eradicating diseases the effect of conditional cash transfers on vaccination coverage in rural nicaragua despite significant global efforts to improve vaccination coverage against major childhood diseases vaccination rates are below 90 to eradicate diseases such as measles however vaccination rates close to 95 are needed we use a randomized experiment to investigate the effect of a demand incentive a conditional cash transfer program in improving vaccination coverage in rural nicaragua double difference estimates show the program led to large increases in vaccination coverage and these resulted in vaccination levels greater than 95 for some vaccines effects were especially large for children who are typically harder to reach with traditional supply side interventions

workfare wellbeing and consumption evidence from a field experiment with kenya s urban poor abstract restrictions like work requirements and constraints on voucher transfers are often used in social welfare systems but little empirical evidence exists on their impact on wellbeing we conducted a 10 day randomized experiment with 432 individuals living below the poverty line in the kawangware settlement of nairobi kenya testing two elements of social welfare design workfare versus welfare and restricted versus unrestricted vouchers participants were randomly assigned to a work condition involving daily work for unrestricted vouchers or one of two wait conditions involving daily waiting for vouchers that were either unrestricted or partially restricted to staple foods we find that working improved psychological wellbeing relative to waiting suggesting that the means of implementing welfare programs may have important effects on individuals beyond the impact of monetary benefit alone furthermore although the restrictions were inframarginal partially restricted vouchers crowded in spending on staple foods suggesting the existence of a flypaper effect in spending from restricted vouchers

a model of delegated project choice we present a model in which a principal delegates the choice of project to an agent with different preferences the principal determines the set of projects from which the agent may choose the principal can verify the characteristics of the project chosen by the agent but does not know which other projects are available to the agent two frameworks are considered i a static setting in which the collection of available projects is exogenous to the agent but uncertain and ii a dynamic setting in which the agent searches for projects

merger policy with merger choice we analyze the optimal policy of an antitrust authority towards horizontal mergers when merger proposals are endogenous and firms choose which of several mutually exclusive mergers to propose in our model the optimal policy of an antitrust authority that seeks to maximize expected consumer surplus imposes a tougher standard on larger mergers i e those involving firms with a larger pre merger market share or equivalently leading to a larger naively computed post merger herfindahl index the optimal policy is a response to a bias in firms proposal incentives firms always propose a larger merger when it is better for consumers than a smaller one but sometimes will propose the larger one even when it is worse for consumers

sustainable innovation business models and economic performance an overview sustainable development requires radical and systemic innovations such innovations can be more effectively created and studied when building on the concept of business models this concept provides firms with a holistic framework to envision and implement sustainable innovations for researchers the concept provides an analytical tool that allows them to assess the interplay between the different aspects that firms combine to create ecological economic and social value in addition the business model concept provides a link between the individual firm and the larger production and consumption system in which it operates this paper provides an introduction to the special issue which emerged from selected papers presented at the erscp emsu 2010 conference held in delft the netherlands papers in the special issue cover a broad range from a conceptual discussion resulting in a research agenda the assessment of diffusion of specific business models such as product service systems the introduction of new management tools for business transition management to case studies on how specific business models evolved in specific communities together these papers provide insight into the promise of the business model concept for understanding and advancing sustainable innovation

is there a turning point in the relationship between income and energy use and or carbon emissions abstract we analyze the effect of fuel mix model specification and the level of development on the presence and size of a turning point in the relationship between income and energy use and or carbon emissions the results indicate that fuel mix the specification for income and the level of economic development affect conclusions about whether there is a turning point in the relationship between economic activity and energy use and carbon emissions including fuel shares generally reduces the size of a turning point that is estimated from a panel that includes observations from both oecd and non oecd nations but this result varies according to the level of development for oecd nations there is limited support for a turning point in the relationship between income and per capita energy use and or carbon emissions for non oecd nations there is no turning point in the relationship between income and either energy use or carbon emissions instead the relationship is positive together the results indicate that forecasters and policy makers should not depend on a turning point in the relationship between income and energy use or carbon emissions to reduce either

assessing the case for social experiments rs ecent academic debates pit two alternative approaches to policy evaluation against one another the first is the experimental approach based on the random assignment of accepted program applicants to a recipient or treatment group and a non recipient or control group the second is the nonexperimental or econometric approach that uses a variety of microdata sources statistical methods and behavioral models to compare the outcomes of participants in social programs with those of nonparticipants the central question addressed in this paper is whether or not randomized social experiments aid in securing answers to basic questions about the evaluation of social programs there are many distinct and complementary approaches to the study of the impact of public policy including full general equilibrium analysis of policy impacts tinbergen 1956 auerbach and kotlikoff 1987 shoven and whalley 1992 kydland and prescott 1991 and less ambitious partial equilibrium microeconomic structural research programs such as those designed to estimate the impact of taxes on labor supply both approaches offer answers to many interesting counterfactual policy questions but their credibility rests critically on the quality of the empirical input used to generate their answers

how not to sell nuclear weapons we consider situations where a sale affects the ensuing interaction between potential buyers these situations are modeled by assuming that an agent who does not acquire the object for sale incurs an identity dependent externality we construct a revenue maximizing auction for the seller we observe that 1 outside options and participation constraints are endogenous 2 the seller extracts surplus also from agents who do not obtain the auctioned object 3 the seller is better off by not selling at all while obtaining some payments if externalities are much larger than valuations

internal versus external growth in industries with scale economies a computational model of optimal merger policy we study optimal merger policy in a dynamic model in which the presence of scale economies implies that firms can reduce costs through either internal investment in build ing capital or through mergers the model which we solve computationally allows firms to invest or propose mergers according to the relative profitability of these strategies an antitrust authority is able to block mergers at some cost we examine the optimal policy when the antitrust authority can commit to a policy rule and when it cannot commit and consider both consumer value and aggregate value as possible objectives of the antitrust authority we find that optimal policy can differ substantially from what would be best considering only welfare in the period the merger is proposed we also find that the abil ity to commit can lead to a significant welfare improvement in general antitrust policy can greatly affect firms optimal investment behavior and firms investment behavior can in turn greatly affect the antitrust authority s optimal policy

a healthier start the effect of conditional cash transfers on neonatal and infant mortality in rural mexico abstract conditional cash transfer programs seek to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty by building the human capital of poor children despite their popularity throughout the developing world relatively little is known about their effect on children s health outcomes this paper evaluates the impact of the mexican conditional cash transfer program progresa on two important health outcomes infant and neonatal mortality it exploits the phasing in of progresa over time throughout rural mexico to identify the impact of the program the paper shows that progresa led to a large 17 decline in rural infant mortality among the treated but did not reduce neonatal mortality on average the benefit cost ratio is between 1 3 and 3 6 tests for heterogeneity show larger declines for some groups including those municipalities whose pre program levels of mortality were above the median and those that prior to the program had higher illiteracy rates and less access to electricity

intra household behavioral responses to cash transfer programs evidence from a regression discontinuity design summary considering two parent households with children this study investigates the behavioral responses of men and women to a cash transfer program in uruguay asignaciones familiares plan de equidad afam pe we examine its effect on labor market responses marital dissolution and the decision making process regarding the use of money the assignment mechanism to the afam pe exogenously alters the distribution of non labor income across applicant households by targeting the monetary transfer usually to the female spouse our identification strategy exploits both the female targeting and a discontinuity in eligibility for enrollment into the program based on a regression discontinuity design and on a follow up survey matched with program s administrative records this study finds that the program has significant negative effects on the formality choice of women at the eligibility cut off these responses seem to be associated with a lower rate of moving from unregistered jobs to formality we also find suggestive evidence that the program results in women taking greater perceived responsibility for decisions in specific spheres of household expenditures this study represents one of the first efforts to analyze the distributional effects of cct programs on different couples members behavioral responses it offers relevant considerations for the ongoing debate about the impacts of these kind of programs on women s agency in developing countries suggesting the need to discuss new designs for social assistance that reduce discouraging effects on formality

economic development and co2 emissions a nonparametric panel approach we examine the empirical relation between co2 emissions per capita and gdp per capita during the period 1960 1996 using a panel of 100 countries relying on the nonparametric poolability test of baltagi et al baltagi b h hidalgo j li q 1996 a nonparametric test for poolability using panel data journal of econometrics 75 345 367 we find evidence of structural stability of the relationship we then specify a nonparametric panel data model with country specific effects estimation results show that this relationship is upward sloping nonparametric specification tests do not reject monotonicity but do reject the polynomial functional form which leads to the environmental kuznets curve in several studies

nutrition information and household behavior experimental evidence from malawi incorrect knowledge of the health production function may lead to inefficient household choices and thereby to the production of suboptimal levels of health this paper studies the effects of a randomized intervention in rural malawi that over a six month period provided mothers of young infants with information on child nutrition without supplying any monetary or in kind resources a simple model first investigates theoretically how nutrition and other household choices including labor supply may change in response to the improved nutrition knowledge observed in the intervention areas we then show empirically that the intervention improved child nutrition household food consumption and consequently health we find evidence that labor supply increased which might have contributed to partially fund the increase in food consumption this paper is the first to study whether non health choices particularly parental labor supply might be affected by parents knowledge of the child health production function

confronting the environmental kuznets curve t he environmental kuznets curve posits an inverted u relationship between pollution and economic development kuznets s name was apparently attached to the curve by grossman and krueger 1993 who noted its resemblance to kuznets s inverted u relationship between income inequality and development in the first stage of industrialization pollution in the environmental kuznets curve world grows rapidly because people are more interested in jobs and income than clean air and water communities are too poor to pay for abatement and environmental regulation is correspondingly weak the balance shifts as income rises leading industrial sectors become cleaner people value the environment more highly and regulatory institutions become more effective along the curve pollution levels off in the middle income range and then falls toward pre industrial levels in wealthy societies the environmental kuznets curve model has elicited conflicting reactions from researchers and policymakers applied econometricians have generally accepted the basic tenets of the model and focused on measuring its parameters their regressions typically fitted to cross sectional observations across countries or regions suggest that air and water pollution increase with development until per capita income reaches a range of 5000 to 8000 when income rises beyond that level pollution starts to decline as shown in the conventional ekc line in figure 1 in developing countries some policymakers have interpreted such results as conveying a message about priorities grow first then clean up numerous critics have challenged the conventional environmental kuznets curve both as a representation of what actually happens in the development process and as a policy prescription some pessimistic critics argue that crosssectional evidence for the environmental kuznets curve is nothing more than a

matching the gold standard comparing experimental and nonexperimental evaluation techniques for a geographically targeted program abstract we compare nonexperimental impact estimates based on matching methods with those from a randomized evaluation to determine whether the nonexperimental approach can match the so called gold standard the social experiment we use was carried out to evaluate a geographically targeted conditional cash transfer antipoverty program in nicaragua the outcomes we assess include several components of household expenditure and a variety of children s health outcomes including breast feeding vaccinations and morbidity we find that using each of the following improves performance of matching for these outcomes 1 geographically proximate comparison samples 2 stringent common support requirements and 3 both geographic and household level matching variables even for a geographically targeted program in which the selection is at the geographic rather than at the individual or household level and in which it is not possible to find comparison individuals or households in the program locales m

selective trials a principal agent approach to randomized controlled experiments we study the design of randomized controlled experiments when outcomes are significantly affected by experimental subjects unobserved effort expenditure while standard randomized controlled trials rcts are internally consistent the unobservability of effort compromises external validity we approach trial design as a principal agent problem and show that natural extensions of rcts which we call selective trials can help improve external validity in particular selective trials can disentangle the effects of treatment effort and the interaction of treatment and effort moreover they can help identify when treatment effects are affected by erroneous beliefs and inappropriate effort expenditure

success factors for environmentally sustainable product innovation a systematic literature review the growing awareness regarding environmental sustainability has fully reached business reality consumers and companies alike are looking for alternatives to mitigate pressing environmental demands resulting from continuous population and economic growth on the other hand companies must deal with an increasingly competitive scenario where innovation is regarded as a survival need in most markets it is thus clear that systematic academic research is paramount to guide companies to succeed in environmentally sustainable product innovation in this context this paper i consolidate extant research and aggregate findings of different studies on environmentally sustainable product innovation through an interpretative framework of published literature on the topic and ii map critical success factors that drive the success of product innovation developed in this new logic of production and consumption to achieve these objectives a systematic literature review on environmentally sustainable product innovation was conducted results show that there are four main critical success factors for environmentally sustainable product innovation market law and regulation knowledge interfunctional collaboration innovation oriented learning and r d investments the factors identified in this research and corresponding variables were subjected to a brief empirical test by professionals the test allowed a preliminary approval of the developed framework and identification of the most important variables within each factor a research agenda based on the state of the art on the topic is also proposed

entry by takeover auctions vs bilateral negotiations firms often enter new markets by taking over an incumbent we analyze a potential entrant s choice of target under two exogenously given takeover mechanisms i auctions where other incumbents can bid for the target against the entrant and ii bilateral negotiations between the entrant and the target the entrant s choice of target depends on the mechanism and it may not maximize its ex post profit nor consumer welfare in an auction the entrant pays a higher price to take over a target with higher synergies because these impose stronger negative externalities on incumbents and increase their willingness to pay for preventing entry auctions increase the price obtained by the target but reduce welfare compared to negotiations because they may discourage the entrant from acquiring a target with higher synergies

production networks and economic policy in this paper we show how to combine data on input output tables and recent insights from the theory of production networks in order to inform policy we first describe the information contained in input output tables compiled by statistical agencies and show how to derive relevant statistics of production networks we then discuss the implications of production networks for policy intervention in a series of domains such as fiscal policy industrial policy or finance finally we present a quantitative exercise applied to french data in order to illustrate that production networks shape the overall impact of competition policy on the economy

the impact of conditional cash transfers on marriage and divorce abstracta growing number of less developed countries have introduced conditional cash transfer programs in which funds are targeted to women economic models of the family suggest that these transfer programs may lead to marital turnover among program beneficiaries data from the experimental evaluation of the progresa program in mexico is used to provide new evidence on the short run impacts of targeted transfers on couples union dissolution and individuals new union formation decisions we find that although the overall share of women in union does not change as a result of the program marital turnover increases intact families eligible for the transfers experienced a modest 0 32 percentage points increase in separation rates with most of the effect concentrated among young and relatively educated women households in contrast young single women with low educational attainment levels experienced a substantial increase in new union formation rates the marital transition patterns are consistent

toward a new conception of the environment competitiveness relationship accepting a fixed trade off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation they typically overestimated compliance costs neglected innovation offsets and disregarded the affected industry s initial competitiveness rather than simply adding to cost properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets allowing companies to improve their resource productivity shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward it is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity

constructing sustainable palm oil how actors define sustainability abstract biofuels as a renewable source of energy have gained considerable importance in recent years the use of biofuels is expected to rise since national governments of developed nations like the us and european countries see it as one of the ways to fulfill climate targets and increase the security in their energy supply production of biofuels is also expected to rise as developing nations see in biofuels the opportunity for connecting to international markets through supplying a new demand in the energy market several studies report on the environmental social and economic gains and detriments that can arise from increased biofuel production and consumption however research that provides insight into the way in which such issues are defined by actors within the product chain is scarce in this article we analyse how the strategies and value definitions of actors involved in the production and consumption of biofuels lead to specific definitions of sustainability the empirical material concerns the chain of palm oil production in colombia and electricity generation in the netherlands it is analysed using the method of action in context which allows us to uncover the level and source of diversity of sustainability definitions in the product chain while the current growth in production of palm oil is definitely buyer driven the analysis of various activities in the chain shows that several aspects of sustainability are defined in more complex actor fields throughout the product chain

strategic complements and substitutes and potential games abstract we show that games of strategic complements or substitutes with aggregation are pseudo potential games the upshot is that they possess nash equilibria in pure strategies ne even if the strategy sets are not convex and that various dynamic processes converge to ne in particular ne exist in cournot oligopoly with indivisibilities in production our notion of aggregation is quite general and enables us to take a unified view of several disparate models

a resource based perspective on corporate environmental performance and profitability drawing on the resource based view of the firm we posited that environmental performance and economic performance are positively linked and that industry growth moderates the relationship with the returns to environmental performance higher in high growth industries we tested these hypotheses with an analysis of 243 finns over two years using independently developed environmental ratings results indicate that it pays to be green and that this relationship strengthens with industry growth we conclude by highlighting the study s academic and managerial implications making special reference to the social issues in management literature

the credibility revolution in empirical economics how better research design is taking the con out of econometrics since edward leamer s memorable 1983 paper let s take the con out of econometrics empirical microeconomics has experienced a credibility revolution while leamer s suggested remedy sensitivity analysis has played a role in this we argue that the primary engine driving improvement has been a focus on the quality of empirical research designs the advantages of a good research design are perhaps most easily apparent in research using random assignment we begin with an overview of leamer s 1983 critique and his proposed remedies we then turn to the key factors we see contributing to improved empirical work including the availability of more and better data along with advances in theoretical econometric understanding but especially the fact that research design has moved front and center in much of empirical micro we offer a brief digression into macroeconomics and industrial organization where progress by our lights is less dramatic although there is work in both fields that we find encouraging finally we discuss the view that the design pendulum has swung too far critics of design driven studies argue that in pursuit of clean and credible research designs researchers seek good answers instead of good questions we briefly respond to this concern which worries us little

the determinants of atmospheric so2 concentrations reconsidering the environmental kuznets curve this analysis explores the effects of income and the spatial intensity of economic activity on the atmospheric concentration of sulfur dioxide the results indicate that there is a u shaped relation between income and atmospheric concentration of so2 and an inverted u shaped relation between the spatial intensity of economic activity and so2 concentrations these results suggest that the spatial intensity of economic activity rather than income provides the impetus for policies and technologies that reduce so2 emissions based on this result the atmospheric concentration of so2 in developing nations may decline faster than indicated by previous analyses the potential for this decline depends on the rate at which income grows relative to population the trade off between the effects of income gains and the spatial intensity of economic activity on the atmospheric concentration of so2 is consistent with the notion that some environmental problems can be ameliorated by slowing population growth and increasing income levels

can the west save africa in the new millennium the western aid effort toward africa has surged due to writ ings by well known economists a celebrity mass advocacy campaign and decisions by western leaders to make africa a major foreign policy priority this survey contrasts the predominant transformational approach west comprehensively saves africa to occasional swings to a marginal approach west takes one small step at a time to help individual africans evaluation of one step at a time initiatives is generally easier than that of transformational ones either through controlled experiments although these have been oversold or simple case studies where it is easier to attribute outcomes to actions we see two themes emerge from the literature survey 1 escalation as each successive western transformational effort has yielded disappointing results as judged at least by stylized facts since again the econometrics are shaky the response has been to try an even more ambitious effort and 2 the cycle of ideas rather than a progressive testing and discarding of failed ideas we see a cycle in aid ideas in many areas in africa with ideas going out of fashion only to come back again later after some lapse long enough to forget the previous disappointing experience both escalation and cyclicality of ideas are symptomatic of the lack of learning that seems to be characteristic of the transfor mational approach in contrast the marginal approach has had some successes in improving the well being of individual africans such as the dramatic fall in mortality

financial incentives in health new evidence from india s janani suraksha yojana this paper studies the health effects of one of the world s largest demand side financial incentive programmes india s janani suraksha yojana our difference in difference estimates exploit heterogeneity in the implementation of the financial incentive programme across districts we find that cash incentives to women were associated with increased uptake of maternity services but there is no strong evidence that the jsy was associated with a reduction in neonatal or early neonatal mortality the positive effects on utilisation are larger for less educated and poorer women and in places where the cash payment was most generous we also find evidence of unintended consequences the financial incentive programme was associated with a substitution away from private health providers an increase in breastfeeding and more pregnancies these findings demonstrate the potential for financial incentives to have unanticipated effects that may in the case of fertility undermine the programme s own objective of reducing mortality

does an intra household flypaper effect exist evidence from the educational fee reduction reform in rural china abstract we test for evidence of an intra household flypaper effect by evaluating the impact of an educational fee reduction reform in rural china on different categories of household expenditure including spending on individual children using pre and post reform data this study exploits cohort comparisons variation in the extent of school fee reductions across different villages and variation in the subsidies received by children enrolled in different grades within the same family to identify the impact of the reform the results show that educational fee reductions are matched by increased voluntary educational spending on the same children who receive the fee reductions providing strong evidence of an intra household flypaper effect

conditional cash transfers and payments for environmental services a conceptual framework for explaining and judging differences in outcomes we develop a conceptual framework elucidating the main determinants of the impact of conditional cash transfer cct and payments for environmental services pes programs using a simple multi agent model and evaluations of existing programs we show that 1 the share of the population who would meet the program s conditions in the absence of payments is a powerful predictor of program efficiency and that 2 program efficiency is eroded by selection bias people who already meet conditions self select into the programs at higher rates than others we then discuss possibilities for increasing efficiency and criteria for evaluating and choosing between ccts pes or other policy instruments

focal organisations and eco innovation in consumption and production systems this paper explores the role of focal organisations in stimulating eco innovation at the locus of greatest environmental impacts within a consumption and production system cps focal organisations by definition have considerable power in these systems we combine insights from the innovation studies literature with the sustainable green supply chain literature to explore how focal organisations exercise this power in pursuit of system wide sustainability through a case study of the milk cps in the uk we illustrate different strategies of the focal organisations to stimulate incremental eco innovation along existing trajectories we also show how despite focal organisation support radical eco innovation is inhibited by inherent path dependencies and other institutional dimensions of the cps by demonstrating the complementarities of positioning the case study findings within two synergistic literatures this paper contributes theoretically by extending and elaborating eco innovation studies it also has a practical utility for policy makers seeking to chart a path to more sustainable cps by relying on focal organisations

innovation processes in large technical systems market liberalization as a driver for radical change abstract electricity supply is a large technical system which exhibits strong path dependencies and high barriers for radical innovations recent market liberalization however has initiated a fundamental restructuring the paper analyzes how liberalization has altered innovation processes in the field of electricity supply we examine three radical innovations under monopoly conditions and contrast the findings with the results from a survey on the innovation behavior of electric utilities in liberalized markets we argue that the selection environment for innovations has changed in various respects in our sample new options open to innovation activities have emerged at the level of the firm and utility strategies turn out to be more heterogeneous this may be interpreted as an increase in the variety of search processes which may lead to a mid term decrease of path dependencies

boys cognitive skill formation and physical growth long term experimental evidence on critical ages for early childhood interventions the effects of early life circumstances on cognitive skill formation are important for later human capital development labor market outcomes and well being in this paper we test the hypothesis that the first 1 000 days are the critical window for both cognitive skill formation and physical development by exploiting a randomized conditional cash transfer cct program in nicaragua we find that boys exposed in utero and during the first 2 years of life have better cognitive but not physical outcomes when they are 10 years old compared to those also exposed but in their second year of life or later these results confirm that interventions that improve nutrition and or health during the first 1 000 days of life can have lasting positive impacts on cognitive development for children the finding that the results differ for cognitive functioning and anthropometrics highlights the importance of explicitly considering cognitive tests in addition to anthropometrics when analyzing impacts on early childhood development

the impact of the bolsa escola familia conditional cash transfer program on enrollment dropout rates and grade promotion in brazil this paper examines the impact of brazil s bolsa escola later renamed bolsa familia program on children s progress in school in brazil the bolsa program which started in the 1990s and expanded rapidly in 2001 and 2002 provides monthly cash payments to poor households if their children between the ages of 6 and 15 are enrolled in school using eight years of school census data from 1998 to 2005 our estimation method compares changes in enrollment and in dropout and grade advancement rates across schools that adopted the bolsa program at different times we estimate that after accounting for cumulative effects the bolsa program has increased enrollment in brazil by about 5 5 percent in grades 1 4 and by about 6 5 percent in grades 5 8 we also estimate that the program has lowered dropout rates by about 0 5 percentage points and raised grade promotion rates by about 0 9 percentage points for children in grades 1 4 and has reduced dropout rates by about 0 4 percentage points and increased grade promotion rates by about 0 3 percentage points for children in grades 5 8 only about one third of brazil s children participate in the bolsa program so the assumption that these results are due only to the impact of the program on participants with no spillover effects onto non participants implies that the impact of participating in the bolsa program is about three times higher than these estimates while these impacts cast a favorable light on the program simple calculations based on the enrollment impacts suggest that the likely benefits in terms of increased wages may not exceed the costs of the program

does money matter the effects of cash transfers on child development in rural ecuador abstract a large body of research indicates that child development is sensitive to early life environments so that poor children are at higher risk for poor cognitive and behavioral outcomes these developmental outcomes are important determinants of success in adulthood yet remarkably little is known about whether poverty alleviation programs improve children s developmental outcomes we examine how a government run cash transfer program for poor mothers in rural ecuador influenced the development of young children random assignment at the parish level is used to identify program effects our data include a set of measures of cognitive ability that are not typically included in experimental or quasi experimental studies of the impact of cash transfers on child well being as well as a set of physical health measures that may be related to developmental outcomes the cash transfer program had positive although modest effects on the physical cognitive and socioemotional development of the poorest c

assessing the relationship between economic and ecological performance distinguishing system levels and the role of innovation in this article we critically discuss the different perspectives that are currently in use for assessing the relationship between ecological and economic performance based on a review of the literature we propose that research up till now has made use of four distinct system boundaries the firm markets production and consumption systems and economic systems making these boundaries explicit is helpful in interpreting the mixed results that have been obtained we describe the consequences of the choice for each of these system boundaries and look at implications for innovation we also argue that the production and consumption system boundary offers potential for further advances in the field and deserves more attention in future research

contracting with externalities the paper studies inefficiencies arising in contracting between one principal and n agents when the utility of each agent depends on all agents trades with the principal when the principal commits to a set of publicly observable bilateral contract offers the arising inefficiency is due entirely to the externalities imposed on non signers in contrast when the principal s offers are privately observed the distortion is due to the externalities given agents equilibrium trades comparison of the two externalities determines the relative efficiency of the two contracting regimes in both cases we show that when n is large each agent can be treated as non pivotal provided that appropriate continuity assumptions are satisfied we also study the case in which the principal can condition each agent s trade on other agents messages we characterize the set of such mechanisms in which each agent s participation is voluntary when the principal can commit to any such mechanism she implements the first best outcome while threatening each deviator with the harshest possible punishment however in the presence of noise that goes to zero slower than n goes to infinity in the limit we obtain a generally inefficient outcome in which each agent feels non pivotal

making conditional cash transfer programs more efficient designing for maximum effect of the conditionality conditional cash transfer programs are now used extensively to encourage poor parents to increase investments in their children s human capital these programs can be large and expensive motivating a quest for greater efficiency through increased impact of the programs imposed conditions on human capital formation this requires designing the programs targeting and calibration rules specifically to achieve this result using data from the progresa randomized experiment in mexico this article shows that large efficiency gains can be achieved by taking into account how much the probability of a child s enrollment is affected by a conditional transfer rules for targeting and calibration can be made easy to implement by selecting indicators that are simple observable and verifiable and that cannot be manipulated by beneficiaries the mexico case shows that these efficiency gains can be achieved without increasing inequality among poor households

ecological modernisation new perspectives abstract ecological modernisation understood as systematic eco innovation and its diffusion has by far the largest potential to achieve environmental improvements in general the market logic of modernisation and competition for innovation combined with the market potential of global environmental needs serve as important driving forces behind ecological modernisation in recent times however additional factors like rising energy prices or fears from climate change have favoured the rise of this innovation based approach to environmental policy the article deals with two special driving forces first there is growing evidence for the importance of smart environmental regulation secondly the increasingly complex actor constellation of global environmental governance leads to mounting business risks for polluters and thereby exerts pressure for eco innovation despite these favourable framework conditions the strategy of ecological modernisation nonetheless faces a number of inherent limitations these include the unavailability of marketable technological solutions for relevant environmental problems like the loss of species the rebound effect neutralising the incremental environmental improvements through economic growth the dilemma of the n curve as well as resistance by modernisation losers against this background structural solutions seem indispensable here eco innovations should be supported by transition management or ecological structural policy

economic growth trade and energy implications for the environmental kuznets curve abstract the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis asserts that pollution follows an inverted u path with respect to economic growth the ekc has been explained in terms of structural changes in the composition of economic output and increased environmental regulation at higher income levels while some authors have incorporated the impact of trade policy orientation on the ekc the impact of the actual movement between countries of goods that embody pollution has not been considered this paper attempts to econometrically quantify the effect using pooled cross country and time series data the ekc hypothesis is examined with respect to commercial energy consumption the source of many serious environmental problems it was found that while both industrializing and industrialized countries have added to their energy requirements by exporting manufactured goods the growth has been substantially higher in the former at the same time industrialized countries have been able to reduce their energy requirements by importing manufactured goods exports of manufactured goods by industrialized countries has thus been an important factor in generating the upward sloping portion of the ekc and imports by industrialized countries have contributed to the downward slope

can drought increase total calorie availability the impact of drought on food consumption and the mitigating effects of a conditional cash transfer program abstract this study uses the panel data of a randomized experiment from the mexican progresa program to evaluate the impact of drought on total calorie availability and the mitigating effects of progresa on food consumption in periods of drought drought reduced total expenditures and total food expenditures but increased the total availability of calories this paradox can be explained by the impact of drought on the composition of calories that is it reduced the consumption of expensive calories in such foods as vegetables fruits and animal products but increased calories consumed from cheaper sources such as grains this study finds that progresa can completely mitigate the negative effects of drought on calorie availability from vegetables fruits and other sources however progresa cannot mitigate the impact of drought on calories available from grains the analysis also shows that during drought households who increase their consumption of grains get them mainly from purchased sources rathe

the ecological footprint of poverty alleviation evidence from mexico s oportunidades program abstract we study the consequences of poverty alleviation programs for environmental degradation we exploit the community level eligibility discontinuity for a conditional cash transfer program in mexico to identify the impacts of income increases on deforestation and use the program s initial randomized rollout to explore household responses we find that additional income raises consumption of land intensive goods and increases deforestation the observed production response and deforestation increase are larger in communities with poor road infrastructure this suggests that better access to markets disperses environmental harm and that the full effects of poverty alleviation on the environment can be observed only where poor infrastructure localizes them

the long run impact of cash transfers to poor families lleras muney we estimate the long run impact of cash transfers to poor families on children s longevity educational attainment nutritional status and income in adulthood to do so we collected individual level administrative records of applicants to the mothers pension program the first government sponsored welfare program in the united states 1911 1935 and matched them to census wwii and death records male children of accepted applicants lived one year longer than those of rejected mothers they also obtained onethird more years of schooling were less likely to be underweight and had higher income in adulthood than children of rejected mothers jel i12 i14 i18 i32 i38 j16 n32

the social construction of market value institutionalization and learning perspectives on stock market reactions this study advances a social constructionist view of financial market behavior the paper suggests that the market s reaction to particular corporate practices such as stock repurchase plans are not as financial economists contend simply a function of the inherent efficiency of such practices rather stock market reactions are also influenced by the prevailing institutional logic and the degree of institutionalization of the practice the theory first predicts that the emergence of the agency perspective on corporate governance in the mid 1980s represented a powerful new institutional logic that would lead the market to reverse its prior aggregate reaction to stock repurchase plans in the united states the paper then considers the potential for institutional decoupling of repurchase plans and develops competing hypotheses about how the market value of these policies might have changed as more firms formally adopted but did not implement the plans over time in contrast to a financial economic pers

child schooling and child work in the presence of a partial education subsidy could a partial subsidy for child education increase children s participation in paid work in contrast to much of the theoretical and empirical child labor literature this paper shows that child work and school participation can be complements under certain conditions using data from the randomized evaluation of a conditional cash transfer program in the philippines the analysis finds that some children who were in neither school nor work before the program increased participation in school and work for pay after the program earlier cash transfer programs notably those in mexico brazil and ecuador increased school attendance while reducing child labor those programs fully offset schooling costs while the transfers under the philippine transfers fall short of the full costs of schooling for a typical child as a result some beneficiary children from poor philippine households increased work to support their schooling the additional earnings from this work represent a substantive share of the shortfall in the schooling costs net of transfer the paper rules out several potential alternative explanations for the increase in child labor including changes in household productive activities adult labor supply and household expenditure patterns that in principle can arise after a cash transfer and may also affect the supply of or demand for child labor

bargaining failures and merger policy in this paper we study the optimal ex ante merger policy in a model where merger proposals are the result of strategic bargaining among alternative candidates we allow for firm asymmetries and in particular we emphasize the fact that potential synergies generated by a merger may vary substantially depending on the identity of the participating firms the model demonstrates that under some circumstances relatively inefficient mergers may take place that is a particular merger may materialize despite the existence of an alternative merger capable of generating higher social surplus and even higher profits such bargaining failures have important implications for the ex ante optimal merger policy we show that a more stringent policy than the ex post optimal reduces the scope of these bargaining failures and raises expected social surplus we use a bargaining model that is flexible in the sense that its strategic structure does not place any exogenous restriction on the endogenous likelihood of feasible mergers

economics of technological change and the natural environment how effective are innovations as a remedy for resource scarcity abstract the paper aims to substantiate the importance of endogenous innovations when evaluating the compatibility of natural resource use and economic development it explains that technological change has the potential to compensate for natural resource scarcity diminishing returns to capital poor input substitution and material balance restrictions but is limited by various restrictions like fading returns to innovative investments and rising research costs it also shows how innovative activities are fostered by accurate price signals and research favouring sectoral change the simultaneous effects of increasing technical knowledge decreasing resource inputs and increasing world population largely determine the chances of long run sustainable development consequently future research has to be directed at a more thorough understanding of the mechanisms driving innovations in the presence of natural resource scarcity

environmental compliance and economic and environmental performance evidence from handicrafts small businesses in mexico this research aims to fill a major gap in the relevant literature on small businesses in developing countries specifically concerning the development of models to better explain economic and environmental performance as a result of environmental compliance thus moving toward an explanation of the sustainable behavior of these businesses data from 186 pottery craft businesses located in three mexican states oaxaca puebla and tlaxcala reveal that environmental compliance significantly influences economic and environmental performance with the mediating role of environmental innovation confirming the porter hypothesis in the context of small businesses in an emerging economy environmental compliance is an important factor in improving the economic and environmental performance of small businesses in emerging economies

pandering to persuade a principal chooses one of multiple projects or an outside option an agent is privately informed about the projects benets and shares the principal s preferences except for not internalizing her value from the outside option we show that for moderate outside option values strategic communication is characterized by pandering the agent biases his recommendation toward conditionally better looking projects even when both parties would be better o with some other project a project that has lower expected value can be conditionally better looking we develop some comparative statics of pandering pandering is also induced by an optimal mechanism without transfers

continuity in mechanism design without transfers we adopt a mechanism design approach to model communication between a principal and a privately informed agent in the context where monetary incentives are not available we provide a simple condition on the distribution of the agent s type which ensures that the optimal mechanism is continuous with strict log concavity of the distribution there exists a unique optimal mechanism that is characterized

taking the dogma out of econometrics structural modeling and credible inference without a doubt there has been a credibility revolution in applied econometrics one contributing development has been in the improvement and increased use in data analysis of structural methods that is the use of models based in economic theory structural modeling attempts to use data to identify the parameters of an underlying economic model based on models of individual choice or aggregate relations derived from them structural estimation has a long tradition in economics but better and larger data sets more powerful computers improved modeling methods faster computational techniques and new econometric methods such as those mentioned above have allowed researchers to make significant improvements while angrist and pischke extol the successes of empirical work that estimates treatment effects based on actual or quasi experiments they are much less sanguine about structural analysis and hold industrial organization up as an example where progress is less dramatic indeed reading their article one comes away with the impression that there is only a single way to conduct credible empirical analysis this seems to us a very narrow and dogmatic approach to empirical work credible analysis can come in many guises both structural and nonstructural and for some questions structural analysis offers important advantages in this comment we address the criticism of structural analysis and its use in industrial organization and consider why empirical analysis in industrial organization differs in such striking ways from that in fields such as labor which have recently emphasized the methods favored by angrist and pischke

on the role of empirical industrial organization in competition policy abstract in this paper i consider the role of empirical industrial organization io in competition policy in particular i consider the effect of the institutional setting in which competition policy is developed on the diffusion of ideas and techniques emerging from the empirical io literature in doing so my aims are two fold first i aim to understand the areas of competition policy most likely to provide fertile ground for future work and those which are less likely to have an impact and second i hope to make a small step towards ensuring that the important potential synergies between competition policy and empirical io are more fully developed to the benefit of both communities and more importantly the public this paper necessarily draws heavily on my experience in the uk but many remarks may resonate more generally

relationships between eco innovation and financial performance evidence from publicly traded companies in poland and hungary while the analysis of the linkages between eco innovative activities and financial performance is a popular topic in the existing body of literature many questions about these relationships especially in transition economies in central and eastern europe cee remain unanswered in this paper we explore four types of eco innovation product process market and sources of supply and their impact on accounting based measurers of financial performance using the data on polish and hungarian publicly traded companies from the years 2006 2013 our results indicated that eco innovators were generally characterized by higher returns on assets and equity and lower earnings retention additionally companies that introduce eco innovation were also significantly larger more likely to face lower financial risk exposure and more likely to possess greater free cash flow than conventional firms the findings suggest that strong asset and financial capabilities are relevant pre conditions for the development of eco innovativeness and that there is a need for environmental policy to create clear incentives for smes to increase activities in that area overall this study extends the understanding of financial performance implications of innovation by focussing on the area of environmental innovation

control of resources bargaining power and the demand of food evidence from progresa abstract i use a structural model of households to recover how much resources each individual controls in the context of the mexican progresa program i find that the eligibility to receive the cash transfers induces a redistribution of resources from the father to both the mother and children although the mother is the one benefiting the most with these information i compute individual poverty rates and quantify to what extent the program reduces within household inequality i also combine these measures to construct a proxy for women s bargaining power and using causal identification techniques i estimate its direct effects on household demand for food exploiting random assignment of the cash transfers as an instrumental variable for the treatment of interest i show that mothers having majority control of household resources relative to fathers increase food consumption as a share of the household budget by 6 5 8 3 i use these estimates to argue that by knowing i the distribution of pre program resources inside the household and ii how much influence each decision maker can have on the desired policy outcome a policymaker can improve the cost effectiveness of a cash transfer program by targeting the cash to resource shares in addition to gender

do remedies affect the efficiency defense an optimal merger control analysis abstract this paper examines the optimal use of remedies and the efficiency defense for merger control we develop a framework in which merger efficiency gains are endogenously determined and are not observed by the competition authority the possibility of an efficiency defense can push firms to design the merger better leading to greater efficiency gains firms can also submit remedies to the competition authority they interact with the efficiency defense by reducing the firm s incentive to enhance efficiency at the same time remedies improve the assessment of the merger in particular by signaling the true level of efficiency gains we ask to what extent it may be optimal to make use of both instruments simultaneously and thus discuss the possibility that the competition agency refrain from using one of the instruments to try to improve overall merger control performance

conditional cash transfers the case of progresa oportunidades conditional cash transfer cct programs innovate by conditioning transfers to poor families on investments in the human capital of children and other family members the mexican cct program progresa oportunidades began in 1997 and has served as a model for many of the now over sixty countries with ccts around the world in large part due to its initial evaluation with an experimental design and numerous follow up studies this article reviews the literature on the development evaluation and findings of progresa oportunidades summarizing what is known about program effects taking into account corrections for multiple hypothesis testing

innovation and competition the role of the product market abstract we study how competition impacts innovation and welfare when firms compete both in the product market and in innovation development this relationship is complex and may lead to scenarios in which a lessening of competition increases r d and consumer welfare in the long run we provide conditions for when competition increases or decreases industry innovation and welfare these conditions are based on properties of the product market payoffs implications for applied work and policy are discussed

heterogeneous impacts of conditional cash transfers evidence from nicaragua abstract in the last decade the most popular policy tool used to increase human capital in developing countries has been the conditional cash transfer program a large literature has shown significant mean impacts on schooling health and child labor this paper examines heterogeneous effects using random assignment data from the red de proteccion social in rural nicaragua using interactions between the targeting criteria and the treatment indicator estimates suggest that children located in more impoverished localities experienced a larger impact of the program on schooling in 2001 but this finding is reversed in 2002 estimated quantile treatment effects indicate that there is considerable heterogeneity in the impacts of the program on the distribution of food expenditures as well as total expenditures in particular households at the lower end of the expenditure distribution experienced a smaller increase in expenditures this study also presents evidence of the rank invariance assumption to hel

driving factors for the success of the green innovation market a relationship system proposal this study aims to map out the relationships that make up green innovation initiatives in brazilian industry the sample comprised 100 managers at manufacturing companies most of them operating in the business of farm machinery and equipment 45 managers and steel structures 14 managers to develop this study medeiros et al j clean prod 65 76 86 2014 study mapping critical factors that drive the success of green product innovation and the paradigm of complexity was used as a reference study based on the results it was possible to identify that the operational dynamic of the factors and variables that affect market success do not happen in an isolated or fragmented way they occur systematically with different contingencies and structured basic and intermediate skills in order to meet the expectations of consumers laws and environmental legislation initially the technological expertise factor was noted as very important for sustaining green product innovation furthermore since proactive leaders are an important factor for successfully developing environmentally sustainable products it must be added to technological expertise as the foundation for developing green innovation after defining the basis for green product innovation the intermediary conditions necessary for using the available technology appropriately were mapped out in this sense variables such as elimination of cultural barriers capacity for critical reflective analysis and experimentation are also very important in addition some of the variables of the cross functional collaboration and market knowledge factors were a part of the structure that organizations need to transform potential into developing green products which is the basis for the third level of the model the fourth level of the model has the meeting consumer expectations and following law and legislation factors which make up the main goals for developing environmentally sustainable products according to a number of surveys that were conducted

managerial incentives and environmental compliance abstract this paper uses a principal agent model to analyze the role of monetary incentives to implement corporate environmental policy the model assumes that the agent has to split a limited amount of effort between two tasks profit enhancement and environmental risk reduction we find that when the agent s effort constraint is not binding wages should increase with performance in each task moreover the sharpness of the optimal monetary incentives for a given task should depend positively on the principal s eagerness to influence performance on this task and on the accuracy of the monitoring technology when the agent s effort constraint is binding however the necessity for the principal to provide insurance to the agent may make it inefficient to link managerial effort expended on environmental risk reduction to the corporate compensation system

does raising family income cause better child health evidence from china abstractfew studies have attempted to identify a causal link between family income and child health especially in developing countries this article takes advantage of an exogenous income shock created by china s rural tax reform between 2000 and 2003 to study the causal impact of household income on child health the analysis finds that an increase in family income significantly raises children s height for age z scores these effects are robust to alternative specifications and a comprehensive set of controls the article also investigates possible mechanisms generating this result we find that with a higher income level better nutritional intake partially accounts for the improvement in child health

social interactions and schooling decisions abstract the aim of this paper is to study whether a child s schooling choices are affected by the schooling choices of other children identification is based on a randomized targeted intervention that grants a cash subsidy conditional on school attendance to a subgroup of eligible children within small rural villages in mexico progresa this policy change spills over to ineligible children if social interactions are relevant results indicate that the eligible children tend to attend school more frequently and the ineligible children acquire more schooling when the subsidy is introduced in their local village moreover the overall effect of progresa on eligible children is the sum of a direct effect due to cash transfers and an indirect effect due to changes in peer group schooling interestingly the social interactions effect is almost as important as the direct effect

crop diversification and child health empirical evidence from tanzania malnutrition is recognized as a major issue among low income households in developing countries with long term implications for economic development recently crop diversification has been considered as a strategy to improve nutrition and health however there is no systematic empirical evidence on the role played by crop diversification in improving human health we use three waves of the tanzania national panel survey to test the effect of crop diversification on child health we implement two instrumental variable approaches and perform several robustness checks to address potential endogeneity concerns we find a positive but small effect of an increase in crop diversification on child height for age z score through greater dietary diversity the effect is larger for subsistence households and children living in households with limited market access