how general are time preferences eliciting good specific discount rates abstract this paper tests the commonly used assumption that people apply a single discount rate to the utility from different sources of consumption using survey data from uganda with both hypothetical and incentivized choices over different goods we elicit time preferences from about 2400 subjects we reject the null of equal discount rates across goods the average person in our sample is more impatient about sugar meat and starchy plantains than about money and a list of other goods we review the assumptions to recover discount rates from experimental choices for the case of good specific discounting consistently with the theoretical framework we find convergence in discount rates across goods for two groups expected to engage in or think about arbitraging the rewards traders and individuals with large quantities of the good at home as an application we evaluate empirically the conditions under which good specific discounting could predict a low asset poverty trap

life cycle consumption and hyperbolic discount functions abstract studies of animal and human behavior suggest that discount functions are approximately hyperbolic ainslie picoeconomics 1992 hyperbolic models explain a wide range of empirical anomalies including 1 missing precautionary savings effects 2 incongruence between the elasticity of intertemporal substitution and the inverse of the coefficient of relative risk aversion 3 consumption discontinuities at retirement 4 variation in patience over the life cycle 5 consumer self reports of undersaving 6 disproportionate retirement accumulation in illiquid assets 7 asset specific marginal propensities to consume and 8 declining national savings rates in developed countries hyperbolic models also provide a new framework for analyzing the welfare gains that come from pro saving policies like social security and tax deferred retirement accounts

income generating effects of biofuel policies a meta analysis of the cge literature abstract while the production of biofuels has expanded in recent years findings in the literature on its impact on economic growth and development remain contradictory this paper presents a meta analysis of computable general equilibrium cge studies published between 2006 and 2017 on the effect of biofuel production on economic development worldwide using 30 cge studies we found that biofuel supportive policies generated significant impacts on gdp and household incomes cge studies included in our database reported an average 0 25 percentage point increase in gdp and a 0 49 percentage point increase in household incomes we also found that results were driven by several key features of the cge studies included in our database we investigated features such as biofuel type geographic area and characteristics of the cge models employed we found that biofuel expansion has heterogeneous effects in developed versus emerging countries simulations on longer time periods and in multi country studies led to results that indicate higher impacts of biofuel expansion on gdp growth and household incomes moreover simulations with an increase in agricultural productivity indicate positive welfare impact gains unlike simulations with land expansion lastly we found that biodiesel development leads to higher welfare impact gains than that of bioethanol

the effect of physician advice on alcohol consumption count regression with an endogenous treatment effect although there are encouraging trends alcohol abuse continues to be a significant public health problem econometric studies of alcohol demand have yielded a great deal of information for alcohol abuse prevention policy these studies suggest that higher alcohol taxes and stricter drunk driving policies can reduce heavy drinking and drunk driving in this paper we explore the role physician advice plays in the campaign to prevent alcohol related problems compared to alcohol taxation physician advice is a more precisely targeted intervention that does not impose extra costs on responsible drinkers compared to the resource costs of arresting processing and punishing drunk drivers physician advice may be a lower cost intervention to provide a basis for alcohol policy analysis we use an alcohol demand framework to test whether physician provided information about the adverse consequences of alcohol abuse shifts demand to more moderate levels there are three aspects of our alcohol demand model that complicate the estimation 1 the dependent variable is non negative it is a count variable number of drinks consumed 2 a non trivial number of sample observations have zero values for the dependent variable and 3 because the data we use is non experimental the treatment variable indicating receipt of advice from a physician may be endogenous we implement an estimation method that is specifically designed to deal with these three complicating factors our results show that advice has a substantial and significant impact on alcohol consumption by males with hypertension and that failing to account for the endogeneity of advice masks this result copyright 2001 john wiley sons ltd

inter vivos transfers and exchange most parents divide their bequests equally among their children whereas inter vivos transfers are usually unequal we propose that exchange is better for inducing inter vivos transfers than bequests inter vivos transfers can be adjusted quickly to the amount of care are less costly than writing a will and can be kept secret from other family members and the public the results from national longitudinal data show that as expected if a parent gives any inter vivos transfers she is more likely to give to children who provide informal care informal care has no effect on the equality of intended bequests

supply side and demand side cost sharing in deregulated social health insurance which is more effective abstract microeconomic theory predicts that if patients are fully insured and providers are paid fee for service utilization of medical services exceeds the efficient level moral hazard effect in switzerland both demand side and supply side cost sharing have been introduced to mitigate this problem analyzing a panel dataset of about 160 000 adults we find both types of cost sharing to be effective in curtailing the use of medical services however when moral hazard mitigation is traded off against risk selection the minimum deductible supply side cost sharing option ranks first followed by the medium deductible demand side alternative making the supply side option somewhat more effective

subjective discounting in an exchange economy this paper describes the equilibrium of a discrete time exchange economy in which consumers with arbitrary subjective discount factors and homothetic period utility functions follow linear markov consumption and portfolio strategies explicit expressions are given for state prices and consumption wealth ratios we provide an analytically convenient continuous time approximation and show how subjective rates of time preference affect risk free rates but not instantaneous risk return trade offs hyperbolic discount factors can be a source of return volatility but they cannot be used to address asset pricing puzzles related to high frequency sharpe ratios

organic label bargaining power and profit sharing in the french fluid milk market the paper determines how the value added created by an organic label is shared in a vertical chain among manufacturers and retailers using purchase data on the french fluid milk sector we develop a structural econometric model of demand and supply that takes into account the bargaining power between manufacturers and retailers our results suggest that the organic label segment is more profitable as it permits the existence of higher margins moreover an organic label allows manufacturers to achieve more bargaining power relative to retailers and hence to obtain a higher share of total margins the econometric model is then used to assess the impact of an environmental policy in favor of the organic segment based on a mechanism of price support our results suggest that while a subsidy policy towards organic products benefits both manufacturers and retailers a tax policy toward conventional products benefits manufacturers of national brands at the expense of retailers and manufacturers that provide the private labels the benefits of such policies on the environment is relatively small all such policies tend to increase the impact on global warming and land use but reduce the impact on eutrophication acidification and energy use

a test of the structure of pac contracts an analysis of house gun control votes in the 1980s enactment of the bill was a major victory for the national rifle association which had worked for years to win relaxation of the landmark gun control act of 1968 congressional quarterly almanac 1986 p 82 i introduction every election the same political action committees pacs contribute millions of dollars to candidates for office well informed participants in the political process surely must get value for their money yet empirical research fails to provide systematic evidence that campaign contributions influence congressional roll call votes 1 a mischaracterization of the exchange between pacs and politicians may produce these contradictory results empirical studies of roll call voting typically use pac contributions from only one election cycle earlier studies generally assume prepayment in the prior congress while more contemporary studies assume a spot exchange recent empirical work however suggests another possibility interest groups may buy current influence with money spent over multiple election cycles stratmann 1995 shows that contributions from both the current and the previous election cycles influence floor votes on agricultural price supports snyder 1990 1992 presents evidence that interest groups make long term investments in politicians previous studies by arbitrarily imposing a payment structure may have produced erroneous estimates of the influence of pac money on legislative votes we examine roll call votes on gun control in the u s house of representatives during the 1980s to determine whether pacs make spot market purchases prepay for votes in the prior election cycle or make long term investments we investigate whether pac contributions have a durable long term investment effect as snyder 1992 suggests we consider two types of evidence concerning the campaign contribution contract first we examine the pattern of expenditures by the two dominant interest groups concerned with gun control the national rifle association nra and hand gun control hgc their expenditures provide strong evidence against the spot market exchange hypothesis both groups made significant expenditures in sessions of congress in which no floor vote occurred nor were these expenditures purchasing services such as committee work in a spot market exchange further 1986 nra expenditures are significantly higher for first term representatives which is consistent with long term investments but contradicts a spot exchange since freshmen have the least influence to sell second we include expenditures from both the current and the five previous election cycles as separate independent variables in a model of roll call voting to date no empirical paper tests whether pac money from more than two cycles influences roll call voting and only stratmann 1995 and grenzke 1989 use a model that specifies money from more than one cycle in an equation explaining roll call votes our probit estimates indicate that nra expenditures in the three most recent election cycles and hgc expenditures in the two most recent cycles buy votes the independent effect of expenditures from different cycles suggests that contributions are neither an unqualified one session prepayment nor a spot exchange the influence of nra expenditures two sessions prior to the roll call votes is evidence of a long term investment the literature on the determinants of roll call voting assumes that pac contributions alter representatives votes interest groups might instead simply provide campaign assistance to their supporters to affect the composition of congress stratmann 1991 bronars and lott 1997 if a difficult to quantify variable and thus omitted from regressions signals a representative s true position and interest groups make campaign contributions on the basis of this variable pac contributions might appear to influence votes the pattern of contributions and votes on gun control however indicates attempts by the nra and hgc to influence votes not merely the composition of congress

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

a non unitary discount rate model we develop a simple macroeconomic model in which agents discount their utility from consumption and the utility from leisure at different rates under this setting time inconsistency emerges for the preferences of agents moreover the time inconsistency problem generates two types of inefficiencies intratemporal and intertemporal we examine the welfare effects of savings subsidy and consumption tax the effects of taxation in our model are quite different from those in the standard model if the discount rate for consumption is higher lower than that for leisure today s self cares less more about the consumption of the future selves than the leisure of the future selves depressing stimulating the consumption of future selves improves the utility of today s self hence a positive negative consumption tax rate improves the utility level of all selves

consumption time in household production implications for the goods time elasticity of substitution abstract under some reasonable assumptions we show analytically that the goods time elasticity of substitution will be greater if consumption time is not included as an input an empirical example with food production is consistent with this result

the economics of poverty traps and persistent poverty an asset based approach abstract longitudinal data on household living standards open the way to a deeper analysis of the nature and extent of poverty while a number of studies have exploited this type of data to distinguish transitory from more chronic forms of income or expenditure poverty this paper develops an asset based approach to poverty analysis that makes it possible to distinguish deep rooted persistent structural poverty from poverty that passes naturally with time due to systemic growth processes drawing on the economic theory of poverty traps and bifurcated accumulation strategies this paper briefly discusses some feasible estimation strategies for empirically identifying poverty traps and long term persistent structural poverty as well as relevant extensions of the popular foster greer thorbecke class of poverty measures the paper closes with reflections on how asset based poverty can be used to underwrite the design of persistent poverty reduction strategies

the thrifty food plan and low income households in the united states what food groups are being neglected food assistance programs in the united states provide low income households with the resources to purchase a healthy nutritious and palatable diet if they buy the market baskets of food outlined in the thrifty food plan this study compares the cost of these baskets with actual spending on food at home by low income households simulations reveal at home food spending by low income households to represent only 86 of what is needed to follow the thrifty food plan married couples with children and female headed households with children spend only 73 and 82 respectively and just 43 and 50 for at home fruits and vegetables

increasing returns and animal spirits the purpose of this note is to simply point out that the multiplicity intrinsic of course to the presence of non convexities characterizes the models of growth with external increasing returns which have been studied recently and more importantly to show that the many competitive equilibria which often arise in those models can be interpreted as animal spirits equilibria that is equilibria indexed by the consumers optimism or pessimism this multiplicity of competitive equilibrium paths can be viewed as providing a new foundation upon which to build a theory of self fulfilling prophecies one which relies solely on the existence of external effects and does not rest on the overlapping generation structure or on back ward bending offer curves the conclusion that multiple animal spirits competitive equilibria are likely to arise in a model of external increasing returns would survive the generalization of the framework used in this paper to many period environments be they overlapping generation or representative agent infinite horizon structures this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

in the same boat but not equals the heterogeneous effects of parental income on child labour this paper examines the impact of parental income on child labour the empirical literature has found conflicting results regarding whether poverty leads parents to send their children to work mos

in kind benefits and household behavior the impact of snap on food away from home consumption abstract supplemental nutrition assistance program snap formerly known as the food stamp program provides in kind benefits that can generally be utilized for food at home fah only according to economic theory snap benefits are fungible with cash for inframarginal households which may allow participants to spend benefits on non fah items however empirical evidence for this theory is mixed this paper exploits an underutilized source of state level variation the early 2000 s recession to determine the impact of snap participation on household food away from home fafh consumption in a difference in difference framework i compare households in high post recession snap growth states to households in low post recession snap growth states the results show that snap participation causes a significant decrease in fafh expenditure and fafh s share of total food expenditure

split sample instrumental variables estimates of the return to schooling this article reevaluates recent instrumental variables iv estimates of the returns to schooling in light of the fact that two stage least squares is biased in the same direction as ordinary least squares ols even in very large samples we propose a split sample instrumental variables ssiv estimator that is not biased toward ols ssiv uses one half of a sample to estimate parameters of the first stage equation estimated first stage parameters are then used to construct fitted values and second stage parameter estimates in the other half sample ssiv is biased toward 0 but this bias can be corrected the splt sample estimators confirm and reinforce some previous findings on the returns to schooling but fail to confirm others

does privatisation of vocational rehabilitation improve labour market opportunities evidence from a field experiment in sweden this paper analyses if privatisation of vocational rehabilitation can improve labour market opportunities for individuals on long term sickness absence we use a field experiment performed by the p

much ado about two reconsidering retransformation and the two part model in health econometrics in health economics applications involving outcomes y and covariates x it is often the case that the central inferential problems of interest involve e y x and its associated partial effects or elasticities many such outcomes have two fundamental statistical properties y 0 and the outcome y 0 is observed with sufficient frequency that the zeros cannot be ignored econometrically this paper 1 describes circumstances where the standard two part model with homoskedastic retransformation will fail to provide consistent inferences about important policy parameters and 2 demonstrates some alternative approaches that are likely to prove helpful in applications

how biofuel policies backfire misguided goals inefficient mechanisms and political ecological blind spots abstract the development of an economically viable biofuel industry rests on strong state subsidies for production and processing creation of markets through government procurement fuel blending mandates price controls as well as foreign trade tariffs and quotas and multiple interventions in agricultural ecological and other regulations we use an approach grounded in agrarian political economy to critically analyze the literature on how biofuel policies interact with broader production trade and agro ecological processes we focus on policies involving the most prominent crops in the places where biofuel production has advanced the most i e usa brazil and the eu but also extend analysis to their relations with broader transformations in production commercial and even governance practices around the world we investigate the political and economic interests driving biofuel policies and how these set the terms in which state interventions and policies are conceived and implemented we find that these are not developed and implemented according to environmental or inclusive pro poor development purposes but according to state interests in energy security and its intersection with a tense alliance between corporate sectors rendering many policy mechanisms ineffective or even outright counterproductive to effectively facilitate more socially and environmentally sustainable energy production and agricultural practices

child income appropriations as a disease coping mechanism consequences for the health education relationship this paper analyses the relationships between hiv aids and education taking into account the appropriative nature of child income using a theoretical model we show that considering remittances from one s child as an insurance asset can reverse the usual negative relationship between disease prevalence and educational investment this prediction confirms the results of an empirical study conducted on data compiled from the demographic and health survey dhs database for 12 sub sahara african countries for children aged between 7 and 22 years old using regional hiv prevalence as a measure of health risk we find that the sign of the slope between health risk and the enrolment of children is not constant splitting the data based on expected remittance patterns for example rural versus urban we obtain that the effect is most likely driven by household characteristics related to child income appropriation

estimating the moral hazard effect of supplemental medical insurance in the demand for prescription drugs by the elderly almost all persons over the age of 65 are insured under the medicare program for inpatient drug consumption this national insurance plan does not however generally cover the purchase of outpatient prescription drugs rx in 1992 more than onethird of all outpatient drug expenditures in the united states were incurred by medicare enrollees yet approximately 50 percent of the elderly did not have any coverage for this type of treatment daniel waldo 1994 in response to this and other gaps in medicare coverage private firms have offered insurance instruments specifically designed to fill such voids commonly known as medigap policies in addition to this form of financial protection contingent upon state of residency and economic status elderly persons may qualify and obtain coverage for rx through medicaid or a state sponsored drug program however even with these incomeand wealth sensitive options many relatively poor elderly are faced with significant outof pocket drug expenditures coverage is concentrated among those elderly with income over 200 percent of poverty and those below the poverty line stephen long 1994 the most vulnerable elderly seem to be protected from the financial hardship of excessive rx expenses through medicaid coverage but private supplemental insurance is potentially too expensive for seniors near the poverty line to alleviate this burden 11 states currently offer some form of rx insurance that is targeted at those elderly or disabled persons who are relatively poor but do not qualify for medicaid at the national level policymakers and interest groups have advocated adding coverage to the medicare program to assess such programmatic changes an accurate forecast of the potential change in rx usage is needed in this paper we use a 1990 sample of medicare enrolled pennsylvanians who may have private medigap insurance or coverage under the state s rx program to estimate the amount by which the rx demand of the average individual would change in the presence of insurance coverage ceteris paribus such a residual increase in the consumption of a medical commodity has been labeled the moralhazard effect of health insurance the estimation of this effect requires a nonstandard regression technique because insurance coverage for rx and those types of treatments that are complementary or substitutable for prescriptions may be endogenously determined those persons with a higher demand for drugs are more likely to demand supplemental insurance for rx coulson and terza department of economics pennsylvania state university university park pa 16802 neslusan division of economic research at the social security administration 4301 connecticut avenue n w washington dc 20008 stuart department of health policy and administration pennsylvania state university university park pa 16802 funding for survey design and implementation used in this research was supported by grants from the pew charitable trusts and the health care financing administration grant no 88 01439 001 the views expressed herein are not necessarily endorsed by either these agencies or the social security administration 1the now repealed medicare catastrophic coverage act of 1988 as well as many of the recent healthcare reform proposals would have provided for outpatient rx coverage for the elderly 122

estimation of input distance functions a system approach this article offers a methodology to address the endogeneity of inputs in the input distance function idf formulation of the production processes we propose to tackle endogenous input ratios appearing in the normalized idf by considering a flexible simultaneous system of the idf and the first order conditions from the firm s cost minimization problem our model can accommodate both technical and input allocative inefficiencies amongst firms we also present the algorithm for quantifying the cost of allocative inefficiency we showcase our cost system based model by applying it to study the production of norwegian dairy farms during the 1991 2008 period among other things we find both an economically and statistically significant improvement in the levels of technical efficiency among dairy farms associated with the 1997 quota scheme change which a more conventional single equation stochastic frontier model appears to be unable to detect

biofuel development in ghana policies of expansion and drivers of failure in the jatropha sector abstract biofuel development was mainly promoted in several parts of africa as an energy security or rural development strategy jatropha was the biofuel feedstock that received the most interest across africa from investors however jatropha expansion gave rise to a number of contested issues which produced conflicts winners and losers access to land was at the heart of several of these conflicts though some success stories of individual jatropha projects have been documented the overwhelming majority of these projects in africa have either collapsed or faced significant difficulties understanding the reasons behind the failure of the jatropha sector is an important gap in the academic literature while the lessons learnt from failed projects could inform future policies and practices this literature review synthesizes the key drivers of failure of the jatropha sector in ghana as identified in the literature and complemented through site visits and expert interviews it identifies a number of reasons behind the failure of individual jatropha projects such as poor business planning institutional barriers limited community participation unfair compensation practices obstacles posed by civil society and unconstructive involvement of chiefs the findings indicate the systemic nature of these problems as they often worked synergistically to catalyse the collapse of many jatropha projects in ghana re vitalising the biofuel and especially the jatropha industry is virtually impossible given the current challenges this would require a renewed political interest in ghana particularly to deal with the deficits of the land administration institutions

estimates of returns to scale elasticity of substitution and the thrifty food plan meal poverty rate from a direct household meal production function abstract many nutritional policies are designed to make home food production more affordable and yet very little is actually known about the home food production process a better understanding of home food production can be used to help explain shortcomings in current nutrition policies and consequently help in designing better nutrition policies this paper provides results from several home meal production function specifications that are rather robust the median returns to scale and elasticity of substitution between money and time is in the 1 2 1 9 range and 33 56 range respectively indicating increasing returns to scale but difficulty in substituting money for time in home meal production a home meal poverty rate is estimated which is the percentage of the sample that produces fewer meals at home than consistent with dietary guidelines the estimated home meal poverty rate is about 85 which is consistent with recent research taking a less rigorous approach though the approach taken here is novel the overall message is consistent with the recent literature time is a more important factor in achieving nutritional targets than money

energy security for india biofuels energy efficiency and food productivity abstract the emergence of biofuel as a renewable energy source offers opportunities for significant climate change mitigation and greater energy independence to many countries at the same time biofuel represents the possibility of substitution between energy and food for developing countries like india which imports over 75 of its crude oil fossil fuels pose two risks global warming pollution and long term risk that oil prices will undermine real living standards this paper examines india s options for managing energy price risk in three ways biofuel development energy efficiency promotion and food productivity improvements our salient results suggest that biodiesel shows promise as a transport fuel substitute that can be produced in ways that fully utilize marginal agricultural resources and hence promote rural livelihoods first generation bioethanol by contrast appears to have a limited ability to offset the impacts of oil price hikes combining the biodiesel expansion policy with energy efficiency improvements and food productivity increases proved to be a more effective strategy to enhance both energy and food security help mitigate climate change and cushion the economy against oil price shocks

illegal drug use and employment this article investigates the relationship between employment and the use of marijuana and cocaine for males in national longitudinal survey of youth data from 1984 and 1988 previous studies yielding mixed evidence may have inadequately accounted for the simultaneity between drug consumption and employment i implement an instrumental variable procedure that identifies drug use with variables that are empirically unrelated to employment including the regional cocaine price and a state marijuana decriminalization indicator results indicate that the use of each drug substantially reduces the likelihood of employment exogeneity tests reveal that standard probit estimates are severely biased toward zero

are snap benefits adequate a geographical and food expenditure decomposition abstract the supplemental nutrition assistance program snap provides resources to supplement household food expenditures in order to achieve a nutritious diet determining the amount of support required or extent of food expenditure poverty entails comparing available resources for food to a nutrition determined threshold clearly the value of the threshold will affect the degree of food expenditure poverty if the threshold value is inaccurate the calculated degree of poverty will be inaccurate usda uses a threshold for setting snap benefits that does not vary geographically or temporally so consequently food expenditure poverty may be understated or overstated in different regions and time periods this article compares food expenditure poverty estimates for snap participants when geographical differences in the threshold are ignored versus not ignored in addition the article decomposes household food expenditures into food away from home fafh food at home fah personal funded fah and snap funded fah in order to assess the degree to which each of these contribute to reducing food expenditure poverty the general findings are that all food expenditure poverty measures are worse when geographical differences are taken into account in addition the analysis shows that fah expenditures and in particular snap fah expenditures contribute the most to reducing food expenditure poverty in snap households the policy implications are that food expenditure poverty is currently underestimated in the us by ignoring geographical differences in thresholds but the food expenditure poverty would be even worse without snap benefits geographical adjustments to the national threshold could help reduce food expenditure poverty across regions

application of computable general equilibrium cge to climate change mitigation policy a systematic review abstract with the growing literature related to climate change mitigation measures and policy interventions a systematic review of the application of computable general equilibrium cge model is inevitable therefore this article aims to characterise the relevant studies define a comparative framework to identify the current state of the art and the gaps in applied general equilibrium models firstly the systematic review found a total of 301 research articles from scopus and web of science databases and finally analysed 154 articles based on inclusion and exclusion criteria from 67 refereed journals the review analysis found that application of cge model is very vital in addressing climate change mitigation issues at the national regional and global levels however china attracted the most substantial research interests followed by the usa india and australia among others which are in line with their share of greenhouse gas emissions in the world most of the research themes focus on the carbon tax emission reduction target emission trading renewable energy energy efficiency and carbon capture and storage as primary drivers of low carbon economy nevertheless there is a trend of employing more static cge model compared to the dynamic cge although application of the latter has a limitation of providing right inputs to the macroeconomic policy finally research directions and gaps envision other complementary models such as dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge and agent based model abm for proper policy interventions

on the validity of econometric techniques with weak instruments inference on returns to education using compulsory school attendance laws we evaluate angrist and krueger 1991 and bound jaeger and baker 1995 by constructing reliable confidence regions around the 2sls and liml estimators for returns to schooling regardless of the quality of the instruments the results indicate that the returns to schooling were between 8 and 25 percent in 1970 and between 4 and 14 percent in 1980 although the estimates are less accurate than previously thought most specifications by angrist and krueger 1991 are informative for returns to schooling in particular concern about the reliability of the model with 178 instruments is unfounded despite the low first stage f statistic finally we briefly discuss bias adjustment of estimators and pretesting procedures as solutions to the weak instrument problem

does compulsory school attendance affect schooling and earnings we establish that season of birth is related to educational attainment because of school start age policy and compulsory school attendance laws individuals born in the beginning of the year start school at an older age and can therefore drop out after completing less schooling than individuals born near the end of the year roughly 25 percent of potential dropouts remain in school because of compulsory schooling laws we estimate the impact of compulsory schooling on earnings by using quarter of birth as an instrument for education the instrumental variables estimate of the return to education is close to the ordinary least squares estimate suggesting that there is little bias in conventional estimates every developed country in the world has a compulsory schooling requirement yet little is known about the effect these laws have on educational attainment and earnings 1 this paper exploits an unusual natural experiment to estimate the impact of compulsory schooling laws in the united states the experiment stems from the fact that children born in different months of the year start school at different ages while compulsory schooling laws generally require students to remain in school until their sixteenth or seventeenth birthday in effect the interaction of school entry requirements and compulsory schooling laws compel students born

labor market effects of marijuana and cocaine use among young men using data on marijuana and cocaine use from the 1984 national longitudinal survey of youth the authors examine the hypothesis that drug use reduces labor market productivity as measured by wages from an analysis that controls for the probability of employment and the endogeneity of drug use they find that although long term and on the job use of marijuana negatively affected wages the net productivity effect for all marijuana users both those who engaged in long term or on the job use and those who did not was positive no statistically significant association was found between cocaine use and productivity

dynamic spillovers of oil price shocks and economic policy uncertainty this study examines the dynamic relationship between changes in oil prices and the economic policy uncertainty index for a sample of both net oil exporting and net oil importing countries over the period 1997 01 2013 06 to achieve that an extension of the diebold and yilmaz 2009 2012 dynamic spillover index based on structural decomposition is employed the results reveal that economic policy uncertainty oil price shocks responds negatively to aggregate demand oil price shocks economic policy uncertainty shocks furthermore during the great recession of 2007 2009 total spillovers increase considerably reaching unprecedented heights moreover in net terms economic policy uncertainty becomes the dominant transmitter of shocks between 1997 and 2009 while in the post 2009 period there is a significant role for supply side and oil specific demand shocks as net transmitters of spillover effects these results are important for policy makers as well as investors interested in the oil market

moral hazard and marshallian inefficiency evidence from tunisia abstract we formalize the link between optimal cost sharing contracts and the production technology in the presence of moral hazard by appealing to several well known results from duality theory building on intuitions from the interlinkage literature we show that optimal contractual structure is determined by the i substitution possibilities that exist between different observable factor inputs as well as ii between these inputs and unobservable effort we endogenize contractual choice using landlord characteristics as instruments exploiting the fact that in our dataset landlords interact with several tenants and vice versa the approach is applied to an unbalanced plot level panel of cost sharing contracts in a tunisian village using a translog representation of the restricted profit function contractual terms are found to be a significant determinant of input use and therefore lead to marshallian inefficiency while the optimality of the underlying contractual structure is rejected

social security income and the utilization of home care evidence from the social security notch this paper exploits social security law changes to identify the effect of social security income on the use of formal and informal home care by the elderly results from an instrumental variables estimation strategy show that as retirement income increases elderly individuals increase their use of formal home care and become less likely to rely on informal home care provided to them by their children this negative effect on informal home care is most likely driven by male children withdrawing from their caregiving roles the empirical results also suggest that higher social security benefits would encourage the use of formal home care by those who would not have otherwise used any type of home care and would also encourage the use of both types of home care services among elderly individuals

equilibrium welfare and government policy with quasi geometric discounting abstract we consider a representative agent equilibrium model where the consumer has quasi geometric discounting and cannot commit to future actions we restrict attention to a parametric class for preferences and technology and solve for time consistent competitive equilibria globally and explicitly we then characterize the welfare properties of competitive equilibria and compare them to that of a planning problem the planner is a consumer representative who without commitment but in a time consistent way maximizes his or her present value utility subject to resource constraints the competitive equilibrium results in strictly higher welfare than the planning problem whenever the discounting is not geometric journal of economic literature classification numbers e21 e61 e91

taxes and time allocation evidence from single women and men the classic model of becker 1965 suggests that labor supply decisions should be analyzed within the broader context of time allocation and market good consumption choices but most empirical work on policy has focused exclusively on measuring impacts on market work this paper examines how income taxes affect time allocation during the entire day and how these time allocation decisions interact with expenditure patterns using the panel study of income dynamics from 1975 to 2004 we analyze the response of single women s housework labor supply and other time to variation in tax and transfer schedules across income levels number of children states and time we find that when the economic reward to participating in the labor force increases market work increases and housework decreases with the decrease in housework accounting for approximately two thirds of the increase in market work analysis of repeated cross sections of time diary data from 1975 to 2004 shows that home production decreases substantially when market hours of work increase in response to policy changes data on expenditures from the consumer expenditure survey from 1980 to 2003 show some evidence that expenditures on market goods likely to substitute for housework increase in response to a greater incentive to join the labor force the baseline estimates imply that the elasticity of substitution between consumption of home and market goods is 2 61 the results are consistent with the becker model meanwhile single men show little response to changes in tax policy and we are able to rule out an elasticity of substitution between home and market goods for this group of more than 1 52

consumption savings decisions with quasi geometric discounting we study the consumption savings problem of an infinitely lived rational consumer who has time inconsistent preferences in the form of quasi geometric discounting the consumer operates a weakly concave production function and must simply divide current resources into current consumption and savings there is no uncertainty a solution to the consumer s problem is a subgame perfect equilibrium of a dynamic game between the consumer s successive selves we show that this game has a continuum of equilibria in stationary markov strategies not only is the stationary point of the consumer s asset holdings indeterminate but each stationary point has a continuum of dynamic paths converging to it the savings policy rules underlying these dynamic paths are step functions

within groups wage inequality and schooling further evidence for portugal this article provides further evidence on the positive impact of schooling on within groups wage dispersion in portugal using data on male workers from the 2001 wave of the european community household panel the issue of schooling endogeneity is taken into account by using the latest available instrumental variable technique for quantile regression i e the control function estimator due to lee 2007 the findings are compared with earlier results based on different techniques i e the instrumental variable estimator due to arias et al 2001 and the standard exogeneity based estimator due to koenker and bassett 1978

current account adjustment in developing countries the role of exchange rate regimes i introduction an important question in open economy macroeconomics is whether exchange rate rigidity hinders current account adjustment also known as the friedman hypothesis according to friedman 1953 a flexible exchange rate regime facilitates current account adjustment while a fixed exchange rate regime delays the adjustment process this hypothesis has stimulated extensive research on the relationship between exchange rate regimes and current account reversals e g adalat and eichengreen 2007 de haan schokker and tcherneva 2008 milesi feretti and razin 2000 pancaro and rueffer 2009 while existing studies have made significant contributions to the literature they largely focus on the determinants of current account reversals rather than the duration of current account deficit spells emphasized in the friedman hypothesis does a country s exchange rate regime really matter to how long it stays in a high current account deficit state and if so to what extent does the fixed exchange rate regime delay the adjustment process this article addresses the above important questions by empirically evaluating the role of exchange rate regimes on the duration of high current account deficit spells in developing countries given the prevalence of large and persistent current account deficits across countries over the last few decades understanding the impact of exchange rate regimes on the duration of high deficit spells is particularly important and pertinent specifically we identify high current account deficit spells and employ hazard models to examine whether a fixed exchange rate regime increases the duration of high deficit spells and thus delays current account adjustment 1 a novelty of this approach is that by estimating hazard models we can explicitly test for the effect of exchange rate regimes on the duration of high current account deficit spells which is more in the spirit of the friedman hypothesis on the basis of a large dataset with annual observations for 95 developing countries over the period 1971 2004 we find strong evidence that in developing countries fixed exchange rate regimes are associated with longer duration of high deficit spells and hence significant delays in the adjustment to high current account deficits this finding is robust to alternative exchange rate regime classifications and different model specifications furthermore we show that fixed exchange rate regimes delay current account adjustment only in the hard peg case but not in the soft peg case from a policy perspective this suggests that only the corner solution of a very rigid exchange rate regime delays the current account adjustment but not if the regime allows for some flexibility in the exchange rate adjustment our findings thus lend strong support to the friedman hypothesis the remainder of the article proceeds as follows after a brief review of the relevant literature in section ii section iii provides a description of our dataset and defines high deficit spells in section iv we discuss the methodological issues involved in the duration analysis the empirical results are presented in section v and section vi concludes ii the literature on exchange rate regimes and current account adjustment the discussion on the relationship between exchange rate regimes and current account adjustment goes back to friedman s seminal work in the 1950s friedman 1953 argues that nominal exchange rate flexibility expedites current account adjustment while nominal exchange rate rigidity delays the adjustment under a flexible exchange rate system where the exchange rate is allowed to vary freely a rising current account deficit would induce the depreciation of domestic currency which in turn leads to an increase in exports a decrease in imports and a rapid convergence to a balanced current account in the case of fixed exchange rate regimes where exchange rates are not allowed to vary countries have to rely solely on internal price adjustment mechanisms to produce corrective movements in their current accounts

discount rates inferred from decisions an experimental study two hundred and four students of economics and finance participated in an intertemporal choice experiment which manipulated three dimensions in a 4 4 4 factorial design scenario postponing a receipt postponing a payment expediting a receipt expediting a payment time delay 0 5 1 2 and 4 years and size of cashflow 40 200 1000 and 5000 individual discount rates were inferred from the responses and then used to test competitively four hypotheses regarding the behavior of discount rates the classical hypothesis asserting that the discount rate is uniform across scenarios time delays and sums of cashflow was flatly rejected a market segmentation approach was found lacking the results support an implicit risk hypothesis according to which delayed consequences are associated with an implicit risk value and an added compensation hypothesis which asserts that individuals require compensation for a change in their financial position

fast food costs and adolescent body mass index evidence from panel data this study draws on four waves of the 1997 national longitudinal survey of youth and external data to examine the relationship between adolescent body mass index bmi and fast food prices and fast food restaurant availability using panel data estimation methods to account for individual level unobserved heterogeneity analyses also control for contextual factors including general food prices and the availability of full service restaurants supermarkets grocery stores convenience stores and commercial physical activity related facilities the longitudinal individual level fixed effects results confirm cross sectional findings that the price of fast food but not the availability of fast food restaurants has a statistically significant effect on teen bmi with an estimated price elasticity of 0 08 the results suggest that the cross sectional model over estimates the price of fast food bmi effect by about 25 there is evidence that the weight of teens in low to middle socioeconomic status families is most sensitive to fast food prices

the effects of rural electrification on employment new evidence from south africa this paper estimates the impact of electrification on employment growth by analyzing south africa s mass roll out of electricity to rural households using several new data sources and two different identification strategies an instrumental variables strategy and a fixed effects approach i find that electrification significantly raises female employment within five years this new infrastructure appears to increase hours of work for men and women while reducing female wages and increasing male earnings several pieces of evidence suggest that household electrification raises employment by releasing women from home production and enabling microenterprises migration behavior may also be affected jel h54 l94

forced displacement and technology adoption an empirical analysis based on agricultural households in bosnia and herzegovina we use the bosnian living standards measurement study lsms survey to show that conflict induced displacement of agricultural households dramatically affects the adoption of new technologies in agriculture we exploit the heterogeneity in the level of violence in the pre war location to account for selection bias this natural experiment seems to be a source of exogenous variation in our case because violence aims at ethnic cleansing without economic consideration we find that the displaced are less likely than stayers to adopt fertiliser and pesticide

corruption and growth under weak identification i introduction the purpose of this paper is to revisit mauro 1995 and re examine his results as a consequence of recent research that cautions against making traditional types of inference in the presence of weak instruments early work done by nelson and startz 1990a 1990b demonstrates that the distribution of the two stage least squares 2sls estimator and the t statistic is poorly approximated by the asymptotic representation when instruments are weak more formally staiger and stock 1997 model the coefficients on the instruments in the first stage equation in the n sup 1 2 neighborhood of zero in which they show that the 2sls estimator loses consistency resulting in a nonstandard distribution for the t statistic in fact they show that under the local to zero framework the distribution of the t statistic depends on the level of endogeneity strength and the number of instruments thus the true size of the t statistic can differ substantially from its perceived size when instruments are weak therefore 95 confidence intervals based on asymptotic approximations such as or 1 96se are no longer reliable as a rough rule of thumb staiger and stock 1997 suggest a first stage f stat of 10 on the excluded instruments as an indication of acceptable instruments in terms of point estimation bound jaeger and baker 1995 show that the 2sls estimator is biased in the same direction as the ordinary least squares ols when using irrelevant instruments hahn and hausman 2002 illustrate a detailed expression for the 2sls bias showing that it is monotonically decreasing in the instrument strength while monotonically increasing in the degree of endogeneity cruz and moreira 2005 verify these results through monte carlo simulations also showing that the classic bias corrected 2sls estimator of nagar 1959 provides a poor correction when instruments are very weak given that the theory and techniques mentioned above were discovered and developed after mauro wrote his qje paper we attempt to reproduce his results and analyze them in light of these recent findings from the early work of left 1964 and huntington 1968 corruption in government has been of great interest to economists these studies argue that corruption could be positively correlated with economic performance in the presence of a thick and cumbersome bureaucracy corruption in this view greases the wheels of bureaucracy thus increasing the efficiency in which transactions occur leading to a positive effect on the economic performance of a country on the other hand rose ackerman 1978 murphy shleifer and vishny 1991 1993 and shleifer and vishny 1993 provide theoretical arguments that corruption deteriorates economic growth through the misallocation of talent and other resources mauro 1995 being the first to introduce instrumental variables ivs in the cross country growth literature contributes to this debate by examining empirically the relationship between two measures of corruption and investment and economic growth his results suggest that corruption has a negative impact on investment and economic growth the significance of his results varies with model specifications but the results appear to be robust when correcting for the endogeneity of corruption using the ethnolinguistic fractionalization elf index as an iv he employs 2sls estimation to correct for endogeneity created by the two measures of corruption mauro 1995 s work has been of great value in the corruption literature and has had profound influence on the direction of policy making the paper is one of the most cited papers not just in the literature on corruption but in economics in general 1 given the impact that the paper has undoubtedly had on the direction of research we find it necessary and relevant to revisit the paper in light of the recent developments in the field of econometrics

rational expectations business cycles in search equilibrium we examine the rational expectations equilibrium paths of the model of search and barter in diamond s aggregate demand management in search equilibrium for some initial positions there are two equilibrium paths converging to different steady states with the high activity path pareto dominating the low activity path with some parameters there is also a continuum of equilibrium paths converging to another steady state moreover there can be cycles that are equilibrium paths even though the environment is stationary

not enough money or not enough time to satisfy the thrifty food plan a cost difference approach for estimating a money time threshold abstract food production at home requires money and time food assistance programs focus exclusively on the money cost while ignoring the time cost this one dimensional focus could undermine the effectiveness of food assistance programs in the spirit of vickery 1977 this paper uses a cost difference approach to develop a money time threshold and several related metrics to determine whether money or time is the most limiting resource in reaching the thrifty food plan tfp target in our empirical analysis we find that when time is ignored single headed households spend on average 35 more than required to meet the tfp target however when time is included these households spend on average 40 less than required to meet the tfp target in addition we find that when time is ignored 62 of single headed households on average spend enough money to reach the tfp target but when time is included only 13 of single headed households spend enough on average to reach the tfp target our empirical results suggest that time is more constraining than money in reaching the tfp target these results imply that metrics solely focusing on money could severely underestimate the gap between actual expenditures and those required to reach the tfp target

estimation in a class of simultaneous equation limited dependent variable models estimation in a class of simultaneous equation limited dependent variable models is considered the minimum chi squared method is used to compare the asymptotic relative efficiency of marginal and new conditional maximum likelihood estimators for this class of models efficient minimum chi squared estimation procedures are described a two step algorithm based on a conditional maximum likelihood estimator provides a natural framework for both computing a linearized and locating the joint maximum likelihood estimator the unimodality of the simultaneous equation tobit likelihood function is proved and this model is used to illustrate the empirical application of some of the estimators considered in the paper the relative efficiency of these estimators in the simultaneous equation tobit model is examined in a set of monte carlo experiments many applications of microeconomic theory to individual data face the joint problems of censoring and simultaneity in particular the dependent variable under investigation may not be continuously observed and some of the conditioning variables representing the outcome of other decisions by the individual may be simultaneously determined smith and blundell 1986 developed an asymptotically efficient test for exogeneity or simultaneity in the simultaneous equation tobit model as a byproduct a conditional maximum likelihood estimator was obtained which is consistent under the alternative hypothesis of simultaneity nelson and olsen 1978 amemiya 1978 1979 and heckman 1978 consider a number of consistent marginal maximum likelihood estimators based on marginal maximum likelihood estimators of the reduced form parameters for the probit and tobit models in contrast the estimator derived from smith and blundell 1986 is based on the corresponding conditional maximum likelihood estimators this paper is concerned with estimation in a class of simultaneous limited dependent variable regression models which includes the simultaneous probit and tobit models as special cases analogous marginal and conditional maximum likelihood estimators to those of nelson and olsen 1978 amemiya 1978 1979 heckman 1978 and smith and blundell 1986 are derived and other new estimators are suggested the minimum chi squared approach discussed by ferguson 1958 malinvaud 1970 and rothenberg 1973 is used to compare the asymptotic relative efficiency of various estimators considered a simple two step algorithm based on the conditional maximum likelihood

are u s cities underpoliced theory and evidence we document the extent of measurement errors in the basic data set on police used in the literature on the effect of police on crime analyzing medium to large u s cities over 1960 to 2010 we obt

the role of birth order in child labour and schooling does when a child was born relative to his or her siblings affect whether the child attends school or participates in child labour we investigate this question by estimating the causal effect of birth order on the probabilities of school attendance and child labour participation to address the potential endogeneity of family size we use instrumental variable approach where the proportion of boys in the family is used to instrument family size using a longitudinal household survey data from ethiopia we estimate unobserved effects bivariate probit instrumental variable model of school attendance and child labour choices the results suggest that the probability of child labour participation decreases with birth order but we find no evidence that suggests birth order affects the probability of school attendance however among children who are going to school hours spent studying increases with birth order results from complementary time use analysis reveal that there is no birth order effect on hour

anticipation and the valuation of delayed consumption this paper presents a model of intertemporal choice that incorporates savoring and dread i e utility from anticipat ion of delayed consumption the model explains why an individual with positive time preference may delay desirable outcomes or get unpleas ant outcomes over with quickly contrary to the prediction of convent ional formulations of intertemporal choice implications of savoring and dread for savings behavior empirical estimation of discount rate s and public policy efforts to combat myopic behavior are explored the model provides an explanation for common violations of the indepe ndence axiom as applied to intertemporal choice copyright 1987 by royal economic society

a model of imperfect competition with keynesian features the recent literature on the reappraisal of keynes has viewed keynesian equilibria as arising when prices are fixed and effective demands and supplies are equilibrated through the adjustment of quantities one problem with this approach is that it lacks a theory of price determination in particular of why prices are fixed in the present paper we show that a number of keynesian features arise in a model in which prices are fully flexible but where agents have some monopoly power one advantage of this approach is that it provides a theory of the determination of both prices and quantities

private politics and environmental management abstract we study determinants and effects of two types of private political actions ppas against s p 500 companies environmental boycotts and shareholder proxy proposals we consider effects on the firms adoption of environmental management systems ems and the environmental protocol iso 14001 we find that ppas have a significant impact on firms environmental management decisions and consistent with baron 2009 that a company s likelihood of experiencing a ppa is higher if it is a receptive target that has a reputation for social responsibility

ramsey meets laibson in the neoclassical growth model the neoclassical growth model is modified to include a variable rate of time preference with no commitment ability and log utility the equilibrium features a constant effective rate of time preference and is observationally equivalent to the standard model the extended framework yields testable linkages between the extent of commitment ability and the rates of saving and growth the model also has welfare implications including the optimal design of institutions that facilitate household commitments steady state results are obtained for general concave utility functions and some properties of the transitional dynamics are characterized for isoelastic utility

do hmo plans reduce health care expenditure in the private sector i introduction since the hmo act was passed in 1973 health maintenance organizations hmos have become one of the most popular types of managed care plans in the u s health delivery system faced with a dramatic increase in health care costs hmos are designed to implement a tight utilization review and authorization process along with restricted choice of providers as a means of managing utilization and quality by comparing health care expenditure patterns of hmo members with those of non hmo members among the privately insured nonelderly population this study seeks to understand the impact that hmos have on health care expenditure in the private insurance sector our data come from the 2000 medical expenditure panel survey meps a nationally representative survey of the u s civilian noninstitutionalized population despite the dramatic growth in the number and proportion of individuals enrolled in private hmo plans much of existing research on this issue has focused on the relationship between hmo enrollment and use of health care services miller and luft 1994 2002 whereas only a limited number of studies have been conducted on the role of prevalent hmo enrollment in saving health care expenditure kralewski et al 2000 analyses on expenditure performance are mostly carried out on the performance of the medicaid or medicare managed care plans buchanan et al 1996 mello et al 2002 this study extends previous research in several ways first rather than using localized or insurance group wise data johnson and aquilina 1986 kralewski et al 2000 mclaughlin et al 1983 mclaughlin 1987 robinson 1996 or employer data baker and corts 1996 feldman et al 1993 we use data provided directly by hmo members through nationally representative surveys second by using decomposed expenditure data we are able to ascertain whether the provision of financial incentives to both consumers and providers in hmo plans makes any differences in medical care expenditure by each party compared with traditional plans furthermore by testing the hypothesis of selectivity in health insurance choice we try to avoid the biased findings that often find in favor of hmo plans trends and relevance during the past two decades the number of hmo enrollees has proliferated from 9 1 million 4 of the total population in 1980 to 76 1 million 26 4 in 2001 health united states 2003 between 1977 and 2001 the percentage of the u s population under age 65 that joined private insurance hmos increased dramatically from 3 7 to 27 9 table 1 over the same time period per capita national health expenditure increased from 1 980 to 4 773 in 1995 constant dollars and total national health expenditure as a percentage of gross domestic product rose from 8 8 to 14 1 out of total national health expenditure the share of private expenditure decreased from 57 3 to 54 1 motivated by the prevalence of hmos in the private insurance market and the insufficiency in understanding its cost containment performance we investigate the patterns of health care expenditure among hmo members to understand whether hmos contribute to limiting medical expenditure relative to non hmo arrangement there are two main complications to our empirical analysis the first is selection bias due to endogenous health plan choice decisions previous studies buchanan and cretin 1986 jackson beeck and kleinman 1983 suggest that the utilization reduction effect of hmos may be a consequence of the selective enrollment of a healthier population in hmo plans rather than the more efficient medical care delivery management of hmos thus we first estimate the probit model of health insurance plan choice decisions and test this hypothesis in line with the analysis of taylor et al 1995 the second complication is that the dependent variables are nonnegative with a high frequency of zero observations

men women and competition an experimental test of behavior this study reports a series of experiments that examine outcomes when agents are able to choose between a payment scheme that rewards based on absolute performance i e piece rate and a scheme that rewards based on relative performance i e a tournament we test for the presence and persistence of gender differences in performance and the rate of entry into the tournament option and whether these differences are sensitive to the structure of the tournament rewards in the winner take all wta condition only the best performer in the tournament for each round received a payment 4 50 in the graduated tournament condition the same payment 4 50 was divided among the first second and third finishers in the tournament in the wta condition men showed significantly lower forecast errors than women in addition a clear sorting effect occurs in the wta condition in early rounds of the wta condition male entrants into the tournament show significantly lower forecast errors than female tournament entrants however the difference disappears over time after controlling for forecasting skill gender did not predict entry into the tournament for the wta condition however lower forecasting skill reduced the probability of entry in the graduated tournament the situation was reversed men entered the tournament at significantly higher rates even after controlling for skill forecasting skill had no impact on the decision to enter the tournament while the average male entrant to the tournament had lower forecast errors than the average female entrant the men entered at much higher rates as a consequence men were much more likely than women to enter the tournament too frequently

the time cost of food at home general and food stamp participant profiles little is known about the cost of time in food preparation at home yet this economic variable is a common thread running through recent concerns about obesity and the food stamp fs program this article provides initial estimates of the time cost in food preparation at home for the united states two standard methods of estimation are implemented and three demographic profiles are considered i the general population ii the typical fs participant and iii the typical fs participant following the united states department of agriculture thrifty food plan for the general population and averaging across methods the time cost share of total food cost is about 30 if the individual works in the market and at home but it is about 49 if the individual does not work in the market for the typical fs participant especially one following the thrifty food plan the time cost share of total food cost can be as much as 26 higher than the general population these substantial percentages provide strong i

determining the impact of food price and income changes on body weight we develop a theoretical model to identify conditions under which price and income changes are most likely to change weight although it is intuitive that raising the price of high calorie food will decrease consumption of such goods it is not clear that such an outcome will actually reduce weight our empirical analysis demonstrates a case where a tax on food away from home a food intake category blamed for much of the rise in obesity could lead to an increase in body weight a finding which emphasizes the need to employ economic modeling when developing public policy to reduce obesity

time to eat household production under increasing income inequality eating requires the raw food materials that make up meals and also the time devoted to buying food preparing meals and eating them and cleaning up afterwards using time diary and expenditure data for the u s for 1985 and 2003 i examine how income and time prices affect time and goods inputs into this household produced commodity focusing on these two years between which income and earnings inequality increased allows examining how household production is affected by changing economic opportunities the results demonstrate that both inputs into eating increase with income and that higher time prices at a given level of income reduce time inputs over this period the relative goods intensity of producing this commodity increased especially at the lower part of the income distribution and the average time input dropped substantially the results are consistent with goods time substitution being relatively difficult for eating and with substitution being more difficult as production expands

waiting time and decision making is time like money time is a resource as such consumers have to make decisions regarding their use of time in the purchase and consumption of goods and services using prospect theory and mental accounting as theoretical frameworks this article investigates whether consumers treat time like money when they make decisions in a series of studies we found that the value of consumers time is not constant but depends on contextual characteristics of the decision situation our results also suggest that in deterministic situations people make decisions involving time losses in a manner consistent with the convex loss function proposed by prospect theory however in decision making under conditions of risk people seem to make risk averse choices with respect to decisions in the domain of time in contrast to the risk seeking behavior often found with respect to decisions involving losses of money we discuss the nonfungibility of time as an explanation for the discrepancy between decisions involving time and those involving money

parties politics and regulation evidence from clean air act enforcement does local federal regulation respond to the preferences of local congressional representatives for example do republican congressmen reduce local enforcement of clean air laws in their districts we use facility level panel data on clean air act inspections over 1989 2005 to study the causal effect of a congressman s party affiliation on local enforcement random assignment of electoral outcomes is obtained with a regression discontinuity design we find that new republican vs democratic representatives significantly depress inspection rates for local polluting facilities in the first year after their election jel d73 q52 q53

direct estimates of household production abstract using time diary and expenditure data for a set of american households in 2003 and 2004 i examine the relation between the inputs into eating time food purchasing preparation consumption and clean up and goods purchased foods goods and time expenditures are positively correlated and direct estimates of a ces household production function indicate the relative difficulty of goods time substitution in producing this commodity

estimating average and local average treatment effects of education when compulsory schooling laws really matter the change to the minimum school leaving age in the united kingdom from 14 to 15 had a powerful and immediate effect that redirected almost half the population of 14 year olds in the mid twentieth century to stay in school for one more year the magnitude of this impact provides a rare opportunity to a estimate local average treatment effects late of high school that come close to population average treatment effects ate and b estimate returns to education using a regression discontinuity design instead of previous estimates that rely on difference in differences methodology or relatively weak instruments comparing late estimates for the united states and canada where very few students were affected by compulsory school laws to the united kingdom estimates provides a test as to whether instrumental variables iv returns to schooling often exceed ordinary least squares ols because gains are high only for small and peculiar groups among the more general population i find instead that the benefits from compulsory schooling are very large whether these laws have an impact on a majority or minority of those exposed

an exogeneity test for a simultaneous equation tobit model with an application to labor supply a test of weak exogeneity in the simultaneous equation tobit model is proposed and illustrated using a female labour supply model estimated using cross section data the test statistic can be simply output from any standard tobit maximum likelihood package and is asymptotically efficient the procedure provides consistent estimators for the simultaneous tobit model whose asymptotic covariance matrix is a simple extension of the usual tobit formula we also provide the lagrange multiplier test of weak exogeneity this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

consumption versus expenditure previous authors have documented a dramatic decline in food expenditures at the time of retirement we show that this is matched by an equally dramatic rise in time spent shopping for and preparing meals using a novel data set that collects detailed food diaries for a large cross section of u s households we show that neither the quality nor the quantity of food intake deteriorates with retirement status we also show that unemployed households experience a decline in food expenditure and food consumption commensurate with the impact of job displacement on permanent income these results highlight how direct measures of consumption distinguish between anticipated and unanticipated shocks to income whereas measures of expenditures obscure the distinction

supply push or demand pull strategic recommendations for the responsible development of biofuel in china this study investigates china s biofuel industry the third largest in the world by combining a strength weakness opportunity and threats swot analysis with a method known as fuzzy analytic hierarchy process fahp more specifically the study employs swot analysis to identify the influential factors affecting the development of the biofuel industry in china it then prioritizes their importance using the fahp method the study finds that high production costs competition with other renewable energy resources inconsistent policy and legislation support and poor technical standards are impeding the growth of the biofuel industry of china the study concludes by proposing strategic recommendations for how the industry can be made both leaner more efficient and effective and greener more socially and environmentally sustainable some of these options focuses on improving technical perform adhering to a supply push mentality others focus on improving affordability and consumer awareness adhering to a demand pull mentality