property rights externalities and resource degradation locating the tragedy abstract resource degradation in the third world is largely driven by the demands of farm households for fuelwood and land for agriculture since resources are often controlled through indigenous systems of property the tragedy of the commons has been used to explain resource degradation as a result private property is suggested as a solution to resource degradation a dynamic model capable of examining household incentives for resource use under private and common property is developed results of the model reject the conventional wisdom that gives rise to the presumed optimality of private individual property in natural resources and the correlated indictment of group management regimes

understanding the evolution and performance of water markets and allocation policy a transaction costs analysis framework abstract water markets and associated allocation policy reforms have struggled to achieve their intended goals in many water stressed rivers in part due to the institutional friction imposed by transition and transaction costs this paper elaborates a transaction costs analysis framework to examine the evolution and performance of water markets and allocation policy reforms this analysis rests on three pillars i a synthesis of three theoretical traditions of institutional analysis williamson north and ostrom often considered independently ii a framework to examine the types and interactions of transaction costs in market based water allocation over time and iii an illustrative analysis of three large river basins the colorado columbia and murray darling with varying levels of success in market based water policy reforms the resulting framework accounts for water s complexity as an economic good this framework and the case studies lead to the identification of several policy implications including the need for a multiphase sequencing of reform strategic investment in institutional transition costs and institutional choices that preserve future flexibility to adjust water rights and diversion limits to manage social and environmental externalities

property rights regimes and natural resources a conceptual analysis revisited summary more than two decades ago schlager and ostrom 1992 developed a conceptual schema for arraying property rights regimes that distinguishes among diverse bundles of rights the conceptual framework has profoundly influenced research on natural resource governance common property and community resource management however currently natural resource governance has changed dramatically challenging the applicability of the conceptual schema there are now many more social actors involved in resource management than the local communities at the focus of original analysis additionally resource management increasingly provides access to various kinds of benefits from outside the immediate context including indirect benefits such as payments for environmental services and results based payments for redd these changes demand addition of new property rights to the original framework this paper updates the conceptual schema in reaction to changes in natural resource governance proposing three specific modifications on the focus of use rights control rights and authoritative rights to come up with a framework that distinguishes eight types of property rights we apply the framework to three purposefully selected governance interventions in china and laos that include the provision of indirect benefits in addition to the direct benefits derived by local people from natural resources the empirical application shows how contemporary governance changes may not lead to local people s outright dispossession since they continue to possess direct use rights to natural resources however local people may be excluded from control and authoritative rights which are exercised exclusively by state agencies and international actors the latter make available indirect benefits to local people which may or may not translate into use rights in the sense of policy based entitlements the empirical insights suggest the possibility of a wider trend of compensated exclusions in natural resource governance

institutions and environmental governance a reconceptualization abstract this article presents the conceptual revisions needed to extend the new institutional approach to environmental governance from its current local and international domains of application to all governance solutions including national environmental and natural resource use policies and multi level governance solutions that are increasingly used to address global environmental change the article suggests that environmental governance is best understood as the establishment reaffirmation or change of institutions to resolve conflicts over environmental resources it also explains why the choice of these institutions is a matter of social justice rather than of efficiency the article suggests a way to understand formal and state centered governance solutions as forms of collective ownership not unlike common property the article demonstrates how institutional analysis can gain resolution by looking at the functional and structural tiers organization of governance functions and formulation of key institutional rules as key aspects of the design of governance institutions

declining volatility in the u s automobile industry dramatic changes in the volatility of output occurred in the u s auto industry in the early 1980s namely output volatility declined the covariance of inventory investment and sales grew more negative and adjustments to production schedules which in earlier decades stemmed primarily from plants hiring and laying off workers were more often accomplished with changes in average hours per worker after the mid 1980s using a linear quadratic inventory model with intensive and extensive labor adjustments we show how all of these changes could have stemmed from one underlying factor a decline in the persistence of motor vehicle sales jel g31 l25 l62 m11

the tragedy of the commons and socialization theory and policy we revisit the tragedy of the commons in an dynamic overlapping generations economy peopled of shepherds who decide how many sheep they let graze on a common parcel of land while relying on di fferent forms of rationality nash players pure or impure kantian players we examine the dynamics of heterogeneity and land congestion when the prevalance of those di fferent forms of rationality evolves over time follow ing a vertical oblique socialization process a la bisin and verdier 2001 we study the impacts of a quota and of a tax on the congestion of land and we show that introducing a quota may in some cases reduce the proportion of kantians pure and impure and worsen the tragedy of commons with respect to the laissez faire finally we examine whether a government should promote either a pure or an impure kantian morality by comparing the relative fi tness of pure impure kantians and their interactions with the congestion of land

property rights to multi attribute fishery resources abstract the united nations code of conduct for responsible fisheries urges governments to manage multiple yield bycatch and habitat attributes of fishery resources the information and enforcement costs of multi attribute management are high however as a result relatively few attributes generally stock biomass age structure and growth are specified in yield targets exposing others e g localized abundance sex to excessive use in the public domain spillovers caused by fishing gear e g gear conflicts bycatch habitat damage generally are regulated with catch limits and area closures that artificially divide or exclude activities which interact due to attribute jointness total fishery income is compromised because tradeoffs are not evaluated at the margin alternative arrangements that bundle fishery resource attributes are suggested bundled property rights could evolve from a comprehensive assignment of usufruct rights which reduce the transaction costs of gathering information on unspecified attributes and of contracting for spillovers markets for harvest rights could resolve the simpler gear conflict and bycatch problems other interactions e g predation habitat requirements would require corporate or collective property rights and governance arrangements that make harvesters and other interested parties the residual claimants of their harvest decisions subject to government restrictions that protect public goods

portfolio management of wild fish stocks abstract managing fish stocks in terms of a portfolio of economic assets is likely to significantly increase benefits for society relative to single species approaches a portfolio framework systematically combines fish stocks that are joined by ecology e g predation competition and unspecialized fishing technologies e g mixed species trawls into a portfolio which balances expected aggregate returns against the risks associated with stock attribute and other uncertainties to be productive however this framework must be combined with property rights institutions that clearly state management objectives create long run time horizons among harvesters internalize spillovers caused by ecological and technological jointness and reduce uncertainty through research and adaptive management although the cost of reducing scientific uncertainty about ecological interactions may limit the portfolio approach to intensive management of relatively few species its scope can be broadened to integrate tradeoffs among more types of marine resources such as nature preserves and oil and gas deposits

aggregate comparative statics abstract in aggregative games each player s payoff depends on her own actions and an aggregate of the actions of all the players many common games in industrial organization political economy public economics and macroeconomics can be cast as aggregative games this paper provides a general and tractable framework for comparative static results in aggregative games we focus on two classes of games 1 aggregative games with strategic substitutes and 2 nice aggregative games where payoff functions are continuous and concave in own strategies we provide simple sufficient conditions under which positive shocks to individual players increase their own actions and have monotone effects on the aggregate the results are illustrated with applications to public good provision contests cournot competition and technology choices in oligopoly

land ownership and conflicts over the use of resources implication for household vulnerability in eastern ethiopia abstract survey data from hirna watershed in eastern ethiopia were used to identify determinants of household choice among alternative land property right regimes to help mitigate negative consequences of scarcity induced land related conflicts and so as to help reduce household vulnerability it has been observed that absence of clearly defined property right and management plan has led to overexploitation of the hillsides leading to perpetuation of poverty and food insecurity multinomial discrete choice models were specified and estimated for explaining decision of household heads for most preferred property right regimes overall two variables namely the dependency ratio and the level of education of the household head provided the most predictive power whether or not the household prefers common property resource regime whereas the number of household members the livestock holding of the household and the area of cultivated land lost due to enclosure of part of the watershed were found to be more relevant in determining household s preference for resettlement to other potential areas on the other hand the age of household head the number of household members and the level of education of the household head were found to be statistically significant in determining the likelihood that a household prefers intensifying agriculture

a biological theory of social discounting we consider a growth model in which intergenerational transfers are made via stocks of private and public capital private capital is the outcome of individuals private savings while decisions regarding public capital are made collectively we hypothesize that private saving choices evolve through individual selection while public saving decisions are the result of group selection the main result of the paper is that the equilibrium rate of return to private capital is at least 2 3 percent more than the rate of return to public capital in other words social choices involving intertemporal trade offs exhibit much more patience than individual choices do jel d11 d71 d91 h43 policy issues often involve intergenerational trade offs one highly publicized and polarizing example concerns the appropriate response to global warming while nordhaus 1994 concluded that there was no need to enact draconian policies to reduce co 2 emissions immediately stern 2006 insisted that the situation was in fact dire the difference in position can be attributed almost exclusively to the rates of time preference assumed by these two authors nordhaus used a few percent based on estimates deriving from private economic behavior while stern essentially set it equal to zero on the basis of a philosophical stance it then becomes clear that co 2 emissions should be taken seriously if for some reason private rates of time preference are too high when applied to public decisions since such decisions should then be made on the basis of a lower rate 1

labor adjustment costs in a destination country the case of mexico abstract rodrik rodrik d 1997 has globalization gone too far institute for international economics washington dc argues that firms use the threat of moving to low cost generally developing markets to make employment more flexible at home although a large literature documents significant adjustment costs in developed countries we know little about their size and importance in developing countries that receive capital we employ monthly mexican data from the gatt nafta period to estimate adjustment costs in mexico we consider adjustment costs for production and non production workers and allow for asymmetry while patterns of adjustment costs are similar as in developed countries adjustment costs in mexico are generally an order of magnitude smaller

rules and games this paper reconsiders the relationship between the rules of a game and its outcomes we develop a notion of rule reform that leads to the selection of pareto improved equilibria points we then apply this notion to a series of naturally occurring fishing rules including examples from malaysia india brazil turkey and canada we show that reforming a game is conceptually akin to reforming an economy

assessing the frontiers of ultrapoverty reduction evidence from challenging the frontiers of poverty reduction targeting the ultra poor an innovative program in bangladesh abstractthis article uses household panel data to provide robust evidence on the effects of brac s building resources across countries targeting the ultra poor tup program in bangladesh we use alternative treatment comparison pairs in addition to brac s own classification we exploit type 1 errors in assignment in brac s selection process to create a second treatment comparison pair this allows us to estimate the program effects on the target group not contaminated by mistargeting to address selection on unobservables we implement heteroskedasticity based identification and two recent estimators based on matching and propensity score reweighting the results show that participation had significant positive effects on food security clothing shoes livestock and cash savings but there is weak or no evidence of an impact on the number of household durables and assets and indicators of health and women s empowerment the effects on the poorest of the poor the target group may be different from

flypaper effects in transfers targeted to women evidence from brac s targeting the ultra poor program in bangladesh abstract many development interventions target transfers to women however little evidence directly explores the flypaper effects of whether women retain control over these transfers once within the household and how reallocation of the transfers affects women s empowerment we study these dynamics in the context of brac s randomized cfpr tup program in bangladesh which provides livestock and training to rural women in ultra poor households our analysis confirms previous findings that cfpr tup increased household asset ownership but shows complex effects on targeted women women appear to retain ownership over transferred livestock but new investments from mobilized resources are largely owned by men cfpr tup also reduces women s movement outside the home and control over income consistent with transferred livestock requiring maintenance at home however beneficiary women also report intangible benefits such as increased social capital and even with limited mobility a preference for work inside the home given a hostile environment outside the home

natural resource federalism preferences versus connectivity for patchy resources we examine the efficiency of centralized versus decentralized management of spatially connected renewable resources when users have heterogeneous preferences for conservation versus extraction resource mobility induces a spatial externality while spatial preference heterogeneity drives a wedge between users privately optimal extraction rates we first address these market failures analytically and show that the first is most efficiently handled with centralized planning while the second is best tackled with decentralized management except in special cases neither approach will be first best but which arises as second best depends on the relative strength of preference heterogeneity versus spatial mobility of the resource we illustrate the theory and test its robustness with a numerical example

a brave new world kantian nashian interaction and the dynamics of global climate change mitigation abstract we model game theoretic situations in which agents motivated by kantian ethics interact with conventional nashian agents we define the concept of generalized kant nash equilibrium which encompasses the nash equilibrium the kantian equilibrium and the kant nash equilibrium as special cases we show the existence and uniqueness of a kant nash equilibrium in a static game of climate change mitigation and derive its properties in a dynamic setting we analyze a differential game of climate change mitigation in the presence of both types of agents and compare their markov emission strategies for both the static model and the dynamic model as the population share of kantians increases the quality of the environment improves and both types of agents are better off

procyclical labour productivity increasing returns to labour and labour hoarding in car assembly plant employment this paper empirically examines the sources of procyclicality in labor productivity for a panel of u s auto assembly plants from 1978 85 an employment demand equation derived from a cost minimization model is estimated to test for the presence of increasing returns and labor hoarding on the employment dimension the data used match employment and wage data from the bls current establishment survey to publically available data on output and the nature of production at these plants statistical evidence in favor of both increasing returns and hoarding is found these findings suggest that the observed procyclicality of labor productivity in this industry is due to both the nature of technology increasing returns as well as attempts by plant managers to maintain a reserve of experienced workers labor hoarding copyright 1992 by royal economic society

on the evolutionary stability of altruistic and spiteful preferences abstract this note demonstrates that a result on evolutionary stability presented by bester and guth bester h guth w 1998 journal of economic behavior and organization 34 193 209 applies under more general preference and payoff functions

social rewards externalities and stable preferences this paper examines the role of social rewards as a corrective mechanism for activities which generate externalities the focus of this paper is on the circumstances under which social rewards provide effective and feasible incentive mechanism that may replace laws and regulations in particular social mechanism is effective only in a society in which individuals who care about their standing in the society can survive in the long run we show that the nature of economic interaction between matched players influences whether the socially minded individuals survive in the long run and restricts the effectiveness of social rewards however circumstances exist where the socially minded survive even though relative fitness is determined only by economic payoff 1998 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

the evolution of monetary equilibrium abstract the hahn problem is that even if a monetary equilibrium with valued fiat money exists in general equilibrium a nonmonetary equilibrium with a zero price on money generally also exists why should we expect the former over the latter here i consider the preferences that will survive repeated trading in an exchange economy where agents compete in biological fitness with unobservable preferences and positive assortativity in matching evolutionarily stable preferences implement the competitive equilibrium that maximizes the sum of agents fitnesses in a standard bewley townsend model this implies selection of the monetary over the nonmonetary equilibrium and also implies the survival of agents with money in the utility function trust in fiat money is only a recent development and even today such faith is hardly universal cass and shell 1980

gender assets and agricultural development lessons from eight projects ownership of assets is important for poverty reduction and women s control of assets is associated with positive development outcomes at the household and individual levels this research was undertaken to provide guidance for agricultural development programs on how to incorporate gender and assets in the design implementation and evaluation of interventions this paper synthesizes the findings of eight mixed method evaluations of the impacts of agricultural development projects on individual and household assets in seven countries in africa and south asia the results show that assets both affect and are affected by projects indicating that it is both feasible and important to consider assets in the design implementation and evaluation of projects all projects were associated with increases in asset levels and other benefits at the household level however only four projects documented significant positive impacts on women s ownership or control of some types of assets relative to a control group and of those only one project provided evidence of a reduction in the gender asset gap the quantitative and qualitative findings suggest ways that greater attention to gender and assets by researchers and development implementers could improve outcomes for women in future projects

property rights regimes in complex fishery management systems a choice experiment application the tonle sap wetland fishery was previously divided into 3 different management zones for conservation open access fishing and private fishing rights to the private fishing zone involved auctions for exclusive rights to temporarily designated plots this paper aims to explore the auction based system by investigating how this fishery management system affects different groups of small scale fishermen and how different characteristics of the fishing lots affect the bidding a choice experiment approach was used to model fishermen s choices in a hypothetical auction market by offering fishermen the choice between purchasing different potential fishing lots and a no purchase option implying fishing only in the communal fishing grounds the preferred latent class model with two segments of fishermen showed that the bidding behavior of the more privileged group out competes the other group irrespective of the lot characteristics this result suggests that it is unlikely that the redesign of the auction system itself would be an effective way of securing access to fishing resources for the two observed groups of fishermen this implies that open access fishing grounds and or other regulations may also be needed in future management as they serve an important role for the poorer segments

labor markets and poverty in village economies we study how women s choices over labor activities in village economies correlate with poverty and whether enabling the poorest women to take on the activities of their richer counterparts can set them on a sustainable trajectory out of poverty to do this we conduct a large scale randomized control trial covering over 21 000 households in 1 309 villages surveyed four times over a seven year period to evaluate a nationwide program in bangladesh that transfers livestock assets and skills to the poorest women at baseline the poorest women mostly engage in low return and seasonal casual wage labor while wealthier women solely engage in livestock rearing the program enables poor women to start engaging in livestock rearing increasing their aggregate labor supply and earnings this leads to asset accumulation livestock land and business assets and poverty reduction both accelerating after four and seven years these gains do not come at the expense of others non eligibles livestock rearing businesses are not crowded out and wages received for casual jobs increase as the poor reduce their labor supply in such labor activities our results show that i the poor are able to take on the work activities of the non poor but face barriers to doing so and ii one o interventions that remove these barriers lead to sustainable poverty reduction

child health and household resources in south africa evidence from the old age pension program this paper presents nonparametric evidence on the effects of the expansion of the old age pension program in south africa on child health did this increase in household resources improve child health and nutrition does the gender of the recipient of the pension affect its impact the answers to these questions have very important policy implications there is evidence that inadequate nutrition during childhood and even in utero affects long term physical development as well as the development of cognitive skills this in turn affects productivity later in life see partha dasgupta 1993 john strauss and duncan thomas 1998 t paul schultz 1999 in the united states the evidence suggests that monetary transfers to the poor have very little impact on child welfare janet currie 1995 susan mayer 1997 however the effects of parental income and monetary transfers on child outcomes are likely to be of greater magnitude among poor households in developing countries the south african pension program provides an unusual opportunity to evaluate the possible effects of such a monetary transfer this paper exploits the rapid increase in the coverage and benefits of the old age pension program in south africa which took place in the early 1990 s anne case and angus deaton 1998 at the end of the apartheid era the government committed to achieving parity of benefits and eligibility requirements between whites and africans this was achieved mostly by increasing the benefits received by the africans in 1993 80 percent of african women above age 60 and 77 percent of african men above 65 received the pension the maximum benefit of 370 rands per month aproximately 3 per day was equal to half of the minimum wage and about twice the median income per capita in rural areas due to living arrangements inherited from the apartheid era close to onethird of african children under the age of 5 currently live with a pension recipient children who live with a pension recipient tend to come from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds as a consequence they tend to be smaller than other children their age to estimate the effect of receiving a pension on the anthropometric status of children this paper exploits the fact that height reflects accumulated investments in child nutrition the larger the proportion of her life during which a child is well nourished the taller she will be given her age due to the expansion of the program in the early 1990 s individuals of qualified age became more likely to receive a pension and the benefits became substantially larger thus children born after the expansion of the program are more likely to have spent a larger fraction of their lives wellnourished if they live with a pension recipient to the extent that the pension resulted in improved nutrition in this paper i present nonparametric evidence of the program s effect on nutrition based on this observation

procyclical labour productivity a closer look at a stylized fact at 4 digit united states manufacturing industry level we find evidence suggesting that the stylized fact of procyclical labour productivity should be treated with great caution we use the nber manufacturing productivity database to investigate the relationship between hourly labour productivity and real output for 450 industries for the years 1958 91 labour productivity is significantly procyclical in 63 of industries and acyclical in 36 in the latter respect a high proportion of investment goods industries display acyclical productivity cross section regressions are carried out that seek to explain the interindustry distribution of cyclicality the analysis attributes a significant role to variations in materials costs as a proxy for fluctuations in factor utilization

evolution of preferences we endogenize preferences using the indirect evolutionary approach individuals are randomly matched to play a two person game individual subjective preferences determine their behaviour and may differ from the actual objective pay offs that determine fitness matched individuals may observe the opponents preferences perfectly not at all or with some in between probability when preferences are observable a stable outcome must be efficient when they are not observable a stable outcome must be a nash equilibrium and all strict equilibria are stable we show that for pure strategy outcomes these conclusions are robust to allowing almost perfect and almost no observability with the notable exception that inefficient strict equilibria may fail to be stable with any arbitrarily small degree of observability despite being stable with no observability

the race for property rights economics literature on the evolution of property rights has increasingly emphasized the optimal timing for establishing those rights yoram barzel dale mortensen 2 and partha dasgupta and joseph stiglitz 3 for example have shown that competition among firms for the rents associated with innovative devices and ideas can lead to the dissipation of those rents in the process when property rights and the rents therefrom are up for grabs it is possible for expenditures to establish rights to fully dissipate the rents leaving the efficiency gains from privatization in question 4 before any conclusions about the welfare gains from establishing property rights can be reached attention must be paid to the evolutionary

institutional ecological economics abstract new institutional economics and its forerunners have we argue made important contributions to the evolving agenda of ecological economics the conceptualisation of environmental problems as instances of interdependence and the acknowledgement of positive transaction costs are key insights into the nature of environmental problems we also discuss how plurality of behavioural motivations and limited cognitive capacity have important implications for environmental decision making and its analysis we show how evolutionary and collective action theories offer complementary takes on the choice and change of environmental governance institutions and how the concept of social capital can enrich analyses of environmental governance we conclude that an emerging institutional ecological economics has the greatest relative advantage in analysing the design implementation and effectiveness of environmental governance solutions

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

how much can asset transfers help the poorest evaluating the results of brac s ultra poor programme 2002 2008 abstract the impacts of an innovative programme in rural bangladesh which has assisted extremely poor households literally the poorest of the poor were assessed over a six year period 2002 2008 the provision of a substantial dose of assets has helped produce very positive results by and large vulnerability to downturns on account of negative events such as illnesses and house damage has resulted in asset losses for several assisted households additional measures that reduce vulnerability and risk will help complete the good work commenced by the asset transfer plan

evolution and kantian morality what kind of preferences should one expect evolution to favor we propose a definition of evolutionary stability of preferences in interactions in groups of arbitrary finite size groups are formed under random matching that may be assortative individuals preferences are their private information the set of potential preferences are all those that can be represented by continuous functions we show that a certain class of such preferences that combine self interest with morality of a kantian flavor are evolutionarily stable and that preferences resulting in other behaviors are evolutionarily unstable we also establish a connection between evolutionary stability of preferences and a generalized version of maynard smith s and price s 1973 notion of evolutionary stability of strategies

property rights regimes and natural resources a conceptual analysis the term common property resource is an example of a term repeatedly used to refer to property owned by a government or by no one it is also used for property owned by a community of resource users such usage leads to confusion in scientific study and policy analysis in this paper we develop a conceptual schema for arraying property rights regimes that distinguishes among diverse bundles of rights ranging from authorized user to claimant to proprietor and to owner we apply this conceptual schema to analyze findings from a variety of empirical settings including the maine lobster industry

spousal control and intra household decision making an experimental study in the philippines i elicit causal effects of spousal observability and communication on financial choices of married individuals in the philippines when choices are private men put money into their personal accounts when choices are observable men commit money to consumption for their own benefit when required to communicate men put money into their wives account these strong treatment effects on men but not women appear related more to control than to gender men whose wives control household savings respond more strongly to the treat ment and women whose husbands control savings exhibit the same response changes in information and communication interact with underlying control to produce mutable gender specific outcomes

rhetoric and reality in protected area governance institutional change under different conservation discourses in mount elgon national park uganda abstract the approach to governance of protected areas has been in transition over last decades partly driven by evolving policy discourses that shape the ways in which conservation is thought to be delivered the most influential discourses are the fortress approach community conservation and back to the barriers how different discourses translate and are instituted on ground are however complex and disputed inclusive policy strategies in relation to local involvement in developing countries are of particular concern the study analyses how conservation policy discourses have become manifested taking the case of mount elgon national park menp uganda it outlines main conservation policy discourses analyses actor s interests and power relations and further examines how institutions for park governance have evolved and changed according to the different discourses the results indicate that conservation discourses and donor support come and go while menp seems to outlast all the worrying reality is that menp administration strongly influenced by the interplay of path dependent institutional forces rooted in the fortress discourse simply sticks to its guns maintaining the application of law enforcement as key management instruments in its approach to governance especially to local people interactions there is an apparent gap between rhetoric and reality in protected area governance

gender property rights and natural resources abstract attention to gender differences in property rights can improve the outcomes of natural resource management policies and projects in terms of efficiency environmental sustainability equity and empowerment of resource users although it is impossible to generalize across cultures and resources it is important to identify the nature of rights to land trees and water held by women and men and how they are acquired and transmitted from one user to another the paper particularly examines how the shift from customary tenure systems to private property in land trees and water has affected women the effect of gender differences in property on collective action and the implications for project design

opening up pandora s box the effect of gender targeting and conditionality on household spending behavior in mexico s progresa program summary this paper evaluates the behavioral impact of conditionality and gender targeting on spending behavior in the progresa conditional cash transfer cct program from rural mexico results indicate that transfer income is not spent differently from general income suggesting that transfers exert only an income effect in addition women who have increased control over their extra cash are not significantly more likely to spend it in a family friendly way than they do household earned income both features entail significant costs to beneficiaries and program budgets our results indicate that further evidence is needed to confidently advocate for their inclusion in cash transfer ct programs

excess labour and the business cycle a comparative study of japan germany the united kingdom and the united states against the background of firm specific human capital theory this paper investigates empirically the relative propensity of manufacturing industries in japan germany the united kingdom and the united states to hold excess labour over the business cycle both stock and utilization dimensions of the labour input are integrated into the study throughout discussion is linked to earlier research that has analysed the relative international performance of the japanese labour market

labor productivity in the efficiency wage model a consideration of the firm s death rate it is inappropriate to equate the representative firm with the typical firm particularly for economies which consist of small enterprises where a large number of jobs are created or disappear as establishments are born or die if workers care about the job disappearance risk their utility and effort offered will be influenced by the death rate of firms this paper sets out an efficiency wage model and takes the probability of the firm s closure into account by extension it is shown that equilibrium labor productivity is plausibly procyclical under certain circumstances which is consistent with the stylized facts observed in many countries

if homo economicus could choose his own utility function would he want one with a conscience reply in my model of the evolution of honesty 1 i assumed the existence of a signal a blush perhaps extreme values of which served to identify some individuals as being honest with certainty joseph harrington notes that without this assumption honest individuals have difficulty invading a population initially dominated by defectors for readers who do not wish to work through the algebra in his comment the argument is easily summarized in nontechnical terms suppose two honest mutants a and b arrive in an uncountably large population consisting entirely of dishonest persons and suppose that the probability that an honest person exhibits an intense blush is say 0 999 while the corresponding probability for everyone else is only 0 001 when a sees an intense blush on the face of b what will then be his estimate of the probability that b is honest assuming that a knows the laws of elementary probability and corrects for the base rate of honest persons in the population it will be zero when virtually everyone in the population is dishonest even a person with an intense blush will be pegged as dishonest provided that even the smallest fraction of dishonest persons also shows an intense blush with

allocation of goods by lottery i introduction many goods such as hunting permits oil drilling leases cellular telephone licenses and rights to fishing berths as well as some buds such as the military draft jury duty and who is to be thrown overboard on a sinking life raft are or have been allocated by lotteries in neo classical welfare economics the random distribution of property rights does not affect allocative efficiency as long as transferability is allowed and the transactions costs are non prohibitive lottery allocations however are generally not transferable thus lottery allocations are inefficient since the goods are not ultimately allocated to the users who value them the most a number of authors such as aubert 1959 fienberg 1971 eckhoff 1989 and elster 1989 36 122 have argued that lotteries are chosen as the allocative instrument because it represents a fair or just means of allocating the goods rawls 1971 374 and eckhoff 1989 have noted that where it is impractical to divide the goods equally among those who desire them a lottery serves to satisfy both the requirement that the process be fair and that the allocation problem be resolved relatively costlessly elster 1989 113 however notes that lotteries are not the only fair allocation mechanism for example he points out that in jewish ethics the problem of allocating an indivisible good such as life saving resources is resolved by denying it to everyone even economists would probably prefer a lottery to this resolution the fairness hypothesis has a rich history in the old testament lotteries are deemed a fair way of allocating goods such as the inheritance of land numbers 33 54 lotteries are also used to allocate bads in perhaps the most famous biblical example of use of lots jonah was chosen by lot to be sacrificed to appease god who had brought a storm that threatened to wreck the ship the story goes that the lot selected jonah because he was shirking his duties elsewhere and should not have even been on the vessel jonah 1 6 1 notice that fair here is taken to mean just given this theological foundation it is not surprising that the lottery has seen frequent use in legal history as well one of the most interesting cases occurred in swedish and finnish trials in the 17th and 18th centuries in cases where a man was murdered by a mob lotteries were used to allocate punishment since the law required an eye for an eye no more and no less eckhoff says that if it was impossible to ascertain which of them had dealt the mortal blow the courts determined that one of the responsible parties be sentenced to death and that the person be selected by lottery 1989 19 a similar use of lotteries occurs in military history to deal with cases of mass desertion in roman armies every tenth man was executed decimated and the remainder pardoned in more modern times the lottery has been used in u s law 2 first of course is the use of a lottery to decide who shall sit on a jury a connection between fairness and lotteries however has also appeared in the common law in an 1842 case u s v holmes which has been discussed by fienberg 1971 eckhoff 1989 and elster 1989 a ship sank in a heavy storm and the lone surviving life raft was in grave danger of sinking the crew threw overboard fourteen male passengers in an effort to save the rest when back in port after being rescued a crewman named holmes the only crew member who had not disappeared upon arrival to port was brought to trial for the deaths of the passengers the court ruled that the non essential members of the crew should have been thrown overboard before any passengers and if that was not sufficient then passengers should have been selected by lot which is the fairest mode elster 1989 65 the fact that a human life presumably a large cost was at stake ex post did not affect the decision 3 the environmental economics literature contains a number of references to the social preferences for and benefits of lottery allocations

the empirical content of nash bargained household behavior in households whose allocation decisions can be represented as nash bargained household decisions extrahousehold environmental parameters eeps serve as pure shifters of the threat points the comparative statics of changes in demands due to changes in these eeps are given these are incorporated into a comprehensive statement of the empirical content of nash bargained household behavior including a nash generalization of barten s 1966 fundamental matrix equation of the theory of consumer demand estimation and data requirements are discussed along with nested testing of the following structure the neoclassical model is nested in the nash bargained model which in turn is nested in an unrestricted model of household demands emphasized throughout is the enriched menu of explanatory variables for demand analysis provided by the nash model as well as the model s ability to jointly analyze i household formation and ii intrahousehold allocation decisions

the mobilization of women s labor for cash crop production a game theoretic approach in the last decade or so economists have modeled phenomena such as household labor supply fertility behavior and child survival rates using the household as the unit of analysis this paper presents data that call into question the assumption that the household is a joint decision making unit which maximizes a neoclassical household utility function the data come from a study of the mobilization of women s labor by their husbands for irrigated rice production in north cameroon the first section of this paper describes briefly the massa rice and sorghum farming system and then considers the relationship between the amount of compensation women receive from their husbands for their labor on rice production and the amount of labor they allocate to rice production the findings suggest that a bargaining model may describe the intrahousehold relations of production and distribution better than the neoclassical model the second section specifies a nash bargaining model and contrasts it with the neoclassical model of the household using the bargaining framework the third section explores in more detail possible explanations of the allocative inefficiency which seems to characterize many of the rice cultivating households

an analysis of sample attrition in panel data the michigan panel study of income dynamics by 1989 the michigan panel study on income dynamics psid had experienced approximately 50 percent sample loss from cumulative attrition from its initial 1968 membership we study the effect of this attrition on the unconditional distributions of several socioeconomic variables and on the estimates of several sets of regression coefficients we provide a statistical framework for conducting tests for attrition bias that draws a sharp distinction between selection on unobservables and on observables and that shows that weighted least squares can generate consistent parameter estimates when selection is based on observables even when they are endogenous our empirical analysis shows that attrition is highly selective and is concentrated among lower socioeconomic status individuals we also show that attrition is concentrated among those with more unstable earnings marriage and migration histories nevertheless we find that these variables explain very little of the attrition in the sample and that the selection that occurs is moderated by regression to the mean effects from selection on transitory components that fade over time consequently despite the large amount of attrition we find no strong evidence that attrition has seriously distorted the representativeness of the psid through 1989 and considerable evidence that its cross sectional representativeness has remained roughly intact

is altruism evolutionarily stable and envy and malevolence remarks on bester and guth abstract in a convincing analysis of the conditions and strength of altruism bester and guth journal of economic behavior organization vol 34 1998 193 209 unfortunately restrict the interpretation of their results their paper provides us with an analysis of the conditions and strength of malevolence or envy as well

kinship incentives and evolution we analyze how family ties affect incentives with focus on the strategic interaction between two mutually altruistic siblings the siblings exert effort to produce output under uncertainty and they may transfer output to each other with equally altruistic siblings their equilibrium effort is non monotonic in the common degree of altruism and it depends on the harshness of the environment we define a notion of local evolutionary stability of degrees of sibling altruism and show that this degree is lower than the kinship relatedness factor numerical simulations show how family ties vary with the environment and how this a ects economic outcomes

the economical management of multispecies fisheries resource based theory implicitly assumes that property rights to resources are secure extant property rights theory enables us to relax this assumption to take into account processes where there are struggles in establishing property rights that enhance

influences of transaction costs in environmental policy abstract there is a growing literature reporting the extent of transaction costs for environmental policies however understanding why transaction costs occur and why they are small or large is also important for efficient policy selection and evaluation following an analysis of the organisational economics literature and reports of the extent of transaction costs for a number of environmental policies three key influences to transaction costs in environmental policies are identified these are the following 1 the characteristics of the transaction for the environmental good 2 the nature of the transactors and 3 the current institutional environment and arrangements these affect transaction costs to the government and all other parties influenced by a policy transaction costs occur due to actions of information collection and policy design policy enactment and establishment implementation and contracting administration and monitoring and enforcement an interrogation of transaction cost influences reveals that 1 the influence varies between parties and is affected by the actions and interactions of and between all parties to a policy 2 how transaction costs are experienced varies across time and 3 who experiences transaction costs depends on the policy itself future policy selection and refinement will benefit from empirical analysis of the causes of transaction costs

homo moralis preference evolution under incomplete information and assortative matching what preferences will prevail in a society of rational individuals when preference evolution is driven by the resulting payoffs we show that when individuals preferences are their private information a convex combination of selfishness and morality stands out as evolutionarily stable we call individuals with such preferences homo moralis a t one end of the spectrum is homo oeconomicus who acts so as to maximize his or her own payoff at the opposite end is homo kantiensis who does what would be the right thing to do in terms of payoffs if all others would do likewise we show that the stable degree of morality the weight placed on the moral goal is determined by the degree of assortativity in the process whereby individuals are matched to interact

how does contract design affect the uptake of microcredit among the ultra poor experimental evidence from the river islands of northern bangladesh abstractthis study examines the demand of microcredit among ultra poor households in northern bangladesh we implemented a field experiment to identify what type of credit is best suited to their demand we found that the uptake rate by the ultra poor is the lowest for regular small cash credit followed by in kind credit we also found that the ultra poor are significantly more likely to join a microcredit programme than the moderately poor if a grace period with longer maturity is attached to a large amount of credit irrespective of whether the credit is provided in cash or in kind

separate spheres bargaining and the marriage market this paper introduces the separate spheres bargaining model a new model of distribution within marriage it differs from divorce threat bargaining models e g manser brown mcelroy horney in that the threat point is not divorce but a noncooperative equilibrium within marriage this noncooperative equilibrium reflects traditional gender roles the predictions of our model thus differ from those of divorce threat bargaining models in the separate spheres model cash transfer payments to the mother and payments to the father can but need not imply different equilibrium distributions in existing marriages in the long run the distributional effects of transfer policies may be substantially altered by changes in the marriage market equilibrium

contracting problems and regulation the case of the fishery the inefficiencies of common property fisheries are of continuing concern to economists the early work by scott gordon 1954 and anthony scott 1955 outlined the problem and later studies by james crutchfield and giulio pontecorvo 1969 and frederick bell 1972 provided empirical estimates of the losses that result those studies were followed by the dynamic models of colin clark 1976 and james quirk and vernon smith 1970 of optimal harvest rates and the use of corrective taxes or quotas to achieve them but in spite of a large and growing literature and the persuasiveness of the outlined efficiency criteria most fisheries retain common property aspects with overcapitalization and excessive labor input why those conditions persist and the failure of the regulatory response to them are the issues addressed in this paper we examine a number of fisheries but focus on the texas shrimp industry which is one of the nation s most valuable fisheries for a single species and which shares the common property characteristics observed elsewhere it is considered overcapitalized and catch per unit of effort is falling 2 examination of the fishery reveals the many margins along which rent dissipation occurs and the nature of the regulations necessary for controlling fishing effort to avoid those losses the regulatory environment in texas is complicated by conflict within the fishery between inshore and offshore fishermen the latter assert that bay shrimping reduces the number of shrimp that successfully migrate to the gulf the inshore fishery is highlighted by another issue the recent resettlement of some 30 45 000 vietnamese refugees including many fishermen along the texas coast marine advisory service paul starr their entry has been met by hostility and violence from existing shrimpers who recognize that they are in an environment characterized by the absence of property rights bay shrimpers have lobbied the texas legislature for broad limits on new entrants yet ironically the sale of additional boats by individual shrimpers to the vietnamese has facilitated entry of the refugees into the fishery regulations in the texas shrimp and other fisheries are incomplete leaving many options for rent dissipation uncontrolled because of high contracting costs among fishermen and political factors that mold government actions contracting costs are high among heterogeneous fishermen who vary principally with regard to fishing skill 3 montana state university and texas a m university respectively we benefitted from comments by terry anderson raymond c battalio gardner brown oscar burt micha gisser wade griffin john r moroney anthony d scott peter temin and participants in workshops at texas a m university and the university of washington research assistance was provided by scott barnhart and phil mizzi funding was provided by sea grant texas a m university throughout this paper we use the terms common property and open access interchangeably here the terms describe a situation where no property rights group or individual exist s for the resource 2catch per unit of effort in the inshore texas gulf and federal gulf waters is presented for 1963 77 by w l griffin c g tydlacka and w e grant they show catch per unit of effort generally falling in inshore and offshore waters while catch per unit of effort fluctuates from year to year it falls from approximately 360 kg shrimp per unit of effort to 220 kg from 1963 to 1977 the common property nature of the fishery is reflected in the following statistics since 1975 the number of vessels has grown by 23 percent nelson swartz for fish houses the record of entry is similar between 1970 a d 1977 the number of firms grew from 259 to 287 though during that period many left the industry as others entered the number of fish houses was calculated from license data supplied by the texas parks and wildlife department the record of entry by fish houses suggests that monopsony as discussed by colin clark and gordon munro is absent in the fishery 3there may be minor differences in labor leisure choices and capital but our statistical evidence and discussions with fishermen indicate that catch variations are largely due to skill government regulations in the texas bays restrict capital and our empirical evidence shows boats to be relatively homogeneous

subdividing the commons distributional conflict in the transition from collective to individual property rights in kenya s maasailand summary this paper suggests that explanations of property rights transformation need to move beyond models of relative price change and state enforcement to include accounts that accommodate conflict and competition among actors and the possibility that state actors may not provide the enforcement that is often taken for granted the transition from collective to individualized holdings in kenya s maasailand is burdened with politics and procedural problems that can undermine the gains anticipated in that move moreover in semi arid ecological settings individualization results in unstable land holdings necessitating re contracting and reaggregation by individual parcel owners

downward nominal and real wage rigidity survey evidence from european firms it has been well established that the wages of individual workers react little especially downwards to shocks that hit their employer this paper presents new evidence from a unique survey of firms across europe on the prevalence of downward wage rigidity in both real and nominal terms the authors analyse which firm level and institutional factors are associated with wage rigidity the results indicate that it is related to workforce composition at the establishment level in a manner that is consistent with related theoretical models e g efficiency wage theory insider outsider theory the analysis also finds that wage rigidity depends on the labour market institutional environment collective bargaining coverage is positively related with downward real wage rigidity measured on the basis of wage indexation downward nominal wage rigidity is positively associated with the extent of permanent contracts and this effect is stronger in countries with stricter employment protection regulations

non convex costs and capital utilization a study of production scheduling at automobile assembly plants i study detailed data from eleven automobile assembly plants these data display considerable cross plant heterogeneity in production scheduling to explain the observed heterogeneity i solve a dynamic programming model when desired production is below the plant s minimum e cient scale non convexities induce production bunching the plant uses less than full capital utilization on average and production is more volatile than sales when desired production is above the plant s minimum e cient scale the plant operates in a convex region of the cost curve in this case it uses high levels of capital utilization and production is less volatile than sales 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved jel classixcation e23 d21 l23

is ignorance bliss the effect of asymmetric information between spouses on intra household allocations fundamental questions about how resources are allocated within the family remain unresolved because family decision making is a repeated game and there is caring it is generally posited that the marriage relationship exploits the high degree of information sharing between spouses even if official cash transfers themselves are common knowledge between household members the transfer may loosen constraints over other income sources less easily monitored empirical research has documented inefficient allocations between spouses and non cooperative behavior as a result of asymmetric information in migrant households however the implications of asymmetric information between cohabiting spouses are still relatively unexplored in this paper the authors used data from a field experiment in southern ghana to test the effect of windfalls on intra household allocation the results from the experiment indicate that spouses behave according to a non cooperative marital allocation contract with differences in spending patterns by gender

training wages and sample selection estimating sharp bounds on treatment effects this paper empirically assesses the wage effects of the job corps program one of the largest federally funded job training programs in the u s even with the aid of a randomized experiment the impact of a training program on wages is difficult to study because of sample selection a pervasive problem in applied microeconometric research wage rates are only observed for those who are employed and employment status itself may be affected by the training program this paper develops an intuitive trimming procedure for bounding average treatment effects in the presence of sample selection in contrast to existing methods the procedure requires neither exclusion restrictions nor a bounded support for the outcome of interest identification results estimators and their asymptotic distribution are presented the bounds suggest that the program raised wages consistent with the notion that the job corps raises earnings by increasing human capital rather than solely through encouraging work the estimator is generally applicable to typical treatment evaluation problems in which there is nonrandom sample selection attrition copyright wiley blackwell