economic policy uncertainty financial markets and probability of us recessions we use probit recession forecasting models to assess the ability of economic policy uncertainty indexes developed by baker et al 2013 to predict future us recessions the model specifications include policy indexes on their own and in combination with financial variables such as interest rate spreads stock returns and stock market volatility both in sample and out of sample analysis suggests that the policy uncertainty indexes are statistically and economically significant in forecasting recessions at the horizons beyond five quarters the index based on newspaper reports emerges as the best predictor outperforming the term spread at the longer forecast horizons

the market transition debate toward a synthesis in his seminal 1989 article a theory of market transition victor nee offered a new theory of social inequality and applied it to the study of the problem of transition from state socialist redistributive economy to market capitalism nee claimed that the emergence of markets in state socialist redistributive economies had unexpected consequences the most privileged stratum or class of state socialism the redistributors lost some of their privilege while those at the bottom of the state socialist hierarchy the direct producers benefited for earlier formulations see szelenyi and konrad 1969 szelenyi 1978 and whyte 1984 as a result inequality as measured by income or access to scarce goods was reduced nee s theory identified the mechanisms by which markets generated equality under redistributive systems if wages are not administratively set but established by transactive relations then producers are likely to have more power market power if markets operate then human capital is likely to be rewarded more while political loyalty is likely to matter less market incentive if there are markets in a redistributive economy then entrepreneurship becomes an alternative avenue of socioeconomic mobility market opportunity nee 1989 data collected in 1985 in rural china offered support to the theory of market transition between 1977 and 1985 overall income inequalities in china declined the income gap between urban residents and farmers shrank the income gap in the countryside between peasants and cadres also narrowed the decline of inequality arguably was the result of deregulation of state policies in agriculture after 1977 chinese peasants received land their production targets were less strictly regulated by planners and they were allowed to bring their produce to urban markets as

sharecropping and the capitalist transition in agriculture some evidence from the highlands of ecuador abstract sharecropping has been the subject of much debate among economists concerned with static efficiency and to some extent with equity this paper shifts the focus to the dynamics of structural change the research reported adds to the discussion a detailed account of a large number of sharecropping contracts and why they vary and offers a theory of the relationship between sharecropping as practised in the ecuadorian province of carchi and a particular pattern of structural change which is described as the transition to an agrarian structure dominated by capitalised family farms the prevalent use of wage labour on sharecropped land and the place of sharecropping in intergenerational asset transfers are shown to be important elements in explaining this transition

agricultural revolution and elite reproduction in qing china the transition to capitalism debate revisited recent actor centric theory about the historical rise of capitalism emphasizes the role of the autonomous agrarian elite in fostering a sustained agricultural revolution this revolution generated ample agrarian surplus in the form of rural elite s elevated income to fuel a capitalist industrial takeoff in late eighteenth century england the nontransition to capitalism in eighteenth and nineteenth century china despite the vast surplus generated in its advanced agrarian sector shows that high agricultural productivity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a capitalist takeoff by comparing qing china with eighteenth century england where capitalist industrialization erupted spontaneously and nineteenth century japan where capitalist industrialization succeeded under intensive state sponsorship this article argues that a strong urban entrepreneurial elite capable of centralizing the agrarian surplus and investing it in productive industrial innovation were as important as the existence of the surplus itself in fomenting capitalist transition the reproduction of the elite in eighteenth century china was constrained not by the anticommercial oriental despotic state as presumed in earlier literature but by the state s paternalist disposition in managing urban class conflict capitalist industrial development in china was further impeded in the nineteenth century when a nexus of local predatory military elite emerged in response to millenarian uprisings and wasted most of the agrarian surplus in their accumulation of means of violence the negative case of china helps us advance the actor centric model of capitalist transition by bringing urban entrepreneurs and class politics back in

the resurgence of sharecropping historical anomaly or political strategy although traditional economic theories regard sharecropping as inefficient and likely to dwindle in systems of capitalist commodity production sharecropping has exhibited remarkable persistence under a range of historical conditions this article explores the reasons for the unexpected tenacity of share farming and considers its implications for the analysis of rural class structure and agrarian change using the example of the resurgence of sharecropping in the california strawberry industry the paper demonstrates that political constraints on agricultural production are key determinants of the contemporary adoption of sharecropping establishing a context in which sharecropping not only facilitates but is recreated by capitalist accumulation

theories of share tenancy a critical survey for the past 2 decades the problems of agricultural tenancy have attracted a great deal of attention not only from agricultural economists but also from economists in general as a typical example of agencyprincipal contract relations despite the prolific growth of literature both theoretical and empirical there has been little convergence in opinions on tenancy contracts the divergence has been especially great on the understanding of the causes and the effects of sharecropping tenancy much confusion underlying the widely divergent perspectives has stemmed from partial treatments of contractual choice which unduly limit the optimizing behavior of contracting parties and the options of contract forms this essay aims at clarifying the sources of the confusion by reviewing the past literature in light of the more general theory of agency principal relations the agency theory in order to examine the problems of various theoretical models in a unified framework in section ii we first develop the basic framework of a general model of tenancy contract in section iii we clarify in terms of the general model contradictions latent in the traditional marshallian theory which asserts that share tenancy is inefficient because of the disincentive effect of cropsharing on the tenant s work effort in section iv we attempt to show that recent efforts to reconstruct the theory based on the traditional assumption have not yet been quite successful section v draws implications and testable hypotheses from more general theories incorporating the aspects of risk and uncertainty section vi tests allocational and distributional implications of those alternative hypotheses based on the summary of evidence col

contract choice and enforcement in an agrarian community agricultural tenancy in upland java this study explores the conditions under which a certain contract is preferred to others through an intensive survey of an upland village in west java despite an obvious difficulty in enforcing the terms of share contract in a highly complex intercropping system no significant difference in allocative efficiency was found between share tenancy and other forms of land tenure the results indicate that share tenancy was chosen only by the landlords who had the ability to enforce contractual terms at a low opportunity cost

estimating the divisional cost of capital an analysis of the pure play technique this paper suggests that the pure play technique can be used in conjunction with the capital asset pricing model to determine the cost of equity capital for the divisions of a multidivision firm since the beta for a division is unobservable in the marketplace a proxy beta derived from a publicly traded firm whose operations are as similar as possible to the division in question is used as the measure of the division s systematic risk to provide empirical support for using the pure play technique a sample of multidivision firms and pure play associated with each division is examined it is shown that an appropriately weighted average of the betas of the pure play firms closely approximates the beta of the multidivision firm

the emergence of a market society changing mechanisms of stratification in china this article examines the effect of institutional change the shift from redistribution to markets in altering the mechanisms of stratification new institutionalists maintain that interests are emb

endogenous matching and the empirical determinants of contract form empirical work on contracts typically regresses contract choice on observed principal and agent characteristics if i some of these characteristics are unobserved or partially observed and ii there are incentives whereby particular types of agents end up contracting with particular types of principals estimated coefficients on the observed characteristics may be misleading we address this endogenous matching problem using a data set on agricultural contracts between landlords and tenants in early renaissance tuscany controlling for endogenous matching has an impact on parameters of interest and tenants risk aversion appears to have influenced contract choice

on the different approaches of measuring uncertainty shocks as uncertainty has become an increasingly prominent source of business cycle fluctuations various uncertainty proxies have been proposed in the literature this paper shows that uncertainty measures based on realized variables fluctuate more than the measures that are based on forecasts more precisely the variation in the realized cross sectional standard deviation of profit growth and stock returns is larger than the variation in the forecast standard deviation moreover the forecast standard deviation of profit growth and stock returns are negatively or uncorrelated the uncertainty measures increase stock returns due to a risk premium but they decrease profit growth

is there a role for uncertainty in forecasting output growth in oecd countries evidence from a time varying parameter panel vector autoregressive model this paper uses a time varying parameter panel vector autoregressive tvp pvar model to analyze the role played by domestic and us news based measures of uncertainty in forecasting the growth of industrial production of 12 organisation for economic co operation and development oecd countries based on a monthly out of sample period of 2009 06 to 2017 05 given an in sample of 2003 03 to 2009 05 there are only 46 of cases where domestic uncertainty can improve the forecast of output growth relative to a baseline monetary tvp pvar model which includes inflation interest rate and nominal exchange rate growth besides output growth moreover including us uncertainty does not necessarily improve the forecasting performance of output growth from the tvp pvar model which includes only the domestic uncertainty along with the baseline variables so in general while uncertainty is important in predicting the future path of output growth in the 12 advanced economies considered a forecaster can do better in majority of the instances by just considering the information from standard macroeconomic variables

long memory economic policy uncertainty and forecasting us inflation a bayesian varfima approach abstractwe compare inflation forecasts of a vector autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average varfima model against standard forecasting models u s inflation forecasts improve when controlling for persistence and economic policy uncertainty epu importantly the varfima model comprising of inflation and epu outperforms commonly used inflation forecast models

abusa the structural history of an economic contract this speculative essay seeks an interpretation of abusa a share cropping arrangement which has been of fundamental importance in the development of the ghanaian cocoa industry according to theoretical expectations such an arrangement is both inefficient and inequitable a pre modern or pre capitalist productive relationship which will inevitably yield to a pattern of fixed rents and wage labour here the role of abusa in the spectacular growth of the cocoa economy and in its recent decline is examined with reference to the development of individual contracts it is argued that this ontogenetic development of abusa is structured by the changing domestic circumstances of farm owner and farm worker their competing interests in a maturing cocoa farm are negotiated and expressed in a sequence of contractual arrangements which gives the worker increasing access to the land and the product of his own labour it is suggested that if the evolution of productive relations towards more evidently capitalist

economic policy uncertainty in the us does it matter for the euro area abstract we investigate the effects of a us economic policy uncertainty shock on some euro area macroeconomic aggregates via structural vars we model the indicators of economic policy uncertainty recently developed by baker et al 2013 jointly with the aggregate price indexes and alternative indicators of the business cycle for the two above indicated economic areas according to our svars a one standard deviation shock to us economic policy uncertainty leads to a statistically significant fall in the european industrial production and prices of 0 12 and 0 06 respectively the contribution of the us uncertainty shock on the european aggregates is shown to be quantitatively larger than the one exerted by an euro area specific uncertainty shock

elite self interest and economic decline in early modern europe why does the leading economic power of its time lose its dominance competing theories are tested through a comparison of four historical cases the florentine city state the spanish empire and the dutch and british nation states institutional context determined social actors capacities to apply their polities human and material resources to foreign economic competition specifically the dominant elites in each polity established the social relations and institutions that protected them from domestic challenges from rival elites and classes but these relations and institutions had the effect of limiting elites capacities to adapt to foreign economic rivals elites acting locally determined their capacities to act globally

beta firm size and concentration the asset beta of a firm is defined as the uncertainty about the firm s future value scaled by its current value empirically beta is negatively related to a firm s size and concentration in its major product market this relation has been interpreted as evidence that monopoly power affects beta this paper shows that this empirical result is also consistent with competitive product markets where greater firm size and concentration are due to greater efficiency in production thus the correlation between beta firm size and concentration is not prima facie evidence of widespread monopoly power

capital asset pricing model beta stability and the pricing puzzle of electricity transmission in brazil abstract this paper seeks to analyse and propose alternative procedures to estimate the cost of equity through the capital asset pricing model capm in the context of electricity transmission in brazil under the assumption that a stable beta is important for regulatory purposes since it provides institutional security for investors as well as fair tariffs for consumers we test different options to find the set of parameters that provides the most stable beta for the transmission sector this paper is prescriptive in nature and attempts to offer alternative options for the cost of equity estimation without changing the theoretical framework i e capm proposed by the brazilian regulator to pursue our aim we test beta stability by modifying three capm elements the risk asset the proxy for market returns and the length of the estimation window by applying robust structural break tests we show that the desirable beta stability may be reached with the use of a brazilian pure play global beta estimated with an 11 year estimation window

productivity and distribution under cropsharing tenancy abstract this paper develops a model of sharecropping assuming tenant autonomy competitive behavior of landlords and laborers and endogenously determined wage and share rental rates the coexistence of wage labor and sharecropping is explained in terms of their incentive labor process and risk sharing characteristics sharecropping serves as a surrogate for the direct supervision of the labor process its incidence is shown to rise in the presence of unemployment at a subsistence wage the model implies that the abolition of tenancy will raise output raise labor income and reduce land income

the spread of sharecropping in tuscany the political economy of transaction costs land tenure is central to many agricultural transformations the author examines one of these transformations the spread of sharecropping in late medieval and early modern tuscany previous research suggested that sharecropping spread as agricultural relations were refeudalized in contrast the author s analyses of fixed term and share term leasing sharecropping show that landlords used sharecropping when it lowered their overall costs of labor supervision and land management however to explain the spread of sharecropping the florentine political economy which created particular patterns of land management costs and labor supervision costs must also be considered florence was a well developed center for urban manufacturing landlords were frequently urban merchants and they resided in florence these factors were crucial in shaping agricultural relations landlords use of sharecropping to reduce the overall costs of land management and labor supervision increased as the distance from florence the site of landlords principal activities increased as the size of farms increased and when crops had high costs of labor supervision and land management thus the use of sharecropping to lower costs associated with agricultural production must be considered in the context of the tuscan political economy

the efficiency of share contracts in ghana s cocoa industry social anthropologists have contributed significantly to our understanding of the consistency between observed labour contracts in the ghana cocoa industry and the cultural historical development of the country this article contributes to the ongoing research efforts in this area by demonstrating that the observed labour contracts are also efficient and consistent with the predictions of economic theory it concludes that joint efforts by anthropologists and economists may be one effective way to proceed in seeking insights into a labour market that is so deeply rooted in the culture of a people

economic interests and sectoral relations the undevelopment of capitalism in fifteenth century tuscany1 many preconditions for a rapid transition to industrial capitalism existed in tuscany in the late medieval early modern period including relatively efficient agricultural production a well developed commercial manufacturing sector the absence of a powerful feudal nobility and feudal obligations a large precocious urban economy and the development of a territorial state no such transition occurred however previous explanations for this are inadequate because they discount the strength of the tuscany economy or downplay the presence of these preconditions to explain the tuscan outcome this article draws on sectoral theories agriculture vs manufacturing from the neoclassical and marxist literature since these theories often give the wrong prediction because they are based on formal attributes of actors the author combines them with a weberian conceptualization of substantively specific economic interests

tenancy choice in a competitive framework with transactions costs the choice between wage labor and sharecrop contracts is analyzed in a model that avoids both the pitfalls of previous models inefficiency of sharecropping and indeterminacy by introducing transactions costs with appropriate nonlinearities plantation data from the american south provide empirical support for the hypothesized nonlinearity in transactions costs and simultaneous determination of direct supervision and contractual choice