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

unbalanced sex ratios in germany caused by world war ii and their effect on fertility a life cycle perspective this paper analyzes the effects of permanently unbalanced sex ratios in germany caused by world war ii on fertility outcomes over the life cycle using census records linked with individual biography data our analysis confirms the commonly found short term pattern of decreased fertility rates due to a stark imbalance of the sex ratio yet the long term effects of such an imbalance crucially depend on when in the life cycle fertility is evaluated we find that female cohorts with low sex ratios have fewer children at younger ages and a larger fraction remains childless while childlessness remains higher throughout their life cycle mothers from affected cohorts catch up and even overcompensate at later ages with respect to the number of children our preferred reading of this result is that with low sex ratios women select themselves into late motherhood according to their fertility preferences this interpretation is consistent with the finding that women from affected cohorts expand their childbearing period and accept lower quality matches in the marriage market our findings have important implications for understanding the long term consequences of large population shocks

does marriage really make men more productive this paper presents new descriptive evidence regarding marital pay premiums earned by white males longitudinal data indicate that wages rise after marriage and that cross sectional marriage premiums appear to result from a steepening of the earnings profile data from a company personnelfile that includes information on job grades and supervisor performance ratings reveal large marital status pay differences within a narrow range of occupations managers and professionals and environments a single firm married workers tend to be located in higher paying job grades there are very small pay differentials within grades married men receive higher performance ratings than single men as a result they are much more likely to be promoted controlling for rated performance however eliminates the promotion differential sanders korenman is an assistant professor of economics and public affairs at princeton university and is a faculty associate of the office of population research at princeton university and a research affiliate of the national bureau of economic research nber david neumark is an assistant professor of economics at the university of pennsylvania and a research affiliate of the nber korenman wishes to acknowledge the hewlett foundation and the harvard university center for population studies for financial support the authors are grateful to james medofffor making available an extract from the company personnelfile questions regarding data availability should be directed to professor james

effects of family background on earnings and returns to schooling evidence from brazil we investigate whether omitted family background variables are responsible for high returns to schooling estimated in brazil returns to schooling fall by about one third when parental schooling is added to wage equations surprisingly the schooling of fathers in law has larger effects on wages than the schooling of fathers on the basis of a model of assortative mating we interpret this as evidence that parental characteristics represent unobservable worker attributes rather than nepotism in the labor market we conclude that the family background bias in returns to schooling is modest and need not imply returns to family connections

trends in family labour hired labour and contract work on french field crop farms the role of the common agricultural policy abstract this paper investigates french field crop farms use of various types of labour during the period 1990 2007 we explore the determinants of the three types of labour used on farm family labour hired labour and contract labour with a particular emphasis on the impact of common agricultural policy cap reforms and subsidies on the three labour types we estimate a system of three equations including a censored model using the french farm accountancy data network fadn database we find that hired labour and contract labour are substitutes as expected but that hired labour and family labour are complements this may reveal complementarities between management tasks which are specifically for the farm head and family labour and technical operations the only operations performed by hired labour in addition we find that in general crop area payments and single farm payments sfp have reduced farm labour while agri environmental payments less favoured area lfa payments and investment subsidies have increased it our results agree with most of the literature that coupled and decoupled area payments reduce labour use on farms

the economic theory of agrarian institutions introduction alternative approaches to the theory of institutions in economic development pranab bardhan rational peasants efficient institutions and a theory of rural organization methodological remarks for development economics joseph e stiglitz part 1 land and labour theories of sharecropping nirvikar singh a comparison of principal agent and bargaining solutions the case of tenancy contracts clive bell contracts with eviction in infinitely repeated principal agent relationships bhaskar dutta et al production relations in semi arid african agriculture hans binswanger et al part 2 credit and interlinked transactions rural credit markets the structure of interest rates exploitation and efficiency kaushik basu credit and agrarian class structure mukesh eswaran and ashok kotwal credit rationing tenancy productivity and the dynamics of inequality avishay braverman and joseph e stiglitz on choice among creditors and bonded labour contracts t n srinivasan some aspects of linked product and credit market contracts among risk neutral agents clive bell and t n srinivasan a note on interlinked rural economic arrangements pranab bardhan interlinkages and the pattern of competition debraj ray and kunal sengupta part 3 marketing and insurance agricultural institutions for insurance and stabilization david m newbery peasants risk aversion and the choice of marketing intermediaries and contracts a bargaining theory of equilibrium marketing contracts pinhas zusman part 4 co operatives technology and the state agricultural producer co operatives louis putterman institutional analysis of credit co operatives avishay braverman and j luis guasch agrarian structure technological innovations and the state alain de janvry et al

evaluating the impact of agricultural extension on farms performance in crete a nonneutral stochastic frontier approach this article attempts to integrate the production and the efficiency based approaches for evaluating the impact of extension on farms performance for this purpose the nonneutral production frontier model is used and the empirical analysis refers to a sample of farms from crete greece the empirical results support the proposed formulation instead of either the production or the efficiency based formulations as extension was found to have a statistically significant effect on closing both the technology and management gaps public and private extension services were found to be competitive in the production function and complementary in the technical inefficiency effect function in addition farms using both public and private extension services achieved a higher degree of technical efficiency than those using either public or private extension services and farms with no extension services were found to be the least efficient

are those paid more really more productive the case of experience this study uses computerized personnel microdata on the white male managerial and professional employees at a major u s corporation to address the following question can the additional earnings which are associated with more labor market experience at a point in time really be explained by higher productivity at the same point in time our answer to this question based on both cross sectional and longitudinal information is that performance plays a substantially smaller role in explaining cross sectional experience earnings differentials and earnings growth than is claimed by those who have adopted the human capital explanation of the experience earnings profile this response depends critically on our assumption that the performance ratings which supervisors give to their white male managerial and professional subordinates adequately reflect the subordinates relative productivity in the year of assessment we present a great deal of evidence which strongly supports this assumption

innovation and trade with endogenous market failure the case of genetically modified products a partial equilibrium two country model is developed to analyze implications from the introduction of genetically modified gm products in the model innovators hold proprietary rights farmers are competitive adopters some consumers deem gm food to be inferior in quality to traditional food and the mere introduction of gm crops affects the costs of non gm food because of costly identity preservation among the results derived it is shown that although gm innovations have the potential to improve efficiency some groups can be made worse off indeed it is even possible that the costs induced by gm innovations outweigh the efficiency gains

the accumulation of human capital during marriage by males married males have significantly higher wage rates than never married widowed or divorced males even when differences in educational attainment experience race and so on are controlled for evidence presented in this paper suggests that most of the unexplained wage differential associated with marital status in earnings regressions results from males accumulating human capital more rapidly when they are married than when those same males are not married the hypothesis that married males earn more than unmarried males because marriage facilitates the financing of human capital accumulation is supported by this and other evidence

endogenous gender power household labor supply and the demographic transition abstract we present a microeconomic model of the household in which there exists no difference in spousal preferences but childrearing is more time costly for women bargaining between the wife and the husband forms the basis of household decisions marital bargaining power is determined according to the incomes of the spouses which in turn help to determine their reservation utility levels outside the marriage the endogeneity of bargaining power introduces a non cooperative element to the couples decision making problem because both the husbands and the wives take into account how their pre marital education decisions affect their marital power and the share they extract from household resources in the future the model predicts that wives invest more than is pareto efficient in their education in order to increase their bargaining power in marriage as a consequence couples have fewer children and consume more when exogenous structural changes lead women to invest more in education a corollary of the model is that empowering women directly through social reforms such as a lower gender wage gap leads to lower fertility and higher spousal consumption and leisure

implications of agency theory for optimal land tenure contracts explores landowner tenant contracts in land tenure in agriculture inefficiency of share tenancy relative to owner cultivation introduction of principal agent models influence of monitoring in studying optimal landowner tenant risk sharing need to study adequate tenant incentives this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

household specialization and the male marriage wage premium empirical research has consistently shown that married men have substantially higher wages on average than otherwise similar unmarried men one commonly cited hypothesis to explain this pattern is that marriage allows one spouse to specialize in market production and the other to specialize in home production enabling the former usually the husband to acquire more market specific human capital and ultimately earn higher wages the authors test this hypothesis using panel data from the national survey of families and households the data reveal that married men spent virtually the same amount of time on home production as did single men albeit on different types of housework estimates from a fixed effects wage equation indicate that the male marriage wage premium is not substantially affected by controls for home production activities household specialization the authors conclude does not appear to have been responsible for the marriage premium in this sample

intensive and extensive margins of fertility capital accumulation and economic welfare abstract this paper investigates the impact of low fertility on long term capital accumulation and economic welfare we find that the impact differs depending on whether the low fertility arises from a decrease in the fertility of mothers the intensive margin of fertility or the motherhood rate the extensive margin of fertility we show that an increase in the fertility of mothers decreases the capital stock and economic welfare conversely we identify a u shaped relationship between the extensive margin of fertility and the capital stock because of the existence of two opposing effects such that the decline in fertility may reduce economic welfare furthermore we show that an intragenerational income redistribution policy can eliminate the welfare loss resulting from the incomplete market

the firm size farm size and transaction costs the case of hazelnut farms in turkey this study analyzes the effects of transaction costs on the size of hazelnut farms in turkey the study finds that higher land slope and higher variance of rain as transaction cost increasing natural effects lead to smaller hazelnut land holdings high slope and weather variation can increase the costs of monitoring the laborers make moving inputs or output up and down harder limit the use of machinery and reduce contractual performance of labor contracts for farm production functions land is a complex input with measurable interactions with nature contrary to common production theory approaches that take natural properties of land as given the study develops a production function that incorporates natural properties such as slope and rain variance the study utilizes two separate data sets for the estimations the first data set explores the characteristics of hazelnut farmers while the second one analyzes the regional characteristics of hazelnut farms

bargaining over babies theory evidence and policy implications it takes a woman and a man to make a baby this fact suggests that for a birth to take place the parents should first agree on wanting a child using newly available data on fertility preferences and outcomes we show that indeed babies are likely to arrive only if both parents desire one and there are many couples who disagree on having babies we then build a bargaining model of fertility choice and match the model to data from a set of european countries with very low fertility rates the distribution of the burden of child care between mothers and fathers turns out to be a key determinant of fertility a policy that lowers the child care burden specifically on mothers can be more than twice as effective at increasing the fertility rate compared to a general child subsidy

the baby boom and baby bust what caused the baby boom and can it be explained within the context of the secular decline in fertility that has occurred over the last 200 years the hypothesis is that a the secular decline in fertility is due to the relentless rise in real wages that increased the opportunity cost of having children b the baby boom is explained by an atypical burst of technological progress in the household sector that occurred in the middle of the last century this lowered the cost of having children a model is developed in an attempt to account quantitatively for both the baby boom and bust

gender differences in education in a dynamic household bargaining model in this paper we explore the issue of gender differences in education in the context of a two sex overlapping generations model where men and women of each generation bargain over consumpt ion number of children and investment in education of their children conditional on gender and parents are altruistic toward their children we show that the difference in the education levels of boys and girls implied by our model is smaller than the one that would result from a pure investment model also we show that as long as the time cost associated with bearing children is positive women bear the entire time cost associated with child rearing we use our model to estimate the cost to a woman of having a child the estimate we obtain using cross country data suggests that such cost amounts to about 5 of the working lifetime of a woman

the gender gap in earnings at career entry we propose a new approach to analyzing gender differences in wages this approach identifies several alternative explanatory mechanisms to account for the sorting of women and men into different types of jobs that offer different levels of reward because labor market rewards derive from labor market positions we study matching processes operating at the micro level that sort workers into existing slots in a given macro level structure of jobs and associated wages we focus on the explanation of gender differences in wages at career entry analyzing data from the national longitudinal survey of youth collected between 1979 and 1991 we find that at career entry women earn 84 cents for every dollar men earn gender differences in worker characteristics account for only about 30 percent of this wage gap gender differences in occupational aspirations have the most important effect accounting for 16 percent of the wage gap and gender differences in job related skills and credentials account for about 14 percent of the wage gap gender differences in adult family roles have little direct effect our analysis further suggests that the external influences of employing organizations and network processes on gender differences in occupational and industrial placement at career entry account for another 42 percent of the wage gap t is well established that in the united states on average women s wages are lower than those of men data on the 1992 annual earnings of full time year round workers ages 16 and older indicate that on average women earned 71 cents for every dollar earned by men u s bureau of the census 1993 we analyze gender differences in wages at career entry when market con

transaction costs strategic interaction and farm restructuring this article offers a transaction cost explanation for the different paths of organizational adjustment in the case of the former state and collective farms in czech republic after 1989 the focus is the strategic interaction among the stakeholders in the agricultural organization undergoing restructuring in the presence of a neutral institutional environment the number of players involved in the intraorganizational process their ability to make collective decisions and their perceived payoffs in alternative farming structures determine the restructuring outcome these factors influence the choice between maintaining the inherited deployment of assets and the creation of a deeply restructured organization empirical results based on a farm level data set support this basic idea

fertility and childlessness in the united states we develop a theory of fertility distinguishing its intensive margin from its extensive margin the deep parameters are identified using facts from the 1990 us census i fertility of mothers decreases with education ii childlessness exhibits a u shaped relationship with education iii the relationship between marriage rates and education is hump shaped for women and increasing for men we estimate that 2 5 percent of women were childless because of poverty and 8 1 percent because of high opportunity cost of childrearing over time historical trends in total factor productivity and in education led to a u shaped response in childlessness rates while fertility of mothers decreased

animal health inputs endogenous risk general infrastructure technology adoption and industrialized animal agriculture abstract this paper develops a microeconomic model of concentrated animal feeding operations that admits roles for all of animal health inputs genetic profile choices and the pertaining economic infrastructure the basic model emphasizes how time on feed feed density and biosecurity choices interact as well as how these choices respond to i input prices and ii attributes regarding animal productivity parameters that might be influenced by policy choices such as animal welfare strictures and restraints on use of medication we show that ostensibly substituting inputs in protecting against animal health risks may in fact be complements and that the model s production choices come as a complementary package we then extend the model to endogenize the choice of animal genetics a finding is that innovations in general infrastructure encourage herd owners to choose more feed efficient but less hardy animals higher feed conversion efficiency then induces the use of denser feed rations accelerated finishing and greater levels of biosecurity actions at farm perimeters our theory provides a coherent framework for explaining associations among inputs and outcomes that are linked with confined animal agriculture it also explains how animal protein supply chain technology adoption and performance can differ according to a region s state of infrastructure why responses to a change in infrastructure may be large and why public sector efforts to reduce production risk may beget private sector effort to do so

global land investments in the bio economy evidence and policy implications for countries dependent on agriculture the recent wave of investor interest in farmland could in principle help set in motion a virtuous cycle of economic growth and poverty reduction a large literature documenting failure of such investments documents the risks involved to appreciate associated opportunities and challenges we review past experience quantify country level potential for area expansion versus intensification and identify determinants of countries attractiveness for investors in the initial stages of the land rush the fact that weak land governance seems to increase rather than reduce land demand justifies an emphasis on improving institutions transparency and accountability while at the same time providing concrete suggestions for policy and research

the use of bootstrapped malmquist indices to reassess productivity change findings an application to a sample of polish farms this article assesses the extent to which sampling variation affects findings about malmquist productivity change derived using data envelopment analysis dea in the first stage by calculating productivity indices and in the second stage by investigating the farm specific change in productivity confidence intervals for malmquist indices are constructed using simar and wilson s 1999 bootstrapping procedure the main contribution of this article is to account in the second stage for the information in the second stage provided by the first stage bootstrap the dea ses of the malmquist indices given by bootstrapping are employed in an innovative heteroscedastic panel regression using a maximum likelihood procedure the application is to a sample of 250 polish farms over the period 1996 to 2000 the confidence intervals results suggest that the second half of 1990s for polish farms was characterized not so much by productivity regress but rather by stagnation as for the determinants of farm productivi

marital status child rearing and earnings differentials in the graduate labour market differential the importance of family role specialisation for the measurement of the residual earnings differential is examined within a sample selection model of participation and earnings the earnings differential between men and women may be divided into that explained by different characteristics and attributes and that due to residual factors one element of this residual may be discrimination although other factors may be incorporated in the unexplained component the residual also incorporates the effects on earnings associated with the production of home goods see polachek ig75 a b these will occur

unobservable individual effects marriage and the earnings of young men i introduction married men earn more than unmarried men this fact is unassailable and is robust across data sets and over time two common explanations of the married male wage premium are i the division of labor in a married household which allocates more of the man s time to the market and ii lower cost human capital acquisition for married men both of these stories view marriage as productivity enhancing kenny 1983 provides some evidence that marriage facilitates human capital acquisition however the potential endogeneity of marital status is ignored furthermore the argument that marriage makes it cheaper to accumulate human capital is difficult to reconcile with the fact that individuals who acquire more formal education tend to marry later than those who acquire less bergstrom and schoeni 1992 an alternative explanation for the marriage premium is that marriage signals certain unobservable individual characteristics such as ability honesty loyalty dependability and determination that are valued in both the labor and marriage markets l although i and ii are quite different in terms of their behavioral content they do share a common thread whether marriage per se increases productivity or high productivity men are more likely to be married marital status should not be treated as an exogenous determinant of the wage rate nevertheless in most wage regressions that control for marital status it is assumed to be exogenous resulting in an estimated marriage premium that is biased upward two exceptions are nakosteen and zimmer 1987 and korenman and neumark 1991 although both papers base their empirics on samples of young men they come to very different conclusions regarding the size and source of the marriage premium nakosteen and zimmer find the marriage premium to be insignificantly different from zero and claim that marriage does not make men more productive korenman and neumark kn present evidence that the marriage premium is at least 15 and rises with years married indicating that marriage may be productivity enhancing in this paper we reexamine the empirical relationship between marriage and wages using a sample drawn from the 1971 1976 1978 and 1980 waves of the national longitudinal survey of young men nlsym our data set is an extension of the one used by kn whose empirical work is based on the 1976 1978 and 1980 waves of the nlsym 2 our results may be summarized as follows estimates of the marriage premium derived from fixed effects models which control for unobserved heterogeneity are uniformly smaller than those obtained from random effects models and other cross section approaches that do not specification tests reject the latter and suggest that the individual effects are positively correlated with both marriage and wages conditional on labor market experience job tenure and year effects time spent in marriage has no significant effect on wages this stands as evidence against any dynamic productivity enhancing effect of marriage we conclude that whatever the source the marriage premium is a pure intercept shift and no more than 5 to 7 further support for this conclusion comes from the relationship between prospective marriage and wages using our longer panel we construct a to be married variable which identifies men who marry sometime during the sample period men who are not married in 1971 but who will be earn at least as much as those who are already married finally an interesting related result is the robust and significant effect of children on wages conditional on marital status and years married the presence of children raises wages about 5 regardless of the estimator employed we interpret the effects of marriage and children on wages similarly as structural breaks in the wage generating process involving adjustments in market work and homework among other things

new evidence on sex segregation and sex differences in wages from matched employee employer data we use new matched employer employee data to estimate the contributions of sex segregation and wage differences by sex within occupation industry establishment and occupation establishment cells to the overall sex gap in wages in contrast to earlier data used to study this question our data cover all industries and occupations across all regions of the united states we find that segregation of women into lower paying occupations industries establishments and occupations within establishments accounts for a sizable fraction of the sex gap in wages nonetheless approximately one half of the sex gap in wages remains attributable to the individual s sex

world business cycles under fixed and flexible exchange rates this paper studies the behavior of monthly industrial production indices during the recent periods of fixed and flexible exchange rate s the central conclusions are as follows industrial production indices are subject to stochastic trend growth the variances of the monthly growth rates are higher in the flexible exchange rate period than in the fixed exchange rate period and are related to the degree of openness and to national income more open economies tend to experience more variability while richer more diversified economies experience less and output movements have been correlated across countries under both exchange rate regimes and there is evidence of a world business cycle copyright 1988 by ohio state university press

why the gender gap in wages narrowed in the 1980s since 1976 the gender gap in wages on average declined by about 1 per year this article focuses on identifying the factors underlying this trend three data sets are analyzed the current population survey the panel study of income dynamics and the national longitudinal survey we find that convergence in measurable work related characteristics schooling and work experience explains one third to one half the narrowing the remainder is attributable to a relative increase in women s returns to experience as well as to declining wages in blue collar work and other factors

incentives in corporations evidence from the american whaling industry in the 1830s when whaling was a prosperous american industry a number of whaling corporations were chartered all of them were short lived this paper analyzes the failure of corporations in the american whaling industry and argues that the corporate form was unable to create the incentives requisite for success in whaling most nineteenth century whaling ventures were owned by a small number of local investors and were configured to provide powerful incentives for their managers the effect of the corporate form on productivity is analyzed using a newly collected panel data set of 874 whaling voyages many whaling corporations were managed by individuals who had previously or would subsequently manage ventures with the usual ownership structure using an individual fixed effects framework i identify a strong negative effect of the corporate form on productivity

is there a wage bonus from drinking unobserved heterogeneity examined while the result that drinkers earn more than abstainers has been remarkably persistent only one paper in the literature on drinking and earnings has been written where individual fixed effects are included this study improves the current literature by utilizing a much longer panel and focuses on the low end of drinking while controlling for unobserved heterogeneity with the inclusion of individual specific effects it is found that while ols specifications yield a positive significant coefficient on current drinking even when a rich set of covariates is controlled for including individual fixed effects renders the coefficient statistically insignificant

genetic information in agricultural productivity and product development two prominent features of recent changes in agriculture have been the advent of precision breeding techniques and an increase in the level of information netputs in production this article identifies ways in which these features may complement in expanding the variety of processed products level of productivity and rate of change in productivity using a martingale concept of information we identify conditions under which information increases the incentives to invest and engage in product differentiation activities a theory on how genetic uniformity can enhance the rate of learning through process experimentation and so the rate of technical change is developed

more on marriage fertility and the distribution of income according to pareto 1896 the distribution of income depends on the nature of the people comprising a society on the organization of the latter and also in part on chance in the model developed here the nature of the people is captured by attitudes toward marriage divorce fertility and children singles search for mates in a marriage market married agents bargain about work and the quantity and quality of children they can divorce social policies such as child support requirements reflect the organization of the society finally chance is modeled by randomness in income marriage opportunities and marital bliss

marital status and earnings of young men a model with endogenous selection it is a matter of course in applied labor economics to presume that marital status is a predetermined contributor to earnings among young males we find no evidence to support that proposition we estimate a model of earnings determination that permits endogenous selection of marital status our estimates are based on a sample of young employed males from the michigan panel survey of income dynamics they indicate that marital status viewed in this manner does not significantly shift the mean earnings profile our sensitivity tests indicate that this conclusion is robust with respect to a variety of alternative specifications excerpt

state space estimates of international business cycles abstract this paper uses gnp data spanning 1973 i 1987 i for canada france germany japan the u k and the u s and presents evidence that business cycles in these countries can be accounted for by an unobservable components model with one serially correlated international component and serially uncorrelated domestic components

endogenous childlessness and stages of development abstract although developing countries are characterized by high average fertility rates they are as concerned by childlessness as developed countries beyond natural sterility there are two main types of childlessness one driven by poverty and another by the high opportunity cost of child rearing we measure the importance of the components of childlessness with a structural model of fertility and marriage deep parameters are identified using census data from 36 developing countries as average education increases poverty driven childlessness first decreases to a minimum and then the opportunity driven part of childlessness increases we show that neglecting the endogenous response of marriage and childlessness may lead to a poor understanding of the impact that social progress such as universal primary education may have on completed fertility the same holds for family planning closing the gender pay gap and the eradication of child mortality

the rise of large farms in land abundant countries do they have a future increased levels and volatility of food prices has led to a surge of interest in large scale agriculture and land acquisition this creates challenges for policy makers aiming to establish a policy environment conducive to an agrarian structure to contribute to broad based development in the long term based on a historical review of episodes of growth of large farms and their impact this paper identifies factors underlying the dominance of owner operated farm structures and ways in which these may change with development the amount of land that could potentially be available for expansion and the level of productivity in exploiting available land resources are used to establish a country level typology the authors highlight that an assessment of the advantages of large operations together with information on endowments can provide input into strategy formulation at the country level a review of recent cases of land acquisition reinforces the importance of the policy framework in determining outcomes it suggests that transparency and contract enforcement recognition of local land rights and ways in which they can be exercised attention to employment effects and technical viability and mechanisms to re allocate land from unsuccessful ventures to more productive entrepreneurs are key areas warranting the attention of policy makers

the wage effects of cumulative job mobility this analysis of data from the national longitudinal survey of youth shows that cumulative job mobility had statistically significant effects on wages in the years 1979 88 the direction of the wage effects positive or negative and their magnitude varied depending on the type of cumulative mobility examined employee initiated versus employerinitiated separations economic versus family related quits layoffs versus discharges the results also indicate that although men and women had different mobility histories men for example had been discharged more often than women and women had quit for family related reasons more often than men the wage effects of each type of cumulative mobility economic quits family related quits layoffs and discharges were similar for men and women tn this paper we examine the impact of cumulative job mobility on the subsequent wages of young men and women most previous work on this subject has focused on the impact of specific mobility events such as quits or layoffs rather than on the impact of total job history on wages researchers looking at single mobility decisions have consistently reported evidence that a change in employers does affect a worker s subsequent wage therefore it is reasonable to ask whether the impact ofjob change is cumulative that is does a worker s current wage reflect the impact of all past mobility decisions quits layoffs and discharges also since most of the

housing decision with divorce risk we build a realistically calibrated life cycle model of housing decisions under divorce risk as observed in the data our model predicts the recent increase in divorce rates leads to reduced homeownership rates the event of a divorce negatively affects homeownership and this effect is long lasting the risk of a divorce triggers a precautionary savings motive however this motive is weaker when individuals can invest in owner occupied homes because homeowners higher savings partially substitute for precautionary savings when young the larger asset accumulation due to divorce risk induced precautionary savings enables households to buy homes earlier whereas the presence of transaction costs leads to reduced homeownership for middle aged and older households when divorce risk goes up

the nature of the farm abstract using a model based on a trade off between moral hazard incentives and gains from specialization this paper explains why farming has generally not converted from small family based firms into large factory style corporate firms nature is both seasonal and random and the interplay of these qualities generates moral hazard limits the gains from specialization and causes timing problems between stages of production by identifying conditions in which these forces vary we derive testable predictions about the choice of organization and the extent of farm integration to test these predictions we study the historical development of several agricultural industries and analyze data from a sample of over 1 000 farms in british columbia and louisiana in general seasonality and randomness so limit the benefits of specialization that family farms are optimal but when farmers are successful in mitigating the effects of seasonality and random shocks to output farm organizations gravitate toward fa

contractual arrangements between farmer cooperatives and buyers in china the agrofood market in china is dominated by spot market exchanges of small farmers and various small traders with only minor penetration of the modern supply chain at the farmgate the emerging farmer professional cooperatives fpcs are expected to facilitate vertical coordination the overall goal of this study is to investigate the contractual arrangements between the fpcs and the buyers based on a national representative survey of 157 fpcs in china this study shows that 32 of fpcs introduced written contracts in the primary marketing channel contracts are more likely to be adopted in the livestock sector and are positively related to the scale of production while branding promotes contracts between fpcs and buyers public certification of quality and food safety often substitutes for contracts furthermore the membership heterogeneity of fpcs affects an fpc s decision to use contractual arrangements with the buyer

the impact of employer provided health insurance on dynamic employment transitions we estimate the impact of employer provided health insurance ephi on the job mobility of males over time using a dynamic empirical model that accounts for unobserved heterogeneity previous studies of job lock reach different conclusions about possible distortions in labor mobility stemming from an employment based health insurance system a few authors find no evidence of job lock although most find reductions in the mobility of insured workers of between 20 and 40 percent we use data from the national longitudinal survey of youth which includes variables describing the health insurance an individual holds as well as whether he is offered insurance by his employer this additional information allows us to model the latent individual characteristics that are correlated with the offer of ephi the acceptance of ephi and employment transitions our results provide an estimate of job lock unbiased through correlation with positive job characteristics and individual specific turnover propensity we find no evidence of job lock among married males and produce small estimates of job lock among unmarried males of between 10 and 15 percent

technical and scale efficiency of crop and livestock farms in poland does specialization matter l efficacite technique et d echelle des exploitations agricoles polonaises est calculee par la methode data envelopment analysis l etude porte sur les differences selon l orientation productive en grandes cultures ou elevage a deux dates de la transition en 1996 et en 2000 l article examine de plus la variabilite statistique des resultats d efficacite ceux ci sont revus a la lumiere des intervalles de confiance construits gr ce au bootstrapping en moyenne les exploitations d elevage ont une efficacite technique et d echelle superieure aux exploitations de grandes cultures l efficacite d echelle est toutefois tres elevee pour les deux orientations l inefficacite technique semble donc due principalement a une inefficacite technique pure c est a dire a une gestion inefficace la faible education des agriculteurs en est une raison majeure en 2000 64 des exploitations d elevage et 86 des exploitations de grandes cultures presentaient des retours d echelle croissants ce resultat suggere des recommandations politiques afin de supprimer les incitations a garder une structure operationnelle fragmentee et de stimuler le marche de la terre il s agit en particulier d ameliorer la legislation concernant la location des terres et de modifier le systeme de retraite agricole

spouse selection and earnings evidence of marital sorting michael a zimmer this article investigates economic bases for individuals selection of marriage partners its central focus is matching of spouse pairs based on unobservable components of hourly earnings using a data extract from the panel study of income dynamics we have observations of individuals wages before and immediately after marriage along with their spouses earnings after marriage we exploit the data to estimate the relation between spouses wage residuals the evidence supports positive marital matching on the basis of earnings the results are robust with respect to variations in the statistical framework of the model jel j12 i introduction the process by which marriages are formed has long attracted the attention of social scientists research has suggested that individuals choose spouses similar to themselves in physical and social traits such as height and ethnicity an area of interest in recent years has been the economic basis of spouse selection beginning with becker 1974 economists focused on earnings characteristics of spouses becker argued that since in most cultures males specialize in market production spouse selection matches high wage males with females who specialize in home production and rearing of families empirical research on becker s hypothesis has produced mixed results in several studies the strategy has been to estimate earnings regressions from samples of existing married couples and then obtain correlations between the ensuing earnings residuals of spouses the correlations are used as indexes of marital sorting in earnings after controlling for measured factors such as schooling age and work experience smith 1979 used census data to estimate residual correlations for black and white couples he obtained estimates of 0 035 for whites and 0 216 for blacks becker 1981 used the 1967 survey of economic opportunity to obtain partial correlations of 0 32 for whites and 0 24 for blacks zimmer 1996 examined earnings correlations among low income marriages although his evidence supports becker s hypothesis of negative assortative mating with respect to wages the results are not consistent across race groups lam 1988 provided an explanation of positive assortative mating with respect to wealth and wages be also established elasticities of spouses hours worked and demands for household goods with respect to wages that would produce positive assortative mating several recent studies have addressed the apparent earnings premium of married males relative to single males nakosteen and zimmer 1997 and cornwell and rupert 1997 argued that married men are observed to earn more than singles because high earning males possess unobserved traits that make them attractive prospects for marriage but here too the evidence is mixed korenmann and neumark 1991 suggested that married males earn more than singles because marriage tends to make them more productive thereby enhancing their earnings prospects these studies have not paid attention to assortative mating per se focusing instead on earnings of husbands in the single versus married state the purpose of this study is to return to the issue of spouse matching on the basis of earnings our empirical strategy based on several waves of data from the panel study of income dynamics psid differs from the articles first cited above by attempting to capture the earnings residual of one spouse prior to marriage and relating it to the residual of his partner in a period shortly after marriage in this manner we do not rely as heavily on the use of ongoing marriages as in the early studies the following section describes our statistical approach in more detail section iii describes the data and specification of the earnings models sections iv and v present results of estimation and section vi concludes the article our results provide broad support for the hypothesis of positive assortative mating with respect to earnings

migration and farm technical efficiency evidence from kosovo this article investigates the effect of migration on farm technical efficiency drawing on a large and representative sample of agricultural households in kosovo a two stage estimation procedure is applied a frontier technique to estimate the effect of migration on farm efficiency followed by a propensity score based matching approach to robustly estimate the sample average effect on efficiency for different levels of migration intensity migration is found to have an efficiency decreasing effect which is amplified for better educated workers the observed negative effect of migration on efficiency is evident even at low levels of migration intensity

specialization then and now marriage children and the gender earnings gap across cohorts in this paper we examine the evolution of the gender gap associated with marriage and parental status comparing cohorts born between 1936 and 1985 the model of household specialization and division of labor introduced by becker posits that when forming households couples will exploit the gains from trade by having one spouse specialize in market work while the other specializes in household work given the historical advantage of men in the labor market the model predicts specialization by gender and therefore an earnings advantage for married men and an earnings disadvantage for married women is this model of specialization useful for understanding the evolution of the gender gap across generations of women and what about children academic papers have shown that wages of mothers are significantly lower than those of non mothers with similar human capital characteristics we do not attempt to build a structural model here but rather document how changing associations between marriage and earnings and between children and earnings have contributed to the gender gap in an accounting sense

the fall in men s return to marriage declining productivity effects or changing selection historically one of the most robust findings from human capital wage equations has been that married men earn more than men who never marry however the earnings premium paid to u s married compared with never married men declined by more than 40 percent during the 1980s data from the national longitudinal surveys young men and youth cohorts are used to explore two competing explanations for this decline changes in the selection of high wage men into marriage and changes in the productivity effects of marriage due to declining specialization within households the results suggest that the drop in the marriage wage premium was due largely to a decline in the productivity effects associated with marriage instrumental variables estimation suggests that these declining productivity effects can be explained by a reduction in the average degree of specialization across households coupled with an increase in the wage penalty associated with wives labor market hours excerpt

measuring and causes of inequality in farm sizes in the united states this article examines the notion of farm size inequality expressed as sales inequality in the united states the farm size index fsi is developed as a measure of farm size inequality fsis are calculated for the farming sector in all 50 states and large variation in farm size across the states and over time is determined the largest fsis are calculated for a number of southern southwestern and pacific states increasing fsis over time are observed in all states as well the spatial and temporal between 1987 and 1997 differences in fsis are explained by running a pooled cross sectional time series model the most influential variables accounting for the differences have to do with the ownership structure where a larger presence of individual and family farms relative to corporate farms and cooperatives leads to a lower degree of farm size inequality also states and regions having relatively larger number of farms owned by minorities have higher fsis shrinking opportunities in the agricultural sector relative to the rest of the economy primarily services are reflected in a declining share of agricultural sector state income in total gross state product gsp this in turn leads to an increase in the farming sector s fsi suggesting that only larger more profitable operations are the likely candidates to pursue farming activities finally grains farming regions have all lower degree of farm size inequality than livestock or fruits and vegetables regions profitable grains farming requires relatively large farm size and equipment investments which leads to a relatively homogeneous structure of grains farms a larger variation in the size of profitable farm operations is possible in fruits and vegetables and livestock this leads to the existence of a large number of very small but still sustainable farms and a relatively small number of large farms that capture most of market sales share

is there a male marital wage premium new evidence from the united states this study reconsiders the phenomenon that married men earn more money than unmarried men a key result of the research on marriage benefits many earlier studies have found such a male marital wa

fear and lathing in the michigan furniture industry employee based discrimination a century ago i introduction despite progress made in the conceptualization of labor market discrimination the sources of discrimination continue to elude economists in their empirical investigations d amico 1987 the primary reason for this failure is inadequate data since studying the sources of discrimination demands information on workers institutional settings in particular the examination of employee based discrimination requires information on coworkers attributes in addition to the characteristics of the worker himself because of this direct tests of employee based discrimination in the modern economy are nearly impossible to make most tests must be rather indirect 1 here we attempt to examine the sources of discrimination by focusing on discrimination by fellow employees in an era in which intergroup tensions were important as they are now we link two themes in labor economics by analyzing employee based discrimination as a special example of a compensating wage differential the data from the 1889 michigan bureau of labor annual report on the furniture industry are uniquely suited to the analysis of employee based discrimination because they include information on the individual worker his firm and his coworkers for over 5000 workers and because the workers surveyed come from several ethnic groups using the data we measure the magnitude and character of employee based discrimination as we examine specific aspects of ethnic interaction in the labor market in the late 1800s empirically we find that employee based discrimination was important in this labor market workers of one ethnic group received a higher wage when working with members of other groups wages rose by about 0 1 percent when the proportion of coworkers in the worker s own ethnic group fell by one percentage point this response was greater in small cities small firms and among certain ethnic groups including the american born dutch and poles protestants were generally paid more when working with catholics thus the wage of the furniture worker was determined not only by his ability to lathe but also by fear and other feelings toward his coworkers we close by attempting to measure the additional labor costs generated by employee based discrimination within a multi ethnic work force concluding that they were probably offset by several benefits which rendered complete segregation unnecessary ii model and data our model of the labor market unites becker s 1971 model of employee based discrimination with rosen s 1974 hedonic wage model we assume that employers sell goods in a competitive output market and hire mobile workers in a competitive input market following the hedonic wage model firms make job offers to workers that include both wage and nonwage benefits a worker chooses the wage nonwage benefit bundle to maximize utility the nonwage benefits bundle to which we restrict our attention is the ethnic composition of the firm 2 as the work force of his firm includes more workers whom he likes dislikes the worker s wage should fall rise the data from the seventh annual report of the michigan bureau of labor 1890 include the worker s wage birth place father s birth place and several human capital measures age occupation years of experience in occupation years with present employer a literacy proxy place of residence and marital status for each individual 3 table i shows the characteristics of the american born foreign born and sons of immigrants in the sample the report is organized by firm with the name and location of the firm followed by a list of the employees in the firm containing thirty three pieces of information about each individual 4 therefore it is possible to measure the ethnic characteristics of each worker s fellow employees and the effect of work force composition on the worker s wage iii expectations about employee and employer discrimination 1889 nativism reached a peak in the united states around 1890 and michigan was a center of nativist feeling

the origins of democracy a model with application to ancient greece abstract this paper seeks to provide an improved understanding of the origins of democracy it begins by developing a theoretical model to demonstrate how exogenous economic conditions can influence the incentives to establish democratic institutions the model predicts that democratic institutions will expand where they mitigate important time inconsistency problems and therefore encourage investment exogenous conditions determine the magnitude of those time inconsistency problems and hence the likelihood of democracy a comparison of ancient greek city states suggests that the conditions under which democracy first emerged support the model other potential applications are discussed

measuring and explaining scale efficiency with the parametric approach the case of greek tobacco growers estimates of technical and scale inefficiencies of tobacco farms in greece during the period 1991 1995 are obtained by using the parametric approach the degree of technical efficiency was found to be lower than the degree of scale efficiency and thus a greater portion of overall inefficiency is due to producing below the production frontier than to producing at an inefficient scale in addition the vast majority of farms in the sample exhibited suboptimal scale implying that output should be expanded to reach the optimal scale empirical results are provided to determine the impact of various socioeconomic demographic and geoclimatic indicators on technical and scale efficiency

success and failure of reform insights from the transition of agriculture this paper analyzes the linkages between the reform strategies in transition countries and economic performance the authors focus on agriculture because of the sharpness of the policy changes fundamental differences among countries and relative simplicity of agricultural relationships the authors document post reform performance in the transition countries of asia and europe the authors show how a pricing reform and subsidy reductions b land rights reform and policies that affect farm restructuring and c the presence institutions that facilitate exchange either markets or market substitutes affect output and productivity the paper ends with general lessons on reforms and transition

evolution of the marriage earnings gap for women abstract using survey of income and program participation sipp panels linked to social security earnings records we examine the earnings gap associated with marriage for cohorts of women born between 1936 and 1975 we compare ordinary least squares and fixed effect estimates we find that among women who work the marital earnings gap has all but disappeared in fixed effects estimates for recent birth cohorts in fact among women without children married women earn more than single women implying a diminished role for specialization when children are not present in contrast the motherhood earnings gap remains large even for recent birth cohorts

longitudinal analyses of the effects of trade unions but union members are different from nonmembers in unobserved ways biasing your estimates y ou should make a selectivity bias correction simultaneously determine union status and economic outcomes develop an unobservables model use longitudinal data archetypical comment on virtually any study of the economic effects of umomsm or suitably modified on any other empirical subject

reforms globalization and endogenous agricultural structures in this paper i draw lessons from two quasi natural experiments the transition process in former communist countries and the rapid globalization of food chains on the optimality of farms and agricultural structures more generally i argue that a the farm structures that have emerged from the transition process are much more diverse than expected ex ante b this diversity is to an important extent determined by economic mechanisms which are influenced by initial conditions eg technology and reform policies c non traditional farm structures have played an important role during transition since they were optimal to address the specific institutional and structural constraints imposed by the transition process d there is more diversity than often argued in the farms that are integrated in global food chains e endogenous institutional contracting innovations in food chains may lock existing farm structures in a long run institutional framework and f indicators based on farm structures are not a good measure of welfare effects of the globalization of food chains

examining the wage differential for married and cohabiting men leslie s stratton i introduction wage analyses almost universally indicate that married men earn more than do single men even after controlling for observable human capital characteristics the same appears to be true for cohabiting men research has failed as yet to reach a consensus regarding the nature of these differentials the evidence is consistent with a number of alternative explanations first marriage could increase men s market productivity because economies of scale and increased specialization within a multiperson household give them more time and energy to devote to market related activities if this is the mechanism driving the marital wage differential then cohabiting men may also experience a wage boost albeit a smaller one as cohabitation is a less stable relationship and less likely to engender specialization wages could jump at the start of a relationship but an increased focus on market related activities is more likely to cause wages to rise at a faster pace alternatively men who marry or cohabit may be inher ently different from men who do not if men are selected into relationships based on their earnings ability then cross section wage analyses will indicate a wage differential for married and cohabiting men but difference estimation will not the goal of this analysis is to shed light on the nature of the marital and cohabitation wage premiums for men by estimating wage models that permit both differential wage growth and selection effects ii literature review evidence of a marital wage premium for men abounds a thorough literature review is beyond the scope of this article but incorporation of a marital dummy in wage specifications for men is fairly standard hill 1979 provides one much cited work empirical estimates in the range of 10 to 30 are typical a number of researchers have explored the nature of this wage differential one explanation focuses on the marital decision itself the argument being that men who are inherently more productive are more sought after marriage partners and hence more likely to marry this is the selection model attempts such as that by nakosteen and zimmer 1987 to estimate a model in which marital status and wages are endogenously determined have yielded inconclusive results and are sensitive to identification restrictions an alternative approach less subject to specification error is to estimate a fixed effects specification that eliminates all individual specific time invariant characteristics 1 researchers korenman and neumark 1991 bartlett and callahan 1984 daniel 1991 and gray 1997 have employed this technique and continue to observe a significant marital wage differential indicating that selection effects do not explain the entire differential gray 1997 finds some evidence that the premium has declined over time as he does not find a significant marital wage differential using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy the most recent cohort of data tested however daniel 1991 also uses data from the nlsy and he finds a significant marital wage differential of about the same magnitude as that obtained from older cohorts generally speaking a comparison of cross section and panel results suggests that less than 20 of the marital wage differential is attributable to individual specific components or selectivity if selection alone does not explain the differential then wages must increase following marriage wages could be higher because they jump or because they rise more rapidly following marriage empirical estimates reported by kenny 1983 using the coleman rossi retrospective life histories study and by korenman and neumark 1991 loh 1996 and gray 1997 using the national longitudinal study of young men suggest that the growth rate of wages increases on marriage once again results from the nlsy are mixed with daniel 1991 finding faster wage growth following marriage and gray 1997 finding no marital wage differential

from motherhood penalties to husband premia the new challenge for gender equality and family policy lessons from norway given the key role that processes occurring in the family play in creating gender inequality the family is a central focus of policies aimed at creating greater gender equality we examine how family status affects the gender wage gap using longitudinal matched employer employee data from norway 1979 96 a period with extensive expansion of family policies the motherhood penalty dropped dramatically from 1979 to 1996 among men the premia for marriage and fatherhood remained constant in 1979 the gender wage gap was primarily due to the motherhood penalty but by 1996 husband premia were more important than motherhood penalties

personality traits technology adoption and technical efficiency evidence from smallholder rice farms in ghana although a large literature highlights the impact of personality traits on key labor market outcomes evidence of their impact on agricultural production decisions remains limited data from 1 200 ghanaian rice farmers suggest that noncognitive skills polychronicity work centrality and optimism significantly affect simple adoption decisions returns from adoption and technical efficiency in rice production and that the size of the estimated impacts exceeds that of traditional human capital measures greater focus on personality traits relative to cognitive skills may help accelerate innovation diffusion in the short term and help farmers to respond flexibly to new opportunities and risks in the longer term

insecure land rights and share tenancy evidence from madagascar most studies of tenurial insecurity focus on its effects on investment this paper studies the hitherto unexplored relationship between tenurial insecurity and land tenancy contracts based on distinct features of formal law and customary rights in madagascar this paper augments the canonical model of sharecropping by making the strength of the landlord s property right increasing in the amount of risk she bears within the contract using data on landlords subjective perceptions in rural madagascar empirical tests support the hypothesis that insecure property rights drive contract choice but offer little support in favor of the canonical risk sharing hypothesis

how women s rights affect fertility evidence from nigeria using data from the demographic and health surveys dhs this paper estimates the effect on fertility of a legal reform in nigeria in 1999 that lowered the value of women s testimony in court i find that the yearly probability of giving birth of women exposed to the reform did not change in general for women exposed to the enforced reform this probability increased by at least 0 04 using stated preferences on fertility i find that fertility increased among women who want fewer children than their husband does but decreased among women who want more children than their husband does i examine the hypothesis that the reform increased for women the value of being married and hence decreased their intra household bargaining power consequently shifting fertility decisions in the direction of husbands preferences jel j13 j18 k10

is there a farm size productivity relationship in african agriculture evidence from rwanda whether the negative relationship between farm size and productivity that is confirmed in a large global literature holds in africa is of considerable policy relevance this paper revisits this issue and examines potential causes of the inverse productivity relationship in rwanda where policy makers consider land fragmentation and small farm sizes to be key bottlenecks for the growth of the agricultural sector nationwide plot level data from rwanda point toward a constant returns to scale crop production function and a strong negative relationship between farm size and output per hectare as well as intensity of labor use that is robust across specifications the inverse relationship continues to hold if profits with family labor valued at shadow wages are used but disappears if family labor is rather valued at village level market wage rates these findings imply that in rwanda labor market imperfections rather than other unobserved factors seem to be a key reason for the inverse farm size productivity relationship

inequality and growth why differential fertility matters we argue that inequality and growth are linked through differential fertility and the accumulation of human capital we build an overlapping generations model in which dynasties differ in their initial endowment with human capital growth the income distribution and fertility are endogenous due to a quantiy quality tradeoff families with less human capital decide to have more children and invest less in education when initial inequality is high large fertility differentials lower the growth rate of average human capital since poor families who invest little in education make up a large fraction of the population in the next generation a calibrated model shows that this fertility differential effect is quantitatively important we also provide empirical evidence to confirm the links between inequality differential fertility and growth suggested by the model

behavioural and material determinants of production relations in agriculture in this essay we develop a framework for analysing the major institutions governing the production and exchange of output and the primary factors of production in rural areas the analysis incorporates general considerations of risk and information constraints jointly with the principal material attributes of agriculture and of agricultural production factors the framework is used to analyse barriers to the existence of the major intertemporal and factor markets it is applied specifically to land scarce environments for which it provides an internally consistent explanation for many of the well documented institutional features of such settings in addition the analysis provides new implications for among other phenomena the inter relationships among ownership holdings operational scale family size and factor productivity for the scarcity of animal rental markets and use of animals as collateral for the renting out of land by small landowners and for the existence of plantations for certain crops

the effects of education on fertility evidence from taiwan this study investigates the impact of women s education on fertility for identification we use the 1968 compulsory education law change in taiwan which generated a regression discontinuity design rdd setting we use the whole population of women from the 1980 and 2010 population censuses results of our rdd estimation using the exact date of birth suggest that the law change was effective in boosting women s education but it did not have any impact on fertility this is in stark contrast to most previous studies using only the birth year as the running variable or using it to construct instruments which find that women s education depresses fertility this study demonstrates that using a discrete running variable in rdd may generate a false discontinuity for an otherwise continuous regression function jel j13 c21 i2

explaining state bans on corporate farming state laws banning corporate farming present a puzzle for a rent seeking explanation of political outcomes since family farmer proponents may receive no direct benefit from these bans an explanation developed here is that these farmers benefit indirectly forestalling corporate entry preserves the farm political coalition structured around those cooperatives patronized by family farmers and so indirectly preserves federal subsidies and supply restrictions that the incidence of state bans is positively related to the importance of federal farm programs the importance of cooperatives and the homogeneity of farmers within a state is consistent with this indirect rent seeking explanation

fertility transitions along the extensive and intensive margins this paper examines the fertility transition through a new lens the extensive margin parents with high levels of children might substitute quality for quantity as the constraints on quality relax or those on quantity tighten however along the extensive margin the quantity quality trade off cannot operate at low levels of fertility we expect quality and quantity to be essential complements we apply these insights to a large school construction program in the american south during the early 20th century the rosenwald rural schools initiative we find that increased schooling opportunities lead to reductions in fertility among women with high fertility levels while at the same time inducing higher levels of fertility among women with low levels of fertility the magnitude of the fertility changes induced in the parent generation is however small compared to the changes in fertility induced by the rosenwald intervention among women that were themselves treated by the intervention the evidence from the rosenwald intervention therefore suggests that changes in female opportunity costs induced by increased educational attainment might be among the most important driving forces of the fertility transition

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

geographical indications and the competitive provision of quality in agricultural markets the economics of geographical indications gis is assessed within a vertical product differentiation framework that is consistent with the competitive structure of agriculture it is assumed that certification costs are needed for gis to serve as collective credible quality certification devices and production of high quality product is endogenously determined we find that gis can support a competitive provision of quality and lead to clear welfare gains although they fall short of delivering the constrained first best the main beneficiaries are consumers producers may also accrue some benefit if production of the high quality products draws on scarce factors that they own copyright 2008 oxford university press

international demand and liquidity shocks in a svar model of the australian economy a structural vector autoregressive model of the australian economy that allows for international shocks from the usa japan as well as world commodity prices is specified and estimated for the period 1979 1999 a block exogenous structure linking the three countries is imposed the international linkages are modelled using a factor structure to circumvent problems from estimating large scale dynamic models the factors are estimated recursively using a kalman filter and are found to represent aggregate demand and liquidity shocks for the usa and japan respectively the key empirical result is the usa shocks are the dominant source of international shocks on the australian economy with the japanese economy having a dampening effect on the usa shocks the empirical results also show that australian monetary policy responds to domestic conditions rather than international monetary policy

on the proportionality of eu spatial ex ante coexistence regulations reply desquilbet and bullock 2010 criticize some aspects of our analysis of the european union s eu spatial ex ante coexistence regulations seacers of genetically modified gm and non gm crops presented in demont et al 2009 we argue that besides misinterpreting some of our original arguments the authors propose a policy analysis framework which is inconsistent with the main goal of the eu s seacers their example incorrectly suggests that seacers play an additional role of regulating non gm crop supply on the market this would be inefficient from a policy economics perspective especially in an open economy where global trade is taken into account therefore we argue that analyzing flexibility of seacers in a market framework could lead to erroneous conclusions and in that case a simple farm level analysis such as presented in demont et al 2009 is preferred

institutional path dependence in climate adaptation coman s some unsettled problems of irrigation districts that emerged in the american west in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in response to aridity to facilitate agricultural water delivery use and trade raise the transaction costs today of water markets these markets are vital for smooth reallocation of water to higher valued uses elsewhere in the economy and for flexible response to greater hydrological uncertainty this institutional path dependence illustrates how past arrangements to meet conditions of the time constrain contemporary economic opportunities they cannot be easily significantly modified or replaced ex post

the division of labor coordination costs and knowledge this paper considers specialization and the division of labor a more extensive division of labor raises productivity because returns to the time spent on tasks are usually greater to workers who concentrate on a narrower range of skills the traditional discussion of the division of labor emphasizes the limitations to specialization imposed by the extent of the market we claim that the degree of specialization is more often determined by other considerations especially emphasized are various costs of coordinating specialized workers who perform complementary tasks and the amount of general knowledge available