communication networks in markets abstract this paper proposes and tests experimentally a dynamic model of bargaining to analyze decentralized markets where buyers and sellers obtain information about past deals through their social network there is a unique equilibrium in which every individual obtains the same outcome independent of their network position and this outcome depends on the peripheral least connected individuals in the network the main testable predictions are that networks with high density and or low variability in the number of connections across individuals allow their members to obtain a better deal these predictions are tested in a lab experiment through 4 treatments that vary the network that subjects are assigned to the results of the experiment lend support to the theoretical predictions subjects converge to an outcome that is independent of their network position and they fare better if they are assigned to a network that is dense and or has low variability in number of connections across members

land subsidence production efficiency and the decision of aquacultural firms in taiwan to discontinue production abstract for some time the over pumping of groundwater by aquacultural producers has contributed to severe problems with land subsidence in many areas of taiwan this has led to policy initiatives that impose extra costs on groundwater users by investigating the effects of the conditions of aquifers production efficiency and other factors on decisions of taiwanese aquacultural producers to exit the industry this paper lays an important foundation for an understanding of the effects of these policy initiatives using data from a nationwide survey this exit decision is examined using an innovative empirical strategy that combines data envelopment analysis with a discrete choice econometric model results indicate that less efficient firms and those located in areas where land subsidence is severe are more likely to exit these relationships may in part reflect the effectiveness of the recent policy changes to reduce land subsidence attributable to aquaculture production

specific experience household structure and intergenerational transfers farm family land and labor arrangements in developing countries data from indian rural household survey was used to test th hypothesis that the coexistence in traditional rural societies of extended intergenerational families infrequent land sales and high reliance on family members as farm laborers is the result of the economic advantages which accrue from the knowledge gained by farming a particular ploy of land over a long period of time the land specific experience of elderly members of a intergenerational household who farmed the land as a child and then as an adult are expecially critical in adverse weather years most previous investigators attributed the existence of multigenerational households the use of family members rather than hired laboreds and the infrequency of land sales to deficiencies in the market i e labor market imperfections and an absence of capital insurance and asset markets in the present investigations these same characteristics are viewed as having an economic advantages a model for estimating the contribution of the experience of the elderly household members to agricultural profits was developed and applied to data from a 3 year panel study of 2900 indian rural farm households the data was collected between 1968 71 by the national council of applied economic research the survey collected information on farm profits farm inputs demographic characteristics and the effects of weather conditions on profits a major limitation of the study was a lack of information on the duration of land ownership age of household members was substituted as a proxy for duration of ownership findings were consistent withe the hypothesis in poor agricultural years gross returns for households which contained an elderly household member were greater than the gross returns for comparable households which did not contain an elderly member the economic advantages of specific knowledge embodied in the experienced elderly farmer were comparable to the economic advantages which accrued to households whose members were more educated the hypothesis cannot fully explain the existence of intergenerational families since there is a relatively large proportion of such families among nonfarm families in many countries including india findings suggest that intergenerational families may provide for more occupational diversity and thereby reduce income risks the specific experience hypothesis has policy implications if technological changes are introduced the value of specific experience may be lost and the frequency of intergenerational households may decline the hypothesis may also explain why farmers are reluctant to agree to land redistribution and consolidation schemes this reluctance may disappear after sufficient technological change has occurred

real options approach to inter sectoral migration of u s farm labor the core of the literature on inter sectoral labor migration is based on net present value models of investment in which individuals are assumed to migrate to take advantage of positive wage differentials in this article we argue that a real options approach taken together with the adjustment costs associated with sectoral relocation may provide a basis for explaining the migration of farm labor out of the agricultural sector given the irreversibility of migration decisions and uncertainty in the economy potential migrants might choose to postpone migration even in the face of positive wage differentials using annual u s employment data from between 1948 and 2009 our results indicate that large elasticities between economic incentives and out farm migration are observed after a high threshold of wage differentials between farm and off farm sectors is surpassed

limit theorems for markets with sequential bargaining this paper models trade as a non coopertative strategic game played at an inlinite sequence of dates a single indivisible commodity is traded buyers and sellers have transferable utility and are characterized by their reservation utilities they meet at random and bargain over the price at which a single unit of the good will be exchanged under a variety of circumstances it is shown that as the costs of search and bargaining become negligible the outcome of the game converges to the competitve flow equilibrium even when there is complete information journal of economic literature classification numbers 022 19x7

decentralized trading strategic behaviour and the walrasian outcome for a market with a finite number of agents pairwise matching and bargaining it is shown that even when the market is frictionless the equilibrium is not necessarily competitive it depends on the amount of information agents use if their behaviour is conditioned only on the sets of agents present and the time the competitive solution is the unique subgame perfect equilibrium if agents have full information and condition their behaviour on some of it there are also noncompetitive equilibria in which behaviour depends on specific information such as the identity of the trading partner and past events

why farmers quit a county level analysis we identify the effects of alternative explanatory variables on the propensity of u s farmers to cease farming with a particular emphasis on understanding the roles of off farm employment and federal farm program payments conventional ordinary least squares analysis using all counties suggests that off farm employment has no statistical effect on the net number of farmers quitting between 1987 and 1997 ceteris paribus a more refined analysis which separates counties losing farmers from those that gained farmers reveals subtle and less clear cut effects of off farm employment and federal program payments on farm exits copyright 2001 oxford university press

probability and timing of succession or closure in family firms a switching regression analysis of farm households in germany in a two step econometric approach that corrects for selectivity bias we analyse the determinants of the probability of succession and the timing of succession or closure in a unique sample of 233 north german family farms we set up the succession decision as an intertemporal optimization problem the empirical results show that larger and more profitable farms which are specialized in dairy production are significantly more likely to have an intra family successor we find that a nonagricultural education of the current manager or the successor delay succession when the family decided to stop farming operations nonagricultural education of the owner delays closure of the farm closure occurs earlier if the manager is able to lease out the land in the process of retirement although farm households react to incentives originating from tax and pension regulations many important determinants of succession are beyond the control of policymakers

intergenerational transfers borrowing constraints and saving behavior evidence from the housing market abstract we examine the effects of intergenerational transfers on saving behavior by analyzing transfers targeted to first time home purchases transfer recipients have a shorter time to save for a down payment of 9 20 for each dollar of transfer received total savings falls by 29 40 cents and the down payment rises by 61 71 cents transfer recipients increase the value of the home purchased but by an amount that is much lower than possible if the transfer were fully leveraged in addition transfers appear to help households achieve certain down payment thresholds that give favorable mortgage terms

is part time farming really a step in the way out of agricultural one of the most important questions regarding the phenomenon of part time farming is whether it is a stable situation or just a step in the way out of agriculture this article provides support for the first possibility in the context of israeli family farms in the 1970s a multinomial logit model of work choices is estimated including estimated transition probabilities among the explanatory variables the results indicate that a high objective probability of exit from farming within the next decade decreased the tendency to engage in off farm work especially in a full time job in 1971

bargaining and markets complexity and the competitive outcome abstract rubinstein and wolinsky rev econ stud 57 1990 63 78 consider a simple decentralised market game in which agents meet randomly or voluntarily and bargain over the terms of trade they show that any individually rational price can be sustained as a sequential equilibrium even though the model has a unique competitive outcome here i consider rubinstein and wolinsky s model and show that if complexity costs of implementing strategies enter players preferences together with the standard payoff in the game then every equilibrium is stationary markov and induces the unique competitive price thus i demonstrate that aversion to complexity may provide a justification for the competitive outcome

contract and exit decisions in finisher hog production finisher hog production in north america has shifted toward larger units and contract format since 1990 exit among independent growers has been high we develop a model showing that growers with any of three efficiency attributes lower innate hazard of exit variable costs or contract adoption costs are more likely to contract produce more and expend more on business protection using 2004 agricultural resource management survey data a recursive bivariate probit model confirms that contracting producers are less likely to exit specialization increases the probability of contracting education nonfarm income and older production facilities are significant in increasing expected exit

bargaining in a network of buyers and sellers abstract we analyze bargaining between buyers and sellers who are connected by an exogenously given network players can make repeated alternating public offers that may be accepted by any of the responders linked to each specific proposer our purpose is to find the conditions of the network which drive the price distribution in equilibrium this paper uses graph theory tools to provide necessary and sufficient conditions regarding the architecture of networks for the subgame perfect equilibrium of the bargaining game to coincide with the walrasian outcome

the role of networks in antitrust investigations antitrust investigations typically focus on the competitive pressures coming from within the defined markets of interest however competitive pressures can also come from other markets even when individually these markets place only weak constraints on one another collectively they may matter a networks approach to modelling competition permits a systemic view of competition that can sometimes paint a more accurate picture we demonstrate this through some simple examples and show more generally how tools from the networks literature can be applied to capture competition across a system of interrelated markets as a leading example we consider antitrust investigations into supermarkets where local geographic markets have been used as the basis of investigation

intergenerational transmissions in immigrant self employment evidence from three generations this paper presents the first study of intergenerational transmissions in immigrant self employment across three generations based on a swedish data set the results show that having a self employed father as well as having a self employed grandfather has a positive effect on self employment propensities for male third generation immigrants for native swedes having a self employed father is of importance for self employment propensities while having a self employed grandfather is not evidently there appears to be a generational link in self employment across three generations for immigrants but not for natives since immigrants transfer general self employment abilities third generation immigrants with self employed ancestors are over represented in self employment many of them however are not necessarily in the same business line as their fathers in contrast when natives transfer general self employment abilities their offspring tend to become self employed in the same business line as their fathers

equilibrium in a market with sequential bargaining this paper considers a market where pairs of agents who are interested in carrying out a transaction are brought together by a stochastic process and upon meeting initiate a bargaining process over the terms of the transaction the basic bargaining problem is treated with the strategic approach the paper derives the steady state equilibrium agreements analyzes their dependence on market conditions such as the relative numbers of agents of different types and discusses their relations with the competitive equilibrium outcome and other results in the search equilibrium literature this paper considers a market that operates in the following way pairs of agents who have mutual interest in carrying out a transaction are brought together by a stochastic process when two agents meet they initiate a bargaining process over the terms of the transaction if two agents reach an agreement a transaction takes place and they leave the market of course the bargaining positions and hence the agreement reached in any particular meeting will be affected by the conditions prevailing in the market these will include the chances that each of the negotiating parties have of meeting other partners in the event that the agreement in the current negotiations is delayed also the expected length of time required to achieve an alternative transaction and the expected behavior of alternative partners the study of such a market mechanism is of interest for two reasons firstly it captures some realistic aspects of the trade in certain specific markets e g asset markets such as housing and some labor markets secondly it contributes to an understanding of the micro mechanisms of price formation and their role in shaping market outcomes in both cases the features studied are largely neglected in the traditional market equilibrium analyses the related literature includes the articles by diamond 4 5 diamond and maskin 6 mortensen 8 9 and zusman and bell 13 these articles consider markets of the type described above in which transactions are concluded at pairwise meetings of agents the major difference between our work and these articles is in the approach to the basic bargaining problem in the cited articles it is assumed that a meeting is concluded with an instantaneous agreement which divides the associated surplus in an arbitrary predetermined way when the surplus is assumed to be divided equally the division rule is in fact nash s axiomatic bargaining solution in contrast the present paper treats the basic bargaining problem with the strategic approach see rubinstein 19 which constitutes an attempt to look into the bargaining black box this approach explicitly models the time dimension of the bargaining process describes in detail the bargaining procedure and justifies the agreement as a perfect equilibrium in

bilateral bargaining in networks abstract each connected pair of nodes in a network can jointly produce one unit of surplus a maximum number of linked nodes is selected in every period to bargain bilaterally over the division of the surplus according to the protocol proposed by rubinstein and wollinsky equilibrium in a market with sequential bargaining econometrica 53 1985 1133 1150 all pairs which reach an agreement obtain the discounted payoffs and are removed from the network this bargaining game has a unique subgame perfect equilibrium that induces the dulmage mendelsohn decomposition partition of the bipartite network of the set of nodes in this network

optimal timing of farm transferal from parent to child when farm income is first increasing and then decreasing in the operator s age the timing of farm transferal from parent to child is optimally determined by families who seek to maximize joint income or utility using a sample of israeli farms in which the operation of the farm changed from parent to child between 1971 and 1981 equations of transfer time and child s education are derived a simultaneous equation censored regression model is estimated using a two stage method results support the theoretical predictions that transfer time is decreasing with parent s age and with child s schooling and increasing with parent s experience

a theory of buyer seller networks this paper introduces a new model of exchange networks rather than markets of buyers and sellers it begins with the empirically motivated premise that a buyer and seller must have a relationship a link to exchange goods networks buyers sellers and the pattern of links connecting them are common exchange environments this paper develops a methodology to study network structures and explains why agents may form networks in a model that captures characteristics of a variety of industries the paper shows that buyers and sellers acting strategically in their own self interests can form the network structures that maximize overall welfare

bargaining dynamics in exchange networks abstract we consider a one sided assignment market or exchange network with transferable utility and the dynamics of bargaining in such a market our dynamical model is local involving iterative updates of offers based on estimated best alternative matches in the spirit of pairwise nash bargaining agents are not strategic in our model we establish that when a balanced outcome a generalization of the pairwise nash bargaining solution to networks exists our dynamics converges rapidly to such an outcome

directly unproductive profit seeking dup activities this paper propses directly unproductive profit seeking dup activities as a general concept that embraces a wide range of recently analyzed economic activities including the subset of rent seeking activities considered by krueger it then proceeds to provide a synthesis and generalization of the welfare theoretic analysis of such activities by developing a fourfold categorization of cases depending on the levels of distortions before and after the dup activity thus a unification and overview of the subject are achieved

the intergenerational transmission of employers we find that about 40 of a cohort of young canadian men have been employed at some time with an employer for which their father also worked and 6 9 have the same employer in adulthood the intergenerational transmission of employers is positively related to paternal earnings particularly at the very top of the earnings distribution and to the presence of self employment income and the number of employers with which the father has had direct contact it has an important influence on nonlinear patterns in the intergenerational elasticity of earnings

intergenerational occupational mobility in great britain and the united states since 1850 comment using historical census and survey data long and ferrie forthcoming found a significant decline in social mobility in the united states from 1880 to 1973 we present two critiques of the long ferrie study first the data quality of the long ferrie study is more limiting than the authors acknowledge second and more critically they applied a method ill suited for measuring social mobility of farmers in a comparative study between 1880 and 1973 a period in which the proportion of farmers dramatically declined in the u s we show that long and ferrie s main conclusion is all driven by this misleading result for farmers

price dispersion in stationary networked markets abstract different sellers often sell the same good at different prices using a strategic bargaining model i characterize how the equilibrium prices of a good depend on the interaction between its sellers costs its buyers values and a network capturing various frictions associated with trading it in contrast to the standard random matching model of bargaining in stationary markets i allow agents to strategically choose whom to make offers to which qualitatively changes how the network shapes prices as in the random matching model the market decomposes into different submarkets and in the limit as bargaining frictions vanish the law of one price holds within but not across them but strategic choice of partners changes both how the market decomposes into different submarkets and the determinants of each submarket s price

rent seeking from a property rights perspective james buchanan 15 15 has suggested that rent seeking analysis can readily be incorporated within the property rights approach and as with public choice the theory of rent seeking can be interpreted as an appropriate extension yet no one has really explored rent seeking or revenue premium tariff or directly unproductive profit seeking from a property rights perspective buchanan 14 15 16 17 clearly indicated that property rights assignments actually underlie the rent seeking process and others have also recognized this 4 20 23 28 but there are further insights into the workings of the political economy which can be derived for instance lobbying activities with nonpecuniary goals clearly fit into the rent seeking framework when viewed through the property rights paradigm this contrasts strikingly with the perception of rent seeking held by some writers 9 10 11 12 13 furthermore a property rights approach to rent seeking provides predictions of a spiraling process of government growth since successful rent seeking by one interest group generally requires expansion of bureaucratic powers while at the same time creating incentives for the formation of additional rent seeking interest groups legislative responses to these new groups requires further expansion of the bureaucracy and creates incentives for more rent seeking so the growth process continues in this paper a brief summary of the conclusions of the rent seeking literature will be presented followed by an explanation of how the same conclusions have been deduced using the property rights paradigm various extensions of the rent seeking concept such as those alluded to above are then obtained by emphasizing a property rights approach following this the terms used to describe rent seeking e g directly unproductive profit seeking etc will be discussed to determine which if any is the most appropriate characterization of the phenomenon

bargaining and efficiency in networks abstract we study an infinite horizon game in which pairs of players connected in a network are randomly matched to bargain over a unit surplus players who reach agreement are removed from the network without replacement the global logic of efficient matchings and the local nature of bargaining in combination with the irreversible exit of player pairs following agreements create severe hurdles to the attainment of efficiency in equilibrium for many networks all markov perfect equilibria of the bargaining game are inefficient even as players become patient we investigate how incentives need to be structured in order to achieve efficiency via subgame perfect but non markovian equilibria the analysis extends to an alternative model in which individual players are selected according to some probability distribution and a chosen player can select a neighbor with whom to bargain

optimal timing in the problem of family farm transfer from parent to child an option value approach abstract the optimal time for transferring the family farm from parent to child is modeled in an option value framework it is assumed that parents have the ability to wait and enrich their information set before making the decision when to transfer the farm to a succeeding child rather than making a prompt decision the results indicate that the optimal timing depends on the wedge between the parents critical level of utility and disutility from the farm transfer to a succeeding child the arguments of parents utility function are country culture and family specific

non cooperative bargaining theory an introduction the paper provides an informal introduction to some of the main themes of the recent literature on non cooperative or sequential bargaining models it focuses in particular on the relationship between the new approach and the traditional axiomatic approach exemplified by nash bargaining theory it illustrates the new insights offered by the non cooperative approach by reference to a detailed analysis of the manner in which the presence of an outside option available to one of the parties will affect the negotiated outcome finally the difficulties which arise in extending this analysis to two person bargaining with incomplete information and to n person bargaining are discussed this is a revised version of the fourth review of economic studies lecture presented in april 1985 at the joint meeting of the association of university teachers of economics and the royal economic society held in oxford the choice of lecturer is made by a panel whose members are currently professors hahn mirrlees and nobay and the paper is refereed in the usual way this paper aims to provide an informal and elementary introduction to an approach to bargaining which has received a great deal of attention over the past few years the approach involves writing down some particular sequence of moves offers and replies to be made over time in the course of negotiations and then looking for a non cooperative equilibrium in the game thus specified in practice a perfect equilibrium or in games of incomplete information a sequential equilibrium while the approach appears at first sight to be very different in spirit from the traditional axiomatic approach in which a bargaining solution is specified by appealing to a number of general requirements which are deemed appropriate on the basis of some a priori considerations the two approaches are in fact complementary while the

risk and farm operator labour supply this study uses a large increase in us federal crop insurance subsidies as a natural experiment to identify the importance of risk for farm operator labour supply subsidy increases induced greater crop insurance coverage which in turn reduced farmers financial risks crop insurance participation data are merged with farm level census of agriculture data from 1992 and 1997 to compare how individuals off farm labour supply changed in response to the policy induced change in insurance coverage the empirical approach controls for unobserved heterogeneity and accounts for the censored nature of the data it is found that greater insurance coverage reduces the off farm labour supply of operators who produced at least 100 000 of output and increased the labour supply of small farm operators who produced less than 25 000 of output

the demand for housing in spain an endogenous switching regression analysis housing demand in spain has been studied by using data disaggregated into primary and secondary housing demands it is found that demand for both types of housing area indeed related and that they are both considered necessities thus suggesting that their consumption ought to be modelled as a joint decision moreover it is found that traditional determinants of housing demand affect primary and secondary home demands differently these differences are attributable to the following economic rationales need for asset holdings diversifications relative high cost of home ownership versus rental in choice locations and differences in land demand intensity across regions in sum the findings suggest that policy makers in spain contrary to popular beliefs must consider secondary homes an integral part of households accommodation need

land and racial wealth inequality could racial wealth inequality have been reduced if freed slaves had been granted land following the civil war this paper exploits a plausibly exogenous variation in policies of the cherokee nation and southern united states to identify the impact of free land on the size of the racial wealth gap using data on land livestock and home ownership i find evidence that former slaves who had access to free land were absolutely wealthier and experienced lower levels of racial wealth inequality in 1880 than former slaves who did not furthermore their children continued to experience these advantages in 1900

farmers health and agricultural productivity agriculture is one of the most hazardous productive sectors around the world most previous studies have focused on health issues of farmers in developing countries while little attention has been paid to farmers health problems in developed countries the present study assesses the effect of farmers health conditions on agricultural productivity in norway employing stochastic frontier regression techniques we conclude that differences in farmers health help to explain the variance in agricultural production efficiency

cooperative lobbying and endogenous trade policy this paper considers trade policies in a small open economy in which two influential interest groups lobby the government since competitive lobbying leads to excessive rent seeking expenditures the lobbies have an incentive to cooperate the outcome of cooperative lobbying is characterized in terms of lobbying and bargaining power of the two groups two important results are derived first if the power of competing interest groups is balanced then cooperation leads to free trade second if it is unbalanced cooperation may on the contrary increase protection

lobbying dup activities and welfare a response to tullock professor tullock 1981 in trying to understand the results in my 1981 paper on lobbying and welfare has raised issues that require further clarification and analysis for brevity s sake i shall concentrate here on the essentials leaving minor remarks of tullock s aside 1 the specific case of lobbying which i addressed originally was tariffseeking by pr otectionist lobbies so that the tariff would be endogenous i then showed that one could not argue in this instance that an exogenouslyspecified tariff at x was necessarily welfare superior to an endogenous tariff at x0 all other forms of lobbying were excluded of course 2 tullock argues that this result obtains because he and krueger 1974 think whereas i do not that tariff rcvcnucs can be wasted as it happens krueger 1974 made no such assumption she explicitly compared in her analysis of the specific cast of premium seeking for import quotas aircad in place quotas with such premium seeking with tariffs that had no corresponding revenue seeking or for that matter any waste resulting from the government directly expending the tariff revenue bhagwati and srinivasan 1980 were the first to introduce the revenue seeking concept and to argue that it was wholly inappropriate for krueger to compare tariffs and quotas on the assumption that the latter gave rise to fill premium seeking whereas the former gave rise to zero revenue seeking

bargaining in stationary networks we study an infinite horizon game in which pairs of players con nected in a network are randomly matched to bargain players who reach agreement are replaced by new players at the same positions in the network we show that all equilibria are payoff equivalent the payoffs and the set of agreement links converge as players become patient several new concepts mutually estranged sets partners and shortage ratios provide insights into the relative strengths of the positions in the network we develop a procedure to deter mine the limit equilibrium payoffs for all players characterizations of equitable and nondiscriminatory networks are also obtained jel c78 d85 competitive equilibrium theory assumes large and anonymous markets in which every buyer can trade with every seller underlying these assumptions are standard goods and services that may be traded at low transaction costs by agents who are not in specific relationships with one another however in many markets goods and services are heterogeneous e g cars apartments or need to be tailored to particular needs e g manufacturing inputs technical support furthermore trad ing opportunities may depend on transportation costs social relationships infor mation advertising trust technological compatibility joint business opportunities free trade agreements etc in such cases it is natural to model the market using a network where only pairs of connected agents may engage in exchange new theories are needed to explore the influence of the network structure on market outcomes many questions arise how does an agent s position in the net work determine his bargaining power and the local prices he faces who trades with whom and on what terms when are prices uniform in the network one possible conjecture is that an agent s bargaining power is determined by his relative number of connections in the network however this simple theory is implausible consider the network of four sellers located at the top nodes and nine buyers located at the bottom nodes depicted in figure 1 assume that each seller supplies one unit of a homogeneous indivisible good each buyer demands one unit of the good and all buyers have identical values for the good the buyer located in the middle has the largest number of links in the network as he is connected to each

intertemporal substitution in labor supply evidence from micro data the sensitivity of the supply of labor to intertemporal variation in the wage is an important issue in macroeconomics the analysis of social security and pensions and the study of life cycle patterns of work this paper explores two approaches to the measurement of intertemporal substitution that have appeared in the literature the first approach is to use consumption to control for wealth and unobserved expectations about future wages in the labor supply equation the second approach is to estimate a first difference equation for hours in which labor supply from the previous period serves as a control for wealth and wage expectations the results indicate that intertemporal substitution elasticity for married men is positive but small

bilateral trading in networks in many markets goods flow from initial producers to final customers travelling through many layers of intermediaries and information is asymmetric we study a dynamic model of bargaining in networks that captures these features we show that the equilibrium price demanded over time is non monotonic but the sequence of transaction prices declines over time with the possible exception of the last period the price dynamic is therefore reminiscent of fire sales and hot potato trading traders who intermediate the object arise endogenously and make a positive profit the profit earning intermediaries are not necessarily traders with many connections for the case of multilayer networks they belong to the path that reaches the maximum number of potential buyers using the minimal number of intermediaries this is not necessarily the path of the network that maximizes the probability of consumption by traders who value the most the object i e welfare

effects of income variability on the demand for owner occupied housing abstract this study investigates whether the uncertainty associated with an income stream affects the demand for owner occupied housing theoretical models yield an ambiguous sign for the direction of change in consumption but our empirical findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the consumption of housing falls when the uncertainty of receipt of income increases specifically in a sample of military employees the income earned by wives had little or no effect on the demand for housing we also find evidence that suggests the demand for housing is affected by pension rights the closer to retirement the stronger the effect

wage growth landholding and mechanization in chinese agriculture this paper uses farm panel data from china to examine the dynamics of land transactions machine investments and the demand for machine services recently china s agriculture has experienced a large expansion of machine rentals and machine services provided by specialized agents which has contributed to mechanization of agricultural production the empirical results show that an increase in nonagricultural wage rates leads to expansion of self cultivated land size a rise in the proportion of nonagricultural income or the migration rate also increases the size of self cultivated land interestingly however relatively educated farm households decrease the size of self cultivated land which suggests that relatively less educated farmers tend to specialize in farming the demand for machine services has also increased if agricultural wage and migration rate increased over time especially among relatively large farms the results on crop income support the complementarity between rented in land and machine services demanded which implies that scale economies are arising in chinese agriculture with mechanization and active land rental markets

favorite sons intergenerational wealth transfers among politicians in this paper we investigate the degree of occupational following in politics and its impact upon the career success and behavior while in office of both sons and fathers we find that sons follow into their politician fathers footsteps to a degree surpassed in the general population only among farmers and self employed proprietors there is substantial indirect evidence which suggests that following is motivated to a large extent by the transfer of valuable name recognition and voter loyalty

extended stay at university an application of multinomial logit and duration models in brazil few studies have been devoted to proving the existence of and evaluating the internal inefficiencies of state universities such work however is highly important because state higher learning is free and a great amount of resources is involved in its maintenance the objective of this study is to develop empirical models to permit an evaluation of the factors related to the decision to complete or abandon the course and to verify whether the duration of the connection to the university is also related to the same factors among the results obtained the most important is that the prolonged stay at a state university favours students whose families could afford their schooling

the dynamics of chinese rural households participation in labor markets the work is devoted to the dynamics of labor market participation of chinese rural households based on a theoretical farm household framework the choice between four distinct labor market participation states is empirically analyzed using household data over the period 1995 2002 from the province zhejiang we apply a discrete time hazard approach to analyze households labor market participation histories in particular we investigate the movements between autarky and participation in general and more specifically the shifts between part time and full time farming estimation results suggest significant duration dependence more precisely a decreasing risk of moving from one state to another with an increasing time a household occupies one of these states further the likelihoods of starting any participation in labor markets and to start part time farming are considerably higher than to end participation or to return to full time farming in addition we find that labor market participation decisions are significantly related to several household and farm characteristics

pricing and matching with frictions suppose that n buyers each want one unit and m sellers each have one or more units of a good sellers post prices and then buyers choose sellers in symmetric equilibrium similar sellers all post one price and buyers randomize hence more or fewer buyers may arrive than a seller can accommodate we call this frictions we solve for prices and the endogenous matching function for finite n and m and consider the limit as n and m grow the matching function displays decreasing returns but converges to constant returns we argue that the standard matching function in the literature is misspecified and discuss implications for the beveridge curve

a strategic model of social and economic networks we study the stability and efficiency of social and economic networks when self interested individuals can form or sever links first for two stylized models we characterize the stable and efficient networks there does not always exist a stable network that is efficient next we show that this tension persists generally to assure that there exists a stable network that is efficient one is forced to allocate resources to nodes that are not responsible for any of the production we characterize one such allocation rule the equal split rule and another rule that arises naturally from bargaining of the players

occupational inheritance in agriculture it used to be common if not expected that a son would grow up and take over the family business or follow in his father s footsteps today we still observe varying degrees of occupational inheritance in business politics the arts and other occupations however blau and duncan find that farmers inherit their occupation at a rate five times greater than the next highest category of occupational inheritors despite a growing concern about the future of the family farm there seem to be no successful attempts to explain why occupational mobility studies consistently find higher rates of intergenerational occupational mobility among farmers than among other groups in this paper we attempt to explain the tendency of farmers to be sons of farmers by itself the preponderance of family farms is not particularly surprising it is interesting that ownership of these farms tends to remain within families across generations moreover sons of farmers tend to become farmers rather than rent or

nash in nash bargaining a microfoundation for applied work a nash equilibrium in nash bargains has become the workhorse bargaining model in applied analyses of bilateral oligopoly this paper proposes a non cooperative foundation for nash in nash bargaining that extends the rubinstein 1982 model to multiple upstream and downstream rms assuming there exists gains from trade for each rm pair we prove that there exists an equilibrium with immediate agreement and negotiated prices that correspond to rubinstein prices if and only if the marginal contribution of a set of agreements is weakly greater than the sum of the agreements marginal contributions we provide stronger conditions under which equilibrium prices are unique

off farm labor market decisions and agricultural shocks among rural households in kenya using household level data from rural kenya this article explores whether and how farm households respond to unfavorable agricultural production environments including any ex post adjustments in off farm labor supply in response to unexpected weather shocks while controlling for a wide range of educational demographic and other locational factors we examine how long term weather conditions and specific rainfall shocks influence a household s decision to engage in and their earnings from the off farm labor market we find that rural households engage in off farm work as a long term strategy to deal with the effects of anticipated weather conditions on their farming operations the analysis does not reveal major short term adjustments in off farm engagement as a result of specific unexpected rainfall shocks these households do however rely on remittance income and petty agricultural wage labor under these circumstances holding other factors constant and conditional on participation households in areas with a more productive local agriculture tend to earn more from off farm work especially in the informal business sector than their counterparts in regions with a less productive agriculture as expected a vibrant local economy in the form of public investment increases the probability of off farm participation

efficiency in decentralized oligopolistic markets the paper analyzes quantity competition in economies in which a network describes the set of feasible trades a model is presented in which the identity of buyers of sellers and of intermediaries is endogenously determined by the trade flows in the economy the analysis first considers small economies and provides sufficient conditions for equilibrium existence a characterization of prices and flows and some negative results relating welfare to network structure the second and central part of the analysis considers behavior in large markets and presents necessary and sufficient conditions on the network structure for equilibria to be approximately efficient when the number of players is large

off farm work and capital accumulation decisions of farmers over the life cycle the role of heterogeneity and state dependence abstract this paper analyzes two principal simultaneous decisions of farm operators off farm labor supply and farm capital investment we first develop a theoretical model analyzing the effects of exogenous shocks on farmers decisions then we estimate jointly a multinomial probit model of farmers off farm labor supply and a switching regression model of farm capital using a two period panel data set from israel this method enables to account for both unobserved heterogeneity and structural state dependence the results demonstrate that farm capital investments during the 1970s which were enhanced by heavily subsidized credit prevented farmers from seeking off farm employment opportunities

markov equilibria in a model of bargaining in networks abstract we study the markov perfect equilibria mpes of an infinite horizon game in which pairs of players connected in a network are randomly matched to bargain players who reach agreement are removed from the network without replacement we establish the existence of mpes and show that mpe payoffs are not necessarily unique a method for constructing pure strategy mpes for high discount factors is developed for some networks we find that all mpes are asymptotically inefficient as players become patient