the political economics of redistribution inequality and tax avoidance a central result in the political economy of taxation is that the degree of redistribution is positively linked to income inequality however empirical evidence supporting such a relationship turns out to be mixed this paper shows how the different empirical reactions can be rationalized within a simple model of tax avoidance and costly tax enforcement by focusing on structure induced equilibrium in which taxpayers vote over the size of the income tax and the level of tax enforcement we show that more inequality may well reduce the extent of redistribution depending on two opposing effects the standard political effect and a negative tax base effect working through increases in the average level of tax avoidance and the share of enforcement expenditures in total tax revenue

revisiting the role of education for agricultural productivity while the majority of micro studies finds that rural education increases agricultural productivity various recent cross country regressions analysing the determinants of agricultural productivity were only able to detect insignificant or even surprising negative effects of schooling in this paper we argue and show that this failure to find a positive impact of education in the international context is rather a data problem related to the use of enrolment and literacy indicators using a panel of 95 developing and middle income countries from 1961 to 2002 together with the newest version of the barro lee educational attainment dataset we show that education indeed has a highly significant positive effect on agricultural productivity which is robust to changes in the control variables and in the econometric methods applied distinguishing between different levels of education further reveals that only primary and secondary schooling have significant positive impacts while tertiary education remains insignificant finally the effect of education is estimated separately for countries with different income levels results indicate that the coefficient of the education variable remains insignificant for countries from the poorest three income quintiles while it is positive and highly significant for the richest two quintiles this finding can be interpreted as support for the prominent argument claiming that education leads to higher agricultural productivity only in the presence of rapid technical change where education will help farmers to adjust more readily to the new opportunities

aid and growth what meta analysis reveals abstract recent literature in the meta analysis category where results from a range of studies are brought together throws doubt on the ability of foreign aid to foster economic growth and development this article assesses what meta analysis has to contribute to the literature on the effectiveness of foreign aid in terms of growth impact we re examine key hypotheses and find that the effect of aid on growth is positive and statistically significant this significant effect is genuine and not an artefact of publication selection we also show why our results differ from those published elsewhere

in kind transfers self selection and optimal tax policy abstract this paper examines the role of public provision of goods as a redistributive mechanism when tax policies are designed optimally on the basis of the information available to the government we characterize pareto efficient allocations that are attainable through the tax policy and derive the conditions under which public provision will enhance welfare above the maximum that can be achieved through a mix of a general income tax and commodity taxes price subsidies first when there are two produced goods we prove that public provision is always pareto improving the improvement is achieved through changing individuals actual consumption levels second with no restrictions on the number of goods we derive a sufficient condition for public provision to be pareto improving this is achieved by weakening self selection constraints so that welfare improving tax changes are made possible suitable examples include provision of day care basic health care and rights to a minimum old age pension

the use and abuse of meta analysis in environmental and natural resource economics an assessment motivated by the 2006 report of a work group appointed by the environmental protection agency epa this paper examines the present state of meta analysis in environmental economics and offers recommendations for its future use to this end we summarize and assess 140 meta analyses from 125 published and unpublished studies covering 17 topical categories in environmental and resource economics first we provide several generic meta analysis models as reference points and discuss major estimation issues five econometric issues are identified as part of a complete analysis 1 sample selection criteria 2 basic data summary 3 primary data heterogeneity 4 heteroskedasticity and 5 non independence of multiple observations from primary studies second a tabular summary is presented for the 140 meta analyses with respect to estimation methods third a narrative summary is presented for 19 meta analyses including the three value of statistical life studies examined by the epa work group and one analysis from each of 16 other categories fourth we offer a set of best practice guidelines for future meta analyses in this and other areas of economics last the paper comments on the use of meta analytic methods for benefit transfers of environmental values

raiders or saviors the evidence on six controversial investors abstract carl icahn irwin jacobs carl lindner david murdock victor posner and the late charles bluhdorn are usually portrayed as corporate raiders the evidence here however shows that between 1977 and 1982 when it was first announced that they had purchased stock in a given firm stock prices on average increased significantly the investors activities in target firms for the two years following the initial stock purchase are likewise inconsistent with raiding we discuss two hypotheses that are consistent with the evidence first these investors improve the management of target firms second they are systematically able to identify under priced stocks

the earnings of informal carers wage differentials and opportunity costs a substantial proportion of working age individuals in britain are looking after sick disabled or elderly people often combining their work and caring responsibilities previous research has shown that informal care is linked with substantial opportunity costs for the individual due to forgone wages as a result of non labour market participation in this paper we show that informal carers exhibit further disadvantages even when participating using the british household panel study bhps we decompose wage differentials and show that carers can expect lower returns for a given set of characteristics with this wage penalty varying along the pay distribution and by gender furthermore opportunity costs from forgone wages and wage penalties are estimated and found to be substantial

explaining differences in efficiency a meta study on local government literature this paper reviews the literature on local government efficiency by meta reviewing 360 observations retrieved from 54 papers published from 1993 to 2016 the meta regression is based on a random effect model estimated with the 2 step random effects maximum likelihood reml technique proposed by gallet and doucouliagos 2014 results indicate that the study design matters when estimating a frontier in local government we find that studies focusing on technical efficiency provide higher efficiency scores than works evaluating cost efficiency the same applies when using panel data instead of cross section data interestingly studies that use the free disposal hull fdh approach yield on average higher efficiency scores than papers employing the data envelopment analysis dea method thereby suggesting that in this literature the convexity hypothesis of the production set is a matter finally the efficiency of local government increases with the level of development of the analysed countries and is positively related to the national integrity of the legal system the opposite holds when considering the corruption

takeover motives during the conglomerate merger wave this article examines the stock market response to acquisition announcements during and immediately after the conglomerate merger wave of the late 1960s the main finding is that acquirer shareholders benefited from diversification acquisitions which implies that diversification was not driven by managerial objectives it is also shown that the market responded positively to bidders who retained the management of target companies and negatively to bidders who replaced target management this is consistent with the hypothesis that the market favored acquisitions intended to exploit managerial synergies it suggests that the market disliked takeovers that were motivated to discipline target management evidence on buyer and target price earnings ratios is presented that is inconsistent with the conjecture that conglomerates were able to mislead investors by earnings per share manipulation

dea and sfa research on the efficiency of microfinance institutions a meta analysis microfinance has played a key role in the fight against exclusion and the promotion of entrepreneurship in developing countries an important question today is how to increase the reach and profitability of microfinance in a context where subsidies are withdrawing to promote the viability and sustainability of microfinance institutions mfis efficiency analysis has found favor in this context and has attracted growing interest among professionals partners and researchers abundant empirical work has been conducted over the last ten years on this subject in very different contexts and with different methodologies the purpose of this article is to provide a meta regression analysis on parametric and nonparametric estimations of mean technical efficiency mte in microfinance using a data set of 262 observations from 38 studies the results show that in the microfinance industry mte scores have increased over time however with an mte rate of approximately 61 1 there is room for improving efficiency mfis use more resources than necessary for the results achieved in terms of outreach and revenue generated our results show heterogeneity of mte according to the methodological approach of the studies studies with a larger number of variables inputs and outputs produced higher mte scores than did those with a smaller number of variables studies using the variable returns to scale assumption resulted in higher mte scores than those using constant returns to scale in addition those with a production approach had higher mtes than did those using the intermediation approach while studies of a large number of mfis had lower scores than did those involving a small sample size moreover research estimating social efficiency generated lower mtes compared to those estimating financial efficiency studies using data from african mfis obtained lower mtes than did those on mfis in latin america and mena which confirms the poor performance of african microfinance

examining the heterogeneity in calorie income elasticities a meta analysis abstract several studies conducted over the past three decades on calorie income relationship appear to give inconclusive results this paper reviews these studies and employs meta regression analysis to examine the potential publication bias in the calorie income elasticity as well as the impact of specific study attributes on the elasticities that have been reported in the empirical literature a total of 40 empirical studies which yielded 99 estimated elasticities were considered the results indicate the presence of publication bias in the reported elasticities besides the estimates revealed evidence of positive and significant empirical effect of income on calorie intake from all the studies that goes beyond publication bias study attributes such as ranking of the journal panel data used in the analysis whether expenditure was used as proxy for income year of primary survey sample size and numbers of the years of primary data were found to have statistically significant impacts on the reported calorie income elasticities in the literature

mergers and long term corporate performance evidence from cross border bank acquisitions we provide evidence on operating performance changes at a sample of u s banks acquired by non u s banking organizations over the 1980 2001 period our sample allows us to compare directly the preacquisition performance of the targets with their postacquisition performance a comparison that has not been possible in prior studies we find that these cross border acquisitions produce improved target performance cash flow profitability at the target increases labor utilization improves and loan losses do not rise we also find evidence that the improvement in target operating performance primarily takes place for those acquisitions that occur following passage of the reigle neal interstate branching legislation

the flip side of financial synergies coinsurance versus risk contamination this paper characterizes when joint financing of two projects through debt increases expected default costs contrary to conventional wisdom separate financing dominates joint financing when risk contamination losses that are associated with the contagious default of a well performing project that is dragged down by the other project s poor performance outweigh standard coinsurance gains separate financing becomes more attractive than joint financing when the fraction of returns lost under default increases and when projects have lower mean returns higher variability more positive correlation and more negative skewness these predictions are broadly consistent with evidence on conglomerate mergers spinoffs project finance and securitization

farm productivity and efficiency in rural bangladesh the role of education revisited this article reassesses the debate over the role of education in farm production in bangladesh using a large dataset on rice producing households from 141 villages average and stochastic production frontier functions are estimated to ascertain the effect of education on productivity and efficiency a full set of proxies for farm education stock variables are incorporated to investigate the internal as well as external returns to education the external effect is investigated in the context of rural neighbourhoods our analysis reveals that in addition to raising rice productivity and boosting potential output household education significantly reduces production inefficiencies however we are unable to find any evidence of the externality benefit of schooling neighbour s education does not matter in farm production we discuss the implication of these findings for rural education programmes in bangladesh

the paradigm of agricultural efficiency and its implication on food security in africa what does meta analysis reveal summary the study investigates whether african agricultural efficiency levels have been improving or not and what drives them over the years based on 442 frontier studies using meta regression analysis the results show that the mean efficiency estimates from studies decrease significantly as year of survey in the primary study increases also studies published in journals with parametric specification and with panel data produced significantly higher efficiency estimates while those with a focus on grain crops reported significantly lower efficiency estimates other results show that education followed by experience extension and credit are the major drivers of agricultural efficiency levels in africa

productivity growth and the effects of r d in african agriculture this article measures and compares total factor productivity growth in african agriculture under contemporaneous and sequential technology frontiers over the period 1970 2004 the sources of productivity growth are examined using a fixed effects regression model and a polynomial distributed lag structure for agricultural r d expenditures while conventional estimates show an average productivity growth rate of only 0 3 per year the improved measures under sequential technology show that african agricultural productivity grew at a higher rate of 1 8 per year technical progress rather than efficiency change was the principal source of productivity growth agricultural r d weather and trade reforms turned out to have significant effects on productivity in african agriculture with a rate of return of 33 per year r d is shown to be a socially profitable investment in african agriculture while a strong r d expenditure growth of about 2 per year in the 1970s led to strong productivity growth after the mid 1980s stagnation of r d expenditure in the 1980s and early 1990s led to slower productivity growth in the 2000s consistent with recent economic recovery in africa evidenced by stronger agricultural gdp growth rates results showed that policy reforms as well as improved weather contributed to the recovery of agricultural productivity after the mid 1980s

technical efficiency in developing country agriculture a meta analysis abstract a meta analysis is performed to review empirical estimates of technical efficiency te in developing country agriculture the objective of the study is to contribute to a better understanding of the factors that influence estimates of mean te a data set of 51 observations of te from 32 studies is used in order to test if specific characteristics of the data and econometric specifications account for systematic differences in the efficiency estimates results using the two limit tobit procedure indicate that factors such as primal versus dual number of fixed inputs and number of variable inputs increase average te estimates on the other hand using the cobb douglas functional form and cross sectional data yields a lower level of te other factors including the number of variables in the model crop type stochastic versus deterministic frontiers and sample size do not seem to significantly affect estimates of te across studies

the rise in old age longevity and the market for long term care this paper analyzes how markets for old age care respond to the aging of populations we consider how the biological forces which govern the stocks of frail and healthy persons in a population interact with economic forces which govern the demand and supply for labor intensive care we test our predictions empirically using state and county level evidence on the u s market for long term care in nursing homes over the last three decades excerpt

who will care employment participation and willingness to supply informal care the impact of informal care responsibilities on the willingness and ability of caregivers to undertake paid employment has been the subject of a number of studies in contrast the effect of employment status on willingness to undertake informal care has been less well explored this paper concentrates on this less studied direction of causality using the data provided by 15 waves of the british household panel survey we find that employment participation and earnings both impact negatively on willingness to supply informal care this evidence has implications for health and social care policy since informal care has been shown to be a significant substitute for formal long term care

the effects of education in agriculture evidence from nepal the impact of education in modernizing and traditional agricultures of nepal is investigated by utilizing a production function framework education is found to have higher payoff to productivity in a modernizing environment than in traditional agriculture higher college education has a significant role in a modernizing environment but not in the traditional area while both worker and allocative effects of education contribute positively to agricultural production allocative effect surpasses worker effect in both environments however only the input allocation component of the allocative effect is important in traditional areas while both input allocation and input selection components are crucial in a modernizing agriculture

the impact of merger bids on the participating firms security holders this paper investigates whether merger bids have an impact on the wealth of the participating firms bondholders and stockholders monthly and daily bond and stock returns are calculated relative to the announcement date of a merger bid for a sample of conglomerate mergers the results show that while the stockholders of target firms gain from a merger bid no other securityholders either gain or lose to provide direct evidence on the existence of diversification effects and incentive effects we test whether the bondholders returns are dependent upon the correlation between the returns of the merging firms and whether the size of the bondholders and stockholders returns in individual mergers are correlated the results are consistent with a capital market that efficiently resolves conflicts of interest between stockholders and bondholders recent empirical studies by mandelker 22 langetieg 18 dodd 6 and asquith 1 provide evidence that mergers have a favorable effect on the market value of the common stocks of merging firms the acquired firms stockholders earn large positive abnormal returns from the merger and the acquiring firms stockholders are affected little if at all although these empirical studies provide extensive evidence concerning the effects of mergers on the stockholders of the merging firms they still leave several important questions unanswered first these studies examine the returns of only one group of the firm s claimants the stockholders it is possible that the positive abnormal returns reported come at the expense of other claimants that is mergers may impose a loss on some claimants of the merging firms and the stockholders positive abnormal returns may simply reflect negative abnormal returns to these other claimants jensen and meckling 15 argue that there is an incentive for the stockholders of leveraged firms to expropriate the bondholders wealth by undertaking investment projects which increase the firm s riskiness since a merger is also a corporate investment it follows that there is an incentive for the stockholders to acquire firms which increase the variability of the firm s cashflow that is the stockholders may earn positive abnormal returns even if there is no real synergy at the expense of bondholders by increasing the firm s risk through merger the bondholders lose because of the increase in the default risk of the

the labour market costs of community care this paper reports an empirical investigation into the influence of informal care responsibilities on the labour supply of women the objective is to examine the argument that the uk policy of caring for the chronic sick in the community involves a nontrivial opportunity cost in the form of the forgone labour supply of the informal carers upon which it relies we find that informal carers who care for less than 20 h per week are in fact more likely to participate in the labour market but tend to work for fewer hours per week than otherwise similar noncarers informal carers who care for 20 h or more a week are less likely to participate but only slightly however when they do undertake formal employment they tend to earn less per hour and work for fewer hours per week

the success of mergers in the 1920s a stock market appraisal of the second merger wave abstract this paper examines the impact on acquiring firm shareholder wealth of mergers during the oligopoly merger wave of the 1920s these acquisitions were relatively unregulated the securities and exchange commission did not exist and antitrust laws were only loosely enforced although the lack of financial market controls and the possibility of monopoly gains should have permitted acquiring companies to capture large take over profits stock price data on 134 firms indicate only modest success the average profitability of an acquisition in the 1920s does not differ from the profitability resulting from mergers in the 1960s and 1970s despite vast differences in the economic environments

energy consumption and economic growth new evidence from meta analysis abstract the causal relationships between energy consumption and economic growth have given rise to much discussion but remain controversial alternative data sets based on different time spans countries energy policies and econometric approaches result in diverse outcomes a meta analysis using a multinomial logit model with 174 samples governing the relationships between gdp and energy consumption is applied here to investigate the major factors that affect these controversial outcomes the empirical results have demonstrated how the time spans subject selections including gdp and energy consumption econometric models and tools for greenhouse gases emission reduction characteristics significantly affect these controversial outcomes

the wealth effect of merger activity and the objective functions of merging firms abstract this paper studies the net effects of the long run sequence of events leading to merger and of merger per se on shareholder wealth the appropriate measure of the wealth effect is shown to be the abnormal dollar return cumulated over time using this measure the long run wealth effect of the event sequence culminating in merger is significantly negative for acquiring firms for acquired firms the effect is negative but not significant the immediate impact of merger per se is positive and highly significant for acquired firms but larger in absolute value and negative for acquiring firms the evidence also reveals that measured abnormal rates of return to acquiring firms are sensitive to a slight variation in model specification and dependent on firm size with smaller firms earning significantly negative post merger returns

total factor productivity growth technological progress and technical efficiency change dimensions of productivity change in yugoslavia 1965 1978 this article total factor productivity growth technological progress and technical efficiency change dimensions of productivity change in yugoslavia 1965 78 was reprinted with permission from the december 1982 issue of the economic journal this article proposes a methodology that decomposes total factor productivity change into two distinct elements technological progress and changes in technical efficiency technological progress is defined as the change in the best practice production frontier all other productivity change is attributed to technical efficiency change the article provides a theoretical framework for decomposing total factor productivity growth as well as a specification and estimation of the deterministic frontier production function it employs a programming technique to estimate a flexible functional form of the production frontier the paper then applies this technique to empirical data from yugoslavia of the period from 1965 to 1978 it concludes that for yugoslavia improvements to technical efficiency comprise the dominant contribution to total factor productivity change this agrees with accumulating evidence that in many developing economies productivity gain due to technological mastery of imported technology is substantial

on mergers divestments and options a note in this note a loss shared by the security holders of merging firms is pointed out separate corporate entities provide double protection against future negative cash flows that are part of any production process e g when customer or employee liabilities exceed future in come independent of whether or not debt is used in the corporate capital structure a merger involves a relinquishment of this double protection in return for a less valuable single protection limited liability in the merged corporation against combined negative cashflows

decent rural employment and farm production efficiency empirical evidence from tanzania and ethiopia promoting decent rural employment by creating new jobs in rural areas and upgrading the existing ones could be one of the most efficient pathways to reduce rural poverty this article systematically investigates the impact of decent rural employment on agricultural production efficiency in ethiopia and tanzania the analysis applies an output oriented distance function approach with an estimation procedure that accounts for different technological demographic socioeconomic institutional and decent rural employment indicators data of the 2011 round of living standards measurement study integrated surveys on agriculture for the two countries are used and a set of indicators is derived to proxy core dimensions of decent rural employment the findings of our analysis show that decent rural employment contributes to agricultural production efficiency

your next of kin or your own career caring and working among the 50 of europe an increasing demand for both formal and informal care is likely to result from the ongoing demographic transition at the same time as there is a further move away from the traditional domestic division of labour public policy making that aims at increasing the supply of informal care necessitates knowledge about the relative importance of various incentives for individual care providers this paper takes as a point of departure that the willingness to supply informal care is partly explained by the extent to which it adversely affects labour market outcomes and analyses the effect on labour market outcomes of providing informal care to one s elderly parent s among the 50 of europe data from share survey of health ageing and retirement in europe was used to examine the association between on the one hand hours of informal care provided and on the other 1 the probability of employment 2 hours worked and 3 wages respectively the results suggest that giving informal care to one s elderly parents is associated with significant costs in terms of foregone labour market opportunities and that these adverse effects vary between countries

the global bio economy throughout history agriculture and natural resources have been used for the production of food feed fibre fuel and environmental goods recent developments in demand both in terms of quantity and quality technology and traditional energy and chemistry markets have reinforced the demand for nonfood applications these developments in combination with increased consumer demands for various food characteristics have led to a rapidly growing and globally integrated bio economy this article introduces and summarizes the plenary papers on the opportunities and challenges for the bio economy that were presented at the 28th triennial conference of the international association of agricultural economists iaae in brazil the following aspects of the bio economy are covered finance volatility poverty conflict productivity investment resource constraints and governance

meat meets meta a quantitative review of the price elasticity of meat the price elasticity of meat has been estimated in numerous studies that utilize a variety of disparate modeling procedures in light of differences in the literature a meta analysis is performed to assess the sensitivity of the meat price elasticity to a number of characteristics including the type of meat specification of demand nature of data estimation method characteristics of the publication outlet and location of demand the results from estimating linear and box cox meta regressions coupled with different panel data treatments reveal that these characteristics have differing influence on the reported price elasticity

decomposition of technical efficiency in agricultural production in africa into transient and persistent technical efficiency under heterogeneous technologies abstract the agricultural sector remains a cornerstone to africa s economic transformation and the achievement of the sustainable development goals sdgs however the sector s performance in terms of productivity growth has been sub optimal when compared with performances in asia america and europe technical efficiency is a major contributor to the growth in agricultural productivity however there is limited research about the sources of technical inefficiency in agricultural production in africa this is critical given that africa has problems with food security and high poverty this study applied a parametric technique to estimate technical efficiency in africa s agricultural sector under heterogeneous technologies while separating unobserved country specific heterogeneities from transient and persistent technical efficiency data consisted of 49 african countries spanning from 1990 to 2016 assuming a homogeneous technology the estimated mean technical efficiency of 38 2 suggests that in africa about 62 of the potential agricultural output is untapped however considering heterogeneity in production technologies the mean estimated technical efficiency value differed between the two classes the numbers suggest that about 59 and 69 of untapped potential agricultural output in class one and class two groups respectively in all cases persistent technical inefficiency hinders technical efficiency an indication that government or regional agricultural policies should be long term oriented with the evidence of conditional convergence in technical efficiency efforts to improve persistent technical efficiency can drive regional targets in food security and poverty alleviation and induce inclusive growth and sustainable development

postponing retirement the political effect of aging abstract conventional economic wisdom suggests that because of the aging process social security systems will have to be retrenched in particular retirement age will have to be largely increased yet is this policy measure feasible in oecd countries since the answer belongs mainly to the realm of politics i evaluate the political feasibility of postponing retirement under aging in france italy the uk and the us simulations for the year 2050 steady state demographic economic and political scenario suggest that retirement age will be postponed in all countries while the social security contribution rate will rise in all countries but italy the political support for increasing the retirement age stems mainly from the negative income effect induced by aging which reduces the profitability of the existing social security system and thus the individuals net social security wealth

majority rule and the public provision of a private good this paper extends the literature on the socialization of commodities by developing a model of voting over the public provision of a private good health care

public provision of private goods government may provide a good that can if legally permitted be supplemented by private purchases policy is determined by majority rule under standard assumptions on preferences a majority voting equilibrium exists a regime of positive government provision with no restriction on private supplements is shown to be majority preferred to a regime of either only market provision or only government provision combined public and private expenditure on the good is higher under this dual provision regime than under either of the alternatives under some preference configurations the median income voter is pivotal under others a voter with income below the median is pivotal

frontier production functions and technical efficiency a survey of empirical applications in agricultural economics abstract the modelling and estimation of frontier production functions has been an important area of econometric research during the last two decades forsund lovell and schmidt 1980 and schmidt 1986 present reviews of the concepts and models involved and cite some of the empirical applications which had appeared to their respective times of publication this paper seeks to update the econometric modelling of frontier production functions associated with the estimation of technical efficiency of individual firms a survey of empirical applications in agricultural economics is an important part of the paper

a meta analytic assessment of the effect of immigration on wages in our increasingly interconnected and open world international migration is becoming an important socio economic phenomenon for many countries since the early 1980s many studies have been undertaken of the impact of immigration on host labour markets borjas 2003 noted that the estimated effect of immigration on the wage of native workers varies widely from study to study and sometimes even within the same study in addition these effects cluster around zero such a small effect is a rather surprising outcome given that in a closed competitive labour market an increase in labour supply may be expected to exert a downward pressure on wages we revisit this issue by applying meta analytic techniques to a set of eighteen papers which altogether generated 348 estimates of the percentage change in the wage of a native worker with respect to a one percentage point increase in the ratio of immigrants over native workers while many studies in our database employ us data estimates are also obtained from germany the netherlands france norway austria israel and australia our analysis shows that results vary across countries and are inter alia related to the type of modelling approach technical issues such as publication bias and quality of the estimates are addressed as well

guarantees leverage and taxes this paper considers the optimal joint decision on firm organization and capital structure under a tax bankruptcy trade off stressing the role of guarantees against default conditional guarantees which are embedded in parent subsidiary structures increase joint value and joint debt relative to unguaranteed stand alone firms such guarantees that are unilateral rather than mutual for moderate default costs may dominate the unconditional mutual guarantees built in mergers we study the optimal characteristics of both guarantors and beneficiaries as well as their impact on the self enforcement potential of conditional guarantees

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency change in industrialized countries this paper analyzes productivity growth in 17 oecd countries over the period 1979 1988 a nonparametric programming method activity analysis is used to compute malmquist productivity indexes these are decomposed into two component measures namely technical change and efficiency change we find that u s productivity growth is slightly higher than average all of which is due to technical change japan s productivity growth is the highest in the sample with almost half due to efficiency change jel c43 d24 in this paper we apply recently developed

food insecurity income inequality and the changing comparative advantage in world agriculture i would like to argue in this article that in the process of economic development in land poor countries in asia agriculture faces three distinctly different problems food insecurity sectoral income inequality and the declining food self sufficiency associated with the declining comparative advantage in agriculture at the high income stage massive imports of food grains to asia if they occur will aggravate the world food shortage which will have significant implications for the poverty incidence in the world i argue that in order to avoid such a tragedy asia should expand farm size to reduce labor cost by adopting large scale mechanization sub saharan africa should realize a green revolution in grain production and latin america should further expand its grain production capacity

the political economy of long term care we build a two dimensional political economy model to explain the provision and financing of long term care and income redistribution voting agents differ in need and income opening up two conflicts one sets families with disabled parents who are in favor of a public long term care program against the ones without such parents who oppose public financing the other sets the poor against the rich with the former preferring heavier income taxation than the latter we show that a structure induced equilibrium always exists and that it is unique if informal care is provided in equilibrium the equilibrium not only explains the negative association of income inequality and long term care financing but also allows predictions about how demographic change might impact long term care arrangements and expenses

a reexamination of the conglomerate merger wave in the 1960s an internal capital markets view one possible explanation for bidding firms earning positive abnormal returns in diversifying acquisitions in the 1960s is that internal capital markets were expected to overcome the information deficiencies of the less developed capital markets examining 392 bidder firms during the 1960s we find the highest bidder returns when financially unconstrained buyers acquire constrained targets this result holds while controlling for merger terms and for different proxies used to classify firms facing costly external financing we also find that bidders generally retain target management suggesting that management may have provided companyspecific operational information while the bidder provided capital budgeting expertise