nonconvexities in the production of timber biodiversity and carbon sequestration abstract fixed logging costs and administrative constraints on logging regulations can create nonconvexities in forestry production sets that include timber and nontimber products managing forests to produce multiple values at a landscape level through the aggregation of stands that are completely or partially specialized in the production of timber or nontimber products can consequently be superior to management systems that treat all stands uniformly even when all stands are identical both fixed costs and administrative constraints are empirically important sources of nonconvexity in tropical rainforests the former is more important when the nontimber product is carbon sequestration while the latter is more important when the nontimber product is biodiversity protection uniform management appears to be superior for the joint production of timber and carbon sequestration while specialized management might often be superior for the joint production of timber and biodiversity at least at low discount rates

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

from malthusian stagnation to modern growth this paper investigates the historical evolution of the relationship among population growth technological change and standard of living the analysis focuses on two most important differences among the malthusian regime post malthusian regime and modern growth regime these were the behavior of income per capita and the relationship between the level of income per capita and the population growth rate the modern growth regime is characterized by steady growth in both income per capita and the level of technology in the malthusian regime technological progress and population growth was glacial by modern standards and income per capita was fairly constant in contrast to the modern growth regime the relationship between per capita income and population growth in the malthusian regime was positive post malthusian regime shared one characteristic with each of the two regimes in addition this paper developed and described an endogenous growth model consistent with the above mentioned transition process

competition risk and managerial incentives this paper examines how the degree of competition among firms in an industry affects the optimal incentives that firms provide to their managers a central assumption is that there is free entry and exit in the industry which implies that changes in the nature of competition lead to changes in the equilibrium market structure the main result is that as the intensity of product market competition increases as a result of greater product substitutability or greater market size principals unambiguously provide stronger incentives to their agents to reduce costs at the same time more intense competition also leads to more volatile firm level profits consequently managers incentives are positively correlated with firm level risk consistent with empirical evidence a decrease in the cost of entering the market has the opposite effect on incentives but still induces a positive correlation between risk and incentives

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

seven centuries of european economic growth and decline this paper investigates very long run pre industrial economic development new annual gdp per capita data for six european countries over the last seven hundred years paint a clearer picture of the history of european economic development first the paper confirms that sustained growth has been a recent phenomenon but rejects the argument that there was no long run growth in living standards before the industrial revolution instead the evidence demonstrates the existence of numerous periods of economic growth before the nineteenth century unsustained but raising gdp per capita it also shows that many of these economies experienced substantial economic decline thus rather than being stagnant pre nineteenth century european economies experienced a great deal of change finally it offers some evidence that from the nineteenth century these economies increased the likelihood of being in a phase of economic growth and reduced the risk of being in a phase of economic decline

the transition to modern agriculture contract farming in developing economies recent years have seen considerable interest in the impact of contract farming on farmers in developing countries motivated out of belief that contract farming spurs transition to modern agriculture in this article we provide a thorough review of the empirical literature on contract farming in bo

natural resource economics and conservation contributions of agricultural economics and agricultural economists research by agricultural economists on natural resources has been distinguished by an interdisciplinary emphasis and a dynamic perspective it has recognized technological and institutional constraints has been oriented toward solving concrete resource management and policy problems and has emphasized empirical and quantitative analysis agricultural economists have introduced methods for evaluating natural resource conservation efforts for predicting adoption of resource conservation technologies and for designing efficient and sustainable resource management policies they have identified ways of improving land management and preventing land degradation proposed reforms of institutions governing water allocation and water quality and introduced policies for balancing environmental and efficiency considerations in the management of pests biodiversity and livestock diseases their research has had substantial impacts on the formulation of resource conservation policies

agency theory and franchising some empirical results this article provides an empirical assessment of various agency theoretic explanations for franchising including risk sharing one sided moral hazard and two sided moral hazard the empirical models use proxies for factors such as risk moral hazard and franchisors need for capital to explain both franchisors decisions about the terms of their contracts royalty rates and up front franchise fees and the extent to which they use franchising in this article i exploit several new sources of data on franchising to construct a cross section of 548 franchisors involved in various business activities in the united states in 1986 the data are most consistent with a model based on two sided moral hazard the empirical models are also more successful at explaining the extent to which franchisors choose to franchise stores than at explaining the terms of franchise contracts finally contrary to the predictions of several theoretical models i find that royalty rates and franchise fees are not negatively related

environmental and distributional impacts of conservation targeting strategies abstract resource purchasing funds have become a major tool for environmental protection and resource conservation these funds use various strategies to target resources for conservation the choice of which may lead to striking differences in environmental performance this paper develops an analytical framework to analyze the impact of alternative targeting strategies on different interest groups including consumers producers labor and environmentalists we show that ignoring the output price effect of purchasing funds reduces environmental gain and in some cases may make a purchasing fund counterproductive and we argue that the optimal design of targeting criteria must consider the price feedback effect

endogenous matching and the empirical determinants of contract form empirical work on contracts typically regresses contract choice on observed principal and agent characteristics if i some of these characteristics are unobserved or partially observed and ii there are incentives whereby particular types of agents end up contracting with particular types of principals estimated coefficients on the observed characteristics may be misleading we address this endogenous matching problem using a data set on agricultural contracts between landlords and tenants in early renaissance tuscany controlling for endogenous matching has an impact on parameters of interest and tenants risk aversion appears to have influenced contract choice

options uncertainty and sunk costs an empirical analysis of land use change abstract in a real option model of land conversion incorporating return uncertainty and sunk costs optimal conversion thresholds are significantly higher than those from expected net present value models not accounting for these factors empirical tests of conversion from agriculture to forest suggest that landowners value the option to convert when making conversion decisions higher uncertainty in returns to all potential uses and lower correlation between shocks to agricultural and forest returns decreases the likelihood of conversion estimates indicate a significant impact on conversion decisions with approximations of option values ranging from 7 to 81 of the expected value of the land asset

tradable set aside requirements tsars conserving spatially dependent environmental amenities land conversion patterns can conflict with endangered species protection by fragmenting the landscape incentive mechanisms can help mitigate the threat of habitat fragmentation by aggregating landowner conservation decisions across the landscape the optimal conservation strategy for endangered species can target the most connected habitat cluster as an initial starting point and then expand the conservation patch to maximize connectivity herein we present an incentive mechanism the tradable set aside requirements tsars designed to target the low cost contiguous conservation landscape and share the burden of conservation among landowners in the lab we examine the performance of two land use conservation policies tsars and the tsars combined with an agglomeration bonus evaluated by economic and biological measures of efficiency we find that tsars relative to a command and control policy increases patch size and habitat connectivity within the landscape additionally combining tsars with the agglomeration bonus increases biological efficiency habitat connectivity and patch size within the landscape but at a price higher opportunity cost tsars with the agglomeration bonus can be more cost effective than a tsars only policy for species sensitive to large core habitat requirements and landscape connectivity

targeting conservation efforts in the presence of threshold effects and ecosystem linkages abstract the prevailing federal policy of targeting conservation programs on the basis of physical criteria tends to ignore the threshold effect of conservation efforts and the correlation between alternative environmental benefits in this article we examine the extent to which conservation funds will be misallocated when threshold effects and correlated benefits are ignored we show that targeting conservation efforts based on physical criteria or political equity concerns may actually lead to the lowest possible benefits to society from conservation expenditure ignoring correlated benefits may lead not only to misallocation of conservation funds among watersheds but also to incorrect resources e g land streams being targeted for conservation the empirical analysis focuses on riparian habitat investments for salmon restoration in the pacific northwest we show that a large portion of conservation benefits would be lost when threshold effects and correlated benefits are ignored and argue that funds should be allocated so that the total value of environmental benefits is maximized not the total amount of resources protected

entrepreneurial orientation risk and incentives the case of franchising the standard principal agent model predicts a trade off in contract design between the protection against risk and incentive motivations distinguishing two types of risks we show that contrary to this traditional view the relationship between risk and incentives can be positive in franchise contracting this implies that the royalty rate decreases with the risk faced by the franchisee on the local market using a unique panel dataset combining french franchise and financial data we address this issue empirically alongside performance outcomes the data support the hypothesis of a negative relationship between risk and the royalty rate which contradicts the prediction of the standard agency theory furthermore our estimations provide evidence that chain performance increases with an adjusted royalty rate this paper has important implications for contract design showing that with increasing local market uncertainty and low risk aversion franchisors should reduce the royalty rate

evidence on performance pay and risk aversion abstract making use of a unique representative data set we find clear evidence that risk aversion has a highly significant and substantial negative impact on the probability that an employee s pay is performance contingent which confirms the well known risk incentive trade off

malthus in sweden this paper presents some new and unique cross county data from 19th century sweden over birth death and marriage rates grain prices and harvests local grain prices correlate negatively with local harvests suggesting imperfectly integrated food markets the so called positive and preventive checks are also present good local harvests are associated with high birth and marriage rates and low death rates we also find that the fertility and marriage effects from changes in prices but not harvests are greater in counties that rely more on manufacturing consistent with an open economy model of fertility choice where agents earn income from both agriculture and manufacturing

transaction costs and the design of cropshare contracts modern cropshare contracts are explained using a model in which agents are risk neutral and contract rules are chosen to maximize expected joint wealth it is shown that the farmer either bears the entire cost of inputs or shares the costs with the landowner in the same proportion as the output the incentives of altering the cropshare percentage are examined and are used to derive implications about the portion of the crop that will be owned by the farmer the model is tested and supported using data from a 1986 survey offarmers and landowners in nebraska and south dakota

unintended impacts of public investments on private decisions the depletion of forested wetlands by affecting relative economic returns infrastructure investments can induce major changes in private land use the authors find that 30 percent of forested wetland depletion in the mississippi valley has resulted from private decisions induced by federal flood control projects despite explicit federal policy to preserve wetlands the model aggregates individual land use decisions using a parametric distribution of unobserved land quality dynamic simulations are used to quantify the impacts on wetlands of federal projects and other factors copyright 1990 by american economic association

targeting incentives to reduce habitat fragmentation the fragmentation of wildlife habitat has long been recognized as a principal threat to terrestrial biodiversity in this paper we develop a theoretical model to analyze the spatial targeting of incentives for the restoration of forested landscapes when land quality is spatially heterogeneous and wildlife habitat can be enhanced by reducing fragmentation we consider a regulator who uses subsidies to encourage the conversion of private agricultural land to forest on a pre defined set of landscapes the regulator can observe land use choices but not the opportunity costs on individual land parcels the important insight to emerge from the theoretical analysis is that solutions at or near corners are a strong possibility on each landscape either none or all of the agricultural land should be converted to forest corner solutions are directly linked to the spatial process determining habitat benefits to verify the theoretical insight we present a simulation of the effects of incentive based policies on the spatial distribution of forests in south carolina the empirical methodology integrates an econometric model of land use change with gis based landscape simulations the empirical findings strongly support our conjecture regarding corner solutions and the optimal targeting policy is shown to produce substantial welfare gains over a spatially uniform incentive

the child is father of the man implications for the demographic transition we propose a new theory of the demographic transition based on the evidence from natural sciences that physical development during childhood affects adult life expectancy positively this theory is embodied in a continuous time olg framework where fertility longevity and education all result from individual decisions we conclude that a sustained improvement in physical development is at the basis of the observed demographic transition in today s developed countries and may be an important factor in explaining the slow transition from the malthusian towards the modern era the dynamics of the proposed model reproduce the key features of the demographic transition including sustained improvements in child physical development permanent increase in life expectancy a hump shaped evolution of both population growth and fertility and late increases in secondary educational attainments

habitat and open space at risk of land use conversion targeting strategies for land conservation funds available to purchase land and easements for conservation purposes are limited this article provides a targeting strategy for protecting multiple environmental benefits that includes heterogeneity in land costs and probability of land use conversion by incorporating spatially explicit land use change and hedonic price models this strategy is compared to two alternative strategies that omit either land cost or conversion threat based on dynamic programming and monte carlo simulations with alternating periods of conservation and development we demonstrate that the positive correlation between land costs and probability of land use conversion affects targeting efficiency using parcel data from sonoma county california

entertaining malthus bread circuses and economic growth we augment a simple malthusian model by allowing agents to consume something besides food whereas food in our case bread is both enjoyable and necessary for survival the other good circuses is pure entertainment it has absolutely no impact on survival but does enhance the quality of life with this very simple modification we show that whereas food supply may remain at subsistence technological change will have a great impact on the consumption of everything else most strikingly though the population remains bound by a malthusian constraint sustained improvements to living standards can no longer be ruled out we also argue that our model better fits the known historical facts the widely held belief that growth prior to the industrial revolution was flat is based largely on historical measures of food production although food supply throughout history may have been and for most individuals still is at or near subsistence levels technological advancements have brought greater convenience and comfort to wealthy and poor alike a possibility that malthus himself conceded in his later and often ignored work therefore our model not only describes historical growth patterns and demographic transitions better than traditional malthusian models but is also more in line with malthus later thinking jel classification numbers b10 i31 j1 n1 o30

from malthus to modern growth can epidemics explain the three regimes we model demographic and economic long run development in a setting where mortality is endogenous and subject to epidemic shocks the model replicates the full transition from malthusian stagnation to modern growth consistent with the historical facts the economy also passes an intermediate post malthusian phase where growth rates of both population and per capita income increase simultaneously as mortality rates fall and become less volatile the escape from the malthusian trap is the result of a series of mild epidemic shocks making it inevitable at some stage but its timing random calibrations show that it can differ by thousands of generations absent differences in exogenous parameters

effects of technology on incentive design of share contracts do observed contracts have the properties predicted by the principal agent model with moral hazard in contract theory this paper tests the predictions of such an agency model in the context of sharecropping in north india the most well known explanation for sharecropping is based on the principal agent model with a trade off between risk and incentives even though sharecropping contracts are quite prevalent in rural areas of developing countries there is very little evidence on factors determining the instruments used to provide incentives in such contracts using information in the data giving rise to exogenous variation in technology across regions this paper tests for the effect of cultivation technology on the incentive structure of share contracts as predicted by the agency model existing empirical evidence on sharecropping seems to indicate that yield on sharecropped plots is lower than on owner operated plots i e there is an incentive problem or moral hazard radwan a shaban 1987 jean jacques laffont and mohamed s matoussi 1995 there is some informal evidence that landowners use various mechanisms to improve efficiency in sharecropping by participating in cost sharing and by repeating contracts robert m townsend and rolf a mueller 1994 examine the nature of these mechanisms in detail but their data do not permit econometric tests more generally though the principal agent model has been widely studied there is little existing empirical evidence for it michael c jensen and kevin j murphy 1990 find that executive compensation is only weakly sensitive to firm performance in recent work rajesh k aggarwal and andrew a samwick 1999 find that executive s pay performance sensitivity is decreasing in the volatility of firm s performance however their results are sensitive to the inclusion of other characteristics of the firms in the regressions as pierre a chiappori and bernard salanie 2003 note in a recent survey empirical work on contract theory using nonexperimental data needs to be careful in adequately correcting for underlying heterogeneity across agents otherwise the parameters of interest would be hard to interpret if such heterogeneity affects contract choice for example douglas w allen and dean lueck 1995 find no role for risk in the choice between share contract and fixed rent contracts but they do not take the heterogeneity across agents into account in a recent paper addressing the issue of heterogeneity across agents ackerberg and botticini 2002 find a significant role for risk in the choice between share contract and fixed rent contract after correcting for endogenous matching between landowners and tenants they find that wealthier tenants are more likely to be in fixed rent contracts in this paper we are able to address such estimation issues and check for the robustness of our results regarding the relationship between technology and the design of share contracts department of economics pennsylvania state university university park pa 16801 e mail pxp22 psu edu this paper derives from related work done earlier in my dissertation i am grateful to two anonymous referees for very helpful suggestions i thank james heckman lars stole robert townsend kala krishna and seminar participants for useful comments financial support from the andrew mellon foundation for both rounds of fieldwork is gratefully acknowledged any errors remain my own 1 see nirvikar singh 1991 for a survey of various theories of sharecropping including steven n cheung 1969 c h hanumantha rao 1971 joseph e stiglitz 1974 david newbery and stiglitz 1979 avishay braverman and stiglitz 1982 mukesh eswaran and ashok kotwal 1985 and sudhir shetty 1988 a common feature of the different theories is an emphasis on uncertainty and asymmetric information 2 an exception is daniel a ackerberg and maristella botticini 2002 ackerberg and botticini differ from our paper in that they examine the role of tenant s risk aversion in the choice between fixed rental contract and share contract they do not examine share contracts per se 3 see john e core and wayne guay 2000

the optimal allocation of conservation funds abstract this paper presents a framework to evaluate alternative designs of conservation programs and their implications for the allocation of conservation funds we show that the efficient allocation of conservation funds must consider two important pooling effects cumulative effects and interrelationships among alternative environmental benefits ignoring the cumulative effects of environmental benefits may cause conservation funds to be overly dispersed geographically and as a result may result in minimum environmental benefits when the budget is small ignoring the interrelationships among alternative environmental benefits may result in not only misallocation of conservation funds among geographical areas but also incorrect resources being targeted for conservation practices implications of these results for the design of conservation programs are discussed

the determinants of subsistence income in a malthusian world abstract this study constructs a simple two sector malthusian model with agriculture and industry and uses it to identify the determinants of income in a malthusian equilibrium we make standard assumptions about preferences and technologies but in contrast to existing studies we assume that children and other consumption goods are gross substitutes consistent with the conventional malthusian model the present theory shows that productivity growth in agriculture has no effect on equilibrium income more importantly we also show that equilibrium income varies not just with the death rate as has recently been demonstrated in the literature but also with the level of productivity in the industrial sector an empirical analysis using data for pre industrial england lends support to both hypotheses

an econometric model of farm tenures in fifteenth century florence we estimate a discrete choice model of farm tenures in fifteenth century florence using data in the form of an unbalanced panel with individual farms nested within landlords total property holdings the probabilities of wage rental and sharecropping tenures are estimated allowing for landlord specific random effects specification tests are used to validate the model our results emphasize the role of long lived fixed assets vines vulnerable to damage by short term over production as a factor favouring sharecropping which taxes over production however we find evidence against theories emphasizing high monitoring costs as an influence favouring rental contracts

dynamics and stagnation in the malthusian epoch this paper examines the central hypothesis of the influential malthusian theory according to which improvements in the technological environment during the pre industrial era had generated only temporary gains in income per capita eventually leading to a larger but not significantly richer population exploiting exogenous sources of cross country variations in land productivity and the level of technological advancement the analysis demonstrates that in accordance with the theory technological superiority and higher land productivity had significant positive effects on population density but insignificant effects on the standard of living during the time period 1 1500 ce

economics of agricultural supply chain design a portfolio selection approach agrifood firms in a globalizing and competitive market both in developing and developed countries often undertake innovations in products and technologies innovators such as firms and other agents develop supply chains to accommodate the nature of the innovations in this article we analyze an innovator s supply chain design problem the design of the supply chain involves three sets of decisions the first is how much to produce the second involves how to undertake production and how many resources to allocate to the production of feedstock agricultural products that are inputs for processing processing and marketing the third set involves deciding on the amount of feedstock to be obtained through contracts with farmers we show that the innovator determines its overall level of production by taking advantage of its monopoly power derived from the innovation in the output market and behaves as a monopsony in buying feedstock from contractors these decisions are constrained by the marginal cost of capital and the properties of production and marketing technologies when the innovator is risk averse risks in farm production processing and marketing will affect both processed output and the share of feedstock bought through contracts

modeling joint production of wildlife and timber abstract production of marketed commodities and protection of natural systems often conflict a focus on only one goal can result in large losses in other goals and may result in inefficient and unsustainable outcomes in this paper we develop a method that combines economic and ecological models in a dynamic and spatial analysis to evaluate land use decisions and find cost effective alternatives for which it is not possible to do better on one objective without harming another objective the method is demonstrated using timber production and species conservation on a forested landscape over a 100 year planning horizon current land use strategies are simulated and compared with cost effective alternatives the approach is compared to a static reserve approach similar to previous studies and found to produce substantially more efficient management strategies for the case study landscape

transaction costs risk aversion and the choice of contractual arrangements publisher summary this chapter discusses transaction costs risk aversion and the choice of contractual arrangements every transaction involves a contract and the transactions conducted in the marketplace entail outright or partial transfers of property rights among individual contracting parties the contractual arrangements through which these transfers are negotiated are several and varied the chapter presents a theory that states that economic efficiency is the same under various land tenure arrangements subject to the constraint of private property rights although transaction costs exist in the real world the theory enables the understanding of much of the farming behavior however the presence of a variety of contractual arrangements under the same constraint of competition poses the question of the choice of these arrangements if a firm can increase efficiency in production by employing productive resources of more than one resource owner a contract to combine the resources will be obtained the formation of the contract involves partial transfers of property rights in one form or another such as leasing hiring or mortgaging

producer protection legislation and termination damages in the presence of contracting frictions this study models producer protection legislation ppl that would grant growers the right to claim damages if their contracts are prematurely terminated in the absence of contracting frictions that prevent contractors from redesigning contracts to accommodate exogenous policy changes producer protection legislation damages ppld would not be distortionary or redistributive if contracting frictions exist then ppld would have efficiency and redistributive effects though the direction and magnitude depends on the size of ppl damages vis a vis expected damages under existing contract law this study clarifies the conditions under which ppld would decrease efficiency and protect growers

the three horsemen of riches plague war and urbanization in early modern europe how did europe escape the iron law of wages we construct a simple malthusian model with two sectors and multiple steady states and use it to explain why european per capita incomes and urbanization rates increased during the period 1350 1700 productivity growth can only explain a small fraction of the rise in output per capita population dynamics changes of the birth and death schedules were far more important determinants of steady states we show how a major shock to population can trigger a transition to a new steady state with higher per capita income the black death was such a shock raising wages substantially because of engel s law demand for urban products increased and urban centers grew in size european cities were unhealthy and rising urbanization pushed up aggregate death rates this effect was reinforced by diseases spread through war financed by higher tax revenues in addition rising trade also spread diseases in this way higher wages themselves reduced population pressure we show in a calibration exercise that our model can account for the sustained rise in european urbanization as well as permanently higher per capita incomes in 1700 without technological change wars contributed importantly to the rise of europe even if they had negative short run effects we thus trace europe s precocious rise to economic riches to interactions of the plague shock with the belligerent political environment and the nature of cities

overconfidence and excess entry an experimental approach psychological studies show that most people are overconfident about their own relative abilities and unreasonably optimistic about their futures e g shelly e taylor and j d brown 1988 neil d weinstein 1980 when assessing their position in a distribution of peers on almost any positive trait like driving ability ola svenson 1981 income prospects or longevity a vast majority of people say they are above the average although of course only half can be if the trait is symmetrically distributed this paper explores whether optimistic biases could plausibly and predictably influence economic behavior in one particular setting entry into competitive games or markets many empirical studies show that most new businesses fail within a few years for example using plant level data from the u s census of manufacturers spanning 1963 1982 timothy dunne et al 1988 estimated that 61 5 percent of all entrants exited within five years and 79 6 percent exited within 10 years most of these exits are failures see also dunne et al 1989a 1989b d shapiro and r s khemani 1987

risk coping land tenure and land markets an overview of the literature over the last decades a significant amount of literature has been published on informal risk coping in developing countries in this paper we review how informal risk coping has been addressed in the land tenure literature from two main perspectives a first stream of research looks at how customary tenure and communal property perform key informal risk coping functions a second subset of this literature analyses how informal risk coping creates land market imperfections through sharecropping or distress sales the segmentation of the literature results from the demsetzian property rights framework further research on risk coping and land tenure would benefit from examining recent work on property regimes

agri environmental policies for biodiversity when the spatial pattern of the reserve matters the aim of this paper is to compare different environmental policies for cost effective habitat conservation on agricultural lands when the desired spatial pattern of reserves is a random mosaic we use a spatially explicit mathematical programming model which studies the farmers behavior as profit maximizers under technical and administrative constraints facing different policy measures each farmer chooses the land use on each field which determines the landscape at the regional level a spatial pattern index ripley l function is then associated to the obtained landscape indicating on the degree of dispersion of the reserve we compare a subsidy per hectare of reserve with an auction scheme and an agglomeration malus we find that the auction is superior to the uniform subsidy for cost efficiency the agglomeration malus does better than the auction for the spatial pattern but is more costly

population technology and growth from malthusian stagnation to the demographic transition and beyond this paper develops a unied growth model that captures the historical evolution of population technology and output it encompasses theendogenous transitionbetween three regimes that have characterized economic development the economy evolves from amalthusianregime wheretechnologicalprogressis slow andpopulationgrowthprevents anysustainedriseinincomepercapita intoapost malthusianregime wheretechnological progress rises and population growth absorbs only part of output growth ultimately a demographic transition reverses the positive relationship between income and population growth andtheeconomyentersamoderngrowthregimewithreducedpopulationgrowth

understanding per capita income growth in preindustrial europe in a malthusian environment per capita incomes are stagnant meaning they cannot exhibit sustained growth however they can still display volatility and persistence when hit by shocks this article simulates a malthusian model with realistic life cycle structure and stochastic and accelerating growth in land productivity we find that differences across simulated economies are quantitatively similar to those found in recently compiled data over gdp per capita for several european countries before 1800 this speaks to the relevance of the malthusian model for understanding preindustrial development in europe contrasting with contentions to the contrary in some of the existing literature

efficient moral hazard abstract this paper presents an infinite horizon discounted dynamic programming model of the endogenous opportunity costs of an agent s effort that is allocated among an endogenous number of principals an agent allocates effort between evaluating new principals and attending to current principals since each principal s return is not maximized by the agent s optimal allocation moral hazard occurs in equilibrium however since the agent maximizes the total expected value of all undertaken projects the agent s allocation of effort is efficient if the agent chooses a single principal then moral hazard does not occur and the allocation is efficient these results are contrary to the inefficient moral hazard results in bilateral principal agent p a and common agency c a models

the role of risk and risk aversion in adoption of alternative marketing arrangements by the u s farmers the objective of this article is to analyse the relationship between farmers risk aversions and the riskiness of various agricultural enterprises to see which marketing arrangements would typically emerge relying on the basic agency theory model we hypothesize the prevalence of alternative marketing arrangements amas in situations with high risk averse farmers and high risk enterprises and the prevalence of spot cash markets for low risk averse participants and less risky enterprises our empirical tests are carried out using the 2004 agricultural resource management survey arms the empirical results are largely supportive of the agency theory of contract choice

uncertainty entrepreneurship and sharecropping in india this study attempts to explain the coexistence of different farm lease arrangements in terms of the varying significance of entrepreneurial functions in india crop sharing arrangements are common in areas of relative economic certainty with very little scope for decision making for example for product and factor substitution and where the entrepreneurial profit is low fixed cash rents are common in situations of high uncertainty where the scope for decision making is significant or where the crops are highly profitable efficiency considerations predominate in areas of sharecropping favoring a smaller farm size whereas under high uncertainty large size is favored for reducing risk

risk preferences and the economics of contracts t he literature of risk aversion and risk preference is one of the richest sources of ad hoc assumptions concerning tastes n o significant behavior has been illuminated by assumptions of differences in tastes such theories have been a convenient crutch to lean on when the analysis has bogged down they give the appearance of considered judgement yet really have only been ad hoc arguments that disguise analytical failures george j stigler and gary s becker 1977 p 89

the risk preferences of u s executives in this paper i elicit risk attitudes of u s executives by calibrating a subjective option valuation model for option exercising data 1996 to 2008 yielding approximately 65 000 values of relative risk aversion rra for almost 7 000 executives the observed behavior is generally consistent with moderate risk aversion and a median mean rra close to one three values are validated for chief executive officers ceos by testing theory based predictions on the influence of individual characteristics on risk preferences such as gender marital status religiosity and intelligence senior managers such as ceos presidents and chairpersons of the boards of directors are significantly less risk averse than non senior executives rra heterogeneity is strongly correlated with sector membership and firm level variables such as size performance and capital structure alternative factors influencing option exercises are tested for their influence on rra values this paper was accepted by brad barber finance

vintage human capital demographic trends and endogenous growth we study how economic growth is affected by demographics in an overlapping generations model with a realistic survival law individuals optimally chose the dates at which they leave school to enter the labor market and at which they retire endogenous growth arises thanks to the accumulation of generation specific human capital favorable shifts in the survival probabilities always induce longer schooling and later retirement but have an ambiguous effect on growth the relationship between the growth of population and per capita growth is hump shaped increases in longevity can be responsible for a switch from a no growth regime to a sustained growth regime and for a positive relationship between fertility and growth to vanish

post malthusian dynamics in pre industrial scandinavia theories of economic growth hypothesize that the transition from pre industrial stagnation to sustained growth is associated with a post malthusian phase in which technological progress raises income and spurs population growth while offsetting diminishing returns to labor evidence suggests that england was characterized by post malthusian dynamics preceding the industrial revolution however given england s special position as the forerunner of the industrial revolution it is unclear if a transitory post malthusian period is a general phenomenon using data from denmark norway and sweden this research provides evidence for the existence of a post malthusian phase in the transition from stagnation to growth in scandinavia

malthus to solow a unified growth theory is developed that accounts for the roughly constant living standards displayed by world economies prior to 1800 as well as the growing living standards exhibited by modern industrial economies our theory also explains the industrial revolution which is the transition from an era when per capita incomes are stagnant to one with sustained growth the authors use a standard growth model with several technologies the first denoted the malthus technology requires land labor and reproducible capital as inputs the second denoted the solow technology does not require land the authors show that in the early stages of development only the malthus technology is used and due to population growth living standards are stagnant despite technological progress eventually technological progress causes the solow technology to become profitable and both technologies are employed at this point living standards improve since population growth has less influence on per capita income growth in the limit the economy behaves like a standard solow growth model excerpt