rational household labor supply traditionally household behavior is derived from the maximization of a unique utility function in this paper we propose an alternative approach in which the household is modeled as a two member collectivity taking pareto efficient decisions the consequences of this assumption are analyzed in a three good model in which only total consumption and each member s labor supply are observable if the agents are assumed egoistic i e they are only concerned with their own leisure and consumption it is possible to derive falsifiable conditions upon household labor supplies from both a parametric and nonparametric viewpoint if alternatively agents are altruistic restrictions obtain in the nonparametric context useful interpretation stems from the comparison with the characterization of aggregate demand for a private good economy

methods of household consumption measurement through surveys experimental results from tanzania consumption expenditure has long been the preferred measure of household living standards however accurate measurement is a challenge and household expenditure surveys vary widely across many dimensions including the level of reporting the length of the reference period and the degree of commodity detail these variations occur both across countries and also over time within countries there is little current understanding of the implications of such changes for spatially and temporally consistent measurement of household consumption and poverty a field experiment in tanzania tests eight alternative methods to measure household consumption on a sample of 4 000 households there are significant differences between consumption reported by the benchmark personal diary and other diary and recall formats under reporting is particularly relevant in illiterate households and for urban respondents completing household diaries recall modules measure lower consumption than a personal diary with larger gaps among poorer households and households with more adult members variations in reporting accuracy by household characteristics are also discussed and differences in measured poverty as a result of survey design are explored the study concludes with recommendations for methods of survey based consumption measurement in low income countries

global warming irreversibility and learning a number of economists have argued that the literature on the irreversibility effect implies that current abatement of greenhouse gas emissions should be greater when there is the possibility of obtaining better information in the future about the potential damages from global warming than when there is no possibility of obtaining better information in this paper we show that even the simplest model of global warming does not satisfy either of epstein s 1980 sufficient conditions so it is not possible to use epstein s analysis to tell whether the irreversibility effect applies to models of global warming we derive an alternative sufficient condition for the irreversibility effect to hold

do workers remittances reduce the probability of current account reversals the authors combine the literature on financial crises in emerging markets and developing economies with that on international migrations by investigating whether the increasingly large flows of workers remittances can help reduce the probability of current account reversals the rationale for this stands in the great stability and low cyclicality of remittances as compared with other private capital flows these properties combined with the fact that remittances are cheap inflows of foreign currencies might reduce the probability that foreign investors suddenly flee out of emerging markets and developing economies and trigger a dramatic current account adjustment the authors find that remittances can have such a beneficial effect in particular they show that a high level of remittances as a ratio of gdp makes the relationship between a decreasing stock of international reserves over gdp and a higher probability of current account crises less stringent the same occurs though less neatly for the positive relationship between an increasing stock of external debt over gdp and the probability of current account reversals the results point also to a threshold effect of remittances the mechanisms just described are in fact much stronger when remittances are above 3 percent of gdp

international pollution control cooperative versus noncooperative strategies abstract international pollution control involving two neighboring countries is modeled as a simple two player dynamic game each country produces a good that is consumed by domestic households production of each consumption good results in emissions of pollutants households in each country derive utility from the consumption of the domestically produced good but incur costs through the total stock of pollution stock externality in this setting we characterize cooperative as well as noncooperative pollution control strategies of the governments of the two countries that maximize the discounted stream of net benefits of a representative consumer it turns out that when the governments are restricted to use linear strategies noncooperative behavior results in overall losses for both countries if on the contrary governments use nonlinear markov perfect strategies and the discount rate is small enough a pareto efficient steady state pollution stock can be supported as a differentiable subgame perfect equilibrium thus the emergence of first best solutions cooperative outcomes does not require any institutional arrangements threats retaliation etc but can be brought about through the use of nonlinear markov perfect equilibrium strategies

uncertainty learning and international environmental policy coordination in this paper we construct a simple model of global warming which captures a number of key features of the global warming problem i environmental damages are related to the stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere ii the global commons nature of the problem means that these are strategic interactions between the emissions policies of the governments of individual nation states iii there is uncertainty about the extent of the future damages that will be incurred by each country from any given level of concentration of greenhouse gases but there is the possibility that at a future date better information about the true extent of environmental damages may become available an important aspect of the problem is the extent to which damages in different countries may be correlated in the first part of the paper we consider a simple model with two symmetric countries and show that the value of perfect information is an increasing function of the correlation between damages in the two countries in both the cooperative and non cooperative equilibria however while the value of perfect information is always non negative in the cooperative equilibrium in the non cooperative equilibrium there is a critical value of the correlation coefficient below which the value of perfect information will be negative in the second part of the paper we construct an empirical model of global warming distinguishing between oecd and non oecd countries and show that in the non cooperative equilibrium the value of perfect information for oecd countries is negative when the correlation coefficient between environmental damages for oecd and non oecd countries is negative the implications of these results for international agreements are discussed

measuring poverty in a growing world or measuring growth in a poor world the extent to which growth reduces global poverty has been disputed for 30 years although there are better data than ever before controversies are not resolved a major problem is that consumption measured from household surveys which is used to measure poverty grows less rapidly than consumption measured in national accounts in the world as a whole and in large countries particularly india china and the united states in consequence measured poverty has fallen less rapidly than appears warranted by measured growth in poor countries one plausible cause is that richer households are less likely to participate in surveys but growth in the national accounts is also upward biased and consumption in the national accounts contains large and rapidly growing items that are not consumed by the poor and not included in surveys so it is possible for consumption of the poor to grow less rapidly than national consumption without any increase in measured inequality current statistical procedures in poor

intra household nutritional inequities in rural bangladesh abstractusing novel data from rural bangladesh reporting individual level food consumption and anthropometric measures we find substantial inequities in the intrahousehold distribution of calories

a dynamic game of emissions pollution with uncertainty and learning we introduce learning in a dynamic game of international pollution with ecological uncertainty we characterize and compare the feedback non cooperative emissions strategies of players when the players do not know the distribution of ecological uncertainty but they gain information learn about it we then compare our learning model with the benchmark model of full information where players know the distribution of ecological uncertainty we find that uncertainty due to anticipative learning induces a decrease in total emissions but not necessarily in individual emissions further the effect of structural uncertainty on total and individual emissions depends on the beliefs distribution and bias moreover we obtain that if a player s beliefs change toward more optimistic views or if she feels that the situation is less risky then she increases her emissions while others react to this change and decrease their emissions

learning and stock effects in environmental regulation the case of greenhouse gas emissions abstract this paper concerns the optimal regulation of greenhouse gases that lead to global climate change in particular we focus on uncertainty and learning which over time resolves uncertainty we present an empirical stochastic model of climate economy interactions and present results on the tension between postponing control until more is known vs acting now before irreversible climate change takes place uncertainty in our model is in the damage caused by global warming the results suggest that a temporary carbon tax may dominate a permanent one because a temporary tax may induce increased flexibility

do international migration and remittances reduce poverty in developing countries summary few studies have examined the impact of international migration and remittances on poverty in the developing world this paper fills this lacuna by constructing and analyzing a new data set on international migration remittances inequality and poverty from 71 developing countries the results show that both international migration and remittances significantly reduce the level depth and severity of poverty in the developing world after instrumenting for the possible endogeneity of international migration and controlling for various factors results suggest that on average a 10 increase in the share of international migrants in a country s population will lead to a 2 1 decline in the share of people living on less than 1 00 per person per day after instrumenting for the possible endogeneity of international remittances a similar 10 increase in per capita official international remittances will lead to a 3 5 decline in the share of people living in poverty

strategic exploitation with learning and heterogeneous beliefs abstract we study the effect of learning with heterogeneous beliefs on the exploitation of a renewable common pool resource to that end we extend the great fish war model of levhari and mirman 1980 to a learning environment in which several agents interact strategically and learn about the distribution of the stochastic evolution of the resource we find that the effect of anticipation of learning with heterogeneous beliefs is twofold first the anticipation of learning makes future payoffs more uncertain which induces the agents to decrease present exploitation due to the precautionary motive second under heterogeneity of beliefs there is a differential informational externality that induces the agents to increase or decrease present exploitation we also perform a comparative analysis on the cournot nash equilibrium with learning by studying the effect of optimism and riskiness on resource exploitation

uncertainty learning and heterogeneity in international environmental agreements this paper concerns the formation of international environmental agreements under uncertainty about environmental damage with different models of learning complete learning partial learning or no learning the results of the existing literature are generally pessimistic the possibility of either complete or partial learning generally reduces the level of global welfare that can be achieved from forming an iea relative to no learning that literature regards uncertainty as a parameter common to all countries so that countries are identical ex ante as well as ex post in this paper we extend the literature to the case where there is no correlation between damage costs across countries each country is uncertain about a particular parameter in our case the benefit cost ratio drawn from a common distribution but ex post each country s realized parameter value is independently drawn consequently while countries remain identical ex ante they may be heterogeneous ex post we show that this change reinforces the negative conclusions about the effects of partial learning on international environmental agreements but under certain conditions moderates the negative conclusions about the effects of complete learning

children s resources in collective households identification estimation and an application to child poverty in malawi children s resources matter but they are hard to identify because consumption is typically mea sured at the household level modern collective household models permit some identication of indi vidual household member resources but these models typically either ignore children or treat them as attributes of adults we propose a collective household model in which children are people with their own utility functions possibly assigned to them by parents extending the frameworks of browning chiappori and lewbel 2007 and lewbel and pendakur 2008 we show identication of children s resource shares within households we invoke semiparametric restrictions on individual preferences and use data on the household level consumption of assignable private goods to achieve identication of each individual s resource share within the household we show this without being able to observe consumption by individual household members of goods that are partly or wholly shared goods within the household further we obtain identication using only engel curves and so do not require ob served price variation in the data we estimate our model using data from malawi andnd that as the number of children in a household grows women s resource shares fall and children s resource shares rise and men s resource shares are basically unchanged we alsond evidence of gender bias against girls and observe that the resource shares of mothers and children are increasing in the education level of the mother finally we use our estimates to construct poverty indices at the person level andnd that per capita poverty indices understate the incidence of child poverty in malawi

efficiency inducing taxation for polluting oligopolists abstract we show that there exists a time independent tax rule that guides polluting oligopolists to achieve the socially optimum production path the optimal tax is dependent on the current pollution stock and it may be negative when the pollution stock is low a surprising result is that the optimal tax rule may give firms a subsidy for an initial time interval even though under laissez faire their output always exceeds the socially optimal output this subsidy however induces firms to produce less than they would under laissez faire

pretending to be poor borrowing to escape forced solidarity in cameroon abstractfrom field observations of credit cooperatives in cameroon we find that 19 of the loans taken are fully collateralized by savings held in the same institutions this behavior is costly to the borrower as it represents a net interest payment of about 24 per year while traditional explanations may partly explain this behavior interviews with members of the cooperatives suggest the following new rationale members resort to borrowing to signal to friends and relatives that they are poor and do not have savings available by doing so they can avoid requests for financial help we develop a signaling model to analyze the conditions under which this behavior is an equilibrium outcome

do remittances lead to a public moral hazard in developing countries an empirical investigation abstract this article tests the hypothesis that in a context of bad governance remittance inflows strongly reduce public spending on education and health in receiving countries a phenomenon called the public moral hazard problem using a large sample of 86 developing countries over the period 1996 2007 and after factoring in the endogeneity of remittances the results suggest a negative impact of remittances on public spending on education and health when governance is bad in remittance dependent economies

can uncertainty alleviate the commons problem global commons problems such as climate change are often affected by severe uncertainty the paper examines the effect of uncertainty on pollution emissions and welfare in a strategic context we find that emissions are always lower under uncertainty than under certainty reflecting risk reducing considerations we show that uncertainty can have a net positive impact on the welfare of risk averse polluters we extend the analysis to increases in risk increases in risk aversion and to risk heterogeneity jel d81 c72 q54 h23

welfare measurement and measurement error the approximate effects of measurement error on a variety of measures of inequality and poverty are derived they are shown to depend on the measurement error variance and functionals of the error contaminated income distribution but not on the form of the measurement error distribution and to be accurate within a rich class of error free income distributions and measurement error distributions the functionals of the error contaminated income distribution that approximate the measurement error induced distortions can be estimated so it is possible to investigate the sensitivity of welfare measures to alternative amounts of measurement error and when an estimate of the measurement error variance is available to calculate corrected welfare measures the methods are illustrated in an application using indonesian household expenditure data

regime shifts and uncertainty in pollution control we develop a simple model of managing a system subject to pollution damage such as climate change under the risk of an abrupt and random jump in the damage function the model allows the full dynamic characterization of the optimal emission policies under uncertainty the results imply precautionary behavior in contrast with the ambiguous outcomes reported in the literature for models of catastrophic occurrences the framework is used to analyze the adaptation vs mitigation dilemma and provides a simple criterion to determine when adaptation activities should be undertaken

inequality poverty and the intra household allocation of consumption in senegal intra household inequalities have long been a source of concern for policy design but there is very little evidence the current practice of ignoring inequality within households could lead to an underestimation of both overall inequality and poverty levels as well as to the misclassification of some individuals as regards to their poverty status using a novel survey for senegal in which consumption data were collected at a disaggregated level this paper quantifies these various effects in total two opposing effects one on mean and one on inequality compensate each other in terms of the overall poverty rate but individual poverty statuses are affected intra household consumption inequalities accounts for 14 percent of inequality in senegal the authors uncover the fact that household structure and organization are key correlates of intra household inequality and individual risk of poverty

optimal control for transboundary pollution under ecological compensation a stochastic differential game approach abstract to account for previously ignored yet widely observed uncertainty in nature s capability to replenish the natural environment in ways that should inform ideal design of ecological compensation ec regimes this study constructs a stochastic differential game sdg model to analyze transboundary pollution control options between a compensating and compensated region equilibrium strategies in the stochastic two player game inform optimal control theory and reveal a welfare distribution mechanism to form the basis of an improved cooperative game contract a case based numerical example serves to verify the theoretical results and supports three key insights first accounting for various random disturbance factors the probabilistic pollutant stock in stackelberg non cooperative game exceeds that of a cooperative game situation second the ec mechanism provides long term effective incentives only when the marginal losses of environmental damage in the compensating region are more than twice that of the compensated region achieving a pareto optimal equilibrium relies upon the attainment of a dynamic allocation ratio derived from the analysis of a robust welfare allocation mechanism third cross region cooperation reliably outperforms stackelberg non cooperation due to either overwhelming incumbent economic interests or high abatement costs this study illuminates the importance of balancing both parties interests within an ec agreement while reducing uncertainty around unobserved environmental factors during ex ante negotiations

international aspects of pollution control pollution is a by product of production is only gradually dissolved by the environment and crosses national borders the market outcome ignores the adverse effects of pollution and thus yields higher levels of output and pollution than would prevail under a supranational social planner which does care about pollution in practice governments often do not cooperate and this leads to outcomes of pollution and production in between the market outcomes and the outcomes under supra national social planning absence of precommitment leads to lower emission charges less cleaning up activities and more pollution appropriate levels of emission charges under the various outcomes are a result of this analysis attention is also paid to investment in clean technology the debate between optimists who believe that higher production is compatible with sound environmental policy and pessimists can be analysed in this way