the effects of monetary policy in the euro area this paper presents evidence on the monetary transmission process in the euro area based on macroeconomic data and on micro data on banks according to the estimations of macro vector autoregression and macroeconometric models a monetary policy tightening significantly reduces output and after a time lag also prices the effect on output is temporary while that on prices is permanent clear patterns of significant asymmetries in the monetary policy effects across countries do not emerge the estimations based on micro data on banks show that the main factor that determines the average bank s response to monetary policy is its degree of liquidity the lower its share of liquid assets in total assets the more strongly does a bank reduce its lending in response to a monetary tightening bank size does not emerge as an important factor for a bank s reaction to monetary policy these results hold for virtually all member countries of the european monetary union despite the differences in their banking systems copyright 2003 oxford university press

the impact of agricultural and household technologies on women a conceptual and quantitative analysis in burkina faso abstract agricultural technologies new cultivars inorganic fertilizers soil and water conservation techniques in sub saharan africa have been primarily introduced to male farmers by male dominated extension services on the family plots these yield increasing input intensive technologies increase the demand for farm labor so not only do men obtain most of the direct benefits from the introduction of technology but this labor intensive technology also increases the demands on women s time for additional labor this raises the question are the combined effects of agricultural technologies beneficial or detrimental to women we first develop a labor market model that examines the impact of agricultural and household technologies on labor allocation and income determination within the household we then discuss the important issue of how household labor allocation decisions and division of income are made within the family in sub saharan africa we use a programming model to estimate the effects of these technologies on household incomes and the income of women the results indicate that the impact of agricultural technologies depends on the type of decision making prevailing in the household in contrast household technologies increase the welfare of women regardless of the type of decision making however with bargaining behavior agricultural technologies do benefit women and there is some empirical support for this type of household behavior in sub saharan african households

multinationals and the developing countries in multinational enterprise and economic analysis caves provides a summary of economic research on multinationals and developing countries yet for policy makers major questions remain unanswered the gaps can be grouped into four categories the impact of the widespread change in development strategies on multinationals the net impact of foreign direct investment on host countries the causes of declining tensions between developing countries and foreign investors and links between our economic knowledge and the decisions that face private and government managers

the impact of development on women a specific factors analysis abstract the specific factors model is employed in this paper as a means of explaining how economic development may serve to diminish women s welfare three changes associated with the development process are analyzed for their effect on women s real and relative wage 1 an expansion of trade induced by an improvement in the terms of trade 2 technological change and 3 an increase in female labor force participation

control and ownership of assets within rural ethiopian households this article investigates how the control and devolution of productive assets are allocated among husband and wife theory predicts that bargaining power within marriage depends on the division of assets upon divorce and on control over assets during marriage using detailed household data from rural ethiopia we show that assets brought to marriage ownership of assets control within marriage and disposition upon death or divorce are only partly related productive resources are controlled by the household head disposition upon death or divorce only loosely depends on individual ownership during marriage but control is associated with larger claims upon divorce assets brought into marriage have little impact on disposition upon death but matter in case of divorce

gender disparity in access to information do spouses share what they know summary the united nations un has declared lack of access to information to be the third major challenge confronting women in developing countries after poverty and violence analyzing a unique dataset of husbands and wives in rural paraguay we identify systematic differences between women and men s knowledge of financial markets and find that the factors that help predict individuals knowledge of these markets vary by gender specifically women are less likely than men to be informed about the financial institutions operating in their communities women are more likely to know what is required to obtain loans from financial institutions if they are more educated live with other adult women belong to wealthier households are in a stronger bargaining position vis a vis their spouses or have their husbands approval to take out entrepreneurial loans

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

a multicriteria approach to sustainable energy supply for the rural poor abstract despite significant progress in energy technology about two billion people worldwide particularly the poor in rural areas of developing countries have no access to electricity decision making concerning the most appropriate energy technology for supplying these areas has been difficult existing energy decision support tools have been useful but are mostly incomplete trade offs as well as impacts that can be positive or negative may emerge as a result of implementing modern forms of energy these can affect both community s livelihoods as well as the confidence of decision makers in relation to alternative technologies the paper discusses a newly designed multicriteria approach and its novel robustness analysis for selecting energy generation systems for the improvement of livelihoods in rural areas the proposed methodology builds upon a sustainable rural livelihoods framework to address multiple interactions and calculate trade offs aimed at boosting decision makers confidence in the selected technologies the methodology is tested via a case study in colombia

determinants of the intrahousehold allocation of food in the rural philippines this study shows that the opportunity cost of time for husbands and wives can affect the intrahousehold distribution of food in a developing country equations which explain the relative allocation of calories within households were estimated for husbands wives and children with data for the rural philippines the estimating equation is derivable from both a joint household utility function and a bargaining model because the same households were included in the four survey rounds the various observations for a given individual were averaged for each variable in the estimation procedure wages were estimated using the heckman approach

on the evolution of the monetary policy transmission mechanism this paper investigates whether the monetary transmission mechanism has changed or whether apparent changes are due to changes in the volatility of exogenous shocks also the question of whether any changes have been gradual or abrupt is considered a mixture innovation model is used which extends the class of time varying vector autoregressive models with stochastic volatility the advantage of our extension is that it allows us to estimate whether where when and how parameter change is occurring our empirical results indicate that the transmission mechanism the volatility of exogenous shocks and the correlations between exogenous shocks are all changing

principal players in utility restructuring the case of orissa abstract research on reform and restructuring in the electricity supply industry does not adequately focus on the process of actual implementation using the restructuring of orissa state electricity board as a case study this paper identifies the principal players and their roles during the restructuring of an electric utility the key players in a utility restructuring exercise are the government top management lending agencies and the consultants three conceptual phases are identified in the restructuring process namely impetus phase reorganisation phase and consolidation phase as the restructuring process moves from one phase to another the roles of the principal players also undergo significant qualitative changes this paper highlights the changing role of the key players as the restructuring process moves from one phase to another

can agricultural input subsidies reduce the gender gap in modern maize adoption evidence from malawi abstract nationally representative data for malawi were used to measure the gender gap in adoption of modern maize and to investigate how if at all malawi s farm input subsidy program fisp has impacted the gap regression results show the probability of adopting modern maize was 12 lower for wives in male headed households and 11 lower for female household heads than for male farmers receipt of subsidized input coupons had no discernible effect on modern maize adoption for male farmers receiving a subsidy for both seed and fertilizer increased the probability of modern maize cultivation by 222 for female household heads suggesting the fisp has likely reduced the gender gap in adoption of modern maize in malawi

privatization of electricity distribution in the northeast of brazil the good the bad the ugly or the naive this paper analyzes the evolution of five electricity distribution companies in the northeast of brazil using technical and financial indicators three privatized and two public firms were analyzed between 1997 and 2008 the financial indicators are used as proxies for the capacity of the business to generate value for shareholders while the technical indicators are used as proxies for service quality provided to consumers we observed that the privatized firms had their financial indicators improved after privatization increasing the value of the firm for the shareholders however there is no evidence that privatization affected the quality of service provided to consumers

examining asymmetries in the transmission of monetary policy in the euro area evidence from a mixed cross section global var model abstract i estimate the transmission of a common euro area monetary policy shock across individual euro area economies to do so i develop a global var model in which all euro area economies are included individually while at the same time their common monetary policy is modelled as a function of euro area aggregate output growth and inflation the results suggest that the transmission of monetary policy across euro area economies displays asymmetries and that in line with economic theory these are driven by differences in economies structural characteristics in particular euro area economies in which a higher share of aggregate output is accounted for by sectors servicing interest rate sensitive demand exhibit a stronger transmission of monetary policy to real activity similarly even though the evidence is less conclusive euro area economies which feature more real wage and or fewer unemployment rigidities also appear to display a stronger transmission of monetary policy to real activity

price policy poverty and power within rural west african households abstract this paper explores the impact of agricultural price policy on poverty in west africa a region in which prices are an important tool for raising rural household incomes a game theoretic collective model of household income generation and resource allocation is developed that incorporates three features typical of west african rural households preference heterogeneity among women and men individual resource control and power mediated bargaining over resource control in the face of changes in households economic environments to explore price effects the model is used to simulate the income impacts of large increases in cotton prices accompanying fast paced agricultural liberalisation in burkina faso in the 1980s the paper shows that where resources are controlled individually by household members rather than pooled pareto efficiency in income generation does not hold the impact of agricultural price policy on poverty is mediated by bargaining over resource control within households bo

commercialization and the balance of women s dual roles in non income pooling west african households barked on structural adjustment programs of which agricultural liberalization has been a major component as previously depressed farmgate prices are allowed to rise increasing incentives for farm households to produce marketed crops such liberalization has the side effect of accelerating commercialization through raising households real incomes it is expected to improve rural peoples physical well being both women and men in west african farm

inefficiency of male and female labor supply in agricultural households evidence from uganda this article analyzes the efficiency of the intra household allocation of female and male labor inputs in agricultural production in a collective household model spouses optimal on farm labor supply is such that the marginal rate of technical substitution between male and female labor is equated over different crops using the uganda national household survey 2005 06 we test whether this condition holds by estimating production functions and controlling for endogeneity using a method proposed by gandhi navarro and rivers 2009 we find that women are less productive than men that there is more female labor input on low productivity parcels and that men are relatively more productive on female controlled plots compared with male controlled plots total farm output could be higher and pareto improvements could be possible if male labor was reallocated to female controlled plots and or female labor was reallocated to male controlled plots

the privatization of eeb from cash drain to major contributor in this paper we describe the successful part privatization of empresa de energia de bogota eeb the city owned electricity company in bogota colombia we describe the reason the preparation and the actual sale process as well as the outcome following the part privatization eeb went from being a company on the edge of bankruptcy to one of the most financially secure electricity companies in south america we also place the case in relation to the standard views on direct foreign investment and their social benefit finally we aim to generalize the experience to see what other organizations in a similar position can learn

do spouses realise cooperative gains experimental evidence from rural uganda summary we use experimental data from variants of public good games to test for household efficiency among married couples in rural uganda spouses frequently do not maximise surplus from cooperation and perform better when women are in charge of allocating the common pool women contribute less to this household common pool than men and opportunism is widespread these results cast doubts on many models of household decision making experimental results are correlated with socio economic attributes and suggest that assortative matching improves household efficiency developing non cooperative household models sensitive to the context specificity of gender relations emerges as a promising future research agenda

responses to electricity liberalization the regional strategy of a chilean generator abstract chilean reformers joined the new trend toward liberalization of the electricity markets around 1980 12 years before any other latin american country this paper summarizes the main characteristics of the electricity reforms in chile and other latin american countries it then analyzes the strategic response by the electricity generating company endesa de chile to these reforms endesa completely reformulated its competitive strategy its most significant commitments were its investments across latin america in privatized power plants in argentina peru colombia and brazil endesa based its internationalization on its chilean experience in transforming an inefficient state owned firm and operating it in the new electrical regulatory framework favorable to market competition the company s competitive advantage originated to a great extent in that chile was the first country in latin america to reform its electrical sector

welfare impacts of technological change on women in southern mali abstract it has often been hypothesized that new agricultural technologies could have an adverse impact on women because additional labor required of them reduces the time spent and therefore income earned from private field activities this study shows that the expansion of cotton cultivation on the household communal fields in southern mali associated with the introduction of new technologies results in increased payments to women for their increased labor on the cotton fields unfortunately these payments are small compared to the loss of revenue from private plot production thus the net effect of the expansion of household cotton cultivation is a reduction in incomes of women who cultivate private plots short run policy implications of this study are that improving women s income requires concern with their private plot earnings for example profitability of the private field crops could be increased with higher input use in the long run as land becomes even more constrained emphasis needs to be placed on institutional changes to increase women s bargaining power so that they obtain larger shares of the new income streams resulting from technological change on the communal field institutional changes already occurring in the region with the apparent objective of increasing women s and non household head men s bargaining power include organized work teams and the movement toward smaller nuclear families

household bargaining power and agricultural supply response evidence from ethiopian coffee growers summary this paper investigates whether preference heterogeneity between spouses contributes to limited cash crop production in southern ethiopia using the value of livestock each spouse would take in the event of divorce as a measure of bargaining power this paper shows a significant negative correlation between the bargaining power proxies and coffee output livestock ownership during marriage does not have a significant impact on coffee production in contrast to the case in commercial production women s exit options have a weak positive effect on production of the staple crop enset

preference heterogeneity power and intrahousehold decision making in rural malaysia abstract this paper examines conjugal household responsibilities roles preference heterogeneity and intrahousehold power relations in rural malay families its three major contributions are to provide an effective initial indicator of separate spheres within the family develop and implement a method for measuring the extent of conjugal preference heterogeneity and illustrate the value of combining this direct measure of preference heterogeneity with a measure of power in estimating household expenditure patterns for three major items food schooling and housing improvement these three measurement innovations applied to the rural malaysia context demonstrate the potential for more direct efforts to model and measure intrahousehold decisions

the environmental paradox in generation how south america is gradually becoming more dependent on thermal generation there has been an increasing focus on global warming emission of green house gases ghg and the problems this might create in this article we review the trend in sustainable and renewable electricity generation in south america where the generation portfolio increasingly depends on thermal generation in particular gas south america is a region that has relatively low emissions but the current development is not desirable in environmental terms we analyze the underlying reasons for this development which is related to security of supply deregulation and the cost of renewable energy we review and discuss the policies to promote renewables in the region we analyze the potential advantages and drawbacks of different types of market interventions such as direct subsidies that create potentially strong market distortions more sophisticated market interventions that might be less intrusive but not necessarily as effective as e g firm energy markets we also review market based solutions such as the clean market mechanism and its potential and the use of renewable electricity in non interconnected zones which might be one of the most economically attractive applications of renewables however without a stronger and more aggressive intervention from the governments in the region it is unlikely that the increase in thermal generation can be stopped

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

assessing monetary policy in the euro area a factor augmented var approach in order to overcome the omitted information problem of small scale vector autoregression var models this study combines the var methodology with dynamic factor analysis and assesses the effects of monetary policy shocks in the euro area in the period during which there is a single monetary policy using the factor augmented vector autoregressive favar approach of bernanke et al 2005 we summarize the information contained in a large set of macroeconomic time series with a small number of estimated factors and use them as regressors in recursive vars to evaluate the impact of the nonsystematic component of the european central bank s ecb s actions overall our results suggest that the inclusion of factors in the var allows us to obtain a more coherent picture of the effects of monetary policy innovations both by achieving responses easier to understand from the theoretical point of view and by increasing the precision of such responses moreover this framework allows us to compute impulse res

the immediate challenges for the european central bank immediate challenges for the ecb issues in formulating a single monetary policy this paper discusses a number of issues that the newly constituted board of the ecb will face early on conducting a european monetary policy will be very different from living under the protective umbrella of the bundesbank we discuss voting on the ecb board and argue that the ability to communicate with the public will be critical for the success of the new institution we also ask how a single monetary policy a common change in the interest rate controlled by the ecb is transmitted to the economy of each member country we show that the monetary process differs significantly inside emu initially at least the cost of a disinflation episode could fall disproportionately on a few member countries those with both a financial structure that spreads a monetary contraction widely and a wage price structure that is relatively inflexible this process moreover is sure to evolve in part as a result of financial industry restructuring already under way but in part accentuated by the common money furthermore as the lucas principle suggests the wage price process itself will adapt to the changing focus of european monetary policy rudi dornbusch carlo favero and francesco giavazzi

a century long perspective on agricultural development this article strategically surveys the past century s literature on agricultural development we organize the discussion around three grand themes that reveal the richness of agricultural development as an intellectual endeavor first we explore the role of agriculture in the broader development process from a macroeconomic and political economy perspective we then examine the role of technological and institutional change in successful agricultural development finally the focus turns to a microeconomic perspective on agricultural household decision making and the problems of imperfect and missing markets asymmetric information and transactions costs that lead to widespread apparent inefficiency and disequilibrium

the impact of sovereign rating changes on european syndicated loan spreads the role of the rating based regulation abstract we analyze the impact of sovereign rating changes on european corporate loan spreads we demonstrate that sovereign downgrades lead to significant increases in the spread of loans to domestic firms we find evidence that the negative effects of a sovereign downgrade are widespread across all firms also unrated which are the majority of firms in the european syndicated loan market a relevant part of this impact depends on the reliance of financial regulation on credit ratings certification effect which reduces also loan size and leads to additional burdens for investment grade firms instead we do not find evidence of a significant impact generated by an upgrade our results hold also controlling for the sovereign risk crisis periods lender characteristics and endogeneity of loan contract terms

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

asymmetric monetary policy effects in emu this paper develops a semi structural modelling approach to study asymmetric monetary transmission in europe a system of dynamic equations containing reaction functions for monetary policy as well as output gap and inflation equations is simultaneously estimated for france germany and italy we find asymmetries on the demand side in the strength of interest rate transmission and on the supply side in the effects of the output gap on inflation the responses are similar in germany and italy and generally stronger than in france out of sample tests do not find a structural break in the transmission mechanisms prior to the establishment of the european monetary union

heterogeneous transmission mechanism monetary policy and financial fragility in the eurozone the eurozone economic activity and banking sector have shown substantial fragility over the last years with remarkable country heterogeneity using detailed data on lending conditions and standards we analyse along several key dimensions of heterogeneity how financial fragility has affected the transmission mechanism of the single eurozone monetary policy the analysis shows that the monetary transmission mechanism is time varying and influenced by the financial fragility of the sovereigns banks firms and households the impact of monetary policy on aggregate output is stronger during the financial crisis especially in countries facing increased sovereign financial distress this amplification mechanism moreover operates through the credit channel both the bank lending and the non financial borrower balance sheet channels our results suggest that the bank lending channel has been to a large extent neutralized by the ecb non standard monetary policy interventions but the policy framework until the end of 2011 was insufficient to overcome credit availability problems stemming from deteriorated firm net worth and risk conditions especially for small firms in countries under stress matteo ciccarelli angela maddaloni and jose luis peydro

the cross country impact of ecb policies asymmetries in asymmetries out abstract since its inception the adequacy of the eurozone to be an optimal currency area has been questioned and along with it the homogeneous transmission and impact of the monetary impulses across the member countries we provide a comprehensive assessment of the transmission mechanism s functioning its symmetry impact on target variables and evolution addressing all the questions which have remained unanswered in the previous literature while adding evidence on the impact of non standard policy measures we do so by adopting a bayesian time varying parameters favar model that fixes the flaws present in past research the empirical analysis shows that the occurrence of the two crises significantly altered policy transmission with both the interest rate and credit channel being consistently affected it also shows that while they provided effective stimuli to the economies the unconventional measures implemented were not able to fix those asymmetries policy wise our findings suggest that authorities must push towards consistent innovation on the fiscal side while gaining more confidence with regards to the new monetary toolkit

structural changes in the us economy is there a role for monetary policy this paper investigates the contribution of monetary policy to the changes in output growth and inflation dynamics in the us we identify a policy shock and a policy rule in at ime varying coefficients var using robust sign restrictions the transmission of policy shocks has been relatively stable the variance of the policy shock has decreased over time but policy shocks account for a small fraction of the level and of the variations in inflation and output growth volatility and persistence we find little evidence of a significant increase in the long run response of the interest rate to inflation a more aggressive inflation policy in the 1970s would have produced large output growth costs

formally modelling a gender segregated economy a response to william darity jr abstract william darity jr s model presented in the november 1995 issue of world development darity 1995 is an important attempt to provide an outline for gender based analysis at the household level the model falls short however because it focuses on income maximization without specific constraints on the man s time this paper demonstrates that as formulated there is no internal maximization solution possible and then offers additional economic information that would be meaningful and appropriate to make darky s model well specified

new macroeconomic evidence on monetary policy transmission in the euro area this paper presents some new macroeconomic evidence on the transmission mechanism of monetary policy in the euro area the evidence is drawn from a number of collaborative research projects undertaken by the ecb and the national central banks ncbs of the euro area and utilises a variety of national and euro area aggregate var and structural macroeconomic models a qualitatively similar pattern of results following a monetary policy shock is observed across models with the maximum output effect typically occurring after 1 2 years price effects are somewhat slower to materialise and are more persistent according to both sets of results investment is the main domestic contributor to the drop in real gdp this contrasts with findings for the us where consumption plays a dominant role in the transmission process in addition if it assumed that the exchange rate moves in line with an uncovered interest parity uip condition the short run output and price effects are largely driven by this channel in the structural macroeconomic models jel classifications c50 c52 e52 e17 e5

monetary policy under emu this paper considers a number of issues connected with the implementation of monetary policy in the euro zone these include the techniques of monetary control whether to adopt an explicit inflation target and if so for what index the politics of decision making within the governing council of the european system of central banks the likelihood of there being conflicts of interest between the member countries of the euro zone the interaction of monetary and fiscal policy and the role of the escb in maintaining financial stability copyright 1998 by oxford university press