individual taxpayer response to tax cuts 1982 1984 with implications for the revenue maximizing tax rate abstract this paper measures the response of taxpayers to the u s personal rate reductions from 1982 to 1984 a baseline income distribution is created to describe what level and distribution could be expected in the absence of tax changes comparison of this baseline with actual tax return data shows that at least one sixth and probably one quarter of the revenue ascribable to the rate reductions was recouped by changes in taxpayer behavior the data also show that federal income tax revenue would have been maximized at a tax rate of about 35 percent and total income tax revenue maximized at a total tax rate of about 40 percent

food security in less developed countries 1970 to 1990 despite a global food surplus almost half of the worlds less developed countries suffer significant problems concerning food most social science and policy discussions of food security make the food availability assumption that increased food supply is the key to reducing hunger critics argue however that increased food supply has little impact on hunger and that the primary culprits are entrenched inequality and militarism a lagged panel analysis of food supply and child hunger rates 1970 90 shows that the food supply has only modest effects on child hunger rates and that food supply is structurally rooted in development processes domestic investment urban bias foreign capital penetration while child hunger is politically based in arms imports internal violence and political democratization population pressure tapped by increased age dependency undermines both the supply of food and the populations access to it and culturally dualism magnifies the effects of population pressure on child hunger the effects of economic growth trickle down to affect food both supply and child hunger and economic growth is also positively correlated with political democratization suggesting there is no short term trade off between growth democratization and social equity authors

efficiency and equity in the producer levy of india india s producer levy scheme has been considered a prime example of government market intervention to depress price incentives for farm producers analysis in this study shows that the scheme increases the average producer price for the short run with inelastic supply in this case significant improvements in income distribution can be obtained with little loss of economic efficiency if the scheme is implemented effectively however if the scheme is applied for the long run it might result in market instability more critically the scheme is likely to have an adverse effect on income distribution in the absence of effective implementation

recurring contradictions in agrarian development pesticide problems in caribbean basin nontraditional agriculture abstract the promotion of nontraditional export agriculture is a cornerstone of us development efforts to spur economic growth and help pull central america and the caribbean out of a decade long crisis this paper analyzes the continued reliance on pesticides in the current development strategy and the socioeconomic implications of the ecological disruption the chemical technology generates relying on interviews with producers exporters and government officials from guatemala the dominican republic and the united states as well as surveys of guatemalan farmers the authors argue that the current agricultural development strategy perpetuates social and technological factors which heighten the potential for renewed crisis in the agrarian sector inadequate knowledge of pesticide hazards and a lack of control over pesdticide use is leaving farmers farm workers and exporters increasingly vulnerable to economic public health and environmental problems paradoxically some measures to overcome these problems threaten to undermine efforts to improve social equity by further concentrating land and resources in the hands of large national and transnational production units

middle income classes and food crises the new food feed competition famine was averted the novelty was that a 3 shortfall in grain production led to a 250 price increase this specific manifestation of the food crisis was the result of the congruence of an old force population pressure with new ones the income explosion and income inequality in a world in which the economic distance between the rich and the poor grows ever greater even minor food shortages are likely to assume major proportions the agricultural price instability that will ensue represents a major threat to the food security of less developed countries examination of the ingredients of modern food crises can help explain some of the new ramifications of the age old problem of world hunger the three elements that are reflected in the food demand situation are population incomes and prices to avoid needless complexity i will reserve my examination of prices to the end population and incomes deserve more detailed analysis

two stage residual inclusion estimation addressing endogeneity in health econometric modeling the paper focuses on two estimation methods that have been widely used to address endogeneity in empirical research in health economics and health services research two stage predictor substitution 2sps and two stage residual inclusion 2sri 2sps is the rote extension to nonlinear models of the popular linear two stage least squares estimator the 2sri estimator is similar except that in the second stage regression the endogenous variables are not replaced by first stage predictors instead first stage residuals are included as additional regressors in a generic parametric framework we show that 2sri is consistent and 2sps is not results from a simulation study and an illustrative example also recommend against 2sps and favor 2sri our findings are important given that there are many prominent examples of the application of inconsistent 2sps in the recent literature this study can be used as a guide by future researchers in health economics who are confronted with endogeneity in their empirical work

compensating differentials and self selection an application to lawyers this paper models individual choice between two types of jobs as dependent on the difference in potential earnings and on preferences for nonpecuniary the model leads to simultaneous estimation of earnings and job choice functions in a manner that takes account of self selection of individuals into the sector of highest utility an application to lawyers choosing between private and public interest law casts doubt on the notion that public interest lawyers are accepting substantially lower earnings by virtue of their choice an impression derived from estimation of earnings functions without accounting for self selection the estimation technique also takes proper account of the choice based nature of the sample which appears to be important

banking deregulation allocational consequences of relaxing entry barriers abstract we present an equilibrium analysis to predict the long run allocational consequences and risk implications of banking deregulation loan demand and deposit supply functions are derived from primitive assumptions about the preferences of individuals and banks are viewed as differentiated competitors in a spatial context we find that a relaxation of entry barriers into banking improves the welfare of borrowers and savers at the expense of bank stockholders equilibrium loan interest rates fall and equilibrium deposit interest rates rise as banking becomes more competitive despite this the equilibrium debt equity ratios of banks increase as entry barriers are relaxed we also examine the implications of capital standards and find that an increase in the minimum capital requirement benefits borrowers but hurts depositors

testing the food first hypothesis a cross national study of dependency sectoral growth and food intake in less developed countries abstract previous cross national studies on dependency and economic growth in less developed countries ldcs seldom compare the impacts of different kinds of dependency their focus on economic growth also overlooks the fact that growth per se does not necessarily benefit the masses an alternative measure of the absolute living standard of the masses i e food intake is examined in this paper this study analyzes data from 73 ldcs after comparing the effects of manufacturing growth and cereal production growth on food intake this study supports the food first hypothesis derived from lappe and collins 1977 work since it demonstrates that in most ldcs even in middle income ldcs cereal production has a much stronger effect on food intake than does manufacturing growth

multimarket competition in banking with an example from the portuguese market abstract banks typically have more than one branch and their activities usually span over several markets this multilocational nature of banks generates equilibrium price dispersion the paper proposes a spatial competition model to explain price differences across banks in the deposits market the model allows to separate two different sources of observed market power collusion in the industry and product differentiation induced by location in local markets an application to portuguese commercial banking is reported as an illustration

domestic and international determinants of bank profits foreign banks in australia abstract this paper develops and tests a model that integrates the existing multinational bank literature with the domestic bank profits literature using data for australia this paper demonstrates that an integrated model results in a small increase in explanatory power when compared to models drawn solely from the multinational banking literature the paper finds that profits are a negative function of competitor market share and bank licence status and a positive function of australian size and home gdp growth it is argued that there is incomplete integration between the market segments of domestic and multinational banks due to the first mover advantages of incumbent banks

does health insurance reduce illness related worker absenteeism the objective of this article is to examine whether having health insurance reduces illness related absenteeism among older workers a nationally representative sample of 1780 workers in the united states aged 52 64 are drawn from the 2004 2006 health and retirement study hrs binary logistic regressions and censored tobit models are estimated for workers likelihood of missing work days due to illness and the number of illness related work days missed respectively while explicitly addressing the possibility of insurance selection effects the findings suggest that over a 12 month period older workers without health insurance are as likely as insured workers to miss work days due to illness and there are no differences in the number of days missed between insured and uninsured workers however there is strong evidence that poor baseline health onset of new diseases and longer hospitalization significantly increase an older worker s absenteeism at work these results suggest that having health ins

critique and transformation on the hypothetical nature of ecosystem service value and its neo marxist liberal and pragmatist criticisms abstract ecosystem service valuation esv attempts to transform the opposition of human economic necessity and ecological conservation by valuing the latter in terms of the services rendered by the former however despite a number of esv inspired sustainability initiatives since the 1990s global ecological degradation continues to accelerate this suggests that esv has fallen far short of its goals of sustainable social transformation a failure which has generated considerable criticism this paper reviews three prominent lines of esv criticism 1 the neo marxist criticism which emphasizes the fictitious character of ecosystem commodities 2 the liberal criticism through friedrich hayek s concept scientistic objectivism and 3 the pragmatist criticism of value monism although each form of criticism provides insight into the limitations of esv all share esv s inability to discern what kind of social transformation is possible unable to provide an account of their own immersion in social and historical context these approaches operate in the hypothetical in light of these shortcomings this paper advances a critical theory approach which we contend provides conceptual tools uniquely well suited to more adequately address the question of social transformation

absenteeism as a mechanism for approaching an optimal labor market equilibrium an empirical study this research examines absence as a response to a non optimal labor market equilibrium its basic premise is that workers may be using absenteeism to move themselves closer to an optimal equilibrium in situations where due to greater than desiredwork hours the workers marginal rate of substitution of income for leisure mrs is less than the wage rate for the last hour worked this notion is tested for a sample of workers using tobit analysis with individual data from company records on absence and wages and an empirical measure of each worker s mrs the results indicate a significant positive relationship between absence and the difference between a worker s mrs and wage

bank commercial loan markets and the role of market structure evidence from surveys of commercial lending abstract this paper seeks to test two tenets that underlie the current practice of antitrust analysis in banking the first is the view that bank commercial loan markets are local in nature and the second is the view that banks in more concentrated markets are more likely to engage in some form of noncompetitive behavior tests of both of these tenets are conducted using an extensive set of loan specific survey information not previously employed to address these issues results consistent with the existence of local banking markets and the dominance of competitive differences as an explanation for observed differences in loan rates are found

inferring market information from the price and quantity of s l deposits abstract this paper infers market information embedded in the price and quantity of s l deposits while previous empirical research typically treats the risk premium as the key element of deposit interest spread subsidy shifting theory suggests that deposit rates also contain a subsidy shifting premium that arises from an institution s eagerness to fund loan and investment opportunities that extract deposit insurance subsidies this paper examines the existence and the nature of both premiums and shows how regulators can use this information to make regulatory oversight more effective

a note on the substitution between wage and non wage benefits in spot labour markets abstract recent empirical work suggests that spot labour market workers have a strong preference towards wages over fringe benefits this paper provides a theoretical framework based on this finding after a discussion of the utility function and equilibrium the paper proceeds to a comparative statics analysis an important result is that workers spend all extra compensation on wages only this is shown to be true in the case that wage benefits are taxed furthermore proportional taxes have no effect for workers choice between wage and non wage benefits

the elusive wage benefit trade off the case of employer provided health insurance this study shows that standard regressions estimated to measure a trade off between wages and health insurance are misspecified by insufficiently accounting for establishment and firm size an interactive size corrected specification is more likely to reveal a trade off furthermore because insurance decisions are typically made by firms and wages set by establishments the insurance constraint on establishments in multi establishment firms weakens the trade off we use model generated data to show that both factors contribute to the failure in previous research to identify a trade off and data from a cross section of northern californian establishments to test for a trade off in multi establishment and single establishment firms

foundations of the structure conduct performance paradigm in banking this paper employs an explicit model of the banking firm to derive formally and thereby assess critically the most commonly tested relationships implied by the structure conduct performance paradigm as it applies to the banking industry these include the relationship between loan rates and market concentration deposit rates and market concentration and bank profitability and market concentration the necessary assumptions and simplifications implicit in past empirical studies are outlined and suggestions for future empirical implementation of the underlying model are presented copyright 1991 by ohio state university press

what s different about banks abstract negotiable certificates of deposit cd s trade in the capital market in competition with other securities like commercial paper and bankers acceptances if cd s must pay lenders competitive monetary interest the reserve tax on cd s is borne by bank borrowers viability of the tax means there must be something special about bank loans that makes some borrowers willing to pay higher interest rates than those on other securities of equivalent risk moreover there must be something special about banks that prevents other intermediaries from competing to assure that it never pays to finance loans with cd s

why does asset inequality affect unemployment a study of the demand composition problem abstract this paper is devoted to a general equilibrium analysis of the relationship between the inequality in asset holdings and the aggregate levels of output and employment in a developing economy since luxuries and basic goods compete for the use of the same scarce resources unemployment is concieved as a mechanism whereby the market demand for basic goods can be limited to a sufficiently low level so that the high demand for luxuries can be met the ambiguous effects of capital accumulation on employment are also examined

economic growth convergence and world food demand and supply in projecting global food demand to 2050 much attention has been given to rising demand due to the projected population increase from the current 7 4 billion to more than 9 billion an increasingly important source of the increase in food demand is per capita demand growth induced by rising income per person since the proportion of income spending on food decreases as incomes rise growth in global food demand will be greater if incomes grow faster in developing countries than in high income countries such a pattern of income convergence has become established in recent years making it important to assess the implications for food demand and supply using a resource based measure of food that accounts for the much higher production costs associated with dietary upgrading this paper concludes that per capita demand growth is likely to be a more important driver of food demand than population growth between now and 2050 using the middle ground international institute for applied systems analysis shared socioeconomic pathway projections to 2050 which assume continued income convergence the paper finds that the increase in food demand 102 percent would be roughly a third greater than without convergence 78 percent since the impact of convergence on the supply side is much more muted convergence puts upward pressure on world food prices partially offsetting a baseline trend toward falling world food prices to 2050

a new test for supplier inducement and application to the canadian market for dental care abstract the hypothesis that dentists do not induce demand for their services is tested using reduced form estimates of the price elasticity of demand if demand is autonomous shifts in supply for whatever reason should generate equivalent estimates provided access costs change proportionately with shifts in supply if demand inducement is present demand can appear to be very elastic or very inelastic depending on what is causing the shift in supply each of three applications of this test conducted in the context of jointly estimated fee and quantity equations using annual canadian data for 1956 1989 rejects the no inducement hypothesis

asymmetric information and the structure of the banking industry abstract we analyze the effects of informational asymmetries on the market structure of the banking industry in a multi period model of spatial competition in the process of lending incumbent banks gather proprietary information about their clients acquiring an advantage over potential entrants we show that these informational asymmetries are important determinants of the industry structure and of banks strategic behavior contrary to traditional models of horizontal differentiation the steady state equilibrium is characterized by a finite number of banks even in the absence of exogenous fixed costs in addition less concentrated industry structures may be associated with higher interest rates

china s food economy to the twenty first century supply demand and trade this paper accounts for the structural changes now taking place in china and suggests that china is not likely to become either an enormous importer or exporter of grain ultimately though china s grain balances will depend on decisions made by chinese policymakers rather than natural resource constraints p v this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

biofuels and the role of space in sustainable innovation journeys this paper aims to identify the lessons that should be learnt from how biofuels have been envisioned from the aftermath of the oil shocks of the 1970s to the present and how these visions compare with biofuel production networks emerging in the 2000s working at the interface of sustainable innovation journey research and geographical theories on the spatial unevenness of sustainability transition projects we show how the biofuels controversy is linked to characteristics of globalised industrial agricultural systems the legitimacy problems of biofuels cannot be addressed by sustainability indicators or new technologies alone since they arise from the spatial ordering of biofuel production in the 1970 80s promoters of bioenergy anticipated current concerns about food security implications but envisioned bioenergy production to be territorially embedded at national or local scales where these issues would be managed where the territorial and scalar vision was breached it was to imagine poorer countries exporting higher value biofuel to the north rather than the raw material as in the controversial global biomass commodity chains of today however controversy now extends to the global impacts of national biofuel systems on food security and greenhouse gas emissions and to their local impacts becoming more widely known south south and north north trade conflicts are also emerging as are questions over biodegradable wastes and agricultural residues as global commodities as assumptions of a food versus fuel conflict have come to be challenged legitimacy questions over global agri business and trade are spotlighted even further in this context visions of biofuel development that address these broader issues might be promising these include large scale biomass for fuel models in europe that would transform global trade rules to allow small farmers in the global south to compete and small scale biofuel systems developed to address local energy needs in the south

dynamic implications of absence behaviour this paper analyses the absence behaviour of workers in the context of a two period model the theoretical results that emerge highlight the potential benefits of analysing absenteeism within a multi time period model as opposed to a single time period model which has generally been adopted by the theoretical models of absenteeism to date workers are employed under a two period contract which is characterized by an experience rated sick pay scheme the theoretical results of the model indicate that if a worker faces such a sick pay scheme the theoretical results of the model indicate that if a worker faces such a sick pay scheme then the probability of absence in the current period is reduced the empirical analysis explores the absence rates observed from a set of workers who face an experience rated sick pay scheme the empirical results present some support in favour of the predictions which arise from the theoretical model

bank concentration and sectoral growth evidence from chinese provinces this paper studies the relationship between bank concentration and economic growth in china it uses panel data for 31 provinces and 8 different sectors over the period 2001 2013 using two stage least squares regressions we find that bank concentration negatively and significantly impacts sectoral growth for chinese provinces this finding has relevant policy implication for policy makers and academics since it suggests that the low level of bank concentration in the chinese financial sector promotes economic growth a finding that this is highly relevant in this period of economic slowdown

bank competition and firm creation we investigate the effects of competition in the financial sector on the creation of firms in the nonfinancial sector explicitly allowing for heterogeneous effects across borrowers characterized by different degrees of asymmetric information we find evidence of a bell shaped relationship between bank competition and firm creation in addition consistently with theories arguing that competition may reduce the availability of credit to informationally opaque firms we find that bank competition results less favorable to the emergence of new firms in industrial sectors where informational asymmetries are more important

the new internationalization of agriculture a reformulation abstract our research on the new internationalization of agriculture builds on analyses of the internationalization of capital and the new international division of labor but reformulates internationalization as a contingent political and economic process we argue that shifts in the institutional structure of capitalism in the 1980s profoundly altered national policy options and agro food markets states such as mexico puerto rico and the dominican republic have been compelled to promote agricultural exports typically at the expense of national food security while southern states pursue a common goal of international competitiveness this involves a varied process of domestic restructuring and differentiates states within the world economy

food riots and protest agrarian modernizations and structural crises summary food riots in the developing world have re gained momentum coinciding with converging financial food and global energy crises of 2007 08 high staple food prices across the world and increasingly un regulated food markets have highlighted among other things the political dimensions of food related protests this has been the case especially in the mena region but also in sub saharan africa east asia and latin america where food related protests have often been catalysts to contest wider processes of dissatisfaction with authoritarian and corrupt regimes after many years of silence food related struggles have begun to receive more attention in the academic literature this has mostly been in the context of emerging debates on land grabbing food security sovereignty and social movements yet there have been few attempts to provide a systematic enquiry of existing analytical perspectives and debates or a clear assessment of what some of the political and economic implications may be for what now seem to be persistent food protests and social struggles this article tries to fill this gap by mapping and reviewing the existing and emerging literature on urban and rural food related protests it also explores theories and methodologies that have shaped debate by locating these in an alternative world historical analysis of political economy the article includes but also goes beyond a critical review of the following authors and their important contribution to ongoing debate farshad araghi henry bernstein henrietta friedmann and philip mcmichael jason moore vandana shiva the world bank and fao publications and recent special issues of review journal of agrarian change and journal of peasant studies

a model of the commercial loan rate this paper explores the theoretical and empirical determinants of the commercial loan rate charged by commercial banks based on a model of financial intermediary behavior which assumes monopolistic competition in asset and liability markets the model incorporates the constraint that banks must maintain at least a minimum quantity of bonds in asset portfolios equations are estimated on a time series basis to explain the behavior of commercial loan rates over the period 1953 to 1980 the evidence appears consistent with the hypothesis that commercial banks operate in a market characterized by imperfect competition and that they explicitly set loan rates the development of large scale econometric models has focused attention on the operation of the commercial loan market because of the importance of commercial loan activity in the transmission of monetary policy moreover it is commonly accepted that the quantity of commercial loans or changes in these loans has an important influence on the holding of free reserves by commercial banks and this implies that the commercial loan market has an effect on the supply of money 2 nevertheless the determinants of commercial loan rates have drawn relatively little analytical attention previous work on the commercial loan market has generally focused on the question of whether this market is characterized by credit rationing 3 most studies assume that the commercial loan market is generally competitive but at times the commercial loan rate does not clear the market the quantity of loans transacted is constrained by the supply function and commercial banks engage in nonprice rationing of customers a corollary of this rationing hypothesis is that events in the deposit market have an important influence on the quantity of commercial loans 4 the purpose of this paper is to explore the determinants of the commercial

moral hazard and sickness insurance abstract we study if the replacement level in the swedish national sickness insurance which replaces foregone earnings due to temporary illnesses affects work absence behavior we use micro data and estimate the effects of a major reform whereby the replacement level during the first 90 days in each absence spell was reduced on work attendance to separate out the effect of the reform from any trend in work absence we distinguish between the implications on the incidence of work absence i e the frequency of spells and the duration of the spells we also use a regression discontinuity approach to estimate the effects on the prevalence of work absence finally we estimate elasticities with respect to the replacement level in the sickness insurance

the role of pensions in the labor market a survey of the literature because employer sponsored group pension plans entail agreements between workers and their employers explicitly linking future payment and employment they offer an unusual window into long term employment relationships this review of recent research on pensions explores how pensions influence employee compensation retirement turnover and other matters central to the determination of labor s price and quantity over time the authors also outline some unanswered questions and difficult to reconcile findings because the pension promise involves an explicit and relatively well documented set of statements regarding future contingent payment and employment an examination of the design and operation of employersponsored group pension plans can yield important insights into the long term employment relationship specifically pension research illuminates some important labor market questions in two ways it offers insight into an important element of compensation in its own right and it furthers our understanding of labor markets in which long term

oil price shocks and chinese banking performance do country risks matter abstract this paper contributes to the existing literature by investigating the impacts of oil prices on bank performance through a broad array of camel capital adequacy asset quality management earnings and liquidity indicators in china over the period 2000 2014 to gain further insights into this issue we also discuss whether the correlations change with different dimensions of country risk i e economic financial and political which extant studies ignored the results reveal that oil prices have a significant impact on banking performance as their increase triggers a reduction in banking performance in terms of capitalization management efficiency earning power and liquidity however these adverse effects are mitigated by country stability especially economic stability and political stability these results are important for policy makers who should be cautious when formulating a strategy for macroeconomic stability from the managerial perspective bank managers should consider establishing early warning and response mechanisms on the back of oil price shocks in order to operate under better performance

inferring market power from time series data abstract using bank specific data on deposit rates this paper tests for the existence of market power in banking by means of time series estimations a test is developed that can reject perfect competition on the basis of the observed relationship over time between deposit rates and security rates adjusted for operating costs the analysis also examines whether pricing behavior differs across markets and banking products in a manner consistent with hypothesized differences price taking behavior is rejected for the vast majority of banks for the deposit category that one would expect to be more geographically limited greater market power is found to be exercised by banks located in more concentrated markets

inequality as a determinant of malnutrition and unemployment policy this paper explores the policy implications that are obtained once it is recognized that at low nutrition intakes a person s productivity is an increasing function of intake in the context of a fully general equilibrium model it is shown that if aggregate assets in an economy are neither large nor small certain patterns of lorenz improving asset redistributions or nutrition transfers increase aggregate output and reduce the volume of involuntary unemployment and the incidence of undernourishment copyright 1987 by royal economic society

the dilemma of cheap food and self sufficiency the case of wheat in iran self sufficiency in wheat has been one of the major goals of iranian agricultural policies since the revolution of 1979 even so the country failed to achieve this goal by the early 2000s despite a satisfactory growth in wheat production this paper addresses this failure and the political difficulties in introducing reforms that would reduce the need for import first the production and consumption of wheat are examined the conclusion is that the cheap bread policy has mainly been responsible for the imbalances between domestic supply and demand and the continued reliance on wheat imports moreover the paper argues that the subsidy program is an expensive safety net for the needy and shows that the iranian government has intended to reform the program since the early 1990s however subsidy reforms are politically sensitive especially in developing countries where subsidies are considered very important both for supporting the poor and for political stability an analysis of the iranian attempts at subsidy reform suggests that they have not yet succeeded mainly due to such political considerations

absenteeism predictors least squares rank regression and model selection results this paper examines the determinants of absenteeism using ols rank based re gressions and a model selection procedure the results show that personal attributes are the most important determinants of long term absences for total working days lost the penalty factors are the most significant predictors the results also show that absenteeism tends to be lower among firms with more part time workers unionization on the other hand increases the total days lost due to absenteeism

modeling the banking firm a survey this paper reports on the status of the literature on micro bank modeling and assesses our understanding of the banking firm s optimal behavior this is no mean task for much has been written on banking broadly defined over the past couple of decades the review is developed in pieces each major subproblem is outlined and the analysis used to deal with the issue explicated this is not the best way to summarize the development of a field it should be immediately recognized one would prefer to have a smooth continuum of development moving the frontier of knowledge evenly through time and across subareas yet this is rarely the way a field develops more likely individual questions attract attention and are the subjects of a substantial number of contributions after a time the field moves on to the new area of interest the banking field is no exception before embarking upon the review however a couple of lines should be devoted to previous attempts there have been essentially three first pyle 1972 analyzes the uncertainty portfolio models at a time when little existed in the literature and hence one finds the review a bit vague and sketchy baltensperger s contributions 1978 1980 are the next serious and rather extensive reviews the quality of these

the economics of poverty in poor countries this paper which examines recently studied links between 1 poverty high fertility and undernourishment and 2 environmental degradation and civic disconnection in developing countries opens by reviewing the limitations of orthodox discussions of economic institutions and property rights and the orthodox dichotomy that has located the cause of poverty in the suppression of markets the introduction also notes that much of the analysis in this paper is based on data from sub saharan africa and india the next section of the paper summarizes evidence on the magnitude and extent of world poverty section 3 exposes the connection between undernourishment and a persons capacity to work as one of the pathways to the poverty trap sections 4 and 5 consider the dependence of impoverished rural populations on common property resources and how the conventional process of economic growth can break down this system and make certain sections of the population especially vulnerable to economic shocks the next two sections explore the possibility that links between poverty high fertility and environmental degradation may constitute another pathway to the poverty trap the eighth section reviews the methodology of using net national product which includes resource depletion and environmental deterioration as an evaluation criterion and argues that mainstream development economists may have neglected environmental and population problems because they have been relying on the wrong economic indices the final section concludes that a number of policies must be used to improve options for people

labor market effects of employer provided health insurance i introduction increasing health insurance coverage is arguably an important policy goal the congressional budget office 2003 estimates that in 1998 20 30 million americans had no health insurance for the entire year approximately 40 million were uninsured at a specific point in time in the year and nearly 60 million were without coverage some time during the year most individuals who have health insurance in the united states obtain it through their employer in 1999 65 8 of nonelderly americans had employer provided insurance also called group insurance or employer sponsored insurance either through their own employer or through the employer of another household member see gruber 2001 employer provided insurance plans generally have lower premiums and offer more benefits than individual insurance plans health insurance providers can offer cheaper and better plans to company employees for at least two reasons first the average administrative cost of such plans is lower than individual plans second employment based plans are typically subject to less adverse selection than individual plans particularly so for large employers furthermore the tax subsidy afforded employment based health insurance renders the effective consumer price substantially lower than the cost see pauly 1986 and gruber 2001 together these various factors give a strong incentive for employers to offer and employees to accept coverage as part of their employment contract as employer provided insurance is by far the most prevalent form of coverage in the private sector policy makers look for further expansion of this base as a way to insure the uninsured while avoiding direct public financing as a way to increase employer based health insurance coverage some states either have or are considering government mandates that require employers to provide insurance to certain types of workers 1 the state of hawaii requires private sector employers to offer health insurance to all workers who work for more than 20 h a week and requires these workers to have insurance the state of california is currently considering a similar mandate there is a considerable interest from policy makers on the effects of such mandates on labor market outcomes in this study we report on an experiment that was designed to provide some insights about possible effects of alternative health insurance regulations on the competitive labor market with a particular focus on mandates since we only considered a competitive market setting with complete contracts and no wage rigidities our results may not be directly applicable to all labor market situations 2 however the study provides useful insights about the interaction of health insurance benefit provision wages and employment structure for labor markets where the competitive wage setting and the complete contracts assumptions are reasonable with these limitations in mind our results can be also generalized to other types of employer provided fringe benefits such as paid vacations or pension plans as any government intervention health insurance regulation may affect the labor market theory predicts that in perfectly competitive labor markets health insurance creates no distortionary effects on the labor market equilibrium as long as the coverage is not mandated and there are no wage rigidities 3 all workers who value insurance above its cost of provision are offered insurance and accept it the wages are adjusted downward see rosen 1986 and gruber 2000 summers 1989 used a simple supply and demand analysis to show that the effect of increases in premiums on equilibrium labor hours and wage depends both on the elasticity of labor demand and labor supply and on how fully workers value changes in the cost of health insurance if the demand or the supply of labor is completely inelastic or if workers fully value the insurance then an increase in the premium would result in an equal decrease shift in wages

the effect of unionism on fringe benefits this study analyzes the impact of unionism on fringes paid to production workers using data on individual establishments it compares fringe expenditures in establishments having the same level of compensation per hour and finds that unionism raises the share of compensation allotted to fringes particularly to pensions vacation pay and life accident and health insurance in addition since unionism also raises the straight time wage rate itself a prime determinant of expenditures on fringes unionism has a very sizeable impact on total fringe expenditures as well as on the fringe share of compensation the union fringe effect exceeds in percentage terms the union wage effect and is sufficiently large to suggest that standard union wage studies understate the union effect on total compensation the study also compares the fringe expenditures of production and non production workers within the same establishment controlling for within establishment pay policies the findings suggest that the pres

how elastic is the firm s demand for health insurance abstract we investigate the impact of tax subsidies on the firm s decision to offer insurance and on conditional firm spending on insurance we do so using the micro data underlying the employment cost index which has a major advantage for this exercise the matching of very high quality compensation data with information on a sample of workers in the firm we find that overall there is a moderately sized elasticity of insurance offering with respect to after tax prices 0 25 and a larger elasticity of insurance spending 0 7 we also find that the elasticities are driven primarily by small firms for whom the elasticity is larger and we find that there is significant value added to this employer based data replicating methods from standard micro data sources in our data lead to misleading estimates of these key parameters our simulation results suggest that major tax reform could lead to an enormous reduction in employer provided health insurance spending

the political economy of food the rise and fall of the postwar international food order the widespread perception of a food crisis since the early 1970s reflects a real turning point in the global structure of production and distribution of food grains scarcity is always an aspect of capitalist relations but its specific form is determined historically through the international food order the latter is a stable set of complementary state policies whose implicit coordination creates specific prices relative to other prices a specific pattern of specialization and resulting patterns of consumption and trade the social consequences of those orderly international arrangements make sense within a marxist conception of accumulation and class formation on a world scale i present a historical analysis of the rise of an international food order after world war ii whose principal axis was food aid from the united states to formerly self sufficient agrarian societies this order had contradictory effects both economic and political leading to a reorganization of aid and trade higher prices

agricultural commercialization of karen hill tribes in northern thailand based on a random sample of 240 farm households in chiang mai province thailand this study shows that contrary to widespread belief karen farm households are well integrated into markets average levels of market integration are 31 for gross farm output 35 for variable inputs 49 for food consumption and 80 for net family income by estimating a two stage least squares 2sls regression model this study finds that integration into output markets is positively associated with a diversification of land use away from rice monoculture more intense contact with nearby urban centers and a greater number of roads connecting the village to the outside world controlling for these factors the distance to urban centers does not impede market integration distant villages are equally well integrated into output markets the study further finds that integration into output markets improves farm productivity and net per capita income concerns about market integration are discussed results have implications for thai policy makers who have recently placed increasing emphasis on the concept of sufficiency economy in order to promote the well being of rural people

pollution intensity of gdp and trade policy can the world bank be wrong abstract what are the environmental implications of open trade policies in developing countries economic theory and environmental critics suggest they worsen environmental quality this conventional wisdom has been challenged by several studies which suggest that outward oriented trade policies are likely to be win win enhance economic growth and environmental quality this paper challenges revised conventional wisdom rcw by demonstrating that developing countries with outward oriented trade policies have higher pollution intensities of gdp than those following inward oriented policies the paper examines why the evidence reported here differs so sharply from rcw studies considers the policy implications of these results and identifies reasons why despite them it may not make sense to totally discount future potential win win opportunities

the impact of deregulation on price and non price competition in the portuguese deposits market abstract the portuguese deposits market experienced a pronounced deregulation phase from 1986 to 1992 during that period the situation moved from a highly regulated market in which government controlled institutions accounted for more than 90 of the market to a complete integration into the fully liberalised european internal market this paper studies the evolution of market power and non price competition during that deregulation process using panel data a system of three equations was estimated representing optimality decisions for deposit rates advertising expenditures and branches an important conclusion is that interest rate and entry deregulation were associated with an increase in both price and non price competition the small foreign owned banks were found to have virtually no market power in deposits on the other hand although no direct relationship between market power and market share was found significant market power was detected for the wholesale and banks that existed since before the revolution thus mergers between large banks are not likely to directly increase market power for the participating firms although the association found between market power and concentration suggests that such mergers may increase the banking industry s profits

market power in cee banking sectors and the impact of the global financial crisis the aim of this study is to undertake an up to date assessment of market power in central and eastern european banking markets and explore how the global financial crisis has affected market power and what has been the impact of foreign ownership three main results emerge first while there is some convergence in country level market power during the pre crisis period the onset of the global crisis has put an end to this process second bank level market power appears to vary significantly with respect to ownership characteristics third asset quality and capitalization affect differently the margins in the pre crisis and the crisis periods while in the pre crisis period the impacts are similar for all banks regardless of ownership status in the crisis period non performing loans have a negative effect and capitalization a positive effect only for domestically owned banks

embracing the global in thailand activism and pragmatism in an era of deagrarianization abstract today few farmers in thailand rely solely on agriculture to meet their needs rural households are dividing their time between farm and nonfarm activities constructing livelihoods that are increasingly hybrid both spatially and sectorally many of the new opportunities also have an important global element this paper contends that embracing the global is essential for many households who are land short farming shy and consumption inclined this offers the prospect of a profound shift in the trajectory of rural change in thailand as these processes intersect

healthy bodies and thick wallets the dual relation between health and economic status there is abundant evidence of a quantitatively large association between many measures of economic status including income and wealth and a variety of health outcomes such as mortality or morbidity however considerable and often heated debate remains especially across disciplines about the direction of causation and about why the association arises although medical scientists are often convinced that the dominant if not exclusive pathway is that variation in socioeconomic status produces health disparities they are increasingly debating among themselves about why low economic status might lead to poor health at least for modern industrial countries 1 the old standby arguments the less well to do have access to less or lower quality medical care or a stronger pattern of deleterious personal behaviors have been rejected as insufficient instead a series of intriguing competing theories have arisen that emphasize long term impacts of early childhood or even inter uterine environmental factors the cumulative effects of prolonged exposures to individual stressful events or reactions to macro societal factors such as rising levels of income inequality a common link is that each theory attempts to document the physiological processes through which low economic status leads to poorer health while these scientific questions are extremely important this research has taken place with little input from economists economists are now making contributions about the alternative pathway the impact poor health may have on economic resources poor health may restrict a family s capacity to earn income or to accumulate assets by limiting work or by raising medical expenses at a minimum this work should provide a caution against exaggerating the magnitude of causation from economic status to health outcomes but the potential contribution runs deeper as people age the evolving variation in individual health outcomes may offer additional statistical information to estimate parameters of household savings and consumption behavior that so far have proven to be somewhat elusive thus incorporating health uncertainty and risk into economic models should eventually enrich our understanding of basic tenets of household behavior the first section of this paper documents the size of the association between health and one prominent economic status measure household wealth section two deals with how health influences economic status by sketching out reasons why health may alter household savings and eventually wealth and then providing estimates of the empirical magnitude of these effects section three shifts attention to the alternative pathway the links between economic status and health and summarizes 2major controversies and evidence surrounding these issues

a global interpretation of the rise of the east asian food import complex abstract the last quarter century explosion of consumer affluence in japan south korea taiwan and china accompanied a new phase in the organization of the global food economy it also conditioned the increasingly speculative capital investments in the region this paper argues that the restructuring of production and consumption relations involved a movement away from the us centered bilateral food surplus regime and toward a multilateral food regime based in wto led agricultural liberalization and the corporate restructuring of agriculture the east asian food import complex advances the neoliberal project of global free trade spawning agro export zones throughout southeast asia

economic development and food production consumption balance a growing global challenge abstract rising affluence in major developing countries principally china and india and increasing diversion of agricultural resources for energy production usa and brazil sharply increase agricultural resource demand food consumption and production changes during development are analyzed using resource based cereal equivalent measures diet upgrades to livestock products require fivefold increases in per capita food resource use reflecting a consistent pattern which is only marginally affected by land base food consumption increases exceed production during early development leading to imports consumption eventually stabilizes at high incomes but production falls short in land scarce countries pork and poultry consumption increase the most less efficient beef and dairy production command a majority of agricultural resources

restoring the promise of american labor law the product of an october 1993 conference on labor law reform jointly sponsored by the school of industrial and labor relations at cornell u and the department of economic research at the afl cio this volume both argues the need for fundamental reform of the legal and institutional underpinnings o

search for nonwage job characteristics a test of the reservation wage hypothesis previous structural models of job search behavior have been based upon the reservation wage property this article provides estimates of a more general search model that nests models with the reservation wage property the estimates lead to rejection of the reservation wage property the model includes hours of work in the utility function but other nonwage job characteristics can be included as well an experiment based on the estimated parameters indicates that a significant proportion of job offers would be mistakenly predicted to be accepted or rejected under the restrictions implied by the reservation wage property

tax structure and tax compliance a model of individual tax compliance behavior including evasion and avoidance is developed and estimated the model recognizes the importance of marginal income tax rates payroll tax contributions and benefits and the probabil ity of detection and the penalty on unpaid taxes share equations for avoidance evasion and reported income are estimated using individual level data the estimation results indicate that the tax base rises with higher benefits for payroll tax contributions and falls with higher marginal tax rates the base also falls with more severe penalties and more certain detection of evasion as individuals substitute towards avoid ance income t he methods by which individuals reduce their tax liabilities take a variety of legal and illegal forms all of which are influenced at least in part by incentives created by the tax structure these methods can be broadly classified as avoid ance and evasion tax avoidance is any legal activity that lowers taxes such as worker substitu tion between wage and nonwage compensation tax evasion is the reduction in tax liabilities by illegal means such as underreporting income on tax returns despite extensive but separate literatures on avoidance and evasion we know very little about the tax base response to changes in tax structure it is the purpose of this paper to examine the role that the tax structure plays in compliance there are several reasons for the persistence of the compliance puzzle most prominent is the absence of detailed individual data that would allow a full empirical specification of all factors affecting compliance this difficulty is most evi dent when searching for individual data on the evasion compliance decision even when avail able data have never allowed in the same work the construction of both tax and audit variables 1 clearly data availability is even more problem atic when looking at the choice among evasion avoidance and reported income in addition pre vious work has not looked at the avoidance evasion compliance decision as a joint process even though these decisions are made simultane ously 2 further both strands of the literature have ignored another factor that may affect the compliance decision the benefits that accrue from participation in payroll programs if benefits are tied only to taxable income then their presence gives individuals an incentive to pay taxes in short there has been no empirical work that analyzes the effects of tax rates probabilities penalties and payroll benefits on avoidance and evasion choices of individuals in this paper we provide such an analysis we first develop a theory of individual choice among the three types of compensation we then esti mate the resulting share demand equations using a unique data set which has detailed information on the compensation paid to roughly one quarter of the labor force in jamaica in 1983 from these data we are able to derive measures of reported taxable income evasion income and avoidance income for individual workers in the formal sec tor we are also able to construct measures of the marginal income tax rate marginal payroll taxes and benefits the probability of detection and the penalty on evasion for individual workers we are therefore able to estimate for the first time the responses of workers to the full range of tax structure parameters section i presents the theoretical model of worker compensation choice and the empirical specification of the model section ii discusses the jamaican tax system data and variable con struction are discussed in section iii estimation results are presented in section iv the final section summarizes the main results

substitution between wage and nonwage benefits you gotta be kidding ollie you re just robbing yourself schuylkill mutual offers a terrific deal on keogh and we could plug you in in fact we advise plugging you in on the corporate end so not a nickel comes out of your personal pocket it comes out of the corporate pocket and there s that much less for uncle to tax these poor saps carrying their own premiums with no company input are living in the dark ages there s nothing shady about rigging it this way we re just using the laws the government has put there they want people to take advantage it all works to up the gross national product you know what i mean by keogh don t you you re looking kind of blank john updike p 296

market concentration and competition in oecd mobile telecommunications markets this study analyses the progress of market concentration in oecd member states mobile telecommunications markets and evaluates the relationship between market concentration and performance using annual panel data from 24 oecd member states for the 1998 2011 period the study estimates regression equations for market concentration mobile prices and profits the empirical results indicate that the more concentrated the mobile market the higher the prices and profits providing support for the market power hypothesis if this hypothesis holds then market concentration can be a useful indicator of market performance on the other hand the applicability of the hypothesis is unclear for the second half of the sample period the results provide evidence that regulatory policies influence the structure and performance of mobile markets

economic growth convergence and agricultural economics after nearly two centuries of lagging behind the industrial countries growth in many developing countries has surged since the early 1990s this outperformance has major implications for almost all areas of agricultural economics and if continued will likely do so into the future this article aims to identify the key ways in which the changes in rich and poor country growth rates matter for agricultural economists as a basis for formulating better research agendas a key impact arises through sharp increases in demand for agricultural resources as demand for livestock products increases this changing structure of food demand has important implications for nutrition studies and policies with the emergence of a double burden of malnutrition on the supply side growth in developing countries tends to increase domestic food supply which is also boosted by increases in research and development spending growth in developing countries both stimulates and benefits from increases in infrastructure investment evaluation of which requires new analytical tools negative impacts include the contribution of increased demand for livestock products to global greenhouse gas emissions in terms of trade policy growth in developing country is tending to lead to convergence of agricultural policies with the pattern of assistance seen in today s developed countries raising concerns about the future need to deal with collective action problems particularly those that increase the volatility of world prices