a globally flexible almost ideal demand system the almost ideal demand system is combined with the fourier expenditure system subject to the assumption that preferences are of the price independent generalized logarithmic class the resulting demand system has the desirable features of each of its components aggregate demand equations are consistent with preferences of a representative consumer and consistent estimates of elasticities are obtained for all observed prices application of the new demand system to u s consumption of meats and fish reveals that it fits the data well and that the restriction to the usual specification is rejected

the demand for assets through a low interest rate environment asset demand is important in many areas of economics to investigate this we estimate a globally flexible dynamic fourier asset demand specification and calculate morishima elasticities of substit

motivations for aid to developing countries abstract this paper attempts to identify the underlying principles of aid allocation and particularly the balance of motivations as between the needs of recipient countries and the interests of donor countries two alternative models are fitted by cross country regressions to bilateral and multilateral aid flows to some 80 developing countries in 1969 1970 and 1978 1980 the first recipient need model assumes that all aid is given to compensate for shortfalls in domestic resources this model provides a reasonable explanation for the distribution of multilateral aid but it is clearly not applicable for bilateral aid flows the second donor interest model assumes that all aid serves only donor interests defined to cover political security investment and trade interests this model gives generally good explanations of bilateral aid but is a poor fit for multilateral aid the relative importance of the various donor interests differs sharply among donors the paper ends with an analysis of the shift in the balance of aid over the 1970s towards the recipient need element and with a reference to the sharp change in policy in the 1980s towards increasing emphasis on donor interest aid

estimating a cointegrating demand system abstract the set of variables in a time series demand model in the form of the almost ideal demand system are found to be i 1 with the demand equations forming a cointegrating system the parameters of the cointegrating equations are estimated and tested using a triangular error correction procedure the null hypothesis of homogeneity with respect to prices and nominal income in the system cannot be rejected

money demand variability a demand systems approach this article tests the fourier flexible form on quarterly u s monetary data the data have been prescreened for consistency with the general axiom of revealed preference and subindexes are formed using the divisia approach in this article the global fourier model fits well although there is a potential problem of overfitting and certain data points exhibit behavior inconsistent with the model the elasticities are variable over time particularly around business cycle troughs it appears that financial asset demand surfaces are highly nonlinear and the many unsuccessful existing attempts to estimate money demand may not have worked well for this reason

choosing to target what types of countries get different types of world bank projects well governed countries are more likely to make use of foreign aid for the purposes of economic development and poverty alleviation therefore if aid agencies are providing funds for the sake of development these countries should receive more aid and categorically different types of aid as compared with poorly governed countries in poorly governed countries aid should be given in forms that allow for less discretion using an original data set of all world bank projects from 1996 to 2002 the author distinguishes programmatic projects from investment projects and national from subnational investment projects if the world bank allows more discretion in well governed countries then it will choose to provide programmatic and national aid for these recipients the author presents evidence that the world bank provides a larger proportion of national investment lending in better governed countries with regard to programmatic lending he finds mixed evidence among counties eligible for international development association ida aid good governance surprisingly is associated with a lower proportion of programmatic aid whereas for international bank for reconstruction and development ibrd borrowers good governance is associated with a higher proportion the author subjects these results to a number of robustness checks although he confirms the existing result in the literature that the world bank provides larger overall amounts of aid to better governed countries his examination of the disaggregated data leads to questioning whether both lending wings of the world bank are designing aid programs in the most prodevelopment way possible

utility functions and global regularity of fractional demand sytems fractional demand systems are utility derived demands having quantities or budget shares proportional to ag bf where g and f are functions of income and a and b vary across goods and are functions of prices many known demand systems that have large regular regions are fractional this paper derives the indirect utility functions that generate all fractional demand systems shows that these systems can all have large regular regions and provides sufficient conditions for their global or nearly global regularity an extension to rank three fractional demands is provided copyright 1995 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

a panel data analysis of the fungibility of foreign aid the donor community has been increasingly concerned that development assistance intended for crucial social and economic sectors might be used directly or indirectly to fund unproductive military and other expenditures the link between foreign aid and public spending is not straightforward because some aid may be fungible this article empirically examines the impact of foreign aid on the recipient s public expenditures using cross country samples of annual observations for 1971 90 for the base sample of 14 developing countries it finds that aid is not fungible at the aggregate level and there is no associated tax relief increasing the number of countries however makes aid fungible moreover results based on the main sample indicate that aid is fungible in three out of five sectors examined developing country governments receiving earmarked concessionary loans for agriculture education and energy reduce their own resources going to these sectors and use them elsewhere only loans to the transport and communication sector are fully spent on the purposes intended by donors because most aid appears to be fungible the rate of return on a specific donor funded project tells little about the impact of that assistance a better approach may be to tie foreign aid to an overall public expenditure program that provides adequate resources to crucial sectors

characterizing some gorman engel curves this paper characterizes all utility derived demand systmes having engel curves that are linear in both income and an arbitrary function of income this class encompasses virtually all utility derived demand systems that have been estimated in the past using ag gregate data with explicit treatment of the problem of aggregation ac ross individuals it includes extensions of the piglog and pigl class es that have similar properties to these classes but allow for more general engel curve shapes this paper extends w m gorman s study o f these forms primarily by characterizing systems of rank two the ap plication of the characterized systems to problems of nesting separa bility flexibility engel curve analysis estimation and aggregatio n are briefly discussed copyright 1987 by the econometric society

why there should be no political foreign aid curse summary this paper considers the causality underlying the so called political aid curse which proposes that foreign aid like oil should hinder democracy using a theoretical model which identifies repression and appeasement as the primary alternatives to democratization it argues that aid revenue should not produce a political curse because it is less fungible more conditional and less constant than state oil revenue making it difficult for recipient governments to use their aid to fund either repression or appeasement using several different measures associated with repression and appeasement the statistical results show that aid cannot be associated with any of these dependent variables

non parametric tests of consumer behaviour the neoclassical model of consumer behaviour postulates that a consumer s choice behaviour can be described as deriving from utility maximization subject to a budget constraint one is then naturally led to ask what this model implies about observed behaviour this question has been addressed from two quite distinct approaches the first approach originating in the work of slutsky 1915 and antonelli 1886 derives necessary and sufficient conditions involving the derivatives of the demand functions the second approach originating in the work of samuelson 1938 1947 1948 derives algebraic conditions on the demand functions implied by maximizing behaviour

an empirical comparison of flexible demand system functional forms this paper compares the performance of eight frequently used flexible forms that are either 1 locally flexible 2 effectively globally regular or 3 asymptotically globally flexible results show that the functions with global properties generally perform better particularly those models having asymptotic properties results using us consumption data indicate substitutability among the components of consumption at most data points there is also some interesting substitution volatility around the time of recessions in the usa copyright 2001 john wiley sons ltd

bias in estimating the almost ideal demand system with the stone index approximation this paper shows that the commonly used stone index approximation can bias the parameter estimates of the almost ideal demand system the bias mostly affects the price parameters and can be more serious when the budget share equations are estimated with individual household rather than aggregate data in the absence of strong substitution effects the price parameter bias can be largely corrected through simple reparameterization copyright 1993 by royal economic society

are consumption and government expenditures substitutes or complements morishima elasticity estimates from the fourier flexible form 1 introduction macroeconomists paid relatively little attention to the economic effects of government expenditures and to alternative methods of financing those expenditures until barro 1974 1979 1981 challenged conventional views on the economic impact of government activity much of the literature stimulated by these studies addressed the effects of alternative financing methods for a given path of government expenditures but barro 1981 also stressed the fact that government expenditures can provide direct welfare to economic agents and that variations in the level of government expenditures may have an impact on the consumption decisions of households as a result many studies estimate the extent to which economic agents treat government expenditures as substitutes to or complements with private consumption expenditures e g kormendi 1983 aschauer 1985 graham and himarios 1991 ni 1995 the degree of substitution or complementarity between private consumption and government expenditures is of crucial importance in assessing the impact of fiscal policies on economic welfare thus it is important to establish the extent to which federal expenditures and private consumption are substitutes or complements as a guide to the design of fiscal policies there is much disagreement about the extent to which consumption and government expenditures are substitutes or complements in use for economic agents 1 studies differ in their details so it is difficult to know what might account for such diverse results but it seems fair to say that the relationship between government expenditures and consumption is largely an open question the diversity of the results however may be a consequence of a number of restrictive assumptions that have been used in various studies many of these assumptions appear hard to justify a priori studies typically estimate the parameters of an equation containing private consumption and government expenditures often assuming that the relevant choice variable for the representative household is an aggregate consumption measure given by the sum of nondurables and services consumption e g aschauer 1985 reid 1985 bean 1986 campbell and mankiw 1990 or the sum of nondurables services and the service flow from durable goods e g kormendi 1983 graham and himarios 1991 this implies that each component of private consumption expenditures is a perfect substitute for the household an assumption for which there is no compelling theoretical basis similarly government expenditures defense nondefense and state and local are typically aggregated e g feldstein 1982 aschauer 1985 reid 1985 graham 1993 with various studies excluding either federal or state and local expenditures just as for private consumption expenditures these aggregation assumptions should be tested rather t han simply imposed in applied work in addition although substitution elasticities are generally not constant in an optimizing framework they are often assumed to be constant in applications by using a single aggregate of consumption or a utility function that imposes a constant elasticity of substitution e g aschauer 1985 and ni 1995 finally none of the above mentioned studies computes elasticities of substitution in a manner consistent with microeconomic utility maximization principles 2 in this article we provide estimates of elasticities of substitution between consumption and government expenditures based on the demand systems approach that has been widely used in testing the neoclassical theory of household behavior see eg deaton and muellbauer 1980 and the survey of barnett et al 1992 this approach has a number of attractive features making it a substantial improvement over the applied studies available in the macroeconomics literature the estimates in this article are based on an optimizing framework where both government and consumption expenditures are treated as choice variables by the representative household

aggregation without separability a generalized composite commodity theorem this paper provides general conditions for aggregating commodities without separable utility these conditions impose weaker and more empirically plausible restrictions on price movements than the currently existing alternative to separability the hicks leontief composite commodity theorem the idea is to allow departures from hicks leontief that take the form of well behaved error terms utility functions that permit generalized composite commodity aggregation include the aids model the translog all homothetic utility functions and any utility function when demands are aggregated to two groups of goods implications of empirical nonstationarity of relative prices for aggregation and demand estimation are considered copyright 1996 by american economic association

simple tests of distributional effects on macroeconomic equations the presence of distributional effects in macroeconomic equations is shown to coincide with nonlinearity in micro behavioral relationships parameters estimated with aggregate data as in representative agent models contain distributional biases that are not measurable using aggregate data alone tests for distributional effects and other measures of the extent of aggregation problems are derived using distributional data observed over time significant distributional effects are noted for a model of annual aggregate u s commodity expenditure data a static model that accommodates individual heterogeneity is found to be statistically equivalent to a simply dynamic model that accommodates first order autocorrelation

a system of demand equations satisfying effectively global regularity conditions a parametric specification of an indirect utility function in terms oaf expenditure and two unit cost functions is proposed specification of these unit cost functions in terms of regular functions leads to the notion of an effectively globally regular system of demand equations that is a system of demand equations that is regular over a cone in expenditure price space and for which the regular region includes all points in any given sample and all values of nominal expenditure and prices generating higher values of real expenditure than the sample minimum this general model nests a number of popular demand systems such as the linear expenditure system as special cases an empirical application illustrates some of these ideas copyright 1996 by mit press

does foreign aid target the poorest to examine the extent to which foreign aid reaches people at different levels of wealth in africa i use household surveys to measure the subnational distribution of a country s population by wealth quintiles and match this information to data on the location of aid projects from two multilateral donors within countries aid disproportionately flows to regions with more of the richest people aid does not favor regions with more of the poorest people these findings violate the stated preferences of the multilateral donors under study suggesting that the donors either cannot or are not willing to exercise control over the location of aid projects within countries the results also suggest that aid is not being allocated effectively to alleviate extreme poverty

the role of theoretical restrictions in forecasting with inverse demand models in recent years the theoretical restrictions of consumer demand have been examined in post sample forecasting exercises however this work has uniformly ignored the concavity restrictions of consumer demand in this paper we evaluate a series of normalized quadratic inverse demand system nqids specifications using rolling windows and generating one to four step ahead forecasts to estimate the models eleven categories of south atlantic fish are used from 1980 through 2001 in addition to the nqids we also examine the forecasting performance of a purely time series model we find that the best predictions are achieved using a composite forecast

translog flexible functional forms and substitutability of monetary assets this article attempts to establish the nature of the relationship between monetary assets by estimating a sequence of four nested demand systems the generalized translog the basic translog the linear translog and the homothetic translog the principal attraction of the empirical work is that i am able to test separately for both homothetic and quasi homothetic preferences over monetary assets the tests reject both homotheticity and quasi homotheticity and thus consistency of the strotz gorman two stage optimization i also perform tests on economic theory to establish whether the parameter estimates are consistent with the utility maximizing hypothesis underlying the models these tests indicate that the generalized translog is the preferred model

war and local collective action in sierra leone abstract we study the brutal 1991 2002 sierra leone civil war using nationally representative household data on conflict experiences postwar economic outcomes local politics and collective action individuals whose households directly experienced more intense war violence are robustly more likely to attend community meetings more likely to join local political and community groups and more likely to vote tests using prewar controls and alternative samples suggest that selection into victimization is unlikely to be driving the results more speculatively the findings could help partially explain the rapid postwar political and economic recoveries observed in sierra leone and after several other recent african civil wars

tax me if you can ethnic geography democracy and the taxation of agriculture in africa it is typically assumed that african leaders enact policies that benefit their ethnoregional group using all types of patronage crop production and political power are geographically concentrated in many african countries and this paper exploits this overlap to cast doubt on this conventional wisdom it shows using data on 50 country crop combinations that cash crop farmers who are ethnically identified with the head of state face higher taxes furthermore democratic regimes impose lower taxes this paper shows that farmers who have few alternatives face higher taxes african leaders have used local intermediaries to exert control over the countryside and to ensure that farmers do not support alternative candidates it suggests that as leaders are better at selecting and monitoring these intermediaries in their home areas they can extract more from the majority at home than abroad using taxes on cash crops which are regionally but not individually targetable

curvature restrictions on flexible functional forms an application of the minflex laurent almost ideal demand system to the pattern of spanish demand 1954 1987 this article introduces a new demand model labeled minflex laurent almost ideal demand system which has been achieved by combining the flexible functional minflex laurent form with the price independent generalized logarithm expenditures structure introduced by muellbauer the model has been applied to analyze the aggregate demand behavior of final consumer goods in the spanish economy from 1954 to 1987 when the flexible functional form has been empirically tested the curvature requirements imposed by economic theory have been studied

testing for homogeneity in demand systems when the regressors are nonstationary an implication of optimizing theory is that demand functions are homogeneous of degree zero in prices and nominal income evidence based on estimations of demand systems has repeatedly found this restriction to be rejected by the data however the hypothesis is often formulated in terms of regressors that are non stationary this paper re examines the evidence for homogeneity in light of recent developments in time series econometrics with special emphasis on the treatment of trends we find the demand system to be stochastically but not deterministically cointegrated using techniques developed for estimating cointegrating vectors in the presence of deterministic trends we re estimate the demand system and find that homogeneity holds in many cases

valuing resource access with seminonparametric techniques an application to clear lake the focus of this investigation is three fold first seminonparametric techniques are considered in order to avoid the pitfall of imparting bias on value estimates second the efficacy of seminonparametric techniques are explored in an empirical setting by valuing recreational access at clear lake iowa finally a technique from eastwood and gallant 1991 is adapted and applied to the count data model

additive general error models for production cost and derived demand or share systems many empirical studies of production specify a deterministic model of the firm derive the implied behavioral equations input demand or share system and then embed this system in a stochastic framework by tacking on linear error terms in contrast this paper proposes general error models gems in which the error specification is an integral part of the optimization model these models are the statistical embodiment of stigler s view that apparent observed inefficiencies reflect the investigator s ignorance of the true optimization problem additive gems are proposed and interpreted specification tests indicate that a translog additive gem is superior to the standard translog specification

new indices of money supply and the flexible laurent demand system the article begins by surveying the existing results on the new divisia monetary aggregates charts display the differences in behavior between the divisia aggregates and the federal reserve s official simple sum monetary aggregates the article then compares system wide fit for the simple sum and divisia monetary aggregates when used as data in the joint estimation of a system of demand equations the demand system is derived from a new laurent expansion approximation to the reciprocal indirect utility function the laurent expansion provides a better behaved remainder term than that of the more commonly used taylor series the results favor the divisia aggregates

evaluating the linearized almost ideal demand system linearizing the almost ideal demand system laids by recourse to the stone share weighted price index is common practice two issues are addressed here first scrutiny of the errors in variables implications of the linearization reveals that not only is the sur estimator inconsistent but a consistent iv estimator cannot be constructed second some alternatives to the green alston elasticities specifically designed for the laids model are developed but neither these nor the green alston elasticities are found to have any advantages over the conventional elasticity formulae some errors in the green alston 1990 paper are corrected the inconsistency and elasticity issues are documented by a monte carlo investigation

quadratic engel curves and consumer demand this paper presents a model of consumer demand that is consistent with the observed expenditure patterns of individual consumers in a long time series of expenditure surveys and is also able to provide a detailed welfare analysis of shifts in relative prices a nonparametric analysis of consumer expenditure patterns suggests that engel curves require quadratic terms in the logarithm of expenditure while popular models of demand such as the translog or the almost ideal demand systems do allow flexible price responses within a theoretically coherent structure they have expenditure share engel curves that are linear in the logarithm of total expenditure we derive the complete class of integrable quadratic logarithmic expenditure share systems a specification from this class is estimated on a large pooled data set of u k households models that fail to account for engel curvature are found ro generate important distortions in the patterns of welfare losses associated with a tax increase

monetary policy and monetary asset substitution abstract this paper shows that changing the target federal funds rate induces changes in relative user costs of monetary assets estimated morishima elasticities of substitution from the fourier flexible form reveal greater substitution from transactions assets and savings deposits into small time deposits than into retail money market mutual funds

the use of conditional cost functions to generate estimable mixed demand systems mixed demand systems have been virtually ignored in empirical work solely because derivation of these systems requires closed forms for both direct and indirect utility functions this article proposes the alternative of using a conditional cost function to generate empirical mixed demand models this approach allows the estimation of mixed demand systems which are explicit in an unobservable variable utility but may lack a closed form representation in terms of observable variables such as prices quantities and expenditure results indicate that this approach is operationally feasible which opens up a wider range of mixed demand specifications in static analyses