the phillips curve macroeconomic policy and the welfare of canadians a review of the two competing paradigms explaining inflation and unemployment fluctuations singles out the keynesian phillips curve as the clear empirical winner over its classic competitors reestimation of the canadian phillips curve for 1957 90 identifies a sharp structural shift toward a high degree of unemployment hysteresis after 1972 the recent attempt of macropolicy to flatten the aggregate demand curve and limit supply side shock accommodation which aims at lower and more stable inflation is then shown to make unemployment higher and more unstable on average to an extent that is an increasing function of the degree of hysteresis understanding and reducing hysteresis and developing a consensus based incomes policy that has a chance of alleviating the dismal trade off should therefore to top research and policy priorities

the federal funds rate and the channels of monetary transmission the authors show that the interest rate on federal funds is extremely informative about future movements of real macroeconomic variables then they argue that the reason for this forecasting success is that the funds rate sensitively records shocks to the supply of bank reserves that is the funds rate is a good indicator of monetary policy actions finally using innovations to the funds rate as a measure of changes in policy the authors present evidence consistent with the view that monetary policy works at least in part through credit i e bank loans as well as through money i e bank deposits copyright 1992 by american economic association

monetary policy matters abstract this paper addresses hoover and perez s comments on our 1989 paper we first show that the estimated impact of monetary policy shifts remains large and ranges from marginally to strongly significant when oil shocks are controlled for we then extend our previous work by expanding the sample period and identifying an additional policy shift in december 1988 with this extension the estimated effects of monetary policy shifts are large and highly significant for all reasonable specifications of oil shocks we also demonstrate that hoover and perez s other objections have little bearing on our conclusions

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

post hoc ergo propter once more an evaluation of does monetary policy matter in the spirit of james tobin christina and david romer s paper does monetary policy matter advocates the so called narrative approach to causal inference we demonstrate that this method will not sustain causal inference first it is impossible to distinguish monetary shocks from oil shocks as causes of recessions second a world in which the fed only announces intentions to act cannot be distinguished from one in which it in fact acts third the techniques of dynamic simulation used in the romers study are inappropriate and quantitatively misleading and finally their approach provides no basis for establishing causal asymmetry

research advances in environmentally and socially sustainable operations abstract consumers and governments are pressuring firms to strike a balance between profitability and sustainability however this balance can only be maintained in the long run if the firm can take a holistic approach to sustain the financial flow profit resource flow planet and development flow people for the entire ecosystem comprising poor producers in emerging developing markets global supply chain partners consumers in developed countries and the planet by considering the flows associated with different entities within the ecosystem we classify and summarize recent operations research management science or ms research developments also we identify several gaps for future research in this important area

reverse channel design the case of competing retailers the economical and environmental benefits of product remanufacturing have been widely recognized in the literature and in practice in this paper we focus on the interaction between a manufacturers reverse channel choice to collect postconsumer goods and the strategic product pricing decisions in the forward channel when retailing is competitive to this end we model a direct product collection system in which the manufacturer collects used products directly from the consumers e g print and copy cartridges and an indirect product collection system in which the retailers act as product return points e g single use cameras cellular phones we first examine how the allocation of product collection to retailers impacts their strategic behavior in the product market and we discuss the economic trade offs the manufacturer faces while choosing an optimal reverse channel structure when a direct collection system is used channel profits are driven by the impact of scale of returns on collection effort whereas in the indirect reverse channel supply chain profits are driven by the competitive interaction between the retailers subsequently we show that the buy back payments transfered to the retailers for postconsumer goods provide a wholesale pricing flexibility that can be used to price discriminate between retailers of different profitability

remanufacturing as a marketing strategy the profitability of remanufacturing systems for different cost technology and logistics structures has been extensively investigated in the literature we provide an alternative and somewhat complementary approach that considers demand related issues such as the existence of green segments original equipment manufacturer competition and product life cycle effects the profitability of a remanufacturing system strongly depends on these issues as well as on their interactions for a monopolist we show that there exist thresholds on the remanufacturing cost savings the green segment size market growth rate and consumer valuations for the remanufactured products above which remanufacturing is profitable more important we show that under competition remanufacturing can become an effective marketing strategy which allows the manufacturer to defend its market share via price discrimination

contract designs for energy saving product development in a monopoly abstract we discuss two types of contracts for energy saving products in a monopoly with the government s budget constraint these contracts specify the subsidy either a fixed amount referred to as f type contracts or a discount referred to as d type contracts and the threshold of the energy consumption level of products below which the products are labeled as certified products and qualified for the subsidy we model a three stage game and give optimal design of the contracts under two different objectives of the government minimizing the total energy consumption and minimizing the average energy consumption our results show that 1 the optimal contract designs are the same under the two objectives 2 if the subsidy budget is relatively low the f type contract is more preferable than the d type contract and vice versa 3 the contracts function of certification enables the government to take the advantage of the consumer environmental awareness to improve the environmental performance even when the government s subsidy budget is zero 4 both contracts benefit the environment under the f type contract only the government pays for the environmental improvement in contrast under the d type contract both the government and consumers pay

partial vertical integration risk shifting and product rejection in the high value export supply chain the ghana pineapple sector summary high value export supply chains hold potential to improve smallholders welfare but their relative production inefficiency and moral hazard problems can cause exporters to prefer vertically integrated plantation production however pineapple exporters in ghana produce both for their own account and purchase from smallholders we hypothesize that vertical integration is only partial because exporters face large market risks that smallholders surprisingly are better able to absorb we show empirically that exporters average rejection rate of export quality fruit is high and varies in response to unanticipated fluctuations in european demand these results support the hypothesis and are consistent with theories of partial vertical integration but not the standard principal agent paradigm

reconciling narrative monetary policy disturbances with structural var model shocks structural var studies disagree with narrative accounts about the history of monetary policy disturbances we investigate whether employing the narrative monetary shocks as a proxy variable in a var model aligns both shock series we find that it does not

discount rates and credit markets theory and evidence from rural india three models of credit markets 1 the permanent income model 2 upward sloping credit supply to individual borrowers and 3 constrained credit due to imperfect enforcement are tested using credit market data and an experimental study of individuals discount rates in south india the permanent income model is rejected by both the discount rate and the credit market data the discount rate data are consistent with either of the other two models while the credit market data are consistent with a combination of these two models other explanations are found to be insufficient to explain the results of this study

crop prices and the demand for titled land evidence from uganda abstract i investigate how agricultural prices affect demand for titled land using panel data on ugandan farmers and a price index that weighs international crop prices by the structure of land use at the sub county level higher prices increase farmers share of titled land i also present evidence of a positive impact of prices on agricultural incomes the effect of prices on land tenure is stronger when farmers have access to roads and markets when they have undertaken investment on the land and when households fear land grabbing

markets power and productivity in rural asia abstract this article deals with three themes first the evidence that rural markets are responsive to scarcity is open to two interpretations i that markets closely approach the competitive ideal and ii that such responses are also consistent with various market imperfections second there is the nature of power and its influence on economic transactions lacking a satisfactory definition of the concept many contributions dealing with power yield few insights third there is the relationship between agrarian structure and economic progress a signal accomplishment of some contributions has been to show that south asia s diverse experience casts considerable doubt on the proposition that this relationship is a simple one

money politics and the post war business cycle abstract the political economy literature has enshrined as stylized fact the view that lower inflation and temporarily lower growth follow the election of republican presidents and has emphasized political manipulation of monetary policy as an explanation support for the monetary explanation comes in econometric work that largely ignores identification issues that dominate the literature on measuring the effects of monetary policy we generalize a standard vector autoregression framework to accommodate discrete political party variables we find almost no support for the view that political effects on the macroeconomy operate through monetary policy and only weak evidence that political effects are significant at all

interpreting the macroeconomic time series facts the effects of monetary policy existing theory and evidence on the effects of monetary policy are reviewed substantial room for disagreement among economists remains new evidence based on multivariate time series studies of several countries is presented while certain patterns in the data consistent with effective monetary policy are strikingly similar across countries others particularly the tendency of interest rate increases to predict high inflation are harder to reconcile with effective monetary policy

migration and income diversification evidence from burkina faso this paper uses limited dependent variable methods and new data from burkina faso to test the impact of inter continental and continental migration on activity choice and incomes in rural households econometric evidence supports our theoretical expectation that the impact of emigration varies both by migrant destination and production activity we find no evidence of either positive or negative effects of continental migration on agricultural or livestock activities and only a small negative impact on non farm activities however inter continental migration which tends to be long term and generates significantly larger remittances stimulates livestock production while being negatively associated with both staple and non farm activities

economic relationship between access to land and rural poverty in nepal in the present socio economic structure of nepal land is the main source of income and consumption for the majority of nepalese this study analyses the economic relationship between access to land and poverty in nepal by establishing the link between land and consumption as well as land and income a generalised additive model gam and ordinary least squares ols demonstrate that greater access to land increases income and consumption of the household and thereby reduces poverty the significant marginal value of land for both consumption and income implies that an effective land reform policy could well be an effective approach to alleviate rural poverty however land reform must come as part of a larger overhaul cluster analysis shows that land reform should target appropriate subgroups within the community in order to differentiate those who would make use of the extra land from those who would not and apply appropriate strategies to each subgroup it reveals the importance of subgroups in determining an appropriate strategy for tackling poverty

costs and benefits of livestock systems and the role of market and nonmarket relationships in developing countries livestock are kept not only for their physical products but also for insurance financing and to display status though this range of purposes is acknowledged livestock policies nevertheless often emphasize physical production a limited perspective that hampers the formulation and implementation of effective livestock policies this article presents a comprehensive appraisal of costs and benefits of livestock systems that takes into account the institutional environment of livestock keepers indicators are developed that capture quantify and organize not only the benefits resulting from the physical production but also those from the intangible functions the method is illustrated by an analysis of cattle in the western province of zambia the results indicate that the perspective on livestock systems developed more closely reflects the observed decisions of the livestock keepers

a retrospective impact evaluation of the tamil nadu empowerment and poverty alleviation pudhu vaazhvu project abstractcommunity based livelihood interventions which focus directly on increasing income and employment have become an increasingly important component of large scale poverty reduction programmes we evaluate the impact of a participatory livelihoods intervention the tamil nadu empowerment and poverty reduction pudhu vaazhvu project pvp using propensity score matching methods the paper explores the impact of pvp on its core goals of empowering women and the rural poor improving their economic welfare and facilitating public action we find significant effects of pvp on reducing the incidence of high cost debt and diversifying livelihoods we also find evidence of women s empowerment and increased political participation

the genesis of inflation and the costs of disinflation this essay asks how high inflation arises and why it is costly to eliminate specifically the paper discusses the roles of price rigidity and credibility problems in explaining the costs of disinflation the puzzle of persistent inflation triggered by onetime macroeconomic shocks and the case for returning to adaptive expectations in theories of inflation this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

returns policies between channel partners for durable products many durable products with relatively short selling seasons have been using returns policies between manufacturers and retailers as the contractual protocol for some time recently these sectors have witnessed the growing popularity of peer to peer web based used goods markets as important transaction channels between buyers and sellers given that these two issues are critically linked from both supply and demand perspectives in this paper we study the role that consumer valuation of used products plays in shaping a manufacturer s incentive to offer a returns policy option to a retailer when used goods might be devalued compared to new ones as a result of physical deterioration or obsolescence we do so through a two period dyadic channel framework where the retailer faces uncertain demand for a durable product from a renewable set of customers who are impatient but forward looking the manufacturer on the other hand needs to decide whether or not to offer a returns contract to the retailer we first characterize the necessary and sufficient condition under which a returns contract is the equilibrium strategy as well as the corresponding channel decisions further analysis of this condition reveals that a higher consumer valuation of used products increases the likelihood of a returns contract being the equilibrium strategy this result seems to be robust except when the potential demands for the two periods are quite deterministic and uncorrelated however it contradicts the burgeoning managerial trend to replace returns contracts with price only ones in sectors where used goods are valued relatively highly by the consumers we also discuss how used goods markets affect the equilibrium channel decisions as well as how demand uncertainty and logistics costs associated with returns influence the equilibrium contracting strategy

identifying the macroeconomic effect of loan supply shocks the inability to clearly distinguish the effects of shocks to loan supply from those to loan demand has made it difficult to quantify the economic importance of the credit channel in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy this study provides an innovative approach to identifying loan supply shocks three different results confirm that loan supply shocks have been successfully isolated from shifts in loan demand our measure is particularly important for explaining inventory movements the component of gdp most dependent on bank lending the effect is present even during periods with strong loan demand and the effect remains even when the unpredictable part of the loan supply shock is isolated this identification enables us to show that loan supply shocks have had economically important effects on the u s economy

prohibition of factor market exchanges and technological choice in chinese agriculture this article constructs a model of technological choice in an economy where market exchanges in land and labour are prohibited empirical data on demand for tractors tractor usage and chemical fertilisers in china are employed to test several hypotheses derived from the theoretical model the theory implies that the impact of relative factor scarcity on the pattern of technological choice in such an economy is similar to that in a market economy as postulated by the hicks ruttan hayami binswanger hypothesis of induced technological change the empirical evidence is found to be consistent with the implications of the model

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

identification and the narrative approach a reply to leeper abstract contrary to the arguments of leeper 1997 the problems that arise in var investigations of monetary policy do not arise with our use of the narrative approach the apparent high predictability of our monetary policy variable that leeper finds is due to overfitting and the estimated effects of our measure when variables other than output are considered are unsurprising given leeper s specifications

narrative and var approaches to monetary policy common identification problems abstract romer and romer romer c d romer d h 1989 does monetary policy matter a new test in the spirit of friedman and schwartz in blanchard o j fischer s eds nber macroeconomics annual 1989 mit press cambridge ma pp 121 170 romer c d romer d h 1994 monetary policy matters journal of monetary economics 34 75 88 adopted a narrative approach to address the identification problems in time series models of monetary policy based on federal reserve documents the romers created a dummy variable equal to one in periods when the federal reserve contracted in response to perceived inflationary pressures this paper shows 1 the dummy variable is predictable from past macroeconomic variables reflecting the endogenous response of policy to the economy 2 unpredictable changes in the dummy do not generate dynamic responses that look like the effects of monetary policy the identification problems that plague time series models also afflict the narrative approach

seasonal labor utilization in agriculture theory and evidence from agrarian households in india this paper develops and tests a dynamic stochastic model of seasonal labor demand of farm households in a developing country seasonality in agriculture is modeled as a dynamic two stage process planting and harvesting with sequential dependence of decisions yield risk is an important determinant of behavior in the planting stage only the proposed model is estimated using plot specific cross section time series data from india consistent estimates of the male and female labor demand functions in the planting and harvesting stages are obtained by panel data econometric methods that control for the nonseparability of the model

informal financial markets under liberalization in four african countries abstract this paper presents survey evidence from four countries on how informal financial agents serve market niches that banks cannot readily reach their methodologies are effective in keeping down transaction costs and default risk relative to banks although informal agents exercise monopoly power in dualistic markets liberalization of repressive financial policies has had little effect on formal financial deepening while informal finance has continued to grow the paper concludes that informal financial institutions are an important vehicle for mobilizing household savings and financing small businesses and it recommends that informal finance be better integrated into financial development strategies

does supervision matter some hypothesis tests using indian farm level data abstract a model is developed and estimated to test for heterogeneity of family and hired labor in agricultural production and to estimate the impact of employer supervision on the productivity of hired labor plot level data are used from a rice growing village in semi arid tropical india the hypothesis that family and hired labor are homogeneous inputs was rejected results indicate that family member supervision is required to increase hired labor productivity output loss attributable to operating at reduced supervision intensity was greater than 10 on over 40 of the plots

migration and rural welfare the impact of potential policy reforms in europe summary this paper uses an agricultural household model in an imperfect market environment and data from burkina faso to explore the impact of potential immigration policy reforms in europe on the welfare of rural households simulation results demonstrate that in contrast to continental migration increased intercontinental migration has strong positive household welfare effects similarly an increase in the stay abroad of intercontinental migrants impacts positively on welfare of the migrant sending household results of these simulations lend support to the introduction of a tmp which would in addition to facilitating migration control in host economies improve the welfare of sending households by allowing for increased engagement in intercontinental migration the temporary nature of such a program would ensure that dutch disease effects would be mitigated through eventual migrant return

how well do tree plantations comply with the twin targets of the clean development mechanism the case of tree plantations in tanzania the clean development mechanism cdm of the kyoto protocol is supposed to provide both carbon mitigation and poverty reduction this article reports from a model based study of market related carbon leakage and poverty reduction in the wake of a cdm tree planting project in tanzania a tree plantation was incorporated in a computable general equilibrium cge model with income differentiated household segments the study focused on sensitivity of carbon leakage and income distribution to different project ownerships and carbon premium allocations it turned out that the project value in terms of carbon premium has clear shortcomings as indicator of induced gdp growth and poverty alleviation the non poor rural and urban households benefit considerably more than the poor households however rising household income in all domestic project ownership arrangements increases demand for food raises use of fertilizer and crop yields a carbon cycle module for agricultural land use was incorporated in the cge model showing an increased carbon sequestration in agricultural soil representing a negative leakage through markets in the range of 60 120 of the certified emissions reductions as registered in the cdm tree plantation project

revisiting the narrative approach of estimating tax multipliers we analyze whether popular measures of narrative tax shocks can be treated as relevant instruments for observable endogenous tax series of interest we find that narrative tax measures are only weakly correlated with cyclically adjusted tax revenues for the us and the uk using weak instrument robust inference narrative tax measures often yield insignificant estimates of tax multipliers we conclude that the literature currently understates the uncertainty associated with estimating the tax multiplier using the narrative approach this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

the dynamic impacts of monetary policy an exercise in tentative identification it is currently popular to identify monetary policy shocks with innovations in some measure of reserves or in the federal funds rate these assumptions about the interest elasticity of the supply of or demand for reserves imply monetary policy shocks that produce dynamic responses of macroeconomic variables that are anomalous relative to traditional monetary analyses this paper tentatively identifies supply and demand shocks in the markets for reserves and m2 for the 1980s and contrasts them with results for the 1970s in the later period identified monetary policy shocks have dynamic impacts that are fully consistent with traditional analyses

in search of the liquidity effect abstract a short run negative relationship between monetary aggregates and interest rates the liquidity effect is central to discussions of monetary policy this paper searches for this empirical relationship we investigate whether the characterization of the liquidity effect is sensitive to i changes in sample period ii conditioning the correlations on past information iii assuming money growth is exogenous and iv treating monetary changes as anticipated or unanticipated the correlations change substantially in each case we conclude that the traditional analysis and modern models which rely completely on demand side behavior cannot explain the observed correlations a successful characterization of the liquidity effect requires identification of both private and policy behavior

segmentation in the informal credit markets the case of the philippines this paper explains market segmentation that occurs in the philippine informal credit markets through the matching of borrowers and lenders by their occupational specializations to internalize transaction costs and facilitate economic activity the regression results support a predictable pattern of matching farmer lenders with borrowers specialized in non farm activities and trader lenders with borrowers specialized in farming

adaptation to land constraints is africa different since the seminal works of malthus and boserup scientists have long debated the impact of population growth and land constraints on the wellbeing of rural people today these concerns are particularly relevant to africa with its rapid population growth very small farms and chronic food insecurity in this paper we examine adaptation to falling land labor ratios using a comprehensive theoretical framework in which households faced with binding land constraints can respond in three ways intensifying agricultural production diversifying out of agriculture and reducing fertility rates using cross country data and drawing upon the existing literature we reach three conclusions first population density is associated with reduced fallows and more intensive use of land but not fertilizer use or irrigation indicating major challenges in achieving sustainable intensification or agricultural productivity growth second there is little evidence of successful non farm diversification in response to land pressures in africa from domestic or international income sources third rural africans in land constrained countries desire smaller families but have thus far benefited little from family planning policies these findings underscore the need for a coordinated multi sectoral approach to sustainably reduce poverty in the region

the relation between narrative and money market indicators of monetary policy this paper studies the relation between narrative based indicators of monetary policy and widely used money market indicators of monetary policy three principal findings emerge first changes in monetary policy as measured by the narrative based policy indices are associated with persistent changes in the levels of m2 and the monetary base in contrast changes in the narrative policy indicators lead to transitory changes in short term interest rates nonborrowed reserves and the spread between the six month commercial paper rate and the three month treasury bill rate third these findings are generally robust across different narrative based policy indices

should african rural development strategies depend on smallholder farms an exploration of the inverse productivity hypothesis in africa most development strategies include efforts to improve the productivity of staple crops grown on smallholder farms an underlying premise is that small farms are productive in the african context and that smallholders do not forgo economies of scale a premise supported by the often observed phenomenon that staple cereal yields decline as the scale of production increases this paper explores a research design conundrum that encourages researchers who study the relationship between productivity and scale to use surveys with a narrow geographic reach when policy would be better served with studies based on wide and heterogeneous settings using a model of endogenous technology choice the authors explore the relationship between maize yields and scale using alternative data since rich descriptions of the decision environments that farmers face are needed to identify the applied technologies that generate the data improvements in the location specificity of the data should reduce the likelihood of identification errors and biased estimates however the analysis finds that the inverse productivity hypothesis holds up well across a broad platform of data despite obvious shortcomings with some components it also finds surprising consistency in the estimated scale elasticities

identifying monetary policy in a small open economy under flexible exchange rates abstract previous empirical study on the effects of monetary policy shocks in small open economies has generated puzzling dynamic responses in various macroeconomic variables this paper argues that these puzzles derive from an identification of monetary policy that is inappropriate for such economies to remedy this it is proposed that a structural model be estimated to explicitly account for the features of the small open economy such a model is applied to canada with tightly estimated results overall the dynamic responses to the identified monetary policy shock are consistent with standard theory and highlight the exchange rate as a transmission mechanism

landownership concentration and the expansion of education we study the relationship between large landownership concentration and the expansion of mass education in nineteenth century prussia cross sectional estimates show a negative association between landownership concentration and enrollment rates fixed effects panel estimates indicate that regions with an initially stronger landownership concentration exhibit increasing enrollment rates this relationship is not driven by differences in the supply of schooling we argue that the implementation of agricultural reforms including the stepwise abolition of serfdom is an important driver of the change in enrollment the results are consistent with the interpretation that emancipation from labor coercion increased the private demand for education

land property rights and resource allocation abstractin this paper we review the most significant empirical literature on the causal effects of land property rights the literature indicates that secure property rights boost investment in both rural and urban areas these effects however do not appear to be the result of improved credit conditions in rural areas clear land rights also lead to increases in productivity and farm earnings in contrast for urban areas the evidence for an effect on earnings is mixed we find little empirical evidence to suggest that land titling programs enhance the development of land markets finally some evidence suggests that land titling induces changes in household structure that foster human capital accumulation and may help to increase the incomes of future generations

relative price changes as aggregate supply shocks this paper proposes a theory of supply shocks or shifts in the short run phillips curve based on relative price changes and frictions in nominal price adjustment when price adjustment is costly firms adjust to large shocks but not to small shocks and so large shocks have disproportionate effects on the price level therefore aggregate inflation depends on the distribution of relative price changes inflation rises when the distribution is skewed to the right and falls when the distribution is skewed to the left we show that this theoretical result explains a large fraction of movements in postwar u s inflation moreover our model suggests measures of supply shocks that perform better than traditional measures such as the relative prices of food and energy

competitive advantage of qualified weee recyclers through epr legislation abstract most of waste appliances in china are handled by unqualified recyclers rather than by qualified ones equipped with advanced but costly technology to address this problem china implements a series of take back legislations in the framework of extended producer responsibility epr with a self financing subsidy scheme to analyze the performance of the legislations we develop a two period model with a selling period run by a manufacturer and a recycling period conducted by two recyclers we show that the self financing condition gives an upper limit for the subsidy we also show that this limit is not monotone in the recyclers competitiveness difference and there may be a gap between the upper limit and the optimal subsidy that maximizes the social welfare i e a larger subsidy does not necessarily render a larger welfare further we numerically show that the legislations improve the environment performance but decrease the total profits of the manufacturer and recyclers interestingly the legislations may or may not decrease the consumer surplus

two tier land tenure system and sustained economic growth in post 1978 rural china abstract the two tier land tenure system has been widely blamed for the problems in land allocation and in land specific investment observed in the postreform rural china greater privatization of property rights in land has been proposed to enable productive farmers to acquire more land to promote land circulation to improve farmers access to credit and to encourage farm investment it is argued here that in the presence of multiple market distortions land privatization is unlikely to provide a solution to the agricultural problems rather an approach which refines the existing framework of the two tier ownership system offers more promise

money real interest rates and output a reinterpretation of postwar u s data this paper reexamines both monthly and quarterly u s postwar data to investigate if the observed comovements between money real interestrates prices and output are compatible with the money real interest output link suggested by existing monetary theories of output which include both keynesian and equilibrium models the major empirical findings are these 1 in both monthly and quarterly data we cannot reject the hypothesis that the ex ante real rate is exogenous or granger causally prior in the context of a four variable system which contains money prices nominal interest rates and industrial production 2 in quarterly data there is significantly more information con tained in either the levels of expected inflation or the innovationof this variable for predicting future output given current and lagged output than in any other variable examined money actualinflation nominal interest rates or ex ante real rates the effect of an inflation innovation on future output is unambiguously negative the first result casts strong doubt on the empirical importance of existing monetary theories of output which imply that money should have a causal role on the ex ante real rates the second result would appear incompatible with most demand driven models of output in light of these results we propose an alternative structural model which can account for the major dynamic interactions among the variables this model has two central features i output is unaffected by money supply and ii the money supply process is motivated by short run price stability this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

money may matter but how could you know abstract christina and david romers reply to our article post hoc ergo propter hoc once more misses the point our argument was never that monetary policy did not matter but that their methods could not provide useful evidence that it did yet they offer additional evidence of the same type with respect to the efficacy of monetary shocks without effectively replying to the criticisms of their methods we show point by point that such responses as they give leave our original conclusion intact their narrative statistical approach is a complicated version of the fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc and as such will not sustain inferences with respect to the direction and strength of the causes of output fluctuations

rural wages labor supply and land reform a theoretical and empirical analysis land reform is one of the most mentioned of the theoretical policy instruments discussed in the development literature yet relatively little attention has been paid to the wage rate consequences of such a program despite the fact that perhaps more than one half of rural families in a developing country receive a substantial proportion of their income from wage earnings in agriculture one reason for this lacuna may be that the determination of wages and family labor supply in the agricultural sector of ldcs has also been somewhat neglected particularly in the context of a heterogeneous labor force 2 the subsistence or institutional wage models of w arthur lewis john fei and gustav ranis and gerald rodgers for instance offer no theory of how rural wage levels or differentials are set and thus provide little guidance on how wage rates would be affected by changes in land ownership patterns more recently pranab bardhan and t n srinivasan david newbery and clive bell and pinhas zusman who formulate general equilibrium market or bargaining models determining endogenously the rental share paid by tenant sharecroppers have assumed that agricultural wage rates are exogenous or determined only by nonagricultural factors all of these models assume that rural labor is homogeneous another reason why the potential wage impact of a land reform program may have received little attention is that models of peasant family behavior such as those of a k sen dipak mazumdar and robert mabro typically embody two restrictive assumptions which would tend to make the equalization of landholdings appear wage augmenting although this implication has never been formally derived these assumptions are that 1 agriculture is dualistic with small farm families facing lower shadow prices of labor leisure than large farm landlords because of impediments to labor mobility and 2 agricultural households are dichotomous small farmers employ family labor and maximize utility while large farms only utilize wage labor and maximize profits data from a 1970 71 allindia survey of over 5 000 households collected by the national council of applied economic research3 indicate however that almost all cultivator households large and small participate actively in the labor market as either buyers or sellers of labor services with almost 88 percent of households cultivating a gross cropped area less than 1 5 acres utilizing some hired labor seventynine percent of these small farm households associate professor yale ujniversity the research embodied in this paper was supported in part by a grant from the ford and rockefeller foundations program in support of social science and legal research on population policy and with funds from the u s agency for international development under order no aid otr 1432 helpful suggestions and comments were provided by james l mccabe mark gersovitz an anonymous referee the managing editor and members of the economic growth center yale university i am also grateful to the members of the research program in development studies princeton university for the use of their facilities research assistance was provided by james devine anne morgan and roberta robson inotable exceptions are r albert berry mark gersovitz and m a rahman all of these authors however employ geometric analyses with differing assumptions leading to wholly different predictions regarding wage effects none consider the heterogeneity of agricultural labor pay attention to questions of stability or attempt to apply their models to data 2lnformation on the differential impact of alternative agricultural policies including land reform on sex or age specific wage rates is not only important in settling income distribution and equity issues but as suggested in an article by the author and robert evenson may have significant implications for population growth and schooling as well 3for a more detailed discussion of these data see the author

land tenure differences and investment in land improvement measures theoretical and empirical analyses this article develops a theoretical framework to examine the relationship between land tenure arrangements and households investment in soil improving and conservation measures it then analyzes this relationship with a multivariate probit model based on detailed plot level data from villages in the brong ahafo region of ghana a major hypothesis tested is that investment in productivity enhancing and conservation techniques are influenced by land tenure arrangements the theoretical analysis and empirical results generally reveal that land tenure differences significantly influence farmers decisions to invest in land improving and conservation measures the findings also show that tenure security does affect farm productivity

informal finance through land pawning contracts evidence from the philippines land pawning contracts have increased in importance in philippine rice growing villages and this article examines the determinants of choice of pawning contracts and the observed loan size the analysis shows that pawning is an informal credit instrument used by small farmers to obtain large loans to finance productive investments such as non farm employment where the returns to investment are high the econometric results suggest that poorer farm households pawn out land while wealthier farm households pawn in the observed loan size is explained by reputation of pawners and rice cropping intensity in the region

agricultural workers credit rationing and family networks in rural mexico abstractwe use mixed methods and first hand household data in mexico to investigate credit practices by households engaged in agricultural wage employment quantitative analysis shows evidence of rationing in the formal sector but also suggests the existence of mitigating mechanisms qualitative analysis provides additional insights first income patterns associated with agricultural wage generate income smoothing needs that are sometimes better met by the informal sector second family networks can perform key functions as gateways to the formal sector through specific informal arrangements that inject flexibility into formal rules and procedures

nonfarm employment agricultural shocks and poverty dynamics evidence from rural uganda this article examines the role of off farm employment in poverty reduction over a short period of time by using panel data from 894 rural ugandan households in 2003 and 2005 taking advantage of the unique off farm labor supply and income data we analyzed how households respond to negative agricultural shocks especially through off farm labor supply and income to mitigate crop income loss our analysis indicates that the flexibility of labor time allocation varies across off farm jobs and that only low skilled and low wage jobs tend to be used to mitigate negative shocks especially among the asset poor

differential adoption of modern rice technology and regional wage differential in nepal in nepal which consists of ecologically distinct regions the concentration of the adoption of modern rice varieties in the favourable rice growing areas of the country has raised fears that regional income disparities have widened this study shows that greater demand for hired labour due to the adoption of modern rice varieties has induced permanent and seasonal migration from unfavourable to favourable areas this appears to have largely equalised average wage rates across different production environments thus as far as labour income is concerned benefits from the modern varieties have been widely shared

identification in macroeconomics abstract this paper discusses empirical approaches macroeconomists use to answer questions like what does monetary policy do how large are the effects of fiscal stimulus what caused the great recession why do some countries grow faster than others identification of causal effects plays two roles in this process in certain cases progress can be made using the direct approach of identifying plausibly exogenous variation in a policy and using this variation to assess the effect of the policy however external validity concerns limit what can be learned in this way carefully identified causal effects estimates can also be used as moments in a structural moment matching exercise we use the term identified moments as a short hand for estimates of responses to identified structural shocks or what applied microeconomists would call causal effects we argue that such identified moments are often powerful diagnostic tools for distinguishing between important classes of models and thereby learning

can downstream waste disposal policies encourage upstream design for environment design for environment takes place when firms explicitly incorporate environmental issues in their product design and manufacturing decisions joseph fiksel 1996 to reduce waste associated with consumer products for example firms can reduce product weight including the amount of packaging that comes with a product and make products easier and less costly to recycle the latter can be accomplished by changing the type of material used in a product avoiding mixing of materials in a single product coding and labeling when different materials are used and designing for ease of disassembly u s congress office of technology assessment 1992 fiksel 1996 an important debate centers around the question of whether design for environment dfe needs to be explicitly targeted using policy instruments focused upstream on producers or whether downstream instruments send sufficient signals back upstream one important downstream instrument is a disposal fee i e charging households a price per pound per bag or per can for their trash many observers feel that downstream instruments do not send appropriate signals back upstream some economists and others have suggested on the other hand that disposal fees can in theory send signals upstream to producers karen palmer and walls 1998 we find that disposal fees provide incentives for efficient dfe only when there is a fully functioning recycling market i e only when recyclers pay households a price for each of their recyclable items and that price varies with the degree of product recyclability in the real world transactions costs of paying households for each individual item recycled would be prohibitively high in a more realistic setting in which households may place some items in a recycling bin but are not paid for doing so a disposal fee by itself will not yield a social optimum it encourages households to place items in the bin but all items allowed in the bin are of equal value to the household i e there is no reason to prefer an easily recyclable aluminum can to a difficult to recycle plastic milk jug this means that there is no signal to producers to make products more recyclable if the government can set product taxes that vary with product recyclability the social optimum can be restored but this option is not practicable 2 we argue that the infeasibility of i paying households for recycling and ii taxing products according to their recyclability means that a first best outcome is no longer attainable instead we set up a constrained second best optimum and solve for policy instruments that achieve this outcome we find that a disposal school of economics and finance victoria university of wellington wellington new zealand walls is also a university fellow with resources for the future washington dc the helpful comments of karen palmer don fullerton and hilary sigman are greatlv appreciated 1 manufacturer take back requirements such as germany s well known packaging take back law were developed at least in part as a way to encourage dfe see www oecd org env epr index htm for updates from a series of oecd workshops held in 1997 1999 on the broader topic of extended producer responsibility in practice individual german producers do not actually take back their own products at end of life they have formed a consortium that arranges to collect members waste from households marked with a green dot and recycle it we do not address take back mandates in this paper 2 in calcott and walls 1999 we derive these taxes don fullerton and wenbo wu 1998 show that a direct subsidy to recyclability combined with other instruments can yield a social optimum this subsidy depends on production function parameters thus if firms differ the subsidy would vary across firms more i mportantly observing and measuring recyclability to determine subsidy payments would be virtually impossible

competitive advantage through take back of used products abstract motivated by a recent antitrust ruling against hill rom one of the two dominant american suppliers of hospital beds we develop a stylized model to investigate the consequences of used product take back on firms industry and customers our findings suggest that by taking back and reselling refurbished products a manufacturer can increase both profit margins and sales to the detriment of a non interfering competitor in our model customers are always better off under product take back but it depends on the degree of competition whether firms use the benefits of take back primarily to increase their margins or to pass them on to the customers by lowering their prices the first firm to offer take back in some cases can deter its competitors from following this profitable strategy especially if it has an existing advantage in terms of lower production cost or higher market share contrary to the claim of hill rom s competitor we find a legitimate business justification for hill rom s reduction of new product prices

impact of government financial intervention on competition among green supply chains abstract this work analyzes the effects of governmental financial intervention on green supply chain competition using a three stage game theoretic model nash equilibrium solutions for governmental and chain member decisions are derived analytical results suggest that the government should adopt green taxation and subsidization to ensure that green profit attributed to green product production is non negative strategically low wholesale price strategies are suggested to recycled component suppliers under green subsidization to stimulate manufacturers intention of green product production under green taxation numerical results reveal that under equilibrium conditions social welfare and chain based profits improve by 27 8 and 306 6 respectively compared with the case without financial intervention

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

tax subsidy policies in the presence of environmentally aware consumers abstract we study policy measures to improve environmental quality in the presence of environmentally aware consumers we consider two sets of policy instruments uniform policies for the firms and policies that discriminate between the firms based on their environmental quality for the latter set either the better performer is rewarded with a subsidy or the worse performer is punished with a tax we find that while a uniform subsidy policy improves average environmental quality a uniform tax policy worsens it further while a discriminatory subsidy policy reduces total pollution and enhances aggregate welfare a discriminatory tax policy may increase total pollution and may reduce aggregate welfare

the time for austerity estimating the average treatment effect of fiscal policy after the global financial crisis a controversial rush to fiscal austerity followed in many countries yet research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates was and still is unsettled mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data this article reconciles seemingly disparate estimates of multipliers within a unified and state contingent framework we achieve identification of causal effects with new propensity score based methods for time series data using this novel approach we show that austerity is always a drag on growth and especially so in depressed economies a 1 of gdp fiscal consolidation translates into a loss of 3 5 of real gdp over five years when implemented in a slump rather than just 1 8 in a boom

local and personal networks in employment and the development of labor markets evidence from the cut flower industry in ethiopia summary we examine the roles of local and personal networks in the employment process and the emergence and development of the labor market in ethiopia s growing cut flower industry using primary survey data of 320 workers randomly sampled from all 64 farms we find that workers who were recruited informally using the social ties were paid less than the formally recruited workers at hiring however these workers quickly increased their productivity and the effect of social ties on wages disappeared over time further we find that the development of labor market for this newly emerged industry took place particularly within the industrial cluster

collective agricultural production a solution for transition economies abstract the paper examines theoretical reasons and provides examples for productivity differences between agricultural service cooperatives and collectives service cooperatives can utilize economies of scale enhance competitiveness and provide technical information advantages that often outweighed problems of free riding low investment and excessive political intervention agricultural collectives while not adding substantial advantages are in addition associated with problems of supervision and effort supply tendencies to substitute casual workers or mechanization for regular members and low investment incentives while collective forms of organization in transition economies respond to high risk and market imperfections they do so inefficiently policies that create conditions for service cooperatives to compete may lead to large productivity gains

rural market imperfections and the farm size productivity relationship evidence from pakistan the subject of this article is the relationships between farm size and productivity and between farm size and profitability in the developing countries the recent controversies over the inverse size output relationship are reviewed and a framework is provided that explains the inverse relationship based on plausible assumptions about imperfections in the markets for labor land credit and risk from this framework a set of testable hypotheses are derived the hypotheses are tested on recent farm level panel data from pakistan a strong inverse relationship between farm size and yield is present in the sample even when household fixed effects are used to account for unobserved heterogeneity moreover the suggested market imperfections framework is consistent with the data