfare programs on behavior in this paper this seemingly irrational rejection of an increase in income is modeled as resulting from welfare stigma that is from disutility arising from participation in a welfare program per se 1 the existence of stigma has been amply documented in the sociological literature patrick horan and patricia austin 1974 lee rainwater 1979 where interviews of recipients have often uncovered feelings of lack of self respect and negative self characterizations from participation in welfare nevertheless this phenomenon has not been modeled and many questions consequently remain when is the disutility of participation strong enough to prevent participation shouldn t we expect individuals to weigh the disutility of participation against the potential benefit in their decisions what is the elasticity of participation with respect to the potential benefit also in a slightly different vein how are the work disincentives of welfare affected by stigma these questions have been given scant attention by economists yet they are crucial for our ability to predict the impact of various welfare programs on the lowincome population here these questions are addressed by modeling nonparticipation as a utility maximizing decision the model is developed and estimated for the afdc program 2 the model posits an individual utility function containing not just disposable income but

rural nonfarm incomes in nicaragua abstract this paper examines nonfarm incomes of rural nicaraguan households using a nationwide survey lsms from 1998 the key findings are as follows a rural nonfarm income rnfi constitutes 41 of rural household incomes b rnfi is much more important than farm wage labor income c rnfi tends to be relatively concentrated geographically and socioeconomically toward the rural areas of the managua zone and the rest of pacific zone which are denser in infrastructure and population and toward the upper income quartile of rural households this concentration implies high entry barriers and capital requirements for rural nonfarm activity that the poor are simply not equipped to overcome equipping the rural poor through training and acquisition of diverse forms of capital to have a chance at the higher return nonfarm jobs would be a major step toward helping them to share the benefits of the rural nonfarm economy d self employment small enterprise income in manufactures is very minor probably due to the ease of obtaining manufactured goods from urban industries and imports wage employment constitutes the bulk of rnfi despite it receiving little attention in development programs and debate e three quarters of rnfi is in the service sector and only one quarter is from manufactures that can be contrasted with the emphasis on small manufactures enterprises in rural development programs and research f education road access as well as access to electricity and water were found to be important to nonfarm incomes

quasi maximum likelihood estimation of multivariate probit models farm couples labor participation joint estimation of farmers farm and off farm work participation requires a multivariate probit model in which the number of equations is twice the number of household members where there are more than two such equations i suggest a quasi maximum likelihood method which requires only two levels of numerical integration the method maximizes the use of sample information given this numerical feasibility condition it is used for estimating a joint participation model of farm couples farm and off farm work the model yields conclusions about comparative advantages of men and women in farm off farm and housework which cannot be obtained with a more limited setup

crop insurance acreage decisions and nonpoint source pollution the redirection of farm policy in the 1996 farm bill has generated much interest in seeking environmentally friendly and economically viable ways to protect farm income agricultural insurance has been suggested as such an instrument this article estimates the effect of crop insurance on crop mix and the resulting change in chemical use in the central nebraska basin providing corn insurance will shift land from hay and pasture to corn which will increase chemical use at the extensive margin this extensive margin effect dominates the effect of crop insurance on the application rate leading to an increase in total chemical use

capacity rationing decision procedures with order profit as a continuous random variable abstract when expected demand is more than available capacity a make to order manufacturer should take the more profitable orders and reject the less profitable orders in order to better allocate its limited capacity and maximize its profit however various orders will arrive at different times in the future so the manufacturer cannot look at all the order inquiries at the same time and choose the most profitable ones when an order inquiry arrives the manufacturer must promptly determine without knowing exactly what the future orders might be whether to accept the order or to reject the order thus reserving the capacity for future more profitable orders this study focuses on such an order selection decision problem under the following assumptions 1 the arrival of future customer orders is a poisson process 2 the capacity requirement of a future customer order is a continuous random variable and 3 the profit per unit capacity used by an order is also a continuous random variable under the stochastic problem assumptions this study investigates two decision procedures that determine whether to accept or to reject an order inquiry based on the available information including 1 current available manufacturing capacity 2 capacity requirement by the order and 3 the profit per unit capacity of the order one procedure is called static probability capacity rationing decision procedure spcr the other one is called dynamic stochastic capacity rationing decision procedure dscr simulation experiments are conducted to validate the proposed procedures an optimal solution method that uses 0 1 knapsack problem formulation to obtain the decisions with perfect information is used to measure the effectiveness of the proposed procedures the results show that the approach utilizing dscr outperforms other approaches by providing the highest profit and is also very robust under various problem conditions

cooperation and part time farming in the israeli moshav a simultaneous equations model of the israeli moshav in which the levels of cooperative marketing part time and full time farming output and capital stock are endogenous is developed and empirically estimated in the process hypotheses relating to the problem of voluntary collective action are tested

the determinants of vinegrowers employment and policy implications the case of a greek island this study investigates the employment of vinegrowers on a greek island samos where there exist attractive alternative employment opportunities particularly in the tourist sector the recent dramatic decline in the number of vinegrowers has been of great concern particularly to wine producers policy makers and local authorities because such a pattern has had and most importantly will have serious economic social and environmental implications the focus of this paper is on two issues first some descriptive statistics on the demographics of vinegrowers and characteristics of vineyards are presented and second a probit model is developed to identify the demographic and other determinants of the probability of off farm and off vineyard work participation the most important source of data information is primary data collected by the authors using a questionnaire which was completed by a representative sample of vinegrowers from the island of samos the empirical findings suggest that the promotion of vinegrowing requires policies that will enlarge the size of vineyards promote investments in human and physical capital and improve the public infrastructure

determinants and effects of income diversification amongst farm households in burkina faso using four years of household data from three agroecological zones in burkina faso sahelian sudanian and guinean the article examines the determinants and effects of household income diversification harvest shortfalls and terms of trade are found to drive diversification but land constraints do not income diversification is associated with higher incomes and food consumption and more stable income and consumption over years

when quality signals talk evidence from the turin hotel industry abstract this study analyzes the relationship between quality signals and price setting through the application of hedonic price functions the model proposals also include variables relating to land use policies and tourism development strategies a simultaneous equation model endogenously estimates quality signals this method is appropriate for analyzing emerging urban destinations as characterized by the presence of an expanding hotel industry the results are based on a dataset of 145 hotels in turin italy the empirical findings reveal that reputation based quality signals help explain tariff levels price proposals also include a premium for quality assured hotels defining some limits of the current hotel classification system the empirical evidence has significant marketing implications for the hospitality industry s competitiveness since the results clarify the impact of quality signals on price level

farm income variability and the supply of off farm labor if farmers are risk averse greater farm income variability should increase off farm labor supply this effect is confirmed for a sample of kansas farmers off farm employment of farmers and their spouses is also found to be significantly influenced by farm experience off farm work experience farm size leverage efficiency and farm specific education in addition farm operators and spouses who receive significant income support through government farm programs are less likely to work off the farm this may suggest that policy changes reducing farm income support payments may increase off farm employment of farmers and their spouses

education labor supply and market development in rural peru summary research suggests that education has a limited effect on subsistence farm productivity yet rural incomes include more than farming as households diversify their income portfolios furthermore education may affect the number of labor hours supplied utilizing data from peru this paper finds that farm households benefit from more education by finding more lucrative opportunities characterized by fewer hours the extent to which this is possible depends on how well local markets are developed since education policy takes time to yield returns policy makers have an additional tool at their disposal improving market access will also increase the returns to education

nonfarm employment and poverty alleviation of rural farm households in honduras abstract this paper analyzes the role of nonfarm income of rural farm households in honduras it uses the national income and expenditure survey from 1993 to 1994 income from nonfarm wage and self employment represents 16 25 of farm household income and is especially important for middle and higher income strata nonfarm wage labor is geographically concentrated in small rural towns and in the industrial free zones located in the northern region while self employment is particularly developed in the southern region access to nonfarm wage employment is confined to educated individuals that belong to large households while female members of wealthier households are mainly involved in self employment food security is strongly enhanced through the engagement in nonfarm activities moreover nonfarm income enables farmers to purchase external inputs for improving yields and labor productivity suitable policies to enhance nonfarm employment include education training and technical assistance to reduce labor intensity in agricultural production as well as public investment and credit services to improve access to nonfarm activities

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

compensating for public harms why public goods are preferred to money this paper provides evidence that public goods represent a more acceptable response to public harms than monetary compensation we demonstrate a preference for public goods over monetary compensation in part because receipt of public goods may limit the sense of guilt or bribery from accepting compensation for the injury more surprising this preference for public goods over money in the presence of a harm remains in a free market choice where guilt is not an issue it appears that public goods psychologically mitigate or balance public harms in a way that makes them more valuable in the presence of public harms

household composition labor markets and labor demand testing for separation in agricultural household models this paper tests the separation of farm labor supply and labor demand decisions using the observation that household composition is an important determinant of farm labor use with nonseparation after assessing the conditions under which the test has power against several alternatives an empirical model is developed to test the proposition that farm employment is independent of family composition the model is estimated on a data set from rural java the null hypothesis that farm labor allocation decisions are independent of household structure is not rejected the results are robust to different specifications of the labor demand function copyright 1992 by the econometric society

family composition and off farm participation decisions in israeli farm households this article studies the relationship between the off farm participation behavior of farm operators and their spouses and the demographic composition of the household we focus on farm families without parents siblings or partners and examine the effects of the existence of elderly children of the farm couple we find that both the father and the mother tend to reduce their participation in off farm work as the number of elderly children rises this result holds even after controlling for observed characteristics we also find that the effect of elderly children stems from considerations related to both farm production and household production

local economic conditions and wage labor decisions of farm and rural nonfarm couples effects of geographical differences in local economic conditions on wage labor demand and wage labor participation decisions of rural couples are examined for current population survey households 1978 82 wage premiums are shown to exist for localities anticipating labor demand growth higher unemployment rates larger share of employment in services and higher costs of living these effects are stronger for males than females effects of local economic conditions on the probability of wage work are consistent with expected market wage and reservation wage effects and for farm households the probability of wage work increases when expected farm output prices decline or the wage increases

income strategies among rural households in mexico the role of off farm activities abstract off farm activities generate on average more than half of farm households incomes in the mexican ejido sector participation in these activities helps reduce poverty and contributes to greater equality in the distribution of income this paper analyzes the determinants of access to off farm sources of income across households we find that education plays a major role in accessing better remunerated nonagricultural employment adults of indigenous ethnic origin suffer from an educational lag and have less access to off farm nonagricultural employment than non indigenous adults at identical educational levels the regional availability of off farm employment strongly affects participation in addition women are differentially limited by distance to urban centers in their ability to gain off farm employment

household income strategies and natural disasters dynamic livelihoods in rural nicaragua this paper assesses the impact of hurricane mitch on livelihood strategies of rural households in nicaragua through destruction or distress sales of productive assets a hurricane or another natural hazard could induce people with relatively remunerative livelihoods to choose more defensive strategies which allow them to survive but at a permanently lower welfare level than before using panel data from before and after hurricane mitch we find that livelihood strategies can be grouped into three welfare categories annual farming and farm employment generate low incomes whereas nonfarm wage employment and livestock farming result in relatively high incomes perennial farming nonfarm self employment and annual cropping with nonfarm employment take an intermediate position high welfare strategies were associated with high levels of capital and the number of people involved was very similar between different years suggesting that households following low welfare strategies were trapped in poverty however many households moved actively between strategies of different welfare levels this indicates that there was no absolute poverty threshold but also that being able to initiate a relatively profitable livelihood strategy was no guarantee that this strategy could be maintained there is no evidence that hurricane mitch affected livelihood strategy transitions livelihood mobility was similar for households inside and outside mitch affected areas

smoothing consumption by smoothing income hours of work responses to idiosyncratic agricultural shocks in rural india while research has demonstrated that farm households in developing economies are able to protect consumption from idiosyncratic crop shocks little evidence shows how this is achieved this paper examines the extent to which labor markets allow households to shift labor from farm to off farm employment and the extent to which such a shift explains the observed lack of correlation between consumption and idiosyncratic crop shocks the empirical analysis uses a novel measure of the idiosyncratic crop income shock which utilizes information on start of season cropping choices to more accurately estimate household expectations of weather

incommensurability and monetary valuation at the very heart of environmental cost benefit analysis cba is the claim that benefits and costs can be expressed in terms of money and hence made comparable in particular cba puts all benefits and costs on a cardinal monetary scale it assumes monetary commensurability a significant literature in ethics and political philosophy has arisen which doubts this assumption but has so far had little impact on the theory or practice of cba in light of this the paper assesses the defense of monetary commensurability offered by cost benefit analysts and the wider economics literature

land property rights and international migration evidence from mexico abstract in this paper i ask whether there is a relationship between land property rights and international migration in order to identify the impact of property rights i consider a country wide land certification program that took place in mexico in the 1990s my identification strategy exploits the staggered implementation and the households eligibility for the program i find that the program increased the eligible households likelihood of having one or more members abroad by 12 in terms of the number of migrants my coefficient estimates explain 26 of the 1994 1997 increase in migrants from ejido areas and 13 15 of the increase from all of mexico consistent with our theoretical model the impact is strongest for households without a land will this implies that land inheritance issues drive at least part of the effect

on the empirical implementation of some game theoretic models of household labor supply this paper discusses some issues in the empirical implementation of game theoretic models of household labor supply in particular we focus on the identification problems inherent in many of these models as an illustration we estimate a game theoretic model which uses data on preferred working hours as additional identifying information

the off farm work behavior of farm operators there is widespread concern about the opportunities for people to begin farming most observers argue that the financial barrier to entry into agriculture has risen relative to farm incomes several authors have pointed to off farm earnings as one important way to overcome this barrier coffman carlin and ghelfi steeves steeves in particular cited evidence that fewer than 20 of canadian farm entrants between 1966 and 1971 recorded no significant off farm work in 1971 nearly 43 of these entrants worked 229 to 365 days off the farm in that year similar evidence for farm entrants in iowa is found in kaldor and jetton hence off farm work by new farmers is often viewed as an important way to manage the high capital investment required to establish a viable farm this viewpoint is not the only one possible neoclassical theory predicts that farmers increase off farm work when marginal returns to off farm work become larger than marginal returns to farming lee bollman sumner because entering farmers often have current off farm work skills they may choose some off farm work regardless of the financial obligations of farming because offfarm work skills depreciate and returns to farming appreciate over time established farmers are less likely to engage in off farm work clearly a simple correlation between farm entry and off farm work will not allow us to distinguish between these views this paper develops two formal models of offfarm labor supply to examine these two interpretations first it analyzes the off farm work decisions in a conventional utility maximizing framework consistent with the view that off farm work is chosen when marginal returns to farming fall below potential off farm returns the paper then analyzes the off farm work decisions when an income target reflecting the need to meet the financial obligations of farming is the objective the paper demonstrates that these models produce divergent predictions about off farm work decisions only under the assumption that the higher financial obligations exceed the higher returns to work on larger farms the models are then tested under this assumption using the 1978 agricultural enumerative survey for the canadian province of saskatchewan

testing the neoclassical model of family labor supply and fertility the mcelroy horney nash bargaining model of family demand behavior relaxes the restriction that nonearned income of husband and wife has the identical effect on family labor supply and commodity demands this restriction of the neoclassical model offamily behavior is tested for the determination of husband and wife labor supply andfertility based on the 1981 socioeconomic survey of thailand the neoclassical restriction is rejected for female labor supply andfertility another unexplored limitation offamily demand studies due to the sample self selection of intact marriages is empirically treated through alternative estimation strategies in this case a more sharply focused theory of marital behavior is needed to identify family demand models

the costs of equal land distribution the case of the israeli moshavim equal land distribution achieved by government policy may adversely affect aggregate output israeli moshavim cooperative villages operate under an equal land allocation rule this study assesses the production and distributional consequences of three alternative hypothetical allocation rules a free market allocation a value maximizing policy of distributing land to current farmers and a policy that maximizes value added without discrimination based on nativity or ethnicity production and supply functions are estimated using sample data on israeli family farms then the four allocation rules are simulated the output loss from distributing land equally is found to be modest compared to the income inequality generated by the other rules

a taxonomy and research overview of perishable asset revenue management yield management overbooking and pricing this paper proposes the term perishable asset revenue management to denote the field that combines the areas of yield management overbooking and pricing for perishable assets after summarizing the characteristics common to problems in this field the paper discusses the objectives and constraints faced by decision makers then it offers a comprehensive taxonomy with 14 different elements and reviews the research that has been done related to each element finally it suggests some important areas of future research that can help bridge the gap between theory and application

the off farm labor supply of farmers theoretical and empirical models are developed to examine the off farm wages labor force participation and hours of work of farmers econometric estimates use data from a 1971 survey of illinois farmers the off farm wage depends on farmer human capital and the local labor market the major result confirms the sensitivity of off farm work to economic incentives a 10 increase in the off farm wage entails an 11 increase in hours of off farm work holding farm characteristics constant results also indicate effects of seasonality risk and life cycle factors on off farm work

does cash crop adoption detract from child care provision evidence from rural nepal this document addresses the issues of agricultural commercialization using data from fieldwork conducted in nepal it aimed to examine the impact of a project designed to commercialize vegetables and fruit the vegetable and fruit cash crop program vcf on male and female time allocation the goal of vfc program was to increase the commercial production of vegetables and fruits in farm households that were heavily dependent on the production of cereal and livestock for home consumption findings from multivariate analysis suggest that for households with one preschooler vfc participation results in more time to agricultural production of the cash crop for both men and women but also a decrease in care time to preschoolers from both men and women meanwhile for households with more than one preschooler this trade off is not so apparent the analysis also suggests that behavior change initiatives to protect time to child care might be feasible in that vfc participation does not decrease the overall nonwork time of men or women with preschool children in residence

economic valuation by the method of paired comparison with emphasis on evaluation of the transitivity axiom the paired comparison pc method is used to investigate reliability transitiv ity and decision time for binary choices among goods and sums of money the pc method reveals inconsistent choices and yields individual prefer ence order over the set of items being compared the data reported support the transitivity as sumption and demonstrate high reliability for individual preference order the paper also discusses using the pc method to obtain conser vative median and mean estimates of willingness to accept compensation for public and private goods the pc method may prove useful for valu ing public goods and warrants further study jel 426

a two season agricultural household model of output and price uncertainty abstract this paper presents a two season model of a household s production consumption labor supply and storage decisions in an environment of output and price risk the analytical results in this study are markedly different from those of models prevalent in the mainstream of the agricultural household literature the empirical analysis that uses panel data from a village in india provides support for the theoretical results and underscores the seasonal dimension of the farmers choice problems the results also show that ignoring risk or risk averse preferences may introduce substantial downward bias in optimal response estimates

are risk benefit tradeoffs possible in siting hazardous facilities ever since alfred marshall introduced the notion of consumer s surplus into the literature as a measure of well being economists have been interested in determining the amount of compensation required to leave individuals indifferent between the status quo and a new situation where less of a commodity can be consumed for example due to an increase in prices the hicksian and kaldor hicks criteria of specifying compensation variations may be appropriate for normal market goods where there is a wellspecified demand curve the analysis is less applicable for dealing with environmental resources where elements of risk are involved or there exist public good features that make it difficult to estimate people s values for different amenities v kerry smith 1989 this paper investigates the question of the appropriate role that providing benefits to a host community possibly in the form of compensation can play in improving the chances of siting a facility that is perceived to be potentially hazardous in section i we develop a simple twoperiod expected utility model to explain preferences for benefit packages the empirical analysis examining the predictive power of this model will be related to the following problem of current interest the u s congress is attempting to locate a site for storing high level radioactive waste from commercial nuclear power plants in the united states an underground repository is to be constructed 2000 feet below the earth s surface for the purpose of permanently storing nuclear waste shipped in casks from power plants around the country once filled to capacity the repository would be sealed to minimize any radiation leakage based on the results of a telephone survey of residents of nevada regarding their attitudes toward a high level nuclear waste repository we suggest ways that the expected utility model might be modified to take into account behavioral factors that are not normally considered part of individual models of choice under uncertainty these factors may be useful in determining when compensation will be a useful tool in facilitating the siting process

time allocation between farm and off farm activities in israeli farm households this paper examines the time allocation of israeli farm families between farm work and off farm work we found that extended families behave differently than nuclear families people in families with adult children or siblings of the farm couple tend to work more off the farm and less on the farm while people in families with parents tend to work less both on and off the farm we also found that farm land and capital do not affect time allocation once we control for the productive structure of the farm the private arab and jewish farm families behave differently than families in moshavim perhaps due to institutional factors cultural background and or labor market discrimination